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V-Day "Celebrating Vagina Warriors" Series: Palestinian and Israeli Women Uninterrupted...

12/01/2003

Palestinian and Israeli Women Uninterrupted:
An Evening Of Compassionate Listening

Featuring Israeli and Palestinian writers Liana Badr, Yvonne Deutsch, Rema Hammami, Rela Mazali Interviewed by Eve Ensler And A Reading By Suad Amiry. At Culture Project@45 Bleecker Street

As part of the evolving series of gathering and events "Celebrating Vagina Warriors", V-Day Special Representative Hibaaq Osman invites you to "Palestinian and Israeli Women Uninterrupted: Evening of Compassionate Listening" featuring Palestinian and Israeli writers Liana Badr, Yvonne Deutsch, Rema Hammami, Rela Mazali, and Suad Amiry and V-Day Founder/Playwright Eve Ensler at Culture Project@45 Bleecker Street.

V-Day Founder/Playwright Eve Ensler will interview Liana Badr, Yvonne Deutsch, Rema Hammami, Rela Mazali. There will be no Q&A, the evening will focus on listening and the spontaneous dialogue that results from intimate conversations held in a public forum. Each of the women participating in this evening " Liana Badr, Yvonne Deutsch, Rema Hammami, Rela Mazali, and Suad Amiry - is a respected writer and activist, with compelling perspectives on the political, social, religious and historic origins of the age-old conflict, and, perhaps most important, insight into the possibility of just peace in the region.

Introduction by V-Day Special Representative Hibaaq Osman. Suad Amiry will read from her novel.

Monday, December 15, 2003
7:00pm
Culture Project@45 Bleecker Street, NYC.
Doors open at 6:30pm

-Open to the Public and by Special Invitation-

Admission is FREE (Donations to V-Day are welcomed)

RSVP [email protected] or 212-645-8329 (VDAY)

About Palestinian and Israeli Women Uninterrupted: An Evening Of Compassionate Listening: This evening grew out of V-Day's visit to the Middle East December 2002. The purpose of that trip was to bring the mission of V-Day. ending violence against women and girls. to the region, and in so doing, to listen to Israeli and Palestinian women as they discussed their urgent need for security, equality, justice and peace. Like previous V-Day visits, including those in Afghanistan, Kenya, Rome, the Philippines, Brussels and Kosovo, a series of meeting were held with a diverse group of women, in an attempt to fully understand the issues they faced. Since that trip, V-Day delegation members have exchanged and explored ideas with the activists and artists they met.

About V-Day: V-Day is a global movement to stop violence against women and girls. After her play The Vagina Monologues struck such wide and resonant chords, Eve decided to use it as a vehicle for change and founded V-Day in 1998. V-Day promotes creative events to increase awareness, raise money and revitalize the spirit of existing organizations throughout the world that work to end violence against women.

SUAD AMIRY

Suad Amiry was born in Damascus, and grew up in four intense and fascinating cities; Amman, Damascus, Beirut and Cairo. Her academic endeavors were even more far-flung. Amiry began studying architecture at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, and went on to achieve her MA from the University of Michigan, and her Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh. Throughout her career she has been a lecturer in Architecture for the University of Jordan, Assistant Professor of Architecture for Birzeit University, Director General and Assistant Deputy Minister for the Palestinian Ministry of Culture. In 1991, she founded the Riwaq Centre for Architectural Conservation in Ramallah, Palestine. In November of 2001, Suad Amiry and her husband were compelled to flee Ramallah as a result of the Israeli occupation of the city. In the days leading up to that moment, Amiry began to better understand her parents" experience of fleeing their Jaffa home in 1948. The diary she kept was eventually published under the title of War Diaries: Sharon and my Mother in Law. The diary compellingly expresses the moment-to-moment hardships of living as a Palestinian under curfew in an Israeli occupied territory. Themes in her scholarly discourse on architecture include traditional/vernacular Palestinian architectural styles and elements; conservation; city planning, particularly historic cities; and landscape design. Amiry never regards any architecture in isolation; she manages always to explore architecture's intimate relationship to the people who dwell within, and its legacy of vibrant, complicated social histories. Amiry has published a number of monographs, articles, books, and manuscripts in Arabic and English. She has been involved in two exhibitions; in one she was showcased as a female artist, in the other she was the sole participant in an exhibition of Palestinian village architecture. She continues to live in Ramallah and work as director of Riwaq.

