now

My friend Esraa wrote a letter to the world as the genocide in Gaza enters its fourth year. Esraa should be in Ireland right now, studying for a master’s degree, but her visa was denied by the Irish government in an act of bureaucratic cruelty targeting her and 50 other students in Gaza who hold full scholarships from Irish universities. A legal challenge has been posed and the process is ongoing. Recently three of the denials were overturned, with the next hearings for more students, including Esraa, being held before the High Court in Dublin scheduled for tomorrow.

Dear World,

In case you don’t know, I managed to graduate this year, after so much struggle, with a degree in English Language and Literature. I graduated after my university, its library, and all the universities in Gaza were destroyed.

Three years.

I lost the home I had lived in my entire life. My beloved home. We stayed in it even after it was partially damaged, enduring rainwater leaking through the roof, until we lost it completely when it fell within what is now called the Yellow Line.

We had a piece of land where we grew olives and figs. A place big enough to hold my entire family. But the genocide swallowed that too.

Three years.

I used to sit around one table with my family, sharing stories about our ordinary days. Now, even the internet can barely carry our voices to one another. The war has scattered us, and each of us is trying to rebuild a life from zero.

Three years.

An ordinary day has become a dream.

As Esraa, I spend my days wondering what comes next. I think about my future. I received a full scholarship to study in Ireland, but my visa was refused. Now I live in an exhausting wait, holding on to a hope whose limits I cannot see, because it is almost all I have. But I don’t want to lose myself waiting for things that may never come.

I want to wake up and smell jasmine, not ashes.

I want to make a cup of mint tea without struggling to find water or light a fire.

I want to run through the corridors of my university, continue my education, and create art with all the materials I have ever dreamed of using, instead of drowning in overthinking.

I want to live.

Is that too much to ask?

Esraa

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

As the Armenian proverb puts it, The world is wide, but what use is it if my heart is narrow? How can we resist the urge to turn our faces away from the grim and ongoing spectacle of wholesale and retail slaughter in Gaza and Lebanon, massacres and land theft which are being perpetrated with our tax dollars and with the full-throated support of our government? The raging dumpster fires on every corner both domestically and internationally are designed to make us shrug and turn our backs. Most days when the big picture is overwhelming, I try to do even one small thing to make the world a little less cruel. And in coming together with other people—whether that be with my teammates at the Gaza Scholarship Initiative (GSI) or with my neighbors in our Morningside Rapid Response group—we find and create hope. There is hope in the work we do together, there is hope in Zohran Mamdani, the dynamic young mayor of New York City, and there is hope in supporting one person at a time as part of a broader movement for systemic change.

James and I are helping to raise funds for a talented young artist and writer in Gaza. She has been accepted with a fee waiver to a master’s program at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) in Dublin, but in order to qualify for a student visa she needs money for her evacuation, resettlement, and living expenses. You can read more about her and donate here.

One of my GSI mentees, Asem Aljerjawi, has written an eloquent and moving piece about his life in Dublin after surviving genocide in Gaza and while his family is still suffering there.

Anti- and non-Zionist Jewish Columbia faculty, including James and a number of our friends who are quoted in this Guardian piece, have filed claims with Trump’s “antisemitism fund.”

On his podcast Why Is This Happening? Chris Hayes spoke with Timnit Gebru about the ethics of AI. I found the discussion illuminating. “Timnit Gebru founded the Distributed AI Research Institute after her high-profile exit from Google’s Ethical AI team.” After you listen to the episode, check out the AI Resist List.

M. Gessen wrote a sobering analysis of the batshit crazy ALIENS webpage the White House launched about ten days ago. When I saw it I assumed it had sprung directly from the brain of Stephen Miller.

Now repeat after me:

The only recognizable feature of hope is action. (Grace Paley)

Choose your lane, find your people. (Mariame Kaba)

Freedom is a constant struggle. (Angela Davis)

The voice of the people is louder than the roar of the cannon. (Armenian proverb)

Let’s go!

xo

Nancy

This past Sunday, I was among those offering blessings at the baptism of a friend’s baby. In preparation, I paged through several anthologies and lists of Armenian proverbs that I have collected over the years and made and arranged the selection below.

Let’s sit crooked and talk straight.

