In his new book, Race Against Terror: Chasing an Al Qaeda Killer at the Dawn of the Forever War, released on Oct. 7, CNN anchor Jake Tapper uses novelistic flair to explore the little-known true story behind a high-stakes, globe-spanning effort to prosecute a jihadist who was ultimately convicted in federal court of killing American service members in Afghanistan.

The yearslong case constructed by a team of dogged federal prosecutors against Spin Ghul, a Saudi-born Al-Qaida operative who was sentenced to life in prison in 2018, represents what Tapper, in his meticulously reported account, calls “unique not only at the Florence Supermax but also in modern American history.”

“Spin Ghul is the only one who was tried and convicted for killing U.S. soldiers on the battlefield overseas,” he writes of the terrorist now serving his sentence in a federal prison in Colorado that has held some of the most dangerous criminals “from the modern era.”

In the briskly told story, Tapper, 56, also lingers on the broader legal and political issues that surround the case even years after its conclusion, highlighting how “the distinction between terrorism and warfare — and between criminal justice and the laws of war — was blurred” in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

“My first goal for people who read the book is they’ll just enjoy the story and find it compelling,” Tapper told Jewish Insider in a recent interview. “I tried to write it almost like a novel in as compelling a way as possible.”

“But a second goal is for people to think about the war on terrorism and the best ways to keep us safe,” he added, noting “an argument to be made that the attempt to lock Spin Ghul up forever keeps us safer than if he had just been sent to Guantanamo, where by now he might have been freed.”

The book, which follows the recent publication of Original Sin, his best-selling book, co-written with Alex Thompson, on President Joe Biden’s “disastrous choice to run again,” is Tapper’s fourth nonfiction work. He has also written several novels and is now at work on a graphic nonfiction book about Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, marking a serious return to his early career dabbling in political cartoons and comic strips.

In the interview with JI last week, Tapper discussed his new book and the lessons he hopes readers will draw from it. The CNN host, who is Jewish, also shared how he balances side projects with his day job, weighed in on the Trump administration’s threats targeting the media industry and explained why he strongly feels that anti-Israel protesters who demonstrated outside his home last year are explicitly antisemitic, among other topics.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Jewish Insider: You say in the acknowledgements section of the book that you first learned about this story at a paintball birthday party for your son, where you spoke with Dave Bitkower, one of the lead prosecutors on the Spin Ghul case. What was it about the story that drew you to write a book about it?

Jake Tapper: I’m a big fan of police procedurals on TV — “Law & Order” and “CSI” and “Cold Case” and all that. I just find sleuthing really interesting, and this story that Dave Bitkower told me was just about the incredible sleuthing that he and these other prosecutors and FBI agents and other folks did to prove this case. It was just so interesting how they pulled together the case from all sorts of documents and testimonies, the methodical way they tracked down evidence and the hurdles that they faced. When he was all done telling me the story in Virginia that day at the paintball location, the first question I had was, has anyone written about this? Has anybody told this story? And he said no, that Spin Ghul’s prosecution was covered but that nobody had done the story about how the prosecution came into place. I was just lucky that I got there first.

JI: It’s quite a yarn. How did you find the time to write this book? On top of your day job at CNN, you recently co-wrote a widely read book about former President Biden. You’ve published several novels and have a number of other projects in the works as well. 

JT: I love writing and I love reporting, and the writing and reporting I do for CNN is different than the writing and reporting I can do for the book. Just as a practical matter, when I have a project, I try to write for at least 15 minutes a day. Everybody can find 15 minutes, even if it’s 7:30 in the morning or 7:30 at night. If you do 15 minutes a day, at the end of the week, that’s an hour and 45 minutes you wrote, maybe three pages, and it adds up. But also, the nonfiction books that I write are about topics I’m really interested in and really, really want to write about. I’m writing them for myself as much as I’m writing them for anyone else.

JI: Beyond your interest in the procedural details of the case, you also draw a larger point about how, as you write in the book, “the distinction between terrorism and warfare — and between criminal justice and the laws of war was blurred” in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. What do you hope readers will draw from the book?

JT: My first goal for people who read the book is they’ll just enjoy the story and find it compelling. I tried to write it almost like a novel in as compelling a way as possible. 

But a second goal is for people to think about the war on terrorism and the best ways to keep us safe. I think there’s an argument to be made that the attempt to lock Spin Ghul up forever keeps us safer than if he had just been sent to Guantanamo, where by now he might have been freed. As the lines of terrorism and war blur because of this opponent that we face, individual terrorists or terrorist groups, our way of addressing it as a country needs to adapt as well.

JI: How do you feel the Trump administration is approaching this ambiguity?

JT: There are two different ways to look at it. One is they are actually following in [former President Barack] Obama’s footsteps, because they have this terrorist from ISIS-Khorasan, [Mohammad Sharifullah, known as] ‘Jafar,’ who is in a Virginia prison or Virginia jail awaiting trial for conspiring to kill Americans in the Abbey Gate suicide bombing [in Afghanistan], and if they’re successful, then he will be the second foreign terrorist tried in U.S. Criminal Court for killing service members on a battlefield, which is interesting. 

By the same token, the Trump team is also expanding the definition of what a terrorist group is by designating drug traffickers as terrorists and deploying the military against them in a way that previous presidents had only really used to deploy against groups like Al-Qaida or ISIS. So it’s both continuity and also pushing the envelope.

JI: Did you get the chance to exchange letters or speak directly with Spin Ghul during the course of writing this book?

JT: I reached out to him in prison, and I was told he was not going to cooperate. But I was lucky in the sense that he had participated in a multiday confession in Italy that I was able to use and tell his story. But no, he didn’t cooperate.

JI: In the book, you briefly relay an amusing anecdote about Susan Kellman, the Jewish defense attorney for Ghul who, as you note, came to roast “a kosher cornish game hen for an accused Al Qaeda terrorist,” as Ghul wouldn’t eat food that wasn’t halal. You write that there was a suspicion Ghul may have been reluctant to engage with Kellman because she was Jewish.

JT: All three of Spin Ghul’s defense attorneys are Jewish. Bitkower is Jewish as well. I don’t know how much Susan’s Judaism played a role versus how much her being a woman played a role versus how much her just being an American played a role. But I think it didn’t help. Susan says [Ghul] was initially happy to hear that she could bring him food that was halal. 

But I think, ultimately, that he was not going to cooperate with the attorneys no matter what, because he just started to refuse to cooperate at all in what I refer to it at some point in the book as “the Jihad of Annoyance,” meaning he has nothing else he can do to fight the to fight the West other than be as uncooperative as possible — and so that’s what he did.

JI: You’ve previously said you are working on a fourth novel in your Marder family series of political thrillers, the last of which was published in 2023. Is that still in the works, and are there any other projects you’ve got going that you can mention?

JT: That novel morphed into a project that is not with the Marder family. I’m working on two other projects right now. One is a new novel, but it’s a whole new set of characters, because I wanted it to take place today, and the Marder family would be too old, so I just wanted to start fresh. 

Then I’m also working on a graphic novel — though it’s not a novel, it’s a true story —  on the Nazi Klaus Barbie, about how he escaped from Germany, how he thrived in Bolivia, how he was tracked down by Nazi hunters and journalists, how he was brought to justice in France, and all the rest. So I’m working on that right now.

JI: What piqued your interest in Barbie? And are you illustrating it yourself? I know you used to draw comics in college and early in your career.

JT: I am, I am, and I’m doing this for Top Shelf Comics, which did the John Lewis graphic novels and the George Takei graphic novels. What piqued my interest was my family and I went to France a couple summers ago, and my son and I went to the Museum of the Resistance, and I learned all about Jean Moulin, who was the hero of the Resistance. I had not known that Klaus Barbie had tortured and maybe killed John Moulin. I had heard of Klaus Barbie as a kid because he was brought to justice in France when I was like 13, but I didn’t really know much about his story. 

When I just kind of started learning more about his story, and learning about all the details of it, it just was so interesting to me. In my 50s, if there’s a story about World War II I’m learning for the first time, I’ve got to believe a lot of people don’t know it either. I wanted to do it as a graphic novel because I miss drawing — I was an art minor in college — and also because I wanted it to be accessible to younger people.

JI: Interesting. Is there anything you can share about the other novel you’re writing that’s set in the present day?

JT: Oh, it’s too early to talk about it. It’s not fleshed out a lot. I don’t have a publisher for it or anything like that. It just exists in my head.

JI: With regard to your return to drawing, I can’t help but recall you mentioning on Seth Meyers’ show recently that, if President Trump continues his attacks on the news industry, “maybe you and I will be drawing comic books together.”  

JT: [Laughs.] Well, I was just joking. I was just joking.

JI: You’ve criticized the Trump administration and the FCC over its interference in the media industry. What is it like for you working day in and day out with the knowledge of these increased threats from the Trump administration coming directly at news personalities and outlets?

JT: I mean, it’s unfortunate, but nothing great in life doesn’t come without a fight. And the fight for freedom of the press and the freedom to deliver a fact-based news broadcast, instead of just trying to appeal to one side of the aisle over the other, is vital to our democracy — and I think, ultimately, will win the day.

JI: You’ve also faced protests outside your home from anti-Israel demonstrators who have taken issue with your commentary on the war in Gaza.

JT: I don’t think that it’s really an issue with my commentary as much as it’s an issue with my faith.

JI: You think it’s directly antisemitic?

JT: Of course. There’s any number of journalists in Washington, D.C., and these people targeted me and Dana Bash. Maybe someday somebody can explain to me why they protested outside the house of [former Secretary of State] Antony Blinken but not outside the house of any secretary or Cabinet official in the Trump administration. It seems pretty obvious to me.

In the two years since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, there have been many books in multiple languages published on the topic — personal accounts, tales of heroism, a hostage memoir — but While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East by Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot may be the most comprehensive. 

In the book, Katz, the founder of the MEAD (Middle East-America Dialogue) and former editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post, and Bohbot, a veteran Israeli defense reporter, answer the biggest questions about that day, going through the events leading up to the attacks, including the fateful night before.

