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A Perfect Seattle Summer Day, ‘Three Girls and Their Buddy’ Zootunes Concert

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

Wow. I’m actually taking a day off from writing about the Israeli-Arab conflict. And I’m going to write about something pleasant, peaceful and idyllic for a change.

Don’t tell anyone (in case they decide they should move here), but Seattle summers are simply glorious. And I’m going to tell you about one summer day (today).

My son, Jonah has spent the last two weeks in a musical theater camp taught by his public school music teacher. The musical’s theme was “outer space.” The kids did everything: made costumes, sets, learned lines, songs, and even baked dessert for the after performance dinner. Besides all this, they did day trips to the Museum of Flight and the University of Washington planetarium to learn more about space. They even picked 40 pounds of fresh raspberries at Remlinger Farms and made ice cream and pie out of it for the dinner.

Jonah loves tending and picking the greens in our home garden. So he informed me that we had to make a salad for the dinner. He was very worried about my doing the job and even wanted to start picking the greens the day before the event himself. I promised him I would do it earlier today so the greens would stay fresh. So I went out back and picked lettuce, spinach, sorrel, basil and Johnny Jump Ups, and the first purple bean of the season, along with snap peas from the Farmer’s Market, and we had ourselves a wonderful fresh summer salad.

The songs chosen for the musical were mostly wacky funny old rock and pop songs from the 60s and 70s. In their original form, these songs were at best insipid. But somehow when a group of children start singing about a “one-eyed, one-horned flying purple people eater” it is transformed into something charming. The production was amazingly resourceful. As I wrote, the kids made everything themselves. You shoulda seen the flying purple people eater! And they did it in the same spirit that Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney used to say: “Gee, let’s put on a show,” in those old MGM movies.

The entire thing was utterly charming from start to finish. Jonah was also jazzed that his mom invited a whole group of neighbors to walk down the street to the local church which hosted the performance. He had a very friendly audience! But the kids would’ve won over the most somber audience.

Even after we left the church grounds on our way to hear Emmylou Harris’s Three Girls and Their Buddy concert, my wife kept marveling at how wonderful the performance was.

At any rate, we made our way to the Woodland Park Zoo, where one of my favorite female performers in the world, Emmylou Harris was joining with Patty Griffin, Shawn Colvin and Buddy Miller for an outdoor performance in the Zoo’s north meadow. The space is a wonderful bowl surrounded by mature maple and pine trees. The summer evening was gorgeous with brilliant sunny weather.

At the Zootunes concert last week, when we came to see Mavis Staples and Allen Toussaint, we witnessed a bald eagle trailed by 10 crows who harried it incessantly. A wonderful sight and only here in our beautiful Northwest.

The concert was wonderful. I especially love the Shawn Colvin song which she sang tonight, I Don’t Know Why I Love These Things But I Do. It is simply one of the most profound, moving love songs I’ve ever heard and one of the best songs she’s ever written. As an aside, Allison Krause and Union Station turned it into a pretty credible up tempo bluegrass tune in their cover version.

But the piece de la resistance was Patty Griffin’s closing encore, Mary. The YouTube video here only begins to do justice to the gorgeous interweaving of heavenly harmonies in the final minute of the song when the three women’s voices simply soar. But listen to the video to get an approximation of how it sounded tonight.

Because Zoo Tunes concerts begin at 6 PM, tonight’s show ended at 8 and we didn’t want to go home before the kids were asleep (what’s the point of going out if you come home and have to put your kids to bed?). So I suggested that we have dessert at the Volunteer Park Cafe, which turned out to be lovely idea. We had a blueberry rhubarb crisp topped with whipped cream. It came out of the oven steaming hot. The sauce was thick and syrupy and had an intensely strong blueberry flavor. Again, another perfect Northwest summer dessert.

Even though we’ve lived here now for ten years, I still had to tell my wife how lucky we are to live here.

And please, remember, you didn’t hear this from me. We’d prefer to keep Seattle a secret just amongst ourselves. Just keep in mind all that foul, dark rainy winter weather we’re supposed to have (we actually average 10 inches LESS of rain yearly than New York City!). That ought to keep most of you away!

Tags: emmylou-harris, patty griffin song mary, seattle summer, volunteer-park-café, woodland park zoo, zootunes
Posted in Children & Family, Folk & World Music, Seattle, The Arts | No Comments »

Jonah’s Snow White

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

Jonah's Snow White (with extra eyes)

Tags: childrens-art, snow white
Posted in Children & Family, The Arts | 4 Comments »

Israel Quakes in Fear of Palestinian Artists

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

How low can Israel go? Need you ask? They can go so low that armed Border Police thugs break up a literary festival celebrating Palestinian culture and artistic expression.

