project update

well, shannon and i have now joined forces and are doing our project(s) together! yay!

we did our first two interviews yesterday and they were SO GOOD! one was my friends mother, and it was really cool to get her perspective (her father is palestinian) and the other was Kasa!

Kasa's interview was incredible, so heartfelt and deeply important to her. it made me so excited to go to this city that is so incredibly important to her.

she also told us some of the cool spots we need to go to in Jerusalem and shes going to hook us up with her sister and/or cousins!

basically yesterday made me 10000 times more excited for our trip to jerusalem! is it june 9th yetttttt?

readings for thursday

so this reading talks about the Basic Law:Jerusalem Capital of Israel 1980. and in this Basic Law, there are only 2 parts- seems pretty simple, pretty easy to not violate.

notttt. because the second part, the one that talks about not allowing and wall or structure to be built that separated West Jerusalem from East Jerusalem. well. not only did they violate that, they actively did it themselves. that is kind of mind blowing to me- that they could completely go against 50% of the law that they wrote THEMSELVES.

but as soon as i started to get indignant, i remembered part of the interview that shannon and i did today with Kasa. (yay Kasa! i love that woman) Kasa was saying that everything Israel does is for the good of everyone there, that Israel always acts in the interest of protecting people, israelis and palestinians. it would be easy to understand and justify a lot of Israels actions if you had that viewpoint.

im also SO EXCITED to meet with PYALARA tomorrow! i felt like since we just met with a jewish/israeli group it would be kind of unfair if we didnt meet with a muslim/palestinian group, seeing as al Kuds is boycotting and we dont get to speak to them. i was interested to read the overview of the group, because when i asked my (palestinian) boyfriend about them he had never heard of the group, which i found surprising. i really really like their well-being program, i feel like something like that is really useful to the youth in such an... intense area. i hope that they are really using their efforts for good, and not for a brian-washing type deal. their Youth Times magazine seems incredibly impressive.

i found the overview of the political context to be a little harder to read, and i tried to figure out the chart on youth population % to be impossible to read/understand. i think it was missing some headings or something.

i cant wait to meet with a big group of students tomorrow!

my interview questions

ok. this is the third time that ive typed this post. lets all say a little prayer before i continue that it shows up this time.

so these are the questions that i plan on asking. i tried to keep them simple, because they could elicit lengthy answers and off-shoot questions.
i would be incredibly grateful to any help that you guys could give me- comments, suggestions, anything!

1. have you ever been to Jerusalem?
if yes:
when did you go there, and why?
what did you think about the city itself? and was the divide between Muslims, Jews, and Christians obvious?

2. what did you grow up hearing/knowing about jerusalem? was it brought up a lot in your religion? in your family?

3. when you hear about Jerusalem, what comes to mind?

4. what would you like to happen in the future for Jerusalem? (stay divided between Israel and Palestine? unite under one of the countries? ect)

5. do you think the world has an accurate perception of the city? is it biased towards one side of the other?

i think this will post, inshallah.

video confrence

well i am a tad bit peeved because i typed out this longggg descriptive post about the video confrence we had last week and apparently my computer took the liberty of deleting it. fantastic.
so to sum it up, i had positive and negative feelings looking back on the video chat. i still think its SO COOL that we can carry on a conversation and see a group of people across the world! and i love michal, i thought she was great and i LOVED the point she kept making about how in day to day jerusalem the conflict isnt like we think it is and there arent all these negative feelings that we think are so prevalent.
i was disappointed in the number of students that showed up, though. i felt like the two girls might have been a little nervous or overwhelmed withall of us asking the two of them questions. i also felt bad that we, lovely americans that we are, had to conduct the whole thing in English. however, i thought those girls were a good mix of backgrounds and i loved their responses.
im so excited to meet this class when we go to Jerusalem!

Project outline

i know this is late guys, i had mucho trouble figuring out what my project would be.

I want to conduct a series of interviews with different types of people about Jerusalem, what the city means to them and how it affects their lives.

and my "different types of people" i mean a Palestinian Muslim who grew up in Palestine, a Palestinian/American, and I'm hoping to get Kasa, possibly a few American Jewish people, including people that have traveled to Jerusalem and a Christian or two.

