Summer Trips, Books, and Controversies
I started the summer with late June week in Ireland. I went to visit Palestinian students from Gaza who were evacuated last August. I spent most of the time in Dublin with a day trip to the seaside town of Bray and a two-day foray to Limerick to take the large contingent of students out to dinner at the same Lebanese restaurant where we dined in October. The students were, overall, doing much better physically and emotionally than they were when I last saw them. But there was an undercurrent of sadness and suffering related to their new lives in exile and to anxiety about their families still in Gaza, where despite a supposed “ceasefire” the siege and daily killings continue.
In mid-July, Irish President Catherine Connolly hosted over 70 students from Gaza in an event that the President’s office touted widely and that was covered in the Irish press. My mentee and friend Sahar Rabah, a creative writing master’s student at Trinity College who was invited to offer some words, sent me the text of her speech, excerpted below:
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the people of Ireland for opening their hearts and their universities to us.
We arrived carrying uncertainty, worry for our families, and dreams that seemed impossible to continue. Here in Ireland, we found not only classrooms and libraries, but kindness, dignity, and a chance to keep believing in our future.
Education has given us more than a degree. It has given us hope, resilience, and the responsibility to use what we have learned to serve others and contribute to rebuilding our communities whenever that becomes possible.
On behalf of the students from Gaza, I would like to thank the Government of Ireland, our universities, our lecturers, and everyone who supported us throughout this journey. Your generosity will stay with us for the rest of our lives.
We hope that one day we can return home carrying knowledge instead of fear, and help build a future defined by education, opportunity, and peace.
The sad irony was that the next day, the Irish Embassy in Tel Aviv started issuing visa denials to the next cohort of students in Gaza awaiting evacuation. The students who received these letters, equally qualified as those from last year, were devastated. The visa process is being managed this year by the Departments of Justice and Foreign Affairs and the applications that were rejected this July were supported by the very same documentation that was accepted last year. Esraa, the student with a full scholarship to the National College of Art and Design with whom I have been working, was among those whose applications were rejected. We are now in the process of assembling materials for a potential appeal and will be consulting with lawyers in Ireland about the best strategy for Esraa and the other students whose educational futures are hanging in the balance.
On the literary front…
My favorite book so far this year is Harriet Clark’s beautifully written, brilliant, and mesmerizing novel The Hill told from the point of view of a girl who lives with her grandparents in New York City and makes weekly visits to her mother who is incarcerated in a women’s prison at the top of the eponymous hill.
The Jewish Currents On the Nose podcast interview with Clark provided a great introduction to Clark and the novel:
Harriet Clark comes from a long line of radicals. Her ancestors were gun runners in Minsk. Her grandparents were active members of the Communist Party USA, and the family moved to Moscow for a time, where her grandfather wrote for the Daily Worker. Her mother is Judith Clark, a former member of the Weather Underground and the May 19th Communist Organization, who was given a life sentence for her participation in the Brinks robbery in 1981 that killed three people. (Judith was paroled in 2019.) Harriet Clark’s debut novel, The Hill, tells the story of a girl who vows to visit her mother every week in the upstate New York prison where she is being held. In this episode of On the Nose, Arielle Angel speaks with Harriet about her stunning new book, what comes after failure in radical movements, and the heroism of trying to keep families affected by incarceration together.
Clark’s book was published within weeks of Zayd Ayers Dorhn’s memoir Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young: My Fugitive Family in the Revolution, which I also read and admired. Following up on his superbly produced 2022 podcast Mother Country Radicals, Dohrn’s book goes into greater detail about family life with his parents, Weather Underground members Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. The New York Times (gift link) ran an interesting double interview with Harriet Clark and Zayd Dohrn, who met for the first time for the purposes of the article.
Meanwhile over at PEN America, there were more shenanigans and controversy. When Chief Communications Officer Geraldine Baum, in a parting salvo written with two co-authors, published a dubious “blog” entitled “A Silent Moratorium” about the “silencing “of Israeli and Jewish writers that relied entirely on anecdotes and circumvented standard internal protocols for PEN reports, the proverbial shit hit the fan—there was coverage of the controversy in the New York Times (gift link). Then PEN America President Dinaw Mengestu resigned in protest and issued a letter explaining why. He also spoke with Josh Nathan-Kazis of Jewish Currents and had this to say:
If people are experiencing that kind of discrimination in publishing, which is the heart of PEN America’s work, we should care more than just providing anecdotal evidence. We should really try to document and show exactly how this happened. To do it so haphazardly is an offense. If this report were about discrimination against Black writers and this is what they did, I would be fucking enraged.
Many people were enraged, including Wellesley Professor of Jewish Studies and English Josh Lambert, who wrote on Substack:
But if we want to understand what is happening in contemporary literature and culture, we cannot simply take a survey of disgruntled writers and polemicists and then circulate their statements as fact. I did not talk to Mengestu, or even read his social media statements about why he stepped down as PEN president. But I would certainly be embarrassed to be associated with such a sloppy piece of work, especially one that is guaranteed to feed the pernicious weaponization of antisemitism.
In a 12 July Instagram post, Mengestu said, “I am not boycotting PEN America. Like many other writers who have reached out to me, I am walking away from it permanently, and I will do everything I can now to help make something better.” After 23 years as a member of PEN America, I declined to pay my dues in 2026, and I aspire to join him in that better place.
Yours in struggle,
Nancy
Nancy Kricorian
August 4, 2026
