Rabin: Our Life, His Legacy

Seen by some as a hero and by others as a traitor for his compromises with the Palestinians, Yitzhak Rabin generated strong emotions in his native Israel. His assassination in November 1995 at the hands of a right-wing Jewish radical shocked the world and changed the face of Middle Eastern politics overnight. But whatever the public view of Rabin might have been, no one else had the perspective that many years of marriage gave his wife. In Rabin: Our Life, His Legacy, Leah Rabin shares her memories of the public figure and the private man.

It soon becomes evident that Rabin is a woman with strong preferences and opinions. She found Rosalyn Carter difficult to deal with and developed a fondness for Yasir Arafat. She has no doubt that her husband's assassination was the result of hate-mongering among right-wing rabbis and intellectuals based at Bar-Ilan University, where Yigal Amir, Rabin's killer, was a student. Leah Rabin may not have written the most objective biography of the late prime minister, but certainly Rabin is intimate and heartfelt and full of timely reflections on Israel's past and future.