Chosen by God: A Brother's Journey

by Joshua Hammer

The story of an unfolding relationship between brothers. It tells of Joshs younger brother, Tony, a troubled teenager who traveled to Israel to work on a kibbutz and fell in with an ultra-orthodox Jewish sect. As Tonys fundamentalist fervor and hostility toward the secular world deepened, so did his estrangement from his family, including his older brother.

Genres: Memoir, Religion

256 pages, Hardcover

First published November 10, 1999

About the author

Joshua Hammer was born in New York and educated at Horace Mann and Princeton University, graduating with a BA in English literature. In 1988 he joined Newsweek Magazine as a business and media writer, transitioning to the magazine's foreign correspondent corps in 1992. Hammer served, successively, as bureau chief in Nairobi, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, Berlin, Jerusalem, and Cape Town, and also was the magazine's Correspondent at Large in 2005 and 2006. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in the 2004-2005 academic year.

Since leaving Newsweek in 2006 Hammer has been an independent foreign correspondent, a contributing editor at Smithsonian Magazine and Outside, and a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, GQ, the New York Times Magazine, and other US publications. He was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in reporting in 2003, and won the award, for his writing about the Ebola crisis in West Africa, in 2016. He is the author of 5 non-fiction books, including the New York Times bestseller, "The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu," which was published by Simon & Schuster in April 2016. Hammer is currently based in Berlin.

Reviews

[Mary K]

Second read and LOVED this book, even better than the first time when it was initially published. Hammer did a fabulous job of taking me along on his journey and I felt the revulsion and attraction I always feel when I’ve been around the Hasidim. I felt the author’s ambiguity and the fairness with which he treated his brother. If you don’t know much about Hasidic Jews, you’ll learn a lot in this book.

[Tess Adone]

Simultaneously memoir and biography, a secular Jew pursues and explores sibling restoration--and its limits--with his ultra-Orthodox brother.

[Julia Boyd]

I truly enjoyed this book and learned quite a lot about the Jewish faith. The story is about two brothers trying to understand and accept each others choices in life. Joshua Hammer the older brother and author of this memoir tells of his emotional journey of acceptance, compassion and acceptance of his younger brothers choice to live and raise his family in the ultra religious Hasidic Jewish faith.



This book is beautifully written, and very educational