About Scholar in Residence

For 2025, Congregation Anshai Torah is honored to announce that Canadian-Israeli journalist Matti Friedman will be our Arnie Sweet Lecture Series Scholar-In-Residence, this coming February.
Mr. Friedman is the award-winning author of four works of non-fiction.

In 2014, following that year’s Israel–Gaza conflict, Friedman published an essay in Tablet Magazine, criticizing the international media’s bias against and undue focus on Israel: An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth. That groundbreaking piece was expanded upon in an editorial published in The Atlantic, three months later: What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel. These critical essays triggered intense discussion, and have been shared on Facebook more than 130,000 times.

His most recent book, Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai is an account of Leonard Cohen’s concert tour to the front lines of the Yom Kippur War. The book was listed by both Vanity Fair and Mosaic Magazine as among their top books of 2022 and is being made into a limited TV dramatic series by Keshet International.

Matti’s 2019 book, Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel, won the 2019 Natan Prize and the Canadian Jewish Book Award, among other prizes. His 2016 book, Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book and won the 2017 Vine Award for Canadian Jewish literature, among other honors. Matti's first book, The Aleppo Codex, was awarded the 2014 Sami Rohr Prize and the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal.

A former Associated Press correspondent, Matti’s work as a reporter has taken him from Israel to Lebanon, Morocco, Moscow, the Caucasus, and Washington, DC. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Tablet, Smithsonian, and elsewhere.

Matti was born in Toronto and lives in Jerusalem.