Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

Attempting to break the agonizing impasse between Israelis and Palestinians, Yossi Klein Halevi directly addresses his Palestinian neighbors in his new taut and provocative book, “Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor.”

Yossi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. Together with Imam Abdullah Antepli of Duke University, he co-directs the Institute’s Muslim Leadership Initiative. Yossi is the author of “Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation,” published by HarperCollins in 2013, which won the Jewish Book Council’s Everett Family Foundation Jewish Book of the Year Award.

Yossi writes for the op-ed pages of leading American newspapers. He is also author of the 2001 book, “At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew’s Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land,” which has been called “a permanent masterwork” by author Cynthia Ozick and “extraordinary and heartbreaking…a book full of wonders” by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams.

Yossi’s first book, “Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist,” told the story of his teenage attraction to, and subsequent disillusionment with Jewish militancy. The New York Times called it “a book of burning importance.”

He has been active in Middle East reconciliation work and serves as chairman of Open House, an Arab Israeli-Jewish Israeli center in the town of Ramle, near Tel Aviv.

Yossi was one of the founders of the now-defunct Israeli-Palestinian Media Forum, which brought together Israeli and Palestinian journalists. He was a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem from 2003-2009.

Born in New York, Yossi has a BA in Jewish studies from Brooklyn College and an MS in journalism from Northwestern University. He moved to Israel in 1982 and lives in Jerusalem with his wife, Sarah, a landscape designer. They have three children.

Books will be available for sale at the event for $30.