The Appropriate Name

Abstract

In her recent account of social relations in Israeli society, the feminist legal scholar, Orit Kamir, has contended that Israeli society is organized around the principle of respectability (Kamir, 2007). Respectability is seen as a person’s most important possession. Therefore, people have to protect it under all circumstances. Hebrew, continues Kamir, has had a significant part in locating respectability at the heart of Zionist daily life. Names as an aspect of language, and in the local arena, as mirrors of language struggles, have become a measure of enacting respectability: a person’s name contributes to his/her respectability providing him/her with “a respectable social status, high self-esteem, the entitlement to pride and self-importance as well as respectful social treatment” (2007: 19).