Laila El-Haddad

Laila El-Haddad is the co-editor of Gaza Unsilenced (2015), the author of Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between (2010), and co-author of The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey (2013), which was named Arab Cuisine Book of the Year 2012 by Gourmand magazine. She is an accomplished and engaging public speaker, a talented writer, political analyst, a social activist, parent of three, and a policy advisor for Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network.

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Praise

“The recipes and stories are magically woven together, inspiring to read, to cook, and to eat. Telling us about the food of Gaza is key to understanding the people’s way of life, and this is what Laila and Maggie do so fantastically well.”
—Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, Co-Authors of Jerusalem: A Cookbook

“Laila El-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt truly are story-tellers sharing the stories of the women, men, and children of Gaza in a way that illuminates their humanity, their dignity, their strength.”
—José Andrés, chef and founder of World Central Kitchen

“This book becomes more essential with every passing day. Not just such a superb cookbook, a collection of vital recipes from a delicious yet often overlooked cuisine, but an argument for understanding. A classic of world food.”
—Anthony Bourdain

“The best cookbooks inspire you to be a better chef. This one can make you a better person. Laila El-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt guide readers through the rich, subtle and complex flavors, history and politics of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims of the Levant… This is gastronomic writing at its finest.”
—Raj Patel, Author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System

“The Gaza Kitchen cookbook is a vital attempt to safeguard a rich culinary heritage that has existed in the Middle East for thousands of years. In documenting Palestinian recipes and food culture, despite the ravages of war, Laila El-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt have significantly succeeded in sharing their culinary travels while bringing dignity and pride to those who continue cooking traditional meals at home in Palestine. This book is an asset to those living in Gaza and to the rest of the world who would like to participate in protecting this rich cuisine.”
—Barbara Massaad, Lebanese Author and Photographer of the Award-Winning Cookbooks Man’oushé, Mouneh, Mezze and Soup for Syria

“These recipes are distinctively Palestinian and many also uniquely of Gaza–with more pronounced flavors, more herby, spicy, peppery, lemony, than those of their regional neighbors. We also get from this very special book a rare insight into the intimate everyday lives of engaging people…”
—Claudia Roden, Author

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Praise

“The editors of this remarkable collection ask, “after the smoke clears, who will remember the dead?” Their answer, and that of their dozens of writers, poets, journalists and analysts, is “we will.” We, they said, Palestinians of Gaza who survived the slaughter, we Palestinians from elsewhere in Palestine and refugees in far-flung exile, we allies and friends from around the world, we will not let the world forget. During the 50 days of Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza, Tel Aviv’s best efforts to keep the world in the dark and to keep the West believing the lie of self-defense, all failed. They failed because Palestinians did not all die, and those who lived were determined to tell their story in their own voices: their poetry, their memories, and their children. This extraordinary book joins the narrative of Palestine’s witness—of oppression, brutality, and death, but also of life reaffirmed and resistance reclaimed.”
–Phyllis Bennis, Institute for Policy Studies

“Readers will find this rich anthology highly informative, evocative, and inspirational. They will find in it culture, creativity, and commitment. And they will also find it painful, emotional, and overpowering, such is the unremitting cruelty with which Palestinians are treated. But read it they must. It equips us all, even the best-informed, with the facts, figures and human stories of steadfastness not just in Gaza but also in the West Bank and amongst the Palestinian citizens of Israel. It enables us to communicate, even more powerfully, why justice is needed, and needed now –and why Israel must be brought to justice. If any book is a must read by the Prosecutor and judges at the International Criminal Court, this book is it.”
–Nadia Hijab, Executive Director of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network

“Gaza Unsilenced is an outstanding collection of short essays that discuss different aspects of Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza in the summer of 2014. Given the ability of Israel and its American defenders to propagandize and distort the historical record, it is imperative that books like this be published and widely read. Israel cannot be allowed to create a false history about the horrors it has inflicted on the people of Gaza and the Palestinians more generally.”
–John J. Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago

