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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, again, everyone. With us now, Judith Sloan and Najla Said who are holding three events in Manhattan and Brooklyn this month trying to talk about Israel and Gaza, Jewish identity, and Palestinian identity, and engage in dialogue rather than diatribe in a different kind of way. Judith is an actor, writer, educator, and radio producer, and Najla is an actor, writer, and activist.

Their project is called Imperfect Allies: Children of Opposite Sides. It combines a 15-minute theater piece with a dialogue that follows among the audience members who sign up because they want to engage with people not like them from diverse backgrounds, Imperfect Allies, if you will, Children from Opposite Sides as the title goes. They have three such events coming up in the next week that we'll tell you about.

Disclosure, Judith Sloan happens to be my sister-in-law, married to my brother. Najla Said has a much more famous and important relative than me, she's the daughter of Edward Said, the late Columbia University Professor who wrote the seminal book on Western attitudes toward Eastern and Middle Eastern peoples called Orientalism. Before they join us live, we'll hear two excerpts from performances by each of them. First, here is a two-minute excerpt in which Najla reads from her book Looking for Palestine, it's her autobiography, talking about herself and her father.

Najla Said: My father was a teacher of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. I learned to pronounce that impressive-sounding title at the age of four, though I had no idea what it meant. When people asked me what my daddy's job was, I'd wrap my brain and articulators around the phrase with great effort and draw it out. I did recognize the word Columbia, and I knew what that was, the park where we played after school and on weekends. I also knew that he did something in an office in that campus park.

To very smart people who study a lot, Edward Said is the father of post-colonial studies, or as he told me once when he insisted I was wasting my college education by taking a course on postmodernism and I told him he didn't even know what it was, "Know what it is, Najla? I invented it." I still don't know if he was joking or serious. To others, he's the author of Orientalism, the book that everyone reads at some point in college, whether in history, politics, Buddhism, or literature class. He wrote it when I was four.

As he explained once when I pressed him to put it into simple English, the basic concept is that historically, through literature and art, the East as seen through a Western lens becomes distorted and degraded so that anything other than what we Westerners recognize as familiar is not just exotic, mysterious, and sensual but also inherently inferior like Aladdin. It's mainly because of my father that people now say Asian-American instead of Oriental.

Brian Lehrer: Najla Said, a co-creator of the theater and dialogue project called Imperfect Allies: Children From Opposite Sides. That was an excerpt from her book or reading of her book, Looking for Palestine. Now, here's the other Imperfect Ally, Judith Sloan, whose previous theater works include Yo Miss! and Denial of the Fittest, one-woman shows that played in New York. She is co-author of the book Crossing the BLVD: Strangers, Neighbors, Aliens in a New America.

This excerpt is a minute and a half of a piece of hers called Dayenu. This is set at a Passover Seder, framed around a song that people sing at the Seder for those of you unfamiliar, called Dayenu, which thanks God for freeing the Jewish people from bondage in ancient Egypt, and you'll hear the word Haggadah. The Haggadah is the book that tells the Passover story.

Judith Sloan: Each year at Passover, I think about, argue about, dream about, and question this question of Dayenu enough. Dayenu. I take down the silver-plated Haggadah given to me by my father when I was a little girl. This Haggadah, one of the few things I have left of him, I inherited the questioning, the dark eyes, dark hair, dark moods. I look through this Haggadah, a marriage of text and image, the pages designed like the pages of the Talmud, taken from the Talmud, multiple arguments on two-page spreads, in four colors.

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Is there enough to go around? Is my freedom dependent on your loss? The argument erupts every year at the Seder. An 80-year-old is criticizing the state of Israel. Israel should stop dehumanizing the Palestinians. A 60-year-old is defending Israel. What about Hamas? They'll stop at nothing. They call for the murder of Jews everywhere. The 20-year-old agrees with the 80-year-old. It's Israel's responsibility too. The 40-year-old is trying to negotiate at the table. The 60-year-old cannot see the Palestinians as human. They are the enemy but who is going to stop the path of mutual homicide, suicide?

