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The nine contributors to Psychoanalysis, identity, and ideology share a far from neutral point of view, since they give clear voice to the Israeli ideological Left. Explicitly identified with critical or post-Zionist thinking, the first six writers analyse various facets of Zionist-Israeli identity. The book portrays a harsh, unflattering portrait, which some might find difficult to accept.
The book begins with Beit-Hallahmi's discussion of secular Jewish identity in early-twentieth-century Europe. Secular Jews' main conflict was between assimilation and Zionism. While assimilation implied the rejection (or disintegration) of Jewish identity, Zionism attempted to replace religious identity with a national one. The goal of national liberation was accompanied by the promise of mental renewal, the dream of the New Jew. Beit-Hallahmi examines four types of secular identity through four ‘biographical’ studies based on real or fictional characters or on ideological types. Proust, whose mother was Jewish, strove to shed all traces of the ‘low’ part in his origin. Like homosexuals, Jews, for Proust, were ‘less than real men’, and he compares the sense of being Jewish to an incurable disease. James Joyce's Bloom, a fictional