The sun will rise whether the rooster crows or not.

Spring comes on the wings of the nightingale.

Birds fly with their wings, people with their kin.

Measure ten times, cut once.

Say it once, listen a thousand times.

Education is a golden bracelet.

You are as many people as the languages you know.

It is better to carry stones with a wise man than to eat pilaf with a fool.

A good tree is better than a bad person.

A lone walnut cannot make noise in a sack.

From heart to heart there is a path.

Tell me who your friend is and I will tell you who you are.

Be neither sweet and swallowed, nor sour and spurned.

Let it be one and fine.

A mother’s blessing will lift the curse of seven priests.

Nancy Kricorian

Birds fly with their wings, people with their kin. ~ Armenian proverb

The other day as I was driving along a country road to my volunteer job at the used bookstore that raises funds for our local public library upstate, I listened to the news on NPR. By the time I arrived at my destination, after hearing story after story about violence, cruelty, and corruption, my nerves were jangling. In the shop, the manager, who was sorting through donations, handed me a ten-year-old non-fiction book about characters in American history who had been devoted to the ideas of democracy and decency. She said, “Do you think anyone will buy this or should we get rid of it?” I answered, “It’s about people trying not to do bad things, which could be instructive at this moment.”

Another thing that I find helpful in this troubling time is being out in the natural world among wildflowers, mushrooms, red newts, frogs, butterflies, and birds. And during spring migration, the birds are especially diverting.

On May 8^th I joined staff members of the Hawthorne Valley Farmscape Ecology Program (FEP) for a bird walk on their 900-acre farm in Columbia County, New York. The highlight of the walk was an open field where we saw six male Bobolinks in their spectacular black, white, and yellow breeding plumage. Bobolinks, who spend the winter in South America, have a 6,000-mile journey to return to their spring breeding grounds in North America. They make their nests on the ground in open fields and grasslands, and modern hay mowing practices have contributed to their annual 2% decline since 1966 in the U.S. Hawthorne Valley delays mowing in one large field to give the Bobolinks an opportunity to successfully breed.

Last week, at the height of spring migration, I went on three bird walks in Central Park: one with my friend and bird guide Gabriel Willow starting at the 81^st Street and Central Park West entrance, one with New York City Bird Alliance’s Tod Winston in the North Woods, and the third with The Linnaean Society of New York, also in the North Woods. Central Park is one of New York City’s top birding locations, particularly during spring migration when over 25 million birds fly over the city on their routes north. Many of them pause for a day or two in our area. As Tod told the Upper West Side Rag, “During migration, birds kind of funnel into New York City parks in this really high concentration, which is what makes New York City a world-renowned birding spot…” On Thursday with Tod, we saw 62 species of birds, including 5 Scarlet Tanagers, and an array of warblers, among them Blackburnian, Chestnut-Sided, Blackpoll, Magnolia, Hooded, Canada, Nashville, Tennessee, and Cape May.

How’s that for diversion?

Yours in struggle,

Nancy Kricorian

READ and LISTEN

I have been mentoring a young writer from Gaza named Sahar Rabah, who is currently enrolled in the creative writing master’s program at Trinity Dublin (she is one of 50+ students the Gaza Scholarship Initiative assisted with university applications that resulted in their evacuations to Ireland in August/September 2025). Earlier this month it was announced that Sahar had won the Calibre Essay Prize from the Australian Book Review. Her elegant, powerful, and devastating essay entitled “Between Reality and Dreams” is behind a paywall and if you would like me to send you a PDF, please let me know.

My novel THE BURNING HEART OF THE WORLD was featured in this list of works celebrating Armenian mothers and grandmothers.

On this episode of his podcast WHY IS THIS HAPPENING? Chris Hayes interviews cognitive scientist and UC Berkeley professor Alison Gopnik about intelligence, AI, and learning. Gopnik argues that a typical two-year-old routinely outsmarts the most advanced AI models.

I just finished reading and highly recommend Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s new book Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, & Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground. It is a fascinating combination of family and social history about Dohrn’s parents Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, members of the radical revolutionary group The Weather Underground, and their lives and times. It expands on themes and materials that he used in his riveting 2022 podcast series MOTHER COUNTRY RADICALS.