Brian Lehrer: Judith Sloan there, after we heard from Najla Said. They are co-creators of the theater and audience participation project called Imperfect Allies: Children of Opposite Sides. They'll be presenting it tomorrow, Sunday, and next Wednesday, including conversations with audience members who want to participate. We'll tell you where shortly. They join us now live. Judith, welcome back, and Najla, so nice of you to come, and welcome to WNYC.

Najla Said: Thank you.

Judith Sloan: Thank you so much for having us, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: I see that you conceived of the imperfect allies project a few years ago, so before October 7th. Can you each talk a little about the original idea and goals for this project? Najla, want to start?

Najla Said: Sure. I originally met Judith because she hired me, and then she produced a sort of one-off performance of my solo show. These are conversations that we've had between us for years, which we had decided we wanted to talk about publicly because my show on its own talks about me as a Palestinian, but to have the other voice there makes a huge difference. We had such interesting conversations. Our original connection was through having lost our fathers so young, and so we thought it might be a wonderful way to try to bring other people into this difficult subject matter and help them talk and listen.

Brian Lehrer: Judith, same question.

Judith Sloan: Yes. That is true that we met not through Najla being Palestinian and me being Jewish, but because we had similar emotional residual effects from our father's death, where we would react out of proportion to the present when we were losing things. It was just as two women dealing with "Oh do you do that?" "Oh yes, I do that. Yes, I cry out of proportion to the present." Then when we started working together, and I did hire Najla to perform in Crossing the BLVD years ago, when Trump had just become president. We were doing a lot of multi-ethnic, multilingual performances with many different actors of all different ethnicities.

We've been talking for years. There was also a part of Imperfect Allies that was a discussion with black and Jewish artists as well. This seemed like the perfect time for us to do this. After October 8th, yes, after October 7th and 8th I teach at NYU, and I teach on Monday nights. I have Palestinian students and I have Jewish students, and people were coming to the class in all kinds of distress.

Then Najla and I both had started talking in October. We did a performance that had been planned originally. Then we turned it into something else as a benefit for Doctors Without Borders and had a dialogue, and then we realized, "Oh, we should really try and figure out how to do these," because both of us had been in situations where we were in, I would say, I don't know what word to use, but kind of vitriolic discussions, and we wanted to do something different.

Brian Lehrer: We might talk about those excerpts that we played from each of your works, but would you set up for our listeners right away what the audience role is in the imperfect allies project because that's such a big part of what makes these more than just going to a show, and we'll invite a few listeners in on this as well. Najla, you want to introduce what the audience participation aspect is?

Najla Said: Sure. Well, what we did was we reached out to people who are interested. We thought it would be a lot of Jewish people, a lot of Arabs. We've gotten so many interesting people, some of whom come from regions of the world where there's similar conflicts. Some have no connection to it, but really would like to talk because they're scared and they want to ask questions. What we're doing is we're going to start with the little performance, and then we're going to break into groups and encourage them to have conversations about what they fear, what they're confused about?

Judith Sloan: And hopes.

Najla Said: And hopes, yes. Always positive.

Judith Sloan: [crosstalk].

Najla Said: What's been amazing is the people who have signed up are actually even in their little one sentence blurb about why they want to do it, saying such profound things that I was personally very surprised. I thought it would really just be a bunch of people who wanted to just come and talk. That's always an issue with this subject matter that people come and make long commentary and don't listen. So far it seems like everyone has got a questioning attitude, and a desire to make some positive outcome from this. That to me has been the most interesting but yes, we're going to break them into groups and then we're going to make people listen and talk.

Judith Sloan: Make them. Brian, also, we're going to allow people to share with the bigger group, but it's small groups and Najla and I were both surprised. We didn't know what would happen, but we were surprised that so many people wanted to participate. It's a hurdle, right? You have to answer a question to come. At first we thought, well, maybe 10 people will come, but then when you get 90 responses, it's shows us something.

