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Until the massacre of 1929, Hebron was considered the safest place for Jews in Palestine, a place where Jews and Muslims had lived side by side for centuries. When the Haganah warned the Jewish leaders of Hebron of impending Arab riots, Hebron’s rabbis refused to believe them. When those riots erupted in Jerusalem on August 23, 1929 and spread throughout the country, the Jews of Hebron paid the heaviest price. The massacre that claimed the lives of 67 unarmed Jewish men, women and children changed life in Hebron for both Jews and Arabs forever. 

Now, 95 years on, and one year after the events of October 7 reignited memories of 1929, award-winning journalist and author Yardena Schwartz will discuss her new book, Ghosts of a Holy War, with the President of Gratz College, Zev Eleff. In this program, she will explore Jewish life in British Mandate Palestine, the tensions that led to the massacre, and the parallels to our post-October 7 world.

Schwartz’s book was inspired by a family in Memphis, TN, who found a box of letters from the late 1920s in their attic. The letters were written by their late uncle, who moved to Hebron at the age of 22 to study at the most prestigious yeshiva in Palestine. Each week, he sent home long letters that painted a vivid portrait of what Hebron was like before the massacre that took his life. The first half of the book is told through the perspective of this young man and his letters from a serenely peaceful Hebron, which today is anything but.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Yardena Schwartz is an award-winning journalist and Emmy-nominated producer. From 2013 to 2023 she was based in Israel, where she reported for dozens of publications, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, Economist, New York Review of Books, and Foreign Policy. She has also reported from Morocco, Nepal, Ukraine, Poland, France, Germany, and the United States.​ Yardena previously worked at NBC News, including stints at The Today Show, Nightly News, and MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports. She graduated with honors from Columbia Journalism School in 2011, earned an Emmy nomination in 2013, and an RNA award for excellence in magazine reporting in 2016. ​ Ghosts of a Holy War is Yardena’s first book.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In 1929, in the sacred city of Hebron—then governed by the British Mandate of Palestine—there was no occupation, state of Israel, or settlers. Jews and Muslims lived peacefully near the burial place of Abraham, patriarch of the Jewish and Arab nations, until one Saturday morning when nearly 70 Jewish men, women, and children were slaughtered by their Arab neighbors. The Hebron massacre was a seminal event in the Arab-Israeli conflict, key to understanding its complexities. The echoes of 1929 in Hamas’s massacre of October 7, 2023, illustrate how little has changed—and how much of our perspective must change if peace is ever to come to this tortured land and its people, who are destined to share it. Noted journalist Yardena Schwartz draws on her extensive research and wide-ranging interviews with both sides to tell a timely, eye-opening story. She expertly weaves the war between Israel and Hamas into a historical framework, demonstrating how the conflict today cannot be understood without the context of ground zero of this century-old war, which began long before the occupation, the settlements, or the state of Israel ever existed.

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