Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author, Amy Dockser Marcus, wrote the novel Jerusalem 1913: The origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the year 2007. Marcus was a journalist working for New York City’s The Wall Street Journal in 1991. She flew to Tel Aviv, Israel in September. The stories and facts she has about this topic are interesting because she has actual historical background and knowledge about it. She is able to describe everything in a very vivid manner. As an example of this, in the beginning of the book in the year 1997, she depicts the suicide bombing in Café Apropos in Tel Aviv. Marcus also explores the final years of the Ottoman Empire. She does this by …show more content…
The main purpose of this book is to direct the audience to the Ottoman era of Jerusalem. Various Jewish settlers came from Europe to Jerusalem, which is where the conflict started. Everything goes wrong in the year 1913 because of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The spread of new ideas were looked down upon. There was a lot of cultural diversity, but none of it spread. Marcus helps the audience understand the different values, knowledge, and backgrounds of ethnicity. In my opinion, we could have avoided the Middle Eastern conflict to begin with by being culturally diverse and acceptable. We must be more accepting to other cultures. Being culturally diverse gives people new ideas and new backgrounds. This book overall was well written because of Marcus’s experiences from being a journalist, but it was a little hard to completely grasp. Having different parts in the book was a good idea, but making different chapters within the parts and having the years not go in chronological order made it hard to follow along. Also, there were too many different groups of people to keep track of, but that is why the author probably broke up her book into parts to help the reader understand the vast amount of