Brian Lehrer: Just to be clear to our listeners, people don't just buy tickets, they fill out a form to answer the following question. I think I have it written down accurately here, "In a few words, what draws you to participate in this event? We're just curious and want to be prepared to make this a thoughtful and purposeful event." That question, you can't buy a ticket without passing through that form.

Judith Sloan: Yes. Some people just say things like, I have one here. "It's all I think about lately," but we do have some that we can share with you.

Brian Lehrer: You want to do that now?

Najla Said: Well, we're getting a lot of the cross sections of people and groups, because with this conflict everything's become so binary, sort of ironically given the world is trying to understand what non-binary is. The first one, "I am a Jewish, Moroccan, Israeli, New Yorker, and I believe there are so many secret narratives and points of connection that aren't being highlighted. I want to be in them."

Judith Sloan: I think that's something that we're also realizing a lot of Arab Jews or Jewish Arabs are also signing up, and so where does that fit in this dialogue? Then here's one, "I'm Palestinian, grew up in Chicago, but lived in Palestine for three years. Victim of Israeli violence, taught at a Jewish school for three years in Brooklyn, also rented from a Hasidic family here. Adored my landlady's grandson, little Moisha, who used to plant plants with me and always asked about my animals. I could tell they really liked me, but were also afraid of me which is a strange experience."

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, Najla and Judith want to invite some calls as a mini version of what they're doing with their in-person audiences at their Imperfect Allies event. If this sounds like the kind of thing you would want to participate in, what experiences or feelings of yours would you want to bring to share with people from the so-called other side. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. What hopes or fears or dreams or pain or love across the usual divide would you want to express in such a setting, or what question might you want to ask an imperfect ally, a child of the other side, so to speak.

Questions definitely welcomed and encouraged, 212-433-WNYC as they will model this right here on the show right now, 212-433-9692. I probably don't have to say this, but what we don't want is people who just want to argue about which side is worse, which honestly is most of the phone calls we get unless we ask a directed question like this. Let's try to avoid that in favor of what hopes or fears or dreams or pain or love across the usual divides.

In this respect, would you want to express in a setting like Najla and Judith imperfect Allies events, or what question might you want to ask an imperfect ally, a child from the other side? Questions definitely welcome as well, 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692. Najla, you have imperfect Allies events tomorrow and Sunday and next Wednesday. I'll invite you to give the specifics at the end of the segment, but have you done any already with anything to describe about how the audience interacted?

Najla Said: We haven't actually done any of this specific event before, but when I travel with my solo show and my book, I often find that I have discussions that are really interesting, but there's a point at which there's a lot of Jewish identity issues and things that I don't feel are my forte. [chuckles] Also to make people feel more safe, it's better to have the two of us so that nobody feels like they're not represented.

If you get the right people who want to listen, they are surprisingly humble and honest and really a lot of the vitriol goes away, because they have someone in their face that they maybe don't know that is looking at them with an open heart and open ears. It's a very different attitude to have than just arguing with someone on the street or in a dinner party.

Judith Sloan: Yes, or social media.

Najla Said: Yes, social media. Oh my God.

Judith Sloan: Anti-social media for the dialogues. Brian, we have done these things separately, and so yes, this is the first time we're doing it together. I think there's so many different kinds of people in New York City. It is the world and the likelihood of living across the street from somebody who was an, "Enemy," in some other country is pretty high in the United States and in New York City. Years ago, I was invited into a high school to do some storytelling and community building between Tibetan and Chinese high school students and talking about how the 15-year-olds and 16-year-olds were not their government.

