A Conversation with Omer Bartov, Marianne Hirsch and Rashid Khalidi, moderated by Sonali Thakkar.

Please join the Cultural Memory Seminar and the Center for Palestine Studies for a discussion of the uses and abuses of memory in the aftermath of October 7, 2023. Attendees are asked to read four short articles by the speakers in advance of the event.

This program is co-presented by the Cultural Memory University Seminar and the Center for Palestine Studies.

Advanced registration is required.
Attendees are asked to read three short articles by the speakers in advance of the event.

SPEAKERS
Omer Bartov is Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. He has written extensively on war crimes and genocide. Recent publications include Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018), winner of the National Jewish Book Award; Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past (2022), and Genocide, the Holocaust, and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis (2023). He is currently writing a book tentatively titled “The Broken Promise: A Personal Political History of Israel and Palestine.” 

Marianne Hirsch is William Peterfield Trent Professor Emerita in English and Comparative Literature and the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender at Columbia, and co-director of the University Seminar on Cultural Memory. She writes about the transmission of memories of violent histories across generations, a process she has termed “postmemory.” Her recent books include School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference (2020), co-authored with Leo Spitzer, and the co-edited volume Women Mobilizing Memory (2019). She is working on a book about reparative memory.

Rashid Khalidi is Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies Emeritus at Columbia University. He has taught at the Lebanese University, the American University of Beirut, and the University of Chicago, was co-editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies and served as President of the Middle East Studies Association. He is the author of eight books, most recently The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler- Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017. 

MODERATOR
Sonali Thakkar is Associate Professor of English at NYU. She is the author of The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Antiracism in Postcolonial Thought (Stanford 2023).

READINGS
Omer Bartov. “As a Former IDF Soldier and Historian of Genocide, I Was Deeply Disturbed by My Recent Visit to Israel.” The Guardian, 13 August 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/13/israel-gaza-historian-omer-bartov.

Marianne Hirsch. “Rethinking Holocaust Memory after October 7.” Public Books, 15 July 2024. https://www.publicbooks.org/rethinking-holocaust-memory-after-october-7/.

Rashid Khalidi. “‘A New Abyss’: Gaza and the Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.” The Guardian, 11 April 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/11/a-new-abyss-gaza-and-the-hundred-years-war-on-palestine.

Naomi Klein. “How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war.”  The Guardian, 5 October 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/oct/05/israel-gaza-october-7-memorials. 

Join us for a Palestine Cuts screening of LYD, followed by a conversation with directors Sarah Ema Friedland and Rami Younis, moderated by Brian Boyd.

A story of a city that once connected Palestine to the world –
what it once was, what it is now,
and what it could have become.

Advanced registration is required for all attendees, including CU/BC ID holders.

We will do our best to accommodate non-affiliate access to campus, but please bear in mind that we are required to comply with the university's policies regarding campus access for those without active student, faculty or staff IDs. 

LYD (2023)
This feature-length, sci-fi documentary shares multiple pasts, presents, and futures of the city of Lyd in Palestine/Israel. From the perspective of the city herself, voiced by Palestinian actress Maisa Abd Elhadi, the viewer is guided through the lifespan of a five-thousand-year-old city and its residents. Lyd was once a thriving Palestinian city with a rich history. In 636AD, It was even considered the first capital of Palestine. When the State of Israel was founded in 1948, Lyd became an Israeli city, and in the process, hundreds of Lyd’s Palestinian residents were massacred by Israeli forces, and most of the city’s 50,000 Palestinian residents were exiled. Today, the city has a Jewish Israeli majority and a Palestinian minority and is disinvested and divided by racism and violence. For Palestinians, Lyd’s story is a painful and tragic fall from grace, which is why our film dares to ask the question: what would the city be like had the Israeli occupation of Lyd never happened? 

Using never-before-seen archival footage of the Israeli soldiers who carried out the massacre and expulsion, the city explains that these events were so devastating that they fractured her reality, and now there are two Lyds –– one occupied and one free. As the film unfolds, documentary portions follow a chorus of characters through their daily lives, creating a tapestry of the Palestinian experience of this city, and vivid animations use the language of speculative fiction to envision an alternate reality where the same documentary characters live free from the trauma of the past and the violence of the present. As the film cuts between fantastical and documentary realities, it ultimately leaves the viewer questioning which future should prevail.

Jury Award for Arab Feature-Length Documentary and FIPRESCI Award from the Film Critics Association,
Amman International Film Festival 2023

SPEAKERS
Rami Younis (Director/Producer) is a Palestinian filmmaker, writer, journalist and activist from Lyd. He was a 2019-20 Fellow at the Harvard Divinity School. As a journalist, he  mainly wrote for the online magazine +972 and served as both writer and editor of its Hebrew sister site, “local call”, a journalistic project he co-founded, designed to challenge Israeli mainstream journalism outlets. Rami served as a parliamentary consultant and media spokesperson for Palestinian member of Knesset (Israeli parliament) Haneen Zoabi. Rami is also co-founder and manager of the first ever “Palestine Music Expo”: an event that connects local Palestinian music scene to the world wide industry. Younis was the host of the Arabic-language daily news show, “On the Other Hand.”

Sarah Ema Friedland (Director/cinematographer) is a documentary filmmaker and media artist based in New York. Friedland’s works have screened widely in the US and abroad and have been broadcast nationally on PBS. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, the Paul Newman Foundation,, the Ford Foundation, NYSCA, the LABA House of Study, The Palestinian American Research Center, and the MacDowell Colony. She is a recipient of the 2014 Paul Robeson award from the Newark Museum and was nominated for a New York Emmy. Friedland was the innaugural  Director of the MDOCS Storyteller’s Institute at Skidmore College and is currently a Clinical Assistant Proffessor in Liberal Studies at NYU and the Director of the Liberal Studies Global Media Lab. She is also an active member of the Meerkat Media Collective.

MODERATOR
Brian Boyd is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology, Director of Museum Anthropology, and Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University. He works on a collaborative community archaeology/museum project in the village of Shuqba, near Birzeit, and is currently co-writing a book with Palestinian colleagues titled “From Memory to Place: an archaeology of the ongoing Nakba”.