Everyone’s got an opinion about the noisy, chaotic and often messy country.

Israel is…

• a vibrant democracy
• an apartheid nightmare
• liberator
• colonizer
• religious dictatorship
• a tech-haven

But how many of those with the strongest opinions have taken the time to wade through enough weighty tomes to understand the complex history of this even more complex country and how it’s become entangled in a dozen political agendas?

Israeli American actress, producer and activist Noa Tishby has just made such research easier, boiling down thousands of years of history and dozens of competing narratives into a concise, personal, even funny tale of a nation where thousands of immigrants from every continent but Antarctica converged on a small piece of land and argued simultaneously in Hebrew, Arabic, Yiddish, Ladino, English, French, German, Russian and scores of other tongues about coming home.

Upon the release of her first book, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth, she joins us to discuss everything you thought you might not know, what you ought to know and how to pull the rug out from underneath a dozen misconceptions about the tiny nation that dominates the news.

Born in Tel Aviv and currently residing in Los Angeles, Noa Tishby has worked as an actress in both Israel and the United States but is best known for being the first to bring an Israeli TV format to the US with the HBO show In Treatment, which she co-produced. She is politically active as powerful defender of Israel.

In conversation with Ethan Bronner, senior editor at Bloomberg News.