I am an historian, teacher, author, essayist, and ghostwriter of nine books based in Tangier, Morocco, where I live with my wife and editor, Rebecca Radding, and our two children.

Currently, I am working on a book about the role of the Catholic Church in the conspiracy to kill Hitler, told through the story of a German Benedictine monk, Father Hermann Keller, who infiltrated the SS. I’ve written several essays about the project: in the American Historical Review about historiographical lessons; in Ploughshares about how I stumbled into the story, and in Comment about my own spiritual journey.

Before I started writing about the Church, I wrote biographies and memoirs for leading figures in Israel and Palestine. I wrote Friendly Fire: How Israel Became Its Own Worst Enemy and Its Hope for the Future (Steerforth, 2020) for Ami Ayalon, the former director of the Israeli Shin Bet; Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) for the Palestinian philosopher Sari Nusseibeh, and An Improbable Friendship: The Remarkable Lives of Israeli Ruth Dayan and Palestinian Raymonda Tawil and Their Forty-Year Peace Mission (Arcade, 2015) about longtime friends Ruth Dayan, the widow of Israeli General Moshe Dayan, and Raymonda Tawil, the mother-in-law of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. I also wrote a bestselling biography of Yossi Vardi, the father of the Israeli start-up industry, I Seek You: Inside Yossi Vardi’s Mind (Aliyat Hagag and Yedioth Books, Tel Aviv 2012).

Trained as an historian in Berlin (MA, Freie Universität Berlin 1993), Chicago (University of Chicago PhD 2000), and Jerusalem (Fritz Rosenzweig Center at Hebrew University 2000-2003), my academic books include Gershom Scholem: A Life in Letters (Harvard University Press, 2002); The Patron: A Life of Salman Schocken (Metropolitan, 2003); Lamentations of Youth: The Diaries of Gershom Scholem (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008); and The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem (University of Chicago Press, 2017). More recently, I returned to the relationship between Arendt and Scholem in an essay for the Catholic literary journal, Dappled Things.

Among my other current projects, I’m working on a series of essays about my Sephardic converso family’s twelve generations in New Mexico.