About ERETZ Magazine

ERETZ Magazine

ERETZ Magazine, subtitled The Magazine of Israel, is a magazine devoted to the geography, history, heritage and culture of the Land of Israel. Based in Tel Aviv, it is written by experts, scholars and guides, and published six times a year, with four regular issues and one double issue making up the annual cycle, in a 64-page format. Its editorial mission is summed up in the Hebrew phrase Yediat Ha-Aretz, knowledge of the Land. Under its publisher and editor in chief Yadin Roman, the magazine has for four decades taken its readers region by region and site by site across Israel, pairing long-form writing with photography, companion travel guides and maps.

Yadin Roman and the origins of ERETZ

Yadin Roman, publisher and editor in chief of the ERETZ Group, was born in Israel in 1948. He grew up in Givatayim outside Tel Aviv, also spending long periods in England and Africa. After completing four years of service in the Israel Defense Forces, as a career officer with the rank of lieutenant colonel, he earned a bachelor's degree in historical geography and economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. For ten years he headed the Israel Ministry of Tourism Guide School, before commencing his publishing career with the production of a tour guides' magazine that would develop into ERETZ Magazine, the geographic magazine of Israel. That biography explains the magazine's character: it was created by the man who trained Israel's tour guides, and it reads like guiding at its best, expert, narrative and rooted in walking the ground it describes.

Four decades of Yediat Ha-Aretz

Writing in issue number 188 in March 2024, Roman noted that since its founding forty years earlier, ERETZ Magazine has focused on the history, heritage and culture of the Land of Israel. The fortieth anniversary framing places the founding in the mid-1980s, and the magazine's own collected volume, ERETZ: The Book, gathers a selection of articles from 1985 to 2005, the first two decades of publication. In that March 2024 issue the magazine turned to Israel's civil society in the aftermath of the 7 October attacks and the protest year that preceded them, arguing that it was impossible to ignore the enormous changes taking place and still be faithful to its editorial mission of knowledge of the Land. The episode showed that for ERETZ, geography was never only landscape: the land includes the society living on it.

Format and frequency

ERETZ Magazine is published six times a year, described by the magazine itself as four regular issues and one double issue. Issues run to 64 pages in a 21 by 29 centimetre format, delivered by airmail from Israel to overseas subscribers. Numbering had reached issue 184 in 2023 and issue 188 by March 2024, a sequence stretching back across four decades. The magazine is written by experts, scholars and guides, a contributors' profile that separates it from general travel journalism: its authors are frequently the archaeologists, historians and licensed guides who know a site professionally. Roman himself has written extensively on the history and geography of Israel and the Jewish people, including a guide to Israel and Jerusalem and five books, among them a book on Masada and a book on Herod the Great, and he is in demand as a speaker on Israel lore.

The Israel Series of special issues

In recent years the magazine has organized its deepest work into an Israel Series of special issues, each devoted to one region of the country. ERETZ has published special issues on the Golan, the Jordan River, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, followed by the Land of Galilee in April and May 2021, the Land of Judea in December 2021 and the Dead Sea in August 2022. The Galilee special issue ran to 144 pages, drawing on more than three decades of researching and writing about the Galilee by Roman and the magazine's staff, and was accompanied by an original Galilee Travel Guide in which twelve Galilee tour guides revealed the special places they reserve for their favoured travellers. Each kit in the series combines a magazine, a guidebook to the area and a map, an editorial formula that turns a periodical issue into a permanent field companion.

Writing the regions: Galilee, Judea and the Dead Sea

The regional issues show the magazine's method at full length. The Judea issue presented the Judean Mountains as the range that formed the heartland of the biblical Kingdom of Judah, the land where Abraham roamed and the setting of the stories of Ruth and King David, while acknowledging that different political viewpoints call the area across the pre-1967 borders by various names, and insisting that as a geographic magazine its focus is on the Land of Israel. The Dead Sea issue, subtitled Shore to Shore, dealt not only with the western shores but also with the eastern, Jordanian side, recording that in the past decade the sea's water level had dropped by nearly fifty feet and its surface had been reduced by a third, and tracing its history from ancient asphalt and balsam to the oases, cliffs and caves that sheltered David, the Essenes, rebels against Rome and Byzantine monks. The Golan guide presented a plateau much of which is nature reserve, with more than thirty identified synagogues from the period of the Mishnah and Talmud and dozens of archaeological sites.

Guides, books and collected editions

Around the magazine, the ERETZ Group built a library of companion publications. The ERETZ Magazine guides cover Jerusalem, Caesarea, the Golan, Megiddo, Akko, Safed and the Jordan River, among other subjects, and pilgrim's companions address Bethsaida and the land of Abraham. ERETZ: The Book, a 336-page volume, contains sixty of the best articles published in ERETZ Magazine between 1985 and 2005, arranged by topic, offering a wide and deep panorama of Israel over the two decades. A later collection gathered history and archaeology articles from 2006 to 2015. Photographic albums include Israel: The First Year, on 1948, and The Early Years, on Israel in the 1950s. Roman's own books on Masada and Herod, and his volume on famous women in Jewish history from Asherah to Queen Salome and Sarah, wife of Shabbatai Zvi, extend the magazine's subjects into book form under the same editorial hand.

ERETZ online and new audiences

The magazine maintains an online presence through its store and its ERETZ Online articles, where long features from the print issues, on subjects from the Great Rebellion of the Jews against the Romans and the Arch of Titus to the magazine's post-October 7 reflections on Israeli society, reach readers who never handle the printed copy. Roman also carries the magazine's material into lectures, listed by the ERETZ Group on subjects drawn from Jewish history, and into podcast conversations in which, as founder and publisher of ERETZ Magazine, he narrates the histories of Masada, Herodium, Caesarea, the Temple Mount and the queens and princesses of the Herodian age. The movement from print to lectures and audio follows the founder's original profession: guiding, first of tourists in the field, then of readers on the page, now of listeners as well.

Place among magazines of Israel

ERETZ Magazine occupies a category of its own in Israeli publishing. It is not a news magazine, not a literary journal and not a tourism brochure, though it borrows the strengths of each. Its offices and publishing operation are in Tel Aviv, its subject is the whole Land of Israel, and its authority rests on forty years of accumulated site knowledge, photography and writing by experts, scholars and guides. In a country where geography, archaeology and history are living public arguments, a magazine devoted entirely to knowledge of the Land, published six times a year in substantial themed issues with guides and maps, performs a function no daily newspaper or website duplicates. Its special issues remain in print as books long after their publication dates, which is the surest sign that ERETZ made periodicals meant to be kept.