Israel and Iran: History and Today, featuring Yardena Schwartz and Jonathan Harounoff

[0:49]Zibby Owens: This is Zibby Owens, and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibby. Formerly moms don't have time to read books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest best selling, buzziest, or underrated authors and story creators whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't have to. Stay in the know, get insider insights, and connect with guests like I do every single day. For more information, go to zibbymedia.com, and follow me on Instagram at zibby owens. There is a lot going on in the world these days, obviously, And the two interviews I did recently made a great pair because it helps us gain some context about the current war, which, who knows, may be over by the time this episode comes out with Iran and everything that is going on in The Middle East, both from a historical perspective and today. So I'm including these two episodes together, Yardina Schwartz and Jonathan Haranoff. And you'll see why as you hear more about their bios, their books, and how they can help us make sense of these complicated times and give us the perspective that we all need. I hope that you find it just as interesting as I did and that you can take from it the lessons you'll need to make sense of the world. Thank you so much to both Jonathan and Yardenne for educating us and giving us context. This is part one of our double episode, Yardenne Schwartz. Yardenne Schwartz is the author of Ghosts of a Holy War, the nineteen twenty nine massacre in Palestine that ignited the Arab Israeli conflict. I met Yardina at the Easthampton Library's Authors Night, like, a year ago, and we have been trading calls and commiserating and talking and learning from each other since then. Finally, we got to do a podcast, which took way too long to happen. Yaradena is an award winning journalist and Emmy nominated producer whose reporting from four continents has appeared in dozens of publications, including The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Time, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, and The Economist. Yardenne was based in Israel for a decade until 2023, and before that worked in New York at NBC News and MSNBC. She graduated with honors from Columbia Journalism School, received an Emmy nomination for her work, and the Religion News Association Award for Excellence in Magazine Reporting. She now lives in New York's Hudson Valley with her husband and children. Welcome, Yardenna. Thank you so much for coming on Totally Booked to talk about ghosts of a holy war, the nineteen twenty nine massacre in Palestine that ignited the Arab Israeli conflict. Thank you so much, Zoe. Really excited to be here. I mean, this could not be more timely given everything happening in the world these days to have this type of background and history and really intimate look. Maybe intimate is the wrong word, but careful analytic view told from the perspective of one family in a way. So it was really, really great way to to get all this information across that we also desperately need. Congratulations. Thanks so much. I know the paperback is is coming out, which is so exciting.

[4:12]Yardena Schwartz: Tell everybody about this book. So I was based in Israel as a freelance journalist for a decade from 2013 to 2023. Throughout that time, was writing feature stories for magazines like Time Magazine, Foreign Policy, National Geographic. I'd always dreamed of writing a book, but I never knew what that book would be about. And I was sort of just waiting for something to hit me. And in 2019, it did in the form of a family from Memphis, Tennessee, of all places. I was introduced to them in early twenty nineteen after they had discovered a box of letters in their attic that they realized over the time piecing together what those letters were, where they were written from, they realized they were sitting in a treasure trove of history. And it really was just an amazing discovery because those letters were written in the late 1920s from Hebron in what was then British Mandate Palestine. And they were written by this family's great uncle, David Schoenberg, who they had never met. They had only heard stories about him because he was murdered in a massacre in 1929 that they had not really known much about. And I, as a journalist, I had heard about this massacre in 1929. I had been to Hebron once, but I knew very little about the massacre. And through the process of reading David's letters and reading going back to archives and, you know, British archives and Israeli archives and reading more about this massacre, what led to it and what followed, I realized that you cannot understand the conflict in the Arab Israeli conflict without understanding what happened in 1929 to the Jewish community of Hebron, one of the world's most ancient Jewish communities, which was essentially decimated by this massacre. And also the aftershocks held so many lessons for our time. And this was back in 2019. I was reading about this really horrific massacre of Jews in what was then Palestine. And I was still writing the manuscript of my book on October 7. And the massacre on October 7 was essentially a repeat of what happened in 1929, only on a massive scale. And I realized that this was just such crucial history for people to know about. And I'm really grateful to this family in Memphis that trusted me with David's letters, with telling his epic story, and also kind of using that story to help us understand what's happening today, because the book takes us from the nineteen twenties up until today. Since I was still writing it after October 7, I included chapters about

