Finding My Grandmother’s Ma’amoul Cookie in Brooklyn: A Story of Palestinian Survival

About the Project

Writing this essay – about finding a cookie – during a genocide forces a constant reckoning: Does it center Palestinians on the ground? Does it serve them? Nadine Apelian Dobbs grew up with parents who fled genocide, war, and displacement – but from vastly different cultures. Their stories were erased in Western media, and she saw that erasure magnified after Oct. 7. Silence felt complicit. Watching her children struggle for belonging gave her the privilege – and responsibility – to speak.

That is why she chose to tell this story – a story so simple about finding a cookie that tasted like her grandmother’s malmoul, yet so complicated and layered as the moment we’re currently living in.

As Nadine writes, she worked on this essay for nearly a year, stopping and restarting every time another massacre, another bombing, another statistic appeared in the news. She wanted the piece, which can seem so trivial when compared to the images coming out of Gaza live on our screens, to resonate beyond the cookie.

What she concluded was that finding her Teta’s cookie, when the world is so determined to erase your identity, when another nation is actively killing your people and stealing your land, was proof of survival – and a sign that Palestinians will never be erased.