Technology Transfer and National Sentiments: The American Phantom Jet in Israel

OZ FRANKEL is a 2019-20 GIDEST Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor and Chair of the History Department at The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College. Working in a variety of archives in the US, Britain, and Israel, his work in critical history has focused on politics and culture—broadly conceived to include literature, material culture, science, memory, and performance. Oz’s fields of interest encompass American Empire, knowledge and its transmission, radicalism and its culture, the history of the state, historiography, and the history of the book. His monograph States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain and the United States (Johns Hopkins, 2006) explores the early roots of the modern informational states and the embodiment of state knowledge in concrete print products. He is now concluding a book manuscript on American-Israeli social and cultural exchanges at the turn of the 1970s, tentatively titled, Coca Cola, Black Panthers, and Phantom Jets: American-Israeli Encounters, 1967-73. Among his recent publications are “The Politics of the Radical Analogy: The Case of the Israeli Black Panthers” in Black Power Beyond Borders, and “The 9/11 Commission Report: History Under the Sign of Memory” in The Palgrave Handbook of State Sponsored History After 1945.

Oz’s GIDEST project asks how foreign products and technology are adapted and adopted once they cross national lines. His case studies are Coca Cola drinks and Phantom military jets. He analyses these two radically different American products, both imported from the United State to Israel in the late 1960s, and the processes--both material and symbolic--through which they were domesticated.