The Men We Loved

Male Friendship And Nationalism in Israeli Culture

Bibliographic Data

ID19920022
AuthorsDanny Kaplan (0000-0003-3569-2863, corresponding author)
Year2006
Pages190
Publication date2006-11-01
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueMen We Loved (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherBerghahn Books (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.3167/9781845451929
OpenAlexW4400020296
Open LibraryOL8959876M
ISBN9781845451929
LanguageEN
Citations received36

Some semi-public, exclusive male settings, most noticeably in the military, encourage the production of intimacy and desire. Yet whereas in most instances this desire is displaced through humor and aggressive gestures, it becomes acknowledged and outright declared once associated with sites of heroic death. In his provocative study of interrelations between friendship in everyday life and national sentiments in Israel, the author follows selected stories of friendship ranging over early childhood, school, the workplace, and some unique war experiences. He explores the symbolism of friendship in rituals for the fallen soldiers, the commemoration of Prime Minister Yzhak Rabin, and the national infatuation with recovering bodies of missing soldiers. He concludes that the Israeli case offers an extreme instance of a much broader cultural phenomenon: declaring the friendship for the dead epitomizes the political “blood pact” between men, taking precedence over the traditional blood ties of kinship and heterosexual unions. The book underscores nationalism as a homosocial-based emotion of commemorative desire

Gender, Security, and Conflict · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Psychology · Anthropology, cultural · friendship · Israel · Jewish studies · Land forces & warfare · Male friendship · Men · Men's Studies · Nationalism · Social Science · Social, group or collective psychology · Sociology

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