Halim Barakat Reads from 'The Crane' (12 February 2009)

Halim Barakat read from his 1988 book 'The Crane,' which has recently been translated from Arabic into English.

12 February 2009
The Gallery
The Jerusalem Fund for Education and Community Development
Washington, DC

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Teaching Teachers about Palestine

American teachers and educators from Maryland, West Virginia and other states visited the Palestine Center on Wednesday to learn about Palestinian culture.

Robyn Davis, the Cultural Coordinator, organized lessons in Arabic music, and Palestinian embroidery, poetry, art and literature. She was helped by Fuad Foty, a DC-based musician, as well as two dancers from the Hurriyah Dabkeh troupe. They gave a short instructional dance lesson.

The group of more than 60 K-College educators also received a useful curriculum to help them teach Palestinian history.

Listen to Fuad Fouty's performance and lesson on the Oud and Arabic music.

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Fady Joudah, Poet and Darwish Translator, Reads at the Fund

Last night, the Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah presented at the Jerusalem Fund. He was a guest of the Fund's Cultural Gallery. Joudah shared his own poetry, as well as some of his award-winning translations of the late Mahmoud Darwish's work. He performed two of Darwish's pieces in Arabic, as well.

The Jerusalem Fund's cultural coordinator Robyn Davis interviewed Joudah and posted it on Youtube. Also, the Fund published video and audio files from the event below.

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Download the audio (mp3) or listen on the player below:



Joudah was the 2007 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for The Earth in the Attic. In his poems Joudah explores big themes—identity, war, religion, what we hold in common—while never losing sight of the quotidian, the specific. Contest judge Louise Glück described the poet in her Foreword as "that strange animal, the lyric poet in whom circumstance and profession have compelled obsession with large social contexts and grave national dilemmas." She finds in his poetry "an incantatory quality and concludes, These are small poems, many of them, but the grandeur of conception is inescapable. The Earth in the Attic is varied, coherent, fierce, tender; impossible to put down, impossible to forget."

Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American doctor and has been a member of Doctors Without Borders since 2001. His translation of Mahmoud Darwishs recent poetry, The Butterfly's Burden, received the 2008 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.

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