Tag Archives: genocide

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.

We have gone from a war on an abstract noun (terror) to a war on immigrants and asylum seekers. The southern border has been declared a military zone and crossing any border has left tourists, students, green card holders, and citizens prey to arbitrary questioning and possible detention. Another Columbia student was kidnapped, and in Gaza the genocide continues unabated. No humanitarian aid has entered Gaza since March 2^nd of this year, and this week Israeli defense minister Israel Katz announced that none will enter. His brazen remarks about the weaponization of food are basically the trumpeting of a war crime, but who will hold Israel to account?

Yesterday 25-year-old Fatma Hassona, a writer and photographer, was killed in Gaza. In January 2024, she was the sole survivor of an Israeli airstrike that killed most of her. On April 16, she and the remaining members of her family were killed in another airstrike in Gaza City. She was mourned in Gaza by young people who knew her or knew of her work.

Nadera wrote on Facebook, I could not sleep, Fatma, after you were killed. I saw all your photos as if they were glued to my eyelids, and I saw your words and texts that I read over and over in front of me in lines like a fence. Your departure killed me, Fatma, but it also killed our whole generation.

Sahar wrote to me, I’m thinking about Fatma, I think about her fiancé. She had only been engaged for two months, and she dreamed of a good life like any other girl in Gaza. I carry something like a rock on my heart and tonight it feels heavier than that. Fatma is gone. Mahasen, the painter, is gone. Dina, the painter is gone. Dhargham is gone (he was working on presenting small plays for children in tents). Muhammad Sami is gone. He was playing with children in the Baptist Hospital building when it was bombed last year. The friends I know are disappearing one by one. I swear to you that yesterday I felt that Gaza was extinguished, completely extinguished when Fatima left. You don’t know how much Fatima inspired girls like me and Nadera and all of us with her strength and her love for everything. By photographing the beautiful Gaza, which is still beautiful. What do we have left now?

I wrote back to Sahar:

I know that it is so hard because of the suffering of your people, of the destruction of Gaza, and because of the sense of powerlessness in the face of this unrelenting violence and cruelty. I am far from Gaza and in a basically safe place with plenty of food and water, but I struggle here to not give into despair because of this sense of impotence in the face of their depravity (all these horsemen of the apocalypse). I repeat this motto over and again, “The only recognizable feature of hope is action.” And I try to do something every day. Being in touch with you, helping you edit poems, sending your poems out to magazines…working on your graduate school applications, following up on them. These are things that give me hope. I want you to try to keep your eyes and your heart pinned on your bright future. Mourn your losses, suffer for your people, but don’t give up hope.

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).

Yours in struggle,

Nancy K

READ

My mentee Nadera Mushtha’s piece on the destruction of Gaza’s cemeteries: This genocide must be stopped, so that our city that was once a calm place for both the living and the dead will stop being a rubble-strewn necropolis. 

Ben Ehrenreich’s beautifully written and wrenching piece about the West Bank in Harper’s: The camp’s young men had seen enough to believe that they would be killed whether they fought or not. “So, they started asking themselves, ‘Why wait for them to kill us?’ 

The following are all pieces related to the launch of my novel earlier this month. An essay I wrote for LitHub about my grandmother, a 1940 Shirley Temple movie, the Armenian Genocide, and my writing life. An interview I did with photojournalist and photo editor Aline Manoukian on the 50^th Anniversary of the start of the Lebanese Civil War via Hyperallergic. Kate Tuttle wrote about the new novel for The Boston Globe (sorry it’s behind a paywall). An interview I did with Eleanor Bader for In These Times. Coverage of our The Politics and Poetics of Memory panel on April 1 at OxyArts. A snappy Q & A I did for the Armenian International Women’s Association (AIWA). Coverage of a visit I made to talk with 8^th grade students at St. Gregory’s Armenian School in Pasadena.

WATCH & LISTEN

Also related to my book launch. Super dynamic Author2Author Podcast interview I did with Bill Kenower. Video recording of my conversation with Nanore Barsoumian as part of the Literary Lights series on April 15. A Twitter live interview about The Burning Heart of the World with NPR’s Scott Simon for his Open Book series.

