A growing literature on the emergence of a Hebrew national culture in the Jewish Yishuv of Palestine has opened up new understandings of the construction of Jewish nationhood in the modern world and its place in the broader context of modern nationalism. Yaacov Shavit and Shoshana Sitton conceive their study of the Yishuv's festive culture primarily as a contribution to this literature, in which they point to two principal lacunae. First, they argue that much of the scholarship to date has overlooked or oversimplified what were in fact “complex links between the ceremonial tradition and the [new national] festivals” (xii). Indeed, the revolutionary self-image that was central to so much of Zionist thought has often excessively colored the historiographical picture, and scholars have at times too hastily accepted the notion that Zionist culture in Palestine was an unambiguously radical new departure, fundamentally at variance with traditional Jewish ways of life. In fact, revolutionary though it was, Zionist culture in Palestine grew out of an often intense (if ambivalent) dialogue with the Jewish past. Not infrequently, it is the very attempts by (some) Zionist cultural activists to shake free of that tradition's impact that most clearly reveal its lingering shadow.