NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 46th episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” It will be available starting 15 November 2024. You can find it and all episodes at Stitcher, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net‘s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie Hope, and many guests, focusing on cultural democracy and related topics. You can also listen on Soundcloud and find links to accompany the podcasts.
François is taking a break over the next months for medical treatment, and I know listeners join me in wishing him a complete and speedy recovery. In the meantime, I’ll be interviewing our guests solo.
Joining me for episode 46 is Libby Lenkinski, Founder and President of Albi.org, “a new fund, institute and lab that uses cultural vehicles to establish paradigm-shifting narratives by and about Palestinians and Jews.” Albi supports film and TV projects; influences the creative industries, expanding the space for critical voices in cultural production to thrive and be true vehicles for change; and supports a cohort of flagship artists working in diverse fields. Albi’s work began in the midst of the Israel-Gaza war. I wanted to interview Libby because the question of what art can do in times of conflict is front and center in her work. I think you’ll find the episode provides a great deal of food for thought for those who live far from war zones.
I met Libby only a year or two ago, when we spoke on the same panel. Since then, I been able to observe the loving spirit—for people, peace, and justice—she brings to her work as Vice President for Public Engagement at the New Israel Fund, which “stands for equality and justice for everyone in Israel,” including the two million Israeli citizens of Arab descent. NIF’s work is well-known and well-respected. When Albi was founded last year, its very existence amounted to a strong endorsement for the importance of art even in the most challenging times.
I asked Libby to tell a little bit of her story. What was the path that led to Albi?
“I’m Israeli-American-Canadian. My dad is Polish Canadian, and my mom is an Israeli kibbutznik. My sister and I were raised in North America mostly, and went back and forth to Israel most of our lives. We were always moved towards our Israeli identity, both as third-generation Holocaust survivors and also as second- and third-generation pioneers of the state. Our family is very left-wing on both sides, so I have been in this space of peacemaking since before birth.
“When I moved to Israel full-time in my 20s, I started to see a different picture of reality on the ground. I knew that I was left-wing and for peace in general, but I had never really encountered Palestinian narratives. I didn’t know Palestinians until college. I didn’t really know non-Jews until college. Getting there and starting to see the West Bank and East Jerusalem and mixed cities within Israel and actually meet Palestinians gave me a whole different window into realities that I just had never been exposed to, and I became a pretty hardcore activist. That was 20-plus years ago.
“I’ve always been in some kind of storytelling role. I speak English and Hebrew, a very little bit of Arabic, some French. I was always doing work that was about translating Palestinian realities to Jewish Israelis, translating Israeli realities to people abroad in Europe and in North America, translating those realities back home. As somebody trying to explain complex, nuanced realities, I started to reach for films and songs and things that could help me shortcut some of the sometimes very complex political science, political framework kinds of things, sometimes trying to explain complex legal ideas.
“In recent years, I discovered through hard work and research that actually the whole field of culture as a driver for social and political change is very active in Israel, but it didn’t have a particular home. People doing that kind of impact work in theater and in film weren’t ever necessarily together in any retreats or conferences or festivals. And so I founded Albi alongside New Israel Fund to be a home for artists and culture-makers who are working in and about Israel-Palestine, not only to form community, but to actually develop strategy and build some power in that space. It is different than NGOs, and it’s different from activism, though it is—I will say from every rooftop—it is the driver, because as as two friends of mine who are real pioneers in this space in the US have said, politics is something some of the people do some of the time, but culture is what everyone does all the time.”
As is true for many people who work in situations of crisis and massive challenge, Libby frequently meets people who commiserate about how difficult her work must be. “But actually,” she told me, “I often feel like I’m the lucky one. What’s in the headlines is unthinkably horrible, and this last year has been the hardest of my life. And what’s in my inbox, the projects that activists and artists are working on and turning to me for advice about and turning to New Israel Fund for funding, those are the hopeful stories. I don’t feel sorry for myself that I’m working on this. I feel a responsibility to open up my inbox and my phone line to the rest of the world, so that you can hear the kinds of things that I’m hearing. I’m not Pollyanna-ish. Artists right now are depressed, however, they’re also prophets. They’re able to absorb because they are often so porous to their surroundings, which is why they’re probably artists in the first place. They’re able to absorb it and and relay it in such a different way than any journalist or pundit or politician ever can. I feel responsible to share those things with the world, because it is air. It is air at a time where it feels like we can’t breathe.”
