A Cultural Co-Resistance Reader: Palestinian and Arab Jewish Writing After 1948

Dr. Hana Morgenstern's A Cultural Co-Resistance Reader: Palestinian and Arab Jewish Writing After 1948 is a timely volume that brings together translated and annotated pieces drawn from two sources from 1950s Israel|Palestine: the Haifa-based, Arabic-language cultural journal al-Jadid and the local communist party newspaper al-Ittihad. The collection features a range of Palestinian and Jewish writers from the Arabic literary scene, all affiliated with the Israeli and Palestinian communist parties, who collaboratively produced short stories, poetry, and essays. Contributors include Mahmoud Darwish, Emile Habiby, Sami Michael, Tawfiq Zayyad, Shimon Ballas, Hana Ibrahim, David Semah, Sasson Somekh, and Jabra Nicola, among others. A Cultural Co-Resistance Reader uplifts their shared internationalist, anti-imperialist vision.

Drawing readers into al-Jadid’s anticolonial cultural milieu, this translated collection demonstrates how literature was tied directly to local and global political action, bringing light to historic cultural and political solidarity work that may inform present-day mobilizations toward inclusive shared societies.


About the Author

Dr. Hana Morgenstern is a scholar of Middle Eastern literature and cultural histories of the Left, with a specialization in Palestine and Israel, including Jewish, Hebrew, Palestinian, and Arabic literatures and literary cultures. Dr. Morgenstern is cofounder and co-investigator of Revolutionary Papers: a transnational research collaboration exploring twentieth-century periodicals of anticolonial and anti-imperial production. She is also cofounder of Archives of the Disappeared, an interdisciplinary research initiative for the study of communities, social movements, spaces, literatures, and cultures that have been destroyed through acts of political repression and mass violence.


al-Jadid cover collage by Lizzie Malcolm
Author photo by Christa Holka