I want to get tons of different perspectives on the city, and see what they do or dont think about the city, how important it may or may not be to them.

week 8 readings

the first reading i read, "seizing locality in Jerusalem" was not over a topic i would normally consider interesting- yeah, architecture doesnt really whip me into much of a frenzy. but what i DID think was interesting was the fact that the Israeli government was trying to use architecture to unite the city of Jerusalem- i never thought it could be used like that. very interesting application.

in the next group of readings i was kind of disappointed by the poem. not by what it said, but there was nothing really poetic about it to me, just the spacing.

"Jerusalem has and continues to be the center of strife. The stones of Jerusalem's history have been carved in history. Palestine represents a point of intersections wherein numerous civilizations flourished."

thats the first couple lines put into paragraph form... i feel like it could have been in the jacket of Armstrong's book.

the next reading i found interesting because of the idea that Israelis have that they have to be in control of the city in order for it to be kept an "open city". hm. i probably wouldnt consider Jerusalem as an open city, especially bc of the wall that they build splitting it.

in my opinion, the type of wall that the Israelis built is a wall of agression. again, open is not the word i would use to describe.

i hope that when we go to Jerusalem the walls are less of a problem than they seem to me now, that the city is as open as the Israelis like to claim

reaction to the movie

i really liked the movie!!!!

i thought it was really interesting though, that by the time we really saw the two rappers they were no longer friends. they showed a flashback (the one on the bus) of the time when they were good friends, but by the time the documentary got underway it seemed that they were enemies, or frienimies as they appeared.

i also thought it seemed kind of sad because subliminal was gaining a lot of (mostly local) fame, performing in packed bars and huge festivals, while TN was having a harder time gaining popularity.

though the reviews i read claimed that both rappers were becoming radicalized, i really only saw that with Subliminal. he was talking about zionism constantly, trying to promote his ideals, while it seemed that TN was just trying to make people aware of what was being done to the palestinians.

overall i liked the movie a lot, though in the beginning i had a hard time following who was who and what was what.

tamari articles

in Tamari's Popular Music article he mentioned the four communities in Jerusalem- Muslim, Christian, Jewish and Armenian. umm... Armenian? scuse me? now i just feel stupid because i was completely unaware of this other community, but the more i think about it the more i realized that Armstrong didn't really address them either. so its not just me =)
i really like the idea of this reading, that it was all informed from the diaries of a person (jewish musician) from the past. i would be interested in reading The Memoirs because theyre told in an ancedotal styple, which is one of my favorites to read- you get the same information but in a much more entertaining and easy-to-read style.
ps whats an Ud? is that the thingy in the picture? kinda looks like a guitar.
i love the phrase that Tamari uses that describes when Wasif would skip out of work- "creative truancy" haha that made me laugh.
wasif's diaries were incredible descriptive of the city both inside and outside the city walls.... i feel like in my diary entries id be crying about a boy or a math test and not chronicling the growth of the neighborhoods outside of my city.
i found the "Lepers, Lunatics and Saints" article to be SO cool and interesting. now-a-days we never really hear about leprosy.... we (or at least I) think of it as a biblical disease, something so far in the past. but here we are, talking about it from 1948, an era not so far from us.
i found it disgusting, however, that all arab leprosy patients were marched to the eastern front. MARCHED. these sick, weak people were marched from place to place.... ironically remiscient of the Holocaust.
i also found it interesting that this article mentioned that one of the chief ideologies of the Zionists were that Palestinian arabs had no "crystallized conscious nationalism of their own" and so they could be easily absorbed into Hebrew culture. uhhh yeah im pretty sure if you talked to my (Palestinian) boyfriend's family they would have a bigggg problem with that statement!

movie reviews

http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117925365.html?categoryid=31&cs=1

what i like about this review is the physical descriptions of the two rappers, and the fact that the jew is dark skinned and the palestinian is so fair. kinda ironic

http://www.fandango.com/channelsofrage_88382/movieoverview

interesting phrase used- "poets of wrath"

im really really excited to see this!!!