CBE welcomes two award-winning journalists, Matti Friedman and Yardena Schwartz, as they discuss how current media coverage and activism falls short of capturing the reality on the ground in Israel.
Matti Friedman is an award-winning journalist and the author of four non-fiction books. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Tablet, Smithsonian, and elsewhere, and he’s currently a columnist for the Free Press. Matti’s most recent book, Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai, was published in 2022 in the US, Canada, Israel, and Italy. His previous book, Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel, won the 2019 Natan Prize and the Canadian Jewish Book Award. Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War was chosen in 2016 as a New York Times Notable Book and one of Amazon’s 10 best books of the year. His first book, The Aleppo Codex, won the 2014 Sami Rohr Prize and the ALA’s Sophie Brody Medal. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Matti was born in Toronto and lives in Jerusalem.
Yardena Schwartz Yardena Schwartz is an award-winning journalist, Emmy-nominated producer, and author of the new book Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine that Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Her reporting from four continents has been published in dozens of publications, including the New York Times, New York Review of Books, Time, National Geographic, and Foreign Policy. Yardena was based in Israel from 2013-2023, and previously worked at NBC News and MSNBC. She graduated with honors from Columbia Journalism School, received an Emmy nomination for her work at MSNBC, and the Religion News Association award for Excellence in Magazine News Religion Reporting. Ghosts of a Holy War is her first book.