SUPPORT

If you would like to support The Burning Heart of the World and you’re a member of Goodreads, you can review and rate the new book here. You can ask your local public library or your neighborhood independent bookstore to order it. Or you can purchase a copy directly from Red Hen Press via IndiePubs.

As many of you know, my spouse James teaches at Columbia University, which has again been much in the news. Things have been moving so fast that it’s hard to keep up with a situation that grows ever more dire. On Friday, March 7 when the Horsemen of the Apocalypse announced that Columbia would be losing $400 million in federal research funding, with much of this loss hitting the medical school, James wrote a letter to his fellow Jewish faculty that was subsequently published on LitHub. The ostensible reason for the government’s ire was rampant antisemitism on the Columbia campus. Let us be clear, an administration whose members have been giving Nazi salutes and empowering known white nationalists does not care about actual antisemitism. They are using these charges as a sort of Trojan horse to muscle their way onto campuses to quash dissent and to stage a hostile takeover. They want to do to higher education in America, starting with Columbia, what DeSantis did to New College in Florida. The Education Department sent warning letters to 60 colleges and universities that they are being investigated for antisemitism, using a definition of the term that conflates antizionism with antisemitism and characterizes protest against genocide as illegal support for a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. And at the end of last week they sent a letter to Columbia that was a hodgepodge of wild demands. Meanwhile, the Columbia Jewish Alumni Association and far-right Betar U.S., the latter of which created and shared with the horsemen a list of students they want targeted for deportation, are at the very least cheering from the sidelines.

The day after James penned his letter, Department of Homeland Security plainclothes officers followed a recently graduated Columbia grad student named Mahmoud Khalil into his university housing, effectively kidnapping him in front of his pregnant and horrified wife, who filmed the proceedings on her phone. By Sunday evening, he had been, without due process, whisked to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana and stripped of his residency status. He is not accused of any crime—he is being targeted because of his role as a mediator in the anti-genocide protests on the campus and statements he has made against the carnage in Gaza. The Center for Constitutional Rights, the ACLU, and CUNY Clear attorneys are representing Mahmoud Khalil in his fight against his incarceration and possible deportation. A federal judge issued a stay preventing his removal while the case is adjudicated.

Last Monday afternoon Columbia faculty held a press conference in support of Mahmoud and denouncing the university administration’s draconian punishments against student protesters. Professor Marianne Hirsch, who is a Holocaust scholar and the child of survivors, gave a moving and impassioned speech about growing up in a totalitarian dictatorship in Romania and the echoes of that experience in Mahmoud’s mistreatment. Professor Nadia Abu El-Haj spoke about the twisted notion of campus “safety” that has been employed by people who don’t want students protesting what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank, and about the fact that it is Mahmoud Khalil who is not safe.

On Thursday, the phenomenal organizers of Jewish Voice for Peace and JVP NYC staged a mass civil disobedience action in Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan calling for the release of Mahmoud Khalil. Among their banners were ones saying: FIGHT NAZIS, NOT STUDENTS; JEWS FOR PALESTINIAN FREEDOM; and NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE. I was unable to join them because I was home sick with COVID (another story), but James was there, and was quoted in the New York Times coverage:

James Schamus, a Columbia professor who participated in the protest and is Jewish, said he thought the notion that the campus was “somehow a hotbed of antisemitic intolerance” was ridiculous.

“We all know that if anything, Columbia is a hotbed of students raising their voice and conscience, and in protest against the inhumane policies that this regime is imposing,” he said.

Since the start of the genocide in Gaza, this has been a fight with two fronts—one struggle is to stop the mass violence against civilians being carried out with our tax dollars and with the full participation of our government, and the second is to resist the repression of political dissent in this country. To be clear, the Biden Administration’s full throttle support for Israel’s murderous campaign in Gaza, coupled with its demonization of the student protests, set the stage for what we are seeing now.

It’s a scary time—they are doxxing, harassing, and targeting individuals to cow the rest of us into submission. One of our neighbors, a brilliant Columbia research scientist named Jennifer Manly, was just denounced on the front page of the New York Post. As another of our neighbors put it in a group email, “Their attack on her shows how little any of this has to do with antisemitism or even with Gaza. This one is just a straight up attack on Jen’s work on race and the social determinants of health.” They are out to destroy livelihoods and lives, as was done during the McCarthy era. Keeping in mind relative risk and relative privilege, we must all do what we can to protect each other and to stand for what we know is right.

