Culture

By Noa Koren ~ Down Jerusalem's weathered cobblestone Old City streets and down hip beachfront boulevards in Tel Aviv, Israel pulses with a cultural rhythm that can be found nowhere else on the planet. Here, hundreds of stones hundreds of centuries old that existed before the very world itself hundreds of centuries prior tell centuries-in-the-making stories—and where street art, electronic beats, modern dance, and experimental theater mix an ever-morphing modern landscape. This is not a balancing of war, but of symphony. Today Israel is going through a cultural renaissance, balancing the...

The compelling mixture of history, geology, and culture in Lebanon has enough evidences of the past and countryside landscape. Lebanon's traces of the past and countryside landscape attract foreign travelers. Among the thousand-year-old traces of...

By Layla Al-Barakani ~ Before ever they had set pen to page, Yemenis had known themselves by word. In golden light and glowing ember, poem and story and song had flowed down the centuries, pealing down the ages. Such tradition—full of metaphor and music and remembrance—is one of the most persistent and typical Yemeni props of culture. Even today, in the screen and sound era, Yemeni oral tradition remains more treasury of values, identity, and pride than entertainment. A Living Legacy Carried by Voice Yemeni performance is not participatory event, performance. Seating men and women of any age in a circle about a ḥakawātī or shaʿir, their own term for reciter or poet,...

Kuwait City – Those were the times when Kuwaiti coffee culture revolved around strong, thick Arab coffees and very old, venerable coffeehouses. Today, they exist in the memory. Today's city-cafes are not houses one would happen to stumble upon and have a drink of the stuff-they are now thrill points which are social hubs, think tanks, and culture meeting grounds. In the past ten years, there emerged a new type of coffeehouse that revolutionized Kuwaiti life. The new cafes mix authentic taste with new look, i.e., roasted coffee, and cosmopolitan style. To some buyers, especially the younger of the two, they are not just hangouts. They are sites of expression,...

There has been a cultural renaissance across Palestinian societies whereby creatives and artists use writing, music, drama, and visual arts to reclaim and safeguard their identity during extended socio-political turmoil. The cultural renaissance is a branding move towards safeguarding cultural narrative and resilience using imagination and articulation. Palestinian artists engage lived experience, social commentary, and historical memory to call forth the richness of life in occupation and diaspora. Transmedia, they address local and international publics through heritage, displacement, and collective identity. Representations of everyday life forego poetically nostalgic visions of lost homeland and redeployments of classical tropes in attempts to call forth a shared history transcending and preceding spatial divisions. Literature...

A health movement based on heritage has therefore become...

By Layla Al Mazrouei ~ Against the dusty light of...

By Aisha Al Hameli ~ Half way along the Arabian...

By Talia Ben-Ami ~ In the hills of Galilee, a...