Tell Your Life Story

The title describes Dan Bar-On's method of using storytelling as both a qualitative biographical research method and as an intervention, to bring people from opposite sides to a dialogue. Such work needs slow pace and long-term commitment, with a special combination of a scientific rigorous analysis with a sensitive approach toward the people one approaches. The book first surveys the author's earlier work in this field, in the Kibbutz, with families of Holocaust survivors and...
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The title describes Dan Bar-On's method of using storytelling as both a qualitative biographical research method and as an intervention, to bring people from opposite sides to a dialogue. Such work needs slow pace and long-term commitment, with a special combination of a scientific rigorous analysis with a sensitive approach toward the people one approaches. The book first surveys the author's earlier work in this field, in the Kibbutz, with families of Holocaust survivors and descendents of Nazi perpetrators, bringing the two groups together. However, most of the book is devoted to Bar-On's work with Palestinians, both Israeli-Palestinians and Palestinians from the PNA. Through different settings (working with PRIME on developing a school textbook with two narratives; with refugees; at a University setting with a mixed students group; conducting interviews in Haifa) he describes the hardships of peace building 'under fire', but also the potential achievements of such work.