Los Angeles Public Library officials have called off a Read Palestine Week talk between authors of a young adult and a children’s book about Palestinians that was set to take place Saturday, Dec. 6, virtually and through a watch-party at the Central Library’s young adult department.
The talk was to have been between Jenan Matari, author of the children’s book Everything Grows in Jiddo’s Garden, and Nora Lester Murad, who wrote the young adult book, Ida in the Middle.
Matari had advertised the library event on her Instagram page more than a week ago, on Nov. 25. It was a contractual requirement with the library, she said. Then earlier this week, she learned that her event had been cancelled by the Los Angeles Public Library.
In an Instagram reel posted Friday morning, Matari said that she initially learned about the cancellation, not through the library’s staff, but from people on the Internet informing her about it. When her team reached out to the library staff for confirmation, they “received a generic email from a team that I had been in pretty close communication with for a couple of weeks,” Matari said.
She said she “had actually been in contact with the team at the Los Angeles Public Library that booked me, and they had let me know that they were experiencing some pushback internally due to racism.” Matari said the library had “caved to Zionist bullying.”
Flyer advertising the author interview between Matari and Murad about their books.
Matari told The LA Reporter she received a brief email this week that read, “I am writing to provide an update that our December 6 program has been cancelled by administration. I appreciate your willingness to work with us, and I am sorry for the inconvenience.”
On Friday, a Los Angeles Public Library representative sent The LA Reporter a statement that confirmed the event “planned for December 6 will not take place.”
The statement also said the decision was based on how resources were being allocated, and the use of the library’s spaces “in a manner consistent with our mission, city standards, and our commitment to city residents, including those who may carry different perspectives.”
The statement also said the library is “committed to upholding open access to information while ensuring that all library programs support inclusion and maintain a safe, welcoming environment for every patron.”
Library officials did not provide specifics about any inconsistencies with their mission. They also provided the language of their mission statement, which reads: “The Los Angeles Public Library provides free and easy access to information, ideas, books and technology that enrich, educate and empower every individual in our city's diverse communities.”
Later the same afternoon, in response to further questions, the library’s communications staff relayed a statement “from library administration” that cited procedures not being followed as the reason the event was called off.
The statement attributed to the library’s administration read, “The library decided not to hold the event after determining that several procedures, required for all library programs, had not been followed. The event also had not been officially scheduled on our online calendar or processed through the proper approval workflow. Our priority is always to provide a welcoming and safe space for everyone. We remain committed to representing diverse voices in our collections, and the author’s book will be available for anyone who wishes to check it out.”
The LA Reporter followed up with the library’s communications staff to get details on what part of the approval process was not followed, and what efforts were made to identify and correct any issues with the process, but was told, “This is all the information we have to share.”
Matari previously had other events at bookstores cancelled, including one that was planned in October at Chevalier’s Books in Los Angeles. In an interview with The LA Reporter on Friday, Matari said it’s “much more dangerous that a library does something like this, versus privately owned bookstores.”
A library’s “entire existence is to provide access to knowledge that is being censored or removed by governing forces, by lobbying forces,” she said. “The library is a safe haven of knowledge, and to be censored and to see them cave to the same type of pressure that privatized institutions cave to is a really dangerous precedent to be set.”
Murad, the author of Ida in the Middle, also described the event’s cancellation as “censorship.” Murad said she had anticipated potential pushback, and provided library staff with tools, including a guide to help “teachers and librarians defend themselves against false accusations of antisemitism.”
“But apparently it wasn't sufficient for them to withstand the pressure to cancel — and they did,” Murad said.
Murad said that as someone who is Jewish and anti-Zionist, her voice is often silenced along with those of Palestinians. “The Jewish community is in an internal battle over who gets to represent Jews and the Zionist Jews do not want people like me to be undermining their claim to speak on behalf of all Jews,” Murad said.
Murad also said that one thing she wanted to make sure “the public understands” is that such censorship affects everyone. “If someone's at home thinking that, ‘Oh, this is a shame that Palestinians are being censored, it's harmful to Palestinians,’ — no, it's harmful to everyone, and it has a special harm for Palestinians and a special harm for Jews, which I am one,” Murad said.
