This chapter reviews the book Having and Belonging: Homes and Museums in Israel (2016), by Judy Jaffe-Schagen. In Having and Belonging, Jaffe-Schagen explores the connection between identity, material culture, and location. Focusing on eight cases involving Chabad, religious Zionists, Moroccan Jews, Iraqi Jews, Ethiopian Jews, Russian Jews, Christian Arabs, and Muslim Arabs, the book shows how various minority groups in Israel are represented through objects and material culture in homes and museums. According to Jaffe-Schagen, in the politicized cultural landscape of borderless Israel, location not only affects the interplay between objects and people but can also provide important insights about citizenship. Her main argument is that the nation-state of Israel is not a multicultural society because it has failed to serve as a cultural “melting pot” for the various immigration groups.
A Melting Pot