What were the artists doing that threatened the security of the State? It appears they had the support of the Palestinian Authority. Say what? The very same Palestinian Authority the Israeli government holds up as its partner for peace? The one it tries to display as the “kosher” alternative to Hamas? That one? Yes, the very one.

A bit of Israeli political hermeneutics is in order here. You see, it is treif for Palestinians to make any claim that Jerusalem is theirs–even East Jerusalem where Palestinians are in the majority. So even a literary festival that expresses Palestinian cultural values alluding to Jerusalem–even that is verboten.

The Guardian points out an important political context for the police action:

Israel regularly prevents political Palestinian events in East Jerusalem, but has recently also started to clamp down on cultural events in an apparent attempt to extend control over the city.

The development comes at a time of growing international concern over the Israeli government’s demolition of Palestinian homes and the continued growth of Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem.

In March, the Israeli authorities banned a series of Palestinian cultural events in Jerusalem, including a children’s march, intended to mark the Arab League’s designation of Jerusalem as the capital of Arab culture for this year.

Israel said the events breached its ban on Palestinian political activity.

Earlier this month, Israeli police closed down a Palestinian press centre that had been established in East Jerusalem for the visit of Pope Benedict XVI.

The fact of the matter is that the literary festival was funded by the British consulate and UNESCO, not the PA. Invocation of the latter had nothing to do with disruption of the festival. The mere presence of Palestinian artisitic expression was enough to doom the event.

Thank God, the French cultural attache had the presence of mind to invite everyone into his courtyard to continue the event. Egyptian author, Adhaf Soueif writes about the festival audience transforming the shutting down of the festival into an act of constructive artistic resistance:

We started walking down Salah el-Din street towards the French Cultural Centre. I looked behind me and there was the Festival: a brightly-dressed, ornamented procession of authors and audience strolling along Salah el-Din Street, chatting and laughing and cradling in their arms trays of baclaveh and kibbeh and salads and bouquets of flowers.

We sat on the raised patio of the French Cultural Centre and our audience sat and stood in the garden. Henning Mankell spoke of how his involvement with Africa makes him a better European. Some workmen engaged on the first floor of the house next door paused to listen. Birds swept through their goodnight flight around us. Deborah Moggach spoke about children and the changing shape of the family. A cat shared the stage with us for a brief moment. Audience and authors were engaged and the energy flowed from the patio to the garden. Carmen Callil spoke about her Lebanese grandfather in Australia. A wedding party passed honking its horns outside. Abdulrazak Gurnah, M G Vassanji and Claire Messud read from their work. When the sunset prayers were called the audience started asking and commenting and suggesting. We could have gone on for hours – but we stopped at half past eight. We dispersed; energised, happy, shaking hands, signing books, promising to all meet up again.

Today, my friends, we saw the clearest example of our mission: to confront the culture of power with the power of culture.

Border Police stationed themselves outside the consulate until the event concluded. When a regime criminalizes culture, then you know it’s been debased beyond redemption.

H/t to Assaf and Soysauce.

Tags: israeli border police thugs, palestine literary festival
Posted in Mideast Peace, The Arts | 9 Comments »

Woodside Colludes With Jobs to Destroy Jackling House

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

Jackling House

Recently, the town of Woodside, CA. voted 6-1 to allow Steve Jobs to tear down the historic Jackling House. Previously, the State Superior Court and Court of Appeals had overturned an earlier Town ruling permitting the demolition on the grounds that this violated state law which called for preservation of culturally significant buildings. Despite these losses and no change in the evidence or arguments presented, Jobs returned to the Town and asked for them to reapprove his plan. They obediently did so.

The arguments presented by Town board members showed just how little they understood the law, which clearly states that the California Environmental Quality Act not only intrinsically values the House, but prohibits its destruction. It is sad to note that the Town’s elected officials not only don’t do their homework, they really could care less:

“I didn’t see any reason to try to restore or maintain this house,” he [council member Dave Tanner] said of the Jackling House.

Tanner cited the structure’s enormous size, associated heating and energy costs, as well as the town’s stated preference for smaller homes on large lots as reasons restoration don’t make sense.

Clearly, the state courts will once again stop Jobs and the Town in their tracks. But this doesn’t bother Jobs who is used to getting his way in life since he is a virtual Master of the Universe.