“There is so much racism and misinformation — anti-Palestinian racism and misinformation about Palestinians — that any … information that comes directly from Palestinians’ experiences is really valuable and necessary for us to all be informed, so that we can be constructive and effective as citizens of the world,” Murad said.
Matari’s book, Everything Grows in Jiddo’s Garden, was recommended by Mychal Threets, a librarian who was recently announced as the host of the Reading Rainbow reboot. Threets describes the story of Matari’s book as one in which a girl learns from her grandfather how to “tend the garden,” which also helps her learn about her family’s roots in Palestine. When she asks her grandfather if they will ever go back to Palestine, where they were forced to move out of, he responds that “Palestine remembers us no matter where we go.” The main character then says, “so I learn all I can from him to help his garden grow.” Threets closes by saying that while the book is recommended for people aged 3 to 8 years of age, “any kid and their grownup will benefit from the story of hope and love.”
Murad’s book, Ida in the Middle, is geared to young adults, and recommended for people aged 12 to 16. It is about a Palestinian American eighth grader who eats a magic olive and is “whisked away to an alternate reality, in which her family never left Palestine,” according to a review in Publisher’s Weekly. The review closes by saying that “Murad persuasively crafts an enlightening tale via introspective, authentic-feeling prose, and a protagonist whose bravery in the face of her fears instills hope and warmth.”
The event flyer states that the event is a virtual conversation — hosted by Teen’Scape, the young adult section of the Los Angeles Public Library’s Central Library location, and the library’s Middle Eastern North African Affinity Group — in which Murad and Matari “will talk about their books, and the influence of Palestine on their stories.” People would have been able to watch this talk at an in-person “watch party” at in the Teen’Scape area of the library, and remotely, over Zoom.
Matari said she had been “excited to chat with Nora [Lester Murad]. She has a young adult book, and mine is a children's book, so I was excited to learn about the overlap in the work that we do.”
“The only way to protect Palestinian life and Palestinian stories, and the indigeneity aspect of it all, is to keep indigenous storytelling alive, is for us to write these stories and put them out there,” Matari said.
Matari said he grew up watching her own grandfather garden. “He still does today at almost 90 years old, and I never really understood his connection to gardening until I learned more about my indigenous Palestinian heritage, my Palestinian identity, from an indigenous lens,” she said. “Understanding that connection to land and how land stewardship is just kind of encoded in our DNA.”
So it was a combination of that experience and “wanting to teach my kids about Palestine from an early age, but not having the resources” that motivated her to write the book, Matari said.
Murad said she wrote her book to share her family’s story as well as that of other people she knows. She is not Palestinian herself, but she is married to a Palestinian, and her children are Palestinian.
“I originally wrote that book when we [Murad and her family] were living in Palestine,” Murad said. “I have three daughters, and there are three girls in the book, and my middle daughter in real life is kind of the prototype of Ida, who's the middle daughter in the book.”
“I'd say pretty much everything that happened in the book happened to us, or to people that we know and love, and that was part of our experience,” Murad said. “Particularly, it was interesting that only my oldest daughter and my youngest daughter ever went to school in the United States because we lived in Palestine for 13 years. My oldest daughter was in kindergarten, first and second grade, so three years, and she experienced racism. And then we moved to Palestine, partly because of that, and when we came back to the United States, my youngest daughter was finishing high school, and she also experienced anti-Palestinian racism. So the experiences of living under occupation were formative for them, but the experiences of experiencing anti-Palestinian racism in the United States were also formative to their experience. And being the mother of Palestinian kids who are experiencing racism was formative for me.”
Murad acknowledged the anti-Palestinian racism experienced by her children is not something “I would ever experience as a white, Jewish person, and I still can't say I experienced it.”
“But as the mother of someone experiencing it, it is a very intense and motivating perspective to have,” Murad said. “I feel like I am definitely fighting for my own children.”
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