The Writers for Democratic Action present…

OMER BARTOV, LEILA FARSAKH, AND RU FREEMAN

From Gaza to Washington: The War Abroad and at Home

Omer Bartov is the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. Born in Israel and educated at Tel Aviv University and St. Antony's College, Oxford, he has written widely on war crimes, interethnic relations, and genocide. Recent books include Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018), which won the National Jewish Book Award; Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past (2022), and Genocide, The Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis (2023). His publications have been translated into multiple languages. Bartov’s essays and commentaries have been featured in such national and international newspapers and media outlets as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Guardian, CNN, MSNBC, and the BBC. He is currently writing a book tentatively titled “The Broken Promise: A Personal-Political History of Israel and Palestine.” His novel, The Butterfly and the Axe, was published last year in the United States and Israel.

History Department profile

Leila Farsakh is Professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is the editor of Rethinking Statehood in Palestine: Self-Determination and Decolonization Beyond Partition (University of California Press, 2021), and author of Palestinian Labor Migration to Israel: Labour, Land and Occupation, (London: Routledge, second edition, 2012) as well as the co-editor of The Arab-Jewish Questions: Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyond (Columbia University Press, 2020).  She has also published widely on the political economy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and alternative to partition in Israel/Palestine in wide range of academic journals and other public venues including the London Review of Books, Le Monde Diplomatique, Al-Shabaka, and Jadaliyya, among others.. Professor Farsakh holds holds a Ph.D. from the University of London and an M.Phil from the University of Cambridge, UK. In 2001, she won the Peace and Justice Award from the Cambridge Peace Commission, in Cambridge-Massachusetts.

Ru Freeman is an award-winning Sri Lankan born writer and activist whose creative and political work has appeared internationally, including in the UK Guardian, The Boston Globe, and the New York Times. She is the author of the essay collection Bon Courage: Essays on Inheritance, Citizenship & A Creative Life (2023), the short story collection, Sleeping Alone (2022), and the widely translated novels A Disobedient Girl (2009), and On Sal Mal Lane (2013), a NYT Editor’s Choice Book. She is editor of the anthology, Extraordinary Rendition: (American) Writers on Palestine (2016), which gathers the voices of 65 American poets and writers speaking about America’s dis/engagement with Palestine, and Indivisible: Global Leaders on Shared Security (2019). She holds an MFA in poetry from Rutgers University, and an MA in labor studies, researching female migrant labor in the countries of Kuwait, the U.A.E, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and has worked at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, in the South Asia office of the AFL/CIO, and the American Friends Service Committee in their humanitarian and disaster relief programs. She is Director of Communications at United Palestinian Appeal (UPA), and teaches creative writing internationally.


Jacki Lyden is a nonfiction author and former longtime NPR host and correspondent. Between 1979 and 2015, she was an award-winning Middle East and foreign correspondent, a host of shows like Weekend All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition, and a familiar NPR voice. On 9/11/01 she was NPR’s first reporter on air in New York. Past awards include The Gracie Award from American Women in Radio and TV for Best Foreign Documentary (Israel and Palestine) and also, with NPR teams, the DuPont-Columbia, the Polk, and the George Foster Peabody Awards for coverage of the First Gulf War, Afghanistan, and the Second Gulf War. In 2001, with novelist and WDA founding member Paul Auster, she hosted “I Thought My Father Was God: True Tales from NPR’s National Story Project” about the stories of ordinary Americans. She is the author of Daughter of the Queen of Sheba, about growing up with her mentally ill mother, which the New York Times hailed as a “memoir classic.” Lyden serves as Chair of the Wisconsin Chapter of Writers for Democratic Action, and lives in Wisconsin and in the Washington, DC area with her husband, the Washington Post Pulitzer-prize winning photographer Bill O’Leary.

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WRITERS FOR DEMOCRATIC ACTION presents "From Gaza to Washington: The War Abroad and at Home"