Olmert at the Soup Kitchen:

Israel’s Ambivalent Spotlight on Hunger1

Olmert in der Suppenküche.

Israels ambivalente Haltung gegenüber dem Hunger

Ilana GOLDBERG

Aufbauend auf zwei, in israelischen Medien breit kommentierten, Performanzen zum Phänomen Hunger in der Gesellschaft beleuchtet die Autorin den „Weg des Hungers” in der Öffentlichkeit seit der Wende zum dritten Jahrtausend. Zwischen einem Foto des bald nach der Jahrtausendwende zum Premier aufge-stiegenen Ehud Olmert in einer Suppenküche aus dem Jahr 2005 und einer, von einem reichen Konzern gesponsorten „Demonstration” mit Spendenaufruf zu Gunsten der schweigend Hungernden erkennt die Autorin den Wandel in der öffentlichen Verhandlung von Hunger. In der Thematisierung von Hunger und dem Aufruf zur Wohltätigkeit ist Israel gefangen zwischen der Nostalgie für sozialistische Solidarität und sich neoliberal gebendem Mitgefühl.

Spectacle 1

Lunchtime on a late December day in 2005, Jerusalem, Israel. The general elec-

tions are three months away. Behind Jerusalem’s central bus station, outside the

entrance to a commercial building remodeled as a soup kitchen, stands Ehud

Olmert, past Mayor of Jerusalem and current Finance Minister, with his entou-

rage. He steps indoors to begin a tour of the Meir Panim „restaurant,” which he

inaugurated some years before as mayor. Amidst a round of camera flashes, he

enters the kitchen, is greeted by the staff and dips a ladle into a large industrial

vat of soup, while chatting with workers and with Dudi Zilbershlag, the phi-

lanthropic entrepreneur who founded this and two other similar soup kitchens in

two other Israeli towns. He proceeds into the dining hall, joins the queue, is

handed a tray and is served today’s fare: soup, Israeli schnitzel (breaded chicken

cutlet) and peas. Olmert takes a seat next to another diner seated heavily in an

old army-issue parka, who is sharing the same meal served in disposable uten-

sils. Olmert’s ad hoc lunch-mate – a regular client of the soup kitchen – has

placed a stack of seven slices of white bread on his tray as an accompaniment to

1 This essay is based on a PhD dissertation on the social and media construction of hun-

ger as a public problem in Israel, written under the supervision of Prof. Haim Hazan and

Prof. Ilana Friedrich-Silber, at Bar-Ilan University (2010).

44 Ilana Goldberg

Olmert dining at Meir Panim restaurant, Jerusalem, December 2005. Credit: Yoav Galai.

the hot dishes. As Olmert leans forward to eat, a dozen camera shutters whiz

and click.

Ehud Olmert (born 1945) was Prime Minister of Israel from 2006 to 2009

when he had to step down due to accusations of corruption. I did not witness the

above scene, but have reconstructed it from a series of photos that were pub-

lished a day later in the print press, along with impromptu comments Olmert

gave to interviewers: „I came to be with them out of a sense of responsibility,”

and „I’m here so that we can minimize the activity of such places. I’m here to

look at things at eye-level, so that I can enable every citizen to live with digni-

ty” (Sofer 2005).

A seasoned news photographer at the scene, whose images were reproduced for

this essay,2 noted that Olmert’s decision to dine at the soup kitchen rather than

to serve the food was „a twist on the classic photo-op.” Indeed, in many visual

representations of Israeli hunger shown in the media, it is the role of the giver

that is accentuated and explicit, while the recipients are concealed. Recipients of

food parcels standing in line at food pantries before a holiday or soup kitchen

diners are often photographed from behind or with downcast faces to protect

them from exposure and stigma. In this photo, Olmert simulates the role of the

2 Photos courtesy of Yoav Galai.

Olmert at the Soup Kitchen 45

recipient, yet he is distinguished by his celebrity and other visual codes such as

his elegant clothes. In accordance with the media conventions mentioned, the

photo frames selected for the news item published on the Meir Panim restaurant

(unlike the photo in the illustration above) were those in which the poor diner’s

features were mostly hidden by the parka hood, while Olmert’s face appears in

full view.

