Synopses & Reviews
Jonathan Garfinkel can t make up his mind not about his girlfriend, or Judaism, or Israel. After hearing about a house in Jerusalem where Jews and Arabs coexist in peace, he decides it s time to venture there. In Israel, nothing is as he imagined it, and nothing is as he was taught. Garfinkel gives us the people behind the headlines: from secret assignations with Palestinian activists and an uninvited visit at an Arab refugee camp to Passover with Orthodox Jewish friends and finding the truth about the mythic coexistence house, Ambivalence is the provocative, surreal, and often hilarious chronicle of his travels. In this part memoir and part quest, Garfinkel struggles with the growing divisions in a troubled region and with the divide in his soul.
Marvelous. Garfinkel deftly mines what it means to simultaneously belong, disavow, love, and loathe an identity, a culture, and a history.... A must-read. David Rakoff
Synopsis
Jonathan Garfinkel hears a curious, touching story about a house in Jerusalem that is shared by a Palestinian and a Jew. As he starts to question the assumptions of his faith and Zionist teachings of his youth, he is impelled to make his first-ever trip to Israel--and the West Bank--and to confront the truths and myths of his upbringing. This provocative, deeply compassionate memoir is about connections and separations--about the perils of what links us and the distortions in what divides us. Vivid and dramatic in style, with unexpected moments of both comedy and pathos, Ambivalence is as much a portrait of life as it is of the Middle East.