The book also dedicates chapters to stark warnings that an Oct. 7-style attack could happen again if Israel does not make necessary changes. 

In an interview with Jewish Insider’s Lahav Harkov and Asher Fredman, the executive director of the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, on the “Misgav Mideast Horizons” podcast last week, Katz said that his “deepest fear is that this could happen again.”

“Eventually, quiet will set in,” Katz said. “And I fear that Israel will fall back in love with the quiet and will neglect, to some extent, the vigilance that it will require to prevent Hamas from being able to … reconstitute itself.”

While Katz said he is skeptical Hamas could again launch attacks at the scale of Oct. 7, “to prevent them from rebuilding and reconstituting … will require a major effort that Israel has never really done.”

“Israel fought wars, we walked away and threw away the key, but we’ve never maintained the success … [except] in the West Bank, after Operation Defensive Shield in 2002. … Israel created operational freedom, and then it retained the operational freedom, so in the almost 24 years since, Israel goes in and out of the West Bank as it sees fit,” he said.

Katz noted that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has talked about creating a similar situation in Gaza.

“The proof will be in the pudding … If [the IDF] doesn’t do that and just says, ‘We’ll jot down the target, we’ll build up the target bank,’ that’s falling right back into the trap that led to Oct. 7,” he stated.

The IDF has also made structural changes to how it gathers intelligence, Katz said, and there is more coordination between intelligence bodies than before and a better flow of information to the decision-makers. 

“I think there’s more vigilance today by the IDF in the way it watches the borders along Israel,” he said. “That preemptive policy, if you see just a rocket being moved or you see a bad guy driving in a car or you see a tunnel being dug — we’re now applying it very much in Lebanon … Israel continues to operate pretty freely in Lebanon. This is part of that new policy. I think that in the aftermath of however this war does end, that will be integral to keep Hamas from reconstituting itself in a way that it could pose another major strategic threat to Israel.”

While Israel Slept is meant to provide “a look at the entirety of what happened,” Katz said.

“What were the different alarm bells that we now know were sounding … in IDF headquarters and Shin Bet headquarters? What were the earlier signs that we know about?” Katz said. “How did Israel fall into a state of complacency? … How was the policy of containment created?” 

Katz said both former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Netanyahu should have “refuse[d] to accept a reality that a genocidal terrorist group is living alongside our border.”

“If you look at the way Israel approached Hamas and approached Gaza, it was as if we’re stuck,” he said. “We don’t have an alternative … [to] this game of whack-a-mole every two years or so, where we hit them on the head.” 

Israel viewed Hamas as “the bottom of the totem pole” of threats, far below Iran and Hezbollah, Katz said. 

Another entrenched — and incorrect — belief in Israel’s political and military establishments was that helping Gaza economically would make Hamas less likely to attack Israel, Katz argued.

“When Naftali Bennett became prime minister in the summer of 2021, he was announcing to the whole world with great pride how he allowed in 10,000 [Gazan] workers” to Israel, said Katz, who was an advisor to Bennett from 2013-2016. “We now know that during his period as prime minister, they were preparing for this invasion and he just got lucky that it didn’t happen on his watch.”

In addition, Katz said that Israel’s general defense doctrine was not to launch preemptive wars in response to conventional military buildups, pointing to Hezbollah’s amassment of 150,000 missiles.

“That has changed,” he said. “The issue of preemption now seems like it’s setting in as the new policy for Israel, which is … the only way forward.”

Katz is also the author of Weapons Wizards, about Israel’s defense industry, and had been working on a follow-up book before Oct. 7. He now views the Israeli military’s reliance on technology as part of what allowed it to remain complacent for so long.

One such kind of technology was defensive. With the Iron Dome, Israel “was able to swat missiles out of the sky like they were mosquitoes. It made it seem like the missile threat is nothing … not a strategic threat.”

When Hamas fighters crossed into Israel via tunnels during 2014’s Operation Protective Edge, Israel sought to address that problem with technology as well, building a border fence with a deep underground element.

“They put these teams of the smartest soldiers and scientists together with sonar experts, seismic experts, geologists … They come up with a system that can detect where a tunnel is being dug, when it’s being dug. They’re so sensitive that they can tell what tool is being used to dig the tunnel: a jackhammer, a shovel, a bulldozer,” Katz said.

“How many people crossed into Israel on Oct. 7 in a tunnel? Zero.” he added. “They blew about 60 different points of entry in the border [fence] and that’s where they came in. … The technology created a false sense of security that we are impenetrable.” 

Israel was also overreliant on intelligence technology, Katz said. 

“There were hundreds of Hamas [terrorists] in the initial wave [into Israel on Oct. 7] and there wasn’t a single one who could call up his Israeli handler and say, ‘We’re coming,’” Katz said. “We had no agents or informants on the ground in Gaza. We thought we knew everything by listening to them, by watching them. We had neglected the basics of intelligence collection, which is human intelligence.” 

Katz said the IDF and Shin Bet have invested in building up greater resources on that front since Oct. 7.

“Contrast Gaza with Lebanon, with the amazing pager attack, with what Israel did in Iran, taking out nuclear scientists and the top military leadership. You see that when Israel allocates the resources, the attention and the focus, it can do incredible things,” he said.

Katz also spoke out against the “huge distraction” of the government’s planned judicial reform that consumed the country in 2023, as well as the outsized public protests against it.

“The right will say that the left and the protesters, and especially those who were the reservists who threatened to not follow orders … weakened the military and the left, or the anti-judicial reform protesters would say the government, in its refusal to stop … and be willing to understand that dividing ourselves made us vulnerable, made us exposed. However you look at it, in the end, the responsibility is upon the government,” he said. 

When Israel Slept includes several stories of senior defense officials warning the government that the deep divisions in Israel posed a security threat and Israel’s enemies would take advantage of the discord; though, Katz noted, no one specifically warned that Hamas was planning an invasion.

Katz said the weakening effect on Israel by the extremely tense political atmosphere should have been obvious to the country’s leaders: “We’re at each other’s throats. We’re ripping ourselves apart on the streets. … If we saw this division on the streets of Tehran or Damascus, would we not try to fan the flames just a bit to achieve our objectives in those countries and among our adversaries? Why would we think they would not do the same to us?”

In addition, Katz said, Hamas chose to launch its attack in October 2023 because Israel-Saudi normalization talks seemed to be coming to fruition, and because Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar believed “the alliance between Israel and the U.S. had been weakened and that the Americans under then-President [Joe] Biden would not stand with Israel. … He was wrong.”

In general, though, Katz pointed out, “they’re a genocidal terrorist group. They don’t need an excuse to want to kill us and attack us. It’s something they wake up to every single day. Terrorists like Hamas and Islamic Jihad seek our destruction.” 

Hamas’ understanding of the Israeli psyche went beyond taking advantage of the divisions of early 2023, and was a part of its hostage-taking strategy.

“From day one … I could have said, ‘We’re going to win this war, because we’re going to bring down Hamas … but the hostages, we won’t get them back.’ And you would have looked at me and said ‘You’re crazy, that’s not a victory.’ And I could have said the opposite, we’ll win the war because we get the hostages back, but Hamas will remain in power, and you also would have said, legitimately, ‘What are you talking about? That’s not victory,’” Katz said.

“If there weren’t hostages, the war would have ended much earlier,” he said. “Part of this is because we the Israeli people — and I think this is something that the world does not recognize — are still very much hurting, are still very much in our trauma. And as long as the hostages remain in Gaza … the Israeli people will not be able to recover, rehabilitate and heal, and this will make this conflict, unfortunately, continue.”

A book that centers on Palestinian identity is drawing controversy from some Jewish parents in the Montgomery County, Md., public school system after it was assigned to first grade students as required classroom reading, Jewish Insider has learned. 

The book,“Tunjur! Tunjur! Tunjur! A Palestinian Folktale,” written by Margaret Read MacDonald, aims to convey a message to children that there are consequences for taking things that don’t belong to them. It tells the story of a woman who “prayed to Allah” for a child and received a pot as her child. The pot, too young to know right from wrong, had a tendency to steal honey from the marketplace and jewels from the king — until she got caught. As punishment, she was filled with muck. “I hope you’ve learned your lesson,” the pot’s mother tells her. “You cannot take things that do not belong to you.” 

While the book does not mention Israel, local Jewish leaders and parents voiced concern that the required book’s subtext sends an anti-Israel message to elementary schoolers and that the reference to “Allah” does not belong in a public school setting. 

A syllabus notes that students can receive supplemental reading materials if “any instructional material conflicts with your family’s sincerely held religious beliefs.”

The book’s lesson that “‘you cannot take things that do not belong to you’ echoes activist rhetoric that falsely casts Israel as an oppressor and the Jewish people as imperialist rather than indigenous,” Dana Stangel-Plowe, chief program officer at the North American Values Institute, a nonprofit that monitors antisemitism in K-12 schools, told JI.

“It reinforces a false narrative that erases the historic Jewish connection to Israel. It sends a troubling message to Jewish families during a time of rising antisemitism,” Stangel-Plowe told JI.

Not all Jewish communal leaders agreed that the book was problematic. Guila Franklin Siegel, chief operating officer of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, argued that Jewish families should embrace the book.  

“If the only complaint about this book is that it’s sharing a Palestinian folktale that teaches children not to take things that don’t belong to them, I can’t see what the problem with the book is,” Franklin Siegel told JI. “It will be a shame if Jewish people wind up objecting to books only because they have protagonists who happen to be Palestinian.” 

“There may well be books and materials that do misinform students about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and we always monitor that work,” said Franklin Siegel. “If we turn this into a back and forth where parents are requesting opt-outs for any material that they don’t see eye-to-eye with, we’ll wind up in a situation where we’re seeing a significant number of students whose parents are requesting opt-outs for things like Holocaust speakers.” 

