This account weaves individual stories from first responders and critically important volunteers into a timeline that also reports events simultaneously occurring beyond – the accounts of state and federal governments’ activities and the response of people and organizations from Florida to Oregon, Washington, and Alaska. This book deals with the public health impact of both the natural disaster and the unnatural consequences that emerged through human efforts. The book reveals personal recollections of health and medical aspects, special needs victims and mass care through sheltering, pop-up medical clinics, and the sole hospital that withstood the storm and continued providing services.

    It offers a glimpse into day to day activities on plantations and farms committed to the growth and profitability of their operations through slave-based labor.

    Ranging over a century of history—from the Jewish Enlightenment and the impending colonialism of the late nineteenth century to today’s modern Arab state—Levy paints a rich portrait of two communities pressed together, of the tremendous mobility that has characterized the past century, and of the paradoxes that complicate the cultural identities of the present.               Levy visits a host of sites and historical figures to assemble a compelling history of social change, while seamlessly interweaving his study with personal accounts of his returns to his homeland. Central to this story is the massive migration of Jews out of Morocco. Levy traces the institutional and social changes such migrations cause for those who choose to stay, introducing the concept of “contraction” to depict the way Jews deal with the ramifications of their demographic dwindling. Turning his attention outward from Morocco, he goes on to explore the greater complexities of the Jewish diaspora and the essential paradox at the heart of his adventure—leaving Israel to return home.