There is a different problem. And then my dad as many of you know was palestinian but born with american citizenship. Went to british schools and wrote a lot about his own identity issues. He left palestine at a very young age. He was raised in jerusalem and in cairo and came here at the age of 14 or 15 to the united states. He was also christian anglican episcopalian and i was born and baptized as an episcopalian. They there again is another strange state. Then i was raised in new york city and attended a private school for girls on the Upper East Side because my parents of course wanted me to have a wonderful and good education and its a very good School However when i went to school but i was episcopalian. I sort of fit and that i didnt and then my father meanwhile was in the other room writing rants of representation of the media and arts and literature. I was as i say in the book watching i dream of jeannie and trying to figure out why it didnt have blond hairs magic powers and a outfit. So there was a lot of this is sort of how i see myself to this day as this kind of confused lost child of immigrants and yet i mostly the daughter this person who too many people really stands like really symbolizes palestinian identity or palestinian american identities so when i became a professional actress and im not going to get too much into this but it became interesting to me to realize how much it mattered that my name was najla said and i didnt want to change it. I didnt want to change it because i dont know as i said last night in my book talk i honestly thought maybe if someone set a different name i wouldnt answer them because i would forget that i change my name. It wasnt like everyone thinks i did these things with a certain amount of integrity and thought but i honestly just did what to change my name. It seemed like an oldfashioldfashi oned silly thing to do in a world in which we live but when i became a professional actress and i realized what having the name najla said regardless of who my father was, how it meant i would be perceived and what would be expected of me i began to really start to deal with my identity. In the book i write a lot about how as a little girl i went to school with these white episcopalian girls and i was episcopalian and relatively white so i was trying to fit in but then i kept hearing that i was arab and then i would sort of look at tv and see what was being presented to me as what an arab should read which was muslim and really browned skin and a certain type of you know all the things my father wrote about. Either terrorists or fanatic muslims or belly dancers so i didnt fit into any of these categories. So i was trying very hard to fit into america and to be like my friends but it wasnt working. When i was in high school i switch to another school where the students were mostly jewish and all of a sudden i fit in. Part of it was because of the way i look and the way i act. I was from the Upper West Side of manhattan which to many people is just a connotation of its just jewish this idea that new yorkers from a certain part of new york could have a certain type of neuroses are jewish people. So i think what happened to me was i had a lot of confusion about my identity and then as i got older i started and the time in which i was born in 1974 and my mom is lebanese like i said that we would go to lebanon but the war started when i was about a year old so there was a war in lebanon and that my dad was palestinian and i didnt quite understand how that fit in because sometimes you couldnt come with us and then my parents were there but they werent muslim so there was a lot going on in my brain. I thought for a long time the best thing to do was just to avoid it and try to be american which i think is something that a lot of Young Children of immigrants try to do. It forced me to deal with my fathers mentality my own mortality but also i just felt very afraid because i was 18 years old and there was my dad telling me i had just been diagnosed with leukemia and we are going back to palestinpalestin e. Youre going to see it and then you are sort of going to grow up and deal with it. And im going to go. So that was the launch point for the book and the play so i realized in the process of writing this book although i constantly feel like i still am this like confused i dont know if im an american. I dont know if im palestinian or lebanese. I dont know if i and smart. I dont know if i understand politics that i somehow still managed to internalize and really take in and understand everything that my father stood for and spoke about and was famous for and was feared forward which is a certain amount of integrity and association with my identity that it is part of who i am and that is something that i will not deny. Even if i dont feel like i have a house in palestine that i note each nook and cranny of the walls or my grandfather was there. It wasnt tangible and that is what made it feel but in writing this book and going through this process i realized i had taken in everything my father taught me and taught all of us. In a certain way the most common question ive been asked other than how does najla said not know where she is from which is not a fair question is what would your father say were he alive now . People constantly are writing we wish edwards said are here. We miss his voice and what i have learned is he left us everything that we need to analyze and look at things the way that he did and my style of talking and writing and performing is very casual, very american, you know i come off as just a human being who is trying to figure that out and i do that on purpose. Its important to me that i carry on something that he taught me which is that as long as you are human and present yourself as a human with all your faults and your daily struggles and your wishes and your thoughts about what you like and what we be you would like to be in the freedom of movement you would like to have two related specifically to palestinians people will listen to you. Many people talk about how he used to speak of this permission to narrate and tell your own story and also this idea that we are all just human beings. I think its quite simple. Sadly i went through this whole process of worrying about being a daughter of this person who seemed to represent so much and have these lofty ideas but what has come out with this is this incredible this incredible realization that its very simple and