Annual Meeting - Martha Hodes on "My Hijacking"

The Board of Directors of the World Affairs Council of Western Massachusetts cordially invite you to attend the 98th Annual Meeting and Dinner with featured speaker Dr. Martha Hodes on her book My Hijacking: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering.

Martha Hodes is professor of history at New York University. On September 6, 1970, she--then 12 years old--and her 13-year-old sister were flying unaccompanied back to New York City from Israel when their plane was hijacked by members of the secular Marxist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and forced to land in the Jordan desert. Nearly a half-century later, her memories of those six days and nights as a hostage were hazy and scattered. Drawing on deep archival research, childhood memories, and conversations with relatives, friends, and fellow hostages, Hodes set out to re-create what happened to her. As the hostages forged friendships and provoked conflicts, the sisters learned about the lives and causes of their captors, pondering a deadly divide that continues today. As a personal history, My Hijacking ultimately brings the author to a deeper understanding of what happened in the Jordan desert, prompting a complex confrontation with trauma and empathy.

Hodes is the author of the award-winning books Mourning Lincoln; The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century; and White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South. She has presented her scholarship around the world and is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University, the Whiting Foundation, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

Special thanks to NAI Plotkin

Host or Publisher The World Affairs Council of Western Massachusetts