Trained in her native England as a lawyer and anthropologist, Jo Roberts is now a freelance writer. For five years she was managing editor of the New York Catholic Worker newspaper, to which she frequently contributed. Her reportage from Israel and from the West Bank has appeared in Embassy, Canada’s foreign policy weekly. She lives in Toronto, Canada.
In this moving, lyrical, and very important book, with some of the
bravest and most honest of Israelis and Palestinians as guides,
Roberts offers readers an intimate, often searing tour of the
country’s psychological landscape.
*Professor Ian Lustick, , Bess W. Heyman Chair of Political
Science, University of Pennsylvania*
This compelling and compassionate book offers fresh insight into
how these divergent histories reverberate in Israel today,
examining how selective memories of suffering that exclude the
‘other’ impede reconciliation and a just peace.
*Mubarak Awad, founder, Palestinian Center for the Study of
Nonviolence*
[A] beautifully written book … Jo Roberts captures the voices of
Jewish and Palestinian Israelis in all their diversity, pain, and
eloquence.
*Professor Michael Rothberg, director of the Holocaust, Genocide,
and Memory Studies Initiative at the University of Illinois*
[T]his nuanced, empathic, and knowledgeable book is an important
read for supporters of [both Israelis and Palestinians], and for
people seeking a book through which to enter the charged field of
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
*Hillel Cohen, Israeli historian and journalist*
Roberts does a masterful job of presenting all perspectives in
their proper context.
*Publishers Weekly*
[Roberts’s] writing has academic credibility and personal appeal.
If that sounds unlikely, it is. Only a writer as good as Roberts
could make it work—but work it does, as it proceeds to unravel
Israel’s paradoxical political identity.
*Embassy*
The author significantly contributes to the historiography of 1948,
particularly in her presentation of the lesser-known experiences of
displaced Palestinians who remained in what became Israel after the
war.
*Electronic Intifada*
A short review such as this cannot do justice to a book which
narrates in rich detail the history of the Jews in Europe leading
to the founding of the State of Israel and its impact on the local
population of Palestine. The discussion of identity, statehood and
the role of narrative give a context for the sources of the
conflicts and their continuation.
*Jewish Renaissance*
Writers have used collective memory to explore the history of
groups besides Israelis and Palestinians, but Contested Land,
Contested Memory distinguishes itself on several counts. First,
Roberts' fine writing makes the discourse of collective memory more
accessible than many other books do. And because the catastrophes
that concern her happened fairly recently, Roberts is able to use
the memories of actual Palestinian and Jewish Israelis to frame her
subject matter.
*National Catholic Reporter*
Roberts’s formal arguments have a lapidary quality that makes them
appear nearly self-evident. I thought more than once, “I knew that.
She’s got that just right, and I couldn’t say it better.”
*America: The National Catholic Review*
Contested Land, Contested Memory is a work that disinters Israel’s
buried history concealed in the collective psyche that ignores the
past. It also shatters the assumed periodization of this conflict
as originating in 1967 and highlights instead how the 1948 war and
a Zionist ideology of ethnic nationalism contributed to this
conflict.
*Journal of Palestine Studies*
This remarkable book is, to my knowledge, the first detailed
analysis of the oppression inflicted upon the Palestinians by the
Israeli government … that has been welcomed by Jewish organizations
and prominent Jewish scholars.
*THE ECUMENIST: A Journal of Theology, Culture, and Society*
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