In Conversation: On Can We Talk About Israel? A Guide for the Curious, Confused, and Conflicted

Daniel Sokatch is the CEO of the New Israel Fund (NIF). He served as the executive director of the Progressive Jewish Alliance and the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties. Sokatch has been named four times to Forward’s “Forward 50,” an annual list of the 50 leading Jewish decision-makers and opinion-shapers. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications. In Can We Talk About Israel? A Guide for the Curious, Confused, and Conflicted (Bloomsbury Publishing), Sokatch offers a primer on Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, addressing the story of that conflict and the perspectives of two peoples that both believe themselves to be (and indeed are) among its victims – and of why so many people feel so strongly about it without actually understanding it very well at all. Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Crossing Mandelbaum Gate and The Outlier, enthused that “Daniel Sokatch has done the impossible – he writes a breezy, sometimes even witty book about the always hot-button, depressing, and controversial topic of Israel and Palestine. His is a calm voice of miraculous common sense.”

Kai Bird is a historian, journalist, and the author of several biographies, including American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (co-authored with Martin J. Sherwin), winner of the Pulitzer Prize. His work includes critical writings on the Vietnam War, Hiroshima, nuclear weapons, the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the CIA. Four decades after Ronald Reagan’s landslide win in 1980, Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency is often labeled a failure. But in retrospect, his political odyssey is a rich and human story that includes both formidable accomplishments and painful political adversity. In The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter (Crown), Bird offers a reevaluation of the complex triumphs and tragedies of Carter’s legacy. The only president in a century to grow up in the heart of the Deep South, Carter was not merely an outsider; he was an outlier. And he looked out on a nation torn by race and demoralized by Watergate and Vietnam and prescribed a radical self-examination from which voters recoiled. Drawing on interviews with Carter and members of his administration, and recently declassified documents, Bird delivers a profound, clear-eyed evaluation of a leader whose legacy has been deeply misunderstood. The New York Times called it a “landmark presidential biography. … Bird is able to build a persuasive case that the Carter presidency deserves this new look.”