Twelve Tribes: Promise and Peril in the New Israel

Product Description
\n“In Twelve Tribes, Ethan Michaeli proves he is a master portraitist – of lives, places, and cultures. His rendering of contemporary Israel crackles with energy, fueled by a historian’s vision and a journalist’s unrelenting curiosity.” — Evan Osnos, New York Times bestselling author of Age of Ambition and Wildland
\nAn "illuminating" and "richly descriptive" (New York Times Book Review) portrait of contemporary Israel, revealing the diversity of this extraordinary yet volatile nation by weaving together personal histories of ordinary citizens from all walks of life.
\nIn 2015, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin warned that the country’s citizens were dividing into tribes: by class and ethnicity, by geography, and along lines of faith. In Twelve Tribes, award-winning author Ethan Michaeli portrays this increasingly fractured nation by intertwining interviews with Israelis of all tribes into a narrative of social and political change. Framed by Michaeli’s travels across the country over four years and his conversations with Israeli family, friends, and everyday citizens, Twelve Tribes illuminates the complex dynamics within the country, a collective drama with global consequences far beyond the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians.
\nReaders will meet the aging revolutionaries who founded Israel’s kibbutz movement and the brilliant young people working for the country’s booming Big Tech companies. They will join thousands of ultra-Orthodox Haredim at a joyous memorial for a long-dead Romanian Rebbe in a suburb of Tel Aviv, and hear the life stories of Ethiopian Jews who were incarcerated and tortured in their homeland as “Prisoners of Zion” before they were able to escape to Israel. And they will be challenged, in turn, by portraits of Israeli Arabs navigating between the opportunities in a prosperous, democratic state and the discrimination they suffer as a vilified minority, as by interviews with both the Palestinians striving to build the institutions of a nascent state and the Israeli settlers seeking to establish a Jewish presence on the same land.
\nImmersive and enlightening, Twelve Tribes is a vivid depiction of a modern state contending with ancient tensions and dangerous global forces at this crucial historic moment. Through extensive research and access to all sectors of Israeli society, Michaeli reveals Israel to be a land of paradoxical intersections and unlikely cohabitation—a place where all of the world’s struggles meet, and a microcosm for the challenges faced by all nations today.
\n Review
\n“These illuminating conversations with a wide variety of ordinary people — ultra-Orthodox Jews, Holocaust survivors, aging kibbutzniks, Ethiopian and Russian immigrants, Arab citizens of Israel, Jewish settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank — fill the pages of this richly descriptive book. … It is refreshing, therefore, to read a book about the lives of actual Israelis, which brings their cacophonous voices, rather than the author’s opinions, to the fore.” --
\nDov Waxman, New York Times Book Review\\n“In
\nTwelve Tribes, Ethan Michaeli proves he is a master portraitist – of lives, places, and cultures. His rendering of contemporary Israel crackles with energy, fueled by a historian’s vision and a journalist’s unrelenting curiosity.” --
\nEvan Osnos, New York Times bestselling author of Age of Ambition and Wildland\\n"Ethan Michaeli writes about Israel with the objectivity of a keen observer and the passion of an insider with a personal stake in the future of the country. In this delightful journey through Israel’s radical diversity, he cautions us against hasty judgments. Love for the Israeli story, and anxiety for its future, animate this book." --
\nYossi Klein Halevi, New York Times bestselling author of Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor and senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute\\n“In his artfully crafted work, Michaeli deftly escorts the reader through the complexities and interactions of Is

Publisher:

Custom House

Pages:

464

Date Published:

2021-11-16