Open City

Jewish Week, The, April, 2002 by Belasco, Daniel

Belasco, Daniel The Jewish Week 04-26-2002 Walls may soon be going up in Israel, but here in New York, some intellectuals are trying to keep communication about the Middle East as open as possible. Queens College professor Ammiel Alcalay has invited three men famous for their risky cross-cultural writings -- Israeli Shimon Ballas, Lebanese Elias Khoury and Spaniard Juan Goytisolo -- to read from their work on May 1 at New York University. The evening promises to be an exploration of the diversity and interconnectivity of seemingly monolithic and polarized national identities.

"These are writers with a very expansive idea of who they are and where they're from," says Alcalay. "In New York there has never been a completely trilingual literary event," he...

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