Revived by Socialist Pioneers Before It Became a Shopping Occasion

The modern Israeli revival of Tu B'Av did not begin as a commercial occasion but as a Zionist pioneer holiday: early twentieth century agricultural settlements and the kibbutz movement took up the day, drawing on its ancient association with vineyard dances and matchmaking recorded in the Mishnah, as an occasion for communal celebration and courtship among young secular settlers building a new agricultural society, a deliberate reclamation of an old rural festival stripped of its rabbinic and penitential associations to serve the very different ideological project of early Zionist settlement.

The day's later transformation into an Israeli commercial occasion for romance, comparable in retail terms to how Valentine's Day is marketed elsewhere, developed still later in the twentieth century, well after the kibbutz movement's own more communal and ideologically inflected pioneer-era observance had already established Tu B'Av as a day with some contemporary secular content to build on, so that the sequence runs from an ancient rabbinic memory of vineyard courtship, through an early Zionist agricultural and communal revival, to a present-day commercial romance holiday, three quite different social projects each finding their own use for the same recovered date.