Introducing the 2015 Lionel Gelber Finalists. Today’s Nominee: Ari Shavit

shavittop Every day this week, Foreign Policy is featuring an interview with one of the finalists for the Lionel Gelber Prize, a literary award for the year’s best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs, jointly sponsored by FP and the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. Today’s finalist is journalist ...

Three Murdered Teenagers Buried In Israel
Three Murdered Teenagers Buried In Israel
HASHMONAIM, WEST BANK - JULY 01: (ISRAEL OUT) Israelis hold Israeli flags along the road of the funeral procession of Gilad Shaer, 16, on July 1, 2014 in Hashmonaim settelment, West Bank. The bodies of Eyal Yifrah, 19, Gilad Shaar, 16, and Naftali Fraenkel, 16, were found on Monday, north of the Palestinian town Halhul, just north of Hebron. They had been missing since June 12. (Photo by Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images)

Every day this week, Foreign Policy is featuring an interview with one of the finalists for the Lionel Gelber Prize, a literary award for the year’s best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs, jointly sponsored by FP and the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. Today’s finalist is journalist Ari Shavit, whose book, My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, reflects on Israel's tortured modern history alongside anecdotes from his own family's experience.

The jury citation for Shavit’s book is below:

shavittop

shavittop

Every day this week, Foreign Policy is featuring an interview with one of the finalists for the Lionel Gelber Prize, a literary award for the year’s best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs, jointly sponsored by FP and the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. Today’s finalist is journalist Ari Shavit, whose book, My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, reflects on Israel’s tortured modern history alongside anecdotes from his own family’s experience.

The jury citation for Shavit’s book is below:

In My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, Ari Shavit describes the tragedy that is Israel’s condition at its root. With love and sadness, Shavit returns to the ‘original sin’ of Israel’s birth in 1948, with the expulsion of most Arabs from Israel’s new territory, and follows the links to the current stand-off in Jerusalem and the West Bank. Hard-hitting and big-hearted, Shavit writes poetically and passionately about one of the defining conundrums of our time.

And listen to the interview, conducted by Rob Steiner, a former Wall Street Journal correspondent and director of fellowships in international journalism at the Munk School, here:

Alicia P.Q. Wittmeyer is the Europe editor at Foreign Policy. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and Forbes, among other places. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and master’s degrees from Peking University and the London School of Economics. The P.Q. stands for Ping-Quon. Twitter: @APQW

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