How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less

How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less
Author: Sarah Glidden
Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016-08-30
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 9781770462533

The award-winning graphic memoir about Israel that offers more questions than answers about identity and politics Sarah Glidden is a progressive Jewish American twentysomething who is both vocal about and critical of Israeli politics in the Holy Land. When a debate with her mother prods her to sign up for a Birthright Israel tour, Glidden expects to find objective facts to support her strong opinions. During her two weeks in Israel, Glidden takes advantage of the opportunity to ask the people she meets about the fraught and complex issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but their answers only lead her to question her own take on the conflict. Simple linework and gorgeous watercolors spotlight Israel's countryside, urban landscapes, and religious landmarks. With straightforward sincerity, lovingly observed anecdotes, and a generous dose of self-deprecating humor, How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less is accessible while retaining Glidden's distinctive perspective. Over the course of this touching memoir, Glidden comes to terms with the idea that there are no easy answers to the world's problems, and that is okay. This debut book landed on several best-of-the-year lists, including Entertainment Weekly's; earned a YALSA Great Graphic Novels for Teens distinction; and won an Ignatz Award. Her second book, Rolling Blackouts, which documents her experience shadowing journalists in Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, will also come out this fall from Drawn & Quarterly.

My Promised Land

My Promised Land
Author: Ari Shavit
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 482
Release: 2013-11-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812984641

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR “A deeply reported, deeply personal history of Zionism and Israel that does something few books even attempt: It balances the strength and weakness, the idealism and the brutality, the hope and the horror, that has always been at Zionism’s heart.”—Ezra Klein, The New York Times Winner of the Natan Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Ari Shavit’s riveting work, now updated with new material, draws on historical documents, interviews, and private diaries and letters, as well as his own family’s story, to create a narrative larger than the sum of its parts: both personal and of profound historical dimension. As he examines the complexities and contradictions of the Israeli condition, Shavit asks difficult but important questions: Why did Israel come to be? How did it come to be? Can it survive? Culminating with an analysis of the issues and threats that Israel is facing, My Promised Land uses the defining events of the past to shed new light on the present. Shavit’s analysis of Israeli history provides a landmark portrait of a small, vibrant country living on the edge, whose identity and presence play a crucial role in today’s global political landscape.

Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me

Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me
Author: Harvey Pekar
Publisher: Hill and Wang
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2014-07-01
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 9780809074044

In Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me, one of the final graphic memoirs from the man who defined the genre, Harvey Pekar explores what it means to be Jewish and what Israel means to the Jews. Pekar’s mother was a Zionist by way of politics, his father by way of faith, and he inevitably grew up a staunch supporter of Israel. But as he became attuned to the wider world, Pekar began to question his parents’ most fundamental beliefs. This book is the full account of that questioning. Over the course of a single day in his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, Pekar and the illustrator JT Waldman wrestle with the mythologies passed down to them, weaving a personal and historical odyssey of uncommon wit and power. With an epilogue written by Joyce Brabner, Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me is an es- sential book for fans of Harvey Pekar and anyone interested in the past and future of the Jewish state.

Where the Streets Had a Name

Where the Streets Had a Name
Author: Randa Abdel-Fattah
Publisher: Pan Australia
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2009
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0330425269

I need to see Sitti Zeynab one last time. To know if I will have the courage to go ahead with my plan. The two nurses look frazzled and smile wearily at me. 'We must leave now,' they say in urgent tones. 'I won't be long,' I reassure them and I jump up onto the back of the ambulance. I can smell the air of her village, pure and scented. I can see her village as though it were Bethlehem itself. I can smell the almond trees. Hear my heels click on the courtyard tiles. See myself jumping two steps at a time down the limestone stairs. I can see Sitti Zeynab sitting in the front porch of the house. I only have to remember that walk through her memories and I know I can make my promise. I've already lost once. I refuse to lose again. 'Stay alive,' I whisper. 'And you shall touch that soil again.'Thirteen-year-old Hayaat is on a mission. She believes a handful of soil from her grandmother's ancestral home in Jerusalem will save her beloved Sitti Zeynab's life. The only problem is the impenetrable wall that divides the West Bank, as well as the check points, the curfews, the permit system and Hayaat's best-friend Samy, who is mainly interested in football and the latest elimination on X-Factor, but always manages to attract trouble. But luck is on their side. Hayaat and Samy have a curfew-free day to travel to Jerusalem. However, while their journey may only be a few kilometres long, it may take a lifetime to complete.

