Matti Friedman
Matti Friedman Discusses his Book “Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai” with Philip Rubenstein
Summary
Join Philip Rubenstein in conversation with Matti Friedman about his book “Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai”. They will discuss the book’s riveting depiction of the chaos and bloodshed that singer Leonard Cohen witnessed in October 1973 in the Sinai desert when Egypt attacked Israel on Yom Kippur. Drawing on Cohen’s previously unpublished writing and original reporting to create a kaleidoscopic depiction of a harrowing, formative moment for both a young country at war and a singer at a crossroads.
Matti Friedman
Matti Friedman is an award-winning journalist and author. Born in Toronto and based in Jerusalem, he’s a frequent contributor to the New York Times opinion page. Friedman’s book Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel won the 2019 Natan Prize and the Canadian Jewish Book Award for history. Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War was chosen in 2016 as a New York Times Notable Book and one of Amazon’s 10 best books of the year. His first book, The Aleppo Codex, won the 2014 Sami Rohr Prize and the ALA’s Sophie Brody Medal.
Philip Rubenstein
Philip Rubenstein was director of the Parliamentary War Crimes Group, which, in the mid-to-late 1980s, campaigned to bring Nazi war criminals living in the UK to justice. Philip was also the founder-director of the Holocaust Educational Trust and played a role in getting the study of the Shoah onto the national school’s curriculum in the UK. These days, he works with family businesses, advising on governance and continuity from one generation to the next.
I found it, thank you for that question which allows me to give credit to a great librarian named Chris Long at the McMaster University Library. Chris, this was during, actually, just before COVID hit, and I just heard that there was this manuscript. I saw it referenced in a footnote somewhere. It was very unclear where it was or what it was. And Chris Long went into the stacks at McMaster and found this absolute treasure, which is just gold. It was 45 pages of Cohen unpublished, unedited, unfiltered. And he scanned it and sent it to me from Hamilton. And I mean, it allowed me to write the book. I don’t think I would’ve had much of a book without that manuscript. So I really owe Chris Long, as many of us owe librarians, you know, if we think about it, I owe a great deal to librarians, so thank you for allowing me to express my gratitude to that one.
We don’t know too much about it. I didn’t see any place where he really describes it. But his instinct to go to Israel and volunteer in 1973 is clearly inspired by what a lot of Western, particularly Jews, did during the 1967 war or immediately after, where people are inspired to travel to Israel and help out. My dad, for example, was in Toronto that year and was just shocked by the outbreak of the war in ‘67 and went to the Israeli consulate to ask how he could help. And a lot of people had that instinct. By the way, they said, “We don’t need your help, but thank you. You would help us by staying in Toronto and not going to Israel.” But I think that was part of what was going on. He had that memory of '67, and he had the memory of an existential threat to Israel, which to us today, seems strange. It’s hard to imagine a situation where people think that Israel could be wiped off the map, you know, 25 years after the Holocaust. But that was very much on people’s minds at the time, and that was part of what was going on. This fear that our existence is tenuous, and that we’re all in this together. And sometimes a war in Israel was almost like the bat signal being projected, you know, in the “Batman” series where it was a distress signal, and it required all of us to drop everything that we’re doing and go help. And that was, I think, very much the '67 experience for many people. And it was what Leonard Cohen was doing in 1973.