Tonight I went to a book party on the Upper West Side for the posthumous memoir A World I Loved, by Wadad Makdisi Cortas, late mother of Mariam Said, at whose apartment the party was. Cortas was a Lebanese educator who died in 1979. Her life was devoted to girls of the Arab world. A secular missionary, by her daughter's description, and a liberated woman. Worked all her life. Handed her memoir, in English, to her son-in-law Edward Said, and died soon after.

Ham Fish of Nation Books spoke, charmingly, about Mariam Said's mother making her children take their shoes off in the house. I saw Eric Foner, Eric Alterman, Mona Khalidi, Carl Bromley, Walter Moseley and Katrina vanden Heuvel of the Nation. Robert Simon of 60 Minutes was there, I congratulated him for his amazing West Bank settlers piece that helped change the moment a few months back. We talked about the hateful Nablus scene in the piece, when the Israeli soldiers take over an Arab house.

I sat with three Arab-American women for a while. Najla Said, Mariam and Edward's daughter, who has a one-woman show called "Palestine," and Cherien Dabis, who directed Amreeka. The third woman was named Nadia, a blonde Palestinian-American whom I squeezed into an armchair with, the sort of person you can talk about anything with forever. We talked about the Arab-American moment. Her parents fled Jerusalem during the Nakba. Her father used to stare at the television in pain as the Israeli line went out to American homes. "I'm Palestinian," Nadia told her schoolmates in innocence, and they asked if her parents were terrorists. Nadia agreed with me that the moment feels new; Julian Schnabel is now directing a movie about Deir Yassin.

I read a lot of the book on the train going home. Wadad Makdisi Cortas was a very upright woman, not glamorous like her daughter. She didn't like religion, didn't like guns. Loved secular education above all, and Quaker meeting. She was a workaholic and fretted as her society was torn apart in the unrest after the war. When girls started showing up at her school who had been forced out by the Nakba, she had the presence of mind to record their stories. She knew it was important.

"The greatest issue on the Lebanese scne was whether Lebanon was an Arab country. The second was whether the Palestinian tragedy was our concern. I was clear in my mind that Lebanon was Arab and that the Palestinian tragedy was of primary concern to us. I felt I shared the opinion of the majority."

The whole Arab world turned to U.N. negotiator Folke Bernadotte as their savior in summer 1948. Then Bernadotte was gunned down by the Stern gang in Jerusalem. "His assassination, on September 17, was like an earthquake...'Of course world opinion will not stand for this,' we muttered among ourselves.'.. After Bernadotte's murder the Arab press declared, 'The conscience of the world is dead.'"This has been the eternal puzzle to the Palestinians: why world opinion has stood by, when the issue is so clear. Why the UN could pass the right of return of refugees in 1948 and reaffirm it every year and nothing has happened.

And now world opinion is at last changing; I could see it at the party. Like it or not, it matters that Jews are on board. Jews have incredible cultural power in America, and now Jews, appalled by Israel's behavior, are getting behind the issue. Max Blumenthal was at the party, I hugged him for all the traffic he brought to this site for Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem (which has been taken down by youtube, he says), then walked out with him. We talked about his funny line about self-hatred in Haaretz, he has other reasons for self-hatred than the fact he's Jewish; I told him it reminded me of Hannah Arendt saying she didn't love the Jewish people, she only loved her friends. Schnabel, Blumenthal, Bob Simon--they are all Jewish necromancers, and they like this story and want to hear the Arab side. A long way from Erica Jong writing that Arabs are animals.

In her introduction, Mariam Said writes that 9/11 changed everything; it was time to publish her mother's memoir. It's an Arab moment now, culturally, politically, and in some part because Jews are moving along with it. There is a joy in thinking you can help change the paradigm of Arab-Americans, as we changed the paradigm of Jewish-Americans. There's a thrill in sharing an armchair with my cousin and believing, tonight, that we can change the world.

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Read Mondoweiss here.