Meanwhile, Margery Smelkinson, a parent of four MCPS students, told JI that she would have preferred the district find a children’s book that teaches not to steal “without causing controversy.” 

“The real problem is that MCPS chose a book that even requires an opt-out form — why not just pick another book?” 

Smelkinson called on the school district to prioritize helping students get up to speed in reading, math and science instead of “creating more barriers to learning.”

“I’m concerned and curious if my child was introduced to [similar rhetoric] last year,” Diana Tung, the parent of an MCPS second grader and kindergartener, told JI. “I assume in a public school setting there’s going to be pretty diverse spiritual beliefs [but] the context of the tale itself [concerns me]. The themes should be taught using a different folktale, I’m pretty confident there are plenty.”  

“Books and materials approved to be available for use in classrooms, beyond being in alignment with curriculum standards, are selected to be representative of our very diverse community,” Christopher Cram, a spokesperson for the suburban Washington school system, which is the 15th-largest school district in the country and educates a significant number of Jewish students, told JI. “Students and families expect to be able to see themselves in the materials we use.” 

The school system has faced several antisemitic incidents since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks, leading to the school board president, Karla Silvestre, being subpoenaed to testify at a congressional hearing in May 2024. Weeks after the hearing, at least six MCPS school buildings — including three elementary schools — were vandalized with antisemitic graffiti. 

The assignment of the Palestinian folktale as required reading comes two months after the Supreme Court ruled in Mahmoud v. Taylor that MCPS must allow parents to opt their children out of lessons and books that feature LGBTQ+ themes if the material conflicts with their religious beliefs.

The rise of antisemitism has dominated breaking news headlines, films and books in recent years. But two leading journalists noticed a void — a lack of resources in how to address the subject matter with young readers. 

Concerned about what they observed, CNN anchor Bianna Golodryga and Yonit Levi, an anchor on Israel’s Channel 12, joined forces to write Don’t Feed the Lion, a new novel geared towards middle schoolers. 

The book tells the story of three children in Chicago who experience antisemitism firsthand at school when a soccer star makes an antisemitic remark and a swastika appears on a locker. Theo, his sister Annie and their new friend Gabe each struggle with how to speak up and confront hate. 

The book comes as antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment has increasingly impacted K-12 classrooms nationwide in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks on Israel and ensuing war in Gaza. 

“We approached this project wearing three hats: as journalists who seek clarity, as Jews who feel the weight of history, and as mothers who want our children to live in a world that is kinder and more just,” Golodryga and Levi, both first time authors, told Jewish Insider in a joint statement. 

“Empathy doesn’t happen in silence. We wrote this to help open dialogue between kids, parents, teachers, and communities, especially in times like these,” the veteran reporters said.

Don’t Feed the Lion, published by Arcadia Children’s Books, goes on sale Nov. 11. 

A tour around Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) upcoming book, Antisemitism in America, has been postponed as the New York Democrat faces blowback over his recent vote to avert a government shutdown.

An event for Schumer moderated by Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY), slated for Tuesday night at New York’s Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center, was removed from the center’s events calendar over the weekend. A staffer for the Manhattan venue confirmed the event’s postponement to Jewish Insider on Monday morning.

A spokesperson for Schumer told Punchbowl News later Monday morning that the tour was postponed, citing security concerns.

The first event, originally scheduled for Monday night at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, was set to face protests organized by the far-left group Jewish Voice for Peace. An event at Washington’s Sixth and I synagogue on Wednesday was canceled Monday morning. 

The postponement of the gatherings comes days after Schumer argued against forcing a government shutdown as a negotiating tool, saying it would further empower President Donald Trump and White House advisor Elon Musk. 

Nine other Democrats joined Schumer in voting for a procedural cloture motion to break a filibuster of a GOP government funding bill and prevent a government shutdown. House Democrats vehemently opposed the move. 

After the Senate vote, Torres criticized the Democrats who voted in favor of cloture, saying they “are making a strategic miscalculation that we as a party will live to regret.”

The event was removed from the Streicker Center’s website over the weekend. An archived version of the page saved on March 15 indicates that the event was posted through at least midday Saturday. 

The event was also set to face protests from Jewish activists frustrated by Schumer’s failure to pass the Antisemitism Awareness Act in the last Congress.

Jewish Insider’s senior congressional correspondent Marc Rod contributed to this report.

Journalist Yardena Schwartz had nearly finished the manuscript for her first book, focused on the 1929 Hebron pogrom in which dozens of Jews were killed and a community was destroyed, on the morning of Oct. 7, 2023.

As reports emerged in the following days of the atrocities that took place across southern Israeli communities and the Nova music festival, “it I felt as if I was living the pages of testimony that I had spent years reading and researching for this book,” Schwartz told Jewish Insider in a recent interview about her book, Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine That Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict. “It felt like they were coming to life. I felt like it was exactly what happened in Hebron occurring today. And it was so chilling.”

Schwartz intended to write a book based on the letters and diaries written by a young Jewish American man named David Shainberg, who, inspired by his faith, moved to Hebron to study at a renowned yeshiva, when he was killed on Aug. 24, 1929. A niece of Shainberg’s found the writings in the family’s home in Tennessee, where they had been collecting dust, and reached out to author Yossi Klein Halevi, who in turn suggested Schwartz take on the challenge of giving life to the story of a young man whose life was cut short.

What Schwartz found was extensive, if scattered, documentation of the 1929 pogrom and its aftermath. There was no English-language compendium focused on the massacre that killed nearly 70 Jews and left more than 100 wounded.

“I felt that if I’m going to write the first book in English that really goes into detail about the massacre and its causes and its aftermath,” Schwartz, a former NBC News journalist, told JI, “I need to do justice to those victims by detailing in as much detail as I can what what happened to them, not only for future generations to know about it, but so that it can’t be denied.”

It was an unintentionally prescient concern that was validated last year, when denials about the extent of Hamas’ atrocities on Oct. 7 began to emerge in the days and weeks that followed. It was through that lens that Schwartz finished the final chapters of her book, which took on a new direction in the wake of last year’s attacks, to weave together the stories, separated by a century, of Jewish pain and resilience.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Jewish Insider: You had not been planning to write a book, certainly on Hebron, and this story was just dropped on you. What was your first reaction when finding out about David and the letters?

Yardena Schwartz: So I had always dreamed of writing a book, but it always seemed like this fantasy. I had this hope in the back of my mind that something would just find me, but I never expected it would be this. I never expected it would be about Hebron, especially since I had only been to Hebron once before I was introduced to this family. I woke up on New Year’s Day in 2019 with an email from Yossi Klein Halevi, who was not yet my mentor, but would become my mentor. And it was very simple. [He said], ‘I met this family who found this box of letters in their attic. It’s a treasure trove of history, of Hebron and the massacre, and I think it would make a great book, but I can’t do it. Are you interested?’ 

JI: What was it like piecing together the history of Hebron?

YS: So much of the research involved going to Hebron itself and interviewing Israelis, settlers and Palestinians who live both on the Israeli side of Hebron and on the Palestinian side of Hebron. I spent hundreds of hours interviewing Palestinians and Israelis about life today in Hebron to understand, and also their stories of their families in Hebron, and then for the history part of it, hundreds of hours reading archival materials, reading books that were written by people who’d lived in Hebron at the time that David lived there, survivors of the massacre, eyewitness testimony from the massacre by survivors and victims, by British officials who testified before the Shaw Commission, which came to Palestine after the riots to investigate. I read the testimony of the British police chief who was in charge of Hebron, testimonies of people who stood before the trials that the British conducted after the riots, newspaper articles that were published in 1928 and 1929 about the lead-up to the massacre, [which] was actually a whole year of propaganda that was disseminated by the Grand Mufti, and not just propaganda, but also this campaign of trying to limit Jewish access to the Western Wall. So there was a lot of newspaper coverage of that, not just in publications like the Palestine Post, which would eventually become the Jerusalem Post, but also The New York Times, JTA, The Times of London. There was a lot of both primary source material from people who were living in Palestine at the time, and also newspaper reports from the time.

JI: What most surprised you over the course of your research and your interviews?

YS: Wow, there were so many moments in researching this book that I was just flabbergasted by how shocking some of these details were, yet so little known. First, the massacre itself, just the atrocities were so brutal and so hauntingly similar to the atrocities that were committed on Oct. 7. And yet I was shocked that such a massive event that made such an impact on the trajectory of Palestine, of Zionism, of the State of Israel, of the Jewish community in what was then Palestine — it had such a lasting impact on not just that land itself, but also the entire region, and yet we still know so little about it. 

The fact that this conflict has been going on for a century, and yet so little has changed over the course of a century. One hundred years ago, when the Jews were massacred in what was then Palestine, that massacre was followed by widespread denials by Arab leaders and by the Arab populace. At the same time, the perpetrators of the massacre were celebrated as heroes, and at the same time, their attacks were blamed on their Jewish victims. 

If that wasn’t mind boggling enough, after Oct. 7, I saw these same patterns emerge. When I was researching and writing about this massacre, I never once, not even once, for a second, imagined that something even remotely similar to that massacre could happen again on that scale — and that it happened again on a scale far greater than what happened in 1929 and was also being met by denials. And not just denials, but in 1929 the denials came from the Arab leadership. The victim-blaming was from the Arab leadership. And today, not only are those denials and victim-blaming coming from the Arab leaders, but from academia, from media, every respected avenue of society is denying that those atrocities were carried out, and simultaneously blaming the victims.

JI: Where were you in the book process on Oct. 7? 

YS: I was pretty close to finishing the book. I was about three-quarters through, maybe two-thirds of the way. I was supposed to submit my manuscript in April of 2024, so I still had some time to finish the manuscript. After Oct. 7, I was pretty incapacitated. I would try to continue writing these chapters as I imagined them looking and I just couldn’t. It just didn’t make sense anymore. The plan I had for how these chapters would look, it just didn’t make sense anymore. The book before Oct. 7 was very much focused on Hebron itself and how it went from being this beacon of coexistence to the antithesis of peaceful coexistence that it is today, through the lens of this massacre and all the forces that it accelerated or galvanized. So when I sat down and tried to write based on that theme, the words weren’t flowing. So I took a break for a few months to go back to reporting because I had taken a long break from reporting to write this book, and I was reporting primarily on the hostage crisis and interviewing hostage family members, families who had lost loved ones and been in the kibbutzim on Oct. 7. And when I came back to writing the book, I understood that I had to just throw away entire chapters.

