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Tag: Middle East

a kaddish for qaddafi. of sorts.

Posted on 21 October 2011 by mira

I feel like I’m supposed to write a kaddish for Qaddafi.  And I’m having a lot of trouble doing so. What I want to do is defend him somehow.  Say that he’s been maligned for decades. Tell you about the jokes Tunisians (Libya’s neighbors to the west) used to tell about Qaddafi, all the way…

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a kaddish for farzad bazoft, and also saddam hussein

Posted on 21 April 201121 April 2011 by mira

I never met Saddam Hussein.  But I wanted to.  We were guests, actually, of Tariq Aziz — who was Foreign Minister at the time.  Little known fact:  they both share a birthday (one year apart): April 28th. It was my birthday.  And we had just been detained.  Pulled from the Baghdad airport just as we…

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abraham, sarah, and hagar, a kaddish for patterns worth shattering

Posted on 11 April 201112 April 2011 by mira

The question is do we feel sorry for Abraham, or do we say goddamn it, you knew what you were getting us into? Or is there some other way to resolve the whole bit? I’ve been thinking about this for at least a thousand years, maybe two. Maybe three. The whole situation sucks. There’s this…

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daily kaddish: all that unrest in the Middle East

Posted on 7 April 2011 by erin

When even a Middle East expert chains them all together like that, it’s no wonder I feel overwhelmed, and my problem is embarrassingly trivial next to the problems of all those people who are trying to live through all this. And then there are all those people who are not living through all this—who are dying in all this.

A Kaddish for all of them.

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the little country that could — a kaddish for mohamed bouazizi and ibn khaldun’s oscillation of elites

Posted on 30 January 201127 March 2011 by mira

Once upon a time there was a little country. It hadn’t always been a little country, but it had for the most part been an outlier in the larger scheme of things. It prided itself on being the ‘breadbasket of Rome’ but if the Punic wars had gone otherwise, Rome might have been the breadbasket…

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a kaddish for the israeli flag, may it rest in peace

Posted on 23 December 201027 March 2011 by mira

People say that there are a lot of reasons to open up a bible. Here’s one of them you might not have ever been asked to think about. And a reason why using the bible — especially לך לך — as a basis for validating nation-building is not a terribly good idea. We can lay…

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the tzaddik sells his daughter

Posted on 14 November 201013 April 2011 by mira

Jerusalem, 1961 The tzaddik, as we know, was a great collector of Judaica: manuscripts, ceremonial artifacts, and ancient pieces of junk. For him, every single fragment was precious and worthy of preserving. Each broken piece of something had matching pieces yet to be discovered. Every object had a story that had to be uncovered. If…

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email mira and erin: kaddish@beitmalkhut.org

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© 2010–24 by Mira Z. Amiras and Erin Vang (beitmalkhut.org). All rights reserved worldwide.

thank you—תודה רבה

Permission to use Lev Kogan's "Kaddish," © 1982 by Israel Brass Woodwind Publications
In-kind support: Global Pragmatica LLC®

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