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(03/06/14 2:05am)
Heartbeat — a collective of young Israeli and Palestinian musicians — performed in the McCullough Social Space on Feb. 27 as a part of their 2014 U.S. tour. Through music, the group shared with audience members a message of mutual peace and understanding.
“I believe deeply that music holds incredible power to bring people together, to open us up to each other and to express ourselves in a powerful way,” said Heartbeat Founder and Executive Director Aaron Schneyer.
Heartbeat is based in Israel and was created by Schneyer in 2007 after he received a Fulbright-mtvU award. Since its inception, the organization has expanded into three chapters and worked with over a hundred musicians.
Heartbeat’s visit to the College was organized by Shelby Friedman ’16, who serves as the Israel Chair for Middlebury Hillel.
“I first heard about Heartbeat through [Associate Chaplain] Rabbi Ira Schiffer,” Friedman said in an interview. “From there, I reached out to them, and it turned out they were already planning a tour in New England.”
Friedman had been seeking a way to bring people together and create a more cooperative tone in conversations about Israel and Palestine — Heartbeat, she realized, could provide that.
“I think this show appeals to a lot of people,” Friedman said. “To Jewish students on campus, music lovers, people who are into conflict, people who are into music.”
The concert featured original songs performed in English, Arabic, and Hebrew. The group criticized the construction of the Israeli West Bank Barrier in “The Wall.” In “City Rising,” Heartbeat members sang, “Governments are like building walls while corporations take control.”
Throughout the show, band members shared messages about the current situation in Israel and Palestine.
“[Heartbeat] is dealing with this conflict in a way our elected officials are not,” said guitarist and vocalist Guy Gefen. “We are understanding together that this is conflict is for both [Israelis and Palestinians] to solve. It is for both of us to create peace together.”
Gefen is one of Heartbeat’s oldest members and joined when he was sixteen years old. A firm believer in peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Gefen was imprisoned for seven months after refusing to be a combat soldier in the Israeli Army.
“A lot of Israelis will attack me for standing up with the Palestinians,” Gefen said. “People think I’m a traitor for being with the enemy.”
On performing with “the enemy” for the first time, Gefen said, “It was empowering to use music to communicate with someone I don’t even share a language with.”
Music is Heartbeat’s tool for uniting people together and transforming conflict. The organization hopes to create a better, safer, and more just future not only for Israel and Palestine but also for the entire world.
“We try to make our instruments louder than the guns,” Shneyer said.
(02/27/14 1:27am)
The International Students’ Organization (ISO) will be hosting Middlebury’s first ever Food and Globalization Week. Running Mar. 4-11, the event — dubbed “F&G Week” for short — will tie together global issues with the academic study of food.
ISO Vice President Mika Tan ’15 has been working on this project with the organization’s symposium committee since November of last year.
“We wanted to do a huge symposium as our first flagship spring event,” Tan said. In the fall, the organization holds the annual ISO Cultural Show.
However, since its early planning stages, the project has been scaled down from the large academic symposium it originally intended to be.
“We realized our main goal is to showcase the diversity of our student body on campus,” Tan said. “So we decided that [F&G Week] doesn’t have to stay academic. We can have fun things, too.”
Tan struggled to find a specific word to categorize F&G Week. “It’s not a symposium, and it’s not a conference.” Eventually, Tan settled on the following: a collection of separate but interrelated activities that celebrate food and culture.
Helen Wu ’16.5 is a board member on the planning committee for F&G and considered other themes such as art and music before ultimately settling on food.
“I think food has the power to gather people together,” said Wu. “Eating food is an occasion to share experiences. It’s an occasion to share history, culture, and geography.”
The activities planned for F&G Week will fall into one of two categories—culture or academics. The cultural category will include food tastings, cooking lessons, and film screenings. A themed Atwater dinner is also being prepared. The academic category of activities will include lectures and panel discussions on topics related to food and culture.
Dr. Teresa Mares, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Vermont, will be the week’s featured speaker. Her work has focused on changes in Latino and Latina diets following migration. Panel speakers for F&G Week will include Middlebury’s own Lois B. Watson Professor of French Paula Schwartz, Gordon Schuster Professor of Anthropology Ellen Oxfeld, and Visiting Professor of Geography Kacy McKinney.
Many activities for the week will be held by other student organizations. Clubs currently planning to hold events include Hillel, Alianza, the Japanese Club and the Southern Society.
“I think a great part of planning this event has been the collaboration with everyone,” said Tan.
The Japanese Club will be holding a cooking workshop where students can learn to make dumplings.
“Our main goal is to help others discover Japanese culture,” said Dew Nawarat ’14, the club’s president.
The Southern Society will hold a Mardi Gras event showcasing Louisiana Cajun food. On the menu are beignets, gumbo, jambalaya and king cake.
“As most students at Middlebury have never been to Mardi Gras or Louisiana, we hope to bring a little bit of the South to New England,” Southern Society President Zack Strauss ’15 wrote in an email.
At the end of F&G Week, ISO hopes that all Middlebury students will gain a deeper appreciation for the diversity of their student body.
“The process is meant to be as fun as it is intellectually stimulating, and we really hope that students will begin to view the connections between themselves and the many cultures that populate their community,” said ISO President Joanne Wu ’15.