JI: I want to flip it, you just talked about the way that Oct. 7 influenced the book. When you wrote about the Hebron massacre, you got into the details. How did having just researched and written so deeply about the atrocities of 1929 affect how you experienced Oct. 7 and the weeks after?

YS: Of the chapters that I had finished writing, and I had considered final, the massacre chapter was the most polished. I had worked on that most. I had finished it long before Oct.7, and I was pretty far into writing the rest of the book when Oct. 7 happened. So when I woke up on Oct. 7, it was the most disorienting feeling, because I felt as if I was living the pages of testimony that I had spent years reading and researching for this book. It felt like they were coming to life. I felt like it was exactly what happened in Hebron occurring today. And it was so chilling. And I think the way that I wrote about the massacre of 1929, in this very detailed way, giving life to the people who were killed. I didn’t just mention the numbers of people killed, I really wanted to bring them to life and give them justice, give their lives justice by naming them, describing who they were before the massacre and what their lives were like before they were killed. And I think that helped inform the way I wrote about the atrocities on Oct. 7. I named the people. I went into great detail, how they experienced it, and what that day was like for them, from morning to night and both before the massacre and after, in both cases, both in 1929 and with the massacre of Oct. 7. 

I did that because, in the case of 1929, when I was writing this chapter long before Oct. 7, I understood that so few people know about this massacre, including myself. And that’s because there has been so little written about it in English. In Hebrew and in Israeli culture, everybody knows about the massacre of 1929 and I think people know not just that it happened, but the scale and the brutality. And that’s because in Hebrew, there are so many books written. So I felt that if I’m going to write the first book in English that really goes into detail the massacre and its causes and its aftermath, I need to do justice to those victims by detailing in as much detail as I can what what happened to them, not only for future generations to know about it, but so that it can’t be denied. And that’s also why I sourced the book so extensively. 

JI: It’s interesting that you bring up that there’s not an English-language accounting of what happened. But it seems like with your book and with Oren Kessler’s book last year, there has been kind of this renewed focus on how Israel’s pre-state years have shaped so much of what we see today. And so I wonder what other stories there are to be told.

YS: My hope is that this book, as well as Oren Kessler’s fantastic book, that this will help inform what has increasingly become this really disinformed conversation around the conflict. And I think a lot of it is because people’s attention spans are so short, and it’s very easy to just look at this conflict through the lens of what’s happening now. And if you look at what’s happening now, it’s a very simple story, there’s a right and a wrong, and when you look at just what’s happening today, it’s easy to come to conclusions, like maybe Ta-Nehisi Coates would like people to come to but you can’t erase the history of this conflict. It will never be solved either, if that history is ignored and if the context of this conflict is just brushed aside. Maybe it’ll be easier for you to make sense of it, or wrap your head around it, but it’s only going to push peace further into the distance if the true sources of this conflict are ignored, and the true sources of this conflict are very clear if you look at the history going back the last century.

JI: You had written very early on in the book, when you were talking about the propaganda that preceded the massacre, that the “truth had become irrelevant.” And as I read that sentence, I thought we could just as easily say this today. 

YS: It’s the exact same playbook. And of all the things that have not changed over the last century, one very important thing has changed, and not for the better. If you look at the international media’s coverage of the riots of 1929, you see that the media was playing the role it needed to play, which was doing reporting and giving to readers a story that shows them what is the truth. That is the essential role of journalism: to get to the truth and give the truth to your readers. And today we look at the coverage of a massacre that was even larger, even worse, and yet that role is nowhere to be found. One hundred years after that massacre, we see the media not portraying these denials and victim-blaming for what they are, as lies, or these absurd claims of, for instance, the Al-Ahli Hospital, just parroting claims by terrorist organizations that are clearly false and and not portraying them as false or as lies, but giving them the same weight as truthful claims, or claims of the IDF, or of Israeli officials or of Israeli citizens. It’s all just portrayed as this, ‘He said, she said,’ rather than, ‘This is what happened.’ Why even publish these absurd claims? Because you’re giving truth to it when you publish it, and the media is leaving readers to decide what’s true and what’s false. Whereas, in 1929, 100 years ago, you think that over 100 years, the media would improve in its role — It’s only failed the true test of journalism. 

I often wonder if the massacre of 1929 were to happen today, when Arab leadership put out those statements saying, ‘No atrocities were carried out in Hebron,’ the media in 1929 portrayed those denials as outright lies. The media in 1929 covered these wild claims that the atrocities were carried out by Jewish students, [but] they portrayed them as wild lies. It was very clear that these were lies, and yet today, I’d imagine that publications like The New York Times would publish those denials and victim-blaming as if they were true. And that is, I think, one of the greatest drivers of this conflict — the media’s failure to call out disinformation for what it is and to even recognize disinformation for what it is. I think a lot of journalists perpetuating these lies don’t even know their lies.

JI: In the book, when you go back to Hebron on a media tour and you’re in a meeting with the mayor, you observe that you are probably the only foreign journalist in that room who knew that he took part in the 1980 attack [in which six Jewish men, including two Americans, were killed in Hebron walking home from Shabbat services]. I’ve seen so many foreign correspondents who parachute in with no understanding about this conflict. I think it underscores the issue that we’re seeing with not just the big stuff, like the hospital, but the everyday reporting.

YS: I’m so glad you brought that up, because that’s such a great example of why knowing this history and having this contextual framework when you approach reporting on this conflict, why it’s so important. Because imagine I’m sitting in that room with this mayor who I have no idea perpetrated a deadly terror attack on civilians in 1980, the same terror attack that led the Israeli government to actually approve the renewal of the Jewish community in Hebron. And I’m sitting in this room and I hear him say, ‘The creation of this new Jewish residential building is a terrorist attack on the Palestinian people, and it will lead to the whole Palestinian population being evicted from this area,’ and I just take him at face value, I just publish what he says. But I don’t do that because I know that he actually served time for a terrorist attack. So it’s mind-boggling for him to call a building a terrorist attack. And I know that his claims of mass Palestinian evictions from this area are absolutely false, because I know that this building is being built on lands where no one lives, it’s an abandoned space. And I also know that when he tells this room full of journalists that already there’s been this mass exile of Palestinians from the Israeli side of Hebron, I know also that that’s false, because I know that the difference in the Palestinian population on that side of Hebron has decreased by maybe 1,000 over the course of 30 years, and that also, the Jewish population of that same area has remained stagnant since 1929. The people sitting in that room are just going to publish what he says without checking the facts. I don’t know if I blame journalists, because I think the reason there was this ability to discern fact from falsehood was because journalists had more time to report and to speak to people and to get the historical context into their stories. And I think today, journalists are churning out multiple stories a day. I’m not excusing their laziness or their failure to understand that you need the historical context and reporting on such an important issue like this, but I think that has a lot to do with it. There is no time, I think, for many journalists to do this historical research before publishing their stories, and so they just get lazy and report what they’re told without checking it themselves to make sure it’s accurate.

JI: What can we take from 1929 and from 2023? When you think about the Jewish future and in Israel, what lessons are there to take as you look to how the Jewish community reinvents and grows itself and rebuilds itself in the wake of such a catastrophe?
YS: Well, I think that my greatest lesson in writing this book, and I hope it’s clear to anyone who reads it, is that peace has always been possible, and I think that the only reason why we haven’t had peace for the last century is because leaders — corrupt leaders who benefit from disinformation and propaganda — have hijacked the future of Israelis and Palestinians to their own benefit and to the detriment of all of us, and too many innocent Palestinian lives and Israeli lives have suffered as a result of corrupt Arab leaders perpetuating the same propaganda and the same lies and weaponizing Islam and weaponizing Al Aqsa. I think that reversing that and ending that disinformation and that propaganda is the only way we will have peace. And I think that we see that going back to 1929, through today, moderate peace-seeking voices among the Arabs of Palestine and among Palestinians today have been silenced by intimidation or by assassination. People who are calling for peace today among Palestinians are labeled as collaborators, and if not silenced by intimidation, they’re killed. And I think that the only way we will have peace is if peace-seeking, moderate voices among Palestinians and the Arab public no longer have to fear for their lives, and those people need to be empowered, and those people need to be able to speak out without fearing for their lives. And if the people who seek peace continue to fail to see that and continue to allow Arab leaders to perpetuate the same disinformation and lies that have led to so much death, so much needless death and destruction, then we’re just going to be destined for another century of massacres. The people who are protesting against the war and for Palestinian lives, and in defense of Palestinian lives, they need to understand that Hamas and Hezbollah are only going to bring more destruction and more death and more wars, and if they really want peace, as all of us do, then it’s these peace-seeking voices within the Palestinian people who need to be elevated and empowered, not groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.

Just a few weeks after the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks in Israel, Haaretz journalist Lee Yaron began gathering testimonies from the massacres and learning the personal stories of their victims. Having been thousands of miles away on the day of the attacks, at Columbia University where the Israeli reporter was on a fellowship, Yaron seized the only tool she felt she had to help the victims — to tell their stories thoroughly and faithfully and ensure they are remembered. In her book, 10/7: 100 Human Stories, which was released in September, Yaron digs deep into the experiences and histories of more than 100 civilians — spanning the gamut of Israeli society as well as foreign victims — through interviews with survivors, the bereaved and first responders.  

Interwoven through the personal stories Yaron, 30, provides Jewish and Israeli historical background as well as political analysis. “I wanted the book to be a way to understand — not just to get to know the victims — but understand Israel and the history of the conflict better,” Yaron said in an interview with Jewish Insider during which she also discussed the impact Oct.7 had on Israel’s peace camp, the reaction of the global left to the Hamas attacks and the gender aspect of Israel’s intelligence failure leading up to Oct. 7.   

