Dr Jasmine Donahaye launches latest volume, Losing Israel

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Dr Jasmine Donahaye, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Swansea University, will launch her latest volume, Losing Israel, in the Glyn Jones Centre in Cardiff on Wednesday, 8 July.

  • Date: Wednesday 8 July
  • Time: 7pm
  • Location: Glyn Jones Centre, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff Bay, CF10 5AL
  • This is a free event
  • A warm welcome to all

Losing IsraelWeaving together politics, birdwatching, memoir and social history, Losing Israel (Seren Books) is an astonishing and human work about an habitually controversial conflict.

In 2007, while researching her family history, Dr Donahaye stumbled upon evidence of her grandparents’ collusion in the displacement of Palestinians in the 1930s and 1940s. She set out to uncover a piece of Israel’s hidden history, and a part of her family’s story unknown to her. What she found challenged everything she thought she knew about the country and her family, and transformed her understanding of the place, and of herself.

Losing Israel is a moving and honest account which spans travel writing, nature writing and memoir. Through the author’s personal situation, Losing Israel explores the powerful attachments people have to place and to contested national stories. Shifting between Wales and Israel, Dr Donahaye attempts to reconcile her conflicted feelings rooted in difficult family history and a love of Israel's birds, and asks challenging questions about homeland and belonging, and the power of stories to shape a landscape. A life-long birdwatcher, Dr Donahaye uses birds in Israel, Palestine and her home in Wales to provide an unexpected and intriguing linking trope across the varied themes of the book.

Dr Donahaye’s focus on the kibbutz movement and her exploration of events during the British Mandate and in new-formed Israel set it apart from the many books about the Israel-Palestine situation. Losing Israel is a book of many levels - family relationships, the nature of nationalism and belonging, cultural dislocation, the story of the Jewish diaspora and Israel and its costs, the relationship between family stories and recorded history, and the reconciliation of contradictory accounts of the past.

 For more information please contact Lisa Shakespeare: email lisashakespearepr@btinternet.com or call 07768 485272