An American Jew
This book is my story, about what it meant to me, a totally secular American Jew who couldn’t spell “Shalom” and whose family celebrated Christmas, to travel to the Holy Land late in life and experience total immersion into a culture and a story that were my birthright but that I had, until then, never known.
Major Uzi Eilam sounds the ram’s horn at the Western Wall, June 7, 1967.
Steven Pressfield grew up assuming he was like every other kid in his red-white-and-blue, Sunday-School attending, Christmas-tree decorating suburb. Then at age thirteen he found out he was in fact not a member of that tribe, but of a very different one.
Five decades later, in November 2011, Pressfield boarded an El Al jet bound for Israel. At long last, he’d committed to researching and writing The Lion’s Gate, a book that would finally wrestle with the riddle of his own identity. What he learned as an artist and a man in the three years it took to complete the work is the subject of An American Jew, an on-the-front-lines account of the creative process…in all its wonderfully confounding forms.
Begin today
Start with this War of Art [27-minute] mini-course.
It's free.
The course's five audio lessons will ground you in the principles and characteristics of the artist's inner battle.
Continue each week (also free) with our "Writing Wednesdays" and "What It Takes" posts, each one like a new chapter in The War of Art. Plus continual videos, freebies, specials and new material throughout the year.