Anthony Shadid’s latest book, House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East, is now available. The two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, 43, died of an apparent asthma attack while on assignment for the New York Times. You can purchase the book here. Tributes to Shadid have poured in; you can read some of them HERE. To read excerpts of Shadid’s recent reportage, click HERE.

Awakening the Arab Spring

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

5:30pm Panel | Killian Hall, MIT

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) presents Awakening the Arab Spring, two programs about the revolutionary events of the Arab Spring, inspired by the March 12-17 residency of composer-in-residence, Jamshied Sharifi (MIT class of 1983). Sharifi will introduce the world premiere of Awakening, a new commission by and for the MIT Wind Ensemble, during a concert held in MIT Kresge Auditorium on March 17. He also will participate in an interdisciplinary panel Awakening the Arab Spring with members of the MIT community, including Associate Provost and Ford International Professor of History Philip S. Khoury; Obaidah Abuhashem, president of the MIT Arab Students’ Organization; and Emily Jackson; president of the MIT Wind Ensemble, in MIT Killian Hall on March 13. 

Purchase tickets HERE

At CAC, we believe in the power of community and an essential part of our community is our families. To serve you better and continue supporting our mission, we have established Ousra, our family services programming. OUSRA aims at addressing a wide range of parenting issues, networking, serving as a resource base and platform for open parenting discussions, and strengthening and building a well connected Arab-American parenting community.

In addition to an online forum, CAC will be occasionally hosting events that may interest families. Like all of our services, Ousra will be open to all families, regardless of their background.

If you would like to join Ousra’s online forum, please click here. You will be asked to join our forum on BigTent. Please be patient as we approve your membership.

Our first educational event will be held on Saturday, March 17th at 4 pm. We will be hosting Nina Manolson, a local family wellness expert. She will be discussing “7 Simple Strategies to Feeding Your Kids Well So They Become More Adventurous Eaters & End Mealtime Struggles!” See the details here.

Questions? Please contact ousra@cacboston.org

“7 Simple Strategies to Feeding Your Kids Well
So They Become More Adventurous Eaters
& End Mealtime Struggles!”

A FREE CLASS FOR PARENTS
 with Nina Manolson MA, CHC, Family Wellness Expert  
founder of HealthyYummyKids.com & FSS parent

Do you…

• Wish your kids would eat more vegetables?
• Struggle with a picky eater?
• Wish your children ate more nutritious food and less junk food?
• Want to make mealtimes easy and fun for the whole family?

In this FREE class you’ll learn:

• How to cultivate a healthy mindset for the whole family.
• How to make changes without feeling overwhelmed or like the ‘food police.’
• How to navigate our fast food and junk food world.
• The secrets to making healthy easy and fun for the whole family.
• The one thing that you have in your house right now that can make an immediate healthy impact on your family!

When: Saturday, March 17th at 4 pm
Where: Center for Arabic Culture, 191 Highland Avenue, 6B, Somerville, MA 02143

Please RSVP to ousra@cacboston.org.

Thursday, March 29, 2012–Friday, March 30, 2012

Radcliffe Gymnasium, 10 Garden Street, Radcliffe Yard, 617-495-8600
The conference is free and open to the public. Registration is required.

Each year, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University hosts a conference that explores from many perspectives the role of gender in a significant aspect of the human experience. This year’s conference, titled “Women Making Democracy,” will consider the role of women specifically—and gender more generally—in movements for democratic change. Activists, journalists, and academics from different fields and disciplines will examine and analyze recent events in countries affected by the democratizing efforts often described as “Arab Spring” and compare women’s experiences of these events with those of women in other moments of democratic change around the world, including Eastern Europe, South Africa, and Latin America.

For more information and to see a schedule for the event, click HERE

To register, click HERE

Monday, March 12, 2012, 8:15 p.m.

The Middle Eastern Music Festival is a celebrated annual event that joins gifted artists from the Middle East and the Balkans with students from all over the world to perform traditional and inspiring music from these homelands.

Admission: $15, $10 reserved seating. Purchase tickets HERE

Dinner and Cultural Conversation Series::
Iraqi Culture in Focus

Join the Center for Arabic Culture on Saturday, March 31st, 5-7:30pm as we celebrate Iraqi culture with an evening filled with Iraqi cuisine, music, literature, and art.

Due to limited space registration is now closed.

We are thrilled for the enthusiastic response to this event and look forward to seeing you at next month’s Dinner and Cultural Conversation Series.

Program::
5pm
Appetizers and Dinner

6pm
Reading by Nawal Nasrallah

6:30pm
Musical performance by Ali Amr

7pm
Reading by Shakir Mustafa

Image courtesy of Iman al-Karimi

Center for Arabic Culture
191 Highland Avenue, 2nd Floor
Somerville, MA 02139  

Suggested Donation:: $10

Proudly co-sponsored by::
Northeastern University World Languages Center, Iraqi American Community Center in Lowell, and the Iraqi Student Project

Each year, Harvard’s Film Study Center awards the Geneviève McMillan-Reba Stewart Fellowship to a Francophone filmmaker from Africa or of African descent. The latest recipient is Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, the French filmmaker born in Algeria in 1966. The Harvard Film Archive is welcome to host a retrospective of his work, with Mr. Ameur-Zaïmeche in attendance to receive his award.

Spontaneity is the watchword of Ameur-Zaïmeche’s cinema. His films seem to arise out of the interactions between the figures onscreen, unfolding without any apparent overarching narrative thrust. They are carefully observed portraits of communities, with plot taking second place to the detailed delineation of characterization and atmosphere.

In a parallel fashion, the filmmaker’s career has progressed in stages. Each of his four films has won prizes internationally, and each has marked a new course for Ameur-Zaïmeche. After a liberal arts education, he embraced a lifelong love of cinema by setting up an independent production company in 1999. His debut,Wesh Wesh, qu’est-ce qui passe? (2001), is a low-budget affair shot in the housing project in the Parisian suburb of Saint Denis where he grew up. The film was immediately hailed as a revelatory addition to the growing cycle of French films about disaffected urban youth. Rather than risk being pigeonholed, Ameur-Zaïmeche made his next film, Back Home (2006), in his native Algeria. His return to France with Adhen(2008) marked a departure from slice-of-life realism toward political allegory tinged with humor, while his latest work, Smugglers’ Songs, is a surprising foray into historical drama, yet handled with great freeness.

Though Wesh Wesh is an eye-catching debut in large part because of the breathless immediacy of its handheld camera, Ameur-Zaïmeche’s subsequent work is calmer and quieter. These films reveal themselves slowly, taking hold of the spectator with strikingly composed, highly detailed shots. Ameur-Zaïmeche gives a performance in keeping with his style as a filmmaker: relaxed and understated.

Presented in partnership with the Film Study Center, Harvard. Special thanks to this year’s selection committee members: Dominique Bluher, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and David Pendleton, as well as to Ernst Karel, Heidi Carrell and Cozette Russell of the Film Study Center and to Sarah Sobol of Sarrazink Productions.

To read descriptions of his films, click HERE