Table Of ContentSuicide Social Dramas
Through an ethnohistorical chronicling of the emotionally laden treatment of
selected suicide media-events, this book offers a neo-Durkheimean account of
suicide, addressing its social-moral threat and the ensuing need to gloss over
its unsettling incomprehensibility. An analysis of the social dramas, cultural
performances, and suicide talk aired in the Israeli public sphere suggests that
such public glossing practices atone for and bring about the symbolic rectification
of the socially detrimental effects of suicide. Drawing on Durkheim’s thoughts
on the social significance of suicide and the sacred cohesive power of society’s
self-representations through rituals and commemorations, the authors revamp the
contemporary pertinence of these cultural devices, showing how, in the process
of reconstituting and redressing the disrupted order, suicide talk constitutes a
revival mechanism of communal “life giving.” A rekindling of the Durkheimean
approach to suicide that examines how society deals with suicide’s shattering of
normative we-feelings, Suicide Social Dramas: Life-Giving Moral Breakdowns
in the Israeli Public Sphere, will appeal to scholars and students of sociology and
anthropology with interests in social theory, Israel studies, suicide studies, and the
interpretation of societal and cultural processes.
Haim Hazan is Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology and Co-director of
the Minerva Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of the End of Life at Tel Aviv
University, Israel. He is the author of Old Age: Constructions and Deconstructions
and Against Hybridity: Social Impasses in a Globalizing World.
Raquel Romberg is Senior Researcher at the Minerva Center for Interdisciplinary
Studies of the End of Life, Tel Aviv University, Israel. She is the author of Healing
Dramas: Divination and Magic in Modern Puerto Rico and Witchcraft and
Welfare: Spiritual Capital and the Business of Magic in Modern Puerto Rico.
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Suicide Social Dramas
Life-Giving Moral Breakdowns
in the Israeli Public Sphere
Haim Hazan and Raquel Romberg
First published 2022
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2022 Haim Hazan and Raquel Romberg
The right of Haim Hazan and Raquel Romberg to be identified as authors
of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and
78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hazan, Haim, author. | Romberg, Raquel, author.
Title: Suicide social dramas : life-giving moral breakdowns in the Israeli
public sphere / Haim Hazan and Raquel Romberg.
Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge,
2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021003380 (print) | LCCN 2021003381 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367568702 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367568719 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003099741 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Suicide—Israel. | Shame—Israel.
Classification: LCC HV6548.I75 H39 2021 (print) | LCC HV6548.I75
(ebook) | DDC 362.28095694—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003380
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003381
ISBN: 978-0-367-56870-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-56871-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-09974-1 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
In memoriam Professor Osvaldo Romberg,
beloved husband and cherished friend
whose life and art remain immemorial.
Contents
Acknowledgment viii
Introduction 1
1 Heroic and nonheroic shame: nation-state building
and betrayal 29
2 Civic and private shame of betrayed and betraying buddies 52
3 Systemic shaming or catch-22 suicides 75
4 Shaming the State 93
5 Cyber shaming 113
6 Shaming the nation 136
Epilogue: a genealogy of Israeli shame and shaming 162
Index 165
Acknowledgment
We want to thank the Minerva Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of the End of
Life at Tel Aviv University for funding this research while providing collegial
opportunities to present and discuss its preliminary versions in various scholarly
forums. Our warm gratitude also goes to Emanuel Marx, Yael Zerubavel, and Yael
Lavi for offering valuable comments on parts of the manuscript.
Introduction
If death is a riddle, suicide is an aporia. A human impasse, suicide is, therefore,
outside of logic and language. Being undecipherable, any attempts to parse its
grammar would amount to belie the unfathomable mystique of the irreversible
act of self-annihilation. Yet, it is because of the fascination with that ultimate
mystery of the human condition that so many academic disciplines as well as
professional apparatuses avail themselves to conceptualizing, theorizing, fore-
boding, and preventing “voluntary death,” or otherwise coined “self-murder.”
Morally imbued and philosophically articulated, the transition from conducting
a programmed life to committing the final hubris of crushing it calls for explica-
tion and correction. Suicide, thus, in spite and arguably because of its enigmatic
nature becomes a mooted issue for endlessly variegated contemplative and prac-
tical discourses, serving, as will be shown later, symbolic expiatory functions.
In effect, the deeper and wider the void of the incomprehensibility of suicide is,
the more glossing mechanisms over the incomprehensible emerge. Our project
takes such glossing as its main topic, focusing on the social dramas and suicide
talk that are propagated and aired in the public sphere, with its social detrimental
effects eventually mended at least discursively. We address these issues by draw-
ing bifocally on Durkheim’s treatises on suicide and on the ritualistic basis of
social self-representations.
In Durkheim’s maverick oeuvre on suicide (1951 [1897]) he shows that sui-
cide, against prevailing mentalist explanations, is the result of various degrees
and combinations of social disorganization (along the axis of regulation) and lack
of social integration or social solidarity (along the axis of integration) prevalent
in times of intense social change (Giddens 1965; Wray, Colen, and Pescosolido
2011).1 Based on the assumptions and results of the moral statisticians of his
time, he theoretically mapped these statistical figures according to geographic
and calendrical variables into three etiological categories of suicide along the
axes of integration and regulation: altruistic, egoistic, anomic (plus the mixes
among them), with the fourth mode, fatalistic, being a theoretical category per-
taining to extreme states of overregulation and total lack of integration.2 In our
revamping of his influential theoretical weaving of individual, cultural, and social
issues, we suggest grounded, local categories that emerge, in contrast, from pub-
lic perceptions and representations of suicide at various periods in the same place.
