now

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken…

 ~ Virginia Woolf, The Waves

For the past two years, when people ask me how I am doing, I have found myself saying, “Genocide, climate catastrophe, and fascist takeover aside, on a personal level, I am okay.” But a quick perusal of newspaper headlines or the update from WTF Just Happened Today undoes that sense of feeling okay. Rather than asking people how they are, I now tend to greet them with, “I’m so happy to see you!” Because in this dystopian time, being together with loved ones, comrades, and like-minded friends is the best balm for the spirit.

Where do you go for solace? A Palestinian friend of mine who lives in Ramallah says working in her garden is the only thing that keeps her sane. Another friend has taken up quilting. Lately, to distract myself, I have been reading 19^th Century English novels and then watching their BBC adaptations. I very much enjoyed Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and the 1996 television serial.

I also wanted to share some information with you about Alphabet/Google—and specifically Gmail—and what you need to do to protect your information. Without alerting users, Alphabet has defaulted Gmail settings so that its Gemini AI program can scrape data from your account, including all emails and attachments, for training purposes. A lawsuit against the company and its Gemini practices has been filed in California. You can read about how to disable Gemini and its scraping of your data, whereby the company is effectively spying on everything you do within Alphabet’s various apps and platforms. When you disable Gemini, you lose its tools, such as spellcheck and the sorting of emails into categories, but this seems like a small price to pay to protect your data and privacy.

Wishing you as much comfort and light as possible this holiday season and in the new year. May our daily practices of kindness and resistance make the world a little brighter.

Fond regards,

Nancy

READ AND LISTEN

An interesting piece by Adam Tooze on Zohran Mamdani’s win and the way forward

The former chair of Africana Studies at Bowdoin College via LitHub on why he would prefer not to talk to the New York Times about Zohran Mamdani.

Hamza Salha’s piece in the Limerick Voice: ‘When I saw Ireland, I Cried’: Palestinian Students Escape War to Study at UL.

Spencer Ackerman blasts a former Obama speechwriter’s viral video from the Jewish Federation conference: Sarah Hurwitz Profanes the Holocaust

PalFest Podcast episode “A choice between extermination and justice”: Ta-Nahisi Coates interviews Tareq Baconi.

International Armenian Literary Association (IALA) holiday book guide (with my latest novel at the top of the list).

Nancy Kricorian

I have known Zohran Mamdani and his parents since he was eight years old and in the same third grade classroom with our elder child at the Bank Street School. We have been friends of the family since that time. My spouse James and Zohran’s dad Mahmoud were founding faculty members of Columbia’s Center for Palestine Studies. James was the studio executive at Focus Features who greenlit his mother Mira Nair’s film adaptation of Vanity Fair. It’s almost surreal to have witnessed Zohran’s meteoric rise in the past six months. Last night as our family watched the elections returns—Noah and I were in Morningside Heights, James was on a trip to Los Angeles, and Djuna joined a thousand DSAMembers at the Masonic Temple in Fort Greene, Brooklyn—we were texting each other photos, memes, and updates and then sharing our jubilation when the election was called on his behalf.

James said to me this morning, Now they know the only way to stay in power is a fascist putsch, so it’s going to be dangerous. But, as my friend Rebecca put it, at least the fight is on. And we won’t only be fighting the horsemen of the apocalypse (as I call the current administration) but the Democratic “centrists” who seem to be more afraid of the left wing of their party and anti-genocide protesters than they are of the authoritarian, grifting racists they are putatively in opposition to.

Let’s take a moment to celebrate Zohran’s inspiring and historic win. And then let’s get back to work.

Fond regards,

Nancy

Last month I traveled to Ireland to meet university students who had been evacuated from Gaza in August and September. I am part of a group that had helped them apply to Irish universities and to secure scholarships for both undergraduate and post-graduate programs. This effort has been among the most satisfying and meaningful experiences of my life. Over twenty members of our all-volunteer team, three of whom live in Ireland with others coming from the U.S., Canada, and Jordan, converged in Dublin for several days of meetings with the students and with each other.

Most of these students had been awarded scholarships to U.S. universities but had been trapped in Gaza for more than a year, unable to reach the campuses for which they were destined. The receiving country would have to negotiate with the Israeli government to enable their safe passage, and chances were nil that the Trump administration would do this. So, earlier this year, our team pivoted to Ireland, where we knew these brilliant young people would be welcomed with open hearts and open arms.

