מתי ואיך החלו לחגוג ימי הולדת משפחתיים ביישוב? בין לאומיות לילדות סנטימנטלית

When and how did they start celebrating birthdays in the Yishuv? This article recreates the patterns through which family birthday parties spread in the Yishuv of British Mandate Palestine, in order to explore the interlinks between nationalism and the concept of sentimental childhood. Relying on newspapers, advertisements,children’s magazines, oral testimonies, women’s journals, and educational materials,the article tracks the ascendance of the custom to absolute dominance in the family space in the Yishuv during the British rule, after being almost unknown in the Ottoman period. The family birthday party became prevalent in the Yishuv’s mainstream without real objections and in a fairly low profile, while spreading to other social groups like immigrants from places other than Central and Eastern Europe and the ultra-orthodox. This process reflects the dominance of the sentimental approach to childhood that focused on the child’s best interest and on satisfying their desires. Implicitly encouraging hedonist individualism, this approach had a complex relationship with most streams of Zionist ideology and with the everyday lives of most social groups in the Yishuv. The dominance of the birthday in the family sphere in the Yishuv illustrates the complexity of the relationship between nationalism and sentimental childhood, which included tension alongside mutualuses and cultural metabolism.