Peter Beinart discusses ‘Daybreak in Gaza’ with co-editors Mahmoud Muna, Matthew Teller, and Juliette Touma

Join Jewish Currents’s editor-at-large Peter Beinart as he interviews Mahmoud Muna, Juliette Touma, and Matthew Teller, who have edited—with Jayyab Abusafia—a haunting new anthology, Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture. This publication includes close to one hundred stories about the lives of people in Gaza, both before and after its destruction since October 7th. We hope you will join us.

About the book: Daybreak in Gaza is a record of an extraordinary place and people, and of a culture preserved by the people themselves. Vignettes of artists, acrobats, doctors, students, shopkeepers and teachers offer stories of love, life, loss and survival. They display the wealth of Gaza’s cultural landscape and the breadth of its history. Daybreak in Gaza humanises the people dismissed as statistics. It stands as a mark of resistance to the destruction and as a testament to the people of Gaza. Profits are donated to the UK-based charity Medical Aid for Palestinians.

This virtual event is for Jewish Currents members and the Beinart Notebook subscribers only.

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This live Zoom event and its recording will have automated closed captioning. For accommodation requests or questions about accessibility, please reach out to events@jewishcurrents.org.

Mahmoud Muna is a writer, publisher and bookseller from Jerusalem, Palestine. He runs Jerusalem’s celebrated Educational Bookshop and the Bookshop at the American Colony Hotel, both centres of the city’s literary scene. Muna is active in many cultural initiatives across Palestine and published the first Arabic edition of Granta magazine.

Matthew Teller is a writer and broadcaster who grew up in a Jewish family in London. He has written on the Middle East for the BBC and other global media, and has produced and presented documentaries for BBC Radio. Teller is the author of Nine Quarters of Jerusalem: A New Biography of the Old City, which was a 2022 Telegraph Book of the Year.

Juliette Touma is director of communications for UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, covering Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. She has extensive experience in crisis communications and emergency response, and has served as head of communications at the UN Development Program in Baghdad; chief spokesperson to the UN Special Envoy for Syria; and regional chief of advocacy and communications for the Middle East and North Africa at UNICEF.

Peter Beinart teaches national reporting and opinion writing at the Newmark J-School and political science at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is editor-at-large for Jewish Currents, an MSNBC political commentator, author of The Beinart Notebook on Substack, a fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace, and the author of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza (Knopf, 2025).

The Beinart Notebook is a weekly newsletter written by Peter Beinart.