November 9, 2014
the demonstration in front of the university - i passed by on my way to an emergency babysitting call. But i thought why is everyone Arab? why aren;t we All there? Were we not invited? I know I didn't know about it in advance - but there is no doubt had be been there to protest the totally disproportionate police response in Kfar Canna we all would have benefited. An egalitarian society is good for everyone.
Save November 27 for a reading at the university:
Four Elements
Save Wednesday for Mochot which features 2 of my poems. Here's one
We have spent the past two days babysitting. This mean we dare not listen to the news. It is pleasant not to hear about the terror. It is terrible that we do not hear about calls for dialogue that are voiced by so many individuals. But they rarely get to the news anyway. "The Encantadas" is selling out in Hebrew. Only the English has not yet been sent out to the public. And that's only because of my babysitting. November 11, 2014 I hope someone in the government is taking Abbas seriously. he doesn't have anything to lose now and if he wants a holy war he'll have it. And I won't blame them. Bibi has beeen complaining that the Palestinians are heating up the area with their rhetoric but what about our rhetoric? Take the example of the police shooting Arabs. They do it out of experience and fear. The experience may be accurate but the fear that takes them over the edge is often not based on reality but rhetoric that becomes ingrained, a way of thinking. Personally I have met more Arab citizens in the past 3 years than I've ever met before. we seem to have many more opportunities and familiarity reduces fear. November 12, 2014 Who wants to get out of bed when the news is so bad? Me I haven't been able to function unless I ignore the way we are behaving. and what will today bring? i shudder to think.
so I was listening to this iraqi song and suddenly remembered some lebanese cookies i used to make For the base you take 3 cups of flour cut in with a cup and half of flour and a bit less than a quarter cup of water. then you make balls the size of walnuts and press them onto a cookie sheet with an indentation in the middle. then you take a cup and a half of crushed walnuts mixed half a teaspoon of cinnamon and fill the indentations. drip a mixture of a cup of icing sugar and about 3 tablespoons of water over the cookies and bake for about half an hour. they are amazing. i'll see if i can get a photoshot before they disappear. they are called carabeige aleppo. found another recipe for it here. tell you about the song another time. Managed to get into "Mochot" tonight even though it was totally booked. Once again I was overwhelmed but this time I noticed completely different things. One poem, for example, is told in the voice of an Arab woman, murdered for the honor of her family. We have a lot of that here, but i was just a bit troubled by the fact that Arab women are only depicted as victims. Not that the Jewish women are not victims here. There are scenes of marriage, divorce, single-parenthood, etc that definitely have women as victims, but somehow it is different. The Arab women I know are far from being victims, by the way. November 13, 2014