Noa grew up in Jerusalem, Israel. In America, she met a Palestinian woman who also grew up in Jerusalem, only on the “other side”. Their friendship inspired her to tell the stories of their families that echo the contradicting national narratives of their people. Noa continues to use the transformative power of storytelling for peacemaking through her memoir A Land Twice Promised - An Israeli Woman's Quest for Peace.
Israeli Noa Baum was 29 years old and “kaput”, finished, in her grandmother’s Yiddish. But when she agreed to a blind date with an American, she realized she had hit rock bottom.
No work of fiction can even come close to real life when it comes to my parents. When this happened I knew that one day I would be able to laugh about it...
Noa arrived from Israel to America in 1990 the month Iraq invaded Kuwait and threatened to attack Israel. She arrived from a place where everyone walked around with boxes of gas masks in case they were attacked with mustard gas, to the quiet peaceful college town of Davis, California. To call it ...