LIANA BADR

Liana Badr was born into a politically active family in Jerusalem. During the 1967 war, she and her family fled to Amman, Jordan. They thought return to Jerusalem would be possible within a few hours. However, some in her family never saw their home again. Most of the others eventually dispersed to several different countries. Forced out by the political situation in Jordan, Badr moved to Lebanon in 1971, where she resumed completion of her BA in philosophy and psychology. In Lebanon, refugees and refugee camps became an intimate part of Badr's life and work, as she traveled the path of journalist, activist, and teacher. Her talents and passion for women's rights and the written word were given outlet while writing for Lebanese magazines, working with a PLO women's organization, and teaching refugee women how to read and write. Badr married a refugee and activist from Jerusalem. Liana Badr has written three novels, a collection of novellas, three collected short stories, six children's books, a book of interviews, and a book of poetry, many of which have been translated. She has also written and directed four films, two of which have won awards. Badr's compelling talent is to communicate her message through documentation of ordinary peoples" daily lives. She highlights their individual perspectives, and explores and examines their strategies for keeping courage while coping with war and hardship. She is the general director of arts at the Palestinian Ministry of Culture in Ramallah, and is currently working on a new film documenting the lives of Palestinians under curfew in that city.

YVONNE DEUTSCH

Yvonne Deutsch was born in Timisoara, Romania to a Jewish Hungarian speaking family. She immigrated to Israel with her mother when she was 8 years old. While she was a student in the Hebrew University in the late 70s she joined the Jewish-Palestinian activist group Campus. Here, for the first time, she participated in direct conversations with Palestinian students from Israel and she became more aquatinted with the Palestinian experience. In the early 80s she became an organizer in The Israeli Committee of Solidarity with Bir Zeit University. With the outbreak of the Lebanon war in 1982 she became an organizer of the Committee against the War in Lebanon, which was the first group to protest the war. With the outbreak of the first Intifada in December 1987, Yvonne joined Women in Black and became an organizer. At the same time she co-founded Women and Peace, the first women's coalition for peace in Israel. In 1994 she became the founding director of Kol ha Isha, (The Woman's Voice) the multicultural feminist center in west Jerusalem. She turned to body soul therapy studies while continuing her involvement in Kol ha Isha as a volunteer and counselor. Yvonne is now ready to come out again in the public feminist arena. The new manifestation of her undying commitment combines her activism, which is focused on the creation of political and social transformation, with her professional therapeutic skills and her wish to bring realization to the ideas of alternative feminist peace organizing. Yvonne shares her life with Andre Rosenthal, who is a Jewish Israeli lawyer and defender of Palestinians' rights, and their two children.

REMA HAMMAMI

Rema Hammami achieved a BA in political science from the University of Cincinnati and then went on to Temple University for completion of her MA and PhD in cultural anthropology. After that accomplishment, she became research supervisor for the Nablus Women's Affairs Center, then research director for the Gaza Strip FAFO Household Survey, director of the Women's Affairs Research and Training Center, Gaza Strip, assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at Birzeit University, and is now the chairperson of the gender studies master's program at Birzeit University Women's Studies Institute. She volunteers on a number of boards and steering committees that are dedicated to women's affairs and human rights. She spreads her talents further as member of two editorial boards. She has published extensively, and her work includes articles, compilations, collaborations and books. Common subjects in her writings consist of social attitudes and their relationship with gender, labor, family law, citizenship, political activism and NGO's.

RELA MAZALI

Rela Mazali was raised in both the United States and Israel. She is a founder of the New Profile Movement, in which she is working to de-militarize Israeli civil society and end the occupation of the Palestinian territories. The Association of Israeli Palestinian Physicians for Human Rights was fortunate to have Mazali lend her talents as Director of Projects and Development, culminating in her planning and directing the 1993 Tel-Aviv conference on the International Struggle Against Torture and the Case of Israel. She went on to help expose the Israel Defense Force's usage of Depleted Uranium Ammunition. She is credited for creating the slogan first used by the Coalition for Women of a "Just Peace in Israel," and was keynote speaker at the 2001 Jewish Unity for a Just Peace Conference, which organized Jews in the United States to speak out against the occupation. Beyond her diligent and influential work as a feminist peace activist, she is also an accomplished writer in Hebrew and English. She has published a number of short stories, articles, essays and educational curricula, a novel, and a children's book. Subjects of in her fictional and documentary work include experiences of soldiers suppressing the Palestinian uprising and children struggling to negotiate the blurry line leading to adulthood. Mazali is persistent in her commitment to peace education, children's rights and gender equality. The beautiful union of her love of children and experience as activist and educator can be seen in her most recent work, co-authored with Haggith Gor, My Book of Rights, which introduces the International Convention on the Rights of the Child to children and their parents.