Award-winning author of non-fiction books, Matti Friedman, will talk about his newest book, “Spies of No Country,” at 7 p.m. Thursday, May 2, at the Jewish Community Campus.
Detailing the time before Israel was a state and the group of Jewish spies, from Arab countries, who went undercover during the War for Independence, “Spies of No Country” discusses the fate of these original spies and their legacy. “Spies of No Country” is the recipient of the 2018 Natan Book Award, awarded in conjunction with the Jewish Book Council.
“The small ad-hoc intelligence unit at the center of this story, the Arab Section, ended up being one of the seeds of the Mossad,” Friedman said. “This very amateurish group of young men goes on to play a key role in creating Israel’s famous intelligence apparatus. The new idea they bring in the mid-1940s is that the Jews don’t need to pay Arab collaborators for information about the other side — they can use Jewish agents who are capable of operating undercover across enemy lines. … Early Israel’s enormous population of native Arabic-speaking Jews is a treasure for a spy service. This realization has a lot to do with the success of the Mossad in Israel’s early decades.”
Born in Canada and now a resident of Israel, Friedman was a member of the Israel Defense Forces and then a correspondent for the Associated Press. His 2014 article in The Atlantic magazine, “What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel,” drew wide attention, and he continues to write about what he considers to be widespread anti-Israel bias. He is currently a reporter for the Times of Israel and a contributor to Tablet Magazine.
His search for facts led him to write his two previous books. The first, “The Aleppo Codex: In Pursuit of One of the World’s Most Coveted, Sacred and Mysterious Books,” which explains how the Aleppo Codex was smuggled out of Syria and into Israel, won several awards including the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, The American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal and the Canadian Jewish Book Award. His second book, “Pumpkinflowers” details his experiences as an IDF soldier during a conflict with Lebanon.
After two successful books, he decided to write about Israel’s first spies because: “I was looking for two things — a compelling story with complicated characters, and a story that would make a point about Israel’s repressed identity as a country that thinks of itself as European but is actually Middle Eastern,” he said. “This story — in which the main characters are Jews from Arab countries who assume Arab identities to help found the State of Israel — was perfect.”
During his presentation at the Jewish Community Campus, Friedman will hold a conversation with Jewish Federation President and CEO Helene Lotman. He will discuss his newest book, “Spies of No Country,” as well as his views on the current events in Israel, which are impacted by the mixture of European Jews and those from surrounding Arab countries, who helped establish Israel.
“I think we still tell ourselves stories about Israel that are simple and European in character — Herzl and the early Zionists, pogroms in Europe, the kibbutz, the Holocaust. But these stories don’t really explain the real country that exists, and that I live in, in 2019,” Friedman said. “Half of the Jews in Israel have roots in the Islamic world, where there were 1 million Jews in the 1940s. That population was displaced and largely moved here, shaping the country. Understanding their story is crucial, not as a footnote but perhaps as the main event, more important to Israel today than the story of the European founders.”
His appearance at the Jewish Community Campus is presented by the Jewish Community Center in partnership with the Jewish Federation of Greater Kansas City and made possible by a grant from the Sam M. Schultz Jewish Book Fair Fund. Go to thejkc.org/spies to register.