Yossi Klein Halevi

Yossi Klein Halevi is a Senior Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. Together with Imam Abdullah Antepli of Duke University and Jennifer Raskas, he co-directs the Institute’s Muslim Leadership Initiative.

Yossi is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor and co-host with Donniel Hartman and Elana Stein Hain of the Institute’s For Heaven’s Sake podcast.

He is also the author of Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation, which won the Jewish Book Council’s Everett Book of the Year Award

Other books by Yossi include At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew’s Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land, published in 2001. The novelist Cynthia Ozick called At the Entrance “a permanent masterwork.” The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, called it “extraordinary and heartbreaking…a book full of wonders.”

His first book, Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist, told the story of his teenage attraction to, and subsequent disillusionment with Jewish militancy. The New York Times called it “a book of burning importance.”

Yossi writes for the op-ed pages of leading American newspapers. He is a former Contributing Editor of The New Republic.

Yossi was born in New York. He has a B.A. in Jewish studies from Brooklyn College and an M.S. in journalism from Northwestern University. He moved to Israel in 1982, and lives in Jerusalem with his wife, Sarah, who helps run a center for Jewish meditation. They have three children.