A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy

In A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, a new book by essayist and journalist Nathan Thrall, the struggle over Israel/Palestine is rendered at the human scale by way of the heart-wrenching story of an accident that killed Abed Salama’s five-year-old son. Situating the personal narrative in the context of structural forces, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama elucidates the daily injustices faced by the roughly 3.2 million Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank and details the painful realities of life in the region. Join Thrall and Salama in a conversation with Michelle Goldberg at Congregation Beth Elohim.

This conversation is sponsored by Congregation Beth Elohim Jewish Currents and Kane Street Synagogue.

Nathan Thrall is the author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy and the critically acclaimed essay collection The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine. His reported features, analyses, and criticism have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, the London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books. Thrall’s writing has been cited in the United Nations Security Council, General Assembly, and Human Rights Council, as well as in reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. His commentary is often featured in print and broadcast media, including the Associated Press, BBC, CNN, Democracy Now!, The Economist, Financial Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, PRI, Reuters, Time, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. He spent a decade at the International Crisis Group, where he was director of the Arab-Israeli Project, and has taught at Bard College.

Abed Salama is a Palestinian living under Israeli rule in the enclave of Anata in greater Jerusalem, who lost his five-year-old son Milad in a harrowing school bus accident.

Michelle Goldberg became an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times in 2017. She is the author of three books: “Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism,” “The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World,” and “The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West.” Her first book was a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism, and her second won the Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize and the J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Award. Previously she was a columnist at Slate. A frequent commentator on radio and television, Goldberg’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Newsweek, The Nation, The New Republic, The Guardian and many other publications, and she's reported from countries including India, Iraq, Egypt, Uganda, Nicaragua and Argentina. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children.

Event Venue

Congregation Beth Elohim, 274 Garfield Place, Brooklyn, United States