Elizabeth Oldfield: Hello and welcome to The Sacred, a podcast from the think tank Theos, shared in partnership with Comment magazine. We had a tough time titling this episode, and that’s because whenever you say or read the words “Israel” and “Palestine,” you will already be having a reaction. Notice it? Over the last three years, we have all read and watched so much about this small piece of land in the Middle East where so much pain and so much blood has been the story.
There is a real difference, I think, from watching headlines from a distance and listening—really listening—to the voices of the people who are there. Which is why I was so delighted earlier this year, while I was at the Aspen Ideas Festival, to catch a little bit of time with Riman Barakat and Karen Brunwasser. They are the co-founders of FeelBeit, which is an Israeli-Palestinian art centre built right on the line between East and West Jerusalem, where Israeli and Palestinian artists come together to make music, to centre creativity, to create a space where all communities can feel at home.
Riman Barakat: Art has that power, that transformative power, but it deeply touches our humanity, and it allows us to feel and sense one another.
Karen Brunwasser: One of our colleagues, Zudi, who’s a Palestinian Muslim from East Jerusalem—Zudi made the choice to go and visit the shiva, which is the mourning week in Jewish tradition, for this guy’s murdered parents. And when he did that, it was so incredibly brave, because who could know how he would be received? Even if it was somebody that was open on October 6, after that, you don’t know if they’re going to scream at you and tell you to get the hell out. He went there. I was so moved. And Maoz, this guy, hugged him really hard and said, “We’re going to bring the peace.”
Elizabeth Oldfield: The things they shared with me about their moral courage, their commitment to each other, reminded me how these small things that we think of as soft can be the difference between a world that holds together and the one that falls apart. I really hope that you find it as beautiful and meaningful as I did, and there are some reflections from me at the end.
Riman and Karen, thank you so much for being here with me in this beautiful place. We’re going to go deep quick, and I want to ask of you: What is sacred to you? Who wants to go first?
Riman Barakat: I’ll go first. I think for me, relationships are sacred. And relationships that really let you see yourself in others.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Beautiful. What about you?
Karen Brunwasser: I agree with Riman, but I’ll make it more specific. For me, it’s family. Not always the easiest thing to navigate, although I’m blessed with a wonderful family. But really, at the end of the day, I think what is most sacred—and when I think about the work that we do, a lot of what drives me are my daughters. Yeah, it’s my daughters. So, the future for them.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Riman, I’d love to just paint a really little picture of your childhood growing up in East Jerusalem. What was in the air religiously and in terms of your identity as a Palestinian?
Riman Barakat: So really, the First Intifada very much shaped my growing up. I was seven years old when that happened. And I used to go to school to a school named Schmidt’s Girls College, right outside of Damascus Gate. And that was very much a flashpoint where Israelis and Palestinians, you know, had all kinds of frictions together. And it was a site where a lot of violence was going on; tear gas was coming into our classrooms. And that’s the reality that I very much wanted to change. And it inspired in a lot of ways the work that I’m doing today.
And I often also speak about my grandfather, who inspired me a lot because he had a shop in the Old City. And sometimes I’d just go down the stairs towards Damascus Gate from my school and would find him hanging out with Israeli retailers. And then they would be drinking tea. And that was kind of like the only ordinary experience for me of encounters with Israelis and Palestinians that showed just a normal interaction and not an antagonistic one.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I think for us in the UK—not all the listeners are in the UK, but many are—I often feel like we don’t have a particularly accurate or complex picture. The idea that Palestinians live in the West Bank or live in Gaza. The sense that there is a really mixed population in Jerusalem living close together who all feel a sense of home in the city is perhaps less understood. What was your sense of that element of your home, and how do you think it shaped the work that you’ve gone on to do?
Riman Barakat: So growing up, I experienced Jerusalem very much as a torn city. But it was only later on—I mean, today it’s very different. Everything is just mixed together. You know, you go to a hospital and it’s Palestinians and Israelis working together. You ride the light rail and it’s Israelis and Palestinians. It’s everywhere—you go to a mall, everywhere it’s mixed. So our lives have become a lot more intertwined and a lot more dependent on one another.
