Benjamin Balint & Matti Friedman: 1973 & 2023
On today’s episode, Abe spoke with two brilliant Jerusalem-based journalists, Ben Balint and Matti Friedman. Ben’s most recent book, Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History won the 2024 National Jewish Book Award in biography. Matti Friedman is the author, most recently, of Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai.
When Abe asked them how they were processing the tragedy, they said, characteristically, that they’ve been doing so through writing. In our Winter issue, Matti wrote a brilliant reflection on the novel Adjusting Sights by Haim Sabato, a great Hebrew novel about the Yom Kippur War, while Ben dived into a new biography about Golda Meir by Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt.
Their work has helped them consider the unsettling similarities between today’s war, and the war of fifty years ago, and the discussion is wide-ranging, exploring the question of when we can begin to write about events, the uniquely Israeli perspective of Haim Sabato’s novel, and the ways that both Sabato and Meir wove the past in with their present through the use of story.
Suggested Reading
No Less Lost
The past can be exhilarating, and it can be quicksand. So discovers Menachem Kaiser in Plunder, his expansive, complicated, generous memoir.
Confusion and Illusions: 1939
In their new book, Jehuda Reinharz and Yaacov Shavit focus on the efforts of the leaders of a diverse and disunited Jewish people in Europe, the United States, and Palestine to cope with this crisis in the years leading up to World War II.
A Spy’s Life
Sylvia Rafael: The Life and Death of a Mossad Spy opens not with an intrepid secret agent about to pull off a bold maneuver, as books with such titles usually do, but with nine men gathered around a table in 1977, studying a picture of an Israeli agent.
Comes the Comer
The New American Haggadah boasts a high-profile cast of contributors—Jonathan Safran Foer, Nathan Englander, Nathaniel Deutsch, Jeffrey Goldberg, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, and Lemony Snicket. But it also features a series of unfortunate translations and commentaries.
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