Suicide 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. Routledge Advances in Sociology 4 Transcending Modernity with Relational Thinking Pierpaolo Donati 5 Exploring Welfare Bricolage in Europe’s Superdiverse Neighbourhoods Jenny Phillimore, Hannah Bradby, Tilman Brand, Beatriz Padilla and Simon Pemberton 6 The Home in the Digital Age Antonio Argandoña, Joy Malala and Richard C. 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Daniel Drewski 11 Anxiety in Middle-Class America Sociology of Emotional Insecurity in Late Modernity Valérie de Courville Nicol 12 Boredom and Academic Work Mariusz Finkielsztein For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Advances-in-Sociology/book-series/SE0511 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 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 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 known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. 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.