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Start gifting10/7
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Learn moreThe definitive account of the 10/7 attacks through the stories of its victims and the communities they called home.
On October 7, 2023—the Sabbath and the final day of the holiday of Sukkot—the Gaza-based terror group Hamas launched an unprecedented assault on the people of Israel. Crashing through the border, attacking from the sea and air, militants indiscriminately massacred civilians in what became one of the worst terror attacks in modern history, and the most lethal day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
A radically passionate work of investigative journalism and political critique by acclaimed Haaretz reporter Lee Yaron, 10/7 chronicles the massacre that ignited a war through the stories of more than 100 civilians. These stories are the products of extensive interviews with survivors, the bereaved, and first responders in Israel and beyond. The victims run the gamut from left-wing kibbutzniks and Burning Man-esque partiers to radical right-wingers, from Bedouins and Israeli Arabs to Thai and Nepalese guest workers, peace activists, elderly Holocaust survivors, refugees from Ukraine and Russia, pregnant women, and babies.
At a time when people are seeking a deeper understanding of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how internal political turmoil in Israel has affected it, they predominantly encounter perspectives from the powerful—from politicians and military officers. 10/7 takes a fresh approach, offering answers through the stories of everyday people, those who lived tenuously on the border with Gaza.
Yaron profiles victims from a wide range of communities—depicting the fullness of their lives, not just their final moments—to honor their memories and reveal the way the attack ripped open Israeli society and put the entire Middle East on the precipice of disaster. Each chapter begins with a portrait of a community, interweaving history with broader political analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to provide context for the narratives that follow. Ultimately, 10/7 shows that the tragedy is much greater than the violence of the attacks, and in fact extends back through the entire Netanyahu era, which propagated a false image of Israel as a technologically advanced, militarily formidable powerhouse so essential to the region that it could continue to ignore and undermine Palestinian statehood indefinitely.
A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin’s Press.
Lee Yaron has been a journalist with Haaretz, Israel's oldest and most award-winning newspaper, for nearly a decade. Her investigative reporting has resulted in the founding of state-level commissions and the changing of substantial bodies of Israeli policy and law. She is an elected member-representative of the Executive Committee of the Union of Israeli Journalists. She has also written and directed acclaimed theater productions notable for their use of found materials, including official governmental texts, to bring attention to marginalized communities both in Israel and throughout the Middle East. Born in Tel Aviv, Yaron splits her time between her native city and New York.
Fred Berman is a five-time winner of the AudioFile Earphone Award for Audiobook Narration and the recipient of the 2013 Audie Award for narration in Spy the Lie. He has read a number of audiobooks for young listeners, including Judy Blume’s Soupy Saturdays with The Pain & The Great One and Andrew Clements’s The Last Holiday Concert. He has also narrated the audiobooks for Robert Kirkman’s popular series, The Walking Dead.
Berman is an accomplished actor of both the stage and screen as well, performing on Broadway as Timon in The Lion King and off-Broadway in Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and King Lear. On television, Berman has had roles on NBC’s hit series Smash as well as All My Children and Law and Order. He lives in New York City.
Reviews
“Lee Yaron’s courageous book is a literary Shiva, a mourning for all those innocents who died on October 7. It is, as she writes, ‘a defense against distortion, a defense against forgetting.’…These stories impart a dose of tough, anguished history about all the wars since 1948 and all the missed opportunities for peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. If you care about Israel, and you care about Palestine, there is no more important book to read than 10/7.”
—Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Crossing Mandelbaum Gate, American Prometheus, and The Good Spy, director of the Leon Levy Center
“10/7 is a shocking but heartfelt book, whose empathy is the only way forward.”
—Nicole Krauss, author of History of Love, Great House, Forest Dark, and To Be A Man
“Framed as a journalist’s first draft of history, this book is actually an elegy for those murdered, assaulted, and kidnapped on October 7. In the tradition of the biblical Book of Lamentations, Yaron deploys deceptively simple descriptive language to convey events terrible beyond imagining. The book deserves to be read as mourning as much as reportage.”
—Noah Feldman, author of Scorpions and To Be A Jew Today
“Wisely appreciating that the preciousness of life lays in our personal stories, and that easy answers should be resisted in the face of human tragedy, Lee Yaron offers a painstakingly detailed, compassionately rendered must-read for anyone who genuinely seeks a more humane future.”
—Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, president of The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership (CLAL), cofounder and executive editor of TheWisdomDaily.com
“They finally have a name, an existence, a history. We can almost hear their voices. Lee Yaron has done extraordinary work, as her book stands as a monument to both the living and the dead. It is the first book that recounts, almost minute by minute and kibbutz by kibbutz, the horrors that unfolded from 6:30 that morning…A remarkable investigation that brings the victims to life through countless testimonies that Yaron collected, giving life and flesh to dozens of families.”
—Anne Sinclair, author of My Grandfather’s Gallery and In The Shadow of Paris
“A collection of intimate stories about the Israeli victims in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. … Haunting eyewitness accounts of one of the decade’s most catastrophic events.”
—Kirkus
“At the crossroads of investigative journalism and 'oral history,' the text is a record of what happened [on 10/7], but its strength lies in how it places the ordeal of the victims within the longer-term context of their individual and family trajectories. What's so striking, when reading, is precisely this ancestral memory borne by the men and women the attackers targeted."
—Le Monde
“The intertwined stories of victims and survivors provide the gripping, detailed source material for Lee Yaron’s unflinching and meticulous reconstruction of the day of October 7, 2023 as it unfolded in numerous places throughout Israel…Yaron endows each of those places with a history, even a sociology, which helps to tell the larger story of the state of Israel itself; while each victim is granted the honor of a biography that reaches back across the decades and generations, to embrace familial destinies marked by exile and the tragic legacy of Jewish persecution in the 20th century.”
—Télérama Magazine
“Yaron’s investigation is carried out on a human level, tracing the victims' individual and family paths as far as possible. We realize how much these paths are haunted by violence and hatred, sometimes spanning generations…A history book for anyone who wants to understand this piece of land beyond the slogan.”
—Marc Weitzmann, France Culture
"10/7 is not just an account of that day of desolation. Yaron traces lives, those of the victims and those who were with them, and also family histories...As a committed journalist, she does not hesitate to take an uncompromising look at Israeli society, its governments, its ways of functioning, its relationship with its neighbors, particularly the Palestinians.”
—Les Echos