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Light Sleeper
  • Published: 24 November 2026
  • ISBN: 9781761625466
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288
Categories:

Light Sleeper

Memoir of a Troubled Jew

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
24 Nov 2026
EBook
24 Nov 2026
Audiobook
24 Nov 2026
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What happens when the story you were raised to believe collides with the reality you can no longer ignore?

For half a century, David Leser has wrestled with the question at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: how can two peoples, bound to the same land by history, memory and grief, ever find a way to live together?
Part memoir, part reckoning, Light Sleeper begins in Gaza on the eve of the first intifada and unfolds into a personal journey through war, family history, identity and conscience. The son of a German-Jewish father who fled the Nazis and a mother whose Jewish-Latvian family was exterminated in the Holocaust, Leser - a lifelong supporter of both Israeli and Palestinian rights to safety, security and self-determination - confronts the moral and emotional fault lines exposed by October 7, and the devastating assault on Gaza that followed.
Can a person stand with both Israelis and Palestinians without betraying either? Is criticism of Israel a moral duty, or a dangerous abandonment of one’s own people? How do trauma, fear and history shape what we are able, or not prepared to see? And what happens when the search for truth costs friendships, certainty and belonging?
Passionate, courageous and profoundly humane, Light Sleeper is not a book that asks readers to agree. It asks them to think, to question, and to sit with uncomfortable truths.
It asks how might we expand our empathy in an age that demands certainty and the choosing of sides.
  • Published: 24 November 2026
  • ISBN: 9781761625466
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288
Categories:

About the author

David Leser

David Leser is an Australian journalist, author, interviewer and keynote speaker. He was born in Montreal, Canada and grew up in Sydney. In his 47 year-career, David has been a Middle East and Washington D.C correspondent, as well as feature writer for the Australian, HQ magazine, the Bulletin, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Melbourne Age, the Australian Women’s Weekly and Good Weekend magazine. He is the recipient of several awards for his journalism, including two Walkley Awards, the first in 1999 for best magazine feature writing [Who’s Afraid of Alan Jones]; the second in 2024 for Commentary, Analysis and Opinion [The Israel-Gaza War]. He has been nominated for a Walkley on three other occasions and won two national magazine awards for story of the year, as well as a United Nations human rights commendation. A Doctor of Creative Arts, David is the author of seven books, including his anthology of profiles, The Whites of Their Eyes, his memoir, To Begin To Know: Walking in the Shadows of my Father and Women, Men & the Whole Damn Thing – his study of patriarchy and misogyny in the age of #MeToo. He is the executive producer of the 2012 award-winning documentary Paul Kelly: Stories of Me, about the life and musical career of Australia’s pre-eminent songwriter, as well as editor of Paul Kelly: The Essays, and, in addition to his journalism, works as a speech writer, writing mentor, guest lecturer and interviewer at writers’ festivals.
portrait photo of David Leser

Praise for Light Sleeper

This is a book of inner rending and tearing: it will hack at the numbed, bewildered heart.

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