Tag Archives: Matti Friedman

“Kishorit, a self-described neurodiverse kibbutz, is redefining Israeli communal living at a time when these communities are on the decline”

TABLET MAG The New Kibbutz Matti Friedman July 27, 2022 The kibbutz, one of the greatest ideas ever put into practice, has fallen on hard times. Having pioneered a new country and wrought a revolution in Jewish history, most of … Continue reading

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“It will start without warning. And the consequences are likely to be enormous”

TABLET MAG The Next Lebanon War by Matti Friedman September 9, 2021 …What’s different this summer is that some of the important changes on the Lebanese side have become easier to see. Lebanon has long been a husk of a … Continue reading

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Matti Friedman: “When consuming news from Israel, there’s a list of questions I ask when deciding if I’m getting sane information or a narrative of a different kind.”

SAPIR Eight Tips for Reading About Israel by Matti Friedman Spring 2021 … Israel is a Jewish country, home to a plurality of the world’s Jews. The powerful story being woven around Israel is a story about Jews. This is an … Continue reading

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“If victory in the Six-Day War was a mixed blessing, the Russian aliyah was just a blessing”

MOSAIC What Israel Gained from Its Russian Citizens by Matti Friedman November 30, 2020 It seems to me that the single event that brought the most good to Israel since its founding was the Russian wave of the 1990s. There … Continue reading

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“How coverage of the Jewish state became a signifier of the ideological activism that now permeates Western culture”

TABLET MAG Israel Was Ground Zero for the New Woke Religion by Matti Friedman July 27, 2020 …Anyone following the doings of the past few months won’t need a recap of the attempted “cancellations” of scholars and scientists for heresies, … Continue reading

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“It’s not European. And it doesn’t divide into right and left, religious and secular. Matti Friedman, author of a new book about Mizrahi spies, on why Israel baffles and infuriates”

TIMES OF ISRAEL Nobody hijacked Israel. It’s just not what its pioneers thought they’d created by David Horovitz July 29, 2019 …I came from the West, with the European stories of Israel — the kibbutz, the Holocaust… The longer you’re … Continue reading

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“Clinton, Bush, and Obama were all “Zoomed in” on Israel and the Palestinians, while not understanding the broader context. Although we haven’t heard Trump’s proposal yet, it will likely have the same defect”

ELDER OF ZIYON Matti Friedman’s Lens and Sisyphean Mud by Vic Rosenthal January 24, 2019 …To really understand the conflicts surrounding Israel since its coming into being, one needs to zoom out even further than [Matti] Friedman does. One needs … Continue reading

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“In the Israeli view, no peacemaker can bring the two sides together because there aren’t just two sides. There are many, many sides”

NEW YORK TIMES There Is No ‘Israeli-Palestinian Conflict’: To understand why, you have to zoom out by Matti Friedman January 19, 2019 …If you see only an “Israeli-Palestinian” conflict, then nothing that Israelis do makes sense…In this tightly cropped frame, … Continue reading

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“Former AP columnist held forth on the subject of How to Report the Middle East from the Middle East at the Jewish Media Summit in Jerusalem”

JUDEAN ROSE Framing the Narrative: Matti Friedman on the Israel Story by Varda Meyers Epstein November 27, 2018 You have to admire Matti Friedman. He bucked the entrenched wisdom to expose the unfairness (here and here) of the media’s excessive focus on … Continue reading

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Diaspora Jews and the media are getting it wrong on Gaza (again)

NEW YORK TIMES Falling for Hamas’s Split-Screen Fallacy by Matti Friedman May 16, 2018 …Most Western viewers experienced these events through a visual storytelling tool: a split screen [the Embassy opening and the Gaza riots]…The attempts to breach the Gaza … Continue reading

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