hawgblawg

My review of Syrian Prayers: Sacred Music from Bilad Al Sham was just published by RootsWorld . You can read it here . Here's...

  ....by Allah we will level the enemy's necks.... Here's one of the exhibits at the New Museum's show of contemporary a...

My friend John grabbed this off of some vet FB page and sent it to me. We don't know who took the photo or what the story is behind it b...

REORIENT recently published a fine overview of Mizrahi music in Egypt and current efforts to keep the Arab Jewish tradition alive, by Moham...

The British Library has a very nice sound archive that includes 74 items from the Middle East, digitized shellac recordings. Most famous ...

And it 's a good one. Here's a short extract: Detective Khafaji may have been recruited into collaboration, but that does not mea...

I read my friend Elliott Colla's police procedural set in post-Saddam Baghdad in manuscript. I thought it was great. He hunted for pu...

I learned of this thanks to a tweet of Teju Cole. As you no doubt know, the great jazz pianist Vijay Iyer just received a prestigious Ma...

Here are two sources for a bio, one from a project for a documentary on the singer, the other , from wikipedia. Written sources are paltry....

Statement from the Ramat Gan Committee of Baghdadi Jews, 14 September, 2012 / 27 Elul, 5772  A) We most sincerely thank the Israeli govern...

Very moving documentary about musicians who were Jewish Arabs and ended up in Israel after 1948. They attempted, as best they could, to recr...

On July 11, The Atlantic published a piece on its website by Kim Kelly, entitled "When Black Metal's Anti-Religious Message Ge...

Very interesting documentary from al-Jazeera, called "Songs of War." It features Christopher Cerf, a composer for Sesame Street, w...

At least one of the fifty some vets of Afghanistan and Iraq who t ossed away their medals on Sunday, May  20, as part of the anti-NATO d...

Journalist writing Rachel Shabi is an Iraqi Jew, born in Israel to parents who migrated there from Iraq in the early fifties and then moved ...

I've commented previously on what I am provisionally calling the "tough guy" kufiya. (Re: From Paris with Love , Green Zone , ...

I haven't even had a chance to see From Paris with Love or The Book of Eli yet, and now there's already another film with a ...

Lately I've run across a spate of kufiyas that are quite distinct from the hipster, the solidarity or the designer kufiyas. Kufiyas worn...

Courtesy of what I've learned from friends, some more commentary on Rihanna and her notorious "Hard" video . First, and I foun...

Over the past year, I've heard my MERIP comrade Moustafa Bayoumi give the same, great, paper twice, at last year's MESA (Middle Eas...