No More Enemies

The idea of “enemies” is obsolete, but we are so thoroughly accustomed to the paradigm that we have a hard time seeing how to let it go. This book aims to remedy that… leavening the shock with humor.

Eminently readable, highly entertaining and full of hope, No More Enemies is a vibrant combination of real-life stories and speculative theory.

This is definitely not your ordinary, everyday nonfiction experience. The nearly 200 micro-chapters come with evocative headings like “Demonizing people may feel good, but it’s dumb”; “Breastfeeding without borders”; “The Einstein-Goldstein Fallacy”; “From Isaiah to Thich Nhat Hanh”; “What mattresses say”; “Being Reem’s shabbos goy”; “A good-looking suit”; “If I were Herzl, I’d be smarter than Herzl.” You can read the book sequentially from cover to cover, or you can sample what interests you, almost like reading a cookbook. These recipes, however, are all about redesigning our world to get along without the enemies paradigm before it kills us.

Author Deb Reich nudges us gently but firmly toward the emergent post-enemies era, when we will look very differently at the neighbors we have been taught to hate and fear, and see instead… partners. Deb has done it herself, in Israel/Palestine, for many years. What is holding us back in our quest for reconciliation and justice is not the people, she says now; it’s the paradigm. And we can redesign it, together: No More Enemies.

Born in Manhattan and educated at Barnard College, Deb Reich first lived in Israel / Palestine in 1966-67 and relocated there in 1981. Apart from a few interludes abroad, she has lived there ever since. She was married to an Israeli and raised two children in Karkur, a small town near the Mediterranean coast; she has also lived in Jerusalem, Wadi Ara, Abu Ghosh, and Tel Aviv, among other places. The quest for a way to "work smarter" toward reconciliation between the groups in conflict in the Holy Land, or any land, has been her lifelong preoccupation. No More Enemies is the result.