Overview

The poignant and insightful memoir from Yossi Klein Halevi, the award-winning journalist and author of the acclaimed Like Dreamers--a coming-of-age story about a traumatic family history, radical politics, and spiritual transformation that speaks to a new generation struggling to understand what it means to be Jewish in America. 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. Increasingly identifying with their history of suffering, he regarded the non-Jewish world with fear and loathing. 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 explores the deep-rooted anger of his adolescence and early adulthood that fueled his increasingly aggressive activism. He reveals how he started to question his beliefs--and his self-inflicted suffering as a hostage of history--and see the world from his own clear perspective. As a journalist and author, Halevi has dedicated himself to fostering interfaith reconciliation. Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist explains how such a transformation can happen--giving hope that peaceful coexistence between faiths is possible.

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9780062362322

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Epic... In compiling the history of these competing utopian dreams, and how the Israeli idealism symbolized by the kibbutz was displaced by the Israeli idealism symbolized by the settlements, Klein Halevi delivers a powerful work about the force of political engagement, on choices, doubts and also a lot about mistakes... Klein Halevi's book is a profound work of introspection about the soul of a people and the internal dangers that may well undermine it even more than external threats."" - Frederique Schillo, Haaretz ""Exquisitely written... Halevi provides a comprehensive, insightful and richly accessible portrayal of the competing utopian visions of modern Zionism...Yossi Klein Halevi's eye for detail and character, and ear for complexity and nuance, create an authoritative narrative with the intensity and sweep of an epic novel. From now on, no understanding of the history and currents shaping the prospects for a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians will be complete without Halevi's remarkable and compelling book."" - Louis Nayman, In These Times ""Remarkable... A work of non-fiction that reads like a riveting novel, Like Dreamers... contains a fascinating cast of characters that entered Israeli public life and marked the transformations and fissures within it... Brilliantly, Klein Halevi interweaves personal narratives with Israeli history, skillfully introducing the complicated interactions between his subjects and Israel's political, intellectual and religious landscape... Klein Halevi's writing is so gripping that one wishes he would never stop."" - Steven Bayme, Jewish Week ""This beautifully researched and written book asks and answers more questions about modern Israel than any book I can ever recall reading. Halevi takes on conflicts that seem to have only one side, sensitively presents them through seven different sets of eyes, then reveals how each of the seven men he follows is himself riven and conflicted. His paratroopers and their dreams for what Israel has been and might become rise and descend like the angels in Jacob's dream."" - Dahlia Lithwick, Slate, Best Books of 2013 ""Like Dreamers is a good read in the best sense. It wears its formidable research very lightly, and it has brisk and compelling forward momentum despite the burden of crisscrossing back and forth among seven parallel lives...[Halevi] has taken on the burden of making us care enough about the lives of seven men to keep track of their exploits as he tirelessly turns from one to the other. (His compositional craft in managing hundreds of these transitions is impressive.) In doing so, he has, I think, captured something fundamental about the dynamics of Israeli society... Halevi has a gift for empathy that goes far beyond the requirements of professionalism, and his is a protean empathy...The greatest contribution of Halevi's Americanness is to open up for English readers the intimate codes of behavior and communication in Israeli civil and military life...Like Dreamers performs this work of cultural translation unobtrusively without ever patronizing the reader... Doors are opened, and we ourselves feel a little less like outsiders looking in."" - Alan Mintz, Jewish Review of Books ""Like Dreamers is a big book, perhaps the big book on Israel we have been waiting for.... [It] is a remarkable feat of reporting, thrilling, painful, and brilliantly recounted, and an unparalleled portrait of Israel's last five decades."" - Don Futterman, Daily Beast ""[Halevi] tracks the...lives of seven of the Brigade 55 members.... [He] succeeds in his broader goal of linking these men and their families to Israel's history during the past five decades. This is a beautifully written and sometimes heartbreaking account of these men, their families, and their nation."" - Booklist (starred review)

