NEW YORK, NY.- In 1990, during the first Intifada, American author Jeffrey Goldberg was a guard in the largest prison in Israel. It was there he met an inmate named Rafiq Hijazi, a rising leader in the Fatah faction of the PLO. Despite their fears and prejudices, they began a dialogue that grew into a remarkable friendship — and now a remarkable book that confronts head-on the issues dividing the Middle East. Join Goldberg and moderator James Bennet, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, for a discussion of Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide which The New York Times calls, “a lucid, richly layered memoir,” on January 24, 2007 at 7 p.m. at the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.

Jeffrey Goldberg was a college-aged American Zionist enchanted with Socialism and the idea of moving to Israel. After a bar mitzvah trip to Israel and summers at Camp Shomria — a Socialist Zionist camp in the Catskills — the idealistic Goldberg was ready for the real thing. He packed his bags for a kibbutz and the Israeli army. Disillusioned by his experience on the kibbutz, he looked forward to serving in the army and pictured walking in the footsteps of the Israelis that fought in the Six-Day War.

Goldberg’s assignment as a shoter (military policeman) in Ketziot, an Israeli prison in the Negev Desert, was highly disappointing, but a life changing experience nonetheless. In defiance of prison policy, he set out to do something almost unheard of — to really listen to what his enemies had to say. He asked them about their politics, beliefs, families, and ambitions in hopes of demonstrating the humanity of the Jewish people to some of the six thousand inmates at Ketziot.

Goldberg’s primary dialogue was with Rafiq. Their honest conversation, which started in the prison, continued for years in Gaza, Washington, DC, and Abu Dhabi and survived periods of escalated violence and fundamentalism. Through careful but frank dialogues with Rafiq and his fellow prisoners, Goldberg learned that, “This conflict isn’t faceless — it’s not an abstract fight to me, something to be argued over at a think-tank — but a real war with real, tragic consequences for people I care about, on both sides of the line.” And as Rafiq himself said, “If a million people in the Middle East could have the sort of friendship we have created — a tenuous, fraught friendship, but a friendship nonetheless — then the Middle East might become a better place.”

Jeffrey Goldberg is the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker. For ten years he was a Middle East correspondent for The New Yorker and for The New York Times Magazine. A winner of the National Magazine Award for Reporting, he is also a former columnist for The Jerusalem Post and the Forward. He has won the Overseas Press Club Award for best human rights reporting, the Abraham Cahan Prize in Journalism, the Outstanding International Investigative Reporting Award from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and is the recipient of the ADL Daniel Pearl Prize in Journalism. Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide has been called one of the best books of the year by The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post among others.

James Bennet, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, began his writing and editing career at the Washington Monthly. He has served The New York Times as metro reporter, Detroit bureau chief, White House correspondent, Sunday Magazine staff writer, and Jerusalem bureau chief.

Tickets to this event are $10 adults, $5 students/seniors, free for members. Tickets may be purchased online at www.mjhnyc.org or by calling 646-437-4202.