AN EVENING WITH JUMANA MANNA
9 December 2022
Avery Hall 114
1172 Amsterdam Ave., New York, NY 10027

Join the Center for Palestine Studies for a screening of Jumana Manna’s film Foragers (2022), followed by a talk by the filmmaker. The event will feature a screening of Foragers, followed by a Q&A and conversation with Jumana about the film, and her broader artistic and cinematic corpus. This event is co-presented by the Graduate School Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

Foragers (2022) depicts the dramas around the practice of foraging for wild edible plants in Palestine/Israel with wry humor and a meditative pace. Shot in the Golan Heights, the Galilee and Jerusalem, it employs fiction, documentary and archival footage to portray the impact of Israeli nature protection laws on these customs. The restrictions prohibit the collection of the artichoke-like ’akkoub and za’atar (thyme), and have resulted in fines and trials for hundreds caught collecting these native plants. For Palestinians, these laws constitute an ecological veil for legislation that further alienates them from their land while Israeli state representatives insist on their scientific expertise and duty to protect. Following the plants from the wild to the kitchen, from the chases between the foragers and the nature patrol, to courtroom defenses, Foragers captures the joy and knowledge embodied in these traditions alongside their resilience to the prohibitive law. By reframing the terms and constraints of preservation, the film raises questions around the politics of extinction, namely who determines what is made extinct and what gets to live on.

Palestine Cuts 2022-23 Curators

Nadine Fattaleh is a Palestinian writer and researcher from Amman, Jordan. She previously worked on projects at the Center for Spatial Research, Studio-X Amman, and MMAG Foundation. In 2021-2, she was the OSUN Fellow in Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College. She is currently a PhD student in Media, Culture and Communications at New York University. Nadine is a member of the Palestinian Social Fund as well as the editorial collective of Science for the People Magazine.

Nasreen Abd Elal is a multidisciplinary graphic designer, illustrator, and researcher whose work centers on the intersection of graphic design and justice-oriented movement work. She works as an information designer at Visualizing Palestine. She graduated with a degree in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies from Columbia University in 2020.

Palestine Cuts is generously supported by Jeanne and Ken Levy-Church.

ABOUT Nakba and Survival

Beginning in 1948, Israeli paramilitary forces began violently displacing Palestinian Arabs from Palestine. Nakba and Survival tells the stories of Palestinians in Haifa and the Galilee during, and in the decade after, mass dispossession. Manna uses oral histories and Palestinian and Israeli archives, diaries, and memories to meticulously reconstruct the social history of the Palestinians who remained and returned to become Israeli citizens. This book focuses in particular on the Galilee, using the story of Manna's own family and their village Majd al-Krum after the establishment of Israel to shed light on the cruelties faced by survivors of the military regime. While scholars of the Palestinian national movement have often studied Palestinian resistance to Israel as related to the armed struggle and the cultural struggle against the Jewish state, Manna shows that remaining in Israel under the brutality of occupation and fighting to return to Palestinian communities after displacement are acts of heroism in their own right.

Adel Manna is a historian who specializes in the history of Palestine. He is the author and editor of several books on Ottoman Palestinian history published in Arabic in Beirut including The Palestinians in the Twentieth Century: A View from Within and Society and Administration in Jerusalem during the Middle Ottoman Period.

Rashid Khalidi is Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University.

6 DEC 2022
6:30PM New York

LOCATION
The People’s Forum
320 W 37th Street
New York, NY 10018 US

This talk will discuss the experience of teaching and writing in a settler-colonial context, of being an anthropology lecturer and a colonized subject at the same time. In this context, violence is an integral part of everyday life and a formative aspect of every professor’s (and student’s) subjectivity. This talk reflects on the concepts of life, knowledge, and death that have emerged in these conditions.

Speaker
Rami Salameh is Assistant Professor in, and Chair of, the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies, as well as the Director of the Program in Contemporary Arab Studies, at Birzeit University. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the Graduate Institute, Geneva. His scholarship concerns Palestinian self-understanding; the project of articulating a distinctly Palestinian anthropology; children’s experience of violence in Palestinian refugee camps; and Palestinian higher education under occupation.

