Anthony David is an historian, teacher, author, and ghostwriter of nine books, most recently Friendly Fire: How Israel Became Its Own Worst Enemy and Its Hope for the Future, which he wrote for Ami Ayalon, the former director of the Israeli Shin Bet. Ayalon turned to David for his memoir after reading Once Upon a Country (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), the biography David wrote for Ayalon’s Palestinian partner in a peace movement, Sari Nusseibeh.
Friendly Fire reflects David’s interest in writing about outsiders and rebels in politics, civil society, or business who fight against the odds for justice and decency in the world.
David’s work with Nusseibeh helped give life to the Al-Quds Bard College for Arts and Sciences in East Jerusalem, where David became a founding faculty member. While teaching at Bard, he wrote a dual biography of two women who, like Nusseibeh and Ayalon, have fought political injustice brought on by the Israeli occupation of Palestine with indomitable courage. An Improbable Friendship: The Remarkable Lives of Israeli Ruth Dayan and Palestinian Raymonda Tawil and Their Forty-Year Peace Mission is the story of the relationship between Ruth Dayan, the widow of Israeli General Moshe Dayan, and Raymonda Tawil, the mother-in-law of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
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), David’s academic books include Gershom Scholem: A Life in Letters (Harvard University Press, 2003); The Patron: A Life of Salman Schocken (Henry Holt & Company, 2004); 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).
While living in Israel, David wrote the bestselling biography of the father of the Israeli start-up industry, I Seek You: Inside Yossi Vardi’s Mind (Aliyat Hagag and Yedioth Books, Tel Aviv 2012).
He lives with his wife, Rebecca, his collaborator and editor, daughter Josephine, and infant son Francisco, in Tangier, Morocco, where he is the academic director of the University of New England Tangier campus and teaches creative writing. In 2017, he founded the literary magazine Moorish Tides to showcase his students’ work.
His current projects include a biography of the Russian-Jewish writer, Svetlana Boym, a book about two German monks and their fight against Hitler, and excavations into his own Sephardic converso family’s twelve generations in New Mexico.