Havurah Shalom

The Havurah Shalom Book Group meets monthly to discuss fiction and nonfiction books voted on by Havurah members. All are welcome to any and all meetings. Copies of our upcoming books can be checked out by members in the Havurah library. A list of the 2024-25 books is available here.

This month, we invite you to read and discuss… 

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy by Nathan Thrall (nonfiction, 272 pages)

Immersive and gripping, an intimate story of a deadly accident outside Jerusalem that unravels a tangle of lives, loves, enmities, and histories over the course of one revealing, heartbreaking day. 

Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for a school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos—the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn Milad’s fate. 

It is every parent’s worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian. He is on the wrong side of the separation wall, holds the wrong ID to pass the military checkpoints, and has the wrong papers to enter the city of Jerusalem. 

Abed’s quest to find Milad is interwoven with the stories of a cast of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and histories unexpectedly converge. In A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, Nathan Thrall—hailed for his “severe allergy to conventional wisdom” (Time)—offers an indelibly human portrait of the struggle over Israel/Palestine and a new understanding of the tragic history and reality of one of the most contested places on earth. 

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, The Economist, Time, The New Republic, and the Financial Times.

Discussion led by Joel Beinin. Nonmembers welcome. RSVP for Zoom info.

(*This is the last Havurah Book Group meeting for the year. We will start up again in September 2025.*)