The following interview is lightly edited for clarity.

Jewish Insider: What made you decide to write this book?

Lee Yaron: I started very early, in the end of October, and I just felt I needed to do something. There’s not much you can do for the dead. So the thing I felt like I could do is to write, and I really wanted to tell the story of Oct. 7 from the bottom-up. I couldn’t hear the politicians anymore. You know, all of these people taking this innocent civilian’s life and just revealing and mistelling their stories. And I wanted to hear it, to learn about them first, to learn about their lives and their beliefs and their communities, and as you saw, I went really deep on the research of their families’ histories two and three generations back, because I tried to understand Israel again and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through these victims to use their stories as a mirror for a bigger story. But it started just from, you know, we’re after Yom Kippur now, and I really felt like I wanted to ask them, “slicha” [sorry], and I wanted to do something for them, at least to make them remembered.

JI: Was there anything that shocked you that you hadn’t already known, that you hadn’t heard already in the stories already out there?

LY: There were a lot of, for example, in the Moshe Ridler story, the story of the Holocaust survivor, I knew a little bit about his story from what was published in Israeli media, but when I was doing the research, I learned about just how crazy is the story of how he survived the Holocaust and was saved by this Ukrainian family. And then afterward, it was amazing the discovery that he was deported from his home in Hertza on the very same day of Simchat Torah, when he was murdered 82 years later. When we began the interviews, the family didn’t know it. And then after two or three interviews, we stayed in touch, and they told me, ‘You wouldn’t believe it, we got a letter from another survivor that is now living in Israel, and she said she knew Moshe from this town, and she wanted us to know that the Nazis deported them on Simchat Torah.’ And they were like, ‘We don’t know if it’s true, you know, it’s like a very old lady, but check it.’ And then I went to the community’s yizkor [remembrance] books, and there are documentations from them, and I discovered it was true.

So a lot of the things were about how this day is not just part of Israeli history, but it’s part of Jewish history, and putting this day in the wider context of you know, understanding the Shahar Zemach story [the peace activist killed defending Kibbutz Beeri], and then understanding his grandmother’s story fleeing the Farhud pogrom in Iraq in Baghdad in ‘41 and this family of generations of fleeing persecution, trying to find a safe place. And how, in that matter, Oct. 7 is not just about our immediate pain and grief. It’s about the shattering of a dream of generations of Israel as a place of safety. And I think that was something that I discovered in so many stories, and a question that is still open now, when we see so many young people now leaving Israel, using the passports of their grandparents to go back to other countries, this feeling of if this place can fulfill its mission, its dream, what we were promised Zionism will be.

JI: I know you split your time between Israel and the U.S. Were you in Israel on Oct. 7?

LY: The day it happened I was doing a fellowship in Columbia University. So it started far from me. But my family lives in Ofakim. It’s one of these border towns. So from the first moments, we understood that there were 20 terrorists near their home shooting and 49 of their friends and neighbors were murdered in Ofakim. My family was luckily saved because they stayed home. It’s so important for me to share the story of Ofakim, because I feel like people outside of Israel do not always understand who were the communities that were harmed by [Oct. 7], and it’s many times very poor communities. In Ofakim, they’ve been suffering from rockets from Gaza for more than 20 years now, since 2001, and people just don’t have shelters in their homes because they can’t afford it. We in Tel Aviv, most of us have [bomb shelters] in our building, at least, but they’re so close, and so many people don’t have it. So when the sirens start [in Ofakim], people are usually running to the street and go to the public shelter for safety. And that morning, of course, they didn’t know terrorists were there, but it just made them easy targets. 

JI: You mentioned you were at Columbia University. A lot has been said about the rise in antisemitism since Oct. 7 and the war in Gaza. Has that impacted you as an Israeli reporter and in your capacity there as a fellow?

LY: I think, like a lot of people on the Israeli left, I was feeling betrayed by the global left movement. … [I was] the first climate correspondent for Haaretz. I was fighting for climate justice for years, for LGBTQ rights, Black Lives Matter. I was revealing so much policies of discrimination against asylum seekers. Everything I believed was aligned with the goals of the global left. … On Oct. 7, I discovered that our lives as Jews and as Israelis are not as worthy to this movement as I thought, and as a woman as well. I understand these people wish for justice for Palestinians, and I share this will that we’ll find a way to live here altogether. But I feel like so many people are looking now for this perfect justice and wishing to change the past. And as a person who lived all my life and grew up in Israel, for me, intifada is [one of] my first memories, it’s not a chant for me, and I know that justice will always be a compromise. No one is going anywhere. Palestinians are not going anywhere. The Jews are not going anywhere. There are 2 million Palestinian Israelis that show us that we can do it and can live together. And I really, I wish this energy that we see in the campuses would go to fight together, people with people against these governments that are, I think we’re all victims, you know, of these governments that don’t care about any of us, Israelis and Palestinians, and to really seek together for a two-state solution, to demand our leaders to work for it. And, you know, so many of the victims of Oct. 7 were part of this peace community, or the people that did more than anyone for a two-state solution, donating money to families in Gaza, driving sick Palestinian kids to hospitals. 

JI: What do you think Oct. 7 has done to the peace community? How do you think it looks today?

LY: I’m speaking with so many families from this community and so many of them say they feel like not only they lost their loved ones, but everything they believed in was destroyed because they chose to live near the Gaza border, because they believed in peace, and they feel foolish, many of them. We see it in the numbers. I mean, a decade ago, 60% of Israelis believed in a two-state solution. A month before the attack, it was about 50% and when you see the numbers a few weeks ago, it’s about 25 to 35% of Israelis. So we look at it now when we’re still in the midst of war, when we’re still all waiting for the hostages and in grief, people lost their faith in peace, and we need to remember that for you know, [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s 17 years in power, he is trying to weaken the peace community, saying we can’t solve this conflict, we can only manage it. 

I come from the younger generation of Israelis that is 50% of the Israeli society, that we are 30 years old or younger, and that means that we were born with the murder of Yitzhak Rabin and the murder of the Oslo Accords. So we’ve never lived in a time of real hope for peace. It’s so important for people to understand that Israel is so young in that way, and of Palestine as well, more than half of the people are 18 years old in Gaza or younger. So we’re all people who were born to this violence. I hope that my generation will be the generation to end what the shot of [Rabin assassin] Yigal Amir finished when we were born. Rabin has his famous words in Oslo when he says, ‘I come to you as a soldier today, I came from war. I know the price of war. I come from the country where parents buried their children. And as a soldier, I say to you, enough. Enough with the tears, enough with the blood.’ Now it feels like the peace community in Israel is destroyed. It feels like Hamas helped to destroy what remained of the peace community. But as a young woman, as a person whose grandparents came to Israel after the Holocaust, after they were deported from so many places, and that’s my only home, I have to be optimistic, and I do believe that hope is action, and that my generation has the responsibility to act, especially after going through this.

JI: You picked 100 stories for your book. How did you choose them?

I had these three principles that I followed. One was to represent the diversity in Israeli society. The book is following 12 chapters of very different communities. There’s a chapter about the refugees from Ukraine, an overlooked community of people who fled the rockets of Putin on Feb. 22 only to flee, again, Hamas rockets and stories in this community; stories of the Bedouin community, part of the Arab Israeli community that’s 22% of the Israeli society. A Holocaust survivor, the kibbutzim, the poor cities on the border — very diverse because the victims were as diverse as Israeli society. 

The second principle was to represent the underprivileged, or people that we didn’t hear their stories a lot, like the story of Sujud, this young woman whose baby was the youngest victim of the attack — a 10-hour-old baby girl, a Bedouin Muslim baby girl that was shot in her mother’s womb [and died 10 hours after she was born]. It’s like this unbelievable, painful story that wasn’t really told. Or the story of the bus of the elderly immigrants from the former Soviet Union, people that we don’t see every day in the news. They come from very mostly from very weak or families that are struggling to make a living. Same thing about the Ukrainians. So I tried to go deep and give respect to people we didn’t hear about. 

And the third and maybe most important one was that I understood that I don’t want to tell individual stories, but to tell stories that are connected to one another. So I chose in the beginning, when I started a few stories in each community that seemed interesting to me, and I started reaching out to the families. I had very little time to write the book. … So I had a few amazing research assistants that helped me to reach the families and ask them if they want to be interviewed, to take the basic information from them for the first interviews. And then we started to, you know, some families didn’t want to speak. It was too painful for them. And the families I could go deep into interviews with were the ones that felt like that was what they could do for their children or for their family members, to at least remember them and to be the ones telling their stories. So after I had a few families in each community, I always asked them about the relationships their loved ones had with other victims or survivors. And then this way one story led me to another. And this web of connections is really the backbone of the book. I built a book around these relationships, and I think it’s important, because I feel like it represents Israel better, because we’re such a small country, these communities were very close-knit communities. And it’s not the tragedy of individuals, of a family mourning one person, it’s communities that are mourning their family, their friends, their neighbors, losing their homes. Kibbutz Beeri lost 10% of the population that was murdered or taken hostage. 

JI: Your book is in some way an answer to the denialism and fake news out there surrounding Oct. 7. How did you go about verifying accounts?

LY: I spoke on every story with multiple people that were connected to one another, with governmental and the IDF and the police and getting the information they had, speaking with families and friends and going to archives, pictures, messages, so I always made sure I had enough sources to verify every piece of information. 

And I think a lot of the beauty… I tried to write a book that is not only about death, but it’s about life, and it’s about really seeing these people not merely as victims but also as the people they were. So some chapters started in the ‘50s, in the ‘40s, and just you know this, getting to know their families and what they’ve been through from these family archives with, I always try to go deep on the personal story and then also research the bigger political and historical picture. And these two lines are woven together because I wanted the book to be a way to understand, not just to get to know the victims, but understand Israel and the history of the conflict better. 

