Introduction

The Introduction sets the scene for converging the three pivots of the book: suicide as a public event, the case study of Israeli society, and the neo-Durkheimean theoretical perspective that frames the book’s core argument. It maintains that representations of some suicide events in the public sphere both reflect sociocultural processes and serve as a means to tackle and restore the ruptured moral order embodied in the act of voluntary self-killing. The Introduction unfolds the course of the ethnographically yarned structure of the book aimed at chronicling the annals of the public presence of suicide in Israel throughout its changing forms of shame and shaming.