A representative of the National Trust for Historic Places called Jackling House “”one of California’s masterpieces.” The Trust’s blog featured this post on the story. It was designed by George Washington Smith, who was responsible for Santa Barbara’s Spanish revival masterpieces including the Biltmore Hotel and art museum.

Montana State University history professor Timothy LeCain noted in a letter to the Town, the irony in their decision to destroy the historic home of the great American copper baron, Daniel Jackling:

Daniel Jackling “wired” America. The copper from his mine…has been strung over thousands of miles of power lines, threaded into the walls of millions of homes, and built into countless electric devices from toasters and autos to cell phones and computers. There, of course, lies the sharp irony of our dangerously forgetful age. That Steven Jobs–a man whose entire career has been built on devices that are essentially useless absent our copper-based electric power grid–proposes to tear-down the home of the very man whose own innovations made that electric grid possible, strikes me as a particularly egregious case of historical ingratitude and amnesia.

In an analogy that is especially pertinent to my home here in Seattle, LeCain notes that this would be like William Boeing buying and destroying Wilbur and Orville Wright’s birthplace. Would we accept such architectural vandalism?

Another dark irony is that one of the arguments Jobs and his supporters use to justify tearing down the house is that it is a dilapidated wreck. A commenter here proudly linked to images taken by a photograher who broke into the house as if to say: “You see what kind of mess you want to preserve?” They neglect to mention that the current owner, Steve Jobs, is responsible for the boarded up hulk Jackling House has become. There is no provision in state law saying an owner should be shown special consideration for neglecting his property.

Interestingly, the Town has hired as its special counsel in this matter, Anna Shimko of Cassidy, Shimko, Dawson & Kawakami, has another important client (pdf). Are you ready? Pixar. That’s right. Steve Jobs’ company is represented by a lawyer also working for the Town. Do I hear conflict of interest anyone? If I were a resident of Woodside I’d be yelling my head off: how are the Town’s interests represented fairly and objectively when the attorney representing them has Steve Jobs interests at heart? And I can tell you that Pixar represents a far more important client to her law firm than Woodside does. So who’s interests will she have at heart? Or are the interests of the Town and Steve Jobs indistinguishable?

Tags: anna shimko conflict of interest, cassidy shimko dawson kawakami, daniel jackling, national trust for historic preservation, steve-jobs, timothy lecain, woodside approves destruction of jackling house
Posted in Arts & Crafts/ Architectural Preservation, Blogs-Tech-Science, The Arts | 4 Comments »

Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: Us vs. Them

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

Georff McFetridge, detail from 'In the Mind' (photo: Lis Charman)

I took the kids to the Olympic Sculpture Park and visited Geoff McFetridge’s graphic exhibition, In the Mind. It is a cheeky, satiric view of social attitudes:

The…PACCAR Pavilion seems to perfectly suit McFetridge’s poster-based provocations. He treats the giant wall in the pavilion as an oversized bulletin board, complete with out-of-scale thumbtacks. The motifs and posters he developed for the space echo the concerns of many of the sculptures in the park, such as the relationship between man-made and natural forms, the interplay between two- and three-dimensional space, visual conundrums, and the arbitrariness of boundaries between different cultural practices.

I was struck by the Us-Them posters as a perfect encapsulation of Israeli and Palestinian attitudes toward each other. The “Us” poster shows a people in all its diversity. Every person and every detail is lovingly articulated. We know who we are. We appreciate us. We are a family.

“Them” is a dark whole. Nothing is distinguishable. We know nothing about them and can know nothing about them. They are impenetrable. The perfect enemy.

As I said, a perfect emblem of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Tags: geoff mcfetridge, in the mind exhibition, olympic sculpture park, us and them
Posted in Mideast Peace, The Arts | 2 Comments »

Jeffrey Goldberg’s Head Explodes…Again, Over Caryl Churchill’s Gaza Play

Thursday, February 19th, 2009

Now I’ve got your attention. Well, Goldberg’s head didn’t exactly explode. But he did–shockingly I might add–discover an anti-Semitic blood libel going on right under our noses. And we never even knew!

Yes, the distinguished English playwright Caryl Churchill has written a 10 minute meditation on the meaning of Zionism in the aftermath of the recent Gaza attack, Seven Jewish Children (read script–pdf). The theater piece is provocative, no question. It raises all sorts of questions about how Jews should respond to both their history (i.e. the Holocaust), the modern state of Israel, and its treatment of the Palestinians.

