The Cult of Dismembered Limbs

This book presents for the first time a comprehensive and nuanced portrayal of ZAKA -- an organization of ultra-orthodox religious Jews who rush to the sites of Palestinian suicide attacks in Israel to care for the mutilated corpses of the victims according to an intricate, symbolically charged, macabre rite. Gideon Aran has spent years embedded with the men of ZAKA, and in this gripping ethnography he takes readers inside the organization and on the ground with these men as they do their gruesome -- but, in their view, holy -- work.