About Ma'ariv LaNoar

Ma'ariv LaNoar

Ma'ariv LaNoar, written in Hebrew as Maariv La'noar and meaning Ma'ariv for Youth, is an Israeli weekly youth magazine published in Tel Aviv by the Tzivlin publishing group. First published in 1958, it is regarded as the first Israeli youth magazine — the first magazine in the young state created specifically for teenagers and young people rather than for children or for adults. In the 1980s the weekly reached the highest circulation of its history, about 100,000 copies, and was one of the two most popular magazines in Israel, alongside the women's magazine LaIsha. It held the leadership of the Israeli youth press for decades, until in 2006 its competitor Rosh 1 passed it in the TGI youth readership survey. In Hebrew, with comics, literature and youth culture at its centre, Ma'ariv LaNoar chronicled — and helped to create — Israeli youth culture from the state's second decade onward.

Founding in 1958: the first Israeli youth magazine

Ma'ariv LaNoar was first published in 1958, ten years after the founding of the State of Israel. Its name ties it to Ma'ariv, the evening newspaper founded in 1948 by journalists led by Dr Ezriel Carlebach, which in its first two decades was the most widely read newspaper in Israel. The youth magazine's lasting distinction, recorded by the National Library of Israel's listing cited in reference works, is priority: it is considered the first magazine in Israel for youth. Children's publications existed before it, attached to newspapers and movements — children's papers sponsored by parties and papers are documented from the 1930s onward — but a commercial weekly addressed to teenagers as a public in their own right, with their own music, fashions, comics and concerns, began in Israel with Ma'ariv LaNoar.

The timing was not accidental. By 1958 the first generation born into the state, and the children who had arrived as young immigrants, were becoming teenagers inside a society that was itself young, austere and rapidly changing. A weekly magazine could speak to them weekly, in Hebrew, about a world their parents' newspapers did not cover: popular music, film, sport, school, first work, army service ahead, and the new consumer and leisure culture arriving from America and Europe. The magazine's publisher in its documented modern form is the Tzivlin publishing group, and its base is Tel Aviv, the centre of Israeli commercial publishing.

Growth and the 1980s peak

In the 1980s Ma'ariv LaNoar reached the highest circulation of all time: 100,000 copies weekly. Reference accounts note that it was then one of the two most popular magazines in Israel, alongside LaIsha. In a country whose population was then under four million, a weekly sale of 100,000 copies meant the magazine reached a substantial share of all Israeli teenagers, with each copy typically read by siblings and friends beyond the buyer. That position made Ma'ariv LaNoar more than a magazine. It was a shared national experience for its generation: the same covers, stars, comic strips and features encountered in the same week by teenagers in Tel Aviv, in development towns, in kibbutzim and in cities across the country.

The peak also reflects the structure of the Israeli magazine market of the period. Before cable television, satellite channels and the internet, a youth weekly had little electronic competition for teenagers' attention. Print was where youth culture was pictured and debated, where foreign pop arrived in Hebrew, and where Israeli teenagers could see their own lives — school, youth movements, part-time jobs, approaching conscription — represented between the covers.

Content: comics, literature and youth culture

The magazine's documented contents combine comics, literature and youth culture in Hebrew. Comics scholarship on Israel notes the place of newspaper and magazine comics in Hebrew from 1935 onward, and identifies long-running series depicting young adolescent behaviour, such as Uri Fink's Zbeng, as central examples of Israeli comics culture — the world of the youth magazines in which teenage readers met Israeli-made comic characters living recognisably Israeli teenage lives. Alongside comics, the magazine carried literature for young readers and coverage of the music, cinema and celebrity culture its audience followed.

Its pages also served purposes beyond entertainment. The magazine reported, in accessible Hebrew, on subjects its readers were growing into — including science and achievement by young Israelis themselves. A later example reported internationally was its interview with a 13-year-old Israeli girl from Ramat Hasharon, Roni Oron, winner of the Israel Space Agency's Satellite Is Born award, who had designed a system for producing oxygen in space using algae and photosynthesis. A youth magazine that interviews a teenage scientist as a peer, rather than as a curiosity, shows the respect for its readers' intelligence that sustained the title's reputation across generations.

Ma'ariv LaNoar and the arrival of global youth culture: the Beatles case

Academic research on youth culture in 1960s Israel uses Ma'ariv LaNoar as a primary source, because the magazine stood at the gate through which global youth culture entered Hebrew. The first mention of the Beatles in the Israeli youth press came in early 1964, when Ma'ariv LaNoar dedicated its cover page to a photograph of female teenagers screaming at a Beatles concert. The photograph was not accompanied by an article or commentary; its caption, This is how youth around the world welcome the New Year, was presumably chosen by the editors, who expressed through it their concern about the hysterical behaviour associated with the band. The Beatles were first mentioned in Israeli youth newspapers a year after their British debut, under the telling headline New Year Madness.

The pages of the magazine then record a genuine cultural argument conducted by teenagers themselves. Some young writers praised Hebrew songs about the Land of Israel as superior and warned that English-language music could distract from schoolwork; one argued that a tremendous moral decline in England and America had among its causes the Beatles' music, with its dark sides; another predicted the band's success was momentary and that they were starting to get old. Set against the desire to protect the morality of youth and their readiness to serve in the military, such arguments fed the climate in which an inter-ministerial committee barred the Beatles from performing in Israel. For historians, Ma'ariv LaNoar is therefore not only a mirror of Israeli youth culture but one of its battlegrounds — the place where a young society argued, in teenagers' own letters, about openness to the world, Hebrew culture, morality and the army.

The youth press market and the rise of Rosh 1

For most of its life Ma'ariv LaNoar was the leader of a small, defined market: the Israeli youth press. Its historic rival arrived from the country's largest newspaper group. Rosh 1, a Hebrew teen magazine of the Yedioth Ahronoth group published in Tel Aviv for young teenagers, grew through the years when print youth media still commanded mass teenage attention. In 2006, according to the TGI survey for 2006/2007, Ma'ariv LaNoar lost the lead to Rosh 1, which surpassed it in the youth readership survey to become Israel's best-selling youth magazine. Reference accounts note that since then no other survey has been conducted to examine readership data in the youth press — a telling detail. By the late 2000s teenage attention was migrating to television and the internet so completely that the industry stopped measuring the print contest the two magazines had fought. The 2006 handover thus marks both the end of Ma'ariv LaNoar's four-decade leadership and the beginning of the end of the mass youth weekly era in Israel.

Tel Aviv, Tzivlin and the magazine's identity

Ma'ariv LaNoar is based in Tel Aviv and published by the Tzivlin publishing group, a specialist magazine publisher. Its name preserves its origin in the Ma'ariv newspaper family even as its publishing home is Tzivlin. That combination — a historic newspaper brand, a specialist publisher, a weekly rhythm and a Hebrew teenage readership — defines its identity in the Israeli magazine landscape. It never aimed at the business reader of TheMarker Magazine or the women readers of Lady Globes; its republic was the Israeli teenager, and for the decades of its peak it governed that republic almost alone, first by priority from 1958 and then by circulation.

Historical significance

The significance of Ma'ariv LaNoar is threefold. First, priority: as the first Israeli youth magazine, it created a commercial and cultural category — the teenager as reader — in a state that had previously published for children and for adults. Second, scale: at about 100,000 copies weekly in the 1980s, standing with LaIsha as one of Israel's two most popular magazines, it was for years one of the largest shared cultural experiences of young Israel. Third, evidence: because it published teenagers' own voices alongside comics, literature and pop coverage, its archive is a primary source for the history of Israeli youth — used by scholars studying everything from the Beatles controversy of the 1960s to Israeli comics. Few magazines document their own readers' coming of age as completely as Ma'ariv LaNoar documented Israel's.

Legacy

Ma'ariv LaNoar's legacy survives the decline of print youth media. It set the template every later Israeli youth title, including Rosh 1, followed: a Hebrew weekly mixing comics, music, stars, stories and readers' participation for teenagers. It carried generations of Israelis from childhood reading into adult newspaper reading, and its name remains the reference point for the era when a printed weekly could unite a country's teenagers in a single conversation. Published weekly in Hebrew from Tel Aviv in the Tel Aviv District by the Tzivlin group, and first issued in 1958, Ma'ariv LaNoar is recorded in this directory as Israel's pioneering youth magazine — the first magazine for Israeli youth, the circulation leader of the 1980s, and a defining publication of Israeli youth culture.