An entirely new take on the Israeli-Palestinian turmoil that examines the life-shaping reverberations of wars and ongoing tensions upon the everyday lives of family members in Jerusalem.

An American, secular, diasporic Jew, Lis Harris was raised with the knowledge of the traditional wrongs completed to Jews. In adulthood, she created a growing awareness of the wrongs they subsequently had done towards the Palestinian people. This gave her a rigorous desire to understand the way the Israelis’ background led these to where about In Jerusalem: Three Generations of an Israeli Family and a Palestinian Family they are now. However, she found that top-down politics accounts and insider assessments produced the people most affected seem like chess parts. What she wanted was to register the effects from the country’s seemingly never-ending conflict on the lives of successive years.

Shuttling back and forth over ten years between East and West Jerusalem, Harris learned all about the lives of two family members: the Israeli Pinczowers/Ezrahis as well as the Palestinian Abuleils. She came to know members of each family-young and older, religious and secular, male and feminine. As they distributed their histories with her, she looked at how each family members survived the loss and dislocations that defined their lives; how, in a region where war and its threat were part of the very air flow they breathed, they gave children expect their future; and how the adults’ knowledge of the discord evolved over time. Combining ten years of historical study with political analysis, Harris creates a living portrait of one of the very most challenging and controversial conflicts of our period.