Simulated Dreams

At the core of the author''s concern stands the question of cultural transmutation in an era riddled with media channels and all-embracing messages. Fragments of the Israeli experience are pieced together in this provocative essay to provide a socio-anthropological agenda for some of the issues involved in the manufacturing of items of symbolic solidarity and common national imagery in an epoch of social disunification and cultural pastiche. The author argues that even though the aesthetic forms of major cultural idioms have unrecognizably altered and are accommodated to befit the shape and style of post-modern living, the basic programs underlying them have remained immutable. Furthermore, it is the quality of adaptability to changing aesthetic conventions that allow such symbolic corner-stones to be left unturned. The case of the youth culture is chose here as a yardstick for examining the double voice of such process - the global versus the tribal.

At the core of the author's concern stands the question of cultural transmutation in an era riddled with media channels and all-embracing messages. Fragments of the Israeli experience are pieced together in this provocative essay to provide a socio-anthropological agenda for some of the issues involved in the manufacturing of items of symbolic solidarity and common national imagery in an epoch of social disunification and cultural pastiche. The author argues that even though the aesthetic forms of major cultural idioms have unrecognizably altered and are accommodated to befit the shape and style of post-modern living, the basic programs underlying them have remained immutable. Furthermore, it is the quality of adaptability to changing aesthetic conventions that allow such symbolic corner-stones to be left unturned. The case of the youth culture is chose here as a yardstick for examining the double voice of such process - the global versus the tribal.

Acknowledgments
Prologue

Introduction

• Myths and Simulations
• Youth and Post-Zionist Simulations
• Forget Zionism?
• Capturing Time-Space
• Myths of the Body and the Territory
• Israeli Collectivism in Retrospective
• Beyond Collectivism

Chapter 1. Resolving Social Inequalities: The Ethnic Discourse

• Five Root Metaphors
• Community as Instant Acculturation
• Afterword: Community as Simulation

Chapter 2. Revisiting the Holocaust: The Historical Discourse

• The Holocaust in Israeli Eyes: A Brief History of Collective Images
• The School Delegations
• The Ministry’s Course
• School Preparations
• Reading the Holocaust
• Afterword: The Holocaust as Simulation

Chapter 3. Serializing War: The Interrupted Discourse

• Israel in the Gulf War
• Framing the Text
• A Poetics of Reversal
• Global Responses to the Gulf War
• Local Responses: The Interrupted System
• Afterword: The Gulf War as Simulation

Chapter 4. Taming Youth Culture: The Generational Discourse

• The Plot
• Late Summer Blues as a Mythical Structure
• The Group
• “Individualism” versus “Collectivism”
• A Rite of Passage
• The Tel-Aviv Syndrome
• Afterword: Blues as Simulation

Chapter 5. Living after the Assassination: The Political Discourse

• Rabin’s Two Bodies
• “Our Father Has Gone”
• Afterword: Rabin’s Bereavement as Simulation

Epilogue

References
Index