Eros and Tragedy : : Jewish Male Fantasies and the Masculine Revolution of Zionism / / Ofer Nordheimer Nur.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Academic Studies Press Backlist eBook-Package 2008-2015
• VerfasserIn: Nordheimer Nur, Ofer,
• Place / Publishing House: Boston, MA : : Academic Studies Press, , [2014]; ©2014
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Language: English
• Series: Israel: Society, Culture, and History
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (224 p.)

Between 1920 and 1922, hundreds of members of the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement left the defunct Habsburg Monarchy and sailed to Palestine, where a small group of members of the movement established Upper Bitania, one of the communities that laid the foundation for Israel’s kibbutz movement. Their social experiment lasted only eight months, but it gave birth to a powerful myth among Jewish youth which combined a story about a heroic Zionist deed, based on the trope of tragedy, with a model for a new type of community that promised no less than a total, absolute elimination of all physical and mental barriers between isolated individuals and their fusion into one entity. This entity was named “the erotic community.” In its quest for human regeneration, Upper Bitania embarked on a journey into a highly specific variant of modern life that, at its core, tried to combine the most profound Nietzscheanism with the insights of Sigmund Freud, all in an anti-capitalist quest for an organic community of “new men.” The quest for a “new man” was to compensate for a crisis of manliness and betrays an obsession with masculinity and male bonding, and their effects on the ideal man and woman.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Table of Contents -- Preface and Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Chapter I. Eastern Galicia and Vienna: Hashomer, Tse’irei Tsiyon, and the Origins of Hashomer Hatzair -- Chapter II. The “Sexual Problem” in the Youth Movement: From Denial, to Love, to Eros -- Chapter III. Tragic Man: An Aesthetic of Anarchism -- Chapter IV. Eros and Tragedy: Dionysos in the Galilee -- Chapter V. Martin Buber and Gustav Landauer: Gemeinschaft and Subterranean Judaism -- Chapter VI. Dancing, Working, and Public Confessions: The Eda Takes Its Form -- Chapter VII. The Eda of Hashomer Hatzair as Männerbund: A Jewish Male Fantasy Comes Full Central European Circle -- Chapter VIII. The Tragic Hero Metamorphoses into a Sensitive Man -- Bibliography -- Index