Category: Writing

Articles by Mya Guarnieri

The Missing Mizrahim

by adminin Miscellaneous, Writing

 notthenemyshabi1

 The Missing Mizrahim: review of Rachel Shabi’s Not the Enemy: Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands, and Q & A with the author

Zeek, August 31, 2009

Some critics have faulted Rachel Shabi’s Not the Enemy: Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands as one-sided. Shabi neglects the animosity that existed between Jews and Muslims long before 1948, the critics say. She exaggerates how good things were for the Jews of the Orient, they moan.

But it seems that Shabi’s detractors might have missed the point.

The pivot that Shabi’s work revolves around is, perhaps, easy to miss. It is simple, a delicate foundation for hundreds of pages. Fortunately, Shabi has taken care to illuminate it in an old-fashioned thesis sentence. She writes: “This book is focused on the stifled, small-voice analysis seeking to break this stalemate formula.”

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Not buying it

by adminin Writing

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 Not buying it

The Jerusalem Post, August 21, 2009

The crowd is small and subdued Friday morning at Tel Aviv’s Hangar 11. Drifts of Israeli Arabs and Israelis walk through an air-conditioned shuk, passing stalls lined with pickles, olives, baklawa, cosmetics, clothes, arts and crafts. One vendor—a tall, lanky man with black hair—sprays puffs of perfume in the air. “Bosem, bosem,” he says.

A makeshift stage is tucked behind the stalls. Below a green and orange sign that reads Koolanu 09 in both Arabic and Hebrew, an Israeli woman grasps a microphone, and sways as she sings a one-sentence song. “We are one, we are one,” she repeats in English.

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After the ‘non-revolution’

by adminin Miscellaneous, Writing

 

dsc03616After the ‘non-revolution’

The Jerusalem Post, August 21, 2009

I’ve tucked away my guidebook and happily stumbled upon an unmarked bar on a low-key street in Budapest. The scene is relaxed—simple blue jeans on casually crossed legs, uncomplicated drinks like beer and wine on plain wooden tables. The bright lighting, high ceilings, and a cluster of birds painted above the bar give the impression of openness.

“Where am I?” I ask a man at a neighboring table.

“Siraly,” he says.

I jot the name down and he looks on.

“No,” he says. He takes the pen and paper from my hands. “Like this,” he says, drawing a firm accent line over the r. “Siraly. It means seagull.” He offers my notebook and pen back to me.

I write “seagull” and then my neighbor’s unsolicited take on the scene. “It’s traditional alternative. But post-socialist,” he says.

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The Balkan two-step

by adminin Israel, Writing

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 The Balkan two-step

The Jerusalem Post, August 7, 2009

Another shot of ouzo? Why not?

I wince as I down the alcohol. I get back out on the floor and study the footsteps of the ring of dancers. I nod my head and mutter to myself—right, left, right, return—and when I think I’ve got the sequence, I break into the semi-circle. I clasp hands with one of the instructors, Mika Yehezkeli, and the friend I’ve brought along, Josh Krug.

As my hips clumsily bump Krug’s and Yehezkeli’s hips and my boot-clad feet threaten to tangle with their legs, it’s clear to me that I don’t have the sequence at all.

“You remind me of Borat,” Krug shouts over the blaring music, which I vaguely recognize as something gypsy. The music speeds up and the circle picks up pace, too.

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An Interview with Adina Hoffman

by adminin Writing

adinahoffman

 An Interview with Adina Hoffman

Bookslut, August 2009

In the opening pages of My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness author Adina Hoffman journeys from her home in Jerusalem to the north of Israel. The landscape there is dismal—blocks of rundown apartment buildings show signs of life but remain eerily quiet. If it serves as any indication of the story to follow, it seems the reader, too, is headed into dark territory.

But the scenery shifts when she arrives at the house of Taha Muhammad Ali, the Palestinian poet at the center of her book. Grey gives way to a riotous orchard—tightly planted citrus, olive, and pomegranate trees laced with roses, oleander, daisies, and chattering birds. We are, writes Hoffman, “now in the proximity of serious imagination.”

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Big trouble in little China

by adminin Migrant workers, Writing

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 Big trouble in little China

The Jerusalem Post, July 31, 2009

As the sky darkens over the sagging cement buildings of South Tel Aviv, Chinese workers gather on the sidewalk outside of Kav LaOved. Inside, the translators that volunteer their time to Kav LaOved every Monday night prepare. “It’s like a party out there,” one comments about the waiting crowd.