That food kitchens answer a basic material need is unquestioned; but what

are their symbolic functions, and what are the political and societal implications

of portraying the soup kitchen and its powerful visitor? This essay will attempt

to answer some of these questions in the context of the emergence of hunger

and charitable food assistance, arguing that soup kitchens are central tropes of

public discourse and civic action in Israel during the first decade of the 21st

century. As we shall see, the implications may be broad, ranging from the local

context of a community food kitchen to the nationwide public sphere in which

the response to hunger is allegorized as a symptom of Israel’s current social and

political predicament.

When the sated and the hungry meet in the space of the soup kitchen, both in

practice and in media representations, the charitable encounter may be imagined

to heal rifts between antagonistic sectors of society. The poor and the rich are

brought into each other’s presence, thus thickening the social glue that is

viewed as vital for Israeli society’s existence. Civic-voluntary engagement in

the social world of food assistance sometimes requires the giver to step into the

shoes, as it were, of the recipient. A volunteer who participates in food rescue

from upscale restaurants, for example, described the first time he asked for the

leftovers on behalf of the poor: „I am used to sitting there as a client, not as

someone who is asking for a favor.” After collecting the food, the volunteer

went on to say that „the first baptism by gunfire (tvilat ha-esh) went over suc-

cessfully” (Yehoshua 2002). In other words, the act of simulated begging is

presented as stepping outside oneself, challenging one’s moral imagination to

occupy an unfamiliar, inferior social position: the volunteer momentarily embo-

dies the role of the hungry person. Apart from the practical usefulness of the

volunteers’ labors, this sort of role-play appears to produce a momentary

reshuffling of the consciousness of social difference reminiscent of the kind of

status reversals that occur in liminal states, as Victor Turner suggested. In Tur-

ner’s theory of the form of social relatedness he calls communitas, the symbolic

repertoire of poverty is often drawn upon in performances characteristic of li-

minal states or persons. Turner also cites an example of members of the privi-

leged classes in hierarchical societies undergoing voluntary experiences of de-

privation to impress upon themselves an awareness of their shared humanity

with the totality of society (Turner 1975: 244-245, 1995: 131-165).

Typically, soup kitchens may not imprint such a radical sense of communitas

on volunteers, since the outlines of social hierarchy and the difference between

givers and receivers are still quite marked in these activities. Nevertheless, the

46 Ilana Goldberg

proximity to the poor and the awareness of others’ needs are taken to have an

edifying effect. When Finance Minister, Ehud Olmert, performed a more radical

gesture and joined the clients of the soup kitchen at the table, he seems to have

been attempting to demonstrate his consciousness of their plight. However,

most observers regarded this as an empty gesture – an exploitation of misery as

a foil for highlighting the candidate’s posture of compassion toward society’s

most vulnerable members.

Indeed, Olmert’s performance of compassion drew condemnation from poli-

tical opponents as a manipulative staging of a photo-op, while objectifying the

poor. Eli Yishai of the Sephardi Shas party was quoted in the daily Haaretz as

saying: „Soup kitchens are not experimental human laboratories, nor are they

museums of the history of poverty that one tours once in four years, to inspect

the condition of the exhibits. The inflation of soup kitchens is bleeding evidence

of the government’s socio-economic failure. The poor are fed up with phony

exhibits of sympathy” (Sofer 2005). Labor Knesset member Yitzhak Herzog’s

response was: „The finance minister’s decision to dine with the needy is a pa-

thetic and arrogant spectacle performed on the back of Israel’s poor” (Sofer

2005).

The illusory image of breaking bread with a genuinely hungry lunch com-

panion (the latter’s private hoard of bread a poignant sign of chronic food-

insecurity) caused this politician’s photo-op to backfire. Olmert is (also some-

what poignantly) quoted as feeling placed in a double bind and telling the jour-

nalists: „If I hadn’t gone, you would have asked me why I didn’t go” (Sofer

2005).

The spectacle of Olmert in the soup kitchen, along with its skeptical recep-

tion, is characteristic of other representations of hunger’s arrival in the public

sphere around the early 2000s. This can be charted in the world of practical

action, as hunger emerged as an urgent social issue addressed by local and na-

tionwide philanthropic interventions; it can also be charted in the world of me-

dia, as hunger simultaneously entered the media’s limelight. The representations

vacillate between two themes – valorization of the goodwill and tenderhearted

care embodied in the voluntary action of food providers who are at the front line

of the response to poverty versus the denunciation and indictment of govern-

ment, and self-chastising of a society shamed by the blatant signs of hunger in

the social body.

