Content Warning: This section cites accounts of war violence, as well as criticisms of Arab culture that some readers may find offensive. 

In June 1979, Thomas Friedman and his wife, Ann, flew to Beirut to begin his work as a Middle Eastern correspondent, a major culture shock after his Midwestern upbringing. He grew up outside Minneapolis in a middle-class Jewish family, losing interest in religion but then as a teenager finding inspiration during a trip to visit his older sister in Israel. Leaving the Midwest for the first time, Friedman writes, “[S]omething about Israel and the Middle East grabbed me in both heart and mind. I was totally taken with the place, its peoples and its conflicts. Since that moment, I have never really been interested in anything else” (4).

Upon returning home, his fascination with all things Israel was inexhaustible, and at Brandeis University, he studied Arabic and developed a great appreciation of the Arab people following visits to Egypt. Pursuing graduate studies in Oxford, he learned as much from his fellow students, many of them Arabs and Israelis, as from his professors. It further taught him the diversity among groups within the Middle East, which went far beyond the simple binary of Arab and Jew.