Arab and Jew
by David K. Shipler
Summary
David K. Shipler spent years covering the Middle East for The New York Times, including a stretch as the paper's Jerusalem bureau chief, and he built Arab and Jew out of that reporting to examine how ordinary Arabs and Jews in Israel and the occupied territories actually see each other rather than how their governments or their conflict's headlines describe them. The book moves between communities rather than staying inside one, sitting with Jewish settlers, Palestinian farmers, soldiers, students and families on both sides of lines that Shipler shows running through neighborhoods, schoolrooms and workplaces as much as through any map.
Shipler is less interested in assigning blame than in showing how each side's fear of the other gets passed down, reinforced by memory, education and daily contact that rarely crosses the line separating the two communities. He reports conversations in which sympathy and suspicion sit side by side in the same person, and the book's overall shape is less an argument for a particular solution than a patient accumulation of how deeply mutual mistrust has settled into everyday life on both sides.
Reading it means moving through many individual voices and encounters rather than a single narrative thread, and it suits a reader who wants the Israeli Palestinian relationship shown through lived perception and daily contact rather than through policy or military history. Shipler's own years of firsthand reporting from the region give the book an on the ground quality that keeps it from reading like a distant analysis.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave Shipler the 1987 award for general nonfiction for a book published the previous year. That year's other finalists were Cyra McFadden's Rain or Shine: A Family Memoir and John McPhee's Rising from the Plains. Shipler had already spent years as a Times foreign correspondent, reporting from Moscow from 1975 and running the paper's bureau there from 1977 to 1979 before moving to its Jerusalem bureau from 1979 to 1984, the reporting base for this book.
Shipler later served as executive producer, writer and narrator of a PBS documentary built from the book, which won a 1990 Alfred I. duPont Columbia Award for broadcast journalism, and he returned to the subject with a follow up film, Arab and Jew: Return to the Promised Land, broadcast on PBS in August 2002, the same year he published a substantially revised edition of the original book reflecting two more decades of change in the region.