BOOKPATHS

Israel; Palestine

Kai Bird talks about his latest book, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate, a description of  “his experience ‘coming of age between the Arabs and Israelis.’”

‘I don't think it's rocket science to understand what should happen and what eventually will happen between the Palestinians and the Israelis,’ he says. ‘It's a very small place ... Eventually these two people are going to have to live with each other.’ – from “Kai Bird’s Gate: One Foot in Israel, One in Palestine,” NPR Website

Israel

Ethan Bronner talks with Amos Oz.

Now, as Israel prepares to mark his 70th birthday with a three-day festival in Arad and an academic conference at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, both in May, and with his latest novella coming out in English translation along with a new selection of translated fiction and nonfiction called 'The Amos Oz Reader,' he offers a way of viewing his two kinds of writing through a single lens. Both usher from the same source, he says — empathy. Both are about imagining the other. – from “Amos Oz, Approaching 70, Sees Israel With a Bird’s-Eye View,” by Ethan Bronner, The New York Times

Israel; Palestine

The News Hour’s Jeffrey Brown “explores the art and conflict found in Middle Eastern poetry” in his recent series of reports, Voices of Conflict.

“These young poets, men and women in their twenties, are in many ways like young poets I meet in the United States – passionate and filled with the energy of discovering language. As we talk, the differences become clear. They want to write about little things, normal things, but nothing in their world is normal. Except perhaps this: one of the young men tells me of how he read a poem in a newspaper once and was so taken by it that he felt he must find the poet.” – from “Mixed Moments from a Day in the West Bank,” Jeffrey Brown, Voices of Conflict