Wednesday, October 11th at 7 pm EDT Communication Department Hub, 3rd floor, Integrative Learning Center, UMass Amherst, 300 Massachusetts Ave, Amherst, MA
Free and open to the public
Sponsored by UMass Students for Justice in Palestine, Media Education Foundation, Interlink Publishing, Middle East Peace and Justice Coalition of Western Massachusetts (MEPJC-WM), Massachusetts Peace Action (MAPA), UMass Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies, Kairos/Franklin County Justice for Palestine, Earth Action--American Friends of the Palestinian House of Friendship (AFPHF), and UMass Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies.
Can't join us? You can order the guests' books from your local independent bookshop or online by visiting Interlink Publishing | Home (interlinkbooks.com)
Linda Dittmar is the author of the just-published Tracing Homelands: Israel, Palestine, and the Claims of Belonging. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University and taught literature and film studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Dittmar’s early years (1939-1960) were marked by the turmoil of war and nation-building as Mandatory Palestine became Israel. Growing into Israeli adulthood, she witnessed the traumatic effects of both the Jews’ Holocaust and the Palestinians’ Nakba. Tracing Homelands is a raw and courageous memoir of the 1948 war and its aftermath, as Israel gained its homeland and the Palestinians lost theirs. Weaving flashbacks of the author’s childhood into her journey to trace remnants of Palestinian locales, it is a searing inquiry into the traumas and wilful blindness that prevent peace from becoming a reality.
Raja G. Khouri and Jeffrey J. Wilkinson, PhD are the authors of the just released book The Wall Between: What Jews and Palestinians Don't Want to Know about Each Other, a groundbreaking book that offers concrete ways for Jews and Palestinians to speak (and listen) differently to each other. The Wall Between is about the wall of distrust, enmity, and hate that exists between Jewish and Palestinian communities in the Diaspora, brought about by issues of identity, trauma, and victimhood as they relate to two “metanarratives”: the Holocaust and the Nakba. It also examines the role disinformation plays and offers fresh insights and a way through that is justice centered, rather than trauma- and propaganda-driven. The authors utilize recent cognitive research on the psychological and social barriers that keep Jews and Palestinians in their camps, walled off from each other. The authors have lived these principles and traveled this journey, away from their tribal traumas, through embracing the principles of justice.