Yossi Klein Halevi Portrait

About the Author


Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.

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.

His previous  book, Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation, was published by Harper/Collins in 2013. That year, it won the Jewish Book Council’s Everett Family Foundation Jewish Book of the Year Award.

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. The novelist Cynthia Ozick called it “a permanent masterwork.” The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, called it, “extraordinary and heartbreaking…a book full of wonders.” The book was re-released by Harper/Collins in January 2019.

His first book, Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist: The Story of a Transformation, published in 1995, 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.” Harper/Collins rereleased the book in paperback in 2014.

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. He 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, he 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, who helps direct Da’at Elyon, a center for Jewish meditation and spiritual work, and their three children.

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Yossi Klein Halevi Portrait