[6:55]Zibby Owens: October 7 and its aftermath showing the really haunting parallels between then and now. You must have just been sitting there being like, I cannot believe this is happening again. And now learning all of the things that happened. And by the way, a lot of these sections that you wrote, like, these were hard to take. You know? I mean, important to view, but, like, I can't believe I mean, of course, I can believe because it happened again. But just the evil. Like, how can you mutilate people's bodies like this? Babies and kids I mean, women and girls, it's just so sickening. I can't understand the divide

[7:32]Yardena Schwartz: of people that somehow this can be okay for some people to do. I just I I cannot wrap my mind around it. Well, I think that's why it's so important for more people to know about what happened in 1929 because there are so many people, sadly, today who justify what happened on October 7 by saying, Well, you know, the people in Gaza were suffering. And, you know, those arguments are absurd to begin with. But they're completely undercut by the fact that the same thing happened in 1929 when there was no blockade of Gaza, no oppression of Palestinians. There was no state of Israel. There were no Jewish soldiers in Palestine. There was no none of the things that people use to really horrifyingly justify what happened on October 7. None of that was the case in 1929. What was happening was there was this massive disinformation campaign set forth by the leader of Palestinian Muslims under British rule, and a propaganda campaign that he initiated claiming that Jews in Palestine were planning to destroy Al Aqsa Mosque, the holiest Muslim site in Palestine, to replace it with their ancient temple, to rebuild their temple. And this lie was so effective. And I think there's another parallel to today with how destructive and how effective disinformation campaigns are. And looking back to 1929, you didn't need social media. You didn't need TikTok to spread disinformation like wildfire and use lies to convince people to carry out really horrific violence against their own neighbors. Back then it was newspapers, Arabic newspapers that were carrying these lies, imams, clerics who were spreading these lies from their pulpits and their mosques, and even teachers, Muslim teachers who were telling their students these things. And so I just think it's so important for us to know about this history because I think one of the reasons history tends to repeat itself is because people haven't learned the lessons history has given to us on a silver platter to just learn from. And my hope with this book is that more people will understand the true history of this conflict because so much of that history is being rewritten on a daily basis by university professors who are indoctrinating their students with these same lies and other lies, and by artists and, you know, celebrities who have no idea what they're talking about. And so I think, you know, everyone really should owe it to themselves to to, you know, kind of arm themselves with that history so that they can be shielded from these lies and this disinformation that is still just so rampant. I also found it fascinating

[10:22]Zibby Owens: just to hear the story of this family and one man's journey. I mean, you take us into his letters home and why he went and how even the fact that he went to Israel at that time to study was not the norm at all, particularly for a family that had fled, arrived in Memphis, and then now their son is going back Yeah. Leaving the country that had given them refuge and what his life was like and his impressions of the area. And even their covering up, essentially, not wanting to talk about his journey and what happened to him, and and yet you mentioned how they were never the same because how can you be the same when you've lost a sibling or a child? So tell me about the effect of his family story on you aside from making you write this entire book.

