Chapter 2, titled “Popular Media in a Post National Age” (pages 31-63 in the book) would be most readily accessible and intriguing for readers who know little about modern Israeli culture. The chapter talks about the media revolution in Israel in the late 1980s and beyond. It uses one of the most influential newspapers that were published in Israel at the time, the local Tel-Aviv weekly Ha’ir, as an example of the deep changes the country was undergoing at the time. The chapter focuses on the economic changes that brought about a consumer revolution in the life of the country and the many ways this revolution influenced Israeli society, its politics and its culture.The chapter’s main argument is that the opening up of Israeli markets to goods and ideas from outside also changed the ways Israelis looked at their own society, their own history, and their own politics. The freer market that gradually grew in Israel in the 1980s and 1990s subjected many old truths to a new examination and to new evaluations. As a result, some of the most accepted notions were either changed or discarded altogether by a growing number of Israelis. These included Israel’s responsibility for the plight of Palestinian refugees, the painful ways the country absorbed various immigrant groups, including Mizrahi Jews and Holocaust survivors, and other aspects of the State’s building process which were reevaluated from the distance and vantage point of time.Israeli Culture between the Two Intifadas attempts to chart one of the latest stages in the development of Israeli culture. It is one of the first books to do so in the English language. Because of time and distance considerations, even in Israel these perspectives have only been offered in the last decade or so. The book also claims that the great window of opportunity for a grand and lasting peace between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East has largely been closed since the breaking of the second Palestinian intifada in 2000. That event plunged the Middle East back again into a tribal war which seems fiercer and more entrenched than before, on both sides. However, considering the great hopes of the Oslo years in the early 1990s, and looking at the great tragedy that followed the shattering of those hopes, I attempt to offer a perspective as well as a lesson and an incentive for a rekindling of those hopes sometime in the future.