An Ideological Death: Suicide in Israeli Literature examines literary challenges to Israel’s national narratives. Many prominent Israeli fiction writers use the prism of suicide to confront the centrality of the army, the mythology of the “new Jew,” the vision of Tel Aviv as the first Israeli city, and the very process by which a nation’s history is constructed.
Translated by Kevin Anderson, Eric A. Plaut and Gabrielle Edgcomb
In 1846, two years before the publication of The Communist Manifesto and twenty-one years before the publication of Das Kapital, Karl Marx published an essay titled "Peuchet on Suicide." Based on the writings of Jacques Peuchet, a leading French police administrator, economist, and statistician whose memoirs included discussions of suicides in Paris, Marx's essay is not a straightforward translation of Peuchet but instead an essay reflecting his own strong positions on the subjects addressed in Peuchet's work.