We also got somebody that answered the form, and said that, I'm going to read it, "When so much of our experience reduces to violence to reach across and create art, that makes space for a different reality as a radical representation of our humanity. I also teach public communities at NYU and Yale and I'm of Tibetan heritage. Invisibility and silence are unfortunate realities that are all too familiar." That's been interesting for me and Najla also that it is a lot of Jews and Palestinians that are coming, but it's also African Americans and Tibetans and people from other places that are wanting to be able to have this dialogue.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a question via text message. Listener writers, "Najla, I love this. Right now though the urgency is with Palestinians because they're being killed so rapidly with such ferocity with US funds." My question is how they are dealing with this exact moment. I would imagine you would get a fair amount like that at your events.

Judith Sloan: Well, we actually got some calls from some Palestinian members or audience members that are coming who asked us if we would figure out a way to participate in-- you know what, we're not going to go handcuff Netanyahu ourselves particularly, but participate in helping getting Palestinian families of New Yorkers here. I know that seems like a bandaid, but it is one way that we're trying to deal with it.

Najla Said: I think for me just to give a little more information about my play in my book, I grew up on the upper West side of Manhattan and have been mistaken for a Jewish person my entire life. I don't push that away. That's part of my shtick to be even more stereotypical with my language. I think that those are the spaces, those liminal spaces where there's a cultural identity that comes with being a New Yorker. To a lot of people, I seem like an Upper West Side Jewish person.

These places where we live in the middle, and we live in New York and we have to figure out how to live together. I think obviously if you asked me to raise money for something right now, it would be to help people in Palestine 100% and to stop the killing, that's the major thing. In terms of what I can do to make a small difference here in terms of-- and this is something I learned from my father, is that it is important to tell stories and to carry this history with us and to not deny it and to not let people deny it. For us, a lot of it just saying it out loud is a huge thing even just being allowed to speak about our history.

Judith Sloan: I agree with that tweet-- did that come in a tweet or a text or something?

Brian Lehrer: A text or question.

Judith Sloan: Yes. This is the overwhelming issue right now is that people are being not only killed but starved to death. We have to do whatever our part is in that right now. One of those things actually is responding to people that are saying, "Can you call your congressperson? Can you help get people out?" Because we found out from people who've been calling us that a lot of the Palestinian families in New York are having to spend a tremendous amount of money for their families to bribe people to get out and get to each next step, which is very common in any fleeing situation that people need money to bribe their way into the United States or wherever.

Brian Lehrer: You're getting a lot of love in our text messages. People write, "These are beautiful people. Thank you. Monthly segment, please." Another one. "I'd Love to simply watch this event. Would they consider streaming it? Many more could learn from it." Another one. "We need more thoughtful across-the-table conversations like this. You give people hope. Thank you." Let's take a call.

Judith Sloan: Brian, just quickly, I want to respond to that one text.

Brian Lehrer: Please.

Judith Sloan: We decided not to stream it on purpose because we did one little experiment with this and realized that people really want to not be public and want to have the space for small dialogues. I've done this with my students, broken up into small groups of four, and had small dialogues.

Najla Said: We're also not allowing phones.

Judith Sloan: We're not allowing phones.

Najla Said: Taking away their phones.

Judith Sloan: We are thinking this should be a book. The space, not streaming.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Namina in Brooklyn. You're on WNYC. Hi, Namina.

Namina: Hi, Brian. Good morning. Thank you for taking my call. I'm a little emotional after I spoke to the young lady. I want to thank the two ladies and I want to know how they get to this point. For both of them, they lost their fathers to come together to sit on a table and bring something like this. A lot of us are hurting. I came from Sierra Leone, the Blood Diamond happened and they killed my father.

There is no closure for me because he was in the army and there was no body. The whole family, we cry every day for every little thing. I'm saying I don't even have the courage to face the people who are in power at that time. Every time I see them, I get so angry. For me, these ladies, how do you do it? How did you find that strength because I don't have it right now as you can hear from my voice? I have to go because I'm so emotional. Thank you for taking my call, Brian.

Najla Said: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Who wants to talk to Namina?

Judith Sloan: I do actually because--

Brian Lehrer: Model how you might, because you're going to get that emotion at your events, right?