What partisans like Goldberg want you to believe is that it is impermissible to remind Jews that because they were the victims of the Shoah that they should be supremely sensitive to victimizing another people. That is treif by Goldberg. The Shoah is unique. It is the Jews’ beautiful burden to bear before the world. It must never be referenced except in its own right and context. Never compare it to anything else because it was incomparable. No one suffers as we suffered. No one can ever suffer as we suffered. To even whisper that we can cause suffering to others that even begins to come close to rivaling what we suffered is a shande. Shame on you!

Here is the most disturbing final passage, which is what Golberg objects to:

Tell her the Hamas fighters have been killed
Tell her they’re terrorists
Tell her they’re filth
Don’t
Don’t tell her about the family of dead girls
Tell her you can’t believe what you see on television
Tell her we killed the babies by mistake
Don’t tell her anything about the army
Tell her, tell her about the army, tell her to be proud of the army.
Tell her about the family of dead girls, tell her their names why
not, tell her the whole world knows why shouldn’t she know? tell
her there’s dead babies, did she see babies? tell her she’s got
nothing to be ashamed of. Tell her they did it to themselves. Tell
her they want their children killed to make people sorry for them,
tell her I’m not sorry for them, tell her not to be sorry for them,
tell her we’re the ones to be sorry for, tell her they can’t talk
suffering to us. Tell her we’re the iron fist now, tell her it’s the fog
of war, tell her we won’t stop killing them till we’re safe, tell her I
laughed when I saw the dead policemen, tell her they’re animals
living in rubble now, tell her I wouldn’t care if we wiped them out,
the world would hate us is the only thing, tell her I don’t care if
the world hates us, tell her we’re better haters, tell her we’re
chosen people, tell her I look at one of their children covered in
blood and what do I feel? tell her all I feel is happy it’s not her.
Don’t tell her that.
Tell her we love her.
Don’t frighten her.

Is this troubling? Yes. But is this language that was never uttered by Israelis in discussing Gaza? No. Is Churchill making things up out of whole cloth? No. Are these ideas common to many Jews and Israelis? Certainly. In fact, you could read far worse hate published by commenters to this blog (or to be more accurate, comments Israel supporters attempted to publish, as some were so hateful and vicious they never saw the light of day).

I call Seven Children a meditation because to call it a play is misleading. It’s not a linear narrative with defined characters. It’s a series of thoughts, slogans and ideas thrown up against each other. There is dissonance, there is anger, there is heedlessness, there is hatred, there is love. And contrary to Goldberg’s head-exploding claim that this is a blood libel, nothing could be farther from the truth.

Boy and girls, no Jews are being killed at the Royal Court Theater where this piece is currently running. No one is shouting “Death to Jews” when they leave the theater. No one will hate Israel (unless they already do) after seeing this play.

What’s really troubling Jeffrey Goldberg about Seven Children? That people will be forced to think thoughts about Israel, some unpleasant thoughts. That they will ask questions, unpleasant questions. That they will grapple with difficult questions of rights and wrongs. That they won’t have any pat answers and certainly not ones that end up by patting viewers on the back for their easy support for Israel in its current predicament.

That’s the problem with the querulous pro-Israel crowd like Goldberg: there are blood-libelers under every bed and nowhere for Jews to run, nowhere to hide. It’s really a tiresome attitude that infantilizes Jews and Israel. Goldberg’s approach would have the world eating pablum and teething biscuits when it comes to discussing the hard, intractable questions about the Israeli-Arab conflict. In fact, Churchill’s play perfectly encapsulates this attitude in advice it proffers to adults about what they should say about the conflict to the “child:”

Tell her she can’t watch the news
Tell her she can watch cartoons
Tell her she can stay up late and watch Friends.
Tell her they’re attacking with rockets
Don’t frighten her
Tell her only a few of us have been killed
Tell her the army has come to our defence

Goldberg is of the camp that we can’t tell “her” anything. Not only that, but the world can’t tell her anything either. Protect her from the unpleasantness at all costs. And anyone like Churchill who threatens to break through the protective shield is a blood-libeler.

It appears Goldberg’s “blood-libel” slogan was derived from a post at the Trotskyite pro-Israel Harry’s Place blog. Which should teach him something about that blog’s level of histrionics. Both Harry’s Place & Goldberg should remember the story about the boy who cried wolf once too often. After a while, everyone turned their backs and said: “There he goes again.” And that was the time he needed to be believed most.

