Jewish Social Studies

Abstract:

This article deals with an unexamined aspect of the Israeli culture of bereavement and its ethos of sacrifice: the expanding legitimation among bereaved parents to actively strive to have a substitute child in place of one killed in the course of military service. It begins by reviewing recent civil initiatives aimed at utilizing new fertility technologies to realize this wish. Despite these developments, the claim this article seeks to promote and discuss is that the underlying aspiration for a replacement child has existed within the Israeli national order from the state's early days, and has several common cultural symbolic and sublimative expressions, such as commemorating a dead soldier by naming newborn relatives for him. New fertility technologies have opened up a path to materialize symbolic modes of commemoration. The article closely examines the concept of the replacement child and the national logic guiding it in two novellas written at the millennium's outset by two influential Israeli authors: "Diana's Child" (Ha-yeled shel Diana) by Savyon Liebrecht and "My Younger Brother Yehudah" (Aḥi ha-ẓa'ir Yehudah) by Sami Berdugo.