Journalist, historian, and professor Gershom Gorenberg joined IIJS on Thursday, October 30, for “My Story, Your Story, the True Story.” In this lecture, Gorenberg examines how competing narratives influence journalism, the writing of history, and the search for a truthful account of the past.
Gershom Gorenberg is an Israeli historian and journalist and the author, most recently, of War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East. Based on documents that remained classified for decades, War of Shadows solves the mystery of the World War II spy affair that nearly brought Rommel’s army and SS death squads to Cairo and Jerusalem. Gorenberg previously wrote three critically acclaimed books on Israel’s history and politics - The Unmaking of Israel, 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. He co-authored Shalom Friend, a biography of Yitzhak Rabin and winner of the National Jewish Book Award.
Gorenberg is a contributing writer for The Atlantic. He has written for The New York Times, Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, and Prospect Magazine (UK) and in Hebrew for Haaretz and Maariv. In recent years, he has spent spring semesters at Columbia as the Knapp Senior Research Scholar at IIJS and adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, teaching a workshop on writing history. He lives in Jerusalem.
The full lecture is available to view below. The images referenced in the lecture are linked separately below and labeled with the time at which they appear in the recording.
Supported by the generosity of the Kaye and Appel families.