[11:08]Yardena Schwartz: Well, I'm still very close with one member of the Schoenberg family, the woman who made this all possible. Her name is Jill Notowich. It was her mother, Susie, who found these letters in her attic when she was moving to a new home in Memphis. And the Schoenberg family is still very much like a big part of Memphis life. Back when David was still living there, his father, who, as you mentioned, his father was a poor immigrant who had fled Ukraine and the pogroms of Eastern Europe with his family. His mother, too, had fled antisemitism in Eastern Europe. They both, when they arrived in America, this was their promised land. This was a place where anti Semitism wasn't going to affect their daily lives, at least not in a way it had in Eastern Europe. And the fact that David left what was really a promising future with his family business, that was really shocking to his parents. But also Zionism at that time was not this dominant force in Jewish life. David himself was a anti Zionist, a different kind than we know today, but he believed that the Jewish return from exile around the world, the return of the Jewish masses to Zion, to Zion, to Jerusalem, to the land of Israel, should be achieved only through the will of God in the arrival of the Messiah. And that was very common among traditional Jews at that time and among secular Jews in America, Zionism was just seen as this, you know, threat to their fragile place in American society. And so the fact that David was going to Israel, not only as an anti Zionist, but as, you know, against the will of his parents was just so fascinating to me. And he wrote about that in his letters and he would always, he'd write these really sad letters asking his family to write to him more because he was writing every week these beautiful, captivating, vivid letters describing what life was like in Palestine in 1928 through 1929. And, you know, his, his family, they're just so grateful they had these letters, that they, that they found these letters and that they now know so much more about what brought him there, what led to his, his death. Among the letters in the box was also a diary that he had written before he, he went. That was also another window into his thinking. And it was just so fascinating reading about, reading his words. He was an amazing writer. He was only 21, 22 when he was writing these diary entries and these letters. And I as a writer, I was just so impressed by his literary skills. Like and I always wondered, you know, what could he have gone on to do? He was studying to be a rabbi. He might have stayed in Palestine. He there was this he wrote about this sweetheart he had left behind in New York during his time between Memphis and Hebron. She was actually supposed to go and without giving too much away from the book, but she was supposed to go to Palestine to unite with him there and they were going to get married. And that was supposed to happen just weeks after he was killed. And so that was another fascinating element of my research, finding out who this, who this girl was. I managed to, to track down her nephew who told me this whole story. And the book is actually being adapted for a feature film. So, I feel like that love story could be a really good part of the movie. But I just think this history is so vital today, especially in countering the disinformation that all of us are being flooded with. And the producer who reached out to me with interest in optioning it, he actually found my book through a Google search because he had heard about this other film you might've heard about, Palestine 36. It has the same name as a book, Palestine 1936, written by Oren Kessler. It's a fantastic book about the Arab uprising that began in 1936. It became known as the Great Arab Revolt. It was in Palestine. We met. I really loved his vision. And, we'll see where it goes, where it's very early stages. So how did you become this type of journalist? What brought you to Israel to begin with? What is your background and story, really? So I grew up in New Jersey and I, from a young age, I always kept journals. I loved writing, loved stories. And in college, I became really interested in journalism and I did a semester abroad in Tel Aviv where I got to know a journalist there. And then when I came back to The States, I did an internship, ABC News Radio, and then the New York Times. And I just, from then I really knew I wanted to be a journalist, but I really wanted to be reporting abroad. And after five years of living and working in New York City, I was working at NBC News, MSNBC, ABC News. I knew I wanted to be a print reporter and I decided to just quit my job at MSNBC as a producer at MSNBC, moved to Israel to become a freelance journalist. I thought I would be there a year, maybe two years, and then come back to New York. But I fell in love with Tel Aviv. I loved living there. And I also fell in love with freelance journalism, being you know, being able to choose the stories I wanted to cover, being able to report for, you know, dozens of different magazines and newspapers. And so that one year in Israel turned into ten. I met my husband there, who's Israeli, had both of my kids there while writing this book actually when I was doing the research in Hebron 2019 and 2020. I was very pregnant and it was kind of, it was a really weird disconnect for me researching and writing this book while bringing children into this world because, as you said, you know, some of these chapters were really difficult to write and, you know, these testimonies from 1929 were difficult to read. And so I think in a way, having kids, you know, being pregnant, bringing new life to the world kind of kept me from just being overpowered by the weight of this story, the weight of this history. And, you know, the joy of having babies and little kids kind of kept me grounded and brought the joy I needed on days when, you know, I was really, you know, upset by things that I'd read or things that I was writing about. So, yeah, it's been been a wild journey. My kids are three and five now. So I felt like, you know, publishing the book in 2024,

[17:49]Zibby Owens: it felt like another baby, you know, because it's been with me since before I became a mom. Cannot believe that you could pull this off with such young kids at home. I am so impressed.

