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 Jonathan Safran Foer’s Here I Am and Joshua Cohen’s Moving Kings both feature Israel and Israelis as …
Washington Post review of “Kingdom of Olives and Ash”
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 a group of writers to “bear witness” to the crisis in Iraq, …
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 …
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 …
Israel’s Happiness Revolution (Tablet, Aug. 31, 2015)
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 song is of the genre known loosely as Mizrahi, a blend of Middle Eastern, …
Jerusalem, Spring 2015: What Is Normal Here? (Tablet Magazine, May 15, 2015)
Before dawn one day early last year, I tagged along with a garbage truck picking up trash around the southern part of Jerusalem. The crew was Jewish and Arab, and so was the trash. (“Everyone eats the same potatoes,” one of the crew chiefs told me.) Spending time on the truck seemed a good way to make a point missed …
The Sistine Chapel of the Jews is restored to life in Jerusalem (Tablet Magazine)
Tablet Magazine, Jan. 5, 2015 Yaakov Stark died penniless and unknown. His murals at the Ades Synagogue are a masterpiece of early Zionist art. In 1901, in Ottoman Jerusalem, members of the wealthy Ades family funded the construction of a synagogue for Jews who had moved to the city from Aleppo, Syria. It was built off an alleyway near the …
What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel (The Atlantic)
The Atlantic, Nov. 30, 2014 During the Gaza war this summer, it became clear that one of the most important aspects of the media-saturated conflict between Jews and Arabs is also the least covered: the press itself. The Western press has become less an observer of this conflict than an actor in it, a role with consequences for the millions …