Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Wednesday 05 April
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
For years, Palestinian writer Laila El-Haddad has been documenting daily life in Gaza. She’s done it with a journalist’s eye for detail, a chef’s instinct for taste and smell and a mother’s hopes and anxieties for the future.
As a reporter, El-Haddad’s work has appeared in the Washington Post, New Statesman and the Guardian and on the BBC, CNN and al Jazeera. Some of her most compelling work, however, has been published on her award-winning blog, Gaza Mom, which she started back in 2004. The blog interweaves personal stories with grassroots reporting, political opinion and amazing local recipes.
Gaza Mom, she writes, is ‘about the trials of raising my children between spaces and identities; displacement and occupation; and everything that entails – from potty training to border crossings.’
El-Haddad is the author of two books, including a Palestinian cookbook and Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting and Everything in Between, a compilation of blog posts and published journalism. At the Wheeler Centre in April, this remarkable writer and activist will discuss the inescapable connections between personal and political in today’s Palestine with host Jordy Silverstein.
Laila El-Haddad’s visit is supported by the Australian Jewish Democratic Society.
Featuring
Laila El-Haddad
Laila El-Haddad is an award-winning Palestinian writer, social activist and public speaker who frequently lectures on the situation in Gaza, the intersection of food and politics, and contemporary Islam.
She is the author of Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between and, co-author of the critically acclaimed The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey. She is also a policy advisor with al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network.
Through her work as a writer and documentarian, she provides much-needed insight into the human experience of the region. She was recently featured in Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown episode ‘Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza’ as his guide in the Gaza Strip.
From 2003 to 2007, El-Haddad was the Gaza correspondent for the Al Jazeera English website and a regular contributor to the BBC World Service. During this time, she co-directed two Gaza-based documentaries, including The Tunnel Trade.
A graduate of Duke University and the Harvard Kennedy School, she is a recipient of the Clinton Scholarship, as well as the Inspiration for Hope and the Literary Leadership Awards. Born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents from Gaza, she currently lives in Clarksville, Maryland with her husband and their three children. You’ll frequently find her poking around people's kitchens, in a forest, or on a basketball court.
Jordy Silverstein
Jordy is a historian and writer. She is the author of Anxious Histories: Narrating the Holocaust in Jewish Communities at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century (Berghahn Books, 2015), co-editor of In the Shadows of Memory: The Holocaust and the Third Generation (Vallentine Mitchell, 2016), and has been published in New Matilda, Overland and the Conversation.
She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate in History at the University of Melbourne, researching a history of Australian government policy towards child refugees as part of the ARC Laureate Research Fellowship 'Child Refugees and Australian Internationalism from 1920 to the present'. Her other research projects have examined histories of modern Jewish identity, sexuality and collective memory.