(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 …
Leonard Cohen TV Drama, ‘Who by Fire,’ Set With ‘Shtisel’ Writer Yehonatan Indursky (Variety, Nov. 28, 2022)
By K.J. Yossman for Variety Leonard Cohen’s 1973 visit to the frontlines of the Yom Kippur war is set to be dramatized in a new limited TV series from Keshet International and Sixty-Six Media. “Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai” is an adaptation of Matti Friedman’s book of the same name, which tells the story of Cohen’s 1973 concert on …
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” on the Honestly podcast with Bari Weiss
Listen to the interview, with great music by Cohen and others, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
In 1973, Leonard Cohen hated his life. Then he went to a war zone (Washington Post review, April 15, 2022)
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 …
Tracing a Portrait of Leonard Cohen Through the Fog of War (New York Sun review, Feb. 28, 2022)
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 …
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 …
Tour of Duty: When Leonard Cohen Serenaded Ariel Sharon on the Battlefield (Haaretz, March 22, 2022)
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 …
Why Leonard Cohen joined a war to sing for his brothers, and never spoke of it again (Times of Israel, March 29, 2022)
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 …