2025 Israel Speaker Series: Israel and the Media with Matti Friedman

Israel has long been a subject of fascination for the world, but in recent years the media’s treatment of the Israel-Palestinian conflict has become an obsession that erases background and context and is inflaming global hostility toward Israelis and Jews. How has this media malfunction happened? What does it look like on the ground? And what can be done? Friedman, a Canadian-Israeli journalist and author, will use his years in the foreign press corps to answer those questions and help observers understand the gap between the real country of Israel and the way it is portrayed.
 

About Matti Friedman

Matti Friedman is a journalist and the award-winning author of four works of non-fiction. 

Matti’s most recent book Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai is an account of Leonard Cohen’s concert tour to the front lines of the Yom Kippur War. The book has been listed by both Vanity Fair and Mosaic Magazine as among their top books of 2022 and is being made into a limited TV dramatic series by Keshet International. 

Matti’s 2019 book, Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel, won the 2019 Natan Prize and the Canadian Jewish Book Award, among other prizes. His 2016 book, Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book and won the 2017 Vine Award for Canadian Jewish literature, among other honors. Mattis first book, The Aleppo Codex, was awarded the 2014 Sami Rohr Prize and the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal. 

A former Associated Press correspondent, Matti’s work as a reporter has taken him from Israel to Lebanon, Morocco, Moscow, the Caucasus, and Washington, DC. Two critical essays he wrote about media coverage of Israel after the 2014 Gaza war, for Tablet and The Atlantic, triggered intense discussion and have been shared on Facebook more than 130,000 times. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Tablet, Smithsonian, and elsewhere.

Matti was born in Toronto and lives in Jerusalem.

Registration required with a suggested donation of $18.