Matti Friedman

"A book about young men transformed by war, written by a veteran whose dazzling literary gifts gripped my attention from the first page to the last." -The Wall Street Journal "Friedman's sober and striking new memoir . . . [is] on a par with Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried -- its Israeli analog." -The New York Times Book Review It was just one small hilltop in a small, unnamed war in the late 1990s, but it would send out ripples that...

"Wondrous . . . Compelling . . . Piercing." -The New York Times Book Review Award-winning writer Matti Friedman's tale of Israel's first spies has all the tropes of an espionage novel, including duplicity, betrayal, disguise, clandestine meetings, the bluff, and the double bluff-but it's all true. The four spies were young, Jewish, and born in Arab countries. In 1948, at the outbreak of war in Palestine, they went undercover in Beirut, spending...

A ragtag unit known as the Arab Section was conceived during World War II by British spies and Jewish militia leaders in Palestine. Intended to gather intelligence and carry out sabotage operations, the unit consisted of Jews who were native to the Arab world and could thus easily assume Arab identities. In 1948, with Israel's existence hanging in the balance, these men went undercover in Beirut, operating out of a newsstand, collecting intelligence...

A thousand years ago, the most perfect copy of the Hebrew Bible was written. It was kept safe through one upheaval after another in the Middle East, and by the 1940s it was housed in a dark grotto in Aleppo, Syria, and had become known around the world as the Aleppo Codex.

Journalist Matti Friedman's true-life detective story traces how this precious manuscript was smuggled from its hiding place in Syria into the newly founded state of Israel

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