Judith Sloan: Yes. We have that emotion every day. I invite you to come. There's links on the NYC website. Brian knows this about me that I was destroyed for many, many years. I was really broken up just the way the caller was speaking. It was very hard for me to come to terms with my grandmother's suicide because she killed herself when I was 9 and then my father died when I was 12. Then the entire family was killed somewhere in [unintelligible 00:24:34] but I don't really know where. It took years of therapy, quite frankly. Having people around that understood that this was residual horrible pain that has no closure and there's no bodies. There's no way to find people.

I think that that's part of what has inspired me to work with immigrant and refugee teenagers and to do all the work I've been doing for the last 30 years in New York but it's really, really difficult. You have to find people who are empathetic ears. One thing that Najla and I were talking about personally in our friendship is that if you reveal a lot of pain and there's no resolution anywhere and there's no caring for it, it makes it worse. We have to find ways, I think, in New York to be able to embrace and hold all the avenues of pain like we just heard on the phone.

Najla Said: Yes. I would also add that the idea of talking about a country like Sierra Leone, where I'm sure in America, a lot of people don't know what's going on there. It's very similar to having up until recently being Palestinian. There's a lot of people who have opinions, but not a lot of people who understand. It affects us personally. It's our identity, it's our story, it's our family. I think that the way in even if someone is not from the same world, it's to find someone who understands the complexity of being from a region that has issues like this because the way it's often portrayed here is there's good guys and bad guys. It's much more complicated than that. I would encourage you to come if you would like.

Judith Sloan: To at least reach out to us in some way because the other thing Najla just said I think that's really important is that things are very complex. We interviewed people from Haiti who were living in a neighborhood where somebody else from Haiti, Toto Constant, who had terrorized Haitians, was showing up at their doors selling real estate. That's a New York thing.

Brian Lehrer: That's a very New York thing.

Judith Sloan: I remember when I was going through some grief and I had said to my friend Frank, who was playing the trumpet on that Dayenu piece, I said, "Oh, what are the chances of a woman like me whose whole family was," my grandmother's family was killed in the Holocaust, "living across the street years later from a guy that we found out had been in the Hitler youth and who also fled to Queens in the '50s probably.

I said to Frank, "What are the chances of that happening?" He said, "100%." I think that that is where we are, Brian, in New York, that even at my NYU class, there are students from all over the world, from Zimbabwe, from Columbia the country, not the university, and from California and from Iowa. These stories we are all sitting together in the same space.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take another call. Amy in Ellenville. You're on WNYC. Hi, Amy.

Amy: Hi there. I'm usually on the Upper West Side, but at the moment I'm in Ellenville on my way back from the Great Solar event. First of all, thank you for what you're doing as Imperfect Allies. I'm a member of a national grassroots organization, Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom. It's Muslim and Jewish women. Each chapter has to have a Jewish and a Muslim co-chair. The idea is to get to know each other as friends and then when hatred strikes to be able to stand up together. We have been very, very challenged since October 7th. My question for Imperfect Allies is how have you been able to get the Imperfect Allies to speak to each other, to feel safe, not to feel hatred or anger? Thank you.

Judith Sloan: We'll have to let you know after.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. We hear Amy getting emotional about that too.

Judith Sloan: We'll let you know after the third one how it goes. I just wanted to clarify something too, and I think Amy-- yes, I understand. You said two things that struck me. One was that if you're friends before a crisis happens, you have a better chance of-- I don't know what the words are, withstanding it or continuing because you have a deeper connection. I do think if Najla and I were not friends before this recent bombing of Gaza, that we would not be able to do this in the same way if we didn't have a deeper friendship.

I also wanted to just clarify that Najla is Christian, and so we're not doing Jewish Muslim on purpose. I think everything gets framed in ways that are not always accurate. We have Christian Palestinians coming, Jewish Arabs coming, Jewish Israelis, and Palestinian Israelis. We have all these different kinds of people coming, and in the news it gets reduced, or it's Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. Well, we don't really quite understand that all the time.

