Isabel Kershner

Kershner was born in Manchester, England.[2] She studied Hebrew and Arabic at Oxford University, and her proficiency in Arabic proved particularly useful in her later reporting across the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria — and Gaza.[3] She moved to Israel in the 1990s, where she would build a decades-long career as a foreign correspondent.[2]

Before joining The New York Times, Kershner served as Middle East editor for The Jerusalem Report.[1] She has reported for the newspaper from Jerusalem since 2007, covering Israeli and Palestinian politics and society for an international readership.[1] She is married to Hirsh Goodman, the founder and former editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Report.[1]

Over her years at the Times, Kershner has reported on significant episodes in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and in Israeli domestic affairs. Her byline has appeared on articles covering the Israeli military's shelling of a United Nations site in Gaza,[4] clashes around Jerusalem's Old City during Ramadan,[5] and the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack — including coverage of recovered hostages, Israel's accounting of its military failures, and the political debate over how to investigate those failures.[6]

She has also written on Israeli political life, including a profile of Yair Lapid after the 19th Knesset election that described him as an election surprise and examined Yesh Atid's winning of nineteen seats.[7] In January 2021, she co-authored a piece on Israel's early COVID-19 vaccination successes and the challenges that followed.[8]

Kershner's first book, Barrier (2005), examined the human impact of Israel's security fence on both Israelis and Palestinians.[3] Her work has been characterized as balancing concern for Israel's well-being with critical journalism.[3]

Her second and more expansive book, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul, was published by Scribe in May 2023 and listed at 370 pages.[2] The project originated when the publisher Knopf sought an author to explain who Israelis are today and accepted Kershner's proposal, initially allowing eighteen months for its completion.[9] Changing conditions in Israel and the region caused delays; during the COVID-19 pandemic, she took a three-month leave from the Times and completed the first draft, with editing finished in 2022 and publication following in spring 2023.[9]

The book appeared amid mass demonstrations over Israel's judicial overhaul, and the INSS review presents it as an account of longer-running social and political processes that contributed to Israel's internal crisis.[2]

To research the book, Kershner interviewed people from different ethnic groups and members of Israel's founding generation, sometimes meeting people at random, in an effort to build a wide-ranging portrait.[9] She has described her most meaningful interview as a conversation with Haim Gouri — poet, novelist, journalist, and documentary filmmaker — who spoke with her for hours on many subjects shortly before his death at age 94.[9]

The book uses former President Reuven Rivlin's framework of four Israeli "tribes" — secular Israelis, religious Zionists, Haredim, and Arabs — while emphasizing that each tribe contains subgroups with distinct identities and backgrounds.[2] It opens by examining the tensions between David Ben-Gurion's labor movement and the revisionist movements associated with Ze'ev Jabotinsky and Menachem Begin, and presents the cooperative desert village of Ein Yahav as an allegory for the decline of the founders' socialist and egalitarian spirit and the rise of a more fractured, capitalist society.[2]

Social divisions are explored through the stories of specific communities and disputes. The conflict over access to the Asi Stream, which runs through Kibbutz Nir David, serves as a lens for examining questions of kibbutz and Ashkenazi privilege and the disadvantages experienced by Mizrahi residents of the nearby city of Beit She'an — a narrative Kershner connects to the Mizrahi political shift toward Likud that contributed to the party's landmark 1977 electoral victory.[2] The book also addresses the integration difficulties faced by immigrants from the former Soviet Union, racism and police violence directed at Ethiopian Israelis and the activism that followed, and Israeli Arab communities — with Lod given particular attention as a focal point of violent incidents during Operation Guardian of the Walls in May 2021.[2] A separate chapter examines settlers in Esh Kodesh alongside their Palestinian neighbors, though the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not positioned as the book's central concern.[2]

On demographic change, Kershner connects shifting population trends to the IDF's capacity to function as "the people's army," noting that almost half of Israeli first-grade students are Arab or Haredi.[2] She contrasts those who serve in the IDF and identify with Israel as a Zionist state with Haredim whose distinct way of life, as she presents it, involves a different relationship to both the Israeli ethos and the labor market.[2] An illustrative anecdote in the book concerns pop singer Noa Kirel, who was drafted into the IDF and immediately flew to Thailand for a vacation — used to represent what Kershner sees as the erosion of the army's unifying role.[2]

The book closes on a qualified note of optimism. Despite her concerns about Haredi population growth and a widening rift between right and left, Kershner argues that Israelis across religious, ethnic, and political divides are now intrinsic to the country's landscape, declining to make definitive predictions about where the divisions will ultimately lead.[2]

Across her newspaper reporting and books, Kershner has focused on Israeli and Palestinian politics and society and on Israel's internal divisions. The Jerusalem Post described The Land of Hope and Fear as a rich, wide-ranging portrait and reported favorable assessments from Israeli, Palestinian, and American critics.[1] An INSS review praised the book as a comprehensive account of Israeli complexity for international readers, while noting that some of its interview-based insights had not been empirically examined.[2]

Kershner's reporting for The New York Times has attracted criticism from pro-Israel media watchdog organizations. CAMERA has written critically about several of her articles, including her coverage of Israeli-Palestinian clashes during Ramadan in April 2021 and a 2019 piece on a ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian factions in Gaza.[10][5] In September 2026, a Times article by Kershner about a film drew criticism after it included the wording that Israelis "still mostly see themselves as victims" of October 7; the newspaper subsequently published an editors' note and removed the phrase, attributing its inclusion to an editing error that had made it appear that Israelis' experience as victims of terrorism was a matter of perception.[11] Additionally, a 2021 article about ancient Jewish sovereignty prompted a correction clarifying the distinction between unified sovereignty and separate kingdoms.[12]

The Jewish Review of Books argues that Kershner presented sharply contrasting accounts of a 2015 incident as merely "conflicting versions of reality." In the episode as the review recounts it, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas claimed that a 13-year-old boy had been executed on a Jerusalem street, while an Israeli hospital released a photograph of the boy recovering there.[13] The publication treats Kershner's wording as emblematic of imbalanced Times coverage of Israel; that is its critical interpretation, not an independently established assessment of her reporting.

A 2014 report in Globes noted that some readers had raised questions about potential conflicts of interest arising from her husband's involvement with an Israeli think tank and her son's enlistment in the IDF.[14] The report presented these as readers' objections in a broader debate about Times correspondents in Israel; no finding of bias or misconduct was established against Kershner.[14]