And, you know, you can say that kind of stays on the superficial level, but I’ll say that in the last, I don’t know, ten, fifteen years, there has been a lot of building of civil society across divides. Our organisation is an example of that, but there are also many more. And in a way, that also rescued us. That made us kind of stay resilient, made Jerusalem stay resilient. And those civil society actors that have been reaching across divides—because also we experienced several rounds. Like, 2014 was like a significant round of violence where everyone kind of was fearful of one another; you didn’t know who you were meeting on the street.
And so it created that kind of—there’s always, I think, with Jerusalemites, that sense of trying to help those you don’t know. And, you know, I talk about how I found myself once in West Jerusalem with a flat tyre and how an ultra-Orthodox was the one to fix my flat tyre—not looking at me, but, you know. Yeah. And there are all sorts of, like, human—just human acts that are not, you know—you don’t hear about those in the news. And they transcend the nationalities of, you know, what we carry as, you know, national identities. And yeah.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Thank you.
Karen Brunwasser: Can I add something specific to what Riman just said? I think that what she’s saying is so true. And it’s this very strong contrast that there are moments when there is a sense of real danger that the city could spin off its axis. And there is anger and fear and hatred, and all of those things very much exist. And at the same time, on the street, I think what I often feel in Jerusalem when there’s sort of boiling points—if I get into a cab, and most cab drivers in Jerusalem are Palestinian, for example, a lot of times there’s a dynamic where we are trying to reassure one another that you don’t have to be afraid of me. And it’s a defence mechanism. In other words, I’m trying to make sure that I’m safe.
So somebody will say—we’ll be sort of extra nice to each other and sort of say something like, “What a crazy, horrible situation right now, yes.” And they’ll say, “The leaders, they’re ruining it.” And it’s a conversation that happens. And I don’t even know—it’s not that we’re saying everything that we’re actually feeling, necessarily. But I think that there’s a desire to reassure someone. And that’s how the city doesn’t explode.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. Wow. You didn’t grow up in Jerusalem. You’re a Jewish family in America. Could you say a little bit about that shaping of you in your childhood? But how did kind of Israel and Jerusalem and the deep divides show up in your—kind of the narratives of your childhood? What were the stories that you were told about it?
Karen Brunwasser: So it’s interesting, because I have an unusual background. So on my father’s side, they are Holocaust survivors who came to the States in 1951. He was born in a displaced persons camp and grew up in the States, and they were a traditional Jewish family. My mother grew up in an Irish Catholic family. They lived not far from one another but didn’t know one another. And they were a very religious Irish Catholic family.
And when my parents met, my mother had sort of lost, I think, faith in her religion, and they got married, fell in love, and my mother, without telling my father, started exploring Judaism and decided she really liked it and decided to convert. In fact, she converted after I was—when I was an infant—and so I had to convert as well. And as a result, I had these two sides in my family, and also the whole Judaism aspect. Being technically a convert, though I never knew anything else, I was always very much aware of that being a choice. Being an American, I could choose differently. And so I was exploring what it meant to me to be Jewish from an early age.
And of course, Israel and Jerusalem—these loomed large in synagogue, in neighbourhoods, in families. It was very much idealised. And when I arrived to Jerusalem, I think I was kind of primed to be moved. And that’s what happened. I fell in love with it. And very, very, very deeply. It was, I think, the priming and also actually just a very strong natural chemistry that I have with the city.
Elizabeth Oldfield: You did a lot of work in diplomacy. Your sense of the childhood and the divide in your city led you to try and do some good, do some healing in that work. And you were working in the cultural sector—is that right?—as an artist?
Karen Brunwasser: I’m a failed artist. I was an actress, which means that I was a waitress. And so I did not succeed in acting. And so I went to my second passion, which was Jerusalem. I moved to Jerusalem when I was twenty-eight years old, having fallen in love with it when I was sixteen. And when I got back in 2005, which was just as the city was coming out of the Second Intifada, it was really sort of on its knees. It was in bad shape. Young creative people were leaving in droves. And a lot of people told me to forget the city and just go to Tel Aviv: “That’s where you’re going to thrive. You’re going to find a husband,” all that stuff. But my soul was just so connected to Jerusalem.
