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 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.

“The old European lens that we’ve always used to understand Israel is less and less useful…this country needs to be understood as a country in the middle east, responding to pressures in the region.”