Thesis (M.A.)--Kokuritsu seiji daigaku tōa kenkyūjo. / Includes bibliographical references.

Inaug.-diss.--Freiburg. / Lebenslauf. "Verzeichnis des schrifttums": p. 91-94.

Thesis--Freie Universität Berlin. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 323-340).

M.A. dissertation, University of Hong Kong, 1978. / Photocopy from typescript.

M.A. dissertation, University of Hong Kong, 1979. / Typescript.

published_or_final_version / Comparative Asian Studies / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / Sociology / Master / Master of Philosophy

The Israeli Communist Party (MKI) and its precursor, the Communist Party of Palestine (PKP), were a unique Arab-Jewish organization. Marginalized and persecuted for most of its formative years, the Communist Party developed, from 1919 to 1965, its own distinctive subculture. Negating and absorbing the Zionist-Socialist and Israeli statist cultures, influenced by both Soviet and left wing European traditions as well as Jewish traditional elements, the Jewish Communists developed their own cycle of holidays. Through the examination of primary sources, ranging from internal Communist documents and newspaper articles to photographs and posters, as well as interviews with contemporaries and comparison with parallel Communist experiences in the United States and in the Arab world – this thesis examines the myths and rituals reflected in the holidays, as practiced by the Jewish Communists in MKI and the Israeli Young Communist League (Banki). The thesis scrutinizes the identity these cultural practices produced. By examining the Jewish holidays, the Israeli civic holidays, May Day, the Soviet November 7th and May 9th holidays, and the rituals concerning the relations between Palestinians and Jews, it is shown that between the years 1919 and 1965 the Jewish Communists created a local, Jewish-Israeli, anti-Zionist patriotic identity. This identity, although sensitive to the working class, was not a working-class identity; it was philo-Soviet and interested in civic rights of Palestinians. A minority of Party Members were Palestinians. The thesis concludes that, nevertheless, the Jewish Communists were not able to withstand the attempts of some factions among themselves to favor the nationalist over the socialist principles. Burdened by the weight of the conflict between Arabs and Jews, the MKI finally split in 1965, ending a significant phase in the development of Communist subculture in Israel.

Communist regimes have claimed that communism is the vehicle for women's emancipation. They maintain that sexual inequality can only be abolished as part of the broader socialist transformation through pulling women into the paid labour force. If the communist claim is true, women in communist regimes should be equal regardless of their cultural tradition, while women's position in communist regimes should be higher than in capitalist regimes. However, women's experiences in communist regimes revealed that their position varies from country to country and region to region, revealing the influence of culture in a variety of guises. In this respect, the former two Germanies and the two Koreas provide a rare chance of a cross-regime and cross-cultural comparative study. Germany and Korea have maintained distinct cultures different from their neighbours. The traditions of the two nations ran into revolutionary changes and discontinuities in the wake of their division into communist and capitalist regimes. The communist regimes of Germany and Korea advocated women's emancipation through making women part of the working class. Their achievements and failures compared with their severed national halves constituted a laboratory situation for the test of the communist claim. In this thesis, the communist claim is tested through the comparison of women's positions in the four countries, in all aspects of social life: under the law, in the education system, at work, in the family and in politics. The novel contribution of the thesis is its cross-cultural and cross-regime analysis, measuring the impact of the state on women's emancipation, taking into account different cultural impediments. It contributes to the development of feminist analyses of the state and culture, adding empirical evidence to theoretic arguments.

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