PALESTINE - ISRAEL - JORDAN - SINAI

Off the beaten track tours • Visit sites • Meet locals • Discuss Human Rights & Politics

Movie review – The Syrian Bride

If you are reading this in April 2020, there’s a good chance you’re among the 2 billion people stuck inside right now to help contain the spread of the corona virus. It can be dull, but there is no better time than now to engage with high quality, thought provoking films! Green Olive is producing […]

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What is Eurovision and why is it so important this year?

– by Alexander Jones –  On May 12, 2018, Israel’s Netta Barzilai won the Eurovision Song Conquest with her song ‘Toy’. Tradition holds that the winning country will host the competition the following year, so 2019’s edition will take place next week in Tel Aviv. Non-Europeans are usually puzzled by what the contest is all […]

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Hamifal

– by Yahav Zohar Jerusalem, an urban planner once told me, is not properly a city but a collection of courtyards. With every turn, with every alley, you come into another world, an entirely different story. In such a fragmented city there seems to be no real cultural mainstream beyond government funded seasonal festivals that […]

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More than just a Relic of the Past – Yiddish in Israel

By Miri –  Yiddish refers to a primarily Germanic language containing elements of Romance, Slavic, as well as a mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic, which is written in the Hebrew alphabet. The language is thought of as having originated in the tenth century in the German Rhineland and from there spread through Bavaria towards the […]

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Palestinian Music – Beyond the “World Music” Label

By Miri –  The iconic Fairuz Music from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East is commonly subsumed under the label “world music”, a category created by media and record industries to diversify the Euro-American market in order to sell more music. In recent years, the Western music market was in fact at least […]

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“Bienvenue a Israel” – French Immigration to Israel

By Miri –  Strolling down some of the busier streets that run parallel to the sea shore in Tel Aviv’s bourgeois North one easily finds a number of small businesses, hairdressers, cosmeticians and so on displaying signs in their windows saying “Nous parlons Francais”. Similarly, passing coffee shops and restaurants in that same area one […]

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Palestinian Cinema – “A Stateless Cinema of the Most Serious National Consequences”

By Miri –   Like Palestinian artistic and cultural forms of expression in general, Palestinian cinema is “structurally exilic”, meaning its actors are spread across different places, with limited means of communication and collaboration. As such the cinematic approaches of Palestinian film makers, just like their backgrounds, differ considerably, yet writer Nana Asfour asserts that “[w]hat […]

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Jews of India – The Bené Israel

By Miri –   India’s historic Jewish communities are usually subdivided into the Cochinis, the Baghdadis, and the Bené Israel, the latter of which constitutes by far the biggest of the three groups.  Bené Israel in India While there is no historic documentation of their origin, it is widely believed that the Bené Israel have descended […]

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Speaking Truth to Power – The Life and Legacy of Edward Said

By Miri –  Edward and his sister Rosemarie, 1940 It has been ten years since the passing of Edward Said. He was a cultural critic, an academic, a writer, an intellectual, a musician and probably one of the most powerful voices of the Palestinian cause.  Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935 to a prosperous […]

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A Community of Its Own? Russian Speaking Jews in Israel

By Miri –  Russian speaking Jews constitute about 20% of Israel’s total population today. Notwithstanding their large numbers, the fact that they have been calling Israel their home for quite a few decades by now, and that especially many of the younger generations perceive of themselves as Israelis, the veteran Israeli population still refers to […]

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Rising from the Margins: Musika Mizrahit

By Miri – In a previous article on this blog we already outlined the historical roots of the socio-economic marginalisation of the Mizrahi (lit. “Eastern” Jews, stemming from Middle East, North Africa and the Caucasus) communities by the dominant Ashkenazi (usually understood as European Jews) elite. The subordination of the Mizrahim also included the forced erasure […]

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The Adyghe – Circassians in Israel

By Miri –  Historical Background Painting of a Circassian Warrior With a history dating back as far as 8000 BC, the Adyghe, commonly known as Circassians or Cherkess, are the oldest indigenous ethnic group of the Northern Caucasus. The original monotheistic religion of the Adyghe, who are subdivided into twelve separate groups, is known as […]

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