AMR Alumni Forum
Saturday 3rd August 2024, 18:00-19:30 BST via Zoom
CONTACT US DIRECTLY TO PARTICIPATE!
amr.org@btinternet.com
Discussion With
Professor Haim Bresheeth-Zabner
Subject of the discussion:
A CONVIVENCIA FOR PALESTINE?
Words fail when one sees the suffering that the people of Gaza have been subjected to in recent months. In such a bleak moment, where can one find hope? Can it come from looking at the past and what has been called ‘’Convivencia.’’ An Israeli Jewish professor thinks so.
In southern Spain, now called Andalucía, people of the three monotheistic faiths (Muslims, Jews and
Christians) lived in relative harmony during Moorish Muslim rule for a few hundred years, until the
Christian Reconquista expelled the Jews and Muslims from 1492. That period has been retrospectively
described as the Convivencia, Spanish for coexistence or living together. This concept is used today for the co-existence of various faiths and immigrant groups.
Is this vision hopelessly idealistic or exactly what is needed and how is it possible to get to this situation
given the hatred of extremists and the deep bitterness caused by decades of oppression and brutality.
This informal AMR forum is an opportunity to explore these issues with our guest, Professor Haim
Bresheeth-Zabner who co-authored the Convivencia Alliance Declaration and set up the international
cross-faith NGO called the Convivencia Alliance.
Our Guest
Professor Haim Bresheeth-Zabner is a founder member of Jewish Network for Palestine (UK). He is a filmmaker, photographer and a film studies scholar, and a Professorial Research Associate at SOAS University of London. His books also include the best-selling: Introduction to the Holocaust. Edited volumes include: The Gulf War and the New World order; Cinema and Memory: Dangerous Liaisons (Hebrew) 2004; The Conflict and Contemporary Visual Culture in Palestine & Israel, special issue of Third Text on Palestinian and Israeli Art, Literature, Architecture and Cinema. His films include the widely
shown, State of Danger (1989, BBC2), London is Burning (2013) and Convivencia at the Turnpike (2015). More recently, The Last Honeymoon in Europe (2018) and An Army Like No Other: How the IDF Made a Nation (2020). He is a well-known speaker and acknowledged expert on a range of topics and has contributed to international and national conferences.
The forum meeting is free and aimed at the alumni, members and friends of AMR.
Simply email us to say if you wish to attend: amr.org@btinternet.com
The meeting will be private and so we will be grateful if you do not share the Zoom link when you receive it. Put any friend / colleague who wishes to attend in touch with us for the link so we can register him/her
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: The views expressed by the contributors to the Forum meetings are their own and AMR as an organisation, does not necessarily endorse them. Contact: amr.org@btinternet.com.