“Israel takes the hammer to Gaza, but it cannot snuff out Palestinian voices. These continue to testify to the inhumanity of the Israeli occupation. There are also silences—the book ends with a list of the names of those killed in Israel’s 2014 bombing of Gaza, human beings who cannot tell us their stories. This book tries to fill that gap.”
–Vijay Prashad, author of The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution

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Praise

“As I write this, I have never met Laila al-Haddad, but yet I have known her for years – first through her blog Raising Yousef, her journalism, and by her handle @Gazamom on Twitter. It was through Laila’s pioneering blog that I made my first “visits” to Gaza — a place I have never physically been precisely because of the situation she describes. The journey she chronicles in this book is intensely personal, and yet it is one Palestinians, exiles and wandering souls all over the world will recognize. The realities of life in Gaza are hard. But Laila’s razor-sharp observations, tenderness, and humor make her throughout this book—a wonderful traveling companion. It’s a journey I highly recommend.”
–Ali Abunimah, Founder of Electronic Intifada

“Laila El-Haddad writes with passion and uncompromising honesty revealing a personal narrative that encapsulates a collective Palestinian experience. Making no pretense at objectivity, Laila challenges the limits of the genre to create for the reader an experience of total immersion beyond his/her comfort zone and shattering the complacency of simply “not knowing.” Occupation and exile, siege and incursions, oppression and dehumanization, the tragedy of the Palestinian experience unfolds in the fullness of its human expression through Laila’s intense and captivating revelations. Her sense of self and identity, sometimes presented with critical distance and irony, remains the dominant vehicle of expression in the multiplicity of Laila’s roles as mother, daughter, wife, journalist, blogger, activist—or simply a Gazan Palestinian grappling with her plight as with the fate of her nation.”
–Hanan Ashrawi, Palestinian parliamentarian and member, PLO Executive Committee

“Through the pulse of the people in a besieged ghetto, and through her voice as a young Palestinian woman navigating the delicate trenches of motherhood, Laila El-Haddad’s writing illuminates Gaza’s inextinguishable culture of struggle and determination for a better world. Her assessment of the personal and collective impacts of Israel’s occupation policy – from trudging through the endless bureaucratic labyrinths of identification papers and travel restrictions, to her everyday conversations with people picking up the pieces of their lives after a bombing -and the piercing analysis of her own personal journey has created a text not often found in current literature on Palestine. It is exactly the kind of documentation that is needed in these times of dehumanization of the Palestinian people.”
–Nora Barrows-Friedman, author of In Our Power

“Gaza Mom is humanly moving and politically explosive, vividly illuminating the cruelties of everyday life for Palestinians living under occupation for decades. Laila El-Haddad writes with disciplined passion and conveys a powerful sense of authenticity. This book should become required reading for Americans who have yet to comprehend the prison camp conditions that prevail in Gaza.”
–Richard Falk, Author of Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope

“As far as I am concerned, should be required reading in every classroom in America. Through her personal journey over a six-year period beginning in 2004, Laila El-Haddad opens a crucial and much needed window into the life of her people, into a daily reality that has to be lived defensively, whether in Gaza, Cairo, or the United States. She helps us navigate and experience a world far beyond our own and unknown to us, of what it means to own “a passport that allows no passage.” Perhaps most critically, this book does what few do: it allows us to understand Palestinians as we understand ourselves and in so doing affirms our common humanity. An extraordinary, eloquent work.”
–Sara Roy, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University

“Americans are often blissfully unaware of the human impact of U.S. foreign policy, because we rarely listen to the voices of those who must live with those consequences on a daily basis. Nowhere is this more evident than in American perceptions of the Palestinians, whose cruel treatment continues to be ignored or dismissed in the so-called Land of the Free. We treat them as abstractions, rather than as human beings with children, parents, husbands, or wives, bound together by enduring dreams and many disappointments. Laila El-Haddad’s brings the realities of Palestinian existence to life with wit, anger, passion, love, and most of all keen eye for the cruel absurdities of life under occupation. Read it, reflect, and reconsider.”
—Stephen Walt

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