I didn’t believe that giving up on Jerusalem made spiritual sense, or that that country could exist by treating Jerusalem as if it’s at the heart of everything. So yes, I met an extraordinary philanthropist called Lynn Schusterman, told her that I really wanted to work on Jerusalem, and she loved Jerusalem. She said, “Come on board.” Developed a strategy that was based on the cultural renewal of the city and built an organisation called the Jerusalem Season of Culture. That’s where it started.
Elizabeth Oldfield: And how did you two meet?
Riman Barakat: So we met in 2014 as, you know, there was a war between Israel and Gaza. And Jerusalem was also full of violence. There had been a few kidnappings of young boys—Israeli boys, and then a kid from the Palestinian neighbourhood of Shuafat. And we met in that period of time. And I had been working in Track Two diplomacy as part of this big initiative. But my work was in Ramallah, and I couldn’t go there anymore. So I kind of, like, started to look again at Jerusalem. And that’s when I met Karen and some of her team.
And that’s when the arts really inspired me, because they showed me this artistic video that was a creation in answer to the war. And it was the blend of the different faces of Jerusalemites from different backgrounds, all standing up against—you know, with a message standing up against violence and sort of saying, you know, this is a city where there is a place for each one of us. And I connected to that message, but also to just the power of the arts to help us imagine a different kind of future. And that’s, you know, when our journey started.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Did you immediately trust each other?
Karen Brunwasser: I had a really good feeling about her. It was—I mean, I think real trust is built over time, obviously. But let’s just say that I had a very good vibe. And I liked her immediately. And it took us a little while to actually start working together. We started inviting her to things. And the background is that we had always wanted Jerusalem’s diversity to be sort of the central feature of what we do. But because of the divisiveness of the city, it’s very hard to actually achieve. And we had tried to build bridges into, you know, Palestinian neighbourhoods and Palestinian cultural organisations. And it was very, very challenging, because that trust was hard to build. The trust is very hard to build. And there’s anti-normalisation, you know, policies and these sorts of things.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I’m so sorry to interrupt again, but could you tell me what that means?
Riman Barakat: Essentially, there’s a movement that says as long as there is an occupation, Palestinians should not be engaging with Israelis in any way that would normalise this abnormal situation. And culture is an area where people that believe in anti-normalisation see it as particularly problematic.
Karen Brunwasser: That’s something that we contend with. And we had brought other people in to try and do it, reach to East Jerusalem, but we were kind of clueless. So first we brought in somebody who was originally from the north of Israel, who was Arab but not from East Jerusalem. And he didn’t get anywhere, because it’s a different world. And then we brought in somebody from East Jerusalem who also didn’t have the—it wasn’t Riman. And then we met Riman, and that’s when everything changed for us. And that’s really the—the one person, the one right person that opens everything up for you. And that’s what happened.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Thanks. And FeelBeit is this—in fact, firstly, just tell me what that means, that name.
Riman Barakat: FeelBeit is a blend of different languages—English, Hebrew, and Arabic—that means “feel at home.” So beit, bayt, in Arabic and Hebrew, mean home. And in Arabic, actually, when you say fil-beit, it just means “at home.” Yeah. And it’s a space where now it is kind of co-led, co-built, where Israelis and Palestinians come, Israeli and Palestinian artists perform.
Elizabeth Oldfield: How unusual is it in the city, in the country?
Riman Barakat: I mean, with respect to the arts, it is unusual and unique. There are, like, a few other initiatives, obviously, that use the arts. In our case, it’s also a physical space. So it combines both that collaboration between Israeli and Palestinian artists but also brings in the community between the two sides, and the uniqueness of it being in Jerusalem, where, you know, you’ve got, like, Palestinians within the 1967 border and Jewish Israelis. So that kind of, like, identities being—you know, those identities.
Karen Brunwasser: I just—I have to jump into something. It’s funny, because Riman, when she says within the ’67 borders, she means outside of the ’48 borders of Israel. We say within the ’67 borders, we mean the opposite, right? And it’s funny. So sometimes, just for anybody who doesn’t exactly understand what it means—so the Palestinians of East—do you want to explain exactly? I mean, just for folks, because when we say inside the border—
Riman Barakat: It’s just, like, where you sit, you know? So it’s like what you consider inside and outside.
