HALEVI, Yossi Klein 1953-

PERSONAL: Born June 9, 1953, in Brooklyn, NY; son of Zoltan and Bertha (Hiller) Klein; married Sarah Rintoul Halevi, June 26, 1983; children: Moriah, Gavriel, Sachar. Ethnicity: "Jewish." Education: Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, B.A.; Northwestern University, M.A. Politics: "Militant centrist." Religion: "Practicing Jew, with strong empathy for other religious paths."

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, William Morrow Co., 105 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016.

CAREER: Journalist and writer. Jerusalem Report, Jerusalem, Israel, senior correspondent; contributing editor to New Republic.

WRITINGS:

Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist: An American Story, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1995.

(Author of introduction) Ya'akov Kirschen, What a Country!: Dry Bones Looks at Israel, Jewish Publication Society (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.

Jewish Identities in Post-Rabin Israel, Institute on American Jewish-Israeli Relations: American Jewish Committee (New York, NY), 1998.

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, NY), 2001.

SIDELIGHTS: Yossi Klein Halevi is an American-born Israeli who writes on Middle Eastern issues for American periodicals. Commentary correspondent Hillel Halkin called Halevi "one of the Jewish world's finest journalists," an author whose work displays "both a great capacity for empathy and a strong sense of where—as a committed Zionist, a politically centrist Israeli, and an observant Jew—he himself stands." Halevi was born and raised in a Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood that was dominated by Orthodox Jews. His father was a Holocaust survivor. As a young man Halevi was an activist, especially for the rights of Jews to emigrate from the former Soviet Union. As a teenager he was a follower of the militant Rabbi Meir Kahane. When he immigrated to Israel permanently, however, he began to take a more conciliatory stance towards the Palestinian Muslims and Christians who shared the region. In Journal of Palestine Studies, Milton Viorst observed: "As a decent man, Halevi had exhausted the potential of extremism and had to find another context in which to be a Jew."

In his book At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land, Halevi seeks common ground among Jew, Muslim, and Christian in an effort to heal the mutual resentments that have led to terrorism and war. The book was published shortly after the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City, and some critics felt that its conclusions "lose to some degree their solid moorings in reality in the wake of the unfolding events," to quote Tova Reich in New Leader. Reich continued: "It's not that the reader no longer trusts the experiences Halevi recounts, but given the new facts on the ground, they take on the coloring of a subjective truth, of a kind of personal testimony or memoir shaped by intense private longings and needs transmitted with the trappings of fiction." A Publishers Weekly reviewer noted that, in the book, Halevi "does not try to gloss over his religious and political resentments, yet exudes a yearning for commonality and love." Reich commented: "Certainly it is a surprising undertaking for a seasoned reporter who has witnessed first-hand the intractable violence and relentless woe brought on by religion. Cynicism and despair would seem to be in order, not a fresh commitment to spiritual renewal. Yet Halevi is driven by a personal need for the full richness of a spiritual life, which he insists on defining by the light of his own inner vision." Reich called Halevi a "[voice] for understanding, tolerance and harmony among Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Halevi, with his nonfiction blurring into fiction, speaks for the possibilities of the future." Calling it "a most extraordinary book on interfaith dialogue," in his Shofar review, Harold Kasimow remarked on the author's "luminous mind and warm heart." As Kasimow further pointed out, "This book brings us an important message: people of different faiths with conflicting truth claims can live together in peace and pray for each other." Writing in America, Michael McGarry likened At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden to a spiritual journey. "Halevi's book," McGarry commented, "invites the reader to step out from being a remote observer to become a fellow pilgrim." "In the post-September 11 and current Second Intifada," Mc-Garry concluded, "the kind of searching, honest and, yes, inspiring, dialogue that Halevi demonstrates may be the only kind that will in the end save us. This is a pilgrimage well worth going on."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist: An American Story, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1995.

PERIODICALS

America, February 25, 2002, Michael McGarry, "On Pilgrimage with 'the Other,'" review of At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land, p. 28.

Booklist, November 1, 1995, Aaron Cohen, review of Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist: An American Story, p. 452.

Commentary, November, 2001, Hillel Halkin, review of At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden, p. 57.

Journal of Palestine Studies, autumn, 1996, Milton Viorst, review of Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist, p. 102.

Los Angeles Times, October 13, 2001, Bernadette Murphy, "Examining Three Faiths in Quest of Spiritual Solutions to Religious Wars," p. B18.

New Leader, November-December, 2001, Tova Reich, "Reaching across Boundaries," p. 17.

Publishers Weekly, August 27, 2001, review of At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden, p. 77.

Shofar, summer, 2002, Harold Kasimow, review of At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden, pp. 128-130.