Representing Value and the Value of Representation: A Different Look at Money

A telling joke circulated in Israel in the fall of 1984. Two men meet somewhere in the country. One has just been abroad. The other says: "Those are nice pants. How much did they cost you?" The friend replies: "Twenty pounds Sterling." The first then asks, "How much is that in Israeli money?" The second replies, "Twenty-five dollars"-that is, twenty-five U.S. dollars. Officially, the shekel (and not the dollar) was Israel's currency and only legal tender. It was printed by the Israeli government, circulated through designated government channels, regulated, bolstered, and devalued from time to time by branches and instruments of the government. The lira, Israel's official currency until 1980, had already been driven out of the market by governmental action and was no longer an acceptable means of payment or exchange. The Jordanian dinar remained legal tender in the West Bank alongside the Israeli shekel. Officially, the U.S. dollar remained foreign currency. Yet in the nearly six years since I had first gone to Israel, I had participated in dozens of transactions involving the transfer of actual cash dollars and many more calculated in U.S. dollars, though formally paid in official Israeli currency. I had grown accustomed to handling $100 bills and worrying about whether they were counterfeit. Like most Israelis, I had watched illegal money changers in Israel proper develop a thriving business alongside their legal counterparts in the West Bank, and I had gotten used to checking the black-market dollar rate printed daily in all the major Hebrew-language newspapers. Israel had developed galloping inflation, changed its currency from the lira to the shekel in an effort to curb the "psychological" effects of inflation and make accounting calculations easier, contemplated formally dollarizing the economy, and simultaneously shown public outrage at the very suggestion of de jure dollarization. Everyone spoke of dollar balatot (literally floor tile dollars) as "real money" kept in people's homes or safe deposit boxes. I knew I had never lived in a situation of galloping inflation or day-to-day use of multiple currencies before I encountered the Israel of the 1980s. I also knew that while many Israelis were becoming quite adept at changing currencies, buying commodities for the express purpose of "preserving value," and moving