CBH Talk | Martha Hodes on “My Hijacking: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering”
In her memoir, My Hijacking: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering, historian Martha Hodes goes back fifty years to tell the story of being a passenger on an airliner hijacked in 1970.
On September 6, 1970, twelve-year-old Hodes and her thirteen-year-old sister were flying unaccompanied home to New York City from Israel when their plane was hijacked by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and forced to land in the Jordan desert. Nearly a half century later, her memories of those six days and nights as a hostage remained hazy and scattered.
In My Hijacking Hodes applies a historian’s tools to recreate the personal and global story of what happened on TWA flight 741, drawing on deep archival research, childhood memories, and conversations with relatives, friends, and fellow hostages. Join her in conversation as she sheds light on the hostage crisis that shocked the world, unravels her own understanding of what happened, and reflects on the fallibilities of memory and the lingering impact of trauma.
Participants
Martha Hodes is professor of history at New York University. She is the author of the award-winning books Mourning Lincoln; The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century; and White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South. She has presented her scholarship around the world and is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University, the Whiting Foundation, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Photograph by Bruce Dorsey
