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Alice Rothchild ’70 Speaks at an Israel/Palestine Conference

October 21, 2015

Alice Rothchild
Alice Rothchild ’70 was the keynote speaker at the Israel/Palestine: Shadows of the Past—Visions of the Future conference held at Rivier University earlier this month.

Rothchild is a Boston based physician, author, and filmmaker who has focused her interest in human rights and social justice on the Israel/Palestine conflict since 1997. After graduating from Bryn Mawr, she studied medicine at Boston University, followed by a medical internship at Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx, and an OB-GYN residency at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. Her early political interests involved working to end the Vietnam War and for women’s reproductive rights and healthcare reform. She was involved in the first edition of Our Bodies Ourselves and practiced OB-GYN for over 30 years. Until her recent retirement, she served as an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Harvard Medical School. In 2003, she began co-organizing annual health and human rights delegations to Israel/Palestine. She writes and lectures widely and is the author of Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: Stories of Jewish and Palestinian Trauma and Resilience and On the Brink: Israel and Palestine on the Eve of the 2014 Gaza Invasion. She directed a documentary film, Voices Across the Divide, which premiered at the Boston Palestine Film Festival 2013.  

Her presentation at the conference, Gaza Eyewitness Report: From Disaster to Resilience, detailed the findings of her March delegation to Gaza with Washington Physician’s for Social Responsibility—exploring realities on the ground, the impact of the war and the siege, and the trauma and resilience experienced by the civilian population and care givers in the health and human rights fields. Her presentation was followed by a screening of her documentary.