18 Signs of Arabic Weddings

Everyone asking for free professional advice. If you are a lawyer, then other guests ask you about immigration. “Doctor, can I show you my rash?” Dentist? They’ll all show you their cavities. Gynecologist? The bathroom is that way. Just make sure the hedges are trimmed

Celebration of Arab Culture at Lincoln Theatre

Look, aside from the World Cup, we Arabs really only enjoy two other things with equal pleasure: Fashion and Music. Take a look back at the last Arab wedding you’ve been to, remember Uncle Sammy dressed in a plaid powder-blue suit and dancing to Nancy Ajram with the ferocity that makes Mick Jagger look like a white boy at a Zulu coming-of-age ceremony.

Too Fat for a Revolution

This problem is very easy to solve. Just imagine that the building has always had only one elevator. You wouldn’t have anything to be frustrated about.

Spanish Ham & the Politics of Culinary Exclusion

An Imam and a Rabbi walk into a bar, in Madrid, sit down and ask for the menu, take a brief look, and say in one voice: “Do you have anything other than ham?”
Imposing ham on all inhabitants makes life near impossible for “Moors” and “Judaizers” and forces out the closeted ones among them. Try refusing to partake in a meal with ham in it and you shall suffer the fate of Natalie Portman in Goya’s Ghosts. The excessive inclusion of ham in the land’s cuisine, no matter how delicious it is, is a method of exclusion. It is in effect, a means of ethnic cleansing.

The Whistling of Places: A Short Text by Raji Bathish

Raji Bathish is a (relatively) young experimental Palestinian author from Nazareth who writes texts that blur the boundary between poetry and prose, and shake the Arab reader out of a naive, stereotypically heroic image of the Palestinian living in occupied Palestine.

Lady Gaga: The Real Barrier to MidEast Peace

Pop quiz—What does more to galvanize radical anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world: (a) Israeli settlements on the West Bank; or (b) a Lady Gaga music video?

Find out our answer…

For Cultural Purposes Only

Update : You may watch “They Do Not Exist” online here. (Tarboush tip: Laurie King) from Sight and Sound Magazine The Palestinian Film Archive vanished during the 1982 Israeli siege of Beirut. Sarah Wood’s ‘For Cultural Purposes Only’ revives the memory of its contents through verbal description and drawings. Palestinian writer Adania Shibli finds her [...]

Fayyad Sbaihat Takes Down Top Chef Chicago

Apparently afraid of a routing on his home turf, Top Chef Chicago host turned down a challenge by iron Chef Fayyad Sbaihat for a throwdown at a place and time of his choosing. Here, you got served Ray

Arranged Marriage: The New Trend in America?

Looking for love and marriage isn’t so easy for some people. Arranged marriage, or having others assist in finding a spouse, could be a solution and it seems to be catching on.  Of course, arranged marriages are nothing new and have been around for a long time. In Gaza, Hamas has taken the initiative to [...]

Nothing Beats a Good Poop Tale

Roger Cohen’s recent column “When Nature Calls” draws a modern day lesson from a story that invokes everyone’s greatest fear: a diarrhea attack just when the bathroom is inaccessible. He writes of one such story with legal consequences, and draws from it a moral about modern America: A man who says he desperately needed to [...]