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Holy Land Expert, Educator, Speaker & Tour Guide

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Book Uri Goldflam

Recommended Reading

Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

By Daniel Gordis

The first comprehensive yet accessible history of the state of Israel from its inception to present day, from Daniel Gordis, "one of the most respected Israel analysts" (The Forward) living and writing in Jerusalem.

Israel is a tiny state, and yet it has captured the world’s attention, aroused its imagination, and lately, been the object of its opprobrium. Why does such a small country speak to so many global concerns? More pressingly: Why does Israel make the decisions it does? And what lies in its future?

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Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation

By Yossi Klein Halevi

In Like Dreamers, acclaimed journalist Yossi Klein 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.

Israel: A Hisotry

By Anita Shapira

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award in History (2012).

Winner of the Azrieli Institute Award for Best Book in Israel Studies in English or French (2014).

Written by one of Israel’s most notable scholars, this volume provides a breathtaking history of Israel from the origins of the Zionist movement in the late nineteenth century to the present day.

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O Jerusalem!

By Larry Collins & Dominique Lapierre

At the center of this massive and brilliant book is the most universal of man's cities: Jerusalem, the mystic heart of three great religions, condemned to pay for the passions it inspires by being - though forty centuries - the most bitterly disputed site in the world.

From Time Immemorial

By Joan Peters

This monumental and fascinating book, the product of seven years of original research, will forever change the terms of the debate about the conflicting claims of the Arabs and the Jews in the Middle East.

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Six Days of War

By Michael B. Oren

In Israel and the West it is called the Six Day War. In the Arab world, it is known as the June War, or simply as 'the Setback'. Never has a conflict so short, unforeseen and largely unwanted by both sides so transformed the world. The Yom Kippur War, the was in Lebanon, the Camp David accords, the controversy over Jerusalem and Jewish settlements in West Bank, the intifada and the rise of Palestinian terror: all are part of the outcome of those six days of intense Arab-Israeli fighting in the summer of 1967.

A Peace To End All Peace

By David Fromkin

The Middle East has long been a region of rival religions, ideologies, nationalisms, and ambitions. All of these conflicts―including the hostilities between Arabs and Israelis, and the violent challenges posed by Iraq's competing sects―are rooted in the region's political inheritance: the arrangements, unities, and divisions imposed by the Allies after the First World War.

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The War of Return

By Einat Wilf & Adi Schwarts

In 1948, seven hundred thousand Palestinians were forced out of their homes by the first Arab-Israeli War. More than seventy years later, most of their houses are long gone, but millions of their descendants are still registered as refugees, with many living in refugee camps. This group―unlike countless others that were displaced in the aftermath of World War II and other conflicts―has remained unsettled, demanding to settle in the state of Israel. Their belief in a "right of return" is one of the largest obstacles to successful diplomacy and lasting peace in the region.

Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

By Yossi Klein Halevi

Attempting to break the agonizing impasse between Israelis and Palestinians, the Israeli commentator and award-winning author of Like Dreamers directly addresses his Palestinian neighbors in this taut and provocative book, empathizing with Palestinian suffering and longing for reconciliation as he explores how the conflict looks through Israeli eyes. And now, in a new epilogue, Palestinian readers have been given a chance to respond through their own powerful letters.

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Reclaiming Israel's History: Roots, Rights, and Struggle for Peace

By David Brog

Author David Brog untangles the facts from the myths to reveal the truth about the Arab-Israeli conflict. In Reclaiming Israel's History you'll learn how the Jewish people have maintained a continual presence in the Land of Israel for over 3,000 years—despite centuries of Roman, Byzantine, and Muslim persecution; how the Romans invented the word "Palestine" as a way to sever the connection between the Jewish people and their land (and how subsequent conquerors doubled down on this strategy); how modern Jewish immigration to Palestine did not displace Arabs but instead sparked an Arab population boom; and the largely untold story of how the leader of Palestine's Arabs collaborated with the Nazis to murder Jews in Europe before they could reach their ancestral homeland.

Industry of Lies

By Ben-Dor Yemini

The Industry of Lies is one of the greatest frauds of recent decades - a fraud of historic, even epic, proportions. When almost half of all Europeans believe that Israel treats the Palestinians just like the Nazis treated the Jews, when leading politicians assert that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the central cause of violence in the world, and when prominent intellectuals argue that Israel is an apartheid state, the unfortunate reality is that the lies are winning.

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Catch The Jew!

By Tuvia Tenenbom

Catch the Jew! recounts the adventures of gonzo journalist Tuvia Tenenbom, who wanders around Israel and the Palestinian Authority for seven months in search of the untold truths in today's Holy Land. With holy chutzpah, Tenenbom boldly goes where no Jew has gone before, at times risking his life as he assumes the identities of Tobi the German and even Abu Ali in order to probe into the many stories in this strange land and poke holes in all of them.

The Innocents Abroad

By Mark Twain

Published under the full name The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims' Progress, this became Mark Twain's best selling book during his life and one of the best-selling travel books of all time. It is a detailed narrative of a long excursion with a group of fellow travelers to the Holy Land shortly after the Civil War aboard the vessel Quaker City. The humorous account covers his visits to Paris, Italy, Greece, Egypt and the Holy Land. At times irreverent, it is always entertaining.

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When and How the Arabs and Muslims Immigrated to the Land of Israel

By Rivka Shpak Lissak

This volume brings evidence that under the British Mandate rule (1918?1948), waves of Arab/Muslim immigrant workers entered the country illegally because of the British policy to ignore illegal immigration. The British mandate government actually ordered the Transjordan army responsible for controlling the borders to ignore illegal immigration. Also, the British Army brought Arab workers from Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon to build and work in their camps. The economic and employment opportunities created by the Zionist Movement, Jewish investors and immigrants, Christian organizations, and the British Mandate in the Land of Israel drew an increasing number of Arab immigrant workers. These opportunities were much better than those they had in their home countries.

