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First Session: Holocaust and Nakba: On the nature of the “and” and the internal grammar of traumatic memory

Marzuk Al-Halabi: Journalist, writer, poet and literary and cultural critic

Umar al-Ghubari from Zochrot

Almog Behar: Poet, writer and literary critic

Second Session: The ethics of memories of the Holocaust and the Nakba and A horizon of Arab-Jewish reconciliation and partnership?

Dr. Yael Barda, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Shira Kupfer, Haifa University

Ala Halihal: Writer and playwright

Responders

Dr. Amos Goldberg (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Van Leer Jerusalem Institute) and Dr. Bashir Bashir (The Open University, Van Leer Jerusalem Institute)

Q&A

Opening statement and moderation: Debby Farber, Zochroא

ABOUT THE BOOK

The Holocaust and the Nakba was initially conceived by a group of Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel, who met during 2008 at Van Leer Jerusalem Institute to discuss those two highly charged subjects. The experience of dialogue on the Nakba and Holocaust was jolting, and it was consequently decided to try and address the issue from an analytic and critical perspective. The book proposes to think of ways to remember the Holocaust and Nakba together and discuss them together in the Israeli context, as well as to examine the very conditions of possibility of such joint thinking – not because these are identical or even similar events, but because both are traumatic and identity-constitutive events. Both the Nakba and the Holocaust have shaped and still shape the destiny and identity of the two peoples, albeit in completely different ways.

The book is a collection of articles and essays by Palestinian and Jewish researchers, writers and thinkers who seek to deal with this issue. They are not cast from the same mold: some of them are in favor of dealing with the two events together and view it as an opportunity for reconciliation and peacemaking, while others categorically deny this possibility. The result is a unique mosaic designed to challenge commonplace thinking about the two nations’ traumatic memories (Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing, 2015)