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As recounted in her 2016 debut work A Land Twice Promised: An Israeli Woman\u2019s Quest for Peace<\/em>, Baum grew up with both a deep love of Israel and a keen sense of Jewish vulnerability and the wounds of the Holocaust. The narrative she grew up with about Israel centred on the heroism of its citizen army (\u201cour boys,\u201d she repeatedly calls them) standing up to the bewildering, relentless hatred of the Arab countries. She was deeply shaped by the experience of living through the 1967 Six Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War as a child.<\/p>\nOver the years, she developed a more nuanced view. She came to face the existence of a hateful, right-wing extreme in Israel and was bitterly disappointed by the actions of the Israeli government in the 1982 Lebanon War, particularly Israeli complicity in the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Her brother, himself named after an uncle who died defending Israel, also suffered post-traumatic stress syndrome from the Lebanon War, leading to a lifelong struggle with mental illness.<\/p>\n
When Baum left Israel to move with her husband to the United States to support his career, she left with her simplistic narratives shattered, but an enduring deep love of Israel and the Jewish people.<\/p>\n
In her youth, Baum had passionately loved acting and storytelling and, in the United States, she became a professional storyteller. As a tale-spinner, she played it safe, however, presenting upbeat material and folktales and not touching on the conflicts and contradictions of modern Israel. All of that began to change when she nurtured a relationship with another mother, a Palestinian she calls \u201cJamuna\u201d in the book. As a result of their friendship and the advice of storytelling mentors that she needed to stop shying away from difficult material, Baum began listening to Jamuna\u2019s heart-wrenching stories of growing up Palestinian in the land of Baum\u2019s dreams, with an eye to telling Jamuna\u2019s stories.<\/p>\n
\u201cHearing how the soldiers of the IDF, \u2018our boys,\u2019 were to a young Jamuna the source of terror and hatred, was heartwrenching,\u201d Baum told the Independent<\/em>.<\/p>\n Baum began touring with a one-woman play called A Land Twice Promised<\/em>, wherein she delivered monologues from the perspectives of herself, her mother, Jamuna and Jamuna\u2019s mother. The show aimed to bring healing and be a contribution toward peace. As one would expect, it was received in many different ways. Baum was called a \u201ctraitor\u201d and told she \u201cshould be ashamed\u201d of herself; others said she had described their own Israeli or Palestinian experience perfectly. Both Israelis and Palestinians said the show was not balanced enough. One woman from Nigeria said the show made her realize Jews were human beings; others said they\u2019d never felt compassion for Israelis before seeing the show. Some said it was the first time they empathized with Palestinians.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the beginning, it was terrifying,\u201d said Baum. \u201cAudience reactions would throw me into bouts of anxiety.\u201d<\/p>\n Gradually, she developed the ability to process the diverse reactions and became confident in what she was doing, and she continued to actively evolve the show based on audience feedback that she solicited.<\/p>\n In 2015, after doing the show for 14 years, Baum was approached by someone interested in making it into a book. It was an offer she couldn\u2019t refuse, though she had never written before. \u201cI\u2019m not really a writer,\u201d she said. \u201cI come from the world of performance, I\u2019m a speaking artist.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite Baum\u2019s lack of writing experience, A Land Twice Promised<\/em> is a moving, lucid memoir that powerfully evokes the Israeli experience in the last decades, and Baum\u2019s personal and familial struggles to come to terms with it.<\/p>\n The book provokes empathy and insight, and will lead most readers to embrace a view of Israel and the Palestinian conflict that is both complex and compassionate. The book has received favorable reviews and even won many commendations, including one from Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Shipler, writer of Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in the Promised Land<\/em>.<\/p>\n