MATTI FRIEDMAN is an award-winning journalist and the author of five nonfiction books. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Tablet Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, and elsewhere, and he is currently a columnist for The Free Press. Friedman’s most recent book, Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe (Spiegel & Grau), was published this year. His previous book, Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai, was published in 2022 in the U.S., Canada, Israel, and Italy. His book Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel won the 2019 Natan Prize and the Canadian Jewish Book Award. Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War was chosen in 2016 as a New York Times notable book and one of Amazon’s 10 best books of the year. His first book, The Aleppo Codex: In Pursuit of One of the World’s Most Coveted, Sacred, and Mysterious Books, won the 2014 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal. Friedman’s books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He was born in Toronto and lives in Jerusalem with his family.
