The Third Temple

"Yishai Sarid's books might outlive his country: that is the message he bears with beauty and with pain." — Joshua Cohen, author of the The Netanyahus, winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

”A powerful, visionary work that will leave you breathless. Yishai Sarid has written an unsettling—one could say prophetic—reflection on faith, zeal, and the consequences of ideological extremism. This is a book that feels prescient and urgent: a gripping, insightful novel that serves as both a reflection of our times and a warning for the future of religion and politics in one of the world’s most contested regions.” — Reza Aslan, author of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

"A masterful indictment of fundamentalist and messianic ideologies, and a probing meditation on Jewish power and powerlessness over time, the book is written with a great deal of integrity and soul — and is perhaps the most essential Israeli novel in recent memory." — Ranen Omer-Sherman, Jewish Book Council

"Yishai Sarid is arguably the most inventive Israeli novelist of his generation." — Le Monde

"The most apocalyptic, futuristic, historical, and perhaps also most realistic novel published in Israel in recent years. . . . Sarid holds the reader in thrall." — Haaretz

"The Third Temple doesn’t find this bloodlust a productive response to a sensitive conflict, nor does it think a Jewish State can weather today’s world while isolated from other nations. It suggests, instead, at every turn, that there is no going back to a past that was, in all likelihood, better in retrospect. Ultimately God, whether He dwells among his people or not, can’t save us from ourselves." — PJ Grisar, Forward

“The project is audacious, and the masterful orchestration of the story and its poetic tone are at the height of this audacity. And so are the questions it raises. . . Beautiful and chilling.” — Le Nouveau Magazine Littéraire

“An extreme novel that reads like a warning.” — Biblioteca Magazine

“Sarid has emerged as a polished storyteller whose writing is lucid, almost transparent, and poetic even though he consciously avoids any poetic pretense. . . The Third Temple is well written, precise and sharp, and its dialogue with Hebrew literature as well as speculative literature is deep and fertile.” — The Bernstein Prize Committee

"If in 2015, Yishai Sarid’s book read like apocalyptic science fiction, a warning meriting consideration, reading it today, I found myself wondering if it might not be too late to avert the apocalypse it envisions." — David B. Green, A blog about art, politics and shared society in Israel