So, for example, there’s this story of Chaim Ben Ariyeh and a chapter about victims of grief. It’s a story that is also mostly overlooked in the international media, of people who just couldn’t bear the grief and ended their lives. There are so many cases like this in Israel today that is hard to speak about because the authorities don’t want to encourage more people to do so, and they feel like when you publish this data, it’s encouraging more people, but it’s true that so many people chose to end their lives, and one of the stories is the story of Chaim Ben Ariyeh, a man who was a settler in the Gaza Jewish settlements and was evacuated with the rest of these 21 settlements and the thousands of people who live there in 2005 in the engagement plan. And it’s a good example … the way that we get to know Chaim and the way he met his wife. You read that they are from the right wing so they’re meeting in a protest against the Oslo peace process with a bus that is taking them to their home in Gush Katif. And then we see their struggle to fight this decision in a year that looks a lot like 2023 what happened in Israel before the war, we had 39 weeks of Israelis protesting against Netanyahu, against the judicial overhaul, was very, very similar from the other side of the map, and then understanding that Chaim was post-traumatic from recognizing the bodies of his neighbors in one of the most horrible terror attacks that happened, and the Kissufim road in Gush Katif. And then we follow one of his last rides, when on Oct. 7, he is sent to save the kids of Beeri, the ones who survived and taken to the hotels in Yam Hamelach (the Dead Sea). And he is just so traumatized by the fact of what he saw and the fact that he couldn’t help them, that after two weeks, he committed suicide. So this is a story, for example, that is a lot about speaking with with his family, but also just going to the archives and finding the articles from 2004, 2005, where he’s giving interviews about how he felt after he found the Hatuel family, or going deep into the these years of the disengagement. And I’m writing in the book about people from the left wing, from the right wing, settlers, people who didn’t care about politics at all, all the Israeli spectrum. It was important for me to represent also these people and to show what the disengagement was for them, as such a critical moment to understand the present.

JI: Was your perspective at all impacted through the conversations you’ve had with the wide range of people that you interviewed?

LY: I tried to leave my perspective, out of the book as much as possible, and to. I felt like my mission was to tell the stories of the victims of this war from their perspectives … in the introductions that are a bit more political and historical where I give a bit more of how I see things.

For me personally this war and writing this book made my commitment to peace and to a two-state solution stronger. I lost a very dear friend of mine, Gal Eisenkot, who was the son of Gadi Eisenkot, who was the chief of the IDF and a minister. And the book is dedicated to Gal. His death was extremely painful, still is. We were good friends since childhood, he was a good friend of mine and my whole family. And he died on Dec. 7, two months after, exactly two months after it started. And I got the call in the middle of an interview with a mother who lost her son and daughter-in-law, and just this feeling of anger, of losing him and feeling that, you know, he died in a mission to save hostages. He was a student. He was a reserve soldier. He didn’t choose a military way like his father. He wanted to be a doctor. He treated Syrian refugees. He wanted to save people and he had so many dreams and hopes, and he was so talented and so kind. And I feel like, when you experience it personally, I feel like, you know, every family in Israel has their own Gal. We’re all and this endless shiva, one-year shiva, still mourning. And just losing him, I feel like you know nothing, nothing is worth it. I mean, of course, Israel needed to respond, of course, what happened to us was horrible, but I would do anything to bring Gal back. We lost so many young lives, and I believe that, we always say in Israel that we need to be worthy. I think being worthy is really working for the next generations not needing to experience what we’ve experienced.

JI: Is there anything else you want to mention that we haven’t discussed?
LY:  I am really upset about the fact that people are ignoring the gender aspect of this war, the fact that women were the first and almost only ones to warn us that that was coming. The tatzpitaniyot [observers] sitting there on the border, reporting to their commanders that they’re seeing a suspected activity and being ignored and dismissed. And then thinking about the peace community that was led by Vivian Silver that just won, that her movement, Women Wage Peace just won this award this week. They led a huge peace march on Oct. 4, with their sister Palestinian movement, Women of the Sun, 2000 women, Israel and Palestinian marching together, speaking about their Mother’s Call. It’s a file they signed together about having more that unites us as mothers than separates us, and their call for their leadership of both sides to go back to the negotiation table. Then three days later, Vivian was murdered with three other members of Women Wage Peace and just thinking that it’s so crucial that we’ll speak about the gender aspect of this war, and that whatever leadership comes next in Israel and in Gaza, we have to have women’s voices in the decision-making process. We need to speak about it — that it’s only men making the decisions of the war and the hostages.

As rockets flew between Israel and Gaza last month, American Jews watched with alarm as anti-Israel rhetoric became the norm in some left-wing circles. Accusations of Israel’s alleged genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid spread widely, even reaching the halls of Congress. 

“It’s become a very common experience for rabbis, and Jews of really any kind who lean to the left progressively, to find, at the very least, difficulties in progressive circles with the love for Israel,” said Rabbi Menachem Creditor, the Pearl and Ira Meyer Scholar-in-Residence at UJA-Federation of New York. Among people like him — American Jews who support progressive policies but also support Israel — “the language of being lonely has been getting louder.” 

With Zioness founder Amanda Berman, Creditor is the editor of Fault Lines: Exploring the Complicated Place of Progressive American Jewish Zionism, a book of essays released this week. The idea behind the book was to allow members of the Jewish community to grapple, collectively, with the increasing difficulty of being a Zionist in progressive spaces. “Why should people continue to feel lonely when it’s a very obvious problem?” Creditor asked. 

The book contains four dozen essays, half of which are original; the rest were reprinted from other publications or taken from speeches or sermons given by the book’s contributors over the past couple of years. Writers include rabbis, journalists, nonprofit professionals and activists; organizations represented include the American Jewish Committee, the National Council of Jewish Women and the pro-Israel LGBTQ organization A Wider Bridge, along with major Reform and Conservative congregations around the country. 

The essays contend with what it means to be a Jew who supports Israel and who also supports progressive causes in the U.S., and to refute common misconceptions from people on both the political left and right. “The presumption from anti-Zionists in the progressive world is that you cannot be a good person and love Israel, and that’s just wrong,” Creditor told Jewish Insider. 

The problem, he argued, is an “anti-Jewish fundamentalism at the fringes of progressive politics,” such as the recent removal of an Israeli food truck from an immigrant food festival in Philadelphia. “If it isn’t countered, it becomes the core of the progressive movement.” The response should be “to show up as loud, proud Jews,” Creditor said. 

The idea to put together a volume of essays came after Creditor saw a Times of Israel blog post authored by Jeremy Burton, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston. “The American left has embraced moral maps that, while they may provide helpful frameworks for understanding some of America’s foundational and ongoing issues, warp understanding and discourse when applied to other parts of the world,” Burton wrote, in a post published the day before Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire.

“I found it to be one of the most important statements today, about how an American-left lens can get Israel wrong,” said Creditor. “It sparked my thinking that we could put together a collection relatively quickly because this is not a new question.”

Creditor has a history of progressive activism, including as founder of the Rabbis Against Gun Violence movement. But he sees himself first and foremost as a Jewish educator — so while he hopes the book might inspire progressive politicians to engage in dialogue on these topics, his desired audience is the Jewish community. 

“I want to support those who are showing up with courage as Zionists in progressive spaces, for them to feel the camaraderie and community of those who are experiencing similar struggles,” said Creditor. He also wants to remind right-leaning pro-Israel advocates that progressives — including those who might criticize, but deeply love, the Jewish state — are, in fact, Zionists.

“As a Jewish community, we have to stop alienating each other when we disagree. We should not deem as anti-Zionist someone who is a progressive American voter who loves Israel. Within Israel, there’s robust debate about what building a better society looks like. That’s a healthy democracy,” Creditor explained. “The presumption that a critical voice is treasonous is itself incorrect.”

As Creditor sees it, progressive Zionists have their pro-Israel bona fides questioned by both the anti-Israel left and some in the Jewish community. “Progressive Jewish Zionists are not receiving the dignity they deserve in progressive circles, and they’re not receiving the dignity they deserve in conservative Zionist circles,” he argued. “Certain conservative Zionist circles typically judge progressive Zionists as naive or disloyal. Those are the same arguments, the same aspersions that progressive Zionists receive from progressive circles.”

Neither Creditor nor Berman define what the book means by “progressive,” but Creditor argues that this is by design. They did not want to limit participation in the project.

“I’m not quite sure what ‘progressive’ means, and there was no litmus test for the authors, because I’m not really sure how to define the word to begin with,” noted Creditor. “I just know how it generally lumps together people who favor LGBTQ equality, combat the American gun violence epidemic [and] who stand for criminal justice reform.”

Still, even though the editors did not set ideological boundaries about who could contribute, the book mostly falls within mainstream pro-Israel discourse. Numerous contributors wrote about trips to Israel with AIPAC, and one essay made the argument that progressives should attend AIPAC’s annual policy conference. 

“There were no submissions rejected based on any institutional affiliation,” said Creditor. After putting out the call for submissions, Creditor and Berman did not receive any from people who affiliated with more left-wing Israel-focused organizations like J Street or IfNotNow.

The one requirement was that contributors consider themselves Zionist. “This is about how to navigate the world of progressive Zionism, not how to reject Zionism,” he noted.

The Appalachian coal miner, a stand-in for the long-suffering white working class, looms large in American politics. Coal miners who lost their jobs as the U.S. moved away from using coal as a power source became a key target of Donald Trump’s “make America great again” mantra in 2016. News organizations reported on coal miners as a political class, with a typical CNN headline from a week before the 2016 election reading “Hillary Clinton might lose Ohio because she badmouthed coal.” 

Now, an Israeli journalist suggests that the story of the American coal miner transcends electoral politics and is actually a powerful parable about our era of global turmoil. In Revolt: The Worldwide Uprising Against Globalization, Yediot Aharonot columnist and Channel 13 commentator Nadav Eyal argues that disillusioned coal miners in Pennsylvania are just one piece in a global puzzle of vulnerable people being crushed by globalization. The book, recently translated into English from its original Hebrew, argues that the solution is not nationalism — but a better, more cooperative globalization.

