NJ library cancels ‘P is for Palestine’ kids book event for second time

JTA — A New Jersey public library on Wednesday canceled a public meeting about the children’s book “P is for Palestine,” citing safety and crowd control, but said it would reschedule a reading of the book.

It had already postponed a talk by the book’s author, Golbarg Bashi, that was scheduled for mid-May.

Jewish critics of the book have said it promotes violence and that its author should not be given a platform at the public library.

The Highland Park Public Library’s board of trustees met Wednesday and reached their decision to cancel the meeting in consultation with the city’s mayor and police chief, according to a cancellation notice on the library website, which also said, “there is no time in the foreseeable future when those (safety) conditions are likely to change.”

But the library pledged to reschedule the talk and reading by “P is for Palestine” author Golbarg Bashi and to schedule a similar program around the book “I is for Israel,” by Gili Bar-Hillel and Prodeepta Das.

In 2017, the same book by Bashi, an Iranian-born instructor of Middle Eastern history at nearby Rutgers University, sparked controversy when it was offered for sale at a popular book store on New York’s Upper West Side.

A nearby Reform synagogue objected particularly to a two-page spread featuring the letter I and stating that “I is for Intifada, Intifada is Arabic for rising up for what is right, if you are a kid or a grownup!”

Critics said the page glorified the violent resistance that characterized the two separate Palestinian “uprisings” of the late 1980s and early 2000s.

Bashi, however, said “intifada” encompasses a broader and largely nonviolent Palestinian cultural resistance.