we mustnt forget how simple it is. You know people have asked me, was your father an antisemite and im like well know, he was just palestinian. If you have actually read anything you wrote he would know he is in no way an antisemite that but people dont do that. Take people take your associations about your tandy and just saying you are palestinian hearings this whole thing with it so the best thing we can do in that i can do in that i have learned to do is to present myself as a human being and that is all there is who are moving forward in our you you know, the in our quest for just peace and in terms of whats happening in the middle east right now with all the upheaval and all the trauma and the sadness, i thank my father, he would be very i remember when in 2011 when mubarak was finally ousted i cried because i think i father would have been so it was everything he ever worked for was for this moment of people coming together in rising up and realizing that they have power to change things. But in the months that followed people have been asking me or the years that followed, people have been asking me ill go what are we going to do . This is a necessary step. We are a necessary place. The upheaval has to come. The difficulty has to come. Unfortunately theres a lot of violence and death and horrible things that my father would never encourage anyone to give up hope and i think thats most important thing. My book was just written to remind those of us of the next generation whether we are palestinian or not. That we have all of the tools we need to continue to struggle and to move forward. Im just going to read a couple of sections from the book and then i will answer any questions that you have. In 1982 we went on this trip to palestine and at this point i had just graduated from high school. My father has been diagnosed with leukemia and i am myself quite ill with a disorder which had developed in part because of my own sort of disconnect with my culture and my identity. I just wanted to kind of disappeared and there was a lot going on. But, so we went on this trip and i didnt want to go. We went to palestine and we went to jerusalem. We went to a motel that was american and that was good because i wasnt excited about being in the middle east and then we went and saw my fathers home. Another thing which i pointed out last night was i was constantly i was worn in the states and i lived on the west side of manhattan and all my friends lived on the east side. All he wanted to do was live on the east side. My mother was from beirut which was divided into east and west and we lived in the west but we were christians so we were supposed to be in the east. My dad was from jerusalem. He was from west jerusalem but we were arab so we were supposed to be in the east kept happening. I was supposed to be in the east all the time and i was always in the west. I only realize that reason only. Its fascinating. How much that played into these categories. These divisions we create and house completely arbitrary they are. I used to go to school in new york and i used to go to the east side and i would be worried that if somehow there would be a war and they would close off the west side and i would want to go home. These are very real things that were prevalent in my childhood and my consciousness and my psyche so this trip scared me for a lot of reasons. So im just going to read we went to jerusalem and visited the house in which my thought it was born and grew up which was as they sit in west jerusalem. My father wrote about this for the observer that although we were frightened my brother and i were convinced that we were going to see the name of one of our jewish friends on the house door. We fortunately didnt but we did encounter a sign that said the International Christian embassy which was a rightwing zionist christian organizations so again i dont know. All of these things started to just spin around in my head and i thought im never going to make sense of any of this. So, sorry. I just want to find so this is on the trip, okay . It was on this trip that i learned my parents grew up in arab cities with jewish quarters that were as much part of of the city as any other neighborhood. In the of my mothers you there was a shiite area in a christian area and there was also a jewish area and even now after more than one israeli invasion and countless internal religious battles the synagogue still stands in beirut and as any other big city each quarter are each quarter arent its particular designation because of the families who settled there and not because someone drew a line. My mom told me the story of how her famous philanthropic mother put money for the jewish home in a blue box on the coffee table of a German Jewish neighbor in beirut. Without knowing that home was going to be in palestine. My dad talks of his jewish friends in egypt trade my mom reminded me that her school, the one her mother ran come it was in the jewish quarter of beirut. I wondered how their experiences were different from mine. I consider the israeli kids in the park with their nannies. Their parents and grandparents might have been victims of the european holocaust but those same adults have probably never thought about anything never thought anything about arabs until they got their, get here now not so much later their children meet, these kids none of us had known anything about the other other than an enemy. It seems so bizarre. I was struck to the reality of the conflict. It had not been going on for centuries very dizzy origins were resent. Not long ago reached the children has the memories of our parents separate tragedies to defend and protect that none of us really get it. The divisions and separations suddenly multiplied spasmodically my head and collide and violently come together. Palestinian Arab Christian palestinianamerican jewishamerican. My father stopped in his tracks on the way back to the card to tell me what he really thought about the middle east conflict. Its my generation that has messed it up. We are too connected to the events of 48 and 67 and we have participated and until we are all gone my generation the sharons and arafats on all of us nothing is going to get done. Its up to your generation to fix fix it fix it really. He put his arm around me as we resumed our walk. I turned my head to stare back at the saucer eyed palestinian children. It began to photograph them excessively whereever we went. I have no other