Come Meet the “Other” at TEDxJaffa Today – Streaming Live!
Filed under: A New Reality, Life, Medical Breakthroughs, Music, News, Politics, Religion, Science, Technology
Watch the stream live today from Jaffa starting at 9 am EST.
It’s really easy to sit at your kitchen table in Brooklyn, Toronto, Vancouver, or Berkley and shoot off comments about the Middle East conflict. It’s harder when you live in it. It’s hard when you have to think twice about taking the bus, plane, or train because it might blow up, and it’s hard knowing that every person who shares your society with you are paying the majority of their taxes to a staggering defense budget.
I live in Israel. I live in Jaffa, Israel — a city next to Tel Aviv populated by Muslims, Christians and Jews. Some of us are atheists, some traditional and others defiantly religious. I chose to live here and it’s a crazy place. It’s not crazy because people here care about their religion, enough to fight over it or talk about it incessantly. It’s crazy because of its improbability.
In Jaffa, some Muslims call themselves Palestinians. Some Christians call themselves Israeli Palestinian Christian Arabs. The Jews are just Israelis of course, unless they come from Arab countries and they are Sephardic or those from Europe say they are Ashkenazi. You can find escaped donkeys galloping down the streets at midnight. You can find the best European chocolate cake beside a working man’s morning hummous joint. My husband says he wouldn’t be surprised to wake up one morning and find a dead body on our front porch: there is also a lot of crime in Jaffa.
But Jaffa has its charm. Its own rhythm is marked by the five calls to prayer, with the one at sunset telling my baby daughter (who is Jewish) it’s time to go to sleep. It’s got a roughness, and sharp corners, and just when you think it’s too hard to handle, you’ll catch a new smell reminding you of some other time from our collective memory when civilization began, somewhere around here.
But more than people know, Jaffa — the city of the Bible where Jonah disembarks from before getting swallowed by the whale and spat out on shore near Nineveh — is a lens through which the world can understand cultural diversity, and cultural freedom in Israel.
Today at my home the East West House we will help host TEDxJaffa under the theme the Desire to Know the Other. There is a strong line-up of people from Jaffa, like my musician husband Yisrael Borochov, but also people from Israel and the Palestinian Authority who will tell their personal and professional stories on working to know the other. One speaker survived a terror attack and was afraid to look in the mirror to see how much of her face was left; one speaker will be a successful Palestinian policeman turned businessman; and if you log on to our simulcast today (or see the videos later) you’ll meet Haya Samir, an Israeli Muslim whose family came to Israel as political refugees from Egypt. Raised as a Jew, she found out as a young woman that she was in fact a Muslim.
Haya is an Israeli diva. And we are so glad to know her. Today she will sing songs of the pioneering days in Israel – Debka Fantasia – before 1948 when young Jews met Bedouin and Arab shepherds. These pioneers longed for a culture that combined, not defined, the Middle East with European values. I think this is what the people in the Arab uprisings are coming to terms with.
Would you like to get off your chair and dance to a little music with us LIVE? Maybe meet someone whose views might change your worldview about the Middle East conflict?
The simulcast starts at at 9 am EST time today Wednesday if you are in New York City. Log on at the TEDxJaffa site to see it. Officially in Israel the event starts at 3.
Alli Meets Aladdin
The idea for TEDx in Jaffa started with my friend Alli Magidsohn, who is producing and curating the event. The fellow Jaffinian, who is from LA, was inspired to fulfill this dream after an encounter with a man (a genie?) in Sinai named Aladdin.
Her words: “We felt lucky to have the opportunity to meet and form a new friendship in an overall context that might have otherwise limited us as enemies and spoke about the area’s conflicts, spirituality, Love, and many other things together. His perspectives broadened my mind and this encounter made me realize that as an American Jew living in Israel, even opposite an Muslim Egyptian man, there is still so much more that we have in common than there is that separates us.
“Other encounters in Sinai, Israel and Palestine led to further ‘broadening’, deeper respect and more curiosity, and TEDxJaffa is the manifestation of this process of personal expansion. ‘The Desire to know The Other’, for me – not necessarily for the event’s speakers – isn’t about explicit things like politics or peace or coexistence, it’s really about that desire to look from the inside, outwards, and to try to take in, understand, or somehow be enriched by exposing oneself to another person’s experience.
Log in folks at 9 am if you are New York or Toronto. All other cities: the event’s at 3 PM + 7 hours EST. Link from here.
Picture of the week: Finding friendship in the ruins of war
Israel is a country of contradictions. While the world outside sees the conflict in the clean crisp black and white of headlines, here in Israel we tend to see things in myriad shades of grey.
Take these two kids for example. Maria Aman (in the wheelchair) is a Palestinian girl from Gaza who was hit by an Israeli rocket during operation Cast Lead. Orel Ilizrov, is an Israeli child from Beersheva who was left with severe brain damage after he was hit by a grad missile fired from Gaza in the same conflict.
Against all the odds, they are best friends.
