Yossi Klein Halevi

Yossi Klein Halevi (born in 1953) is an author, journalist and researcher of Israeli culture and society.

Halevi was born and raised in New York in a Jewish family. He completed a BA in Jewish Studies in Brooklyn College in 1978, and completed his MA in Journalism in Northwestern University. In 1982, he moved to Israel, together with his wife Sarah (nee Lynn Rintoul).

In 1985, the documentary film "Kaddish", produced by Steve Brand, which focuses on his relationship with his father, a Holocaust survivor, was released. The "Village Voice" called it one of the best ten films of the year.

He worked as a senior writer for the bi-weekly magazine the Jerusalem Report, from its founding until 2002. Halevi wrote a column for The Jerusalem Post, and wrote regularly on Israeli issues for the op-ed page of the Los Angeles Times, and occasionally for the New York Times and Washington post.

His first book, "Memoires of a Jewish Extremist", was published in 1995. In it, he tells of his youthful attraction to, and subsequent break with, the militant Rabbi Meir Kahane.

In 2001 he published "At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land". The book tells of his spiritual journey as a religious Jew into the worlds of Christianity and Islam in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Halevi joined the prayers and meditations in mosques and monasteries, in an attempt to experience the devotional lives of his non-Jewish neighbors and to create a religious language of reconciliation among the three monotheistic faiths.

Halevi has been active in Middle East reconciliation efforts, and serves as chairman of Open House, an Arab-Jewish educational project in the working class town of Ramle. He was a founder and board member of the now-defunct Israeli-Palestinian Media Forum, which brought together Israeli and Palestinian Journalists.

Halevi is a senior fellow in the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem-based academic research institute. He is Israel correspondent and contributing editor of The New Republic.

Halevi is a frequent lecturer on American and Canadian campuses, focusing on politics and culture in Israel.

Currently Halevi is writing a book about the paratroopers who reunited Jerusalem in the Six Days War.

Bibliography

* Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist, Little Brown and Company, New York-Boston, 1995.
* At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land, Morrow, New York, 2001.