Adah Kay: obituary


November 22, 2014
Sarah Benton

adah & tom
Tom and Adah Kay

Adah’s funeral will take place at The Golders Green Crematorium West Wing at 1pm on Monday 24th November followed directly by a celebration at The Irish Centre on Camden Square, London NW1. Adah requested no flowers. Any donations to Cancer Research.

 

It is with great sadness that we report the death of Adah Kay on 12th November. A lifelong activist, Adah took the commitment to social justice that she learnt in the socialist Zionist youth movement Habonim seriously enough to abandon her residual Zionism and spend many years living and working with her husband Tom Kay in Ramallah on the West Bank from 2002. Tom taught architecture at Bir Zeit University, while Adah embedded herself doing social research on the occupation.

Tom died in 2007 but Adah continued their joint project, recording and bearing witness to what was happening in occupied Palestine, analysing and making sense of it all. Pluto Press became her publisher, first with Stolen Youth: The Politics of Israel’s Detention of Palestinian Children, co-written with Adam Hanieh and Catherine Cook and published by Pluto Press in association with Defence for Children International/Palestine Section, 2004; and recently, with Nadia Abu-Zahra in 2013, the powerful analysis of Unfree in Palestine: Registration, Documentation and Movement Restriction, showing in painstaking detail how Israel’s bureaucratic control of identity documents and the population registry has been used to deprive the Palestinians of basic rights and freedoms.

She signed up to Jews for Justice for Palestinians soon after we were founded in 2002 and worked wherever she felt most effective in the solidarity movement, in the latter years with campaigning for BDS, particularly with Bricup, the British Campaign for Universities in Palestine. Increasingly interested in communication through theatre she co-authored a play with Sonja Linden Welcome to Ramallah produced at the Arcola in 2008.

Diagnosed with multiple myeloma late in 2010, she alternated her treatment – and her relapses – with doing whatever she could find energy for, including being the Executive Director of a play with a cast of older actors that opened last month to acclaim at the Southwark Playhouse, Who do we think we are?

Back in May 2002 Adah, recently moved to Ramallah, returned to England and gave a talk* at a Palestine Solidarity meeting in London, one of a number of similar presentations she gave to draw attention to the horrific realities of the recent Israeli invasion and occupation of the West Bank. We’re pleased to publish her notes for the PSC talk, with materials she drew on and selected from to convey the reality of that moment of the occupation. These notes were never revised for publication but even in unedited form tell us so much about Adah herself and of the realities she was trying grasp and convey in all their raw immediacy.

Warm, generous, infectiously enthusiastic, inspirational – Adah was a joy to know and a pleasure to work with. She will be sorely missed by her many friends in Palestine and in Israel as well as here in Britain and elsewhere.

* See Palestinians want to be left alone to build their state and their lives in peace

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