Do Empathy Book Club: A Day in the Life of Abed Salama
Do Empathy Book Club: A Day in the Life of Abed Salama Online
Laurel Ridge staff and faculty are welcome to join us for the Do Empathy Book Series, a monthly book discussion that encourages us to see through others' eyes and grow in understanding of the human experience. Whether you read all the book, some of it, or none, you're welcome to join us! Participation in group discussion is not required to attend and all are welcome to engage however much or little they're comfortable.
May's book is journalist Nathan Thrall's A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy (272 p.), an intimate story of a deadly accident outside Jerusalem that unravels a tangle of lives, loves, enmities, and histories over the course of one revealing, heartbreaking day. Join us as we consider:
- How personal stories and tragedies are essential to humanizing larger political conflict
- Why the context of history is critical to understanding the experience of modern-day inequities
- How institutions structured to regulate and restrict impact the every-day individual
Register through this page for a calendar invitation, event reminders, and notifications of when the book is ready for check-out. Registrants will be notified when the library has copies available for loan, typically five weeks in prior to discussion!
Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for a school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos—the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn Milad’s fate. It is every parent’s worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian. He is on the wrong side of the separation wall, holds the wrong ID to pass the military checkpoints, and has the wrong papers to enter the city of Jerusalem. Abed’s quest to find Milad is interwoven with the stories of a cast of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and histories unexpectedly converge.
In A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, Nathan Thrall—hailed for his “severe allergy to conventional wisdom” (Time)—offers an indelibly human portrait of the struggle over Israel/Palestine and a new understanding of the tragic history and reality of one of the most contested places on earth.
