Over the next few weeks, we’ll be tweeting recommendations of some brilliant Israeli books, tv shows and films to keep you entertained whilst we #StayHomeSaveLives. Follow the recommendations as they’re released on our twitter account.
Recommendations so far:
Our first recommendation is Tom Segev’s masterful biography of Israel’s founding father, David Ben Gurion, A State At Any Cost. Listen to the BICOM podcast with Segev here.
Following an undercover team in the IDF’s counter-terrorism unit, Fauda, was voted best international show by the New York Times in 2017. Series 3 starts on 16 April! Read a Palestinian perspective here.
Yitzhak Rabin’s murder 25 years ago shocked the world. Read this account of the killing and how it reshaped Israel in Dan Ephron’s Killing A King. Review here.
Enjoying Homeland? It was adapted from Israel’s Prisoners of War – Hatufim, the country’s highest-rated TV drama of all time. Watch the trailer here.
The acclaimed When I Lived In Modern Times by Linda Grant tells the tale of 20-year-old migrant Evelyn Sert arriving in Palestine at the birth of the State of Israel. Read the opening chapter here.
Eli Cohen infiltrated the highest levels of the Syrian government in the 1960s. Sacha Baron Cohen stars in the Netflix miniseries dramatising his heroism, The Spy. Read the real story here.
Spies of No Country by Matti Friedman tells the story of the fledgling Israeli intelligence service’s Arab Section and in doing so shows the country’s diversity and complexity. Review here.
Netflix’s Shtisel follows the lives of a fictional Haredi family living in Jerusalem. Read one fan’s account of why she loves it here.
Set against the backdrop of the Second Intifada, Judith Frank’s fictional All I Love and Know describes the lives of a couple who relocate from the US to Jerusalem to raise their niece and nephew, recently orphaned by a suicide bombing. Read an excerpt here.
In the film Oriented, film maker Jake Witz follows the lives of three friends in Tel Aviv to discover what it’s like to be gay and Palestinian in Israel. Read about the film here.
In Jerusalem: The Biography, Simon Sebag Montefiore chronicles the 3,000 year history of one of the world’s most contested, controversial and beautiful cities. Listen to the author here.
Described by Walter Izzuliuno as “an utterly compulsive, hilarious Israeli romantic comedy drama that is guaranteed to make you feel better”, the first two seasons of Beauty and the Baker are available on Amazon Prime. Watch the trailer here.
No Room for Small Dreams: Courage, Imagination, and the Making of Modern Israel by the late, great, former president and prime minister, Shimon Peres, offers an examination of the crucial turning-points in Israeli history. Review here.
Netflix’s The Red Sea Diving Resort, loosely based on the events of Operations Moses and Joshua in 1984-1985, tells the story of a covert Mossad operation that helps Ethiopian-Jewish refugees escape to safe haven in Israel. Read the true story here.
In The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, historian Jonathan Schneer recounts the story that eventually led to the creation of the State of Israel. Review here.
Netflix’s When Heroes Fly brings together four IDF veterans who served together in the 2006 Lebanon War. They’re reunited for a rescue mission in Colombia. Watch the trailer here.
Francine Klagsbrun’s biography of Gold Meir, Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel, provides a comprehensive account of the life of Israel’s first woman prime minister, and the third woman in the world to hold that position. Read a review here.
The late Martin Gilbert’s Israel: A History is regarded as one of the best accounts of the Jewish state’s story yet published. And at over 2,000 pages, it will keep you busy for a while. More details here.
A Tale of Love and Darkness is the late Amos Oz’s memoir, thought to be the biggest-selling literary work in Israeli history. Described by Linda Grant
in her review as “one of the funniest, most tragic and most touching books I have ever read”.
in her review as “one of the funniest, most tragic and most touching books I have ever read”.
Author Yossi Klein Halevi’s Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation is a must read. Interweaving the stories of the paratroopers, Halevi traces the history of Israel from 1967. Read an excerpt here.
The Unorthodox, directed by Eliran Malka, tells the story of the formation of Shas in the 1980s as an upstart political party to represent the interests of Israel’s Sephardic Jewish population. Read a review of the dark comedy here.
Sapiens, Yuval Harari’s epic history of our species, has sold over 10 million copies, and the book has been translated into nearly 50 languages. Harari is a lecturer at the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Micah Goodman’s Catch-67: The Left, the Right, and the Legacy of the Six-Day War offers an interesting, alternative perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Read his article in The Atlantic about it here.