Book Launch / Wed 23rd Sept / 6pm - 8pm

*Doors open at 5.30pm*

*Hosted event

Les Juifs, les Arabes, ma famille et moi by Pierre Hazan is a deeply personal yet political narrative tracing two centuries of Jewish-Arab coexistence through the story of the author's own family.

Writing as a member of the last generation of Jews born in Arab lands, Hazan traces this history through four figures: his ancestor Moshe, a rabbi who journeyed from Jerusalem to Europe and back before siding with the Arab world against European colonial powers; his great-uncle Daoud, a revolutionary and co-founder of Egypt's first independence party who was sentenced to death by the British yet remained a Zionist; his maternal grandfather Maurice, whose Arab, Jewish, and British identities collided as the Middle East grew turbulent in the 1940s; and his father, Elie, who tried to delay an irreversible exile after the 1956 Suez Crisis, as Jews across the Arab world were uprooted following the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

Weaving family history with broader historical currents, the book is both an elegy for a largely vanished world of Jewish-Arab coexistence and a fragile note of hope that such coexistence might be reimagined.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Pierre Hazan is the former Diplomatic Correspondent for Libération (Paris) and Le Temps (Geneva), specializing in humanitarian action and international justice, and has closely observed conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and the Middle East. A Fellow at Harvard Law School (2005) and the United States Institute of Peace (2006), he has authored several books, including Justice in a Time of War and Judging War, Judging History (Stanford University Press, 2010), and served as a U.N. expert on cultural rights in 2013.