Brian Lehrer: I know you're aware you're doing this as an era-defining crisis rages on over there for both sides. So much bombing and starvation has come up, and the hostages are still being held. Hopefully, this is a meaningful exercise in its own right at any time, but maybe even more so on this day of the Eid, and just after Easter, and with Passover coming this month, and also April now being Arab-American Heritage Month in the United States, as declared by President Biden in 2021. This is year four of that.

Judith Sloan: There's more awareness in general.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, this might be closer to the surface for people than it even is anyway, with all of this going on right now, although everything is so close to the surface in the last six months.

Judith Sloan: Right, and I think every time there's mass killing, you hear about numbers of people and the 32,000 Palestinians or the hostages that are still being held, that those individual people are not just numbers. When the World Kitchen members got killed, there suddenly became new attention. That's also not new. In every war, it's when the Americans get killed, or the Westerners get killed, that people bring attention to it.

Najla Said: I also wanted to just add one thing. We had a conversation where Judith was telling me something, and I maybe got a little bit worried that I might be offended or uncomfortable. I said I have to listen to you with my Jewish ears. We took that. A lot for me is after October 7, I've lived in New York my whole life. Most of my friends growing up were Jewish. I got a lot of vitriol directed at me as the one Palestinian that people know after October 7th. It was very hurtful, but I think also, I know these people so well that I understand why they reacted the way that they did.

That's one of the hardest things to try to do. Just as an example, I finally watched Zone of Interest the other night, and I was reminded of how horrible the Holocaust was. I mentioned this to Judith, and she's the one who said, "Yes, but it's supposed to--" It's also like in his Oscar speech, Jonathan Glazer, made the very clear connection between Gaza now and that. It was Judith who said that, and me who was fixated on what happened in the Holocaust. We have ways of seeing things through different eyes and different ears. We just have to be open to that, I think.

Judith Sloan: In the performance that we're doing together, we often say things at the same time. I need to listen to you with Palestinian ears, because that's coming out of my mouth, or she's telling a story about her family. I think that one other thing that's really clear, Brian, is that when I went to Israel for the first time, and for the only time actually, I was performing there, but I was also trying to find some of my family in Yad Vashem.

I also was invited to be with some Israeli-Jewish women that were working together, and I came back and I wrote a story about a grandmother character looking like the grandmother of the Palestinian family. Twenty five years ago, I got a lot of pushback and vitriol from mostly Jewish audiences. I also think that for some of my Jewish students that are quick to say that everything is anti-Semitism criticizing the state of Israel, or what's going on, or the way Palestinians are treated.

When you go there and you see how people are treated as Jew, it's brain-crushing and soul-wrenching to think that, okay, we were treated this way, and then this is happening. I think that that can sometimes get interpreted as anti-Semitism, that it might be the first time people are massively uncomfortable with what they had grown up with thinking.

Brian Lehrer: I'm sure even just that could start a whole other spate of phone calls. It's also where we are out of time. I want to thank Judith Sloan and Najla Said, who are co-creators of this new project called Imperfect Allies, Children of Opposite Sides. There are three events coming up in the city tomorrow, Sunday, and next Wednesday. Judith, do you want to tell people how they can sign up? I think the first two are sold out, right?

Judith Sloan: The easiest thing is to just go to EarSay, E-A-R-S-A-Y.org, EarSay.org and click on the links and get on the waiting list because even if they're sold out, you know five people won't show up because that's the way people are. Even though they answered a question, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to be able to show up. We encourage people to just go to EarSay.org and they can find more information as well.

Brian Lehrer: Anything to add, Najla, as we run out of time?

Najla Said: No, but thank you for having us.

Judith Sloan: Thank you so much for having us.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for doing this. You're getting a lot of love from our audience for even trying. Thank you very, very much.

Najla Said: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. More in a minute.

 

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