Interview

The Passion Play of Death by Todd Hasak-Lowy

A. B. Yehoshua is one of Israel's truly world class writers. Born in Jerusalem in 1936, Yehoshua published his first short story collection 1962. Since that time he has published eight novels, as well as plays and non-fictional essays. Yehoshua's novels engage Israeli and Jewish history in inventive and surprising ways, and his new novel, A Woman in Jerusalem, set in Israel during the difficult days of the Second Palestinian Intifada, is no different. In addition to winning just about every literary prize in Israel, in 2005 Yehoshua was named a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, putting him in a group that included five Nobel Prize winners.

Yehoshua recently made headlines here and in Israel after giving a talk at an American Jewish Committee event in which he questioned the limited natureof a diasporic Jewish identity, a stance Yehoshua has held for years. This opinion is neither trivial nor, for us American Jews, something easy to brush aside. But since Yehoshua earned such a platform for his views on Jewish identity in the first place thanks to his fiction, in this interview I sought to put his creative work back at the center.

I ...