Week 2 Book Recommendations - Exploring love, empathy, and cooperation in spite of the conflict
You can also direct us to send one or both of them to someone as a gift from you. Please note that all but $25 of your donation will be tax deductible. Thank you.
In Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, Yossi Klein Halevi embarks on the
difficult process of addressing his Palestinian neighbors with empathy while explaining his own Israeli
point of view on the conflict that divides them. “I call you ‘neighbor’ because I don’t know your name, or
anything personal about you,” writes Halevi in this emotional and provocative book. “Given our
circumstances, ‘neighbor’ might be too casual a word to describe our relationship. We are intruders into
each other’s dream, violators of each other’s sense of home. We are incarnations of each other’s worst
historical nightmares. Neighbors?” Yossi Klein Halevi is an American-Israeli author and senior fellow at
the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.
In An Improbable Friendship: The Remarkable Lives of Israeli Ruth Dayan and
Palestinian Raymonda Tawil and Their Forty-Year Peace Mission, Anthony David details the unlikely
friendship between Ruth Dayan, the wife of Israeli iconoclast, politician, and famed general Moshe Dayan,
and Raymonda Tawil, whose daughter Suha married Yasir Arafat, chairman of the PLO and Palestinian national
hero. Tracing their highly political lives from before their meeting in 1970 and thereafter, David creates
a vivid portrait of two feisty women determined to forge peace. Anthony David is an American author with a
Phd in the history of Jerusalem known for co-writing Once Upon a Country with Palestinian
academic Sari Nusseibeh.
Week 1 Books
Exposing the divisions that exist in Israeli society between different ethnic, religious, and political groups.
Jerusalem, Drawn and Quartered is an exploration of Jerusalem by American-Israeli blogger Sarah Tuttle-Singer. Long known for her thoughtful and sometimes provocative blog posts about life in Israel, Tuttle-Singer embarked on this project by spending a year in Jerusalem, living for three months in each quarter of the Old City. Tuttle-Singer brings her raw honesty, dark humor, and intimate love for Jerusalem to life in this unique travelogue to give readers insight into the holy and contentious city at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Native: Dispatches from an Israeli-Palestinian Life is a collection of Sayed
Kashua’s satirical Haaretz columns. Kashua is a Palestinian-Israeli writer and journalist
best known for his humorous columns in Haaretz and his popular satirical sitcom, Avodah
Aravit (Arab Labor), which both explore the turbulent day-to-day experience of living in Israel
as an Arab citizen. Native transforms Kashua’s newspaper shorts into an autobiographical arc
of life in Israel during the Arab Spring, rocket attacks, and the 2014 Gaza war that is at once wry,
absurd, earnest, and exhausted. The inherent contradictions and absurdities of being Arab in Israel
come to light as Kashua slowly comes to the conclusion that he must leave Israel.
Join in APN's 3 Weeks of Contemplation. For a donation of $108 or more, APN will send you 2 books of your choice indicated by what you put in the comment box: "Letters" “Friendship" "Jerusalem" "Native".
You can also direct us to send one or both of them to someone as a gift from you. Please note that all but $25 of your donation will be tax deductible. Thank you.