Books
A NEW CONVERSATION ABOUT NARRATIVES AND PEACE
Attempting to break the agonizing impasse between Israelis and Palestinians, the Israeli commentator and award-winning author of Like Dreamers directly addresses his Palestinian neighbors in this taut and provocative book, empathizing with Palestinian suffering and longing for reconciliation as he explores how the conflict looks through Israeli eyes.
Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor is one Israeli’s powerful attempt to reach beyond the wall that separates Israelis and Palestinians. In a series of letters, Yossi Klein Halevi explains what motivated him to leave his native New York in his twenties and move to Israel to participate in the drama of the renewal of a Jewish homeland, which he is committed to see succeed as a morally responsible, democratic state in the Middle East.
This is the first attempt by an Israeli author to directly address his Palestinian neighbors and describe how the conflict appears through Israeli eyes. Halevi untangles the ideological and emotional knot that has defined the conflict for nearly a century. In lyrical, evocative language, he unravels the complex strands of faith, pride, anger and anguish he feels as a Jew living in Israel, using history and personal experience as his guide.
Halevi’s letters speak not only to his Palestinian neighbors, but to all his neighbors in the Middle East. In writing this book he is inviting his neighbors not only to read, but to respond with letters of their own. This is the first step in a project that will enable Palestinians and Israelis, Arabs and Jews to hear each others stories.
Like Dreamers
THE STORY OF THE ISRAELI PARATROOPERS WHO REUNITED JERUSALEM AND DIVIDED A NATION
In restoring Jewish sovereignty to the Holy City during 1967's Six-Day War, the paratroopers of Reserve Brigade 55 fulfilled a dream of two millenia, forever changing the history of Israel and of the Middle East. And, as veteran jounalist Yossi Klein Halevi compellingly reveals in Like Dreamers, they served pivotal roles in shaping Israel's destiny long after their resounding military sucess. As he follows the lives of this Israeli band of brothers, and charts the idealogical divides among them, he weaves an epic chronicle of modern Israel that humanizes the country's political and cultural dilemmas, and offers an unprecedented glimpse into its soul.
At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden
A JEW'S SEARCH FOR GOD WITH CHRISTIANS AND MUSLIMS IN THE HOLY LAND
In At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden, Yossi Klein Halevi describes his unprecedented and extraordinary spiritual journey to discover, as a religious Israeli Jew, a commonspiritual language with his Christian and Muslim neighbors in the Holy Land.
"Could religion be a source of unity?"wondered Halevi. To find the answer, he began a two-year exploration of the devotional life of Christianity and Islam. He followed their holiday cycles, befriended Christian monastics and Muslim mystics,and joined them in prayer in monestaries and mosques -- searching for wisdom and holiness in places that are usually off-limits to outsiders of other faiths.
With a new foreword relating to September 11, Halevi chronicles the difficulty of overcoming obstacles -- theological, political, historical, and psychological -- that separate believers of the three monotheistic faiths. And he introduces a dynamic range of fascinating individuals attempting to reconcile the dichotomous heart of this sacred place -- a struggle central to Israel, but which resonates for us all.
Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist
THE STORY OF A TRANSFORMATION
The child of a Holocaust survivor, Yossi Klein Halevi grew up in 1960s Brooklyn perceiving reality through the lens of his family's brutal past. Determined to take action -- and seek retribution -- he became a disciple of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane and a member of the radical fringe of the American Jewish community.
In this wry and moving account, Halevi explore the deep-rooted anger of his adolescence and early adulthood that feuled his militant politics. He reveals how he began to question his beliefs and see the world from his own clear perspective, freeing himself from being a hostage to rage.
Speaking to a new generation struggling to understand what it means to be Jewish in America, Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist explains how such a transformation can happen -- giving hope that peaceful coexistence among faiths is possible.