Jonathan Garfinkel hears a curious, touching story about a house in Jerusalem that is shared by a Palestinian and a Jew. As he starts to question the assumptions of his faith and Zionist teachings of his youth, he is impelled to make his first-ever trip to Israel—and the West Bank—and to confront the truths and myths of his upbringing. This provocative, deeply compassionate memoir is about connections and separations—about the perils of what links us and the distortions in what divides us. Vivid and dramatic in style, with unexpected moments of both comedy and pathos, Ambivalence is as much a portrait of life as it is of the Middle East.

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"Jonathan Garfinkel crosses so many intimate borders he should be issued an emotional passport. Ambivalence ducks headlong into the political in a very personal way. Here’s a memoir of a perplexed man digging up his past in an effort to bury the divide in his own soul."
—Michael Winter

"Marvelous. Jonathan Garfinkel deftly mines what it means to simultaneously belong, disavow, love, and loathe an identity, a culture, and a history. And he does so with artful language and deep feeling. Unless you go through life with a four-year-old's lack of nuance (and if you do, congrats on that), then Ambivalence is a must-read."
—David Rakoff, author of Don’t Get Too Comfortable