Why The Jews?
The Reasons for Antisemitism

By Dennis Prager & Joseph Telushkin

The very word Jew continues to arouse passions as does no other religious, national, or political name. Why have Jews been the object of the most enduring and universal hatred in history? Why did Hitler consider murdering Jews more important than winning World War II? Why has the United Nations devoted more time to tiny Israel than to any other nation on earth?

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Ordinary Men: Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

By Christopher R. Browning

Ordinary Men is the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass shootings as well as round-ups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. Browning argues that most of the men of RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions. Very quickly three groups emerged within the battalion: a core of eager killers, a plurality who carried out their duties reliably but without initiative, and a small minority who evaded participation in the acts of killing without diminishing the murderous efficiency of the battalion whatsoever.

The Night Trilogy:
Night, Dawn, Day

By Elie Wiesel

Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiography account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie's wide and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author's original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to enduring that the world never forgets man's capacity for inhumanity to man.

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If This Is A Man / The Truce

By Primo Levi

Primo Levi's account of life as a concentration camp prisoner falls into two parts. 'If This is a Man' describes his deportation to Poland and the 20 months he spent working in Auschwitz. 'The Truce' covers his journey home to Italy at the end of the war.

We Should All Be Zionists

By Einat Wilf

"We Should All Be Zionists" is the third volume in Dr Einat WIlf's trilogy, after "Winning The War of Words" and "Telling Our Story". It brings together her essays on Israel, Zionism and the path to peace, which were published in a wide range of publications over the past four years. They present Wilf's key insights on the Jewish State, the essence of the conflict, and the hope for peace that is to be found in the Abraham Accords and changes in the Arab world.

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Chutzpah: Why Israel is a Hub of Innovation and Entrepreneurship

By Inbal Arieli

Dubbed “Silicon Wadi,” Israel ranks third in the World Economic Forum Innovation Rating. Despite its small size, it attracts more venture capital per capita than any other country on the planet. What factors have led to these remarkable achievements, and what secrets do Israeli tech entrepreneurs know that others can learn?

Who By Fire:
Leonard Cohen in the Sinai

By Matti Friedman

In October 1973, the poet and singer Leonard Cohen—thirty-nine years old, famous, unhappy, and at a creative dead end—traveled to the chaos and bloodshed of the Sinai desert when Egypt attacked Israel on the Jewish high holiday of Yom Kippur.

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The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World

By Dan Senor & Saul Singer

Why do Israelis have among the world’s highest life expectancies and lowest rates of “deaths of despair” from suicide and substance abuse? Why is Israel’s population young and growing while all other wealthy democracies are aging and shrinking? How can it be that Israel, according to a United Nations ranking, is the fourth happiest nation in the world? Why do Israelis tend to look to the future with hope, optimism, and purpose while the rest of the West struggles with an epidemic of loneliness, teen depression, and social decline?

Let There Be Water

By Seth M. Siegel

Let There Be Water illustrates how Israel can serve as a model for the United States and countries everywhere by showing how to blunt the worst of the coming water calamities. Even with 60 percent of its country made of desert, Israel has not only solved its water problem; it also had an abundance of water. Israel even supplies water to its neighbors-the Palestinians and the Kingdom of Jordan-every day.

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The Source: A Novel

By James A. Michener

In his signature style of grand storytelling, James A. Michener transports us back thousands of years to the Holy Land. Through the discoveries of modern archaeologists excavating the site of Tell Makor, Michener vividly re-creates life in an ancient city and traces the profound history of the Jewish people—from the persecution of the early Hebrews, the rise of Christianity, and the Crusades to the founding of Israel and the modern conflict in the Middle East. An epic tale of love, strength, and faith, The Source is a richly written saga that encompasses the history of Western civilization and the great religious and cultural ideas that have shaped our world.

Exodus

By Leon Uris

Exodus is an international publishing phenomenon—the towering novel of the twentieth century's most dramatic geopolitical event. Leon Uris magnificently portrays the birth of a new nation in the midst of enemies—the beginning of an earthshaking struggle for power. Here is the tale that swept the world with its fury: the story of an American nurse, an Israeli freedom fighter caught up in a glorious, heartbreaking, triumphant era. Here is Exodus—one of the great bestselling novels of all time.

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The Haj

By Leon Uris

Leon Uris retums to the land of his acclaimed best-seller Exodus for an epic story of hate and love, vengeance and forgiveness. The Middle East is the powerful setting for this sweeping tale of a land where revenge is sacred and hatred noble. Where an Arab ruler tries to save his people from destruction but cannot save them from themselves. When violence spreads like a plague across the lands of Palestine - this is the time of The Haj.

Mila 18

By Leon Uris

It was a time of crisis, a time of tragedy - and a time of transcendent courage and determination. Leon Uris’s blazing novel is set in the midst of the ghetto uprising that defied Nazi tyranny, as the Jews of Warsaw boldly met Wehrmacht tanks with homemade weapons and bare fists. Here, painted on a canvas as broad as its subject matter, is the compelling story of one of the most heroic struggles of modern times.

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Raquela: A Woman of Israel

By Ruth Gruber

During her extraordinary career, nurse Raquela Prywes was a witness to history. She delivered babies in a Holocaust refugee camp and on the Israeli frontier. She crossed minefields to aid injured soldiers in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and organized hospitals to save the lives of those fighting the 1967 Six-Day War. Along the way, her own life was a series of triumphs and tragedies mirroring those of the newly formed Jewish state.

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