New City

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 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. A book review.

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.

Short Take Musrara: The New City Neighborhood That Became No Man’s Land

Musrara, a formerly New City neighborhood founded by Palestinians, had a unique fate in 1948.

Short Take Sheikh Jarrah: The Northern Gateway to Jerusalem

The neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah has historically been the northern gateway to the Old City and a home to powerful Palestinian families and consulates.

Backgrounder The West Side Story, Part 1: Jerusalem before “East” and “West”

Before 1948, Jerusalem was not split between an “East” and a “West.” Rather, a cosmopolitan, multiethnic New City grew organically out of the Old City.

Personal Story The Baq‘a Zone Ghetto: A Memoir of a Palestinian Jerusalemite Who Remained in West Jerusalem after the War

Jacob Nammar, whose family established the al-Nammamreh neighborhood in al-Baq‘a, shares the trauma his family went through as one of the few Palestinian families who remained.