Psychedelics in Israel: A Brief History

I’m excited to announce the publication of a new book chapter titled “Psychedelics in Israel: A brief history”, which I published together with Itamar Zadoff as part of a new book by MIT Press titled Expanding Mindscapes: A Global History of Psychedelics.

This book opens a new chapter in psychedelic historiography. Psychedelic scholars have thoroughly scoured the American history of psychedelia for the decades. Now, psychedelic scholarship is waking up to the existence of other psychedelic histories across the world. The new book contains 20 chapters that deal with such subjects as capitalist ayahuasca rituals in communist China (Alex Gearin), the relationship between phenomenology and psychedelics in 1930s France (Gautier Dassonneville) and queer-psychedelic rituals in Karachi, Pakistan (Manal Kahn). Mr. Zadoff and I were accorded the honor of writing up Israel’s psychedelic history.

It was a fascinating and fun text to work on. It sent us to the first Israeli LSD experiments which took place in psychiatric hospitals in the early 1960s, through a long series of bohemian, colorful figures including the poet Yonah Walach, poet David Avidan, and poet/mystic/guru Rina Shani, through the psychoactive rivalry between the stoned Sabres of the Lul group and the subversive, radical hallucinatory spirit of the internationally-oriented Third Eye Group led by Jacques Katmor, through holocaust survivor’s Ka-Tsetnik’s psychedelic visions of the astral Auschwitz, and through to  the meteoric rise of the Israeli psytrance scene the rise of Ayahuasca ceremonies, and the development of an extensive Israeli psychedelic community and ecosystem. Along the way arose complex questions on the relationship between drugs and Zionism, escapism, the alternativeness, and normativity of psychedelics in Israeli culture.

It’s a weird time to be publishing this paper, just two months after an unprecedented event in psychedelic history: the massacre of around 350 Israeli ravers, many of them psychonauts under the influence of psychedelics, at the hands of Hamas terrorists in the Nova Music Festival on October 7^th,, with thousands of other injured or suffering trauma. I publish this paper with the hope that this community will be able to heal itself in the wake of these events and with prayers for peace to come to our aching part of the world.

You can read a preprint version of the article using this link