Untold Stories: First-ever US Nakba Museum opens in Washington DC
http://mondoweiss.net/2015/06/untold-stories-washington
When Bshara Nassar arrived in Washington, DC, he strolled along the National Mall and passed myriad museums dedicated to exposing the painful history of oppressed peoples: the National Museum of the American Indian, the Holocaust Museum, Laogai Museum, the list goes on. He quickly recognized there was no place for the Palestinian story to be told, which inspired him to launch the first-ever Nakba Museum Project of Memory and Hope.
As Nassar worked on a masters degree in conflict transformation, the thought of a space dedicated to Palestinian voices became a working reality. He was particularly interested in telling the little-known story of the Nakba, which means catastrophe in Arabic. The term is used to refer to the displacement of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948 when the State of Israel was created. Today, nearly 5 million people, nearly all of them descendants of the original group, are registered as Palestinian refugees with the United Nations.
A non-partisan team of Palestinian and Jewish-American artists formed to support Nassars dream. One of the artists whose work will be featured in the upcoming exhibit, painter Ahmed Hmedat, curated the show by recruiting other Palestinian artists and helping assemble their work for display. Another collaborator of Nassars was an American Jewish friend named Sam Feigenbaum, who did the exhibits website and graphic design.
I just wanted to prove that somewhere in the world that a Jew and a Palestinian could get along, said Feigenbaum, who had first met Nassar several years earlier and got back in touch with him after the outbreak of a war in Gaza last fall.