Jewish Stories, World Histories

Former Jerusalem bureau chief for Newsweek and the Daily Beast, Dan Ephron, analyzes the single most consequential event in Israel’s recent history in Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (W.W. Norton). He describes how Rabin, a former general who led the army in the Six-Day War of 1967, embraced his nemesis, Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat, and set about trying to resolve the twentieth century’s most vexing conflict. Based on Israeli police reports, interviews, confessions, and the cooperation of both Rabin’s and Amir’s families, Killing a King is a tightly coiled narrative that reaches an inevitable, shattering conclusion. One can’t help but wonder what Israel would look like today had Rabin lived.

Rita Gabis is an award-winning poet and prose writer. Her grants and fellowships include a New York Foundation for the Arts Award for creative nonfiction and residencies at Yaddo and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She is the author of the poetry collection The Wild Field. Her work has appeared in Harvard Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. In A Guest at the Shooter's Banquet: My Grandfather's SS Past, My Jewish Family, A Search for Truth. (Bloomsbury), Gabis comes to terms with an unthinkable revelation about her family story. Built around dramatic interviews in four countries, filled with original scholarship, A Guest at the Shooters' Banquet is a history and family memoir, documenting "the holocaust by bullets" with a remarkable quest as Gabis returns again and again to the country of her grandfather's birth to learn all she can about the man she thought she knew.