Natan and the Jew­ish Book Coun­cil are thrilled to announce the Spring 2025 Natan Notable Book: 10/7: 100 Human Stories by Lee Yaron (St. Martin’s Press, 2024).

This defin­i­tive account of the attacks of Octo­ber 7 – part­ly an oral his­to­ry and part­ly a work of inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism – fills the spaces between the facts of the day with the thoughts, fears, and mem­o­ries of peo­ple who lived it. The book returns the nar­ra­tive to the peo­ple who expe­ri­enced it, with­out an agen­da or the fil­ters of pol­i­tics, mil­i­tary oper­a­tions, or media noise. Yaron, an expe­ri­enced jour­nal­ist, cre­ates a web of sto­ries which links the vic­tims and sur­vivors of 10/7 in a way that repli­cates and high­lights the inter­con­nect­ed­ness of Israeli life, while shin­ing a light on the diver­si­ty of the peo­ple that make up the Israeli pop­u­la­tion. Yaron pro­files vic­tims from a wide range of com­mu­ni­ties — from left-wing kib­butzniks and Burn­ing Man-esque partiers to rad­i­cal right-wingers, from Bedouins and Israeli Arabs to Nepalese guest work­ers, peace activists, Holo­caust sur­vivors, and refugees from Ukraine and Rus­sia — depict­ing the full­ness of their lives, not just their final moments.

With the selec­tion of Yaron’s book as a Natan Notable Book, the com­mit­tee not­ed the impor­tance of rec­og­niz­ing the human­i­ty behind an event that is a dai­ly head­line — one that has been exam­ined and mourned, vil­i­fied and dis­missed. At a time when social media head­lines reduce whole lives to one image and boy­cotts are attempt­ing to silence voic­es that chal­lenge the main­stream nar­ra­tive, 10/7: 100 Human Sto­ries restores com­plex­i­ty to the sto­ry, to peo­ple involved in the most fun­da­men­tal ways, and to the mem­o­ries of those who did not sur­vive to tell of that day. 

As Natan Notable Books com­mit­tee mem­ber Feli­cia Her­man said, ​“Although 10/7 is pri­mar­i­ly focused on telling many of the sto­ries of that trag­ic day — sto­ries of vic­tims, sur­vivors, and the hero­ic efforts to fight back the ter­ror­ists and to save lives — we named the book a Natan Notable Book because it goes many lay­ers deep­er than that. Yaron tru­ly flesh­es out each of these lives, mak­ing each a win­dow into Jew­ish his­to­ry, Israeli his­to­ry, and the com­plex­i­ty of life in Israel today. She treats each person’s sto­ry with com­pas­sion, under­stand­ing, and respect — what­ev­er their eth­nic, reli­gious, or polit­i­cal back­ground. The book there­by becomes essen­tial read­ing for any­one try­ing to tru­ly under­stand Israel and peo­ple who call it home.”