Dec
16
2024
Peter Beinart discusses ‘Daybreak in Gaza’ with co-editors Mahmoud Muna, Juliette Touma, and Matthew Teller
This Friday, December 20th at 1pm ET on Zoom:
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.
In addition to our print and digital subscriptions, Jewish Currents now has a membership program. This new initiative is for those hungry for community, learning, and conversation. By becoming a member, you will receive our print magazine, invitations to exclusive events—like this one!—and more. Whether you’re a long-time subscriber or a new reader, we hope you’ll join us as a Jewish Currents member today!
Sally Hayden
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. (Photo credit: Sally Hayden)
Andrew Shaylor
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. (Photo credit: Andrew Shaylor)
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).
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Virtual Book Launch: Aurora Levins Morales’s Rimonim
This Wednesday, December 18th at 6pm ET on Zoom:
Jewish Currents is proud to cosponsor this virtual book talk, alongside Ayin Press, the Jewish Liberation Front, and Rise Up. Join poets Aurora Levins Morales and Mónica Gomery for an evening of poetry and conversation to celebrate Levins Morales’s new book, Rimonim!
About the book: Rimonim is a richly woven tapestry of poetry meant for use. From a time of rupture and uncertainty, beloved movement poet Aurora Levins Morales brings us a prayer book for the street, for reconstituting the future through our gestures in the present. In these poems of devotion and protest, Levins Morales speaks across and through time with an undeniably prophetic voice. Written in collaboration with various communities looking to honor, unravel, and rebuild Jewish liturgies, Rimonim is a book of lyric in the most immediate sense—of poems that are meant to be read and sung. Rooted in tradition and flowering in the tumultuous present, these poems will both accompany specific Jewish practices and offer inspiration for the sacred work of human liberation, where joy meets justice.
Ultimately, these forty-nine poems honor the forty-ninth year, when it was taught that everything in the land would begin anew, everything redistributed and freed, when the people would see that everything on this earth was “ready to wake and bloom / just under the skin of what is.”
