A FLEETING GLANCE – Madelyn Hoffman

In December 2013, the author stood underneath wire-netting constructed by Palestinians to protect themselves from garbage and human wastes, thrown onto the streets below by illegal Israeli settlers, often hitting Palestinians.
This cruel and puzzling behavior led her to reflect on an imagined dialogue between two girls of eight years old, whose stories haunt each other over time, through their growth into adulthood. This imagined conversation reveals their common humanity, raises questions about the boundary between good and evil and prompts questions about how accepting similarities in family traditions and ethnic practices might help overcome conflicts through peaceful dialogue and mutual acceptance.
A moving and touching portrait and slice of life revealed through the girls’ eyes, as they witness a horrible and shameful page of history in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, one that shows no signs of ending, creating many innocent victims and an outcast population under the indifferent gaze of the world.

Madelyn Hoffman was the director of the GrassRoots Environmental Organization (GREO) in New Jersey from 1983-1998. She worked with over two hundred citizens’ groups from every part of New Jersey on issues of toxic chemical pollution. She then was the director of New Jersey Peace Action (NJPA) from 2000-2018.
Madelyn Hoffman holds a B.A. cum laude from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut obtained in 1978 and a Master’s degree in Public Administration from Rutgers Newark obtained in 1981. Hoffman teaches U.S. Government, Ethics, Environmental Studies and Public Speaking, while coaching ESL students in reading and writing.
Madelyn was Ralph Nader’s Vice Presidential running mate, in New Jersey, in 1996. She has run as the Green Party candidate for New Jersey Governor in 1997 and again in 2021. She also ran for the U.S.
Senate as a Green in 2018 and 2020. During her candidacies, she’s been interviewed dozens of times and is respected as a powerful voice of the Green Party of the United States where she also serves as the co-chair of the Green Party Peace Action Committee.
She is a contributing author with an essay titled Protesting COVID Style in Corona City, Voices from an Epicenter, Lorraine Ash editor, 2020, Magic Dog Press; author of the chapter A Grassroots Perspective on the Brownfields and Superfund Programs in Cultures of Contamination: Legacies of Pollution in Russia and the U.S., Michael Edelstein, Editor, Elsevier Press, 2007; and author of the article No More Walls: Humanism’s Role in Building Lasting Coalitions in Toward a New Political Humanism, Barry Seidman and Neil Murphy, editor, Prometheus Books, 2004.