The Times story reveals that James Nicola’s New York Theater Workshop is contemplating bringing this piece to New York. He is the very same who buckled under imaginary pressure and refused to produce Rachel Corrie when it was offered to him. Though Corrie wasn’t a very good play, that wasn’t the reason he refused it. He refused it because he was afraid is was too provocative and would be too offensive to New York’s Jewish population.

The problem Nicola has here is that Churchill’s piece is not a bad play. It is a very good and provocative play. And because it is a play that carefully represents many conflicting emotions and points of view (as opposed to agit prop), it is even more challenging than Rachel Corrie was. If he couldn’t deal with Corrie how will he deal with this?

Posted in Film-TV-Media, Jews & Judaism, Mideast Peace, The Arts | 60 Comments »

‘With An Iron Pen’: Collection of Israeli Anti-Occupation Poetry

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

Clare Kinberg, editor of Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal, brings welcome news of the publication of a new translation of political poetry from Hebrew, With An Iron Pen, dealing with the matzav in a critical context. Here’s what SUNY Press has to say about the book:

A groundbreaking collection of forty-two Israeli poetic voices protesting the occupation of the West Bank.

The eighty-eight poems in With an Iron Pen, all originally written in Hebrew, offer a collective protest to the continuing Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Palestinian territories—“the sin of Judah,” which is written “with an iron pen, engraved with the point of a diamond on the tablet of their hearts” (Jeremiah 17:1).

Including such preeminent voices as Yehuda Amichai, Aharon Shabtai, Dahlia Ravikovitch, Meir Wieseltier, and Natan Zach, the forty-two poets in this groundbreaking anthology represent the full range of contemporary Hebrew poetry. Together, they turn an unforgiving gaze on the Occupation, speaking with rage, shame, sorrow, and despair at the continuing violence that has defined the lives of Palestinians and Israelis over the years, and the hopelessness that has permeated both societies. The result is a collection of poems that are as important for their compelling poetic beauty as for their significant political accomplishment. The original Hebrew edition, published in 2005, received accolades in the Israeli press for its comprehensive collection of dissenting voices and for its daring and beautiful poetry. With an Iron Pen is a must read for all who seek a better understanding of the occupation and the wider conflict in the Middle East.

“These dissident Israeli voices, recognized and new, prophetic, raging, heartbroken, challenging, public and intimate, from the moral core of Jewish tradition, have gone almost unheard in America until now. The lyrical range is impressive, the edition scholarly; this is a historic collection.” — Adrienne Rich

Tal Nitzan has published three poetry collections, including Domestica and An Ordinary Evening. A preeminent translator of Spanish into Hebrew, she has translated over forty books and won numerous awards for her work. Rachel Tzvia Back has translated works for numerous anthologies, including The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present; Lea Goldberg: Selected Poetry and Drama; and With this Night. Her own poetry collections are Azimuth, The Buffalo Poems, and On Ruins & Return. She is Professor of Literature at Oranim College and Bar-Ilan University.

The book should be an Israeli echo of the fierce poetry of Mahmoud Darwish which reflects these issues from a Palestinian perspective.

Regarding the quotation from Jeremiah from which the title of the collection is taken, it strongly reminds me of the Kafka story, In the Penal Colony. There too the sins of prisoners are etched in their flesh by a monstrous type of pen or, as it’s called in the story, a “harrow”:

[The] apparatus stands here in front of us. As you see, it consists of three parts…The one underneath is called the Bed, the upper one is called the Inscriber, and here in the middle, this moving part is called the Harrow.” “The Harrow?” the Traveller asked…

“Yes, the Harrow,” said the Officer. “The name fits. The needles are arranged as in a harrow, and the whole thing is driven like a harrow, although it stays in one place and is, in principle, much more artistic. You’ll understand in a moment. The condemned is laid out here on the Bed. ..

As soon as the man is strapped in securely, the Bed is set in motion…But it’s the Harrow which has the job of actually carrying out the sentence.”

…“Our sentence does not sound severe. The law which a condemned man has violated is inscribed on his body with the Harrow. This Condemned Man, for example,” and the Officer pointed to the man, “will have inscribed on his body, ‘Honour your superiors.’”

I never cease to be amazed at both the evocativeness of Biblical allusions in modern literature, but at the depth of specifically Jewish allusions in Kafka’s work. Certainly it would be interesting to know whether Kafka had read this passage from Jeremiah and whether he deliberately invoked it. But in a way it doesn’t matter for Kafka’s work embodies so fully the prophetic outlook and its preoccupations with justice, sin and redemption, that he needn’t necessarily have been fully aware of this passage in order to echo it in the story.