Nancy Kricorian

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LISTEN

An excellent episode of The Dig podcast, featuring Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Mike McCarthy on the MAGA and DOGE war on woke. It’s LONG, but the first hour is particularly good, and I found Keeanga’s trenchant analysis to be helpful.

Fantastic Between the Covers interview with Omar El Akkad, author of the new book One Day Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This. I am a huge fan of David Naimon’s podcast, and this is bar none the best episode I have listened to.

READ

Interview with the ever-brilliant Palestinian novelist Adana Shibli.

Muskism and McCarthyism: Fascinating discussion with political science professor Corey Robin about fear in the workplace. “Fear is an amplification method. Governments only have a certain level of coercive power; they can’t map, let along control, all of society. What they can do is use fear to extend the coercive power they do have further than it might otherwise god. Fear, then, is a way of getting people to do what you want them to do, without having to exercise the coercive power that might otherwise be necessary to get them to do it.”

The official publication date of my new novel THE BURNING HEART OF THE WORLD is April 1, but friends have told me they are already receiving their preordered copies. Nanore Barsoumian wrote a beautiful and thoughtful review in The Armenian Weekly. Library Journal said, This is a fast-moving, relatable story that would be a good addition to a historical fiction section or fiction of special interest to women. Fans of Lisa Wingate and Chris Bohjalian will also enjoy it.

ACT

April 17 Day of Action for Higher Ed.

Check out Tesla Takedown.

Support your local public library with For the People.

Sign up for alerts from Save the Post Office

If you’re in New York City, sign up for alerts from local organizers Rise and Resist.

Greetings, dear friends. In this most horrific of times as we continue to watch a livestreamed genocide in Gaza, I’m sending you a quick note about two upcoming events. Both are benefits for organizations providing medical care and psychosocial support to Palestinian children.

On Saturday, November 9^th from 3-5 p.m. on Zoom, I will be offering a workshop entitled Life Stories that is part of Workshops for Gaza, which organizes online classes and workshops on a variety of topics to raise money for Palestinians who are trying to survive the ongoing genocide of their people and the destruction of their homeland.

LIFE STORIES: In this workshop with novelist Nancy Kricorian, participants will use family stories and oral history as a point of departure for writing fiction and narrative nonfiction. Participants will read short prose pieces by authors such as Grace Paley, Jayne Anne Phillips, and William Saroyan, then work on a series of in-class writing exercises to be shared and discussed.

I have selected the Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund as the recipient of monies from my workshop. In 2017 when I was on a research trip to Beirut, I met Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon who is a close friend of a friend. As I listened to his stories at a café in Hamrah, I was impressed by the work he did with children who had been injured in war zones. When the genocide started in Gaza I was amazed and awed to see him in news reports from the besieged hospitals in the Strip.

You can sign up for the workshop here. You may donate to the Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund here.

Also on November 9th, I will be participating in a reading entitled Translators Against Genocide from 6-8 p.m. at The People’s Forum in Manhattan. I’m a bit of a cuckoo’s egg as a novelist in this lineup of literary translators, including my friends Susan Bernofsky, Nick Glastonbury, and Kira Joseffson. The event is part of the Writers for Palestine series and will be a benefit for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.

I’ll write a longer message soon. In the meantime, please read Arundhati Roy’s brilliant PEN Pinter Prize acceptance speech. And as poet Eileen Myles tells us, do everything you can to stop the U.S.-sponsored genocide in Gaza and mass murder in Lebanon.

Yours in struggle,

Nancy K

On the first day of classes at Columbia yesterday, some students poured red paint over the Alma Mater statue in the Quad as an opening salvo. My photo of the bloodied statue, a symbol that there would be no business as usual on the campus as the U.S. sponsored assault on Gaza continued, went viral on X.

I am in touch almost daily with my mentees in and from Gaza, so I hear their firsthand accounts of what they and their families are living. You can read their work: Sahar Rabah has two poems in The Markaz Review, and We Are Not Numbers posted Nadera Mushtha’s essay about the destruction of her family’s olive grove.

