Send Us Your Questions for Matti Friedman

Matti Friedman's viral piece on the Gaza War. Plus: Send him your questions.

Matti Friedman

’s A Terrible Price has been getting thousands upon thousands of clicks, and, more importantly, a lot of discussion. It’s in our new issue, and last week Yehudah Mirsky called it “one of the very finest pieces written on the Gaza war to date.” (Mirsky, who teaches at Brandeis, is Rav Kook’s leading biographer and a former staffer at the State Department’s Human Rights Bureau.) Others have taken issue with Matti’s review of the recently published field notes of IDF reserve officer and anthropologist Asaf Hazani.

We asked Friedman to review the book (which is in Hebrew), because he has served in the IDF, reported on it, and researched its history in several excellent books about the Israeli-Arab wars. In short, we wanted someone who could put Hazani’s observations (some of them, I think, genuinely troubling) in context. His piece begins:

The Hamas massacre on October 7, 2023, pulled Asaf Hazani away from his civilian pursuits as an anthropologist into the parallel life he shares with many Israelis—that of a soldier in the IDF reserves. He’d spend the next months as a colonel at a divisional headquarters outside Gaza as the country struggled to comprehend the scale of the murder, kidnapping, and rape inflicted by Palestinians in southern Israel and as the army fought to reverse its own disastrous collapse in the war’s first days and move to the offensive.

Hazani has now published the first book-length look at the Gaza war from inside the army, presented as the field notes of an anthropologist who found himself in uniform and recorded his experiences in the war’s first stage, from October 2023 to January 2024. But it’s a stranger and more personal work than suggested by that description . . .

I’ll be talking with Matti soon on the JRB Podcast. Read the whole essay here and tell me in the comments below what questions you’d like me to ask him, or just click on this button.

For reviews of Matti Friedman’s last three books, here’s a curated dive through our deep archives: Secret Chord on his book about Leonard Cohen’s legendary visit to the battlefields of the Yom Kippur War, Our Man in Beirut about the role of Mizrachi spies during the War of Independence, and Cedar of Lebanon, a review of Friedman’s most personal book, which draws on his own experience as a soldier in Lebanon.

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