On Sunday night in New York I attended a gathering for the Friends of the Jenin Freedom Theatre at a lovely apartment on the Upper West Side. Forty people crammed a booklined room with a grand piano to hear Nabil Al-Raee, the theater’s artistic director, and Alia Alrosan, a student and actress. The contrast between these two visitors’ background in Palestine and the background as they spoke was dramatic: everyone there knew they had come from a refugee camp in an occupied city to this spacious apartment with African masks and a broad carpet and windows opening on the last of the NY marathoners stumbling out among the big elms on Central Park West.

And yet the magic of their appearance was that there was no contrast at all. The two scenes were somehow continuous; the two Palestinians knit them with their words and feelings.