booktheque

The Men We Loved

Danny Kaplan · 2006

Where to buy

Amazon’s price changes daily, so the most accurate place to see it is there, at the moment you buy.

View on Amazon

This is an affiliate link: if you buy through it, the site earns a small commission at no extra cost to you, which helps us bring quality content and maintain the site. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

About the book

"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."--Publisher's website.

Book details

Year
2006
Language
English
Publisher
Berghahn Books
Editions
4
Pages
190
ISBN
9781845451929

Data source: Wikidata

More by Danny Kaplan