Haaretz review

By Ilene Prusher May 23, 2016 A good war memoir never makes war look glamorous. Rather, it puts you in the shoes of the soldier or civilian at those incredible moments when life hangs by a thread, unpacks a few of the conflicting political forces at play and, ultimately, breaks your heart. It must, because you meet characters who will …

Israel’s Prophetic War (Wall Street Journal review)

By Bret Stephens May 6, 2016 From 1985 to 2000, the Israeli military occupied an 11-mile-deep “security zone” in southern Lebanon, in an effort to prevent the area from becoming a staging ground for attacks by Hezbollah into Israel itself. Some 250 Israeli soldiers were killed fighting in the zone and another 840 were injured—numbers that, for a country of …

Matti Friedman’s ‘Pumpkinflowers’ (New York Times review, May 3, 2016)

By Gal Beckerman Israel, like America, is an idea, not just a place. As a result, it has been subjected to much metaphorical thinking — it is a refuge, a beacon, a start-up company, an unlikely flower blooming in an unforgiving desert. Since the Middle East’s descent into chaos following the Iraq war and the ­aftermath of the Arab Spring, …

The Peculiar Language of Soldiers (The Atlantic, May 4, 2016)

JERUSALEM—“We have two flowers and one oleander. We need a thistle.” Listening to the Israeli military frequencies when I was an infantryman nearly two decades ago, it was (and still is) possible to hear sentences like these, the bewildering cousins of sentences familiar to anyone following America’s present-day wars. “Vegas is in a TIC,” says a U.S. infantryman in Afghanistan …

New York Times review, April 24, 2016

Review: In ‘Pumpkinflowers,’ a New Style of Middle East Combat By Jennifer Senior, Books of the Times During the 1990s, Matti Friedman and his fellow Israeli soldiers fought in a string of conflicts that never collectively earned a name. These battles existed in historical parentheses, wedged between Israel’s first Lebanon War, in 1982, and its second, in 2006. But that …

Upcoming events in May 2016

A bunch of events coming up in the U.S. and Canada following the publication of Pumpkinflowers on May 3: May 3, New York, 7pm: A discussion with the great journalist and editor David Samuels at the Manhattan JCC. Details here. May 4, New York, 6pm: A discussion of war writing with Marine Corps vet and author Elliot Ackerman, moderated by …

Publishers Weekly review of “Pumpkinflowers”

A starred review of Pumpkinflowers from Publishers Weekly: Friedman, an Israeli journalist and writer, recounts the history of a hilltop bunker in southern Lebanon that was held by the Israeli army during the 1990s, beginning with the biography of a young soldier stationed there and transitioning into a memoir of his own time on the hill and his post-war visit as …

Holy Rubble and Rabble (Wall Street Journal book review)

April 1, 2016 “Whoever did not see Jerusalem in its days of glory has not seen a beautiful city in his life,” the Talmud says of the days when Herod’s temple shone at the center of a city that symbolized the gateway to the divine. The world was given 10 allotments of beauty, the sages say, and Jerusalem got nine. Along …

The Age of the Terror Selfie (Tablet, Jan. 5, 2016)

At a lonely army outpost in 1994, Israel was shown the difference between radicals and fanatics—and between soldiers and storytellers. But the West didn’t learn. This fall and winter have seen many of us here in Israel consuming a miserable kind of reality TV: blurry clips of young Palestinian Muslims with knives seeking release in murder and martyrdom, lunging, stabbing, falling stricken …

When One Israeli Went Too Far (Review, Washington Post, Oct. 29, 2015)

One Saturday night in late 1995, I was with a few other 18-year-olds at a kibbutz in northern Israel, watching a Hebrew B-movie called “Lemon Popsicle” on TV. Words began scrolling urgently at the bottom of the screen, a news flash: The prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, had been shot at a peace rally in Tel Aviv. Soon the movie winked …