Hana Morgenstern – författare

In the years after the Palestinian Nakba and the establishment of the state of Israel, Palestinian and Arab Jewish writers created a cultural front of opposition to Zionism in the Communist magazine al-Jadid. Thinkers such as Hana Ibrahim, Tawfiq Zayyad, Sami Michael, Emile Habiby, Jabra Nicola,and Shimon Ballas formed a new literary aesthetics; they drew on internationalist, anti-colonial and Arab left cultures to challenge the Zionist narrative with stories of their communities. In Cultural Co-Resistance in Palestine/Israel: Anticolonial Literature and Radical Print, Hana Morgenstern brings this forgotten literary world and its radical commitments to collaboration to life for the first time, tracing its influences on decades of subversive writing, translation and print. She follows experiments in building cultures of solidarity under conditions of extreme inequality, illustrating a theory and practice of what she terms cultural co-resistance. Engaging in close historical and literary readings informed by a decade of archival and field work, the book demonstrates how co-resistance shapes and innovates oppositional literature and social imaginaries practised jointly by Palestinians and Israeli Jews in the region.Published alongside this volume is the companion anthology A People’s Literature of Israel/Palestine: Anticolonial and Socialist Writing, which presents the Arabic-language fiction, essays and poetry of this early anticolonial circle in English translation for the first time. The two books together document and interpret cultural co-resistance, situating it within the wider traditions of internationalism, anti-Zionism, and anti-imperialism.

For the first time in English translation, A People’s Literature in Palestine/Israel: Anticolonial and Socialist Writing after 1948 brings together stories, poems, and essays by Palestinian and Arab Jewish intellectuals who created a shared anti-Zionist literary movement after the Nakba and the establishment of Israel in 1948. At the heart of the movement was Adab al-Sha'b ('A People's Literature'), popular writing-from-below published in the Communist periodicals al-Jadid and al-Ittihad. Located in prisons, border villages, transit camps and Palestinian areas under military rule, these works capture the linked struggles of Palestinians, Arab Jews, and Left organisers during the 1950s and early 1960s.This collection shares intimate and imaginative histories of everyday life under occupation and displacement. Personal accounts of partition, ethnic cleansing and expulsion of village communities, and colonial policies in the transit camps reflect an early alternative history to Zionism.Stories of border murders, strikes, covert action, organising and solidarity link local struggles to global anticolonial and socialist movements. Writers including Emile Habiby, Sami Michael, Tawfiq Zayyad, Hana Ibrahim, Shimon Ballas and Jabra Nicola, all included in this anthology, drew inspiration from socialist realism and the currents of Third World liberation from Egypt to Vietnam to reimagine literature as a form of radical history and imagination.

For the first time in English translation, A People’s Literature in Palestine/Israel: Anticolonial and Socialist Writing after 1948 brings together stories, poems, and essays by Palestinian and Arab Jewish intellectuals who created a shared anti-Zionist literary movement after the Nakba and the establishment of Israel in 1948. At the heart of the movement was Adab al-Sha'b ('A People's Literature'), popular writing-from-below published in the Communist periodicals al-Jadid and al-Ittihad. Located in prisons, border villages, transit camps and Palestinian areas under military rule, these works capture the linked struggles of Palestinians, Arab Jews, and Left organisers during the 1950s and early 1960s.This collection shares intimate and imaginative histories of everyday life under occupation and displacement. Personal accounts of partition, ethnic cleansing and expulsion of village communities, and colonial policies in the transit camps reflect an early alternative history to Zionism.Stories of border murders, strikes, covert action, organising and solidarity link local struggles to global anticolonial and socialist movements. Writers including Emile Habiby, Sami Michael, Tawfiq Zayyad, Hana Ibrahim, Shimon Ballas and Jabra Nicola, all included in this anthology, drew inspiration from socialist realism and the currents of Third World liberation from Egypt to Vietnam to reimagine literature as a form of radical history and imagination.