Ten Days of Birthright Israel

Ten Days of Birthright Israel
Author: Leonard Saxe
Publisher: UPNE
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2008
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9781584655411

The remarkable story of Birthright Israel, an intensive ten-day educational program designed to connect Jewish young adults to their heritage

Side by Side

Side by Side
Author: Sāmī ʻAbd al-Razzāq ʻAdwān
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 18
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 1595586830

In 2000, a group of Israeli and Palestinian teachers gathered to address what to many people seemed an unbridgeable gulf between the two societies. Struck by how different the standard Israeli and Palestinian textbook histories of the same events were from one another, they began to explore how to "disarm" the teaching of the history of the Middle East in Israeli and Palestinian classrooms. The result is a riveting "dual narrative" of Israeli and Palestinian history. Side by Side comprises the history of two peoples, in separate narratives set literally side-by-side, so that readers can track each against the other, noting both where they differ as well as where they correspond. The unique and fascinating presentation has been translated into English and is now available to American audiences for the first time. An eye-opening--and inspiring--new approach to thinking about one of the world's most deeply entrenched conflicts, Side by Side is a breakthrough book that will spark a new public discussion about the bridge to peace in the Middle East.

Israel

Israel
Author: Anita Shapira
Publisher: UPNE
Total Pages: 529
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 161168353X

A history of Israel in the context of the modern Jewish experience and the history of the Middle East

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine
Author: Rashid Khalidi
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2020-01-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1627798544

A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective. Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process. Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.

In Jerusalem

In Jerusalem
Author: Lis Harris
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2019-09-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807029963

An entirely fresh take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that examines the life-shaping reverberations of wars and ongoing tensions upon the everyday lives of families in Jerusalem. An American, secular, diasporic Jew, Lis Harris grew up with the knowledge of the historical wrongs done to Jews. In adulthood, she developed a growing awareness of the wrongs they in turn had done to the Palestinian people. This gave her an intense desire to understand how the Israelis’ history led them to where they are now. However, she found that top-down political accounts and insider assessments made the people most affected seem like chess pieces. What she wanted was to register the effects of the country’s seemingly never-ending conflict on the lives of successive generations. Shuttling back and forth over ten years between East and West Jerusalem, Harris learned about the lives of two families: the Israeli Pinczowers/Ezrahis and the Palestinian Abuleils. She came to know members of each family—young and old, religious and secular, male and female. As they shared their histories with her, she looked at how each family survived the losses and dislocations that defined their lives; how, in a region where war and its threat were part of the very air they breathed, they gave children hope for their future; and how the adults’ understanding of the conflict evolved over time. Combining a decade of historical research with political analysis, Harris creates a living portrait of one of the most complicated and controversial conflicts of our time.

Drinking the Sea at Gaza

Drinking the Sea at Gaza
Author: Amira Hass
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2014-11-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1466884533

In 1993, Amira Aass, a young Israeli reporter, drove to Gaza to cover a story - and stayed, the first journalist to live in the grim Palestinian enclave so feared and despised by most Israelis that, in the local idiom, "Go to Gaza" is another way to say "Go to hell." Now, in a work of calm power and painful clarity, Hass reflects on what she has seen in Gaza's gutted streets and destitute refugee camps. Drinking the Sea at Gaza maps the zones of ordinary Palestinian life. From her friends, Hass learns the secrets of slipping across sealed borders and stealing through night streets emptied by curfews. She shares Gaza's early euphoria over the peace process and its subsequent despair as hope gives way to unrelenting hardship. But even as Hass charts the griefs and humiliations of the Palestinians, she offers a remarkable portrait of a people not brutalized but eloquent, spiritually resilient, bleakly funny, and morally courageous. Full of testimonies and stories, facts and impressions, Drinking the Sea at Gaza makes an urgent claim on our humanity. Beautiful, haunting, and profound, it will stand with the great works of wartime reportage, from Michael Herr's Dispatches to Rian Malan's My Traitor's Heart.