Vanity Fair: Best Books of 2022

Matti Friedman’s concise and poetic book recounts Cohen’s highly improvised concert tour of the front lines of the 1973 Yom Kippur War between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The little-known episode marks a resurrection of sorts in Cohen’s life. Holed up on the island of Hydra before the war, he was in a personal crisis: Dried up creatively, he had …

Times Literary Supplement (UK) review, Nov. 11, 2022

By David Lipset When Syria and Egypt, still indignant at their humiliating defeat in the Six Day War six years earlier, attacked Israel on Yom Kippur, the annual Day of Atonement and the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, in early autumn 1973, the singer and poet Leonard Cohen was in a dark state of mind. Then aged thirty-nine, Cohen …

Who By Fire (Jewish Book Council review, March 28, 2022)

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 …

Israel’s Minister of the Hyphen (Tablet Magazine, April 11, 2022)

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 …