Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Speaker Series Event! Condition Critical: A Report Back on Gaza

When: Thursday, February 23, 2016

Where: 73 Tremont Street, Sawyer Library Poetry Center 

Speaker Alice Rothchild, MD, an obstetrician-gynecologist, has visited Gaza as part of an Israel/Palestine medical aid delegation. She will share images and impressions of the destruction and resilience that she has encountered and how ongoing siege conditions affect the lives of women and families. 

Her latest publication, Condition Critical: Life and Death in Israel/Palestine presents key blog posts and analytical essays that explore everyday life in Israel, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza up close and with searing honesty. These eyewitness reports and intimate stories depict the critical condition of a region suffering from decades-old wounds of colonization and occupation. Condition Critical dares (and inspires) its readers to examine the painful consequences of Zionism and Israeli expansion and to bend the arc of the moral universe towards justice. 

In Condition Critical Alice Rothchild grabs for the truth behind the lies, writing with extraordinary moral clarity and a sharp eye for the injustices, absurdities, and cruel historical ironies that define Palestinian life on both sides of the Green Line. (Ben Ehrenreich, Author of The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine

Rothchild is a physician, author, and filmmaker who has focused her interest in human rights and social justice on Israel/Palestine since 1997. She practiced ob-gyn for almost 40 years. Until her retirement she served as assistant professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Harvard Medical School. She writes and lectures widely and also is the author of Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: Stories of Jewish and Palestinian Trauma and Resilience and On the Brink: Israel and Palestine on the Eve of the 2014 Gaza Invasion. She directed a documentary film, Voices Across the Divide which premiered at the Boston Palestine Film Festival in 2013. Her latest trip to Israel, the West Bank and Gaza was in January 2017.

Sponsored by the Women's and Gender Studies Program and the Mildred F. Sawyer Library.