Thank You Daniel & Ismail Backers!

After a year of intense editing, translation, and production, Daniel and Ismail has finally taken the field! We are so grateful to our generous backers who have been with us since the beginning of this multilingual journey and are eager to share this important book with you!

Daniel and Ismail is a one-of-a-kind, uplifting picture book about a Jewish boy and a Palestinian boy who bond on the soccer field—translated into English, Hebrew, and Arabic. We wouldn’t have been able to complete this daunting project without the support of our backers on Kickstarter. Thank you for supporting Restless in our mission to bring global literature to English-reading children, middle graders, and young adults. We believe that now more than ever it is important to share literature that celebrates, not depreciates, our similarities and our differences.

Thank you to the following backers who supported this publication:

Benjamin Jacobi, Anonymous, Paul Ryan, Anonymous, Robert Boscacci, Nneka Bolden, Barbara Chan, Anonymous, Elaine Reese, Kendall, Christopher O'Rourke, Andrea Blaauw, Naomi Firestone-Teeter, Bradley Hercman, Benjamin Samuel, Cantors George & Ricki Henschel, Shawnta Dodson, Farid Zhafri bin Mohd Zaid, K.A. Cummins, Heather Whittaker, Nick Gutierrez, Carlos Torres, Marian Rader, Heather Yoder, Gina Weber, Anjelica Ruiz, Anna Knutson, Scout O'Gara, Morgan A. Dedmon, Nanda Dyssou, Laurence Shapiro, Sophia Far, Laurel Levitan, Emily Somberg, Sevrina Flores, Stephen Sadow, Max Ubelaker Andrade, Megan Sullivan, Cathy Ries Neal, Naomi Sinnreich, Camille Lofters, Ben Nichols, Fatima Iqbal, Ilana Bittner, Noel Schornhorst, Thomas Hoffmann, Matt Bucher, Scott Junkins, Colin Legerton, Dan Landau, Bilal Ali, Galit Hasan-Rokem, Eleanor Lamb, Margo, Mick Pickup, Eugene Mundol, Juan Pablo Iglesias Yacher, Joshua Mikutis, Martin Miller, Harold Augenbraum, Rose Mary Salum, Zack Ham, Merry Arnold, Sam Bett, Cindi Hickman, Donald Kudler, Mauricio Dorfman, Rachel Rodnyansky, Dean Whitehead, Kristen Neff, Jacob Craycroft, Anonymous, Anonymous, Anna Li, Joan Gore, Diane Baer, Daniel Weinberg, Terry Segal, Hongwoo Lee, Matthew Zapruder, Zehra Karim, Anthony Eaton, Barbara Rothblatt, Amelia Gersema, Ebrahim Al-Bishri, Stanford Brown, Tegan Tigani, Richard Hurowitz, Susan Miron, Charles Dee Mitchell, David Smith, Anonymous, Anonymous, Anonymous, Margot Atwell, The Creative Fund, Melissa Moxie, Anonymous, Anonymous, Anonymous, F.D. Toussaint, Pamela Rostron, Natalie Grand, Eric Damon Walters, Isaac ‘Will It Work’ Dansicker, Anonymous, Dinah Lenney, Kim, Ilan Stavans, Anonymous, Molly Antopol

Out Today: Shulamith Hareven's 'Thirst: The Desert Trilogy'

Out today from Restless Books is Shulamith Hareven'sThirst: The Desert Trilogy, a vivid and surprising retelling of three canonical Biblical tales that together cast a searching, critical light on modernity. Written by one of Israel’s most important writers and translated from the Hebrew by one of its leading cultural critics, Hillel Halkin, these stories come alive again in what The New York Times calls “evocative and lush prose.” Download the newly designed eBook today!  

A Letter to a Palestinian Friend

This week, in the wake of the murders of four teenagers, a hundred Gazans have been killed by Israeli forces and Israeli civilians have been wounded and homes destroyed by Hamas missiles. 

Tal Nitzan, author of the poetry collection At the End of Sleep, published by Restless in June, lives in Tel Aviv. Long active in the anti-occupation movement, Tal corresponds with the Palestinian poet Basem Al-Nabriss. Once a Director General of the Ministry of Culture for the Palestinian Authority, he was ousted from his post after Hamas took control in 2007. Tal and Basem have exchanged messages again this week, and Tal has shared her latest reply with Restless.

Dear Basem,

It is the fourth day of the war between my country and yours—if the tormented Gaza strip could even be called a country. My government and Hamas are carrying it out, our peoples pay the price, and the end is not in sight. You write that you pray for the peace and safety of both peoples. You never forget to pray for us, even when your family is under Israeli fire. I don't know how to pray, and no words can express now my pain and rage and anxiety.

I think about your lone voice, ceaselessly and bravely advocating peace and non-violence in the face of a regime that wouldn't tolerate such opinions, and about the price you paid. I think about your absurd fate, persecuted and bombed alternately by Hamas and by the IDF, about the cruel choice you were forced to make, remaining with your family or saving your own life. I can't think of you as belonging to another people. For me, you are my people, beyond any doubt, and this is not a mere phrase: you are my brother in the most obvious, natural way. You share my most essential beliefs, you speak my deepest language.

You wrote to me today: "We need the voices of Israeli intellectuals, those voices that did not lose the essence of human values and nobility. We need the voice of reason on both sides, the words that would abolish the barrier between our two peoples."

I promise you that these words are spoken here, and written and published, and shouted in parades, by the same voices that have been speaking against the ongoing occupation of Palestine and against the Israeli government's policy of war and aggression rather than striving for peace. Voices very much like yours, trying to break this vicious circle of suffering and hopelessness. It's hard to be heard now under the explosions and cries of incitement, and tragically, hate, fear, and vengeance spread much faster, like fire.

Hamas missiles have reached my town, for three days now I've been woken up by the sounds of alarm and explosions and shaking windows, but it's your family who is in immediate mortal danger every day and every hour. Gaza is threatened by a power cut, but I feel as if I'm writing to you from a bottomless darkness. Yet I don't renounce my hope that you and I and my children and yours and your little granddaughter Tal* will emerge from these sick, dark times and live the lives we deserve. It's your unyielding optimism that gives me hope.

I hold on to this light.

All my thoughts are with you,

Tal.

*Note: Al-Nabriss named his first granddaughter after Nitzán.