Genre: Essay

We juggle delicately between the metaphorical and the real.

If you don’t know you’re on the Fool’s Journey, you’re on a fool’s errand.  Recently I did a tarot reading ...

I am a Jewish man trappedin the body of a Jewish man.—Charles Bernstein, “Unready, Unwilling, Unable”1 Let no man deceive ...

God is infinite and contains all possibilities. What we see of God in the world, and what we see of ...

I know two things for sure about God: God is good, and God has a sense of humor.  Once, when ...

How did the rupture between Arab and Jewish worlds come to affect us collectively and individually?

As the song continues, it opens up, revealing contradictory layers underneath.

Msika’s bold nonconformity and tragic fate resonated deeply with her contemporaries, and fascinate me now.

When I think of Zohra Elfassia’s “Abiadi Ana,” I think of my paternal grandmother.

Salim Halali’s life testifies to the entwinement of Jewish and Muslim communities in Algeria and Morocco before World War II.

Al-Ala, the music of al-Andalus, has always been present in my family. It was a sort of familiar hum in our lives and rituals.

That community of Jews who left Algeria after independence left it forever. They joined a world of refugees marked by war, forever dreaming of home.

“Yafa Vetama,” a song once buried in the rubble of history, is very dear to me.

While preparing our own interpretations of these divas’ songs, we tried to creatively reconstruct a relationship to identity and history that was expansive and intersectional.

How does an object become so warped, so distorted by events that have no inherent meaning in themselves?