The Israeli Occupation too is like the harrow of Kafka’s story in that it etches both the sin and punishment directly onto the bodies of Israelis and Palestinians alike. It draws the blood of the victim in the same way, at times in great volumes and at times in tiny pinpricks. And as in the Kafka story, where the sentence takes an interminable 12 hours to execute, the Occupation has gone on now for forty years with still no end in sight.

Tags: in the penal colony, israeli anti occupation poetry, kafka, prophet jeremiah, with an iron pen
Posted in Jews & Judaism, Mideast Peace, The Arts | 3 Comments »

Palestinian Artist Wins Guggenheim/Hugo Boss Award

Sunday, November 16th, 2008

Emily Jacir, Hugo Boss/Guggenheim winner (Sarah Shatz)

The Guggenheim Museum announced that Palestinian artist, Emily Jacir has won this year’s prestigious Hugo Boss Award:

Emily Jacir, the 37-year-old artist of Palestinian descent…has won this year’s Hugo Boss Prize.

The $100,000 award, established in 1996 by the Guggenheim Museum and named for the German men’s wear company that sponsors it, is given every two years for significant achievement in contemporary art…

Ms. Jacir, who divides her time between Ramallah…and New York, won the Golden Lion Award…at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Her work there, a room-size installation in the Italian pavilion, documented the assassination of the Palestinian intellectual Wael Zwaiter by Israeli agents in Rome in 1972 for what they believed was his role in the massacre of Israeli athletes at that year’s Summer Olympics.** Using photographs, objects, texts and interviews, she created a narrative that reflects on her own anguish over the Middle East.

The Hugo Boss Award jurors had this to say about her work:

“Emily Jacir’s rigorous conceptual practice—comprising photography, video, performance, and installation-based work—bears witness to a culture torn by war and displacement. As a member of the Palestinian diaspora, she comments on issues of mobility (or the lack thereof), border crises, and historical amnesia through projects that unearth individual narratives and collective experiences. Jacir combines the roles of archivist, activist, and poet to create poignant and memorable works of art that are at once intensely personal and deeply political. It is the refined sophistication of Jacir’s art and the relevance of her concerns—both global and local—in a time of war, transnationalism, and mass migration that led us to award her the 2008 Hugo Boss Prize.”

This is a description of another work of hers which sounds interesting and provocative:

…Where We Come From…was recently acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Jacir asked Palestinians around the world: “If I could do something for you, anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?” She then documented herself fulfilling the requests for people who are prohibited entry into their homeland and/or restricted from movement within it. She visited a mother’s grave, played soccer with a boy in Haifa, and visited a student’s family in Gaza because he is prevented from traveling home while at school in the West Bank.

And another fascinating project:

Crossing Surda (A Record Of Going To And From Work), which was inspired by Israeli soldiers throwing her passport in the mud and holding a gun to her temple at a checkpoint between Ramallah and Birzeit University, and involved her cutting a hole in the bottom of her handbag and stealthily filming her trek across the same terrain, to and from teaching classes, as a generative gesture of revenge…

I’ve featured this story for two reasons: one, that I wish to highlight anyone, whether Jewish or Muslim; Israeli Jew or Palestinian who achieves distinction working for peace and justice for either or both peoples; two, Palestinians, including their artists, generally labor in obscurity. For those of us who read the N.Y. Times daily (you can fill in the name of your own daily paper), why hasn’t Ethan Bronner done a feature story about Jacir, whose work has earned numerous international art awards? Why when we think of the word “Palestinian,” do we not even think of the word “artist?” And isn’t this another symptom of the cultural impoverishment foisted upon us by this age-old conflict?

If you live in or near New York, the Guggenheim will host a show of Jacir’s work from February 6-April 15th. The National has featured a fine profile of Jacir.

**Actually, the Mossad’s “Wrath of God” operation was supposedly intended to gun down the Palestinians who planned and executed the Munich Olympic massacre. But many of the assassinated victims were Palestinian artists and intellectuals who had nothing to do with Munich. While the Mossad claims Zwaiter was involved, Palestinians who knew him claimed he was “energetically against terrorism.”

Tags: emily jacir, guggenheim museum, hugo boss art award winner, Wael Zwaiter, wrath of god
Posted in Mideast Peace, The Arts | 4 Comments »