Professor Katharina Galor, ‘Friendship Across Borders: Writing Lives in the Shadow of Conflict’

Professor Katharina Galor,

‘Friendship Across Borders: Writing Lives in the Shadow of Conflict’

Jewish Women’s Voices Seminar

How can life-writing illuminate the human dimensions of political conflict?

In this seminar, Professor Katharina Galor reflects on writing Out of Gaza: A Tale of Love, Exile, and Friendship. Galor’s memoir recounts an unexpected friendship between a Palestinian Muslim woman from Gaza and an Israeli Jewish scholar (the author). Their connection begins with a phone call from a detention centre for undocumented migrants in Belgium and unfolds across several countries and political landscapes.

What does it mean to tell a life story shaped by displacement, borders, and competing historical narratives?

At the centre of the story is the life of a Palestinian woman whose experiences are shaped by the history of Gaza, exile, and migration. Her story is told in conversation with the author’s own family history of displacement as Jews in twentieth-century Europe. Together, these narratives bring into view broader historical memories, including the Holocaust, the Nakba, and the enduring realities of refugees and exile.

How can life-writing hold together Jewish and Muslim perspectives, Israeli and Palestinian histories, and personal memories shaped by conflict?

Galor examines what it means to write another person’s life across political, cultural, and religious divides and what ethical questions arise when narrating lives marked by unequal mobility, borders, and political constraints.

How might a personal story open space for dialogue across deeply divided histories?

By reflecting on the process of writing this memoir, Galor explores how life-writing can connect intimate experience with larger historical forces. Personal narrative, she suggests, offers one way to trace fragile yet meaningful connections across borders, identities, and histories of exile.

Exploring life-writing, memoir, and the ethics of narrating lives across political and cultural divides, this seminar will appeal to anyone interested in how personal stories can illuminate histories of displacement, exile, and conflict. It will also be of interest to students and scholars of Middle Eastern history, migration, and refugee experience, as well as those curious about the methodological challenges of writing across religious, national, and political boundaries. No prior specialist knowledge or preparation is required.

This seminar will be introduced and moderated by Dr Vera Fine-Grodzinski.

Speaker Details:

Credit: Mary Channen Caldwell

Professor Katharina Galor is a scholar of visual and material culture whose work explores questions of heritage, identity, and memory in Israel and Palestine. Trained in art history and archaeology, she studies how images, objects, and built environments shape cultural and political narratives across Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions from antiquity to the present. She teaches in the Program in Judaic Studies at Brown University and is affiliated with the Center for Middle East Studies.

She is the author and editor of several scholarly books, including Finding Jerusalem: Archaeology between Science and Ideology, The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians, and Jewish Women in Historical Perspective. Her most recent book, Out of Gaza: A Tale of Love, Exile, and Friendship (Potomac Books / University of Nebraska Press, 2025), explores exile, cross-cultural friendship, and the human dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The book received the Grand Prize Gold Award for Overall Non-Fiction from the Reader Views Literary Awards and an Award of Excellence from the Religion Communicators Council Wilbur Awards. A French edition, Fuir Gaza: amour, exil et amitié, will appear in 2026 with Édern Éditions in Brussels.

Dr Vera Fine-Grodzinski studied Philosophy and Sociology at the ‘Frankfurt School’ at J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt and Art History at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She also holds an MA and a PhD from University College London. Her doctoral dissertation, ‘French Impressionism and German Jews: The Making of Modernist Art Collectors and Art Collections in Imperial Germany’, is a study of a pioneering Jewish art dealer, Paul Cassirer, private collectors and public patrons before World War I. Her memoir ‘History, Memory, and Me’ is awaiting publication later this year.

Fine-Grodzinski is a curator, writer, independent scholar, and lecturer in social and cultural Jewish history. Her articles have been published in academic and cultural journals in the UK and abroad. She is co-founder of OCLW’s Jewish Women's Voices programme.

About the Jewish Women’s Voices Programme:

Jewish Women's Voices is a collaborative initiative by Dr Kate Kennedy, Director of the ‘Oxford Centre for Life-Writing’, and Dr Vera Fine-Grodzinski, a scholar of Jewish social and cultural history.

The Programme is the first of its kind at any UK academic institution. Launched in October 2023, the Programme celebrates the life-writing of Jewish women, who are often underrepresented in mainstream historical accounts. The Programme is a three-term seminar series dedicated to exploring the diverse experiences of Jewish women across centuries, countries, and cultures.

Further information about the Programme can be found here. 

Further Details and Contacts:

This hybrid event is free and open to all. If you are able, please consider making a donation of £5, £10, or £20 to support the Centre’s activities and outreach initiatives. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.

Registration is strongly recommended for in-person attendance and required for hybrid attendance. Registration will close at 10:30 on 05/05/2026.

The event will be recorded and made available on the OCLW website soon after. Registration is not required to access the recording.

Queries regarding this event should be addressed to OCLW Events Manager,  Dr Eleri Anona Watson.