Teaching Arabic in Israel : A Linguistic Challenge in Majority–Minority Relations

Throughout Israel’s history, Jewish and Arab children have, with few exceptions, attended separate schools, each conducted in the native language of its pupils. The Arab school system teaches children Arabic, English and Hebrew as mandatory subjects from elementary school through to matriculation, along with other Jewish national and cultural elements. The study of Arabic in the Jewish educational system is, however, minimal or non-existent. Despite the fact that Arabic is an official language in Israel and the native language of over one million of the state’s citizens, laws mandating its study are not enforced and the proportion of Jewish students who can actually speak it after graduating school is tiny. Read more

Testament of Youth

Musrara, Jerusalem: the Naggar School of Photography, Media and New Music is situated on the border between the old city and the new, poverty and wealth, the Jewish and the Arab worlds. With Teen Spirit, recent graduates of the school interrogate another difficult border: that between childhood and adulthood. The result is a portrait of contemporary Israeli youth, illuminating stark contrasts between the tribalism of the social group and the isolation of the teenage bedroom, a desperation to conform and a desire to assert an individual identity.

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The Jazz Baroness

On the night of 15 October, 1958, a vintage Bentley was pulled over by the Delaware State Police. Suspicions had been raised by the sight of a white woman driving with two black male passengers, one of whom had danced his way into a motel along the road in search of a glass of water. This man was Thelonious Monk and the other man was Charlie Rouse. Monk refused the officers’ request to leave the car and they beat his fingers with blackjacks. When the driver screamed that Monk was a pianist, they beat him harder. Minutes later, the officers found marijuana in a suitcase which the driver, Nica, claimed was hers. Had Monk been busted he’d have lost his cabaret card and the right to perform in New York for up to seven years. Read more

Exclusion

Of all the wounds that rend the human heart, what aches so keenly or heals so slowly as exclusion? The childhood gang we weren’t allowed to join; the lovers entwined, oblivious to our presence; the decision of Southport’s Reform Synagogue to dispense with our rabbinical services over a matter as trivial as a single Opal Fruit on Yom Kippur; each spurning smoulders on down the years like an Everlasting Light. Read more