But no one is celebrating. Chinese workers comprise one of the smallest groups of foreign workers in Israel—numbering roughly 20,000 of the estimated 300,000 migrant workers in the country—but they pay the largest amount of money to enter Israel. An Indian worker who obtains work in Israel typically scrambles together 10,000 US dollars in loans to pay the fee; the going rate for a Chinese worker to secure employment and a visa is now a whopping 31,000 US dollars. Though this “entry fee”—paid to employment agencies who arrange for jobs and visas—is illegal, foreign workers pay it overseas, far from the prying eyes of the Israeli government.

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Israel is at war again

by adminin Politics, Writing

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 Israel is at war again

Zeek at Jewcy.com, July 20, 2009

Israel is at war again. This time, the frontline is deep within the country’s borders—South Tel Aviv.

Home to African refugees, foreign workers, and economically disadvantaged Israelis, South Tel Aviv was once a picture of pluralism and coexistence. Indian, Nepali, Chinese, and Filipino workers gathered in tight clusters, chattering in their mother tongues. Refugees from Darfur, Sudan, and Eritrea lined South Tel Aviv’s parks, their children sharing brightly colored swings and slides with Hebrew-speaking Filipino kids, many of whom were born and raised in Israel.

And then came Operation Oz.

On July 1, hundreds of refugees and foreign workers were detained in a massive South Tel Aviv raid that marked the beginning of Operation Oz. Waves of arrests continued in the following days. Legal foreign workers and asylum seekers were not immune—they were rounded up and warned to keep out of Tel Aviv. The next time they were caught, the police cautioned them, they would be imprisoned—with their papers in hand.

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Clothes like days

by adminin Miscellaneous, Writing

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 Clothes like days

The Jerusalem Post, July 17, 2009

“It’s a kind of a dance,” says Michal Bassad. The designer is perched on a table next to her sewing machine. Her studio, which also serves as her store, has only a few racks of clothing, reflective of her artistic approach to fashion.

Though the space is minimal, it’s energetic—loud music streams though an old radio, and the teal walls serve as an impromptu chalkboard. “Anger is energy” is scrawled in white beside the makeshift dressing room of little more than a corner partitioned by paper patterns hanging from a steel rack. Her clothes are as dynamic as the environment they are created in.

“My clothes are very organic in that manner, they are not planned, they are intuitive,” Bassad says. This approach explains why no two pieces are identical.

“Each is one. It’s like days,” says Michal, “no day is the same, no day repeats itself.” While each piece is distinct, they are all reflective of Bassad’s unique vision— part punk rock, part recycled, entirely fanciful.

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The bigger picture

by adminin Middle East, Politics, Writing

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 The bigger picture

The Jerusalem Post, July 10, 2009

At night, cries of dissent like “Allahu akbar!” and “Death to the dictator!” rise from the rooftops of Tehran. The protesters’ calls are punctuated by shattering glass as Basiji smash car windows in retribution on the streets below. But the people persist, turning their voices to the sky, an Iranian-American in Tehran, who asked to be called Reza, reports to The Jerusalem Post.

“The scare tactics, like killing protesters, have worked,” Reza says, “When there were thousands of people out, [the protesters] felt safe. But because the crowds have thinned, it’s not like it was before.”

But in many ways, Iran is as it was before—for this now-simmering resistance was a long time coming. And many, like Reza, anticipate that there is still more to come.

Despite the fact that the protests were focused on the election results, Reza is certain that the election was merely the spark in the powder box, igniting years of frustration and disillusionment. “Last time I was here, in 2007, literally everyone—from taxi drivers to my family—was very angry and was openly cursing the president and the government, mostly because of the economic situation.” Reza explains that though Iranians readily aired their discontent to one another, no one did so in public and never in the streets.

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Body and Jewish souls

by adminin Miscellaneous, Writing

 

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Body and Jewish souls: review of Melvin Konner’s The Jewish Body

The Jerusalem Post, July 10, 2009

Who knew that Dr. Ruth, the grandmotherly sex expert, was a Haganah fighter in Israel’s War of Independence? How often the Nazis’ considered the “final solution” a public health program? And when we think of the nose job do we categorize it as a form of therapy, as some did in the 19th century?

Surprises such as these are sprinkled throughout Melvin Konner’s The Jewish Body. Konner, who earned both his PhD and MD at Harvard and is a professor at Emory University, is a well-known and well-published scholar. And it is in Konner’s able hands that the Jewish body comes to life, representing the individual and collective, the literal and metaphorical, the corporeal and spiritual, and the historical and contemporary. The result is a dense, entertaining text comprised of a variety of topics that ordinarily might not appear between the covers of the same book—from religious law to golem to Jewish boxers to Kafka to current genetic research. Though Konner’s rich and provocative study is at times a bit scattered and occasionally over-simplistic, it ultimately pushes readers to consider the Jewish people, past and present, in a new light.

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