The documentary No Other Land follows Basel Adra, a young Palestinian man from the West Bank who from the age of 15 has recorded Israel’s destruction of homes in his community. To keep up with damage wrought, Adra worked with Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist, and the directors Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor to create an unsparing and blunt film about the devastation wrought by the Israeli occupation. What they produced is one of the year’s most powerful films, and yet it has still not secured a distribution deal in the United States. If No Other Land makes one point very clear, it is, as Ahmed Moor writes in his review, that “the Nakba continues”—and it never really ended. A film that stirs both melancholy and outrage in its audiences, it makes one want to “to be somewhere else and avoid the story altogether.” But it also insists that one cannot—that one must, as Moor concludes, “bear witness and…share in the grief.” Read ““No Other Land” and the Brutal Truth of Israel’s Occupation”
Over a long and productive career as a writer, Lore Segal left a striking mark. Segal was a translator, children’s book author, and novelist, and her works of fiction and nonfiction alike resound with a bracing honesty, an openness and a nonjudgmental stance on the material of life. As Michele Moses argues in a career-spanning essay, this candidness was defined by a curiosity about the world. Full of “an irrepressible gusto,” Segal’s body of work helped her readers metabolize the great and minor events of the 20th century. For Moses, “the pleasures of writing and language always lie at the center” of Segal’s writing, “embodied by the excitable intellects of her characters, and by a mischievous sense of humor that appears on just about every page.” Until the end of her life, in fact, and even until the very week of her death at 96, Segal kept writing “with the disarming blend of youthful curiosity and daring intelligence that was a hallmark of her work since the beginning of her writing career.” Read “Lore Segal’s Stubborn Optimism”
