One warm night in Chicago, a 21-year-old ultra-Orthodox Jewish woman sits at the dinner table with her husband at the home of his family. Her Blackberry dings. She sees an e-mail from an unfamiliar address. Her biological mother, whom she…
The Jewish holiday of Sukkot arrives in October each year, immediately following the Yom Kippur holiday. This is one of the many Jewish holidays that Jewish people understand and enjoy while the rest of the world has no clue. My…
Israel is the most controversial and complicated country in the world, with so many perspectives about the people, the land, the situation. One highly unique perspective on Israel that the world never hears about is that of Arabs in Israel who…
It is like Christmas, said the man in the shop. I was in a small market in Tiberias, Israel buying a few groceries just before the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur in 2011. The man who spoke this sentence did…
Very little is written or known about a certain aspect of the culture of *Upper Egypt ‑ the tradition of revenge killings, also known as blood feuds or vendettas. One of the Connect the Cultures partners, Joseph Nazir, is a…
Is any region of the world entirely organic and self-sustaining? Probably not. But one entrepreneur in the South Sinai, Egypt has a vision of organic farms being the sole source providing produce to his region, and his goal could become…
Bedouins are a large part of the Middle Eastern population. They live in all Middle Eastern countries as well as North African countries, numbering in the tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands in each country. The Bedouin culture…
In my village in Upper Egypt when I was a child we played in the dust. We collected it, we built small walls, tiny walls in the ground. We would make a small fence with the dust and say this…
How old is the leadership of the Muslim woman in their nations? According to the centuries-long story of Muslims and according to the Quran, the holy book of Islam, women have been always the backbone of family life as well…
I had to face all the challenges, to build my own future with my own fist. There has been the deepest of suffering in this life. Suffering from being alone, being a slave of others. But it has made me…