Ambivalence: Adventures in Israel and Palestine

By Jonathan Garfinkel

Book Overview

Jonathan Garfinkel can't make up his mind--not about his girlfriend, or Judaism, or Israel. After hearing about a house in Jerusalem where Jews and Arabs coexist in peace, he decides it's time to venture there. In Israel, nothing is as he imagined it, and nothing is as he was taught. Garfinkel gives us the people behind the headlines: from secret assignations with Palestinian activists and an uninvited visit at an Arab refugee camp to Passover with Orthodox Jewish friends and finding the truth about the mythic coexistence house, Ambivalence is the provocative, surreal, and often hilarious chronicle of his travels. In this part memoir and part quest, Garfinkel struggles with the growing divisions in a troubled region and with the divide in his soul. "Marvelous. Garfinkel deftly mines what it means to simultaneously belong, disavow, love, and loathe an identity, a culture, and a history.... A must-read."--David Rakoff

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393066746
• ISBN13: 9780393066746
• Release Date: August 2008
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 5.8" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Charming and meaningful

This book surprised me. It started out seeming flippant and too-too clever, positively Woody Allenish. Then I understood there was a point to this, and gradually, I became more and more absorbed by the book and the author's frankness about his confusion. I share and relate to his confusion and appreciate his articulacy in laying it out. While this is no intellectually or politically profound intervention, it is deep in its way, well written, humane, and full of information most of us ambivalent Zionists would not ordinarily come across without also being put off by an author's militancy. Bravo Garfinkel!

captures the uneasy dynamic of Israel-Palestine

While the book doesn't offer any answers or dispassionate analysis, the author presents an honest, balanced and sympathetic personal encounter with the trouble of Israel-Palestine- of two groups of people each believing they have the sole rightful mandate to live on the land.

Honest, Searching, & Personal Look at the Isreal/Palestine Issue

This is a heartfelt and searching book by an author attempting to come to terms with the Israel/Palestine question and the complexity of his own beliefs. We follow along with Garfinkel as he visits Israel and meets ordinary people on all sides of the issue and evaluates what he hears and sees and how it accords with what he has been taught/thought.