As this genocide grinds into its twelfth month, my young friends sound increasingly despairing. The driving rain over the weekend flooded tents, destroying people’s belongings and raising the specter of waterborne diseases. Every week someone loses another family friend, a cousin, or a former professor to an Israeli bombing attack in a civilian area. As another young person I know put it, “There are no humanitarian areas in Gaza; every corner is soaked in blood.”

In addition to my work with We Are Not Numbers, I have been volunteering with the Gaza Scholarship Initiative for Displaced Students, which is helping to find spots in U.S. and European institution of higher learning for undergraduate and graduate students whose universities have been destroyed. Some of these students, the ones who managed to exit Gaza before the Rafah crossing was wrecked and sealed, are already on U.S. campuses. Some of them are still trapped in Gaza, their universities having deferred their admissions to the Spring semester. Sahar is one of these students; she should be at Rutgers in the MFA Program in Creative Writing right now, and the hope is that she will be able to get to Cairo as soon as the border opens so she can fly to the U.S. in December for a January start in Newark.

When will the genocide stop? When will the border open? And how can we speak of Gaza without mentioning the horrors  currently going on in the West Bank, as Israeli politicians threaten to turn it into a “mini-Gaza”?

I heard a former Israeli hostage negotiator named Gershon Baskin on Democracy Now this morning talking about how to come to a deal to end the carnage in Gaza, and he said, “…it will take extreme American pressure on Netanyahu to make a deal. And the Americans have the pressure, if they were to choose to use it.”

Vice-President and presidential contender Kamala Harris claimed that she was heartbroken over the scale of the suffering in Gaza; she claimed that the Biden Administration has been working around the clock for months to get a ceasefire deal. As Palestinian-American poet, novelist, and psychologist Hala Alyan put it in her recent New York Times Op-Ed,

I appreciate Ms. Harris’s broken heart. What I’d appreciate more is a direct naming of who is killing and starving Palestinians, acts that are neither inevitable nor without a perpetrator. I’d appreciate the upholding of international law through sanctions and an arms embargo. 

Tell the Biden Administration and Congress to Stop Arming Israel.

Yours in struggle,

Nancy K

P.S.

Red Hen Press, which is celebrating its 30^th Anniversary this year and will be publishing my new novel in April 2025, received a great writeup in Publishers Weekly.

I wanted to share this brilliant and moving piece, entitled “Gloves On,” by Anne Carson about “the black doorway” and living with Parkinson’s Disease.

Everything feels rather dire right now, from the awful clown show of American politics, to the terror of a burning planet, so I’ve again been finding solace in the natural world. I saw a Scarlet Tanager flitting through the tree canopy the other day, and after hearing its eerie, echoing song at the top of the ridge, I finally caught a glimpse of a Hermit Thrush. We have been eating oyster mushrooms and chanterelles that I foraged in the woods, as well as copious greens from our garden. And sunsets by the pond have been spectacular.

I just handed in the copy edited manuscript of my novel, The Burning Heart of the World, which will be published on April 1, 2025 by Red Hen Press, and can now be pre-ordered from Bookshop.org. A publisher decides how many copies to print in part based on the number of preorders, so ordering the book ahead is a good way to support an author, including yours truly. I have started scheduling events for April in Los Angeles, New York, and Detroit. If you want me to come to a bookstore (or a community center) near you, let me know. I will also be available for in-person and virtual reading group visits.

Also on the literary front, I was disappointed to read a terrible story about much admired and lauded fiction writer Alice Munro, but I loved this interview in Mizna with poet Chase Berggrun.

Last month my elder child Noah’s debut feature film, Summer Solstice, opened for limited runs in New York and Los Angeles. It received a rave review and was a Critic’s Pick in the New York Times. The Los Angeles Times review was also excellent. Noah did a number of interviews, among them one in Variety, one in Filmmaker, and another in Film Stage.

As Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza grinds into its tenth month, a small bright spot was the fact that Armenia recognized the Palestinian state. Mary Turfah’s piece Running Amok, about the horrific images Israeli soldiers are posting from Gaza and what they mean about Zionism past and present, was a tough read in the Baffler. Israeli historian Ilan Pappe wrote a bracing piece about The Collapse of Zionism in the New Left Review. Some of my new organizer friends were involved in a Gaza protest during New York City’s Pride parade. I have started working with a new mentee in Gaza through We Are Not Numbers—a collaboration made difficult by the intermittent and poor Internet access Nadera has in Shujaya. I hope to be able to share one of her essays soon.

Thanks for reading. I hope you’re keeping cool.

Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil, struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness.

~ Vasily Grossman, LIFE AND FATE

In this bleak time, I find hope in the organizing I have been doing with Jewish Voice for Peace, We Are Not Numbers, Writers Against the War on Gaza, and like-minded friends and comrades. Last week I went to Albany for the Not on Our Dime campaign rally and press conference organized by State Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani. I count myself lucky that our family is united in opposition to Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, and that our circle of friends is filled with people who have been speaking out against the atrocities we are witnessing daily on our smart phones.

I have been so focused on the horror in Gaza that I can only tolerate a few minutes a day of contemplating the dire situation in Armenia, as the Armenian government’s tense negotiations over demarcating “disputed” areas of the border with Azerbaijan have resulted in the handover of some villages, which is causing much internal strife. In the meantime, in ethnically cleansed Artsakh, Azerbaijan’s destruction of Armenian cultural heritage proceeds apace. And then there is the dubious land deal threatening the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem, which occurs at the intersection of things Armenian and Palestinian. 

In March, I wrote a talk for a beleaguered group of dissident grad students at an unnamed university, which according to the students’ accounts has turned into a quasi-totalitarian state.  This essay, in which I avoided certain terms at the request of my hosts who feared repercussions of stating things too baldly in that context, was recently published by The Markaz Review: “A Small Kernel of Human Kindness: Some Notes on Solidarity and Resistance.” 

PalFest posted video of my introduction to the Freedom To Write for Palestine event at Judson Church on May 7. My friend and Armenian tutor Sosy Mishoyan and I did a Western Armenian translation of Mosab Abu Toha’s poem, “Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear.” Two of my mentee Haya Abu Nasser’s powerful poems appeared in The Massachusetts Review at the end of last week. And my spouse James wrote an open letter to Columbia’s Task Force on Antisemitism in response to said task force’s dangerous conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism.

Beloved Armenian illustrator, artist, and writer Nonny Hogrogian passed away recently, and her obituary in the New York Times gives a sense of her long and storied life, most of it spent with her devoted husband and collaborator David Kherdian, to whom I sent my profound condolences. Nonny’s Caldecott Award picture book One Fine Day is a perennial favorite, and it is my custom to send a copy of that book to friends upon the birth of their first child.

On a brighter note, James and I recently celebrated our 35^th wedding anniversary. The week before that milestone, our daughter Djuna graduated from New York University Law School. The commencement ceremony was interrupted twice by the unfurling Palestinian flags in front of the podium and approximately 100 of the 500 graduates, including Djuna, were wearing keffiyehs. In September she will be starting a fellowship at the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law at NYU. And next week our elder child Noah’s debut feature film Summer Solstice will be playing at the IFC Center in Manhattan.

Last week I gave the opening remarks at Freedom to Write for Palestine at Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan. This memorable gathering of writers was brilliantly curated and produced by Omar Hamilton and Sharif Kouddous of the Palestine Festival of Literature, and it was recorded for posterity. Writers Against the War on Gaza and Amplify Palestinerounded out the organizing team, and everyone’s efforts came together beautifully. Publishers Weekly and New York Magazine did great coverage of the event, placing it in the context of the controversy surrounding PEN America’s terrible response to the genocide in Gaza and the efforts of writers to hold the organization to account.

Here is an excerpt from my introduction:

While PEN America has organized a street rally in support of Ukrainian writers imprisoned and killed by Russia and taken a delegation of Ukrainian writers to meet with Congress, it has yet to organize any public event on behalf of Palestinian writers who have been imprisoned and killed by Israel. PEN International, English PEN, and PEN South Africa called for a ceasefire in Gaza five full months before PEN America did, and PEN America’s call came only after over a thousand writers had signed a letter denouncing the organization for its inaction. PEN America’s priorities so often align with the U.S. government’s own foreign policy goals that one writer quipped, ‘PEN America has been turned into an outpost of the U.S. State Department.’

