The direct, blunt, and critical “Dugri” speech style has characterized Israeli Sabra culture for many decades (Katriel, 1986). Concurrently, beginning in the 1980s and primarily influenced by trends from the United States, an emotion-focused therapeutic discourse emerged and grew in Israel (Beit-Hallahmi, 1992; Kidron, 2003). The question addressed in this article is how these two styles coexist, or rather: what are the unique characteristics of contemporary “Dugri” Israeli empathy? Based on an analysis of findings from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in three life-coaching training schools in Israel between 2010 and 2012, I argue that unique Israeli empathy is characterized by the following: (1) unlike definitions of empathy elsewhere (Hollan, 2012), Israeli empathy focuses on expressions of the speaker’s authenticity rather than the recipient’s feelings; (2) it is imagined as devoid of emotion, yet practically allows for the expression of anger or pain; (3) and it is anchored in a collective ethos, but alongside the ongoing erosion of this ethos and of social solidarity, it is often experienced as more blunt than historical expressions of Dugri.
Kaneh-Shalit, T. (2022) Israeli Empathy: When Dugri meets the Therapeutic. Israeli Studies in Language and Society, 15: 99-115. [Hebrew]