By Melissa Levin The next time Peter Beinart, who wrote a post on “The Israel Debate in South Africa” for The Daily Beast, visits South Africa, he ought to spend more time, with more people, getting a deeper sense of the complexities of the country and its struggle history. He may learn then, for starters, that […]
Remember that little video campaign called #Kony2012? Yeah, we wish we could forget too. Few videos have reached the magnitude of pestilence that the non-profit Invisible Children’s video achieved this year. By transforming a complex regional crisis involving the Lord’s Resistance Army into a simple, manufactured (and in some ways factually false) narrative about the […]
Kehinde Wiley has seemed unstoppable. In the last five years, the artist has gathered praise from all over the place, established a high price for this work, and developed a highly distinctive style. His wildly ambitious World Stage series, documenting life in Africa, Asia, South America and the Middle East, looks for an unparalleled authority to represent […]
A muted response in the blogosphere persuaded me to write about Israeli interior minister Eli Yishai’s now not-so-recent remark, which I’ve come to think of as ‘the “white man” comment’. If you missed it, in June 2012 Yishai, responding to criticism of Israel’s treatment of African migrants, claimed that: “Muslims that arrive here do not […]
Guest Post by Anonymous* If you follow current headlines, you may have noticed a seemingly new conflict arising in the Middle East. Recent migratory trends in Israel have led to new challenges beyond the decades long occupation of the Palestinian Territories. The tension surrounding the influx of African asylum seekers and refugees to Israel has […]
My Land, a new documentary on the occupied territories of Palestine by Nabil Ayouch, opens with the statement by the director that his background gave rise to the inquiry his film makes. In the Israel-Palestine conflict this is almost a statement of the obvious: where you come from defines your position. Ayouch is one of […]
Short films sometimes get a bad rap — they’re considered a “learning exercise” for film school students, or worse, they’re made synonymous with boring, pretentious art house… stuff. This year’s matinee trio at NYAFF had some fun with these stereotypes. Osvalde Lewat’s ‘Sderot, Last Exit’ is an experimental documentary that follows student filmmakers as they […]
The recent controversy around Günter Grass’s criticisms of Germany’s arms trade with Israel is an interesting post-script to the Namibian genocide controversy. The Nobel prize-winning author has written a poem – called ‘What needs to be said’ – which argues that historical guilt is the reason for the sale of arms to Israel, a monstrous form of […]
In an astoundingly ambitious new series of 12 feature-length documentaries titled The Price of Kings (available to watch online) the British production company Spirit Level Films challenge the perception of leadership in provocative and imaginative ways. Through a creative counterpoint between historical ‘truth’ and memory, and supported by powerful archival material, the series thoughtfully and […]
Very much in the fashion of other democratic states, some Israelis have decided to take up the cause against social ills such as unemployment, crime and disease. How do they plan to do it? Not by addressing the realities of Occupied Palestine and a bloated security regime, making schools and hospitals more accessible for Israelis […]