The positive pole of the spectrum is nicely illustrated by one media portrayal

of the third protagonist in the scene described above: Dudi Zilbershlag, the soup

kitchen’s founder. On the eve of Israel's 53d Independence Day (2001), as part

of a newly invented tradition of holiday coverage stories about social entrepre-

neurs, the leading Israeli daily Maariv published a feature story about Zil-

bershlag's recent philanthropic project (Tzezan 2001). The story portrays him as

a pioneer among a new class of local heroes and entrepreneurs who together –

from the mid-1990s, through the 2000s – created Israel’s new landscape of cha-

Olmert at the Soup Kitchen 47

ritable food assistance. Such stories came to fulfill a regular ritual media slot in

subsequent years – before the holidays of Rosh HaShana and Passover – fos-

tering a sense of pride in the altruistic enterprises of individuals for the collec-

tive good.

Ehud Olmert and Dudi Zilbershlag at the Meir Panim soup kitchen. December 2005. Credit: Yoav Galai.

The Maariv article describes the Zilbershlags, an ultra-Orthodox couple from

Jerusalem who lost two of their sons to a rare illness of the digestive system.

The parents decided to commemorate their deceased sons by establishing a net-

work of soup kitchens: the Meir Panim restaurants. Underlying their charitable

work (hesed) is a total philosophy whose professed goal is repairing the world

(tikkun olam) and bringing people closer: Jews and non-Jews, secular and reli-

gious (Tzezan 2001). Advancing the notion that charitable giving spins threads

that can weave the disparate parts of society together, Zilbershlag goes on to

explain that he hopes to expand the web of giving beyond the ultra-Orthodox

community, noting that the location of the restaurant at the central bus station

was inspired by Abraham’s hospitality, which, according to Midrashic sources,

was located at a crossroads (Tzezan 2001).

The negative end of the spectrum is implicit in all media reports about hun-

ger: The concealed or downcast faces in photos and the statistical reports about

the numbers of meals delivered always index the existence of hungry families

and vulnerable individuals. The explicit denunciations also take different forms

48 Ilana Goldberg

– headlines with the word ‘disgrace’ (herpa) in bold print along with commenta-

ry on the moral collapse of social welfare provision. Traumatic themes of the

compromised social body include iconic figures of the hungry schoolchild or

the hungry soldier, as well the failings of the moral economy implied in reports

about incidents of food theft. In such reports, shame-emotion mobilizes a sense

of individual and collective guilt and responsibility. In these representations, the

media facilitates the contagion of shame (busha) from the needy person – typi-

cally a diner at a soup kitchen or a recipient of a food package – to the spectator

and to society in general.

Spectacle 2

September 2009, Rabin Square, Tel-Aviv. Along with thousands of pedestrians

who pass daily, I observe a public installation concerning hunger. It is staged by

the secular Latet organization – a voluntary organization chiefly dedicated to

food assistance and poverty advocacy. The holiday of Rosh Hashanah is one

week away, and Rabin Square, Israel’s foremost urban public space, where so-

me of the most significant political demonstrations have taken place in the past

thirty years, has been lined with rows of long dinner tables, complete with place

settings, plates, knives, and forks. Each table is surrounded by some fifty plastic

garden seats. This is the third year in which Latet’s installations have filled the

square before the New Year: I recall that the square was lined with empty su-

permarket trolleys last year. This year, the vast billboard dominating this public

space calls upon the passersby to donate NIS 10 toward a holiday meal for the

needy. Later, at a nearby café, I check Latet’s website: Through the online

counterpart of the billboard, one can donate a virtual meal and join an existing

„table” or „open a table” and electronically invite friends to join, so that one of

200,000 hungry families might enjoy a holiday meal. Many of Israel’s leading

media celebrities have „opened tables” and their photographs can be scrolled

through by surfers.

This second spectacle resonates with the first one, with which this essay be-

gan, in a number of striking ways. Firstly, the traditional religious charitable

ethos of feeding the poor has been magnified and projected onto a national stage

and adopted by Israel’s secular mainstream – in an act of cultural mimicry of

ultra-Orthodox hesed – as a worthy and necessary type of civic action. Second-

ly, as in Olmert’s choice to dine at the table, the latter spectacle also reworks the

trope ambiguously as feeding (with) the poor, sharing a meal with the (now

absent) poor at one dinner table. Latet’s New Year installation in Rabin’s square

in 2009 is striking in its blatant iconicity – using household furniture and props

to conjure up a commensal image of civic and national solidarity. However,

unlike Olmert’s humbling of himself at the table, the signs of contrition are

mostly muted or implicit.