""Epic... In compiling the history of these competing utopian dreams, and how the Israeli idealism symbolized by the kibbutz was displaced by the Israeli idealism symbolized by the settlements, Klein Halevi delivers a powerful work about the force of political engagement, on choices, doubts and also a lot about mistakes... Klein Halevi's book is a profound work of introspection about the soul of a people and the internal dangers that may well undermine it even more than external threats."" - Frederique Schillo, Haaretz ""Exquisitely written... Halevi provides a comprehensive, insightful and richly accessible portrayal of the competing utopian visions of modern Zionism...Yossi Klein Halevi's eye for detail and character, and ear for complexity and nuance, create an authoritative narrative with the intensity and sweep of an epic novel. From now on, no understanding of the history and currents shaping the prospects for a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians will be complete without Halevi's remarkable and compelling book."" - Louis Nayman, In These Times ""Remarkable... A work of non-fiction that reads like a riveting novel, Like Dreamers... contains a fascinating cast of characters that entered Israeli public life and marked the transformations and fissures within it... Brilliantly, Klein Halevi interweaves personal narratives with Israeli history, skillfully introducing the complicated interactions between his subjects and Israel's political, intellectual and religious landscape... Klein Halevi's writing is so gripping that one wishes he would never stop."" - Steven Bayme, Jewish Week ""This beautifully researched and written book asks and answers more questions about modern Israel than any book I can ever recall reading. Halevi takes on conflicts that seem to have only one side, sensitively presents them through seven different sets of eyes, then reveals how each of the seven men he follows is himself riven and conflicted. His paratroopers and their dreams for what Israel has been and might become rise and descend like the angels in Jacob's dream."" - Dahlia Lithwick, Slate, Best Books of 2013 ""Like Dreamers is a good read in the best sense. It wears its formidable research very lightly, and it has brisk and compelling forward momentum despite the burden of crisscrossing back and forth among seven parallel lives...[Halevi] has taken on the burden of making us care enough about the lives of seven men to keep track of their exploits as he tirelessly turns from one to the other. (His compositional craft in managing hundreds of these transitions is impressive.) In doing so, he has, I think, captured something fundamental about the dynamics of Israeli society... Halevi has a gift for empathy that goes far beyond the requirements of professionalism, and his is a protean empathy...The greatest contribution of Halevi's Americanness is to open up for English readers the intimate codes of behavior and communication in Israeli civil and military life...Like Dreamers performs this work of cultural translation unobtrusively without ever patronizing the reader... Doors are opened, and we ourselves feel a little less like outsiders looking in."" - Alan Mintz, Jewish Review of Books ""Like Dreamers is a big book, perhaps the big book on Israel we have been waiting for.... [It] is a remarkable feat of reporting, thrilling, painful, and brilliantly recounted, and an unparalleled portrait of Israel's last five decades."" - Don Futterman, Daily Beast ""[Halevi] tracks the...lives of seven of the Brigade 55 members.... [He] succeeds in his broader goal of linking these men and their families to Israel's history during the past five decades. This is a beautifully written and sometimes heartbreaking account of these men, their families, and their nation."" - Booklist (starred review) ""[Halevi] skillfully relates lesser-known events--such as the January 1995 Beit Lid bombing--and conveys the ever-changing nature of Israeli culture and religious life. He also succinctly evinces the national psychology when he writes that 'in Israel, no trauma was ever really forgotten, only replaced by a new trauma.' Halevi's book is executed with imagination, narrative drive, and, above all, deep empathy for a wide variety of Israelis, and the result is a must-read for anyone with an interest in contemporary Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."" - Publishers Weekly (starred review) ""Astonishing... Like Dreamers is a majestic study of love and death, war and dreams, the evolution of Israel and the meaning of Zionism.... Like Dreamers has depth and expanse but most of all it has insight. In writing one of the most sparkling histories of the Jewish state, Halevi has also written the Great Israeli Novel, made all the greater because it's true."" - Stephen Daisley, Commentary ""Halevi expertly employs a traditional journalistic form: he isolates seven paratroopers... and reconstructs their lives... to render a complicated history intimate, human, relatable. His meticulous, sensitive, detailed reporting -- the book is the work of more than a decade -- is incredibly effective at making the small big. Over and over again, anecdotes about one religious settler or one secular kibbutznik resonate as powerful metaphors for the state's challenges... Caricatures are replaced with nuanced understanding of what was gained and lost as a communitarian farming society transformed itself into an entrepreneurial high-tech haven... ""Compared with so many books about Israel, Like Dreamers... is not a polemic, or even an argument. It is refreshingly free of prescriptive language and judgment about a subject too often overwhelmed by people screaming past one another."" - Jodi Rudoren, New York Times Book Review ""A magnificent book, one of the two or three finest books about Israel I have ever read.... Nothing explains more eloquently why Israel, more than most any other country, lives or dies based on the power and justice of its animating ideas."" - Jeffrey Goldberg, Bloomberg News Praise for Like Dreamers: ""Powerful.... a textured, beautifully written narrative.... There is much to admire in this book, especially Mr. Halevi's skill at getting inside the hearts and minds of these seven men."" - Ethan Bronner, New York Times ""Mr. Halevi's masterly book brings us into [the]...debate and the lives of those who live it, not through fiction but through a factual account illuminated by his own intelligence and empathy."" - Elliott Abrams, Wall Street Journal

Author Information

Yossi Klein Halevi is an American-born writer who has lived in Jerusalem since 1982. He is a senior fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and the author of At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land and Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation, which won the Jewish Book Council's Everett Family Book of the Year Award for Best Jewish Book in 2013. Together with Imam Abdullah Antelpi of Duke University, he co-directs the Hartman Institute's Muslim Leadership Initiative. He and his wife, Sarah, have three children.

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