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Matti Friedman has spent more than a decade dissecting how Israel is covered in the press and what those stories reveal about the storytellers themselves. His 2014 Atlantic essay, What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel, remains one of the sharpest examinations of why global attention is fixated on Israel and why the coverage so often skews against it.
In this conversation, Matti reflects on whether the problems he identified then still hold true today in an age of social media storms. He explains why Israel remains outsized in the Western imagination, how Hamas has weaponized Palestinian suffering, and why the media so often amplifies their playbook.
We also explore whether Israel’s failures in the narrative war are the result of its own missteps, entrenched hostility, or something deeper, and what both the Israeli government and Jewish communities abroad can and should do differently.
More from Matti:
The Free Press - Is Gaza Starving? Searching for the Truth in an Information War
The Atlantic - What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel
Tablet - An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth
Guest Bio:
Matti Friedman is an award-winning journalist and the author of four non-fiction books. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Tablet, Smithsonian, and elsewhere, and he’s currently a columnist for the Free Press.
Matti’s most recent book, Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai, was published in 2022 in the US, Canada, Israel, and Italy. His previous book, Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel, won the 2019 Natan Prize and the Canadian Jewish Book Award. Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War was chosen in 2016 as a New York Times Notable Book and one of Amazon’s 10 best books of the year. His first book, The Aleppo Codex, won the 2014 Sami Rohr Prize and the ALA’s Sophie Brody Medal. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
Matti was born in Toronto and lives in Jerusalem.
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