In “A trip to Hebron,” Benjamin Moser describes how the apartheid he witnessed transformed him into an advocate for Palestinian rights. Moser says, “Before you can start to feel the justice of the Palestinian cause, you have to go through a lot of steps.”
He describes visiting Hebron in this article. From his perspective, “When my parents were growing up, Jim Crow was the law of the land in our state. When I read about it as a child, it seemed so bizarre and exotic to me—separate water fountains for black people?—that I am astonished to realize how recently it ended: only a few years before I was born. Yet Hebron felt worse to me than anything I’d read about Jim Crow. Worse than apartheid—a word that is now, finally, being applied to Palestine.”
Benjamin Moser is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer. He is a staff writer for The Nation, and he regularly writes in his newsletter “Urubuquaquá”. Moser has also written several books and has worked as a book critic for Harper’s Magazine, and as a columnist for The New York Times Book Review. Moser has won several other awards, including Brazil’s State Prize in Cultural Diplomacy and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Read more about Moser’s journey at the Promised Land Museum.
Subscribe to and read Benjamin Moser’s writing at https://benjaminmoser.substack.com/about?utm_source=menu-dropdown.
