The Men We Loved: Male Friendship and Nationalism in Israeli Culture (review)

Abstract

The Men We Loved: Male Friendship and Nationalism in Israeli Culture, by Danny Kaplan. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006.190 pp. $80.00 (c); $25.00 (p). Such classic stories as Jonathan and David in the Bible and Achilles and Patroklus in Homer's Iliad, along with contemporary images of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, or even Batman and Robin, reinforce the dominant view of between men as strong, inseparable, and intense. Yet they also suggest that men form these uniquely masculine friendships only in time of war or to fight together in combating evil. You don't quite get the vision of them sitting down for an intimate conversation about how they are feeling, as women allegedly in their friendships. Despite the legacy of these historic friendships, men today are seen as incapable of true and intimate friendships. Contemporary men's friendships are often viewed through a gendered lens by which women's friendships are seen asface-to-face and men's friendships as side-by-side. However, intimacy comes in many guises, and who is to say that sitting and talking about personal matters is really any deeper or more personal than sharing a life-threatening situation in battle or engaging in a common hobby or sport activity? We know that men do friendship in varying ways according to social forces (education, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, social class) and cultural norms and practices in different societies. This is one of the lessons learned from Danny Kaplan's scholarly monograph. The Men We Loved: Male Friendship and Nationalism in Israeli Culture. Unlike much psychologically oriented research on the voluntary nature of and how it meets individual needs, Kaplan explores the intersection of the micro and the macro, the interpersonal stories of in the context of Israeli nationalism. He begins by first detailing the more political and social theories related to in Western thought, such as Aristotle's formative ideas from the Nichomachean Ethics. And he uses Jacques Derrida's views to investigate the relationship between the political/ideological and the emotional in fraternal friendships. Kaplan then introduces us to some key concepts in Israeli Hebrew related to friendship, re'ut and haverut, whose meanings have evolved and signal various degrees of sociability, intimacy, shared destinies, and traditions. It's not an easy read to understand the subtleties of a language you don't speak and the historic and evolving meanings attached to words from a culture you don't live in, but Kaplan's point is clear: historical and current political circumstances that necessitate social cohesion shape the ideology of and the language used to talk about it. However, reader beware: this is an academic book steeped in the postmodern jargon of hegemonic masculinity studies and sociological research. …