Impossible friendships in pre-1948 Jerusalem

Dr. Sonja Mejcher-Atassi, Associate Professor of English, has spent years documenting the story of an extraordinary group of young men and women, Christians, Muslims and Jews from Palestine, Lebanon, and Germany, who met weekly at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in the period immediately before the Nakba of 1948. Some of them went on to become internationally acclaimed writers, artists, and intellectuals, including Wald Khalidi and Jabra Ibrahim Jabra. Dr Mejcher-Atassi explains some of the lessons she learned from her painstakingly slow research across many countries and disciplines, in official and private collections and archives. Her book on this historical moment brings to life these individuals' lives and what their group tells us about urban life in Palestine during a violent period of Palestinian and Zionist nationalist contestation and British colonial retreat.