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INTRODUCTION
ISRAEL'S DAILY, HA'ARETZ HAS RECENTLY been featuring Hanoch Piven's collage portraits of international celebrities and Israeli politicians. Piven uses everyday objects in creating his portraits and although one of his more striking images consists of little more than two wads of white cotton wool "hair," every Israeli recognizes it immediately as a caricature of the country's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. (See figure 1) An election poster of the now-defunct ultra-nationalist Tehiya Party featured the silhouette of a young man bearing a flag. What unmistakably identified this young man as a proud Sabra-a native-born Israeli-was his tousled hair, but, even more so, his blorit, that unmistakable, unruly, forelock, falling over the forehead and catching the breeze.
Hair has always constituted a important feature of the Israeli image. Hairstyle, or lack of it, has been emblematic of Israeli identity ever since the advent of Zionism, and continues to be so today. But while the disheveled Ben-Gurion-look was once standard, today's Israelis display a rich variety of hairstyles, hair colors, and hair lengths.
Because hair is conspicuous, and because it differs from person to person, both in its physical and natural aspects (color and texture), and with regard to culture and fashion (length and style), hair has come to represent a racial, ethnic, cultural, sub-cultural, or individual badge of identity.
In this respect, Israel is no different from other cultures, all of which have their unique customs, rituals, traditions, and fashions that dictate whether and how people should cut their hair, shave their faces and/or heads, brush, comb, tie, decorate, style, or cover their hair with a hat, kerchief, skullcap, or wig.2 Sculptures, paintings, photographs, and writings-past and present-testify to the fact that every culture has attached moral, ritual, and mythological significance to hair. The attitudes toward hair, and the practices that develop around it, generally reflect a system of social values regarding body hygiene, sex, aesthetics, gender, class, religion, and intergenerational relations. Hence, the analysis of hair as a cultural code or as a collection of codes (whether explicit or implicit) could serve as an important key to understanding the special character of a given culture and of the milestones in its processes of change.
Jewish culture is no exception. The Bible itself associates different...