After months of communicating with them via WhatsApp and Signal chats while they were living amidst a genocide in Gaza, greeting these students in the real world was an almost unimaginable joy. I arrived a few days earlier than most of our group so I could spend time with my mentee and friend S, a poet who is enrolled in Trinity’s master’s program in creative writing. I thought it would be strange, finally being in the same physical space after our year and a half of almost daily communication on message platforms while she was in Gaza, but when I arrived at her student apartment, the only thing I learned that I didn’t already know was how tall she was. She gave me a tour of the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing, we walked along the river, dined at a Palestinian restaurant, and rode bicycles in Phoenix Park where we went in search of the fallow deer and found them at the far end of the park.

I also made an overnight trip to the University of Limerick with two other mentors to meet our cohort of students there and the administrators who had scrambled the resources to support them. As nineteen of us were seated in a Lebanese restaurant in Limerick, one of the students gestured at the platters arrayed on the long table and said to me, “I wish I could take this food to my family in Gaza.” All these students had left their families behind, and their emotional well-being is pegged to how their parents, siblings, and extended family are faring in Gaza. Each of them is also struggling with the trauma of what they had seen and survived, along with the guilt of having escaped. The young journalists among them carried the added burden of what they had witnessed and documented through their work.

Despite all this, our weekend together in Dublin overflowed with joy and love. On Saturday night, over a hundred students, mentors, and university administrators filled a local restaurant with conversation, laughter, and song. At an all-day workshop for the students on Sunday, during the lunch break, someone turned on music, and the students pulled us to join them in dance. Looking around the room at the beautiful faces of these students and my fellow mentors, I felt proud of these young people and of our work safeguarding their futures and the future of Palestine.

If anyone is interested in learning more our efforts, which will now shift in part to supporting the rebuilding of the educational sector in Gaza, please get in touch with me directly.

All best,

Nancy

WATCH AND READ

Public Instagram reel of Mohammed Hirez, one of our students in Ireland, as he says goodbye to his twin brother and widowed father on the morning of his evacuation from Gaza to Ireland. It is an unfathomably cruel world that forces this kind of separation on them without their knowing when they will meet again.

Palestine Deep Dive video interview with Hamza Salha, another of our students and a journalist, entitled “Buried Under Rubble.”

Abdallah Aljazzar’s “My Last Words to Gaza” about the heartbreak of leaving his family behind.

My We Are Not Numbers mentee Nadera Mushtha on returning to the rubble of her family home in Shujaiya. Nadera is still internally displaced within Gaza.

On the Nose (Jewish Currents’ podcast) episode: The Rabbinic Freak-Out About Zohran Mamdani. (And may Zohran be the next mayor of New York City!)

A conversation between Marianne Hirsh and M. Gessen about the field of Holocaust Studies and the impact of the genocide in Gaza.

Video recording of the Markaz Review Book Club’s discussion of my recently published novel The Burning Heart of the World.

Ai Weiwei via Hyperallergic on Germany and the art world—never a mention of Gaza, but it underlies the whole piece. “Under most circumstances, society selects the most selfish, least idealistic among us to take on the work we call ‘art’ because that choice makes everyone feel safe.”

Nancy Kricorian

Mariam Kaba’s admonition to, “Choose your lane, find your people,” has brought me into familiar circles of organizing and activism on behalf of Palestine and has introduced me to new literary friends and political comrades. These relationships and the work we are doing together give me a sense of hope and purpose in this truly dismal moment.

As the deliberately engineered famine and relentless bombing continue in Gaza, as Israel flattens the last remaining buildings in Gaza City, and forces its residents to flee south into ever smaller areas, the U.S. is floating a plan to empty Gaza of its Palestinian inhabitants so it can be turned into a casino on the Mediterranean. In the face of this fathomless cruelty and lawlessness, the majority of the world’s people stand with Palestine. The problem is that those in power are not holding Israel to account for its flagrant crimes, and the U.S., the U.K., and Germany are arming, covering for, and colluding in this horror. This genocide has ripped the mask off all our institutions in the west—it has shown the bankruptcy and venality of the government, the press, the academy, arts organizations, etc.

It’s grimly fascinating that images of intentionally starved children have prompted these leaders to at least SAY something about the crisis that has been created in Gaza. It seems that bombing, maiming, and killing tens of thousands of children are tolerable outcomes; but starving them is such a bad look that they have mumbled a few words of condemnation. Whether this turns into meaningful action like arms embargoes, boycotts, and sanctions remains to be seen.

A ray of light in all this has been the work I have done with a group of dedicated volunteers helping students in Gaza to find scholarships at Irish universities. Months of labor resulted in an evacuation of several dozen students to Ireland last week. After weeks of waiting, days of not being sure whether the evacuation would take place, and then a grueling 16-hour bus ride from Deir al Balah to Amman, these young people finally flew to Dublin. There was coverage in RTE of the arrival of the first group of students and this video at the Dublin airport features a young journalism student that I know. What a relief for them to have made their way to safety and to have found a way to continue their education after Israel’s scholasticide in Gaza. But what sadness they all feel about the families they left behind.

