Pourquoi Israel

Very good exploration of the contradictions, paradoxes, ambiguities and ambivalences of a nation whose collective personality has been formed and deformed through the trauma of the Holocaust. Israel's strange mix of idealism, pragmatism, religiosity, secularism and hysteria are very well captured, and yet, at a distance of more than forty years, it is hard not to see the world shown to us by Lanzmann without feeling a combination of nostalgia, melancholy, frustration and disappointment.