Background
Halevi was born and raised in Borough Park, Brooklyn in New York in a Jewish family. His father was a Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor.
Halevi was born and raised in Borough Park, Brooklyn in New York in a Jewish family. His father was a Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor.
He completed a Bachelor in Jewish Studies in Brooklyn College in 1978, and completed his Master of Arts in Journalism at Northwestern University.
He worked as a senior writer for the bi-weekly magazine The Jerusalem Report from its founding until 2002. Halevi wrote a column for The Jerusalem Post, and wrote regularly on Israeli issues for the op-ed page of the Los Angeles Times, and occasionally for the New York Times and Washington Post. His first book, Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist, was published in 1995.
In it, he tells of his youthful attraction to, and subsequent break with, the militant Rabbi Meir Kahane.
Halevi joined the prayers and meditations in mosques and monasteries, in an attempt to experience the devotional lives of his non-Jewish neighbors and to create a religious language of reconciliation among the three monotheistic faiths. Halevi is a Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Jerusalem-based research institute and educational center.
He is Israel correspondent and contributing editor of The New Republic. He is a lecturer on American and Canadian campuses, focusing on politics and culture in Israel.
In the fall of 2013, he began teaching at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New New York
Halevi"s book Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided A Nation was released by HarperCollins in October 2013. Halevi has been active in Middle East reconciliation efforts, and serves as chairman of Open House, an Arab-Jewish educational project in the working class town of Ramle.