Highlighting: “Alive and Beating” by Rebecca Wolf. Arbitrary Press. 2025. 244 pages. ISBN-10: 195876213X.
“For many years after [the terrorist attack], I struggled with the question of why she had been killed. Alisa was a bubbly, always-smiling person who was friends with everyone. But as I grew older, I realized that existential questions have no answers, and so instead I started to focus on the lives that she saved,” Rebecca Wolf said regarding her inspiration for her debut novel, “Alive and Beating.”
Wolf was a good high school friend of Alisa Flatow, HY”D, who was murdered in a terror attack in Israel almost 30 years ago. Following Alisa’s passing, her family made the heroic decision to donate Alisa’s organs, saving the lives of many others.
This novel follows the story of seven people from diverse backgrounds and neighborhoods throughout Jerusalem who are desperately in need of an organ transplant. Given that organ donation is very time sensitive, each character’s story takes place within 36 hours. These seven characters — Leah, a Hasidic young woman; Yael, a daughter of Holocaust survivors; Hoda, a Palestinian hairdresser; David, an Iraqi restaurant owner; Severin, a Catholic priest; and Youssef and Yosef, two teenage boys (one Arab, one Jewish) — may seem extremely different from one another, but they all share the same goals of healing and finding meaning in their lives.
Wolf chose Jerusalem as the setting for her novel because it is such a multicultural society. Wolf said, “People of every race and religion live there, and on the outside may look and act very differently. But inside, we are all the same, and we can all struggle with the same health issues. The color of one’s skin doesn’t matter when receiving an organ transplant; even more so the person’s religious or cultural background. Perhaps this is why people feel more unified in medical settings. When stripped to our bare humanity, our differences dissipate. We are all human beings. The journalist in me loved weaving in facts about different religions and backgrounds while also informing the reader about different neighborhoods of Jerusalem.”
Wolf chose the characters’ names after thorough research into common names for individuals with those backgrounds. Wolf specifically noted that she chose Hoda as the Palestinian woman in honor of Hoda, an Egyptian Muslim who owns Chubby’s barber shop in Teaneck. Wolf has fond memories of chatting with Hoda during her son’s haircuts about the similarities they shared despite differences in their backgrounds. Additionally, Srulik, a character that links many of the other characters throughout the novel, is named for Wolf’s grandmother’s cousin, a Holocaust survivor and pioneer in Israel.
Wolf was raised in Teaneck and currently lives there with her family. After attending the Frisch School, she spent a year in seminary at Midreshet Moriah in Jerusalem and then attended Barnard College, where she majored in political science with a concentration in terrorism. During her time at Barnard, Wolf worked as a reporter and editor for the Columbia Daily Spectator. Following college, she worked for a couple years on Wall Street as a reporter covering heavy industries for Dow Jones Newswires.
Wolf spent the spring semester of her junior year of college in the war studies department at King’s College London, the same semester in which Alisa was studying abroad in Israel. Wolf remembers flying to Israel after Alisa’s death. She was at Ben Gurion Airport when Alisa’s body was loaded into the cargo hold of the plane that returned Alisa to America for burial. Wolf very clearly remembers the press conference that was held the day after Alisa’s family donated her organs, in which then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said, “Alisa’s heart is alive and beating here in Jerusalem,” the inspiration for the name of her novel.
Wolf chose to write a novel about organ donation because she was inspired by Alisa’s parents, who met with rabbis at an incredibly challenging time to discuss organ donation after Alisa was pronounced brain dead. Their decision to donate Alisa’s organs was a catalyst for Jews in Israel and around the world to become organ donors, a very uncommon practice at the time. “Because her death was so public, her organ donation was as well, and it opened up the conversation about how to clearly define brain death to allow for more Jewish donors. In fact, since Oct. 7, there have been at least 12 Israeli soldiers who were killed in battle whose organs were donated, saving many lives, both Jewish and non-Jewish,” said Wolf.
When asked whether she will write another book, Wolf said she has contemplated the idea but it will most likely not be about Jews and/or Israel. When asked why, Wolf said because of the current climate of bias against Jewish and pro-Israel authors, including the Instagram account “Zionist Authors,” on which Jewish authors and those who write about Israel and/or Jews are blacklisted by antisemites controlling the account. Wolf shared that Jewish and pro-Israel celebrities frequent the account and buy the books of these authors so they can continue to write about these important topics.
“Alive and Beating” is available for pre-order on Amazon and barnesandnoble.com and will be available for purchase at these sites on March 11. When asked about her main goals for her new novel, Wolf said, “I hope my book will remind people that we are all human beings, and in our shared humanity, we can hopefully recognize each other’s pain. It takes a lot of courage and effort to put aside one’s biases and life experiences and try to look at another person just as another human being, separate from his or her background and community. But it is possible, and it’s something we must work toward for this world to be a better place.”
