For half a century, David Leser has wrestled with the question at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: how can two peoples, bound to the same land by history, memory and grief, ever find a way to live together?
Part memoir, part reckoning, Light Sleeper begins in Gaza on the eve of the first intifada and unfolds into a personal journey through war, family history, identity and conscience. The son of a German-Jewish father who fled the Nazis and a mother whose Jewish-Latvian family was exterminated in the Holocaust, Leser - a lifelong supporter of both Israeli and Palestinian rights to safety, security and self-determination - confronts the moral and emotional fault lines exposed by October 7, and the devastating assault on Gaza that followed.
Can a person stand with both Israelis and Palestinians without betraying either? Is criticism of Israel a moral duty, or a dangerous abandonment of one's own people? How do trauma, fear and history shape what we are able, or not prepared to see? And what happens when the search for truth costs friendships, certainty and belonging?
Passionate, courageous and profoundly humane, Light Sleeper is not a book that asks readers to agree. It asks them to think, to question, and to sit with uncomfortable truths.
It asks how might we expand our empathy in an age that demands certainty and the choosing of sides.