New City

Personal Story Zakia Jabre Hajjar: “What I Had in Jerusalem Was Like a Treasure, a Precious Gift, and I Lost it”

A Palestinian Jerusalemite’s memories of growing up in Jerusalem before the Nakba, as shared with her daughter through letters in later years

Personal Story The Day of the Long Night

A Palestinian Jerusalemite remembers his childhood and its terrifying end in the New City neighborhood of Qatamon. An eyewitness testimony to the violent end of the New City.

Backgrounder The West Side Story, Part 4: The Erasure of the New City and Its Transformation into Jewish West Jerusalem

Jerusalem’s New City was violently transformed and severed from the rest of Jerusalem, its Palestinian inhabitants exiled and banned from returning to this day.

Graphic Hand-drawn Map of Qatamon

Who lived in the New City Palestinian neighborhood of Qatamon, which ceased to exist as such after 1948?

Backgrounder The West Side Story, Part 3: From Bourgeois Comfort to Untenable Peril: The Emptying of the New City

How the New City came to an abrupt and violent end

Backgrounder The West Side Story, Part 2: The Darkening Horizon: Jerusalem’s New City under the British Mandate

In the face of rising Jewish immigration, Jewish self-separation, and the looming end of the British Mandate, Jerusalem began to implode, placing the New City in peril.

Blog Post Book Review: Karmi Memoir Tells Jerusalem Story of Loss and Rediscovery

A woman’s attempt to reconcile her English and Palestinian identities leads her to Jerusalem to search for the Qatamon home her family left in 1948.

Photo Boys Troop from the Jerusalem New City YMCA, 1938

A glimpse back in time to life and boyhood in pre-Nakba Jerusalem

Blog Post “I Wasn’t Born There; I Never Lived There, but I Was from There”

A Palestinian woman returns to Jerusalem to rediscover and reclaim her mother’s city for her.