Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai

An expedition into the troubled soul of one of the worlds greatest songwriters.Haaretz 

Not only is a hidden side of Cohen revealed but so too a hidden side of Israel.David Bezmozgis

A Vanity Fair best book of 2022 * Mosaic Magazine best book of 2022

The little-known story of Leonard Cohens concert tour to the front lines of the Yom Kippur War, including never-before-seen selections from an unfinished manuscript by Cohen and rare photographs

In October 1973, the poet and singer Leonard Cohenthirty-nine years old, famous, unhappy, and at a creative dead endtraveled from his home on the Greek island of Hydra to the chaos and bloodshed of the Sinai desert when Egypt attacked Israel on the Jewish high holiday of Yom Kippur. Moving around the front with a guitar and a group of local musicians, Cohen met hundreds of young soldiers, men and women at the worst moment of their lives. Those who survived never forgot the experience. And the war transformed Cohen. He had announced that he was abandoning his music career, but he instead returned to Hydra and to his family, had a second child, and released one of the best albums of his career. In Who by Fire, journalist Matti Friedman gives us a riveting account of those weeks in the Sinai, drawing on Cohens previously unpublished writing and original reporting to create a kaleidoscopic depiction of a harrowing, formative moment for both a young country at war and a singer at a crossroads.