ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 addresses suicide media-events marked by heroic and nonheroic shame, as they were discussed during Israel’s 1950s and 1960s nation-state building processes. “Heroic shame” during nation-building processes was associated with the implausibility of fully realizing the values of ideally committed citizenship, especially in military service, whereby individual citizens were construed as hologram-like instances of a morally bound collectivity. Suicide was thus but one option for citizens who were deemed to have failed to live up to that high standard position of being a moral embodiment of the nation. “Non-heroic shame,” on the other hand, refers to cases that evince the yet-unfinished bureaucratic normalization of the new State. They attest to the failure and shame of some citizens not only for disobeying its laws, as they developed before a fully-fledged system of legal sanctions was in place, but also for failing to withstand the collective shame that these infractions entailed. This chapter also discusses the media’s Self-Censorship Act of 1960, aimed at reducing detailed public debates and visibility of suicide cases in the newly established State, following the rise of suicide cases among Holocaust survivors, and shows its relevance for the Israeli National Suicide Prevention Program, established in 2009 in accordance with the blueprint of the World Health Organization.
