As the Middle East peace process disintegrates and the second Palestinian Intifada begins, Wendy Pearlman, a young Jewish woman from the American Midwest travels to the West Bank and Gaza Strip in a quest to talk to ordinary Palestinians. A remarkable narrative emerges from her conversations with doctors, artists, school kids, and families who have lost loved ones or watched their homes destroyed. Their stories, ranging from the humorous to the tragic, paint a profile of the Palestinians that is as honest as it is uncommon in the Western media: that of ordinary people who simply want to live ordinary lives. As Pearlman writes, "the personal stories and heartfelt reflections that I encountered did not expose a hatred of Jews or a yearning to push Israelis into the sea. Rather, they painted a portrait of a people who longed for precisely that which had inspired the first Israelis: the chance to be citizens in a country of their own."
The occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has been one of the world's most widely reported yet least understood human rights crises for over four decades. In this oral history collection, men and women from Palestine--including a fisherman, a settlement administrator, and a marathon runner--describe in their own words how their lives have been shaped by the historic crisis. Other narrators include: ABEER, a young journalist from Gaza City who launched her career by covering bombing raids on the Gaza Strip. IBTISAM, the director of a multi-faith children's center in the West Bank whose dream of starting a similar center in Gaza has so far been hindered by border closures. GHASSAN, an Arab-Christian physics professor and activist from Bethlehem who co-founded the International Solidarity Movement. For more than six decades, Israel and Palestine have been the global focal point of intractable conflict, one that has led to one of the world's most widely reported yet least understood human rights crises. In their own words, men and women from West Bank and Gaza describe how their lives have been shaped by the conflict. Here are stories that humanize the oft-ignored violations of human rights that occur daily in the occupied Palestinian territories.
For ten years, Voice of Witness has illuminated contemporary human rights crises through its remarkable oral history book series. Founded by Dave Eggers, Lola Vollen and Mimi Lok, Voice of Witness has amplified the stories of hundreds of people impacted by some of the most crucial human rights crises of our time, including men and women living under oppressive regimes in Burma, Colombia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe; public housing residents and undocumented workers in the United States; and exploited workers around the globe. This selection of narratives from these remarkable men and women is many things: an astonishing record of human rights issues in the 21st century; a testament to the resilience and courage of the most marginalized among us; and an opportunity to better the understand the world we live in through human connection and a participatory vision of history.
Within these pages are the memories of Palestinians - housewives, pastors, physicians, prisoners, professors, refugees, researchers, students, teachers, and university administrators living either in Palestine, refugee camps, or exile - who have suffered loss and yet have kept their identity as Palestinians and through perseverance have kept their culture vibrant and alive. It is hoped that in meeting these people, the reader will understand the suffering and loss of Palestinians; see their longing for freedom and peace; and join in supporting their struggle for justice.The continuing dispossession of the Palestinians and the violation of their human rights, and the right to political self-determination, is a blight on the collective international community. A major obstacle to restitution of justice for the Palestinian people is the ongoing and unconditional support of Israel by Western nations, especially the United States, which allow Israel to act with impunity.In the words of Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, founder and chairman of the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy, "The very intimacy of these revelations (the narratives), their searing honesty, and their unassuming humanity compel the reader to engage in the challenge of awareness through identification, and to acquire that uncomfortable, yet essential, knowledge that has hitherto been denied or excluded or distorted. The simple truth, often the most complex reality to convey, is laid bare in Palestine is Our Home for all those who want to shed the complacency of ignorance in favor of the responsibility of knowledge." Palestine Is Our Home presents brief contemporary history of Palestine, short essays, first hand testimonies, and chapters on the liberation art of Palestine and on the origins of the traditional Palestinian costume. Four tables and sixty-one gray scale images - maps, photographs including those of works of art, traditional costumes, and embroidery - serve to illustrate the narratives and chapters of the book. Finally, a leader's guide is provided, which when used in conjunction with the questions for reflection found at the end of each section of the book, serves to facilitate the use of the book by discussion groups.
Here in their own words are Frederick Douglass, George Jackson, Chief Joseph, Martin Luther King Jr., Plough Jogger, Sacco and Vanzetti, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Mark Twain, and Malcolm X, to name just a few of the hundreds of voices that appear in Voices of a People's History of the United States, edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove. Paralleling the twenty-four chapters of Zinn's A People's History of the United States, Voices of a People’s History is the long-awaited companion volume to the national bestseller. For Voices, Zinn and Arnove have selected testimonies to living history—speeches, letters, poems, songs—left by the people who make history happen but who usually are left out of history books—women, workers, nonwhites. Zinn has written short introductions to the texts, which range in length from letters or poems of less than a page to entire speeches and essays that run several pages. Voices of a People’s History is a symphony of our nation’s original voices, rich in ideas and actions, the embodiment of the power of civil disobedience and dissent wherein lies our nation’s true spirit of defiance and resilience.
Among the Jewish writers who emigrated from Eastern Europe to France in the 1910s and 1920s, a number chose to switch from writing in their languages of origin to writing primarily in French, a language that represented both a literary center and the promises of French universalism. But under the Nazi occupation of France from 1940 to 1944, these Jewish émigré writers—among them Irène Némirovsky, Benjamin Fondane, Romain Gary, Jean Malaquais, and Elsa Triolet—continued to write in their adopted language, even as the Vichy regime and Nazi occupiers denied their French identity through xenophobic and antisemitic laws. In this book, Julia Elsky argues that these writers reexamined both their Jewishness and their place as authors in France through the language in which they wrote. The group of authors Elsky considers depicted key moments in the war from their perspective as Jewish émigrés, including the June 1940 civilian flight from Paris, life in the occupied and southern zones, the roundups and internment camps, and the Resistance in France and in London. Writing in French, they expressed multiple cultural, religious, and linguistic identities, challenging the boundaries between center and periphery, between French and foreign, even when their sense of belonging was being violently denied.
Thank You, Anarchy is an up-close, inside account of Occupy Wall Street’s first year in New York City, written by one of the first reporters to cover the phenomenon. Nathan Schneider chronicles the origins and explosive development of the Occupy movement through the eyes of the organizers who tried to give shape to an uprising always just beyond their control. Capturing the voices, encounters, and beliefs that powered the movement, Schneider brings to life the General Assembly meetings, the chaotic marches, the split-second decisions, and the moments of doubt as Occupy swelled from a hashtag online into a global phenomenon. A compelling study of the spirit that drove this watershed movement, Thank You, Anarchy vividly documents how the Occupy experience opened new social and political possibilities and registered a chilling indictment of the status quo. It was the movement’s most radical impulses, this account shows, that shook millions out of a failed tedium and into imagining, and fighting for, a better kind of future.
