My whole childhood was about being in the garden. It wasn't really a religious place to me. The love I felt there... was in contradiction with what I saw in the streets. It was a different world.

What I love most about New York is that I can walk in the street and nobody is looking at me as if I'm different. In my country and in Italy, you have to choose sides. I was a famous journalist and I was also an immigrant and ultimately I never stopped feeling like I was a guest.

There's a deformity in the information that the public in the United Statesis receiving. It's contained in kind of a bubble and one day this bubble will explode.

I think the first time I really felt that I was Palestinian was a time when I was trying to go back to school with my father at night and there was a curfew for Palestinians. My father said, "I will walk first, but you have to understand, the police will not let me go... So keep moving and don't look at me and don't look back."

I was 16 when my father died, and I had a choice to come back and live in his house or I'd stay at the school. But I felt if my father wanted me to go to that school when I was 5, there must have been a reason - and I understood that reason when I was a teenager, because that school became the only place where I was safe.

My first memory as a child growing up is of playing in the gardens, the mosque is really a gigantic garden, probably the biggest in all of East Jerusalem. Our house was about 100 meters from the mosque.

You can come from China, Russia, any place, and you can be a New Yorker. You can say what you want to say here, really express yourself.