About Me — Rebecca Ruth Gould

Rebecca Ruth Gould
About Me Stories
7 min readJan 4, 2021

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“Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will” (Antonio Gramsci)

Rebecca Ruth Gould in Isfahan (Iran) in 2016. Photo by the author.

Hello! Welcome to this short summary of myself. I define myself as a writer, reader, political thinker, translator, teacher, lover of staying up late at night, of wandering through cities and watching the stars, coffee, documentary films, medieval ruins, and poetry in languages other than my own. My reading ranges across novels (Fyodor Dostoevsky and Virginia Woolf are among my favorites), philosophy (I adore Giambattista Vico and Walter Benjamin), and poetry (I love Mahmoud Darwish and Zbigniew Herbert, among others).

Instead of trying to summarize my life, I will show some images of myself in the various places I have lived and written about. Each of these places — and the people depicted in them — has in various ways left a trace on my soul.

Me (below) carrying my beloved sister Beth on my back. Christmas, 1986, Washington, DC.
Me (left) holding the hand of my beloved sister Kate, gripping her teddy bear.
When we lived together in Florida (c. 1988), I created the “sister’s club” together with my younger sisters, Beth (left) and Kate (right).
Me with two Kist women in the Pankisi Gorge (Republic of Georgia) in 2006. Photo in author’s possession.
Me in the Citadel of Aleppo in 2010. Photo in author’s possession.

What I Write

I began writing on Medium only in December 2020, and am excited about reaching a wider audience through this medium, of discovering new themes, and making new friends in the process. Here are the topics and genres I have written in so far:

1. Palestine

I lived in Bethlehem while working in Jerusalem from 2011–2. I subsequently wrote a book, Erasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom (Verso 2023), about that time and about how that experience came back to haunt me in 2017 after I had relocated to the UK. Soon after the UK adopted a new definition of antisemitism…

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Rebecca Ruth Gould
About Me Stories

Poetry & politics. Free Palestine 🇵🇸. Caucasus & Iran. Writer, Educator, Translator & Editor. rrgould.hcommons.org https://www.soas.ac.uk/about/rebecca-gould