Gaza Kitchen cooking class and talk with Laila El-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt
Sun, Jun 20, 2021 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time (UTC-4)
Register here.
Venture into The Gaza Kitchen with the Museum of the Palestinian People
About this event
On June 20, venture into The Gaza Kitchen with the Museum of the Palestinian People and join Laila El-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt for a live cooking demonstration and conversation on Gaza, food, and culture. This event will take place on Zoom, and the featured recipe will be released to registrants in advance of the event.
At a somber time for Gaza’s people, the third edition of the award-winning cookbook The Gaza Kitchen is being published on June 15. The highly anticipated release contains new recipes, an all-new Authors’ Introduction, and updates from a trip back to Gaza that Laila El-Haddad made with the World Food Program in late 2019.
The Gaza Kitchen blazed a strong trail that many other Palestinian cookbooks followed, establishing Palestinian cuisine as a distinguished part of the world’s cultural heritage. The Gaza Kitchen has been lauded for the clarity and accuracy of its recipes—and also for the deep humanism of the authors’ approach, in which the joyous faces and families of Gaza’s cooks and food vendors share equal space with the recipes.
“Laila El-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt truly are storytellers sharing the stories of the women, men, and children of Gaza in a way that illuminates their humanity, their dignity, their strength.”
-José Andrés, chef and founder of World Central Kitchen
About the Authors
Laila El-Haddad is an award-winning Palestinian author, social activist, policy analyst and journalist. She frequently speaks on the situation in Gaza, the intersection of food and politics, and her own personal journey as a Palestinian mother and journalist.
She is the author of Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between, and co-author of the critically acclaimed The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey, which was the recipient of ‘Best Arab Cuisine Book’ award from Gourmand magazine, and a finalist at the 2013 MEMO Palestine Book Awards. She is also the co-editor of the anthology Gaza Unsilenced.
Maggie Schmitt is a writer, researcher, translator, educator, and social activist. She holds a B.A. from Harvard in Literature and has conducted advanced graduate studies in Social Anthropology and Mediterranean Studies at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Schmitt works in various media—writing, production, photography, video—exploring the daily practices of ordinary people as a way of understanding political and social realities in the Mediterranean region.
