The new tough Jew emerged in the eighties amidst the transnational age of iron (Iron Fists, Iron Ladies and a crescendo of arm sales). The aesthetic of toughness, both in Israel and the U.S. driven by a collective memory of loss, promoted heroes on rescue-missions in movies such as Uncommon Valor, POW, Missing in Action and Delta Force - the latter produced by Menachim Golan on location in Israel. The ultimate was Sylvester Stallone's Rambo acting out this obsession with defeat, trying to erase the past and alter the present by subduing savages on the frontier.

after Jan Nederveen Pieterse in Aesthetics Of Power