Published: October 24, 2025; Aithor: Julia Sonrisa
Address: 617 Kent Hall, New York, NY, United States
Phone: +1 212-854-2581
Web: https://www.iijs.columbia.edu/Journalist, historian, and professor Gershom Gorenberg joins IIJS to explore how conflicting accounts shape our understanding of the past and present. In his lecture, “My Story, Your Story, the True Story,” Prof. Gorenberg investigates how narratives frame the way history is written.
Gershom Gorenberg is an Israeli historian and journalist and the author, most recently, of War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East. Based on documents that remained classified for decades, War of Shadows solves the mystery of the World War II spy affair that nearly brought Rommel’s army and SS death squads to Cairo and Jerusalem. Gorenberg previously wrote three critically acclaimed books on Israel’s history and politics — The Unmaking of Israel, The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977, and The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount. He co-authored Shalom Friend, a biography of Yitzhak Rabin, and winner of the National Jewish Book Award.
Gorenberg is a contributing writer for The Atlantic. He has written for The New York Times, Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, and Prospect Magazine (UK), and in Hebrew for Haaretz and Maariv. In recent years, he has spent spring semesters at Columbia as the Knapp Senior Research Scholar at IIJS and adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, teaching a workshop on writing history. He lives in Jerusalem.
Time: 5:30 pm EDT
Free!
Detailed information and discussion of the event.