The Wisdom of Hamas (The Free Press, Dec. 28, 2023)

They understand the war they’re fighting. Many in the West still don’t. JERUSALEM — In the days after Hamas terrorists invaded Israel on October 7, triggering the current war in Gaza, many believed that Hamas had erred. The word “miscalculation” recurred in news analysis and in statements from Israeli leaders. People here in Israel were galvanized into action by the …

Let Objects Speak: A web series from Beit Avi Chai

“Let Objects Speak,” produced by Beit Avi Chai in Jerusalem, takes viewers on a tour of some of the Jewish treasures of the great Russian collections, looking for the human stories behind the artifacts. I was honored to translate the series from Russian, adapting it for an English-speaking audience, and narrating six episodes — three from the Hermitage in St. …

Back to 1948 (The Free Press, Oct. 19, 2023)

My smartphone says it’s October 2023, but in Israel it feels like 1948.  That was the year this country was established as 600,000 Jews fought the combined might of the Arab world three years after the genocide in Europe. You can still feel that war in the air and underbrush of Kibbutz Mishmar Ha’emek in northern Israel, where I traveled this week, …

When Did Humans Start Settling Down? (Smithsonian Magazine, July/August 2023)

Matti Friedman Twelve thousand years ago, long before the beginning of recorded history, a group of perhaps 200 people lived in a small village by a stream flowing into the Sea of Galilee, in what today is northern Israel. The villagers hunted gazelle and hares, fished for carp, built stone houses, and buried their dead in a cemetery next to …

Speech at Jerusalem protest, 9.7.23

(This is the English translation of a speech I delivered in Hebrew at a protest against the Israeli government’s policies on Saturday night, July 9, 2023, outside the President’s official residence in Jerusalem.) When I was 17, in the mid-1990s, I moved from Canada to Israel. I joined the army and found myself with a company of the Nahal Brigade …

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 …