Yossi Klein Halevi

Halevi was born in Brooklyn, New York, on June 9, 1953, to Zoltan and Bertha (Hiller) Klein.[1] He grew up in Borough Park, in a neighborhood dominated by Orthodox Jews.[6][7] His parents were Hungarian Jews, and his father, a native of Transylvania and a Holocaust survivor, was a central presence in his childhood.[6][8] Halevi recalled that his father began telling him about his wartime experiences when he was three or four years old.[4] Those accounts shaped his early understanding of antisemitism and the need to protect Jewish people.[4]

In an account reproduced by Mosaic, Halevi described his father escaping Nazi cattle cars and spending a year with two other Jews in a six-by-eight-foot hiding pit in a forest.[9] Halevi wrote that his father's stories taught him that even “the most innocent details of our lives” could contain lessons about survival.[9] He later connected the period between Passover and Shavuot with the deportation of Jews from Transylvania to Auschwitz, describing those weeks as particularly fraught for families carrying that history.[8] He also recalled his father's postwar departure from religious observance and subsequent return, which he associated with Israel's restoration of Jewish collective power.[8]

Writing began early in Halevi's childhood: he started writing books in fourth grade and established a small mimeographed newspaper in sixth grade.[6] As a sixth grader, he interviewed his father about his wartime experiences and submitted the resulting article to the Jewish Press, which published it.[6] His first writing thus included the family history that later figured in his reflections on Jewish vulnerability, survival, and identity.[6][4]

At age 12, Halevi joined Betar, the Zionist youth movement founded by Ze'ev Jabotinsky, and attended its camp in the Catskills.[4][6] In 1965, around the time of his bar mitzvah, he became involved in the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry.[4] His activism focused particularly on the right of Jews to leave the Soviet Union.[7] He later observed that activists in the movement were motivated both by concern for persecuted Jews and by shame over what they understood as earlier generations' passivity during the Holocaust.[7]

As a teenager, Halevi followed Rabbi Meir Kahane and joined the Jewish Defense League, participating in its activism while still in high school.[1][6] In his retrospective account, he joined at 13 after beginning in Betar, and Kahane's advocacy of violent tactics appealed to him at that age.[10] He later explained that he and other young members believed they were joining to protect Jews, with “Never Again” expressing their response to the Holocaust.[11] Halevi said that he left the movement after Kahane moved to Israel in 1971 and, in his view, redirected its attention from Soviet Jewry toward an anti-Arab campaign.[10]

During Passover in 1973, Halevi and seven other activists staged a sit-in at the Soviet immigration office in Moscow and were arrested.[6] Most, though not all, of the participants came from the Jewish Defense League.[6] Halevi explained that they hoped to demonstrate to Soviet authorities and Soviet Jews alike that American Jews were committed to the emigration campaign.[6] Following their release, they met refusenik leaders in a Moscow apartment.[6]

Halevi earned a bachelor's degree from Brooklyn College of the City University of New York and a master's degree from Northwestern University.[1] While studying in Israel in 1973, he experienced the Yom Kippur War as an American student.[6] He recalled Israeli friends going to the front while he volunteered to pick tomatoes on a moshav, an experience he found humbling and that helped make him conscious of eventually wanting to live in Israel.[6] His later journalism studies at Northwestern supplied professional skills, including interviewing and structuring stories.[6]

Halevi began writing for the Village Voice in 1980, and the following year the newspaper and Moment magazine sent him to Israel on reporting assignments.[6] He settled in Israel in 1982, at age 29.[12] He subsequently wrote for American Jewish newspapers, The Jerusalem Report, and The New Republic.[6] His journalistic positions have included senior correspondent for The Jerusalem Report and contributing editor to The New Republic, with his work addressing Middle Eastern issues for American readers.[1]

He arrived in the summer of 1982, at the beginning of the First Lebanon War.[3] Halevi described encountering a divided Israel and called the experience of entering what he termed a “dysfunctional society” formative for his Israeli identity.[3] He connected that arrival to a lasting commitment to uphold Jewish unity, rather than understanding unity as something that could be taken for granted.[3] After settling permanently in Israel, he adopted a more conciliatory approach toward Palestinian Muslims and Christians sharing the region.[1]

Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.[2] His public work includes Israeli-Arab dialogue, Muslim-Jewish relations, and engagement with the relationship between Israel and diaspora Jewish communities.[5] He also cohosts For Heaven's Sake, a podcast addressing sociopolitical trends in Israel, diaspora relations, and Jewish collective consciousness.[2]

At the institute, Halevi helped develop the Muslim Leadership Initiative, an educational program addressing Judaism, Jewish identity, and Israel.[6] The initiative was proposed at the institute in 2012, and Halevi and Imam Abdullah Antepli helped found it in 2013.[6][13] He has served as its co-director with Antepli; Maital Friedman has also been identified as a co-director.[14][15] In a 2022 essay in SAPIR Journal, Halevi wrote that the initiative had brought more than 150 emerging Muslim North American leaders to the Jerusalem campus to study Judaism, Israel, and Zionism.[13] He described its purpose as deepening participants' understanding of Israel's place in Jewish identity and values, rather than challenging their support for Palestinians.[13]

Halevi's first book, Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist: An American Story, appeared in 1995 and drew on notes he had kept during his Jewish Defense League years.[1][6] It recounts his involvement in Jewish militancy and his subsequent disillusionment.[6] The autobiographical narrative covers his youth in the 1960s and 1970s, Soviet Jewry activism, involvement in and break with Kahane's movement, and emigration from the United States to Israel.[9] It was published in November 1995, two days after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.[6] His transformation from a proponent of violence to an advocate of understanding is a central element of the life story chronicled in the book.[5]

Other early publications included Jewish Identities in Post-Rabin Israel in 1998.[1] Halevi also wrote the introduction to Ya'akov Kirschen's What a Country!: Dry Bones Looks at Israel, published in 1996.[1] These works accompanied his continuing journalism on Israel and Middle Eastern affairs.[1]

At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land, published in 2001, recounts a first-person exploration of Christian and Muslim religious life and encounters in the Holy Land.[6] The book sought common ground among Jews, Christians, and Muslims while confronting resentments associated with terrorism and war.[1] Its exploration of religious experience aimed at possibilities for unity rather than further division.[6] Reviews addressed both its interfaith search for commonality and its candid treatment of religious and political resentments.[1] Its publication coincided with the September 11, 2001 attacks, and a critic raised the question of how subsequent events would affect the reception of its conclusions.[1][6]

Published in 2013 after an eleven-year writing process, Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation follows seven paratroopers who fought in the 1967 battle for Jerusalem.[16] The men served in Israel's 55th Paratroopers Reserve Brigade and participated in the fighting that helped reunite East and West Jerusalem.[17] Rather than ending with the battle, the book follows their postwar lives and their involvement in Israel's political, social, and cultural transformations.[17] Their later paths included peace activism, leadership in the settlement movement, kibbutz ideology, entrepreneurship, and music.[16]

Halevi explained that he used these lives to explore competing Zionist dreams and the country's changing society.[16] The narrative also follows the men through the Yom Kippur War and its aftermath.[12] A review in the Jewish Review of Books interprets its movement among seven parallel lives as a longitudinal portrait showing how people from different backgrounds and ideological positions could act together during national emergencies.[12] The same reviewer suggests that Halevi's perspective as an American immigrant with an Orthodox upbringing helped him explain Israeli military and social culture to English-language readers.[12]

Like Dreamers won the Jewish Book Council's Everett Book of the Year Award.[4] Its treatment of Jewish sovereignty also includes moral responsibility: in one passage, Halevi writes that existential threats do not absolve Israel of its obligations.[18] He presents Jews returning to their homeland as carrying the hopes of Jews in exile, quoting the lines, “The lands beyond the sea are behind us / We are their longing.”[18]

Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor was published by HarperCollins in May 2018 and became a New York Times bestseller.[15][4] A free Arabic version was made available to reach Arab readers and elicited responses from Palestinian and Arab readers.[19]

A review in the Jewish Review of Books interprets Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor as an effort to explain the Zionist case to Palestinian and other unsympathetic readers.[19] The reviewer characterizes Halevi's approach as conciliatory, recognizing Jewish and Palestinian national aspirations while supporting territorial compromise when compatible with Israeli security.[19] This reading places the book's defense of Jewish national attachment alongside its effort to address people who do not share its starting assumptions.[19]

