This book focuses on the Shaʿar-Ha-ʿaliyah Camp/Quarantine during the years 1949–1952. Shaʿar-Ha-ʿaliyah served as the central immigration processing camp in Israel soon after the founding of the state, opening its gates in 1949 and officially closing in 1962. It also, and primarily, served as a quarantine center. In this regard, the book deals with the history of quarantine, isolation, and public health. It was published shortly before the Covid-19 outbreak, which makes the subject matter of the book more relevant than ever. But this book is also relevant for readers and researchers interested in the Israeli immigration experience.
The book addresses the activities of the camp/quarantine from different angles (Confines, Structure, Meaning, and Memory) and from the different perspectives of the various “players” involved. In other words, it presents the picture as seen in the eyes of the beholder (if using Foucault's terminology, then the “eyes” reflect the well-known examining gaze): journalists, reporters, photographers, managers, clerks, police officers, physicians, and health professionals (using medical rationales to justify their practices), politicians (justifying or opposing these practices, depending on their political agendas) and the immigrants (new or veteran; sick or healthy; Holocaust survivors or immigrants from Arab states). This is where the book's strength lies: in its ability to examine this unique locus from a multidimensional perspective. The methodology helps readers understand that the immigrants’ experience and the diverse interests of the stakeholders were quite complex, and far from homogeneous. Seidelman outlines it well:
As the details of this story will show, Shaar Ha'aliya affected individuals differently. At this first moment of arrival, the large categorizations of Mizrahi and Ashkenazi are not a reliable way to understand whether a person would have felt welcome or happy or discriminated against and traumatized. Some North Africans were deeply scarred by their time there, while others hardly remember it. Some Europeans were unmoved by what they found there, while for others, the camp conjured memories from the war and the Holocaust. One man who was there for weeks considered it “fine,” while others who were there for several hours considered it horrible. How one experienced Shaar Ha'aliya was largely an individual matter, the outcome of the interaction between factors of language, background, time, lodgings, food, weather, interpersonal relations, age, expectations, and past experience that resulted in one's own personal encounter and memories. (11)
Seidelman describes in detail not only these (institutional or personal) players, but also the absorption process, as well as the power dynamics and the ways in which the new immigrants were not passive: they protested, escaped, demonstrated, initiated strikes, and the like. This leads to the understanding that alongside the manifest functions of the camp/quarantine (i.e., public health) it also had additional intentional and unintentional functions and consequences: symbolic, political, and professional, among others.
The book is titled Under Quarantine. Indeed, it discusses the quarantine and the question of whether Shaʿar-Ha-ʿaliyah was a camp, a quarantine, or both. It also examines the uses and abuses of the quarantine. But the quarantine is only one component of the bigger story, as depicted so well in the book (by, for example, describing the use of food as a control mechanism). In my view it is the equivalent of the camp's barbed-wire fence (the physical barrier around the camp), which appears as a central and recurring theme of this book. It is a book about Shaʿar-Ha-ʿaliyah, where medicine and public health played an important role (and justification), but perhaps not the main role. In this sense “The Fence” might fit better as a title, conveying to readers that the book expands the (physical and symbolic) hole in the fence so as to allow one to view not only the practice of medicine but the entire experience of Shaʿar-Ha-ʿaliyah. This is a story of a melting pot, of rites of passage, of an immigrant absorption ceremony.
Seidelman criticizes various aspects of the practices at Shaʿar-Ha-ʿaliyah. She adopts a personal tone, avenging Shaʿar-Ha-ʿaliyah's honor and its place in the collective memory. It is not that anger is out of place: the way some of the procedures (medical or nonmedical) were conducted, even if they were (medically) justifiable at the time, is an issue that deserves attention and indeed embodies lessons to be learned. But while criticism is important, it sometimes blurs the sharpness of the multidimensional layers presented so well in this book. One such example is the film The Ringworm Children, which on the one hand Seidelman criticizes (“The film's problems are indeed severe,” 126), while on the other hand she uses it to analyze the memory of Shaʿar-Ha-ʿaliyah. In other words, while the author impressively puts aside the one-dimensional label of racism or paternalism (veterans vs. newcomers; Ashkenazi vs. Mizrahi), she often resorts to these dichotomies. At the same time, this analysis misses other, more up-to-date studies on the issue.
Another lesson relates to the use of public health rationales and procedures (i.e., quarantine, isolation, and examinations) in order to pursue or justify nonmedical interests. Seidelman refers to such practices as abuses of the quarantine, but the book might benefit from a more thorough comparative approach, juxtaposing the practice of quarantine in the British Mandate era and the functions of immigrant medical examinations at the time. Such a comparison might indeed reinforce the author's conclusions. Although it deals with law and the legal system, Assaf Likhovski's groundbreaking article “Between Mandate and State: On the Periodization of Israeli Legal History” (Journal of Israeli History 19, no. 39 [1998]) explains why we should avoid strict dichotomies between these two periods, since categories of periodization “serve … ideological purposes.” Using this theory, a more detailed examination of quarantine in Mandatory Palestine, based on existing research, would fit well with the book's narratives.
In sum, this book is an important contribution to the ever-growing body of Jewish and Israeli studies literature, Jewish immigration studies, and health and immigration scholarship. In particular, it facilitates a broader multidimensional perspective on a specific locus in its historical as well as current contexts.