Before the interview, I’d listened to all the episodes so far of Albi’s podcast, “Make Art, Not War,” a coproduction with The Forward. I highly recommend you do the same, because they open a window to first-person testimonies about realities that are often distorted. The first five episodes had dropped by the time I interviewed Libby. They were all marked by a feeling of real relationship, not only with Libby but often with each other’s work and lives.
I told Libby that one thing that especially impressed me was that at the end of each episode, she tells the interviewee who her next guest will be, and asks each to pose a question for the next. “Most all of the questions,” I said, “the matrix that all the questions grew out of was how radically life has changed for Israelis and Palestinians in the last year or so. Most of the questions were things like, would you still go in the Eurovision contest, or would you work with this person going forward? Or how would you feel about appearing in this context? Or is there something that you never thought you would do that you’re seeing yourself doing and feeling right now? It was so interesting how all those questions knitted together into something that said the ground that you’re standing on has been moving for over a year; how does that feel and and what do you say about that?”
Libby told me that “it’s a whole different life now. That really has been reflected in all of the conversations that have been aired, and the couple that are coming that haven’t been aired yet. I think that one aspect is that there’s Israel and Palestine, the real place where real people live their full lives and are involved in whatever struggles, whatever families, whatever professions they’re involved with. When I hear these artists ask each other the kinds of questions that you heard on the podcast, first of all, it’s moving because they’re also humanized. Because from afar, you would think some of them may be enemies. You would think some of them have no relationship to one another. You would try to put them into one of the neat boxes that the world has set up in this very polarized moment, and one by one by one, they break those unfair tags.
“Shaanan Streett, the Israeli hip-hop pioneer who was my first guest, put a question to Tamer Nafar, the first Arabic language rapper to break through—they’ve known each other for 20-plus years. Shaanan’s first question for Tamer is, ‘How are you?’ Then he says, ‘Libby, after I ask him, How are you? I would ask him what are his hopes?’ And then Tamer offers his question to Israeli-Palestinian singer Mira Awad, who has been a very vocal advocate for peace and coexistence in a way that Tamer himself has not been. He asks her a pointed question about would she still represent Israel at Eurovision together with an Israeli singer if that was offered to you today? And she’s able to give a very honest answer to that question, because underneath it, everyone knows that this group of artists and our general space of non-extremist Israelis and Palestinians are sharing in grief, in confusion. It’s like you can be a little more honest and safe, because you know that everyone that’s part of this project is at least personally affected by what’s going on. The shared grief and the shared sense of the world being totally different is coming through in every conversation that I have.”
We talk about the full range of Albi’s work on the podcast, including Albi Film and Television Fund, “the first-ever independent moving image fund for productions by or about Israelis and Palestinians, entirely committed to equality and democracy;” Albi Lab, “an experimental funding and programmatic space for piloting and exploring new potential avenues for cultural production to become a driver for social change.” Libby also described several pipelines that are central to Albi’s work:
“One is about Palestinian citizen creatives who are underrepresented in every creative field. We’re creating a pipeline that starts in high school and goes through late career. The second is an impact pipeline connecting NGOs and activism to the creative fields, through artist residencies in NGO archives, through learning days on specific issues that artists can attend with experts from different NGOs working on advocacy issues. And we’ve co-created the first impact production lab to try to bring the field of impact production to Israel in a more serious way. Then the third pipeline is around us, Israel, and trying to create opportunities for exchange of ideas and also sharing space between American artists looking at these issues and Israeli and Palestinian artists.”
We also talked about the issues that arise in trying to do this work, such as the dynamic that Mira Awad and others described as freedom of expression becomes more and more limited. There’s a dialectic of risk and self-censorship that affects what can be said. I see this all the time in the U.S. where there’s very little formal government censorship, but self-censorship is rife. I can only begin to imagine how it affects people when the powers-that-be have a keen desire and the ability to shut down artistic expression. Libby describes several projects in detail whose makers have found ways to navigate this reality to great impact. You’ll find several artists who are central to Albi’s work, including some podcast interviewees, at Albi’s site.
I promise that if you listen to this podcast you will learn much and find yourself thinking and feeling more about what it means to be an artist committed to justice and peace in these times.
Tamer Nafar & Djam1l, “Put Your Arm Around Me”.
Order my book: In The Camp of Angels of Freedom: What Does It Mean to Be Educated?