Jewish Storytelling at a Time of Extremism

Source: Shalom Hartman Institute

Yossi Klein Halevi and Yardena Schwartz in conversation with Hartman Vice President of Research and Publications, Claire E. Sufrin. Drawing on Halevi’s Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist (1995) and Schwartz’s Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine That Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict (2024), the conversation will trace the historical, religious, and political currents that shaped extremist movements and examine their implications for today. They will reflect on how their own reporting, research, and personal experiences have informed their understanding of extremism, identity, and peoplehood.

Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He is co-host, together with Donniel Hartman, of the Hartman Institute’s podcast, “For Heaven’s Sake” – the number one Jewish podcast in the English-speaking world. Halevi’s 2013 book, “Like Dreamers,” won the Jewish Book Council’s Everett Book of the Year Award. His latest

Claire E. Sufrin is the Vice President of Research and Publication at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, where she edits the award-winning Sources: A Journal of Jewish Ideas, oversees Kogod Research Center seminars, and teaches in the Hartman Teen Fellowship and other programs. Claire earned a PhD in Religious Studies from Stanford University, where her research focused on the German-Jewish thinker Martin Buber, and a BA in Religious Studies from Yale University.

Claire is co-editor of The New Jewish Canon, a collection of the most significant Jewish ideas and debates of the past two generations. Her written work has appeared in a variety of academic and lay publications on topics including Buber’s writings about the Bible and his philosophy of history; post-Holocaust theology; the intersection of religion and literature; and Jewish feminism. Before joining Hartman in 2022, she taught in the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies at Northwestern University for over a decade.

Claire lives in Evanston, IL with her husband Michael Simon and their two children.

Yardena Schwartz is a member of the inaugural cohort of the Hartman Seminar & Writers Workshop for Journalists and an award-winning freelance journalist and Emmy-nominated producer. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, TIME, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, Columbia Journalism Review, Politico Magazine, the Forward, USA Today, and other publications. She has reported from Israel and the West Bank, Morocco, Nepal, Ukraine, Poland, France, Germany, and the United States.

Yardena previously worked at NBC News headquarters in New York, including stints at The Today Show, Nightly News with Brian Williams, and Andrea Mitchell Reports. Yardena graduated with honors from Columbia Journalism School and is a recipient of the 2016 RNA award for excellence in magazine reporting. In 2013 she earned an Emmy nomination for her work at MSNBC.

Originally from New Jersey, Yardena has been living in Tel Aviv since 2013. In June 2021, she embarked on a year of living as a digital nomad with her husband and daughter, starting in Croatia. She is at work on a book about Hebron.