Respondents
Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia, and Vice President and Vice Chair of the Board at The Institute for Palestine Studies in Washington DC. She has published two books: Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (2001), which won the Albert Hourani Annual Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association in 2002, and The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (2012).

Helga Tawil-Souri is Associate Professor in the Departments of Media, Culture, and Communication, where she is the Director of Graduate Studies, and of Middle East and Islamic Studies at New York University. She is co-editor of the 2016 book Gaza as Metaphor and is currently working on another volume on new Palestinian visual spaces. She has published essays on Palestinian cinema, television, video games and popular culture; telecommunications and internet infrastructure in the Palestinian Territories; and cultural/territorial politics, checkpoints, identification cards, and surveillance in Palestine-Israel.

Thayer Hastings is a doctoral candidate at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center, where he studies the political anthropology of the Arab world, and holds an M.A. from the Georgetown University Center for Contemporary Arab Studies.

Sponsoring Institutions
Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University
Department of English, Lehman College
Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, CUNY Graduate Center
Program in Middle Eastern Studies, CUNY Graduate Center

MASTERCLASS WITH AMEER FAKHER ELDIN
15 November 2022
Avery Hall 114
1172 Amsterdam Ave., New York, NY 10027

Co-presented by the Graduate School Architecture, Planning and Preservation

Join the master class with director Ameer Fakher Eldin, which will explore the filmmaker's craft as it relates to the making of his first feature fiction film, The Stranger (Al-Garib). The master class is a chance to intimately engage with technical and artistic processes of filmmaking, including the development of script, composition of scenes, the aesthetics of landscapes.

Introduction by Nadine Fattaleh, PhD student in Media, Culture and Communications at New York University.

Ameer Fakher Eldin is a Syrian writer and director based in Germany. He was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 1991 to Syrian parents from the occupied Golan Heights. His debut film The Stranger premiered at the 78th Venice International Film Festival (Giornate Degli Autori), where it won the Edipo Re Award and was selected as Palestine's official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 94th Academy Awards, followed by great acclaim at 43rd Cairo International Film Festival receiving two awards: The Prize for Best Arab Film in the festival and the Shadi Abd El Salam Prize for Best Film in the International Critics Week Competition.

Palestine Cuts 2022-23 Curators

Nadine Fattaleh is a Palestinian writer and researcher from Amman, Jordan. She previously worked on projects at the Center for Spatial Research, Studio-X Amman, and MMAG Foundation. In 2021-2, she was the OSUN Fellow in Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College. She is currently a PhD student in Media, Culture and Communications at New York University. Nadine is a member of the Palestinian Social Fund as well as the editorial collective of Science for the People Magazine.

Nasreen Abd Elal is a multidisciplinary graphic designer, illustrator, and researcher whose work centers on the intersection of graphic design and justice-oriented movement work. She works as an information designer at Visualizing Palestine. She graduated with a degree in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies from Columbia University in 2020.

Palestine Cuts is generously supported by Jeanne and Ken Levy-Church.

THE STRANGER (AL GARIB)
Film Screening + Q&A with Ameer Fakher Eldin, moderated by Khaled Malas
11 November 2022
Lenfest Center for the Arts

In a small village in the occupied Golan Heights, the life of a desperate unlicensed doctor who is going through an existential crisis, takes another unlucky turn when he encounters a man wounded in the war in Syria. Overturning all community expectations in times of war and national crisis, he ventures forth to meet his newly found destiny.

WATCH TRAILER

Palestine Cuts 2022-23 Curators

Nadine Fattaleh is a Palestinian writer and researcher from Amman, Jordan. She previously worked on projects at the Center for Spatial Research, Studio-X Amman, and MMAG Foundation. In 2021-2, she was the OSUN Fellow in Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College. She is currently a PhD student in Media, Culture and Communications at New York University. Nadine is a member of the Palestinian Social Fund as well as the editorial collective of Science for the People Magazine.