“My Jewish life is religious; my Israeli life is secular,” Halevi wrote in a 2023 essay.[20] He has described himself as both religious and Zionist while declining to call himself a religious Zionist, because he sees that label as carrying particular political and cultural associations in Israeli society.[8] In one anecdote, a neighbor assumed that his knitted kippah meant he would vote for the national religious camp.[8] Halevi replied that he liked that style of kippah and that it held personal religious meaning rather than functioning as a political membership card.[8]

Halevi has described the Holocaust as central to his religious and political formation.[4] In a 2021 interview, he discussed a photograph of a Jew putting on tefillin while surrounded by SS officers, which he understood as an image of kiddush Hashem.[4] His reflections on remembrance also include the statement that “Yom HaZikaron is an open and ongoing wound.”[8] Discussing the aftermath of the Holocaust, he called displaced-persons camps “the first post-Holocaust societies.”[8]

His understanding of Israel distinguishes the Jewish people's historical attachment to the land from the imperative of security after the Holocaust.[21] In a response to President Barack Obama's 2009 Cairo speech, later relayed publicly by Jeffrey Goldberg, Halevi said: “The Holocaust doesn't explain why we're here. The Holocaust explains why we fight as fiercely as we do to stay here, but it doesn't explain our rootedness.”[21] The distinction places Jewish rootedness at the center of his account of Israel, while treating the Holocaust as an explanation for the intensity of the determination to survive.[21]

In his 2023 essay, Halevi celebrated the secular state's role in bringing Jews home, teaching them to protect themselves, helping them heal after the Holocaust, and retrieving Jewish communities from what he called an increasingly dangerous and dysfunctional Middle East.[20] He also described engagement with people beyond his own religious and political community as both a professional and spiritual commitment.[20] Explaining that commitment, he invoked the rabbinic phrase “Elu v'elu divrei Elohim chaim,” translated as “both these and these are the words of the living God.”[20] He wrote that his career had involved writing about and engaging with Jews across political and religious divides, as well as people of other faiths.[20]

The recognition received by Like Dreamers and the bestseller status of Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor are prominent markers of Halevi's reception as a writer.[4] His books range from an autobiographical examination of Jewish extremism to interfaith exploration, collective biography, and an address to Palestinian readers.[1][4] Across those works, his subjects include Jewish vulnerability, the responsibilities of sovereignty, religious encounter, and the competing political visions within Israeli society.[6][16]

His work also connects personal testimony with larger Jewish experiences: his father's survival, his own Soviet Jewry activism, and his immigration to Israel all appear in accounts of his intellectual development.[6] His journalism and books address English-language readers, while the Arabic availability of Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor extends that effort toward a Palestinian audience.[1][19] The Muslim Leadership Initiative provides an institutional counterpart to his writing about interfaith understanding, bringing Muslim leaders into direct study of Judaism, Zionism, and Israel.[13]

Halevi's account of arriving in a divided Israel in 1982 and his later description of dialogue as a spiritual commitment give personal expression to his emphasis on Jewish unity.[3][20] His public roles encompass both internal Jewish conversation and engagement across national and religious boundaries, rather than limiting dialogue to a single audience.[5][20]

Halevi's political formulations express his interpretations of Jewish history and Israeli society rather than a consensus account.[22] In a 2017 interview, he distinguished “May 1967 Jews,” who in his framing remember vulnerability and isolation before the Six-Day War, from “June 1967 Jews,” who emphasize victory and the responsibilities of Jewish power afterward.[22] He identified with both perspectives and connected their tension to his writing and his ambivalence about a Palestinian state.[22]

In 2021, he expressed concern about what he viewed as both anti-Zionist extremism and far-right Zionist extremism among young Jews.[4] His 2023 essay described anxiety about Israel's political future and a loss of instinctive solidarity with parts of the Jewish people.[20] In a 2026 interview about the War of Independence and Palestinian displacement, he argued that displacement involved both expulsion and flight and could not be captured by a single narrative.[11]

Critical discussion of his books has also addressed their framing and scope.[12][19] The Jewish Review of Books review of Like Dreamers notes that its concentration on seven paratroopers, kibbutz institutions, and religious-Zionist institutions leaves other Israeli communities outside its central narrative.[12] Its review of Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor offers an interpretation of Halevi's religious and political position, rather than an uncontested classification of his Zionism.[19]