Finding Meaning: An Existential Quest in Post-Modern Israel

From its trendy urban centers to its ancient deserts, Israel's history is based on the rich heritage of traditions and contradictions. It is known as a start-up nation, with hospitable and warm interpersonal relationships, and a steady high-ranked happiness level. Yet, its deep political disparities and past traumas ripple beneath the surface of its culture, with unyielding existential threats looming from its neighbors and from within its borders. The turbulent Israeli setting―characterized by salient existential threats, issues of identity and dialectic world views―serve as a magnifying glass for unravelling a variety of significant ways through which the human fundamental motivation to find meaning in life is manifested.

Finding Meaning incorporates a conceptual framework for examining the post-modern, sociocultural Israeli scene that facilitates and triggers the search for meaning among its citizens. Combining theory, data, and illustrative case studies, this book unravels a variety of significant and fundamental manifestations of a quest for meaning under existentialist duress, carefully navigating the cultural context of post-modernist Israel. Written by experts in these areas, this book offers new insights into this quest by suggesting a new construct that weaves together the personal and cultural environment, highlights several key processes and dimensions that appear to characterize this search, and offers broad perspectives that contribute to the research at these intersections.

Finding Meaning is a pioneering book with an insightful, innovative, and hopeful lens for academic, scholarly, and some lay readers interested in meaning and contemporary Israeli society.

Ofra Mayseless is a former dean and current professor of developmental psychology at the Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Israel; she is also the head of the Multi-University Center for the Study of Human Spirit. She published over 100 articles and chapters, edited two books, and authored one. She studies attachment, caring motivation, transition to adulthood, search for meaning and spiritual development.

Pninit Russo-Netzer is a senior lecturer and researcher. Her main research and practice interests focus on meaning in life, positive psychology, existential psychology, spirituality, positive change and growth. She is the head of the Education Department at Achva Academic College, the founder and head of the 'Compass' Institute for the Study and Application of Meaning in life, and the head of the Academic Training Program for Logotherapy (meaning-oriented psychotherapy) at Tel-Aviv University. She published scholarly journal articles and chapters on these topics, and co-edited the books Meaning in Positive and Existential Psychology, and Clinical Perspectives of Meaning.