Nasreen Abd Elal is a multidisciplinary graphic designer, illustrator, and researcher whose work centers on the intersection of graphic design and justice-oriented movement work. She works as an information designer at Visualizing Palestine. She graduated with a degree in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies from Columbia University in 2020.

Palestine Cuts is generously supported by Jeanne and Ken Levy-Church.

A Flower From Every Meadow: The History Section of al-Nur Ahmadiyya Library in Acre

1PM New York / 8PM Jerusalem

Endowed in the 18th-century in Acre by the notorious Ottoman governor of Sidon, Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar (d.1804), al-Nur Ahmadiyya Library was established as a part of the governor’s famous mosque-college complex inside the walled city. The recent discovery of this public library’s catalog reveals a relatively large holding of 1,800 volumes, a few of which survive in libraries around the world. This talk will explore the history section, which includes about 160 entries.The eclectic but consistent selection of books from humanities fields that exceed the topic of history seems to be a realization of the Arabic proverb, “a flower from every meadow.” The result is a well-ordered garden that betrays nothing less than royal aspirations or pretensions. In short, this is not the usual college library.

Dana Sajdi (Ph.D., Columbia University 2002) is Associate Professor of History at Boston College. She is the author of The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant (2013, Turkish and Arabic translations in 2018); editor of Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century (2008, in Turkish 2014) and coeditor of Transforming Loss into Beauty: Essays in Arabic Literature and Culture in Memory of Madga Al-Nowaihi (2008). She is the recipient of several fellowships including from Princeton University, Wissenschfatskolleg zu Berlin (EUME); Research Center for Anatolian Civilization; MIT-Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture; and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She is working on the history of Damascus based on a local tradition of textual representations of the city between the 12th-20th centuries.

This talk is copresented by the Khalidiyya Library in East Jerusalem.

To watch other talks in the Readings in the Khalidiyya series, click here.

Join us for an evening of staged readings and a talkback with the NO PLACE / LA MAKAN playwrights!

CPS developed the NO PLACE / LA MAKAN theatre initiative to provide the opportunity for playwrights to develop a new work within a community of actors, directors, dramaturgs, scholars, and the other writers. The commissioned playwrights are: Khawla Ibraheem (London-Jenin), Ismail Khalidi (Tennis at Nablus, Returning to Haifa), and Bashar Murkus (The Museum, Hash). Collectively, these writers have had works produced on some of the world’s leading stages, including the Public Theatre (New York), the Young Vic (London), and the Tokyo International Festival, as well as residencies with the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab and the MacDowell Colony. The NO PLACE / LA MAKAN initiative will culminate in two fully-realized radio productions of each play (one in Arabic and one in English), translated, directed, performed, and recorded by professional theatre artists and radio producers.

The staged readings, copresented by Columbia’s School of the Arts and the Middle East Institute, will preview the English language versions of each play.

PLAYWRIGHTS

KHAWLA IBRAHEEM is a Syrian/ Palestinian theatre artist born and raised in Majdal Shams – the occupied Golan Heights. She is an actress, playwright, and director. In 2004, a group for youngsters, Khawla among them, led by the Syrian writer Mutaz Abu Saleh, started a small theatre in the village: “O’eon” (eyes). She later graduated from Haifa University with honors in Theatre Studies. Khawla started her career as an actress with theatres in Palestine. She has starred in plays such as, A Parallel Timeline by Bashar Murkus, Servant of Two Masters by Carlo Goldoni, The Whole Story and Summer Time by Ameer Hlehel, The Bride and the Butterfly Hunter by Nisim Aloni, Winter Funeral by Hanoch Levin, Sarita by Maria Irene Frone, and The Publisher by Ameer Hlehel. She wrote and directed two shows for the National Palestinian Theatre: a musical for all ages called The Story Keeper and Soon to be Gone, a show that tells the story of the Druze Syrian community in the occupied Golan Heights. Khawla also wrote and directed several plays as a member of the Family of the Freedom Theatre, including London-Jenin. Khawla was in residence with the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab (2019) and the MacDowell Colony (2020).

