Matti Friedman

Matti Friedman was born to a Canadian Jewish family and grew up in Toronto. His family attended an Orthodox synagogue. In 1995, he immigrated to Israel at the age of seventeen and settled in Ma'ale Gilboa. His parents and sister joined him a year later. He was conscripted into the Israel Defense Forces and served in the Nahal Brigade. He was deployed to the Israeli security zone in southern Lebanon during the South Lebanon conflict in the late 1990s, spending much of his service at an Israeli position called Outpost Pumpkin, the name of which was to inspire the title of a book he later wrote about his experiences in Lebanon. Following his military service he studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Friedman is married with three children and lives in Jerusalem. ==Career==

AP journalist Between 2006 and the end of 2011, Friedman was a reporter and editor in the Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press (AP) news agency. During his journalistic career, he also worked as a reporter in Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon, Moscow and Washington, D.C. The book won the 2014 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, was selected as one of Booklist's top ten religion and spirituality books of 2012, was awarded the American Library Association's 2013 Sophie Brody Medal and the 2013 Canadian Jewish Book Award for history, and received second place for the Religion Newswriters Association's 2013 nonfiction religion book of the year. Pumpkinflowers: South Lebanon conflict Friedman's 2016 book, ''Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier's Story of a Forgotten War'', is about his experiences as an IDF soldier during the South Lebanon conflict. Spies of No Country: pre-independence agents In 2019, Friedman published Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel, the story of four Arabic-speaking Jews who operated an Israeli, pre-independence Zionist intelligence unit, the "Arab Section," in Beirut, then in the territory of the French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon towards the end of the British Mandate for Palestine. Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai In 2022, Friedman released Who by Fire:Leonard Cohen in the Sinai, an account of Leonard Cohen's almost forgotten visit to Israel and the occupied Sinai during the Yom Kippur war. Few photographs have survived of the visit and Cohen himself rarely discussed the visit in later years. Friedman tracks down soldiers who remember Cohen's impromptu appearances near the battlefront and speculates about the impact of the visit on Cohen's subsequent life and career. The book was selected as one of the year's best books by Vanity Fair, was optioned for the screen by 66 Media and Keshet International, and adapted as a successful stage show in Israel. Other journalism Friedman has been an op-ed contributor for the New York Times. He was a columnist at Tablet magazine, writing articles from 2013 to 2022. ==Views and opinions==

Following the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict, Friedman wrote an essay criticizing what he views as the international media's bias against Israel and undue focus on the country, stating that news organizations treat it as "most important story on earth". He said when he was a correspondent at the AP, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the piece went "viral" on Facebook. AP issued a statement, saying that Friedman's "... arguments have been filled with distortions, half-truths and inaccuracies, both about the recent Gaza war and more distant events. His suggestion of AP bias against Israel is false". Veteran journalist Mark Lavie, who worked at the AP's Jerusalem bureau, agrees with Friedman's charges leveled against the AP. ==Published works==

• The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible, 2012 • Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story, 2016 • Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel, 2019 • Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai, 2022 • Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe, 2026 ==See also==