Listen to the interview, with great music by Cohen and others, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

By Diane Cole Musician, heal thyself. Over the course of his long career, the Canadian singer-songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen (1934-2016) honed a distinctive style that infused joy with melancholy and mixed outward calm with edgy bursts of rage at a universe unwilling to yield its meaning. He had a gift for hypnotic song lines and for sexy lyrics that …

By A.R. Hoffman People have been singing about wars for just as long as they have been fighting them. The poet Homer and the prophetess Deborah both wove together melody and military, and no doubt songs will emerge from the battle for Kiev just as they did from those for Troy and Mount Tabor.  Art may be just an interloper …

By Beth Dwoskin  Leonard Cohen fans know that Judaism was a crit­i­cal part of his iden­ti­ty. Experts know that sec­u­lar Israelis revere his mem­o­ry. These two facts come togeth­er in this riv­et­ing book by Mat­ti Fried­man. When the Yom Kip­pur War began in 1973, Cohen was one of so many dias­po­ra Jews who went to Israel with the com­mon and naive expec­ta­tion that …

Author Matti Friedman’s book on Leonard Cohen’s tour of the Sinai Desert during the October 1973 war between Israel and Egypt is an expedition into the troubled soul of one of the world’s greatest songwriters By Iddo Schejter October 1973 may be the most horrific month in Israeli history. During this much-documented time, when approximately 2,300 Israeli soldiers were killed …

Using Cohen’s own notes, and recollections of Israeli soldiers who heard him, Matti Friedman teases out the astounding story of the Jewish singer-priest on the Yom Kippur frontline By David Horovitz Matti Friedman had a series of near and not-so-near misses with Leonard Cohen. Friedman was born in Canada in 1977, four years after the 1973 Yom Kippur War during …

Minister of Religious Services Matan Kahana arrives at the president’s residence in Jerusalem on June 14, 2021EMMANUEL DUDANDE/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES Matti Friedman Matan Kahana’s lonely battle to build a religious-Zionist-labor-Orthodox-democratic Jewish state It’s impossible to understand Matan Kahana, the surprise star of the current Israeli government, or to grasp the spirit of the coalition that has governed here for …

Some upcoming book events (live and in person!) in the US and Canada: Tuesday, March 29, 2022, Los Angeles: Writers Bloc at the Skirball Center, 7:30 p.m. With Rabbi David Wolpe and a musical guest Sunday, April 3, 2022,Toronto: 11:30a.m., Beth Tikvah (3080 Bayview) Monday, April 4, 2022, New York: Streicker Center, 6 p.m. With author Abigail Pogrebin and a …

Israel’s last wave of Ukrainian and Russian Jews is preparing to absorb the next one Matti Friedman New people with old stories are sitting on the benches in Nahariya, the beach town in northern Israel where my parents live. One woman sits in a park near the Jewish Agency’s immigrant absorption center, holding her smartphone and crying as another woman’s …

Beijing’s courtship of Israel has been canny and effective Matti Friedman Last week I drove up to Haifa to see with my own eyes a sight that, for most Israelis, has yet to sink in: the country’s brand new port, our third, which is beautiful, automated, efficient, and operated by the same Chinese company that runs the megaport at Shanghai. …