Cultural Co-Resistance in Palestine/Israel: Hana Morgenstern with Ammiel Alcalay
Thu, Sep 24, 2026
5:30 PM–7:30 PM
Kevorkian Center, NYU. 255 Sullivan Street New York, NY 10012. Free and open.
Join our friends from the NYU Hagop Kevorkian Center for this event with Hana Morgenstern and Ammiel Alcalay which introduces two interconnected new books on a forgotten world of anticolonial, Palestinian-Jewish literary culture. In the 1950s, following the Nakba and the establishment of the Israeli state, Palestinian and Arab Jewish writers — among them Emile Habiby, Emile Touma, Jabra Nicola, Tawfiq Zayyad, Hana Ibrahim, David Semah, Sami Michael and Shimon Ballas — formed a socialist, anti-Zionist print culture, drawing on internationalist, anticolonial and Arab Marxist aesthetics to challenge Zionist hegemony with stories of their communities.
Cultural Co-Resistance in Palestine/Israel: Anticolonial Literature and Radical Print* traces this movement’s history for the first time, reading its periodicals as counter-institutions that revived Arab and Palestinian culture. The book develops a theory and practice of ‘cultural co-resistance’— solidarity-building through literature and art under conditions of extreme inequality — and recovers the anticolonial imaginaries it made possible. It follows the afterlives of that history, tracing its development in literature, subversive magazines, translation and cultural activism up to the present.
Its companion anthology, A People’s Literature of Palestine/Israel: Anticolonial and Socialist Writing*, gathers the movement’s Arabic short stories, solidarity poems and essays, published in local periodicals and presented here in English translation for the first time. Set in prisons, occupied villages, borderlands, transit camps and areas under military rule, this is writing that linked local chronicles of Jewish migrants from the Arab world, Palestinians and socialist organisers to global anticolonial movements, from Black liberation and Arab socialism to Algerian decolonisation.
*Limited quantities will be available for purchase at the event.
Reception: 7:00 PM – 7:30 PM, Kevorkian Center, 255 Sullivan St. NYC
Accommodation requests related to a disability should be sent to [email protected]. A good-faith effort will be made to fulfill requests.
This event is organized and hosted by NYU Hagop Kevorkian Center and is co-sponsored by Hunter College Arabic Program, the Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center (MEMEAC), the Center for the Humanities and Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Iniatitve at the CUNY Graduate Center.
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