Jae

“The amount of time we spend in everyday interactions far outweighs the time we spend at formal events. Yet it’s the formal events that are recorded in family histories. The everyday interactions that make up the bulk of our lives get lost. That’s why this topic is so important. Asking your older family members about social interactions when they were children shows something of the time and culture, as well as how your family members have evolved with the changing times.”
― Elizabeth Keating, The Essential Questions: Interview Your Family to Uncover Stories and Bridge Generations

“Differences in views of moral personhood are especially evident in immigrant families in the US. Children raised in America grow up in a very different environment than their immigrant parents did. For example, the parents may have been raised in a culture where teenage girls and boys didn’t go out on dates or interact with one another much at all, but now their children are growing up in a culture where this is expected. The children of immigrants are caught in two different systems. Doing what is “normal” in American culture may clash with their parents’ customary ways of showing moral personhood. Notions of how a moral person should interact with others aren’t easy to change because people learn these actions and protocols at an early age.”
― Elizabeth Keating, The Essential Questions: Interview Your Family to Uncover Stories and Bridge Generations

“We will all save each other. Or maybe we won’t. Maybe there is no saving, only salvaging. Maybe every breath is the triumph, and we must learn to take the win.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“In 2009, Zionist settlers, adorned with backpacks as if going on a weekend camping trip, entered our homes in occupied Jerusalem, escorted by Israeli occupation forces. They claimed that our home was theirs. After a tumultuous battle with two colonial committees in Israeli occupation courts, the settlers seized half of our home. Their takeover was part of a broader effort to ethnically cleanse the entirety of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. We were among 180 Palestinian families facing dispossession orders from Israeli courts that claimed that our homes were built on Jewish lands.”
― Mohammed El-Kurd, Rifqa