In her short literary career, begun at age thirty-nine and ending with her death at fifty-seven in 2005, Batya Gur wrote six bestselling crime novels that established her as Israel’s leading practitioner of the genre. A former high-school teacher, Gur claimed to have modeled her books’ hero, an academic-turned-detective named Michael Ohayon, on herself. Praising her works, which have been translated into several languages, Sean Cooper examines what makes them especially Israeli:

If there is to be a resolution to the conflict between the Jewish state and a putative Palestinian one, writes Jonathan Michanie, it won’t start with drawing lines on maps or restrictions on where Jews can build houses, but with the Palestinian Authority (PA) abandoning its official anti-Semitism. The PA can, in this regard, learn much from those Arab nations that have recently made peace with Israel: