With all the anti-Arab bashing we see in the news every week, Arab America is determined to expose those who discriminate against our community. We will recognize those who vilify the positive influence and contributions Arabs have made to the fabric of American society. And we will use hummus as our weapon. By naming those … Continued
By Jonathan Ofit Mondoweiss Last week, a video of a 15-year-old student at Wanstead high-school in London named Leanne Mohamad went viral. Leanne, a Palestinian, was taking part in the Jack Petchey Speak Out Challenge, where she won a regional final with her speech “Birds not Bombs”. The Jack Petchey-sponsored competition is an English competition … Continued
With all the anti-Arab bashing we see in the news every week, Arab America is determined to expose those who discriminate against our community. We will recognize those who vilify the positive influence and contributions Arabs have made to the fabric of American society. And we will use hummus as our weapon. By naming those … Continued
LA Times By: Sheri Linden There’s an irresistible pull to the story of Mohammed Assaf, the Palestinian wedding singer who made his way from a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip to the TV screens of tens of millions of fans. The same can be said of “The Idol,” an uneven but charmingly earnest fictionalized … Continued
Egyptian Mau with Egyptian cat statue BY: Habeeb Salloum/Contributing writer Among the countless breeds of cats, no other but the Mau can claim direct descent from the divine felines of the Nile Valley. ‘O cats of Egypt my illustrious sires’, would be the poetic words of the Egyptian Mau if it could only speak. Well … Continued
The Lebanese box office sensation What About Tomorrow – consisting of old 8mm footage of performances of legendary singer/writer Ziad Rahbani’s play of the same name ̶ will make its U.S. premiere during the Arab American National Museum’s 2016 Arab Film Festival, part of the Cinetopia International Film Festival June 3-12, 2016, at venues throughout southeast Michigan. Leyla Bouzid’s … Continued
Last night, Noor Theatre was honored with an Obie Award, specifically an Obie grant that recognizes the achievements of small theater companies. We are really proud and thrilled to have been awarded. And so happy to see our own Arian Moayed honored for his gorgeous acting in Guards at the Taj (along with our longtime … Continued
The New York Times
Good morning on this drizzly Tuesday.
You’ve probably heard of Little Italy. But Little Syria?
Travel back in time, New York.
From the 1890s to the 1920s, Washington Street from Rector Street to Battery Place was the heart of New York’s Arab world, filled with thousands of immigrants from Greater Syria — roughly present-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Many left their homelands because of troubles like starvation, lawlessness and religious intolerance.
Others came for economic opportunity, said Matthew Jaber Stiffler of the Arab American National Museum, in Dearborn, Mich.
Many of those involved in Greater Syria’s silk industry, for example, took their talents to New York, where they became renowned for making kimonos and women’s undergarments, Mr. Stiffler told us.
The streets of Little Syria were also vibrant with smoking parlors, cafes whipping up Turkish coffee and shops brimming with everything from rugs and brass lanterns to pistachios imported from the Middle East.
But the bustling neighborhood began to dwindle after the Immigration Act of 1924, Mr. Stiffler said.
And the Little Syria that remained was demolished when construction for the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel began in the 1940s.
You won’t catch a whiff of the hookah and spices there anymore, but look closely at Washington Street today, and you can still see traces of the quarter’s Downtown Community House and St. George Chapel.
You can learn more about Little Syria and its legacy at an exhibit by the Arab American National Museum that opens tomorrow evening at the Department of Records and Information Services on Chambers Street.
Source: www.nytimes.com
U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders applauds fellow panelist Linda Sarsour, Executive Director at Arab American Association of New York, during a discussion at the First Unitarian Congregational Society in the Brooklyn borough of New York April 16, 2016. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson America’s Arab and South Asian activists are redefining whiteness BY Zahir Janmohamed Newsweek … Continued
Al Bawaba Let’s have a quick show of hands! Who wants to learn to communicate in one of the planet’s most challenging languages? Al Bawaba’s Dictionary of Unspoken Arabic will have you ‘speaking’ fluently in a matter of minutes – able to express a wide range of key human expressions – while sidestepping costly classes, hellish homework, … Continued
BY: Yusra Al Shawwa/Contributing Writer We Arab Americans like to do things a certain way and that’s okay. There are little moments in life we can’t avoid, but can definitely appreciate as part of our culture. Others may not understand why we’re always late or trying to feed people, and neither can we, but we’re not … Continued
Alia Al Ghussain
The Electronic Intifada
Israel froze funding to Al-Midan Theater after it staged A Parallel Time by Bashar Murkus last year. Nir Elias Reuters
The Palestinian community in Haifa enjoyed a small victory in March when a theater successfully challenged the Israeli government to win reinstatement of official funding cut after controversy over the staging of a play about prisoners last year.
But the reinstatement also threw into focus the constraints on Palestinian artistic expression in present-day Israel and some saw the resumption of official funding as a double-edged sword.
On 29 March, al-Midan Theater reached agreement with the Israeli culture ministry to resume the transfer of public funds to the theater, as well as to unfreeze outstanding funding for last year, ending a stand-off that started in May 2015.
The ministry had frozen al-Midan’s public funding after the theater staged Bashar Murkus’ play A Parallel Time, which revolves around the lives of six Palestinian prisoners and a jailer in an Israeli prison.
