THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY 17 &24, 2020 55
nation. You don’t need to meditate for
two hours a day to realize that.”
We drove to Hebrew University,
which is atop Mt. Scopus. We walked
into the humanities building, and,
through an emergency exit, onto a roof-
top. There was a panoramic view of the
Old City and the Temple Mount. Ha-
rari recalled his return to the university,
from Oxford, in 2001, during the sec-
ond intifada. The university is sur-
rounded by Arab neighborhoods that
he’s never visited. In the car, he had been
talking about current conditions in Is-
rael; in recent years, he had said, “many,
if not most, Israelis simply lost the mo-
tivation to solve the conflict, especially
because Israel has managed to control
it so efficiently.” Harari told me that, as
a historian, he had to dispute the as-
sumption that an occupation can’t last
“for decades, for centuries”—it can, and
new surveillance technologies can en-
able oppression “with almost no kill-
ing.” Harari saw no alternative other
than “to wait for history to work its
magic—a war, a catastrophe.” With a
dry laugh, he said, “Israel, Hezbollah,
Hamas, Iran—a couple of thousand
people die, something. This can break
the mental deadlock.”
Harari recalled a moment, in 2015,
when he and Yahav had accidentally vi-
olated the eight-person rule. They had
gone to a dinner that Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu was expected to
attend. Netanyahu was known to have
read “Sapiens.” “We were told it would
be very intimate,” Harari said. There were
forty guests. Harari shared a few pleas-
antries with Netanyahu, but they had
“no real exchange at all.”
Yahav interjected to suggest that, be-
cause of “Sapiens,” Netanyahu “started
doing Meatless Monday.” Harari, who,
like Yahav, largely avoids eating animal
products, writes in “Sapiens” that “mod-
ern industrial agriculture might well be
the greatest crime in history.” When
Netanyahu announced a commitment
“to fight cruelty toward animals,” friends
encouraged Harari to take a little credit.
“People told me this was my greatest
achievement,” Harari said. “I managed
to convince Netanyahu of something! It
didn’t matter what.” This assessment gives
some indication of Harari’s local politics,
but Yoram Yovell, his TV-presenter friend,
said that he had tried and failed to per-
suade Harari to speak against Netanyahu
publicly. Yovell said that Harari, although
“vehemently against Netanyahu,” seemed
to resist “jumping into the essence of
life—the blood and guts of life,” adding,
“I actually am disappointed with it.” Ha-
rari, who has declined invitations to write
a regular column in the Israeli press, told
me, “I could start making speeches, and
writing, ‘Vote for this party,’ and maybe,
one time, I can convince a couple of thou-
sand people to change their vote. But
then I will kind of expend my entire credit
on this. I’ll be identified with one party,
one camp.” He did acknowledge that he
was discouraged by the choice presented
by the September general election, which
was then imminent: “It’s either a right-
wing government or an extreme-right-
wing government. There is no other se-
rious option.”
At Hebrew University, his role is
somewhat rarefied: he has negotiated his
way to having no faculty responsibilities
beyond teaching; he currently advises no
Ph.D. students. (He said of his profes-
sional life, “I write the books and give
talks. Itzik is doing basically everything
else.”) Harari teaches one semester a year,
fitting three classes into one day a week.
His recent courses include a history of
relations between humans and animals—
the subject of a future Harari book, per-
haps—and another called History for
the Masses, on writing for a general
reader. During our visit to the university,
he took me to an empty lecture hall with
steeply raked seating. “This is where ‘Sa-
piens’ originated,” he said. He noted, with
mock affront, that the room attracts stray
cats: “They come into class, and they
grab all the attention. ‘A cat! Oh!’”“
I
t’s hard to keep a good friendship
when someone’s financial status
changes,” Amir Fink told me. Fink and
his husband, a musicologist, have
known Harari since college. “We have
tried to keep his success out of it. As
two couples, we meet a lot, we take va-
cations abroad together.” (Neither cou-
ple has children.) Fink went on, “We
love to come to their place for the week-
end.” They play board games, such as
Settlers of Catan, and “whist—Israeli
Army whist.”
Fink spoke of the scale of the op-
eration built by Harari and Yahav. “I
hope it’s sustainable,” he said. With“Sapiens,” he went on, Harari had writ-
ten “a book that summarizes the world.”
The books that followed were bound
to be “more specific, and more politi-
cal.” That is, they drew Harari away
from his natural intellectual territory.
“Homo Deus” derived directly from
Harari’s teaching, but “21 Lessons,” Fink
said, “is basically a collection of arti-
cles and responses to the present day.”
He added, “It’s very hard for Yuval to
keep himself as a teacher,” noting, “He
becomes, I guess, what the French
would call a philosophe. ”
While Harari was at Oxford, he read
Jared Diamond’s 1997 book, “Guns,
Germs, and Steel,” and was dazzled by
its reach, across time and place. “It was
a complete life-changer,” Harari said.
“You could actually write such books!”
Steven Gunn, Harari’s Oxford adviser,
told me that, as Harari worked on his
thesis, he had to be discouraged from
taking too broad a historical view: “I
have memories of numerous revision
meetings where I’d say, ‘Well, all this
stuff about people flying helicopters in
Vietnam is very interesting, and I can
see why you need to read it, and think
about it, to write about why people wrote
the way they did about battles in Italy
in the sixteenth century, but, actually,
the thesis has to be nearly all about bat-
tles in Italy in the sixteenth century.’ ”
After Harari received his doctorate,
he returned to Jerusalem with the idea
of writing a history of the gay experience
in Israel. He met with Benjamin Kedar.
Kedar recently said, “I gave him a hard
look—‘Yuval, do it after you get tenure.’”
Harari, taking this advice, stuck with
his specialty. But his continued inter-
est in comparative history was evident
in the 2007 book “Special Operations
in the Age of Chivalry, 1100-1550,”
whose anachronistic framing provoked
some academic reviewers. And the fol-
lowing year, in “The Ultimate Experi-
ence: Battlefield Revelations and the
Making of Modern War Culture, 1450-
2000,” Harari was at last able to in-
clude an extended discussion of Viet-
nam War memoirs.
In 2003, Hebrew University initiated
an undergraduate course, An Introduc-
tion to the History of the World. Such
classes had begun appearing in a few
history departments in the previous de-
cade; traditional historians, Kedar said,