Israel-Palestine conflict comes to the Turin Book Fair

The L.A. Times reports that… the organizers of the this year’s Turin Book Fair made it an occasion to honor Israeli authors on the 60th anniversary of the nation’s founding, which understandably has made a lot of people angry. So, lots of boycotts of the book fair and heightened security. Yeah, it’s unfortunate that this is happening around an event that is about culture and that peaceful form of communication known as literature, but I think if I were organizing the event I would probably have ignored Israel’s anniversary. Making the book fair an occasion to specially honor Israel given their policies and what is going on there now could only provoke the kind of reaction that it did.

Thanks to Kathleen McCook for sending the LA Times story to email lists.