With humility and analytical rigor, Khalifah offers a bracing and astute challenge to the
commonplace that remembering is always redemptive. With an erudite reading of both
the scholarly “regimes of memory studies” and of Palestinian literary production since
the 1980s, he shows how the weight of Holocaust remembrance continues to destroy
Palestinian lives. Attention to historical and political contexts reveals why remembering
the Nakba won't solve the problem.

Lila Abu-Lughod, Professor, Columbia University, USA

Redemption through memory of trauma has become a talismanic adage shaping modern culture and the field of Memory Studies since the Holocaust assumed the paradigm status of modern evil. But does an elegiac temporality work for the ongoing condition of Palestinians, with the processes leading to the Nakba of 1948 culminating in a genocidal war since 2023? Omar Khalifah's revolutionary book unsettles the founding assumptions of our age to herald a Palestinian literature that is not captured by the work of mourning but driven by the struggle for freedom.

A. Dirk Moses, Professor, City College of New York, USA

Thoughtful, incisive, and urgently needed, Omar Khalifah's analysis of the complexities and ambivalences of Palestinian memory exposes the limits of memory studies. What use is memory when the catastrophe is ongoing? How can we adequately acknowledge Palestinian suffering when the field has been built on the exceptionalism of the Holocaust and Jewish victimization? If you are interested in how Palestinian literature helps us think about these questions with ethical clarity, read The Unsettling Nakba.

Marianne Hirsch, Professor, Columbia University, USA

The Palestinian nakba is an unceasing, intensifying, and expanding catastrophe. Khalifah tackles challenging questions about memory, remembrance politics, justice for Palestinians, and Israel's exploitation of Jewish suffering. An astute and probing engagement with memory studies and Palestinian literature, Khalifah's book is an indispensable and unflinching work of critical reflection and revaluation. Essential.

Bashir Abu-Manneh, Lecturer, University of Kent, UK and Hunter College, New York, US