CBH Talk | A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy
In Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, the struggle over Israel/Palestine is given a profoundly human face through the heart-wrenching story of a tragic accident that killed Abed Salama’s five-year-old son. Granular in its recitation of the daily injustices that make up the lives of the roughly 3.2 million Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank, and even-handed in detailing the intractable narratives of the region, the book is a mirror and we are challenged to face it. Join Thrall in a conversation led by Masha Gessen, with special guest Abed Salama, traveling to Brooklyn from the West Bank.
Co-presented by Center for Brooklyn History, BPL Presents, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, The New York Review of Books, and Jewish Currents .png){kind=small}
To watch a livestream, click HERE.
Participants
Nathan Thrall is the author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy and the critically acclaimed essay collection The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine. His reported features, analyses, and criticism have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, the London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books and have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Thrall’s writing has been cited in the United Nations Security Council, General Assembly, and Human Rights Council, as well as in reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. He has been described as “one of the best-informed and most trenchant observers of the conflict” (Financial Times), “an American analyst with a severe allergy to conventional wisdom” (Time), and the author of a series of articles “that have defined the new intellectual and political parameters for what is increasingly recognized as Israel-Palestine’s one-state (or post-two-state) reality” (The New York Review of Books). Thrall has received grants, fellowships, and awards from the Open Society Foundations, Middlebury College Language Schools, The Writers’ Institute, and Longreads. His commentary is often featured in print and broadcast media, including the Associated Press, BBC, CNN, Democracy Now!, The Economist, Financial Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, PRI, Reuters, Time, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. He spent a decade at the International Crisis Group, where he was director of the Arab-Israeli Project, and has taught at Bard College. Originally from California, he lives in Jerusalem.
Masha Gessen is a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of 11 books of nonfiction, most recently Surviving Autocracy; The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, which won the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction; The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy, a 2015 award-winning account of the Boston Marathon bombers; and The Man without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, a 2012 portrait of the Russian leader that Foreign Affairs said “shines a piercing light into every dark corner of Putin’s story.” The Moscow-born Gessen is the recipient of numerous awards, including Guggenheim, Andrew Carnegie, and Nieman Fellowships, Hitchens Prize, Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary, and an honorary doctorate from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. They have written about Russia, Ukraine, Putin, LGBT rights, and Donald Trump for the New York Review of Books and New York Times, among other publications; appeared as a commentator on CNN, MSNBC, PBS, and other news outlets; and famously, they were dismissed as the editor of the Russian popular-science magazine Vokrug sveta for refusing to send a reporter to observe Putin hang-gliding with Siberian cranes. They are a Distinguished Professor at the Craig Newark School of Journalism at CUNY and a Distinguished visiting writer at Bard.
Abed Salama is a Palestinian living under Israeli rule in the enclave of Anata in greater Jerusalem. Salama’s story of losing his five-year-old son Milad in a harrowing school bus accident provides the framework for Nathan Thrall’s depiction of Israel/Palestine. Salama is traveling to the U.S. to join Thrall in conversation about the book.
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In Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, the struggle over Israel/Palestine is given a profoundly human face through the heart-wrenching story of a tragic accident that killed Abed Salama’s five-year-old son. Granular in its recitation of the daily injustices that make up the lives of the roughly 3.2 million Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank, and even-handed in detailing the intractable narratives of the region, the book is a mirror and we are challenged to face it. Join Thrall in a conversation led by Masha Gessen, with special guest Abed Salama, traveling to Brooklyn from the West Bank.
Co-presented by Center for Brooklyn History, BPL Presents, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, The New York Review of Books, and Jewish Currents
To watch a livestream, click HERE.
Participants
Nathan Thrall is the author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy and the critically acclaimed essay collection The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine. His reported features, analyses, and criticism have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, the London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books and have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Thrall’s writing has been cited in the United Nations Security Council, General Assembly, and Human Rights Council, as well as in reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. He has been described as “one of the best-informed and most trenchant observers of the conflict” (Financial Times), “an American analyst with a severe allergy to conventional wisdom” (Time), and the author of a series of articles “that have defined the new intellectual and political parameters for what is increasingly recognized as Israel-Palestine’s one-state (or post-two-state) reality” (The New York Review of Books). Thrall has received grants, fellowships, and awards from the Open Society Foundations, Middlebury College Language Schools, The Writers’ Institute, and Longreads. His commentary is often featured in print and broadcast media, including the Associated Press, BBC, CNN, Democracy Now!, The Economist, Financial Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, PRI, Reuters, Time, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. He spent a decade at the International Crisis Group, where he was director of the Arab-Israeli Project, and has taught at Bard College. Originally from California, he lives in Jerusalem.
Masha Gessen is a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of 11 books of nonfiction, most recently Surviving Autocracy; The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, which won the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction; The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy, a 2015 award-winning account of the Boston Marathon bombers; and The Man without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, a 2012 portrait of the Russian leader that Foreign Affairs said “shines a piercing light into every dark corner of Putin’s story.” The Moscow-born Gessen is the recipient of numerous awards, including Guggenheim, Andrew Carnegie, and Nieman Fellowships, Hitchens Prize, Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary, and an honorary doctorate from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. They have written about Russia, Ukraine, Putin, LGBT rights, and Donald Trump for the New York Review of Books and New York Times, among other publications; appeared as a commentator on CNN, MSNBC, PBS, and other news outlets; and famously, they were dismissed as the editor of the Russian popular-science magazine Vokrug sveta for refusing to send a reporter to observe Putin hang-gliding with Siberian cranes. They are a Distinguished Professor at the Craig Newark School of Journalism at CUNY and a Distinguished visiting writer at Bard.
Abed Salama is a Palestinian living under Israeli rule in the enclave of Anata in greater Jerusalem. Salama’s story of losing his five-year-old son Milad in a harrowing school bus accident provides the framework for Nathan Thrall’s depiction of Israel/Palestine. Salama is traveling to the U.S. to join Thrall in conversation about the book.