Between The Suns

Justin White's memoir takes us on a journey from the Virginia suburbs to the cloistered precincts of Israel's Sephardic ultra-orthodox. Along the way, he experiences a cross-section of Israeli life, working in Israel's high-tech sector and attending some of the country's most prestigious universities as well as learning and living in the ghetto-like neighborhoods of the extremely religious. Many of the characters he meets, religious or secular, Sephardic or Ashkenazi, immigrant or native-born, have, in common with the State of Israel itself, the quality of being "neither here nor there," caught between different worlds, living in that liminal space "between the suns" where, according to mystical lore, nothing is quite real and anything is possible. And so this record of one man's time in Israel provides us with a glimpse into the conflicts-between religious and secular, high-tech and Torah, European and Arab-that roil Israeli society and whose resolution will determine the fate of the Land and its people.