On May 11, Samuel G. Freedman spoke with Gershom Gorenberg on his latest book, War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East. War of Shadows is a true-life spy thriller: the story of the World War II espionage affair that brought Germany's Erwin Rommel to the very brink of conquering the Middle East - bringing with him the S.S. officer already responsible for the murder of half a million Jews. Only a last-minute intelligence breakthrough cut off Rommel's secret source and defeated the Nazis.
Years in the making, this book is a feat of historical research and storytelling. Set against intrigues that spanned the Middle East, it presents a new picture of a crucial period in the pre-state history of Israel, and challenges the conventional memory of World War II and and of the Holocaust.
Gershom Gorenberg is the Knapp Adjunct Senior Research Scholar and Adjunct Professor of Journalism. An Israeli historian and journalist, Gorenberg has been covering Middle Eastern affairs for three decades. Gorenberg's next book is War of Shadows: Code Breakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East, forthcoming from Public Affairs. War of Shadows demolishes myths of World War II in the Middle East and solves the mystery of the spy affair that nearly brought Rommel’s army and SS death squads to Cairo and Jerusalem.
Gorenberg's last book was The Unmaking of Israel, on challenges to Israeli democracy and the history behind them. He is also the author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements 1967-1977 and The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount, and coauthor of Shalom Friend, a biography of Yitzhak Rabin that won the National Jewish Book Award.
Gorenberg is a columnist for the Washington Post and a senior correspondent for The American Prospect. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Foreign Policy and other leading publications in North America, Europe and the Middle East. He holds degrees from the University of California at Santa Cruz and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Samuel G. Freedman is an award-winning author, columnist, and professor. A former columnist for The New York Times and a professor at Columbia University, he is the author of the nine acclaimed books, and is currently at work on his tenth, which will be about Hubert Humphrey, Civil Rights, and the 1948 Democratic convention.
Supported by the generosity of the Kaye and Knapp Families.