way of capturing what i felt inside. On tuesday june 16, 1992 we piled into a vehicle went to gaza. My mom had told me had to wear a skirt there. Which i thought would be no big deal since i had brought many with me on the trip great as i got up from the thick breakfast room to change might mother quickly added it could not be a very short skirt. I was taken back for a moment because my mother never seemed to care what we were. But i heeded her warning and carefully chose a skirt that my parents had given me for my birthday. By my standards of the time it hung just above my knees. I put on a pair of rounds played oxford shoes from rossetti inelegant store on madison avenue. I had no idea was expected. I had no idea what to expect. I thought i looked modest enough this peso since my real then audience baby face made me look much younger than my 18 years but as soon as we enter the driver suggested we stopped to get a full let fulllength for jobs or headscarf on the way. My mother refused chiding the driver in arabic we are not muslim. We are arabs and we can be respectful without being covered head to toe. He nodded his head and let us be. I wanted to throw up. We entered the strip to a military checkpoint. They were army posts in intimidating soldiers manning stations all over the area and more barbed wire than i had ever seen. Daddy, to us and later in his own article that the entrance gave the place the appearance of an enormous concentration camp. We researched cleared and let through. I took pictures from the car window as we approached gaza refugee camp. There were people everywhere. This place has the highest population density in the world dad told us. 65,000 people live here on top of each other. Are you listening . And half a square mile of space space i was listening that i didnt need to hear the details. I could see everything. The car windows were closed but i could still smell the open sewers. Daddy continued to lecture us all the while mentally taking notes for his article. The statistics are nightmarish. Terrible infant mortality rates high unemployment the lowest income and appetite territories and the fewest medical services and on and on. This was 20 years ago. Gaza today is much much worse. Despite my mothers insistence that my outfit was fine i felt conspicuous and alienated from my people as i descended from the car. Then i put my fancy suede shoe into the muddy earth of gaza and inhaled that horrifying stench of raw sewage that penetrated the car window but i had only faintly smell that when i was inside the vehicle. At that moment i truly realized i had absolutely no idea about anything. We had lunch at the house with some important people. As we entered all of the men including my mother and father were guided into one room and the women into another. I was confused. Ive been to the middle east many times before and despite my relative isolation in recent years had nevertheless grown up around lots of arabs. This was the custom i have never encountered anywhere and in the movies. I followed my mom into this female salon and the women begin talking about cooking. I understood them. Frankly i had nothing to say. I didnt cook. I didnt even eat. My mother nodded smiled and politely answered all their questions. I could tell she was slightly bored but was making every effort not to show it. I too was bored so i slipped away. I knew i would get away with it. I they knew that to these people i was just a little girl and essentially an american one. I could always pretend i didnt know any better. My father stand in the doorway waiving his hand gesturing for me to come in. Quite a deal of the men jumped the to get miniatures but i smiled quietly and purged myself on my next to my father. They were not to my surprise talking about men in the middle east always need to be talking about, politics. I felt like i played the part of the bored teenager in the same and just about every country in the air broke i knew what to do. Tune out. Arab men always seem to want to sit and talk very seriously about politics. They would all listen intently to one another one and everyone would smoke a lot of cigarettes drink cups of there but coffee and somewhat finger prayer beads as they thoughtfully consider the argument to which they had an audience. In a smokefilled room all eyes were fixated on my dad. Most of the men didnt know why my father was important other than he was a connection to the outside world or more specifically to the west. The irony of my dads renown until he passed away his face was far more friendlier to people outside of palestine than to anyone who actually live there. They did know he was important and he had been brought here to tell them his stories. After we left i asked daddy to explain exactly what if instead. I would have been able to follow that heavily accented arabic conversation even if i have had been listening. Later in his article use the same word to use for me. I didnt hear single whole fulltime in the two hours i was would the men. One of them spoke up having to and 17 years in jail. His children were sick and relatives destitute. There was a lot of anger. The phrase i kept hearing was slow death. There seem to be considerable animus against the west bankers who were characterized by gas is as spoiled or privilege. We are forgotten and because of the unimaginably difficult job improving gaza i was not to forget. I can try to conjure up a picture of gaza but all are member of the days of feeling. There was a dead head and all on a platter for lunch and a small piece of fruit given to me by one of the young girls of the house which i pretended to fight in and chew and swallow. She plucked it off a tree near the porch and chose a second piece for herself. She popped it into her mouth and smile. All that i noticed was the way her filthy dust that covered the one she did not eat. I did not want to eat because of the calories but i also wondered how anyone could eat a piece of fruit without washing it. The inside of the house was immaculate usually decorated even though the outside was stinky and dirty. I tried to wrap my teenage head around the existence of such a place in the world where people are trapped like caged animals in the filthiest zoo unearth while i got to prance around in suede shoes and a 150 skirt and get on a plane and go home. In this way the trip to palestine added another dimension to my anorexia. I wanted desperately to suffer not just for my daddy but all