Israeli Black Panthers demonstration.
On October 24th, Oz Frankel, Associate Professor of History at the New School for Social Research, will discuss his new book Coca-Cola, Black Panthers, and Phantom Jets: Israel in the American Orbit, 1967-73 in an online event hosted by the UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center.
Thursday, October 24, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM (Pacific Time)Webinar
Organized by the UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies.
About the Book
In the late 1960s, Israel became more closely entwined with the United States not just as a strategically but also through its intensifying intimacy with American culture, society, and technology. Coca-Cola, Black Panthers, and Phantom Jets shows how transatlantic exchanges shaped national sentiments and private experiences in a time of great transition, forming a consumerist order, accentuating social cleavages, and transforming Jewish identities. Nevertheless, there remained lingering ambivalence about, and resistance to, American influences. Rather than growing profoundly "Americanized," Israelis forged unique paths into the American orbit. As supporters and immigrants, American Jews assumed an ambiguous role, expediting but also complicating the Israeli-American exchange. Taking an expansive view of Israeli-American encounters, historian Oz Frankel reveals their often unexpected consequences, including the ripple effects that the rise of Black Power had on both extremes of lsraeli politics, the consumerist ideologies that ensnared even IDF soldiers and Palestinians in the newly occupied territories, and the cultural performances that lured Israelis to embrace previously shunned diasporic culture. What made the racial strife in the US and the tensions between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews in Israel commensurable? How did an American military jet emerge as a national fixation? Why was the US considered a paragon of both spectacular consumption and restrained, rational consumerism? In ten topical chapters, this book demonstrates that the American presence in Israel back then, as it is today, was multifaceted and contradictory.
Coca-Cola, Black Panthers, and Phantom Jets can be purchased here.
About the Speaker
Oz Frankel is Associate Professor of history at the New School for Social Research and the editor of Social Research: An International Quarterly. His scholarship spans several fields, including comparative and transnational history, knowledge production and transmission, popular culture and its audiences, historiography and historical consciousness, and the history of the state. He has published works in US, British, and Israeli history. In addition to Coca-Cola, Black Panthers, and Phantom Jets: Israel in the American Orbit, 1967-73 (Stanford 2024), professor Frankel is the author of the monograph States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States (Johns Hopkins, 2006). Among his most recent publications is the article, “Historical Consciousness in the Age of Donald J. Trump: Populism, Evangelicalism, and the Typological Imagination,” in the anthology, Claiming the People’s Past: Populist Politics of History in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge 2024).
DISCLAIMER: The views or opinions of our guest speakers and the content of their presentations do not necessarily reflect the views of the UCLA Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies. Hosting speakers does not constitute an endorsement of the speaker's views or opinions.
Sponsor(s): Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies