Research Catalog

Rubber bullets : power and conscience in modern Israel

Title: Rubber bullets : power and conscience in modern Israel / by Yaron Ezrahi.
Author: Ezrahi, Yaron.
Publication: New York : Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Use in library	DS113.3 .E98 1997	Off-site

Details

Description

307 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

Among commentators on Israeli affairs, Yaron Ezrahi is distinguished by his analytical brilliance, his twin passions for Jewish tradition and the tradition of liberal democracy, and his ability to see behind current events to their causes, some of them three generations in the making, some three millennia. In Rubber Bullets: Power and Conscience in Modern Israel, he offers an uncommonly insightful analysis of the ways the history, politics, and national character of Israel come to bear on current affairs there. Ezrahi regards surprising and divisive recent events - such as the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Benjamin Netanyahu's defeat of Shimon Peres in the subsequent ministerial election - as signs of an ongoing, fundamental conflict in Israeli society. This conflict is between "collectivist" national aspirations, upon which the Israeli state was founded in 1948, and the ever more clamorous voices of individualism, called forth by Israel's tradition of liberal democracy. Ezrahi explores ways in which the conflict is felt in diverse aspects of Israeli life and culture, from the social dimensions of military service and the development of the modern Hebrew language to Israelis' attitudes toward nature and the status of women. As Ezrahi sees it, the use of rubber bullets - meant to wound but not to kill - against Palestinian agitators in 1987 epitomized the new Israeli ambivalence about military power, which reflects a more general one between the claims of national identity and those of the self.

Subject

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

1. The Impoverished Language of the Israeli Self -- 2. The Limits of Private Space -- 3. Escape to Nature? -- 4. The Precariousness of Autobiographical Time -- 5. Self-narration as Self-defense -- 6. Father's Milk: Father's Tales That Feed and Kill -- 7. My Father, My Son -- 8. Historicizing the Fantasy of Jewish Power -- 9. Rubber Bullets -- 10. Women as Agents of the Anti-epic -- 11. From Here to Eternity and Back.

ISBN

0374252793
9780374252793

LCCN

96016862

OCLC

ocm34590946
34590946
SCSB-14419692

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library