While the leadership at PEN America is being roundly denounced for its double standards on Israel and Palestine, many of its staff members’ work in this area and on other issues is being stymied and undermined. We would like to give a shout out to PEN America United, the union representing PEN America’s staff, which has been trying to get a fair contract for over eighteen months. PEN’s Chief Executive Officer’s salary was disclosed to be $465,000 in 2022, and in recent contract negotiations management proposed a $48,500 minimum starting salary for staff, well below industry standards and hardly a living wage in New York City. In addition to her annual salary, which has likely increased over the past two years, PEN’s CEO earns an additional undisclosed six-figure yearly sum for serving on Meta’s Oversight Board. As one sign at a PEN America United rally phrased it, “Are fair wages banned too?”

The evening raised over $8,000 for We Are Not Numbers (WANN), a youth-led organization in Gaza that trains a new generation of Palestinian writers. At the top of the program, Michelle Alexander read a poem by my friend and WANN mentee Haya Abu Nasser. When WANN alumni Mahmoud Alyazji read a remembrance with an accompanying film about his best friend Mohammed Zaher Hammo, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike with his family, there were audible sounds of weeping in the audience, and I venture to say there was not a dry eye in the house. After musician Huda Asfourplayed a final song to close out the evening, which was by turns inspiring, moving, and galvanizing, we all headed out into the world with firm resolve to continue fighting for Palestinian freedom.

In the meantime, the situation in Gaza has grown increasingly catastrophic as Israel drops bombs on displaced, starving people living in tents, and gives confusing, impossible evacuation orders to families with no place to go. Repression at home continues to be brutal as riot police are summoned to break up peaceful student Gaza solidarity encampments. I have made a chant by the Columbia students a new motto, “Disclose, Divest. We will not stop. We will not rest.”

Nancy Kricorian

I am writing this with a heavy heart. Today’s images from the ruins of Al Shifa Hospital have me reeling. The genocidal maniacs have sunk to a new low, and Joe Biden is a full partner in this unconscionable carnage, which has killed and maimed tens of thousands of civilians and is designed to make Gaza uninhabitable. With the bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus today it seems they are pushing for a wider regional war.

I have been mentoring Haya Abu Nasser, a young Palestinian writer from Gaza through the We Are Not Numbers program, which was recently featured on The Rumpus. I have placed six of Haya’s beautiful and devastating poems in prominent literary magazines, including “At The Cliff of Death,” which was published by Mizna.

After being internally displaced four times, and spending months in a tent in Rafah, a few weeks ago Haya was able to leave Gaza and make her way to Malaysia where she is enrolled in a masters program in International Affairs. Haya’s family is still in Gaza, and she wants to help her brother Ahmed get out for medical treatment and to finish his BA degree. He has asthma, is malnourished, and was recently diagnosed with hepatitis. So Haya and I have started a GoFundMe campaign. Ahmed has only two courses left to become a Renewable Energy Engineer. The funds raised will secure his safe passage out of Gaza, cover his university tuition, as well as his medical and living expenses. Please donate if you can and share if you will.

My friend Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a professor at Hebrew University who lives in the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem, has been subjected to a campaign of harassment and was suspended from teaching because of her speaking out against Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. Thankfully she was reinstated last week. During a recent interview on the excellent podcast Makdisi Street, she talked about ashla, the Arabic word for the scattered body parts that families have been collecting after bombings in Gaza. She expanded the meaning of ashla to include the scattered remnants of the Palestinian people, as well as the divided and enclosed Palestinian enclaves in the West Bank and Gaza. She said, “We theorize about the flesh, but Palestine…I’m putting at the center the scattered body parts, the body bags, and the dead bodies, the burned bodies.” I hope you will listen to the whole interview, because as painful as some of the details are, her analysis is brilliant, and she ends with hope. She speaks about the love that people feel for each other and for the land in Palestine, and she dreams of a future that is free of settler colonial necropolitics. As she puts it, “Love is a practice of freedom.”

Nancy Kricorian