In a Zoom interview with Jewish Insider, Eyal explained why he believed he was so well-suited to predict Trump’s ascent before many American commentators and political insiders: an “outsider’s view,” he said. He leaned on that perspective in a Hebrew documentary about the former president’s rise that aired in Israel in June 2016, when his chance of winning the presidency still seemed like a longshot to many in the U.S.

It was this documentary, “Trumpland,” that led to a book deal for Eyal, but from the beginning, he decided that Trump would not be the centerpiece of his project. “The era of the revolt is too momentous, too consequential, to be defined by Trump or by the media’s addiction to him,” Eyal writes in the book’s introduction. 

The English edition of Revolt, which was originally published in Hebrew in 2018, is not just a retelling of American political pundits’ conversations about the so-called “white working class.” He connects political discontentment among U.S. industrial workers to Syrian refugees fleeing to Europe and even to radical climate activists. Rather than making an argument about the recent rise of nationalist leaders like Trump or Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Eyal aims to focus on the people who feel they have been left behind in the global economy . 

While many authoritarian leaders around the world have recently wooed their citizens with appeals to nationalism, Eyal posits that this energy could be cultivated for other ends.

“Speaking with my American friends, they want to believe that [Trump’s election was] an accident. It’s a fluke. I don’t think it is,” Eyal told JI. “I don’t want to say it’s a movement, but it’s a sentiment: Revolt. [But] it doesn’t need to go to the Trump side. It can go to positive stuff.”

The people, organizations and movements Eyal reports on in Revolt do not correspond to a specific political ideology, but rather reflect a general sentiment directed at systems and governments that people believe failed them. “What we’re seeing is a multi-layered, leaderless revolt of some sort against porous structures, which are deemed corrupt, hollow, or unrepresentative,” he explained. 

The non-Hebrew editions of Revolt don’t include much reporting on Israel’s current political situation. Each version includes some local flavor: the German edition has a particular focus on the country’s neo-Nazi problem, while the Italian one has a lengthy section on COVID-19, the north of Italy having been devastated in the early days of the pandemic. The book will also be published and sold in local languages in countries including Brazil, Croatia, Spain, and the Netherlands.

The original Hebrew edition attempts to make the case to Israelis that, in the current moment, there is “only one [model] that is really successful within globalization, at least in the West, and that model is of a liberal democracy,” Eyal told JI. In his view, if Israel moves too far to the right or too far in the direction of the country’s ultra-Orthodox — in other words, if it abandons the tenets of what Eyal views as its liberal democracy — then Israel is “just going to destroy its own partnership with globalization.”

Eyal’s politics lean left, and his argument will make sense to progressives. He writes that growing the social safety net, and in turn increasing taxes, will help people like the Appalachian coal miners who are out of work and might not want to learn a new trade. But he also argues that labeling people who feel left behind by globalization as racist or backward is wrong. “It’s about not delegitimizing those people who are revolting, who feel that nothing works for them,” he said. 

If the only people who lend legitimacy to those who feel left behind are radicals, then they will be drawn toward radical, authoritarian politicians. What Eyal wants to see is a “radical mainstream,” where more moderate politicians offer a solution to the very real problems of globalization, rather than “the radical sides of your party.”

In a new book looking back at his time in the military and in several presidential administrations, former national security advisor H.R. McMaster expounds on what he thought were “fundamental flaws” in the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran and why he tried to persuade President Donald Trump not to withdraw from the deal. 

In Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World, released on Tuesday, McMaster called the original JCPOA negotiated by former President Barack Obama “an extreme case of strategic narcissism based on wishful thinking” that led to “self-delusion and, ultimately the deception of the American people.” 

Yet, when Trump wanted to make good on his campaign promise to leave the deal, McMaster made clear his opposition to withdrawing from the accord. In the book, McMaster explains that he wanted the U.S. to maintain leverage to punish Iran for its behavior on matters unrelated to the Iranian nuclear program and to get the parties in the agreement to fix the deal’s flaws. McMaster said he also wanted to avoid giving Tehran the opportunity to portray itself as a victim. But as he attempted to work on a comprehensive Iran strategy, McMaster wrote, Trump grew “impatient.” 

McMaster details how he intervened in former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s efforts to certify the deal in April 2017, and how he successfully lobbied the president to recertify the agreement over the next two 90-day deadlines as required under the 2015 Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act. “We had created a window of opportunity for our allies to demonstrate the viability of staying in the deal while imposing costs on Iran,” McMaster writes. “That window closed soon after I departed the White House.” A month after McMaster left the administration, Trump announced the U.S. withdrawal from the deal. 

The former national security official accuses the Obama administration of ignoring Iran’s behavior in the region and avoiding confrontation in an effort to preserve the accord. According to McMaster, Obama officials “focused on selling the deal rather than subjecting it to scrutiny” by using a “red herring” talking point — the Iraq War — to pose “the false dilemma” of either supporting the deal or going to war with Iran. 

McMaster also offers his view on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Trump peace plan announced in early 2020. Trump’s moves on Israel, he writes, “communicated support for Israel, but also removed incentives that might have been crucial in a future agreement.” While he described the rollout of the peace plan as “dead on arrival” due to lack of participation from Palestinian leaders, McMaster posits that the plan itself may at some point “help resurrect the possibility of a two-state solution.” 

The book itself is not a tell-all on the Trump administration. McMaster does not write about being excluded from Trump’s meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the president’s trip to Israel, or his disputes with Trump and Jared Kushner. “This is not the book that most people wanted me to write… a tell-all about my experience in the White House to confirm their opinions of Donald Trump,” McMaster writes in his preface. “Although writing such a book might be lucrative, I did not believe that it would be useful or satisfactory for most readers.”

McMaster accuses the Russians and the alt-right movement of leading a campaign against him, under the hashtag #FireMcMaster, because they viewed him as a threat to their agenda of undermining America’s national security. McMaster writes that the attacks against him were “often inconsistent” in nature. “For example, one caricature on social media portrayed me as a puppet of billionaire George Soros and the Rothschild family (both of whom were frequent targets of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories), while articles in the pseudo-media charged me and others on the NSC staff as being ‘anti-Israel’ and soft on Iran,” McMaster recalls.

Michael Anton, a former senior National Security Council official in the Trump administration, is “amazed” by what the administration has achieved in the president’s first term — but warns in a new book that the U.S. could careen into disaster if Donald Trump loses his reelection bid in November.

In his new book, The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return, which hit bookshelves last week, Anton argues that this situation has not fundamentally changed — America remains on the brink, and a Trump reelection is the only way to preserve the American way of life.

Although Anton served as the spokesman for Trump’s National Security Council, and left the administration just before former National Security Advisor John Bolton took office, foreign policy is not Anton’s top focus in the book.

However, he writes that the current international world order, with America at its helm, is “a voluntary alliance of neoliberal elites across nations to work together in their own interests.”

According to Anton, Trump’s foreign policy doctrine seeks to fight back against the current structure by rolling back decades of steadily expanding American foreign policy, which dictated that America needed to maintain a presence in every corner of the world.

Trump’s foreign policy has a more narrow focus, centered on defending national security, maintaining America’s economic and trading competitiveness, and maintaining America’s alliance structure, Anton continued.

“It’s a more focused doctrine than what Trumpism replaced. It’s seeing American interest through a more narrow lens,” he told Jewish Insider. “Once you define everything as a priority, nothing is a priority. Once you define everything as an interest, it means nothing is an interest.”

Anton explained that the Trump administration’s approach to the U.S.-Israel relationship fits within such a mold in part because of Israel’s critical position in the U.S.’s security strategy.

“But so many foreign relationships can’t be reduced to dollars and cents,” he added. “America has allies out of shared conviction and shared interests… Some of these alliances that you have are simply because of a natural affinity to democracies that share common values, and so on and so forth, and relationships built up over decades. And you don’t necessarily ask the question, ‘Hey, what am I getting out of this today?’ It’s not a calculation at every step of the way in foreign policy.”

Anton characterized the recent normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates as one of a litany of major Trump administration foreign policy accomplishments.

He declined to say whether this move was in the works during his tenure in the White House, but indicated that it fits within the Trump administration’s broader Middle East strategy.

“We knew going in that a big part of Middle East diplomacy would have to be as much normalization as possible between Israel and other states,” Anton said. “We knew also that some of that normalization would take place below the radar. It wouldn’t be formal or it would take a while for it to become formal. But we certainly were seeking to achieve as much formal normalization as possible.”

Anton also boasted that the Trump administration had helped improve the Israeli-Saudi relationship.

“The fact that relations get better and a lot of quiet and not particularly visible cooperation takes place is also an accomplishment, even if you don’t see it and even if there’s no moment where people sit down and shake hands and sign something,” he said, adding that the Trump administration sees improving relationships between Israel and Arab states as a critical step in facilitating an Israeli-Palestinian peace process. 

Anton acknowledged that the Trump administration’s peace proposal is not, and cannot be, a final peace deal, but laid blame on the Palestinians for the lack of progress — criticizing Palestinian leaders for walking away from the negotiating table after the U.S. moved its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

“What I had hoped for at the time was that it was a demonstration of displeasure… that would last a finite amount of time… and then the Palestinians would come back knowing that that recognition really didn’t change anything,” he said. “I don’t think that they’re helping themselves by staying away and not talking. I don’t see what that gains them.” 

Anton said he does not believe there is anything specific the U.S. can do to incentivize the Palestinians to return to the table, but it can push Arab states to encourage the Palestinians to reengage in negotiations.

In a second term, Anton predicted that Trump would continue to work toward a Middle East peace deal — although he acknowledged that is contingent on the Palestinians returning to the negotiating table. Anton also suggested that the administration would continue to pursue talks with North Korea and focus on the U.S.-China relationship.

