There was a time when it was possible for Jews and Arabs to live together peacefully in Palestine and to intermarry. Both groups are Semites and share more similarities than they have been willing to acknowledge. Not anymore. Now those who try to cross the line have to pay a heavy price that sometimes costs them their life as has been the case of the actor and director Juliano Mer-Khamis who was killed earlier this month.

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PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature presents

Revolutionaries in the Arab World

Featuring Rula Jebreal (Miral), Issandr El Amrani (The Arabist), Adbelkader Benali, Alex Nunns (editor of Tweets from Tahrir), and Abdellah Taia

Wednesday, April 27, 7:30 p.m.

92nd Street Y, Unterberg Poetry Center, 1395 Lexington Ave., New York City

This panel will explore the sweeping political changes in the Arab world. Hear from experts and on-the-ground bloggers how social media and citizen journalism galvanize the revolution. In the borderless world of the Internet, where revolutionary ideas spread at lightning speed, will other despotic regimes collapse? Which ones? And how does an autocracy transition into a democracy, and at what cost? Alex Nunns, editor of Tweets from Tahrir (O/R Books) — a collection of key tweets from the activists who brought heady days of revolution to Egypt in early 2011 — will be joined by Palestinian author/journalist Rula Jebreal (Miral), blogger Issandr El Amrani (The Arabist), Moroccan writer Abdellah Taia, and Moroccan-Dutch writer Adbelkader Benali to tackle these urgent questions. For more info

Tickets: $20/$15 PEN Members, students with valid ID. Call (866) 811-4111 or visit ovationstix

Co-sponsored by the 92 Street Y, Unterberg Poetry Center

PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, New York City, April 25-May 1, 2011 – More than 100 writers from 40 nations will convene in New York City to celebrate the power of the writer’s voice as a bold and vital element both on the page and in public discourse. Chaired by Salman Rushdie and created in2001 as one means of combating American cultural isolationism, the Festival will include panels, lectures, readings, one-on-one conversations, and readings at venues across the city, including the festival’s hubs — The Standard, New York and the High Line. The stellar line-up of authors will include Gioconda Belli, Harold Bloom, Ernesto Cardenal, Deborah Eisenberg, Jonathan Franzen, Malcolm Gladwell, Hanif Kureishi, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Andrea Levy, Amélie Nothomb, Cynthia Ozick, Elif Shafak, Wallace Shawn, Vladimir Sorokin, Wole Soyinka, Irvine Welsh, and Edmund White, among many others. Check out our complete schedule of events

Micah Sifry’s WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency is a thoughtful and thought-provoking look at the promise and limits of Internet-based transparency efforts. Sifry looks at everything from digital sunshine laws to the Iranian election to Cablegate, and examines what has worked to make the world’s governments and corporations more accountable and when technology-driven transparency efforts have failed. His postmortem on the Obama administration’s largely abandoned transparency efforts are particularly sharp, especially in light of how much mileage the few successful government transparency projects delivered.

Read the rest of the review on Boingboing

OR Books and Guernica magazine are proud to present Raja Shehadeh and Norman Finkelstein in conversation, this Tuesday at NYC’s Alwan Center for the Arts, FREE at 8pm.

Re-imagining Palestine in the new configuration of the Arab world is topical to our perception of the future of the region and the world at large. Unprecedented changes have swept across the political, social and cultural landscape of the Arab world over these last several months – changes that are bound to impact not merely the region but the machination of world politics. Palestine is pivotal to the Arab world’s sense of self and cultural identity. It has always been at the core of the Arab people’s revolt against proxy colonialism and their collective disdain for regimes from Morocco to Yemen. 

Raja Shehadeh and Norman Finkelstein, both authors and scholars, are at the forefront of these debates, and whose conversation will better our understanding of the role Palestine will play, its impact and how the conflict itself will be impacted in these challenging times. 

More information here. Hope to see you there!

Listen to the reading here: http://www.worldvisionreport.org/player.php?storyfile=show-217

It was a crisp, sunny spring afternoon in New York — worrisome weather for anyone hoping to gather a crowd in a dark and dingy bar basement. But as it turned out, a blue sky was no deterrent for the several dozen who collected on bar stools and ottomans in the candle-lit bowels of the Lower East Side dive Cake Shop last Saturday. They had come for the March installment of the Enclave Reading Series, guest-curated by Dale Peck and Joshua Furst, cofounders of the nascent indie publishing collective Mischief + Mayhem, a de facto imprint of the fastidiously curated print-on-demand/e-book publisher OR Books.

Read more at Thirteen.org.