Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

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

I call you "neighbor" because I don't know your name, or anything personal about you - and for that we share the blame. Given our circumstances, "neighbor" might be too casual a word to describe our relationship. We are intruders into each other's dream, violators of each other's sense of home, incarnations of each other's worst historical nightmares. Neighbors? So begins Yossi Klein Halevi's Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, a powerful attempt to reach beyond the Wall and into the hearts of "the enemy." In these ten, brief letters, Halevi endeavors to explain his position as a liberal, American-born Jew who immigrated to Israel in his 20s, intoxicated by a vision of a homeland and now, desperate to see it succeed as a morally responsible, democratic state in the Middle East. Deeply informative, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor is an education in a dream and the inevitable conflict that has been born of it. As Halevi probes Zionism and the battle of competing narratives that has raged between Israelis and Palestinians in the last 70 years, he attempts to untangle the knot of human emotions that has encircled the conflict. In words that often read like poetry, Halevi interrogates the complex mess of faith, anger, warmth, pride, and shame he feels as a Jew living in Israel, using history and personal experience as his guide. These illuminating and poignant letters are addressed to Halevi's Palestinian neighbor, and yet they are also sure to speak to a wide, American Jewish audience, perhaps, particularly, the many secular, American Jews who prefer to disassociate themselves from Israel and the conflict. This is a problem that causes many American Jews to avert their eyes. Letters from My Palestinian Neighbor forces the reader to look. Sure to stir a great deal of debate, on all sides, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor is a perfect book for our complicated times.

Now in paperback comes the New York Times bestseller from Yossi Klein Halevi, a taut and thought-provoking book in the form of a series of letters addressed to his imagined Palestinian neighbor about the moral complexity of living as a Jew in Israel and his desire for interfaith reconciliation.