[18:00]Yardena Schwartz: I have an amazing husband. He's just like the most supportive angel of a husband and father, and he's with me in this. And there were many times when I wanted to give up on writing this book and felt like either it was just beyond my capabilities. I felt like, you know, maybe I wasn't the right person to do this book. It's just so, it's huge. I mean, it's like covers a 100 years of history And often I felt like, you know, I'm not doing it justice. He, and every time I wanted to give up, he was like, you can't, you know, first of all, you owe it to this family in Memphis to bring this story to life. And it's, he just reminded me how important this history is to bring

[18:39]Zibby Owens: to the world. So true. Well, I'm glad for him then. Thank you to him for this book and thank you so much. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince. Summer always makes me rethink what I'm reaching for every day. Lighter fabrics, better materials, pieces that just feel good the moment you put them on and look effortless. That's why I keep coming back to quints. They focus on high quality essentials. Think breathable linen, soft organic cotton, washable silk, but without the luxury markup. It's that rare balance where everything feels elevated but still easy. Quince has beautiful everyday pieces like 100% European linen pants, dresses, and tops with styles starting at $32. Their denim is soft and easy to wear. I wear my jean jacket all the time. And their organic cotton sweaters are perfect for layering on cool summer nights. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. Quince works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middlemen. So you're paying quality, not brand markup. And it's not just clothing. Quince has really become a destination for elevated essentials across home, kitchen, bedding, and beyond, making it easy to bring a more premium feel into everyday life. In addition to my jean jacket, recently got a white tank top dress with a beautiful cotton skirt that is absolutely gorgeous, and I can't wait for it to be warm enough so I can wear it every day, but it has been a cool spring. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quince.com/zippy for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's quince.com/zippy for free shipping and three hundred and sixty five day returns. Quince.com/zibi. This is one part of our double episode Jonathan Harunoff. Jonathan Harunoff is the author of Inside Iran's hashtag woman life freedom revolt. This is a very timely episode, and Jonathan is an award winning British writer of Persian descent now serving as Israel's international spokesperson at the United Nation. Hear what he has to say. Welcome, Johnny. Thank you so much for coming on Totally Bugged to discuss, well, so many things, especially this timely topic, unveiled, what is going on in Iran with Iranian women, you write about in the book. You outline so much of the current state of affairs. We're dealing with it. I mean, it's one thing dealing with the diplomatic and media

[21:11]Jonathan Harounoff: challenges at the United Nations in New York. That has its own set of challenges, but I think a much greater challenge is what's going on in The Middle East itself. The carnage that the Islamic Republic has unleashed on the citizens of Israel and all of its neighbors. It's no longer just attacking military sites affiliated with The United States or or it's not just attacking Israel. It's it's it's sort of gone rogue, where you're seeing, The UAE, Bahrain, Cyprus, Greece, coming under attack the Islamic Republic. And I think it just highlights, you know, my book focuses predominantly on the the kind of discrimination and and terrorism that is unleashed on the Iranian people from within. But what we're seeing now is is very much how its foreign policy is also destructive and how the Islamic Republic has really spent forty seven years constructing a very dangerous foreign policy and also a very harmful domestic policy, one that consists of indifference, apathy, discrimination, second class status for women, and minority groups. All of this is coming sort of to bear at the same time. In your book, you start out

[22:26]Zibby Owens: explaining how one woman's, you know, loose burqa led to this massive movement in the country. You set the stage by talking about how as an Iranian Jew yourself, your family had left a long time ago and that the population itself had decreased to from, I think you said, 80,000 to 10,000, which is still the second biggest population in The Middle East of Jews, and then what a nation does when its women band together and say it's time to rise up but are faced with, you know, morality police and an infrastructure, which makes that close to impossible. How did you grow interested in this angle of the discussion, and how did you decide to write this book at this time? Well, there's certainly the personal connection

