Amichai Chasson

Jan 14, 2025 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Elliot Kaufman |Akiva Schick |Amichai Chasson

The real Jerusalem syndrome isn’t the one your tour guide told you about. It’s what Saul Bellow experienced on his 1975 trip. “When I came to Jerusalem I thought to take it easy,” he writes in To Jerusalem and Back. “But no one takes it easy here.” He wrote to a friend, “My intention was to wander about the Old City and sit contemplatively in the gardens and churches. But it is impossible in Jerusalem to detach oneself from the frightful political problems of Israel.

Sep 30, 2024 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Amichai Chasson |Akiva Schick |Hillel Halkin |Matti Friedman

Some evenings, in the still calm of Massachusetts, I stretch out on the couch and open Google Maps. My fingers glide over that gleaming digital globe, from North America to the Middle East, and once they find Jerusalem, I start running the regular route I used to take, before I went into this temporary exile in North America.

Jan 22, 2024 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Amichai Chasson |Eitan Kensky

Will the hunters come again to our abode tonight, seeking our soulswith gun threats? Will they come quiet and furtive, until the crackof a shot cuts through the crickets? Perhaps they will arrive with a shofar blastlike the lords of the land subduing the world, bringing their sonsto teach them the wiles of war, carrying our corpses on shoulders broad,smiling, victorious, in promenade. Will they then get drunk around the bonfire out back?

Jan 21, 2024 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Neta Stahl |Amichai Chasson |Matti Friedman |Yosef Lindell

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