BASHAR MURKUS is a theatre creator from Palestine - he lives and creates in Haifa, and is the artistic director of Khashabi Theatre which he, together with a group of Palestinian Artists, founded in 2011. Khashabi is a completely independent Palestinain theatre in the city of Haifa founded as the artists’ collective Khashabi Ensemble. In 2015 it achieved a physical space in the Wadi Salib neighborhood that was emptied from the majority of its original inhabitants 1948. Khashabi is working towards a Palestinian society that freely practices art and creativity as a natural right, and strives to renew its cultural identity by placing independent culture front and centre. Over the years, Bashar Murkus and Khashabi Theatre gained popularity in Europe and have performed in major festivals and venues such as Festival d'Avignon, Romaeuropa Festival, Theatre de la Ville Paris etc. 

ISMAIL KHALIDI is a playwright, screenwriter and theater director. His plays include Truth Serum Blues (Pangea World Theater ‘05), Tennis in Nablus (Alliance Theatre ‘10), Foot (Teatro Amal ‘16), Sabra Falling (Pangea ‘17) and Dead Are My People (Noor Theatre ’18). He has co-adapted two novels for the stage with Naomi Wallace; Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa (Finborough Theatre ‘18) and Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer (Actors Theatre of Louisville ‘19). Khalidi’s work has been included in numerous anthologies and he co-edited, also with Ms. Wallace, Inside/Outside: Six Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora (TCG ‘15). His writing has been featured in American Theatre Magazine, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, Mizna, Guernica, Al Jazeera and The Dramatist. Khalidi holds an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He is currently a Directing Fellow at Pangea World Theater.

TALKBACK CHAIR
JEAN HOWARD is the George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. At Columbia she has received the Faculty Mentoring Award in 2006 and the Presidential Teaching Award in 2020; she has also received Guggenheim, NEH, Mellon, Folger, Huntington, and Newberry Library Fellowships. In 2010 she gave the Columbia University Schoff Memorial Lectures on 'Staging History: Imagining the Nation' on playwrights William Shakespeare, Tony Kushner, and Caryl Churchill. Her teaching interests include Shakespeare, Tudor and Stuart drama, Early Modern poetry, modern drama, feminist and Marxist theory, and the history of feminism. She is on the editorial board of Shakespeare Studies and Renaissance Drama. She has published essays on Shakespeare, Pope, Ford, Heywood, Dekker, Marston, and Jonson, as well as on aspects of contemporary critical theory including new historicism, Marxism, and issues in feminism.

NO PLACE | LA MAKAN is a project of the Center for Palestine Studies. The radio plays were produced in partnership with the A. M. Qattan Foundation, with support from Taawon, The Tides Foundation, and the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. For more info about the NO PLACE | LA MAKAN initiative click here.

Join the Center for Palestine Studies for a presentation by Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.

The presentation will be followed by a panel discussion by legal and policy experts in the field.

This event is copresented by the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University.


SPEAKER
Francesca Albanese was appointed the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, by the Human Rights Council at its 49th session in March 2022 and has taken up her function as of 1 May 2022. Ms. Albanese is an Affiliate Scholar at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University, as well as a Senior Advisor on Migration and Forced Displacement for a think-tank, Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development (ARDD). She has widely published on the legal situation in Israel and the State of Palestine and regularly teaches and lectures on international law and forced displacement at universities in Europe and the Arab region. Ms. Albanese has also worked as a human rights expert for the United Nations, including the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the UN Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees.

PANELISTS
Elazar Barkan is Professor of International and Public Affairs at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs. His research interests focus on human rights and on the role of history in contemporary society and politics and the response to gross historical crimes and injustices. His human rights work seeks to achieve conflict resolution and reconciliation by bringing scholars from two or more sides of a conflict together and employing historical methodology to create shared narratives across political divides and to turn historical dialogue into a fundamental tool of political reconciliation. 