Maria was left paralyzed when her house suffered a direct hit. Four of her family were killed. Orel, an only child, is lucky to be alive. His mother threw herself on top of him in an attempt to protect him from the missile.
The children were hospitalized at the Alin Rehabilitative Center in Jerusalem and were given neighboring beds. Despite the traumas that both suffered, they ignored the conflict – as kids so rightly do – and formed a deep friendship based on everything they have in common, and not everything that keeps them apart.
Photo by Nati Shohat/Flash90
Galilee Circus wins our Rosh HaShana competition
The Galilee Circus performing in the US.
We asked readers to choose their top charity, and to explain why they felt this charity should receive a $25 gift voucher from JGooders.
Out of a choice of eight, David picked the Galilee Circus, a troupe set up in the Galilee to bring Jewish and Arab children together to learn circus skills and put on performances.
In his comment, David said:
“The Galilee Circus – the effort brings many smiles to folks who could use it, while working on reducing stereotypes – key for a peaceful co-existence.”
We’ve featured Galilee Circus a couple of times on ISRAEL21c. You can see our features here:
Youth circus troupes build a pyramid of hope in Israel
Jewish and Arab children learn cooperation in the Galilee circus
Many thanks to everyone who took part in the competition. The final word goes to Tova, one of our readers who said:
“These are all amazing causes – and even if you don’t win, you can think about making a small gift in honor of the new year…..I personally did so.”
The Simpsons to bring peace to Israel
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence, History and Culture, Politics, Pop Culture, Travel
Like most existential quarrels, the Arab-Israeli conflict is a nuanced and tricky beast. Those on the outside often take a paternalistic, “Oh, those silly Middle Easterners, why can’t they just realize that coexistence is the way to go, put their weapons down and start getting along?” attitude.
In the minds of most Israelis, I’d wager, this perspective is naïve and can lead to disaster. Many have argued that Bill Clinton’s personal need to end his presidency on a positive note led to over-simplified tactics at Camp David, which in the end backfired and brought about the Second Intifada.
I’m not sure that that thesis is itself sufficiently nuanced, but diplomacy analysis aside, a similarly paternalistic outsider’s view that has informed many tongue-in-cheek pop culture Mideast peace comments. And these comments also come off to us locals as either refreshingly naïve (as in the case of the dreamy conclusion of Tom Robbins’s Skinny Legs and All) or as not necessarily adding to the discussion but amusing nonetheless (especially when they are aimed at exposing the hypocrisies and general lack of vision among our leaders, like when Bruno stopped by last summer).
And our beloved Simpsons, probably one of the greatest TV shows of all time, if not the greatest, has a dodgy track record when it comes to understanding cultural nuances from an insider’s perspective. It’s all part of being an irreverent, edgy comedy.
According to Ha’aretz, Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie are headed our way in the coming months:
Multiple media sources have quoted the show’s executive producer, Al Jean, as saying that America’s number one animated family will head to the Holy Land next year.
“I think we’re going to do one next year where they go to the Holy Land as we haven’t been there yet. The premise will be that the Christians, the Jews and Muslims are united in that they all get mad at Homer. It’s the only thing they can agree on,” Jean said.
Sometimes the international ethnic and otherwise-sensitive communities don’t manage to take The Simpsons with the appropriate grains of salt. Racial stereotypes as regular characters? But of course. Accusations of homophobia? You got it. And then there are the recurring episodes where the family travels internationally, ripping apart the cultural and ethnic mores of China, Italy, African banana republics, Ireland and Japan. They’re exceedingly funny, but sometimes people get offended. When the Simpsons traveled in South America in a 2002 episode, the Tourism Board of Rio de Janeiro reportedly seriously mulled a lawsuit against the Fox Network for libel. Or slander. Or something.
The episode that kicked off this recurring series is 1996′s “Bart vs. Australia,” which supposedly had Aussies in such a tangle that letter writing campaigns and public censuring ensued. But a closer reading of that episode reveals that it’s all tongue-in-cheek – its very plotline focuses on the Americans’ laughable lack of understanding of anything non-American, which is carried out throughout as the starting point of many quality jokes. The family barely escapes (pictured) with their lives.
So just because the Simpsons talk or act in a certain way, doesn’t mean that the show’s writers or producers want its audience to follow suit. But when it comes to Mideast peace, why not? Sometimes a little naïveté is what we need to break out of our most self-perpetuating, defeatist grooves.
ISRAEL21c takes CNN World Report on a trip to Lod
Filed under: General, Israeliness, Life, Politics
With so much of the media focused on the conflict, the ISRAEL21c feature stories airing on CNN — like this one by Molly Livingstone about a multi-ethnic, multi-religious effort to redevelop the city of Lod — are beacons of hope and progress from a place often seen only as a place of conflict.
More ISRAEL21c stories will likely be seen on CNN in the future – meanwhile, there are dozens of others to view and enjoy at the ISRAEL21c YouTube channel.
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