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Talk on American Jews and Israel Nov. 8 at Duke

Israeli author Yossi Klein Halevi to speak at free, public event

DURHAM, N.C. -- Israeli author Yossi Klein Halevi will discuss the future relationship between American Jews and Israel Wednesday, Nov. 8, at Duke University.

The talk begins at 6 p.m. in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library on West Campus, and is free and open to the public. Parking is available in the Bryan Center garage and lot.

Imam Abdullah Antepli, chief representative of Muslim affairs at Duke, will moderate the discussion with Halevi and Bruce Jentleson, a professor of political science and public policy.

Halevi was a senior writer for the bi-weekly magazine The Jerusalem Report from its founding until 2002. He has also written a column for The Jerusalem Post, and wrote regularly on Israeli issues for the op-ed page of the Los Angeles Times, and occasionally for The New York Times and Washington Post.

His first book, “Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist,” was published in 1995. In it, he tells of his youthful attraction to, and subsequent break with, the militant Rabbi Meir Kahane. In 2001 he published “At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land.” The book tells of his spiritual journey as a religious Jew into the worlds of Christianity and Islam in Israel.

His most recent book, “Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation,” was published in 2013 and received the National Jewish Book Award and the RUSA Brody Medal. In the book, Halevi interweaves the stories of a group of 1967 paratroopers who reunited Jerusalem, tracing the history of Israel and the divergent ideologies shaping it from the Six-Day War to the present.

Halevi is a Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Jerusalem-based research institute and educational center. He is an Israel correspondent and contributing editor of The New Republic. Halevi lectures on American and Canadian campuses, focusing on politics and culture in Israel.

This event is made possible by the Rudnick Lecture Endowment. For more information, visit http://jewishstudies.duke.edu.