TLV1 (TEL AVIV, ISRAEL) -- Eran Kaplan, Israel studies professor at San Francisco State University, discusses his book Beyond Post-Zionism, a critical analysis of an intellectual fad that took the Israeli political and intellectual debate by storm in 1990s.
Post-Zionism emerged as an intellectual and cultural movement in the late 1980s when a growing number of people inside and outside academia felt that Zionism, as a political ideology, had outlived its usefulness.
“In the ordinary lives of most Israelis, this enthusiastic commitment to the traditional ideology no longer seemed relevant,” Kaplan says. “The concerns of the individual, of everyday lives, of simple middle-class or bourgeois considerations, trumped issues issues that in the ’50s and ’60s would have seemed almost heretical, I think, in the lives of ordinary Israelis. So I do think that there was a change in the way Israelis lived their lives and experienced their lives. And I think that this change is reflected in various aspects in the arts, int the culture that was produced, but also in the intellectual, critical schools that emerged.”