In October 1973, the poet and singer Leonard Cohen traveled from his home on the Greek island of Hydra to the chaos and bloodshed of the Sinai desert when Egypt attacked Israel on the Jewish high holiday of Yom Kippur. In Who by Fire, journalist Matti Friedman gives us a riveting account of those weeks in the Sinai, drawing on Cohen’s previously unpublished writing and original reporting to create a kaleidoscopic depiction of a harrowing, formative moment for both a young country at war and a singer at a crossroads.
About Matti Friedman
Matti Friedman is an award-winning journalist and author. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Tablet, Smithsonian, and elsewhere.
Matti’s last 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 most recent book, Who by Fire: War, Atonement, and the Resurrection of Leonard Cohen, comes out in the U.S. and Canada in March 2022. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
Matti was born in Toronto and lives in Jerusalem.
A former Associated Press correspondent, Matti’s work as a reporter has taken him from Israel to Lebanon, Morocco, Moscow, the Caucasus, and Washington, DC. Two critical essays he wrote about media coverage of Israel after the 2014 Gaza war, for Tablet and The Atlantic, triggered intense discussion and have been shared on Facebook more than 130,000 times.