Maria LaHood is Deputy Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where she represents Palestinian rights advocates facing suppression in the United States in cases such as Bronner v. Duggan, defending against a challenge to the American Studies Association’s resolution endorsing a boycott of Israeli academic institutions; and Jewish National Fund v. US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, a case challenging human rights advocacy under the Anti-Terrorism Act.

MODERATOR
Katherine Franke is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia University, and Director of the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law. She is also on the Executive Committees of Columbia’s Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender, and the Center for Palestine Studies. She is among the nation's leading scholars writing on law, sexuality, race, and religion drawing from feminist, queer, and critical race theory.

ABOUT Being There, Being Here
Arabic is unconditionally the national language of Palestinians, but for many it is no longer their mother-tongue. More than a century after the early waves of immigration to the Americas, and more than seven decades after the Nakba of 48, generations of Palestinians have grown up in a variety of different contexts within Israel-Palestine and the world at large. This ongoing scattered state has led to the proliferation of Palestinian culture as it is simultaneously growing in multiple directions, depending on geographical, political, and lingual contextualization. The Palestinian story no longer exists exclusively in Arabic. A new generation of Palestinian and Palestinian-descended writers and artists from both Latin and North America, Scandinavia, and Europe at large, as well as Israel-Palestine are bringing stories of their heritage and the Palestinian nation into a variety of languages such Spanish, Italian, English, Danish, and Hebrew—among so many other languages.

Being There, Being Here is the product of an eight-year long journey in which Maurice Ebileeni explores how the Palestinian homeland is being imagined in multiple languages from a variety of positions both locally and globally. The book poses unsettling questions about this current situation and also looks to the future to speculate about how a Palestinian nation might still house the notion of home for an increasingly diverse Palestinian population.

Enjoy 50% off with discount code 05BTBH22 when purchasing your copy of Being There, Being Here from Syracuse University Press. The offer expires on October 31, 2022.

SPEAKERS
Maurice Ebileeni is a member of the faculty in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Haifa.

Joseph Slaughter is a member of the faculty in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

ABOUT Mother of Strangers
Based on the true story of two Jaffa teenagers, Mother of Strangers follows the daily lives of Subhi, a fifteen-year-old mechanic, and Shams, the thirteen-year-old student he hopes to marry one day. In this prosperous and cosmopolitan port city, with its bustling markets, cinemas, and cafés on the hills overlooking the Mediter­ranean Sea, we meet many other unforgettable charac­ters as well, including Khawaja Michael, the elegant and successful owner of orange groves above the harbor; Mr. Hassan, the tailor who makes Subhi’s treasured English suit, which he hopes will change his life; and the very mischievous and outrageous Uncle Habeeb, who insists on introducing Subhi to the local bordello.

With a thriving orange export business, Jaffa had always been a city welcoming to outsiders—the “Mother of Strangers”—where Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived peacefully together. Once the bombardment of the city begins in April 1948, Suad Amiry gives us the grim but fascinating details of the shock, panic, and destruc­tion that ensues. Jaffa becomes unrecognizable, with neighborhoods flattened, families removed from their homes and separated, and those who remain in constant danger of arrest and incarceration. Most of the popula­tion flees eastward to Jordan or by sea to Lebanon in the north or to Egypt and Gaza in the south. Subhi and Shams will never see each other again.

Suad Amiry has written a vivid and devastating ac­count of a seminal moment in the history of the Middle East — the beginning of the end for Palestine and a portrait of a city irrevocably changed.

SPEAKERS
Suad Amiry is a writer and an architect. She is the author of six works of nonfiction, including Sharon and My Mother-in-Law, which was awarded the Viareggio-Versilia International Prize in 2004, and Golda Slept Here, which was awarded the Nonino Risit d’Aur Prize in 2014. Amiry received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture and is the founder of the RIWAQ Centre for Architectural Conservation in Ramallah, where she lives.

Rashid Khalidi is Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University.