[23:10]Jonathan Harounoff: with my grandparents and great grandparents coming from Iran, growing up, hearing about their stories and how they were very delicately able to distinguish and differentiate between their innate connection to the land of Iran, to its culture, to its history, to its language, to its food, and then at the same time to sort of exhibit a contempt and disdain towards the Islamic Republic. And in the course of writing this book, it became very apparent to me that there's also a very clear gulf that exists within Iran as well. I think many readers and many people who are interested in Iran but haven't learned about it to a great extent can appreciate as well that in a country where there are 93,000,000 people, the vast majority of them are actually not supportive of the regime. The vast majority of them want greater relations with the West, with The United States, even Israel as well. And my book focused on one specific incident in 2022 following the killing of a young Iranian Kurdish woman named Maslajina Ramini who was killed by the country's morality police. And her death triggered nationwide unrest and then international outrage. But that wasn't an isolated incident, even though the character of that protest movement was inherently focused on the lack of women's rights. What you're seeing with each wave of protests that there's usually one kind of spark, one kind of trigger event, whether it's the killing of a young woman in 2022 or the dwindling economic situation in December 2025. And then what happens once everyone else joins into the protest movement is it becomes a sort of accumulation, boiling pot of forty seven years of resentment, of pent up rage that consists of outrage over the socioeconomic situation, outrage over the way the country's very beautiful environment and natural resources have been completely plundered, Outrage over the fact that the inflation is is sky high and unemployment is is high and the value of the currency is is completely through the roof. So from a journalistic standpoint, I was also interested in covering this because whenever, you know, consumers of news would read about Iran, almost invariably they would you know, the news organizations would talk about the Islamic Republic. They would talk about the country's nuclear weapons program. It's its its dangerous foreign policy, its proxies. Very rarely would you see news items about the people of Iran, who these people are, what kind of viewpoints do they hold. And I had the opportunity and the privilege to spend three years interviewing Iranians inside Iran and in the diaspora from 2022 to 2025 and to to hear about their experiences under the regime, their hopes for a future Iran, and their concerns as well. And it was, I know, you know, you're saying that this is a timely conversation, but the reality is we've seen, waves and waves of unrest, take place a number of times in the past forty seven years. These things happen over and over again, but now it just is getting a bit more media attention because there's a a war, of course, going on, but the the plight of the people inside Iran should never be forgotten. Interesting.

[26:38]Zibby Owens: So what is your main hope for us to get out of this book? I think the main hope is that

[26:45]Jonathan Harounoff: the book will at least humanize some of the and put a face and a name and a story and an age and a profession to some of the people whose lives were cut short in 2022, 2023, but also ever since then. Just to highlight just how brilliant these people were and how extraordinary the people of Iran are. We're talking about incredible artists, musicians, rappers, people who really don't have people who are incredibly and endlessly creative, who don't have weapons or anything, and they're up against a very brutal regime. They're using their hair, they're using their music, they're using their bodies, they're using their dance to express their own kind of defiance and resistance. And it's at those kinds of moments in history, and especially in Iran, where I think you see the most extraordinary kinds of scenes of defiance come out. Just one example, there was a song that became well known. It even won a Grammy that was awarded by Doctor. Jill Biden, and it was written by a young Iranian rapper. His name is Sherwin Hajipur. And he composed this song called Bahoyah, which means because of in Farsi. And it essentially consists of dozens and dozens of tweets that were posted by Iranian people who were expressing their personal reasons for being upset with the regime, their personal reasons for fighting for a brighter post Ayatollah future. And it was an incredible song. And the moment it was published on Instagram, it went completely viral. He was arrested, like many other people were arrested whenever they got any attention. But his song and the message that it carries really had a tremendous impact. And it breathed life into the movement and it became the unofficial anthem of the Women's Life Freedom Movement. But you also saw during that period of time young girls and women dancing defiantly with their hair uncovered, dancing to songs, to traditionally Persian songs, but also to Western songs to highlight their desire to connect with the world. So one popular example was there was a group of four or five young girls who were dancing at the same time to one of Selena Gomez's songs with Rima, Calm Down. And I don't think Selena Gomez would have expected to have become sort of one of the voices of the Woman Life Freedom Movement in Iran, but her song and the dance routine went completely viral. Even Selena Gomez ended up weighing in and again amplifying the message of the Iranian people. What eventually happened was these girls who were dancing with their hair uncovered and singing as well. So there were three violations there. They ended up being arrested and forced to deliver a forced confession before being released. But I think just those examples highlight just how much of a threat the people of Iran are viewed as by their own government. That's also a repetitive theme that you see over and over again. The people of Iran who want nothing more than just, you know, the freedom to live the way they want to live are seen as an existential threat to a government that will do whatever it takes just to prevent that. So in the context of that, how do you feel about putting out a book that raises these issues when you know there's a regime that is desperate for all sorts of retribution for even the slightest

[30:20]Zibby Owens: misstep?

