Authority control databases
| International | |
|---|---|
| Other | |
Nathan Thrall | |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Writer |
| Website | nathanthrall |
Nathan Thrall is an American author, essayist, and journalist based in Jerusalem. Thrall is the author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, which was named a best book of 2023 by over ten publications, including The New Yorker,[1] The Economist,[2] Time,[3] the Financial Times,[4] The New Republic,[5] The Millions,[6] Mother Jones,[7] The Forward,[8] Booklist,[9] The New Statesman,[10] and The Irish Times,[11] and was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice.[12] His first book,The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine, was published by Metropolitan/Henry Holt in 2017. He is a contributor to The New York Times Magazine,[13] the London Review of Books,[14] and The New York Review of Books.[15]
Thrall is the former Director of the Arab-Israeli Project at the International Crisis Group, where he covered Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel's relations with its neighbors from 2010 to 2020.[16] Thrall is a professor at Bard College. [17]
Thrall is Jewish and his mother is a Jewish émigrée from the Soviet Union.[18] Thrall received a BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara's College of Creative Studies and an M.A. in politics from Columbia University. A former member of the editorial staff of The New York Review of Books, he was hired at the International Crisis Group by Robert Malley.[19] At the start of his tenure at the International Crisis Group, Thrall lived in Gaza.[20]
Thrall's book A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy was named a best book of 2023 by over ten publications, including The New Yorker,[1] The Economist,[2] Time,[3] the Financial Times,[4] The New Republic,[5] The Millions,[6]Mother Jones,[7] The Forward,[8] Booklist,[9] The New Statesman,[10] and The Irish Times,[11] and was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice.[12] The Financial Times named it a best book of 2023 in two categories, Literary Nonfiction[21] and Politics,[22] stating, “This quietly heartbreaking work of non-fiction reads like a novel. At its centre is a tragic road accident outside Jerusalem in the West Bank from which Thrall, a Jewish American journalist, carefully traces the labyrinthine lives of those involved and the tangled web of politics, history and culture that ensnare them all.”[23]
Thrall's essay collection The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine (Metropolitan/Henry Holt, 2017; Picador, 2018) received positive reviews in The New York Times,[24] Foreign Affairs,[25] Time,[26] and The New York Review of Books.[27] The Jewish Book Council's Bob Goldfarb wrote that his book, The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine, "brings unparalleled clarity to the dynamics of Israeli-Palestinian relations, and is an essential guide to the history, personalities, and ideas behind the conflict."[28] Mosaic selected the book as one of the best of the year, writing, "A knowledgeable and bold retelling of the Israel-Palestinian conflict that forces readers to take a serious and fresh look at their assumptions. Throughout its counterintuitive retelling of this history, it offers an unusually provocative and sometimes startling contribution to the genre."[29]
In January 2021, the London Review of Books published Thrall's article, "The Separate Regimes Delusion," which argued, "The premise that Israel is a democracy, maintained by Peace Now, Meretz, the editorial board of Haaretz and other critics of occupation, rests on the belief that one can separate the pre-1967 state from the rest of the territory under its control. A conceptual wall must be maintained between two regimes: (good) democratic Israel and its (bad) provisional occupation."[30] Thrall's article was praised in Haaretz by Gideon Levy, who wrote, "the American writer Nathan Thrall, who lives in Jerusalem, published an eye-opening and mind-expanding piece in The London Review of Books .... Thrall doesn't hesitate to criticize the supposedly liberal-Zionist and leftist organizations, from Meretz and Peace Now to Yesh Din and Haaretz. All of them believe that Israel is a democracy and oppose annexation because it could undermine their false belief that the occupation is happening somewhere else, outside of Israel, and is only temporary."[31]
In March 2021, The New York Review of Books published Thrall's piece, "A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: One man's quest to find his son lays bare the reality of Palestinian life under Israeli rule,"[32] together with an animated trailer.[33] The article was covered in The Washington Post,[34] Foreign Policy,[35] The American Prospect,[36] Jewish Currents,[37] European publications,[38][39] the Israeli newspaper Haaretz,[40] a podcast episode hosted by New York Times columnist Peter Beinart,[41] and a two-part, forty-minute segment on Democracy Now![42][43] Longreads called it "an astonishing feat of reporting" and named it a Best Feature of 2021.[44][45][46]
Thrall went on to write a non-fiction book based on the article, completing the work with the help of New York Bard College, which awarded Thrall a writing fellowship. The college invited him to teach a course and Thrall proposed one on Israel and apartheid which he gave for Spring 2023.[47][48] A Day in the Life of Abed Salama-Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy was published on October 3, 2023 by Metropolitan Books.
