Sarah Tuttle-Singer - Jerusalem, Drawn and Quartered: One Woman’s Year in the Heart of the Christian, Muslim, Armenian, and Jewish Quarters of Old Jerusalem

Advance Praise

No city shines and shimmers like Jerusalem, and no city pierces and burns like her. Sarah Tuttle-Singer, in her lyric and soulful prose, captures both the light and the shadows, the holiness and the heaviness, of one of the worlds most magnificent, maddening places. In a bold and deeply personal journey, she searches bustling alleyways and ancient stones, intimate rooms and holy texts, to unlock the secrets to Jerusalems beauty, energy, and pain, which are found, most of all, in the souls of its inhabitants.

Daniel B. Shapiro, Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel

Sarah Tuttle-Singer has taken her experiences of the city of Jerusalem and crafted a masterpiece of her heart. Sarahs distinctive voice will give you the chills on every single page as she celebrates the beauty of Jerusalem while detailing the complexity of loving a city so embattled, so diverse, and so difficult. This book is simultaneously a love letter and a declaration of frustration; a poem and a song; a masterpiece of confusion and undying affection.

Mayim Bialik

Raw, dark, funny, this book brings you closer to the truth of the Old City today than any other Ive read. Sarah Tuttle-Singer captures the sensuality, anger, and promise of the Holy City in a narrative that moves from one incredible true story to another. Her pilgrimage is intimate, irreverent, unashamedand written with haunting beauty.

Rob Eshman, former editor in chief of the Jewish Journal

Sarah Tuttle-Singer, who loves Jerusalem passionately, offers us an unvarnished, intimate, and sometimes shocking look at life within the walls of the Old City. Her stories of modern existence in ancient Jerusalem come to life through in-depth portraits of this historic citys residents. In spite of the fact that perspectives are deeply polarized, and fear and interpersonal conflict are a constant reality, Sarah Tuttle-Singer gives us the real dirt that shows us that co-existence is not only possible but happening each and every day. This is a hard-hitting book about hope that offers us glimmers of humanity that can help us imagine a time of peace and acceptance that, today, seems so far away.

Peter Yarrow (Peter, Paul & Mary)

Sarah Tuttle-Singers book is a real love story, maybe even a love song, for the city of Jerusalem. In this brilliant and fascinating book, Tuttle-Singer brings us Jerusalem in all its ugliness and beauty, darkness and light, bad and good. With the honest, funny, and sad stories of her life and of the city, one can not stop reading until the end.

Avi Issacharoff, journalist and co-creator of the hit TV series Fauda

Sarah Tuttle Singer has written a brave, honest, and fiercely personal love letter to Jerusalem. Whether youve lived there your whole life or have never been, she is the tour guide you want to the worlds most beautiful and broken city.

Daniel Sokatch, CEO of the New Israel Fund

Part searing personal memoir, part psychic and political exploration, this is Jerusalems Song of Songs, an exquisitely written love poem to a city at the centre of many universes. It also marks the debut of a major new talent. Sarah Tuttle-Singer is a force to be reckoned with.

David Rose, contributing editor with Vanity Fair and special investigations writer for The Mail on Sunday

Beautiful, intense, mad, exhilarating: Sarah Tuttle-Singer hasnt just written a terrific book about Jerusalem, shes written a book that is now a part of Jerusalem. Taking us through the back alleys of the Old City, she introduces us to its world-class characters, their dreams and fears and most of all daily lives. In Sarah Tuttle-Singer, earthy Jerusalem has found its lover.

Yossi Klein Halevi, author, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

An intimate, bracingly honest, beautifully written memoir of life in the most captivating city in the world.

Peter Beinart, author, The Crisis of Zionism

If you love Jerusalem, you will love this book. Sarah Tuttle-Singer in her life love affair with the city, new and old, people from across the political and religious divide brings it all together like only Sarah could. Jerusalem Drawn and Quartered is a rollercoaster of culture, senses, emotions, and experiences. It reads like a diary, a very personal diary with dark secrets, but reflects the holy city that is so much for so many and has so many secrets of its own.

Lieutenant Colonel Peter Lerner, retired IDF spokesperson

Jerusalem Drawn and Quartered is a vivid evocation of the city in all its contradictions, showing its Jews and Arabs with their mutual fears and hatreds and contempt that do not altogether preclude moments of shared humanity. The story of the city is also the story of Sarah Tuttle-Singer, which is told affectingly, with unblinking honesty.

Robert Alter, author of The Art of Biblical Narrative

Sarah Tuttle-Singer brings Jerusalems Old City to life like no writer before her, penning a ferocious love letter that will infuriate zealots and enthrall most everybody else. Jerusalem Drawn and Quartered is at once a biography of the tiny walled world in which a mosaic of anguished peoples struggle to coexist, and Tuttle-Singers own storyrollicking, wrenching, coarse, and wise.

Making several homes in the different quarters of the torn, treasured enclave over the course of a year, Tuttle-Singer creates friendships from the most unpromising encounters with people of all faiths, dreams, and prejudices. But her readiness to think well of all those she meets unless proven otherwise costs her dearly too. All of which she describes with sometimes shocking candor.

Her love for the city and its residents spills from the pages. So, too, her delight in each new discovery she makes, each new character she wins over, each new world she insists on entering.

Tuttle-Singers book sparkles with zest and originality: Who, hitherto, has dismissed the idea of rebuilding the Temple because they mistrust Israeli building contractors and wouldnt want to see a revival in the sacrifice of all those adorable goats?

Written with too much real-world knowledge to be easily dismissed by more conventional experts, Tuttle-Singers book is ultimately a plea for Jerusalem, as she puts it, not to be ripped to ragged pieces by those who say they love her the best. If there were more Jerusalemites like her, that simple, elusive aspiration might even be realized.

David Horovitz, Editor, The Times of Israel

Dangerous. Seductive. Laugh out loud funny. Sarah Tuttle-Singer has created a savvy and sexy Innocents Abroad for the internet age. Tuttle-Singers stories are at once wildly original yet vaguely familiar, weaving nostalgia for her former life as a free-spirited moppet on Venice Beach with indefatigable optimism for peace in Jerusalem, her adopted ancestral home. Jerusalem Drawn and Quartered is a revelation and the best of the new voices covering the worlds most maddening conflict: the millennial struggle for the Holy Land.

James Oppenheim, co-founder and lover-in-chief of Crave Gourmet Street Food

Jerusalem Drawn and Quartered is stunning, devastating and brimming with wisdom. Tuttle-Singers curiosity and courage drive her to open worlds otherwise impermeable; her tireless quest for human connection and understanding tear at your heart and make you question everything youve assumed to be true. Her voice is not only raw, provocative, and always honest, it is also fiercely sensitive and desperately needed in these confounding and conflicting times.

Rabbi Sharon Brous, IKAR

The story leaves the stones and all who walk them in Jerusalem bare, raw and lovable.