Anton’s broader argument in The Stakes — that America is on the brink — echoes his 2016 essay, “The Flight 93 Election,” which made waves in political and media spheres. In it, he argued that a Hillary Clinton victory would, essentially, mark the end of America as it has existed, and that a Trump victory was the only possibility to stave off a calamity.

Anton said that, despite four years of a Trump presidency, the U.S. remains in a precipitous situation because of the influence of the federal bureaucracy and other institutional powers like the media, academia and the corporate world. “Every other power center in the country is held by people who oppose the president’s agenda,” he said

And America will find itself on the brink of disaster every four years, Anton continued, “until and unless we can get back to something like a real politics of give and take in this country.”

Philosopher, writer, spiritual leader… soothsayer? Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks has filled many roles, but even he could not predict the timeliness of his latest book Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times.

“A free society is a moral achievement,” Sacks, formerly the chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of Great Britain, opens. “Over the past fifty years in the West this truth has been forgotten, ignored, or denied. That is why today liberal democracy is at risk.”

The last portion requires little further elaboration. Any casual glance at the current state of the Western world reveals the fragmentation of a society in an era of rising tensions. But rather than dwell only on describing the existence of these problems — as many recent authors have done — Sacks follows their historical and philosophical origins to understand how what he calls the “moral achievement” of creating a liberal society could become forgotten.

The book, which is released today for American audiences by Basic Book, examines what Sacks terms the “I” of self-interest and the “we” of shared values and responsibility, ultimately providing a pathway for moving from the former to the latter.

In doing so, Sacks provides as good an argument as any for moving forward productively and conscientiously. 

Sacks — who studied philosophy at Oxford and Cambridge, including under the late Roger Scruton — mixes sociology, history, philosophy and theology, all the while writing with a perceptive clarity and underlying warmth that explains his status as one of the foremost Jewish thinkers of today.

Building his argument from the ground up, Sacks starts with the roots of free society in examining the political philosophies that not only informed the creation of modern democracy, but also developed the idea of individuality and personal liberties.

In his chapter “Democracy in Danger,” Sacks contrasts the two most influential definitions of the social contract that defines liberal democracy: Rousseau’s definition of rights as rendered by individuals against the state versus Locke and Hobbes’ definition of rights as a mutual protection from the state. He warns that a growing Anglo-American preference for the former belies the importance of shared responsibility in a democracy, writing that if communities “stop believing in the existence of a significant arena of individual responsibility, we will lose the sense of common morality that finds its natural home in families and communities.”

Sacks further connects this thread to Anglo-American society’s growing sense of separation and loneliness, joining a long list of thinkers — including Jonathan Haidt and Steven Pinker — in citing the twin processes of social media use and identity politics as driving factors in an epidemic of isolation and fragmentation that has increasingly transformed Western politics.

In an interview with Jewish Insider, Sacks cited the multiculturalism that began in the 1970s and more recent identity politics each as a wave that “fragments and destroys the idea of an overarching culture that turns disconnected individuals and communities into a cohesive society.”

While he reserves no criticism, Sacks treats these movements and their disciples with evident care, describing them as unfortunate products of postmodernism rather than simply the work of ill-intentioned radicals seeking disruption.

“The first country to introduce multiculturalism, and the first to regret it, was the Netherlands.” Sacks writes in his chapter on identity politics. “When asked why they were against it, the Dutch people interviewed said: because they were in favor of tolerance. When asked for their explanation of the difference between the two, they tended to reply that tolerance means ignoring differences; multiculturalism means making an issue of them at every stage.”

In most Western countries, that heightened focus on identity has coalesced into nationalism, the return of which has become especially apparent across Europe. As history shows, the products of such movements ultimately target the foundations of liberal democracy, while including a rise in antisemitism and other forms of hatred.

The way forward, Sacks argues, requires an acceptance of difference alongside a shared cause, more commonly and aptly called patriotism.

In conversation with JI, Sacks cited George Orwell’s differentiation of the two in his 1945 essay “Notes on Nationalism,” during which the English novelist wrote, “The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.”

Patriotism, Sacks argues, is the best means to turn from “I’ to “we.” Inserting a shared commitment and shared values without erasing individuality or identity. Throughout his book, Sacks also refers to this commitment as a “covenant,” a permanent and powerful collaboration that turns individual “I”s seeking personal good into “we”s seeking common good.

Yet many of the examples of success that Sacks cites from the 19th and 20th centuries were precipitated by violence, including the Civil War and World War II.

Jonathan Sacks readily acknowledged this pitfall. “Violence is always a sign of political failure,” he said.”I would hope that wise political leadership will lean in to people suffering early enough to avoid the need for violence”

In his epilogue, Sacks touches on this subject, contrasting the different responses to World War I — which saw few changes and ultimately led to more chaos — and World War II — which saw a reformation of institutions and a commitment to shared values. 

The latter saw a development of national narratives that inculcated a common morality and sense of commitment. 

Now, 75 year later, these narratives are depleted. “Britain, like America, has recently become sort of ashamed of its national narrative,” Sacks remarked, noting that he has spent time working alongside numerous prime ministers in an effort to resurrect a respectable replacement. He cited the popular Broadway musical “Hamilton” as an important example of renewing old values by “[retelling] the national narrative in a thrilling way.”

But broader than hit musicals, Sacks argued that the most effective and immediate move towards reinstating a shared commitment lies in requiring mandatory national military service.

Citing Israel — which he called one of the best examples of a current Western-style democracy with a “we” culture — described national service as “the most sensible socially and financially way of engaging that generation and getting them to feel that this was something other than a black period in their lives.”

But Jonathan Sacks wisely advised that no quick fix exists. 

“You don’t expect quick victories. When it comes to changing the mood, we expect to win a few cycles,” he said. “And then they generate disciples and before you know it, the world has changed. But it changes in very small steps at the beginning.”

New York Times editor Bari Weiss was gearing up to write a book about censorship and the policing of free speech in the 21st century. Then a gunman opened fire at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018, killing 11 Jewish worshippers. 

Weiss, a native of Pittsburgh, had celebrated her bat mitzvah at the Tree of Life synagogue. The scourge of deadly antisemitic violence had hit closer to home than she ever thought possible. And that attack and its aftermath made it clear to Weiss that the book she really needed to be writing in this moment was How to Fight Anti-Semitism, which will be published tomorrow.  

“Antisemitism is something that I had been following closely my whole life,” Weiss told Jewish Insider in a recent interview. “But it had sort of remained mostly something that was happening to other people in other places.” 

The deadly shooting changed that view, and deeply affected Weiss. She opens her book in a very personal way, detailing her reactions and experiences in Pittsburgh in the days after the attack. It is hard not to hear despair, anger and fear in her opening words, after not just one but two deadly synagogue shootings in the span of six months. 

“It was clear after the Poway attack [in April] that Jews — never mind everyone else living in a divided nation awash in weapons owned by people who could radicalize themselves in front of computer screens — had reason to be afraid in America,” Weiss wrote. 

But by the book’s conclusion, Weiss sounds a much more optimistic note, championing a defiant, joyous Judaism that refuses to back down, and an unapologetic love for the State of Israel, flaws and all. The book’s final chapter exhorts Jews to “practice a Judaism of affirmation, not a Judaism of defensiveness” as a way to combat the dark forces of antisemitism, and to not being afraid to call out antisemitic sentiments from any part of the spectrum. 

“My intent with the book was always for it to have a really energizing, positive message for people,” she said. “I think Jewish history teaches us nothing other than that.” And in the book’s opening, she said, “I really tried hard to take myself back to that morning [after the Pittsburgh shooting], and tried to help the reader go there with me.”

In just 200 pages, Weiss lays out a brief history of anti-Jewish bigotry, her classification of the three categories of antisemitism — from the right, the left and radical Islam — and her proposals for how Jews around the world can fight the ancient hatred. 

While Weiss had always known about and studied antisemitism around the world, she was shocked when it reared its ugly head in the United States. Could Jews in the U.S. one day contemplate emigrating — the way many French and British Jews have in recent years? 

“I wouldn’t have written this book if I didn’t think that was in some ways a possibility,” she told JI. “Does it worry me right now that if you are a man walking around Crown Heights with a kippa and tzitzit out, that you might be physically assaulted? That to me is a pretty wild state of affairs, and one that has been largely overlooked in the past.” 

The New York Times columnist pulls no punches in calling out the insidious antisemitism on both the right and the left of the political spectrum, including that emanating from the White House. 

“In the nearly three years he has been in office, Donald Trump has trashed — gleefully and shamelessly — the unwritten rules of our society that have kept American Jews and, therefore, America safe,” she writes. “He has, at every opportunity, turned the temperature up rather than down. And he has genuinely appeared to have relished his role as the fomenter of chaos and conflict.” 

But Weiss still opines in her book that “anti-Semitism that originates on the political left is more insidious and perhaps more existentially dangerous… calling out politicians like Steve King is easy. Calling out Ilhan Omar is not. That is because Omar is herself targeted by racists and lunatics who wish her harm because of her faith, her gender, or the color of her skin.” She makes it clear that “two things can be true at once: Ilhan Omar can espouse bigoted ideas. And Ilhan Omar can herself be the hate object of bigots, including the president of the United States.”

While Weiss doesn’t believe she is entirely alone in calling out antisemitism across the political spectrum, she said it can be disheartening to watch people let one or the other slide. 

“There are lots of people who are loath to look at the ugliness on their own side,” she told JI. “The reality is that 75% of Jewish Americans vote for Democrats. We live in blue states… what does it mean when the place we thought was our natural home starts to look less and less hospitable?”

Weiss has penned a book that is both personal and academic, and one that she hopes will appeal to Jews and non-Jews alike. 

“I want people to have the sense that they’re listening into the conversations that our community has around our Shabbat dinner table,” she said. While she notes the core appeal of the book is to the Jewish community, “I think that anyone who knows anything about history understands that a society where antisemitism thrives is a society that is dead or dying. And there are lots of signs that America in its current state is in a sort of spiraling period.”