Adalah, a Haifa-based legal center, alleged that the ministry’s decision was taken for “political reasons.”
Acting on behalf of al-Midan, Adalah filed a petition against the decision in October 2015.
The legal grounding for the ministry’s decision was dubious from the outset, according to Adalah. The group argued that the decision was illegal and “did not meet the basic requirements of administrative law.” No hearing was held before the decision was made, no formal reasoning was provided for the decision and it did not have any proper factual basis, the legal center said.
In addition, the play had been approved three times by official bodies, including a committee supported by the culture and education ministries, and Adalah lamented the fact that it took the intervention of Israel’s attorney general for the issue to be resolved.
A necessary compromise
“It is unfortunate that it was only after the intervention of the attorney general that the ministry of culture retracted its illegal freezing of funds and its attack on the theater’s freedom of expression and artistic creativity,” Adalah stated after agreement was reached.
“The most important thing for us is that the agreement made between the theater and the ministry did not impose any prohibition or conditioning of the creative content produced by the theater,” Adalah added.
The agreement did, however, entail a compromise under which al-Midan agreed to a deduction of 75,000 shekels (just under $20,000) from its annual budgets between 2016 and 2019. And Palestinian artists in Haifa remain acutely aware that their artistic expression is curtailed by the Israeli state.
“The tightening of democratic spaces in any state is usually reflected in its control and censorship of art. When a state begins censoring art, we know we’ve reached a dangerous situation,” Khulud Khamis, a Haifa-based author, told The Electronic Intifada.
Some artists feel that the reinstatement of funding to al-Midan was simply an attempt to polish Israel’s democratic credentials in the international arena.
“Personally, I was not impressed by the reinstatement of funding,” said Yazid Sadi, al-Midan’s production director. He was speaking to The Electronic Intifada in a personal capacity and was not stating the theater’s position.
“I expected it, as the culture ministry needs from one side to show how democratic they are, but from the other side they made us pay a penalty of 300,000 shekels … So that we think twice next time before we want to stage A Parallel Time or any other meaningful political theater or art.”
Sadi described the compromise al-Midan made as necessary to maintain its freedom of programming: “If we had given into their pressure and cancelled A Parallel Time, we probably wouldn’t have had to pay the penalty. But we didn’t think twice and decided to pay the penalty gladly. The play became a symbol of freedom of expression, and we were ready to give up all of our funding if they would rob us of this very basic right.”
Shrinking freedoms
“A state that censors art is a state that is well aware of the power of art as a tool for political resistance,” Khamis said. “Art has the power to convey reality in different forms and shed light on socio-political phenomena from perspectives that the state does not want us to see, thus acting as an eye-opener.”
While Israeli law is supposed to provide for freedom of speech, Palestinian citizens, who make up one-fifth of Israel’s population, often see these rights violated. In 2003, for instance, the Israeli film board banned the commercial viewing of a film about Israel’s 2002 siege of Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. The film, Jenin, Jenin, which comprises a collection of interviews with camp residents a week after the invasion, was directed by Mohammed Bakri, a Palestinian citizen of Israel.
The ban was later overturned, although the judge in the case commented that the accusations of war crimes by Israeli forces made in the film were “lies,” and that the documentary had “not been made in good faith.”
Like A Parallel Time, Jenin, Jenin sheds light on the ugly face of Israel’s occupation.
More recently, in 2015, the Israeli high court upheld key provisions of a law imposing legal consequences for those boycotting or advocating a boycott of Israel.
This law will disproportionately affect Palestinian citizens of Israel, who are already marginalized under Israeli law.
A 2011 measure — that Palestinians call the Nakba Law — prevents commemoration of the ethnic cleansing that led to Israel’s creation, for example. Such laws severely restrict the ability of Palestinians in Israel to express their opinions and draw attention to Israel’s crimes, historic and contemporary.
“The problem is that everything is linked to loyalty … You only have the space they will allow you,” said Nadim Nashif, director of Baladna, a Palestinian youth group in Israel.
A “loyalty in culture” bill proposed by Miri Regev, Israel’s culture minister, is currently making its way through Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. The bill would cut funding to any institution that questions the existence of Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state,” denigrates state symbols like the flag and marks the Nakba. An amended version of the first draft was approved by Avichai Mendelblit, Isarael’s attorney general, in February.
“The aim is to make Palestinian cultural institutions behave,” said Nashif.
Maintaining an ethnocracy
The definition of Israel as a Jewish state results in the repression of Palestinian identity and freedom of expression, Nashif added.
“The whole structure of the state is designed to create and educate generations of ‘good’ Arabs, including in the cultural field — Arabs who don’t question government policy, who do not talk about the Nakba,” Nashif said.
Sadi agreed: “The so-called Jewish democracy is ridiculous as it can’t be a real democracy since it is only for Jews.”
This partly explains why Palestinian artists in Israel are disproportionately targeted for censorship. A new generation is exploring and expressing its Palestinian identity, openly questioning the Israeli institutions which discriminate against its community.
“Palestinian artists are usually not funded, or they are not hired,” said Nashif. “Now the discrimination is more extreme and much more evident. The policies of Miri Regev were there before, but done more quietly. There was a concern about image. This government is arrogant enough to say it out loud. These fights have always been there but now they are more open and brutal.”
Source: electronicintifada.net
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