Olmert at the Soup Kitchen 49

Hunger as an Emerging Theme in Israel’s Public Sphere

The two spectacles described above provide bookends to an era in which the

theme of hunger emerged and was elaborated on in the Israeli public sphere in

numerous ways: from holiday food drives by voluntary organizations, the

appearance of stationary food collection boxes on street corners, banner ads on

the internet, and mediathon fundraisers with corporate backing by the most po-

pular supermarket chains. The cultural visibility of hunger mirrored a new so-

cial landscape in which the number of volunteer organizations devoted to food

distribution had suddenly mushroomed. This widespread activity began to draw

public attention in the media as well as within government, academic, and po-

licy circles in the early 2000s. According to various surveys carried out in

2004/2005, several hundred non-profit organizations were then actively invol-

ved in different forms of food distribution – soup kitchens, food coupons, com-

munity food pantries, provision of school meals, or delivery of weekly food

parcels – engaging some 20,000 volunteers and serving a needy population of

some 450,000 people around the country. According to one study, 80% of the

organizations surveyed were providing weekly, bi-weekly or monthly food

parcels to needy families. According to another survey, some 80,000 people

were receiving food parcels on average every month, over 10,000 ate at soup

kitchens, and close to 30,000 received cooked meals at home.

Through the participation of volunteers, these elaborated forms of food cha-

rity answered an urgent need, while simultaneously inventing a performative

repertoire for reconstituting social solidarity and constructing an ethical national

self-image. In addition, these practices took form precisely during a period that

was witnessing the ascendancy of a neoliberal ethic in Israeli society and eco-

nomy – an ethic that critical sociologists have called „responsibilization” (Rose

1999; Lemke 2001; Ilcan & Basok 2004). In other words, an expectation

emerged at this time – instilled through various cultural and material practices –

that non-state social actors (both individual and organizational) would develop a

moral agency and subjectivity that predisposed them to take responsibility for

addressing social ills. Unlike the early years of austerity when Israel was a de-

veloping economy and citizens were called on by the government to tighten

their belts and share in one economic plight, the state’s social welfare apparatus

in the 2000s did not hasten to register the need for, nor become visibly involved

in orchestrating an institutionalized response on behalf of needy citizens.

Instead, civil society, business, and philanthropy responded to the plight of the

poor through practices such as highly publicized food drives, and were joined

by the media in depicting such nationwide enlistment through mediated cultural

performances. Nevertheless, while this activity was mostly placed in the spot-

light in order to valorize it, there was a shadow side to it all, and the topic of

food assistance was also treated with ambivalence and sometimes outright criti-

cism.

50 Ilana Goldberg

Sociologist Ronen Shamir, a vocal critic of neoliberalism, decried the way in

which social protest had been eviscerated by charity, co-opted by market forces,

and spectacularized by the media in a public opinion piece about Latet’s anti-

hunger New Year installation in 2007. In that year, volunteers from Latet filled

Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square with hundreds of white cardboard cut-out figures me-

ant to represent hungry, voiceless citizens. The corporate-sponsored campaign

ran under the slogan: „1 million people silently hungry,” and encouraged citi-

zens to text an SMS message and make their NIS 10 donation. Shamir lambas-

ted this action as a „neo-demonstration,” writing that: „There’s no need to go

(my emphasis I.G.) to a neo-demonstration; reading about the campaign […] in

the news is enough […] the neo-demonstration isn’t organized – it is produced”

(Shamir 2007).

In contrast to what Shamir describes as a toothless „neo-demonstration,” the

historical record of anti-poverty social protests in Israel actually includes a

number of heroic episodes of dramatic, blood-and-guts political riots. These

reach back as far as the early years of the state, from the Wadi Salib events of

1959, through the rise of Israel’s Black Panther party in the early 1970s. Ac-

cording to sociologist and historian Deborah Bernstein, the distressing anxieties

of the poor about their access to basic nutritional subsistence, the demand for

dignity and a right to earn a living have been a part of Israeli public discourse

for many decades. Formerly, such demands received articulation in the slogan

lehem – avoda (Bread – Work!), which emerged as an authentic idiom of social

protest as early as 1949 (Bernstein 2008). The slogan soon achieved the status

of a symbol, repeatedly documented and amplified in news accounts. It con-

densed within it an entire cluster of meanings: „bread – as a symbol of subsis-

tence, work – as ensuring [provision of] bread, liberation from dependence, and

[promising] respect and participation within the new society” (Bernstein 2008:

249; my translation – I.G.). While it fell into disuse after the 1970s, the slogan

was revived in the 1990s (Bernstein 2008: 254) in response to the economic

effects of welfare retrenchment and deregulation. Bernstein’s genealogy of this

political protest slogan provides an instructive counterpoint to media spectacles

witnessed in the 2000s, in which the framing of economic distress comes to be

largely depoliticized as a cry of hunger, rather than a demand for bread/work. In

this new framing, hunger received amplification as a spectacle of suffering,

indignity and shame, alongside a valorization of voluntary giving, rather than

through angry acts of political protest or demands for entitlement.

Publicly Feeding (with) the Poor.

We may take these emblematic moments, the two political meal spectacles

described above and the media report on the founding of Meir Panim, as coor-

dinates that describe the journey that ‘hunger’ travelled in public consciousness

during the past fifteen years in Israel. From occasional mentions in the news,

soup kitchens and food assistance became a topic worthy of ritual and holiday

Olmert at the Soup Kitchen 51

coverage, highlighting society’s shame, alongside the worthy responses of ca-

ring individuals. Cameo appearances by politicians in zones of hunger kept

hunger and need alive as a social issue on the public agenda. However, we can

also discern a symbolic movement of generalization and centralization of the

theme of hunger from local to national arenas – from the backyard of Jerusa-

lem’s central bus station to Rabin Square. This movement reflects the construc-

tion of hunger as a constitutive problem of relevance to society and the nation

as a whole.

In this movement, the traumatic themes of hunger and food insecurity be-

came compelling symbolic candidates for generating and reinforcing social

solidarity in a post-utopian context (Giesen 2004b), and food assistance became

an effective practical mechanism for performing it. The distribution of food

donations from the ‘haves’ to the ‘have-nots,’ apart from providing a social

good, functioned as a visual and material concretization of the imagined com-

munity and collective solidarity of Israeli society. Indeed, through these media-

tions, hunger was transformed from a privately and viscerally experienced inju-

ry into a public problem. Hunger now had the potential to engage broad swaths

of citizens at the grassroots, while, at the same time, awareness of hunger mig-

rated into the visual field of political leaders, who publicly acknowledged the

disgrace. However, the performances of commensality simultaneously assuaged

the injury of these disparities.

Many scholars have noted the recent rise and proliferation of rites of public

confession and discourses of contrition and apology, in which collectivities

acknowledge guilt or remorse over past crimes and injustices. Some key exam-

ples are Willy Brandt kneeling at the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Memorial, Tony

Blair acknowledging Britain’s part in the Irish potato famine, the Truth and

Reconciliation Commissions of post-apartheid South Africa, or the Australia

Prime Minister apologizing to the indigenous Aboriginal population for inflic-

ting wrong through unjust policies (see e.g. Olick & Coughlin 2003; Giesen

2004a, 2004b).

Bernhard Giesen writes of rituals of confession that „they provide the only

way of getting the recognition of national identity beyond the reclaiming of

artificial primordialities and questionable utopias” (Giesen 2004b: 153). With

the liberalization of the economy leading to the shrinking of social rights and

greater inequality, the Israel of the early 21st century has drifted away from its

erstwhile utopian bases of solidarity (Shafir & Peled 2002: 278-307). While the

contemporary Israeli discourse concerning hunger does not profess regret in

reference to a shameful past, it does articulate a politics of shame, whose refe-

rent is the present social and economic situation. It paints a dystopian image of

Israeli society as beset by social inequalities, while devising ways of repairing it

through charitable giving. The public exhibition of the injuries of hunger and

demonstrations of solidarity with the hungry, while not precisely ‘confessions,’

do indeed enlist the disgrace of hunger as a resource for fueling collective moral

52 Ilana Goldberg

commitments and mutual responsibilities. It can be argued that hunger has been

enlisted as a conspicuous and meaningful category in the shaping anew of Isra-

el’s social and national imaginary. The public embrace of hunger and charitable

food assistance responded to cultural, political and social desires that reflect

Israeli society’s post-socialist quandaries: caught between nostalgia for the

social solidarity embodied in a broad welfare state and the new discourse of

neoliberalism, privatization and compassionate giving.

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