Published Dec. 15, 2017 The Ties That Bind Jerusalem Different religions have their own holy sites in Jerusalem, the city where I've spent my entire adult life. The place I believe to be among the most important, however, is a grubby swath of garages, welding shops and...
In war, the battle today is less on the ground than on social media Dec. 14, 2017 In the 1990s, I served as an infantryman at an obscure Israeli outpost in southern Lebanon whose claim to fame was a curious incident one Saturday morning in 1994: A...
JERUSALEM — My most unsettling neighbors here in Jerusalem are Indians: Afzal Hussein Shah, Chulam Muhammad, Mansub Ali. They occupy a lot on a street near my home. You pass No. 22, then No. 24, but instead of No. 26 you find a rectangle of...
A short essay on a striking turn to Israel in American Jewish fiction this year, from the latest Jewish Review of Books: Distant Cousins Reading novels published in the last year by some of America’s best Jewish writers, I found myself struck by a recurring character—Israel. That...
A review (The Washington Post, June 23, 2017) of a new collection of essays about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank: What happens when famous novelists ‘confront the Occupation’ in the West Bank By Matti Friedman Last year, the American novelists Michael Chabon, Ayelet Waldman and Dave Eggers led...
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...
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...
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...
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...
What my preschooler's taste in pop says about where the country is at The Israeli culture wars arrived in my kitchen a few months ago when I discovered that the cure for my daughter’s grumpy preschooler moods was a Hebrew dance hit called “Happiness Revolution.” The...