WHO BY FIRE: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai

Presented by CWRU’s Siegal Lifelong Learning Program

Thursday, April 20 @ 7:30 pm

Mandel Jewish Day School

26500 Shaker Blvd., Beachwood

In October 1973, the poet and singer Leonard Cohen—thirty-nine years old, famous, unhappy, and at a creative dead end—traveled from his home on the Greek island of Hydra to the chaos and bloodshed of the Sinai desert after Egypt attacked Israel on Yom Kippur. Moving around the front with a guitar and a group of local musicians, Cohen met hundreds of young soldiers, men and women, at the worst moment of their lives. In Who by Fire, journalist Matti Friedman gives us a riveting account of those weeks in the Sinai, drawing on Cohen’s previously unpublished writing and original reporting to create a kaleidoscopic depiction of a harrowing, formative moment for both a young country at war and a singer at a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 is a journalist and the author of three previous works of nonfiction. Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel (2019,) Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War (2016,) and The Aleppo Codex (2014,) have received international acclaim.

Matti’s work as a reporter has taken him from Israel to Lebanon, Morocco, Moscow, the Caucasus, and Washington, DC. A former Associated Press correspondent and essayist for the New York Times opinion section, he currently writes a monthly feature for Tablet Magazine. His writing has appeared in Smithsonian Magazine, the Atlantic, and elsewhere. Matti was born in Toronto and lives in Jerusalem with his family.

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Presented by CWRU’s Siegal Lifelong Learning Program

Ayelet Tsabari was born in Israel to a large family of Yemeni descent. She is the author of the memoir, The Art of Leaving, winner of many awards including the Canadian Jewish Literary Awards. Her first book, The Best Place on Earth, won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish Fiction, and has been published internationally to great acclaim. She studied film and photography in Capilano University’s Media Program in Vancouver, where she directed two documentary films, one of which won an award at the Palm Spring International Short Film Festival.

A graduate of Simon Fraser University’s Writer’s Studio and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, Ayelet teaches at the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, at University of King’s College’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction, and The Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Track in Creative Writing in Bar Ilan University.