“Yonatan can't see us growing ugly anymore. ‘We'll never be as handsome as we are today,’ he would always say.” Thus begins Ron Leshem's novel Beaufort, winner of Israel's 2006 Sapir Prize for the best work of literature published that year, which documents the camaraderie developed between a group of Israeli soldiers isolated in a remote military outpost. The success of the book, with its celebration of the beauty of soldiers and unabashed expression of homosocial attraction voiced only after a soldier's death, perfectly illustrates the main argument of Danny Kaplan's absorbing study of the interrelations between male friendship and nationalism: The ideological construction of soldiers' fraternity serves as the foundation for the imagined solidarity of the (Israeli) nation, and that this construction finds its most prominent expression in national commemorations of heroic death.

Based on thirty interviews with heterosexual men, combined with ethnographic observations and the analysis of media and popular culture texts, Kaplan explores the concept of male friendship in Israeli culture as an emotion that, while largely experienced as personal and private, is in fact deeply implicated in ideological form as a tool in the service of nationalism, epitomized in the ideal of military activity. Kaplan situates this examination in the distinction between the Hebrew terms ḥaverut and re'ut: While ḥaverut is a broad concept that may refer to various types of friendly relationships, re'ut is today uniquely associated with homosocial camaraderie, particularly that related to shared military experiences. Tracking the historical development of re'ut as an Israeli national-emotional ideal, from early Zionist thought inspired by Romantic notions of fraternity, through the years of pre-state settlement, and on to Israel's formative years and its attempts to construct social cohesion, Kaplan demonstrates how this concept has come to function as a hegemonic script and meaning-making mechanism for the modeling of male friendship, shaped and perceived as a collective national-level attachment and inculcated through a variety of cultural discourses and practices.

Analyzing the detailed narratives conveyed by his informants, in which they describe their most cherished personal friendships, Kaplan identifies the recurring building blocks from which these narratives are constructed, as well as the cultural meaning systems that lie beneath these formulations. Through careful dissection of personal narratives, Kaplan demonstrates that these building blocks, rather than being necessarily congruent with actual life experiences, more often serve as convenient shortcuts for arriving at certain cultural understandings of friendship that endow it with a mythic, national-ideological significance. Thus, for example, while relatively few of the interviewees refer to friendships formed in the military as their most significant relations, the military nevertheless serves as the most dominant image against which the idea of male bonding is constructed. Within the telling of the personal life story, the actual lived experience of friendship thus becomes intertwined with the mythic, ideological notion of re'ut, with the latter ultimately serving as the litmus test for all forms of camaraderie.

With such an epic model to emulate, many men unsurprisingly feel that their own friendships cannot live up to cultural expectations. Moreover, given the cultural constraints on public expressions of emotions by men in general, and of homosocial love in particular, the experience of friendship is characterized by a permanent sense of lack and the constant negation or denial of desire. It is here that Kaplan makes his most brilliant theoretical move, linking this personal suppression of passion to the surrounding culture's celebration of heroic sacrifice and death, and suggesting that it is through the mediation of collective rituals of national commemoration that the ideal of re'ut may finally be realized. The love and desire that cannot be voiced in life become legitimized in death, in what Kaplan provocatively refers to as “a dynamics of collective necrophilia” (xi). This collective desire, rendered manifest in a variety of cultural practices and artifacts (and finding its original Jewish source in the biblical story of David and Jonathan), stands at the heart of the imagined community of the nation. Kaplan goes on to convincingly demonstrate that the death of the friend need not be real; it is enough that it is symbolically experienced or constructed as death (as in the case of friendship gone sour) for the formerly concealed homosocial passion to be revealed. Moreover, even when death is not experienced at all—the friend is alive, the relationship thriving—it is already imagined, so that friendship can acquire the idealized form of re'ut.

While The Men We Loved functions superbly as an analysis of re'ut as a powerful cultural construct driving Israeli society, some of its own limitations must be acknowledged. Because of his focus on the dominant ethos, Kaplan remains less attentive to the wide variety of alternative narratives that have become more prevalent over the past few decades and that challenge the dominant framework of thought. As a result, the script for re'ut as presented in the book appears both all-encompassing and stagnant. Kaplan recognizes this, but considers it a logical outcome since a “monolithic, monumental hegemonic sentiment … is a requisite for national consciousness” (145). Yet the cultural power and durability of hegemony is derived not from its intransigence, but rather from its continual capacity for regenerative mutation in light of ongoing sociocultural developments. Such developments, and their influence on the dominant narrative, remain relatively unexplored.

Some of this neglect might be the result of Kaplan's selection of informants. The interviewees represent a subgroup that, while compatible with prototypical hegemonic Zionism, has in practice become more and more scarce over the years. Thus, for example, virtually all interviewees completed three years of military service and engaged in military reserve duty for much of their adult lives. At a time when approximately 25 percent of Jewish Israeli males do not serve in the military at all, and only one of every five men of reserve duty age completes even one day of reserve service annually, suggesting that these interviewees can unilaterally represent Israeli society or its hegemonic voice is something of a stretch. Kaplan acknowledges this sampling limitation, but constructs it as a methodological choice, suggesting that the plurality of voices in a culture is represented within—and not only across—individuals, and that traces of “othered” voices may thus be identified even within the discourse of the sociocultural elite. This is true in principle, but in practice Kaplan's methodological choice does not achieve the desired results. While the interviewees exhibit some moments of internal multivocality, they more commonly appear oblivious—either of their own accord, or through the selection of their accounts—to narratives that depart from what is perceived to be the mainstream. Furthermore, allowing “othered” voices to speak only through their hegemonic stand-ins seems problematic on a more fundamental level; traces of alterity as voiced and interpreted by members of the elite do not replace the need for these actual voices to be heard.

Likewise, for a study whose focus is on present-day Israeli society, the selection of cultural texts analyzed sometimes seems curiously anachronistic. If this selection is indeed representative of the entire scope of material raised by interviewees, then surely the absence of more contemporary texts, with which they interact on a more regular basis, and their continued appeal to nostalgia, is worthy of careful theoretical consideration. Recent years have seen an explosion of cultural texts dealing explicitly and implicitly, hegemonically and critically, with the issues addressed by Kaplan (one thinks, for example, of the television series Tironut and Miluim, or the more subversive The Cameric Five and M.K. 22). Adding such texts to the corpus might have resulted in a more nuanced portrait that would perhaps be more reflective of the tensions and contradictions inhered within the dominant ethos of re'ut.

These caveats notwithstanding, The Men We Loved provides a fascinating exploration of an understudied social relationship in a cultural setting that, while extreme in its military-centered fervor, bears much relevance for all contexts in which personal lived experiences are colored by often unacknowledged ideological structures. Neatly constructed, elegantly written, and passionately argued, its messages resonate far beyond the Israeli sphere.