Getting to know these brilliant young people has been one of the privileges of my life. Our communications have been mainly through WhatsApp and Signal messages, voice memos, and occasional phone calls, and we have become friends without ever having been in a room together. As soon as they touched down in Ireland, I booked my plane ticket to Dublin. Inshallah—which is a word I have repeated so frequently lately that I’m thinking of having it tattooed on my arm in both Arabic and English—we will meet in the real world in October.

Nancy Kricorian

SUGGESTED READING

Sahar Rabah’s “Children of War” was translated into English by Ammiel Alcalay. Her Argentinian publisher shared an Instagram reel of this poem being read in Spanish. Sahar was part of last week’s evacuation to Ireland and starts in the master’s program in creative writing at Trinity College Dublin next week.

I highly recommend this important piece by Simone Zimmerman entitled Rhetoric Without Reckoning. In Jewish Currents, she argues that a new wave of liberal Zionist criticism of the Israeli government smacks of hypocrisy without an account of early support for what many people recognized from the beginning was a genocidal campaign. She says, “Only the logic that Jewish death is unacceptable and Palestinian death is a tragic necessity can explain the way these leaders remained ensconced in a story about Jewish victimhood as Gaza burned. In fact, even within that very first week after October 7th, there was no way to tell a story exclusively about Jewish victimhood unless you simply did not value Palestinian lives.”

This is an interview that Olivia Katrandjian did with me for The Washington Independent Review of Books.

And finally here is another classic from James about the dumpster fire in Morningside Heights via LitHub: “Where Is My Anti-Semitism Money?”

The horsemen of the apocalypse continue their rampage against immigrants, trans people, women, abortion, history, the environment, and dissent. Their motto seems to be: A fire on every corner, a fox in every henhouse, a grifter and thief with a hand in every till. Meanwhile, and relatedly, the Israeli government launched a war against Iran that the U.S. government joined, and while that seems to be over for the moment, these vile collaborators continue apace with a genocide in Gaza. All of this is demoralizing, but we must keep our proverbial shoulders to the wheel, and we need to do it together.

On a brighter note, Columbia graduate and former student protest leader Mahmoud Khalil was released from detention and returned to his wife and infant son in New York City. I was at the rally held on the steps of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine on Sunday afternoon where Mahmoud spoke passionately about his personal ordeal and the suffering of the other men he met in the ICE detention facility in Louisiana. He said his imprisonment had only firmed his resolve to keep speaking out for Palestine. He then led a march to the gates of Columbia University to denounce the administration’s hypocrisy. His attorneys are still fighting the government’s attempts to have him deported because they claim that his speech is a “national security threat,” but at least now, he is home with his family.

Today is the mayoral primary election in New York City, where Zohran Mamdani is running neck-and-neck with bully and sexual harasser Andrew Cuomo. Because the city now uses ranked choice voting, the results will likely not be known until July 1^st. On a side note, I have known Zohran since he was 8 years old and an elementary school classmate of our oldest child. And no matter what the result, I have felt like a proud auntie watching his excellent and practically flawless campaign.

My friend Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian’s inspiring book FOREST EUPHORIA, which was published on May 27, is already a national bestseller, and you can read an excerpt of it on LitHub. Patty and I will be in conversation about the book on Saturday, 28 June at 1 p.m. on Zoom as part of the International Armenian Literary Alliance’s Literary Light Series. You may register to join us here.

The Massachusetts Review published two poems by friend and mentee Sahar Rabah, who is still in Gaza where starvation and daily bombardment continue and are barely covered in U.S. mainstream media. The MassReview also published my young friend T.S.’s powerful piece Why Must We Be Heroes? My mentee Nadera Mushtha’s piece about higher education in Gaza during a genocide was published by The Guardian.

Leila Sansour wrote a clear-eyed if devastating analysis of why Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war against the entrapped and besieged Palestinians in Gaza. In the face of this depraved cruelty, her conclusion is that we must support the rebuilding of Palestinian society: “The strategy to confront it should therefore focus on unwavering commitment to rebuilding kinship, a sense of shared purpose, restoration of community, and civic dignity.”

Let’s follow the example of Ms. Rachel for Littles and do something every day that shows our commitment to creating a world where all children are cherished, where no children are bombed and starved, where families are not torn apart by masked thugs, and where all beings, human and non-human, are respected.

Yours,

Nancy K

P.S. I will be joining The Markaz Review Book Club’s meeting to discuss THE BURNING HEART OF THE WORLD on Zoom on Sunday, July 27 at 1 p.m. ET/19 CET. You can learn more about the book club and sign up for the event here.