[30:21]Jonathan Harounoff: Well, the research and journalism and reporting of the book took, I guess, three years, and there were many, many voices who didn't want to be disclosed by name, but they were able to give me a tremendous amount of helpful information on background or just off the record completely. But then there were incredible people who knew what the risks were. Many of them had already spoken in some capacity before, but this was their this is their life's mission. You know, this is what they dream of. And I think it goes back to when I was talking about, you know, Jewish people in Iran as well, that the people of Iran have such a strong connection to their country that they're not willing to give up their place in a country that's with a history stretching back thousands of years because of the forty seven year old regime. And so even though there are serious risks involved, of course, risks are not just confined to Iran. They're not just confined to Israel. We've seen, of course, with the proxy forces wreaking havoc, but also with guerrilla gangs and assassination attempts on the lives of people like the president of The United States and also Iranian American activists and journalists in Brooklyn. We see an assassination attempt in London, anti Semitic incidents linked to Iran, the Islamic Republic, all the way to in Australia and Canada. So this is really is a global issue, and the Islamic Republic is the chief instigator of globalizing the inter fadr essentially. So in answer to your question, Siby, there are tremendous risks, but I think the people of Iran are not willing to they haven't been able to they won't give up on on their mission despite the risks at hand. But what about you personally? How do you feel? Not only am I writing about Iran, but I'm also working with the Israeli mission at the United Nations. So there are there are always risks, and we always take precautions to stay safe. But this is an extremely important topic. This is a topic that's very close to my heart, and that's why I'm I'm speaking speaking out about it. But, of course, there are risks, and and we have to take precautions.

[32:32]Zibby Owens: And how did you end up becoming the Israeli

[32:36]Jonathan Harounoff: spokesperson to the UN? It was through a combination of just good luck, being at the right place at the right time. My background is in corporate communications and journalism. I spent about seven years covering Israel, Iran, antisemitism for a variety of publications. And I was invited to cover an event at the UN a couple of years ago where they were screening the forty seven minute footage of the Hamas atrocities on October 7. And I wrote about it for a publication. Nobody read that, but then tweeted about it and it got a lot of traction. And that got me into the door with the previous ambassador and one thing led to another and this position came up. But it wasn't through the traditional diplomatic track. This is my only stint in diplomacy. My background is in media and journalism, but I think all of these things tie in with the essence of communications, journalism, media. It's just the sort of other end of the communication spectrum.

[33:39]Zibby Owens: Do you feel optimistic about what's about to happen? Do you have any insights into knowing as much as you do from the people in Iran as well as global politics, how are you feeling about what's to come?

[33:54]Jonathan Harounoff: Well, the initial reactions when Operation Roaring Lion epic theory happened, I got a few messages from, you know, close contacts, Iranian contacts, and that most of them were, you know, a combination of cautious trepidation, but also a form of elation that there's some you know, there's suddenly there's suddenly an opportunity for the Iranian people themselves to take charge of their future. The Islamic Republic isn't isn't necessarily equipped to deal with the military threat of Israel and and The United States and its allies, which is why you usually see them unleash brutality on their own people who are much more defenseless. So this was, in many of the people I spoke to, in their eyes, a real opportunity for them to take charge of a future that they so desperately want. But of course, this all comes at a cost and the Islamic Republic is firing indiscriminately all over the region and human lives are being lost and it's extremely tragic. But the threat remains and Israel and The United States are continuing to work in very close coordination with No Daylight in order to achieve this goal, this goal of making the region a safer place, eliminating any existential threats that are facing Israel, eliminating any threats facing The United States, and also bringing the people of Iran to a future that they so richly deserve. It's my livestream. You know, my grandparents would always talk about my great grandparents would talk about life in Iran. Was my livestream to to one day go back to not go back to go to Iran. I've never been to Iran. And I would have wanted to have visited with my great grandparents. Unfortunately, they recently passed away, but I'm hoping to one day be able to go with with relatives who were there, retrace their steps, and and really unlock the rich history that Jewish history and just general history that exists in Iran that is being overlooked and overshadowed by all of this

[35:54]Zibby Owens: mayhem that's caused by the Islamic Republic. Thank you so much. Thanks a lot. Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Zibby, formerly moms don't have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and buy the books.