In the Jordan Valley, lightly traveled blacktop roads wind around dense plantations of medjool date palms and banana trees. A wire fence running north to south demarcates the border between Israel and Jordan. On the Israel side of this divided…
Out of the fire of war a quiet man walks, full of thought. “Syria was like heaven on earth,” he says to me. I’m sitting with Fouad, a sweet and serious man wearing a crisp sky blue shirt in…
Love in the Middle East can be as sweet as in any other part of the world. But when it involves a couple from different cultures or religions, the stories rarely have happy endings. Love does happen, though. In Israel sometimes you…
One of the young Bedouin women I’d met sitting in a circle around a fire the other day invited me back to her arisha for more tea. Her house is in a recess amongst the other Bedouin homes and not…
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…
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…
Here is the story of a man with Israeli and Syrian citizenship who lives in a village in Lebanon. Impossible, you think? Not at all. This Syrian Israeli, whom we'll call B, is a 32-year-old dentist from an Arab village…