Light Sleeper
Filed Under: Books
What happens when speaking out against injustice means risking your place among your own people? For almost fifty years, award-winning journalist David Leser has wrestled with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, both as a reporter and as the son of Jewish parents shaped by the Holocaust. Now, in his most personal book, Light Sleeper, he examines identity, inherited trauma and conscience, asking whether it is possible to hold the suffering of two peoples in our hearts when the world demands we choose sides.
On October 7 1987, Leser drove into Gaza as a young journalist, unaware he was entering a territory on the brink of the first Palestinian uprising. Within minutes, his car was surrounded and pelted with bricks and stones. Almost four decades later, with the atrocities of October 7, 2023 and Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza, Leser began to draw on his reporting, his family’s escape from Nazi Germany and his own fractured relationships to confront a haunting question: how can a people who have endured centuries of persecution inflict such suffering on another? What does it mean to be Jewish today, and can loyalty to one’s people coexist with opposition to the actions of the Israeli state?
Light Sleeper is a book about the human cost of taking a stand. Leser’s condemnation of the devastation in Gaza,
including the articles that earned him his second Walkley Award in 2024, and his sixth Walkley nomination in 2026, has
come at a deeply personal price.
Lifelong friendships have fractured. Former friends have branded him a traitor. Relationships have been tested by
divisions spreading from the Middle East into Australian homes and institutions. Leser examines all this, together with his own failures of friendship, anxieties and sleeplessness.
At a time when antisemitism is rising and the war in Gaza continues to divide communities, Light Sleeper offers something rare: a willingness to question deeply held beliefs without abandoning compassion. Leser asks what becomes of our humanity when grief for one people leaves no room for another’s suffering.
In a world demanding that we take sides, does the greater courage lie in refusing to stop seeing the humanity of both? Or
does it require something else again – finding the moral clarity to stand against the majority view of your own people?
Helen Garner
In the tradition of the fractious rabbis, Hillel and Shammai, David Leser makes ‘an argument for the sake of heaven’, and does that rare thing these days: accepts that two things can simultaneously be true. ‘I stand with both’ is the only sane, humane – and dare I say it? – truly Jewish response to the civilian suffering caused by the barbarities of October 7th and the obliteration of Gaza .
Geraldine Brooks
Leser on Palestine is trouble in every sense: Trouble. Troubled. Troubling. Be ready for a heartquake.
Andrew Denton
If you don’t agree with everything in this book, good. One of the great traditions of Jewish thought began with an argument; at its heart is a commitment to hearing diverging viewpoints. This spirit of intellectual risk-taking and inquiry flourished too in the medieval Islamic world, where reason, debate and the pursuit of knowledge produced much of the philosophy and science we now take for granted. Modern fundamentalists have sought to shut down these traditions. They insist on cognitive rigidity – a core feature of evil behaviour. In this book, David Leser resists them with everything he’s got.
Jess Hill