Rabbi David leads a two-week series book reading of Yossi Klein Halevi's "Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor." Order and read this powerful, personal historical account of one American-Israeli's experience of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, then come to the JCOGS Café for a meaningful discussion. Participants are being asked to attend both sessions.

About the Book:
Attempting to break the agonizing impasse between Israelis and Palestinians, the Israeli commentator and award-winning author of Like Dreamers directly addresses his Palestinian neighbors in this taut and provocative book, empathizing with Palestinian suffering and longing for reconciliation as he explores how the conflict looks through Israeli eyes.

Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor is one Israeli’s powerful attempt to reach beyond the wall that separates Israelis and Palestinians. In a series of letters, Yossi Klein Halevi explains what motivated him to leave his native New York in his twenties and move to Israel to participate in the drama of the renewal of a Jewish homeland, which he is committed to see succeed as a morally responsible, democratic state in the Middle East.

This is the first attempt by an Israeli author to directly address his Palestinian neighbors and describe how the conflict appears through Israeli eyes. Halevi untangles the ideological and emotional knot that has defined the conflict for nearly a century. In lyrical, evocative language, he unravels the complex strands of faith, pride, anger and anguish he feels as a Jew living in Israel, using history and personal experience as his guide.

Halevi’s letters speak not only to his Palestinian neighbors, but to all his neighbors in the Middle East. In writing this book he is inviting his neighbors not only to read, but to respond with letters of their own. This is the first step in a project that will enable Palestinians and Israelis, Arabs and Jews to hear each others stories.

   About the Author:

Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.       He is the author of Like Dreamers, which won the Jewish Book Council’s Everett         Book of the Year Award. He is a former contributing editor of the New Republic           and writes for the op-ed pages of leading American newspapers, including the Wall     Street Journal, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.