10/7

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