Karen Brunwasser: But it also means, do you have citizenship or do you not have citizenship?
Riman Barakat: I don’t have Israeli citizenship.
Elizabeth Oldfield: And say more about that.
Riman Barakat: So East Jerusalem residents have a permanent residency. It’s not—because you—I mean, that’s what it’s called, but you always need to prove that your centre of life is in Jerusalem. And so you always need to live in Jerusalem. So if I’m away for several years, my identity card could be revoked. So that’s the status. I’m allowed to vote in the Jerusalem municipal elections, but not in Israeli national elections and not in Palestinian national elections.
Elizabeth Oldfield: How does that sit? How’s that formed you?
Riman Barakat: I mean, it’s pretty unusual, but there’s something also that I like about it, because it doesn’t make me kind of—it doesn’t stick me anywhere. I’m able to navigate between different spaces, different communities, different identities. So there’s something I like about it that doesn’t hold me into one label.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Nice. Yes. I have this phrase: friendship is my theory of change. And I really—and I think deep in the peacebuilding, reconciliation literature, we can see—you said relationships are sacred to you—that when we are in contact with people, particularly in our bodies, when we know each other not as two-dimensional cardboard cut-outs or identity groups or labels but as real people, our ability to hate each other really goes down. So it’s harder to hold on to.
I’ve just seen this lovely thing where you clearly—even within how you talk about borders, there’s a difference, right? There’s a different understanding. There’s a different background. As you’ve gone along, both between you two and, I guess, the whole team, presumably there have been times where it’s really hard and really bumpy and there’s pain and anger. I don’t want to—could you just say more about that, like, proper granular relational work?
Karen Brunwasser: Sure. First of all, maybe context. I’ll say that because we’re in Jerusalem—you know, we’re in the Middle East—in general, relationships are closer and warmer, also in professional contexts, right? There are things that happen, you know—hugs and kisses and “you look great” and “sweetheart” and “darling”—that’s all okay there still, right? And people don’t really know how to interact in any other way. So that’s kind of common to both sides.
And then if you understand that this is a team that built FeelBeit—there was a destroyed building, and then we had to build FeelBeit from scratch. And we got FeelBeit just as COVID hit. So we all took salary cuts. We actually brought the furniture from our own homes into FeelBeit because we didn’t have the budget to furnish FeelBeit. So at first, FeelBeit was just furnished with our stuff, and we turned that into its own exhibition.
I think one of the remarkable things about FeelBeit and why it works is that we have these two sides of it. One side is sort of the values side, which is that we’re trying to build a different future together. And so we’re connected around that vision. But the other side of it is that we are an arts organisation that presents and commissions art and has big events and festivals. And then you’re really in the trenches together, you know. You have to rely on one another in a very, very serious professional way, and everything gets tense, and we’ve had—it’s non-stop crises and non-stop disruptions. And so you have this—there’s this relationship that’s built because of the work you’re doing together that is building. So you get to know each other in very deep ways.
And at the end of the day, when the work meets the audience, it’s a very social space. So we’re dancing together, and we’re hanging out and having a drink together, whether it’s an alcoholic drink or a non-alcoholic drink. And because, again, it has a Middle Eastern culture, we know each other’s families. Our families show up. There’s a lot of heart and soul in the place that is, I would say, allowed and really kind of intrinsic to the environment. Yeah.
Riman Barakat: Yeah. I’ll add also that as a team, and, like, talking about our relationship, for example, we’ve seen each other, like—I mean, in multiple situations over time, over the last eleven years. And those choices that we make in those crisis moments, those very much build the trust. It’s the choice to decide to continue. It’s the choice to—when everything looks like it’s falling apart, like what happened on October 7, it’s this kind of, like, you know, this one second of decision that, you know, like, you decide, I’m going to call Karen and see how she’s doing, or she’s going to call me. And that makes all the difference, you know, because you could choose to pull away and say, okay, I’m angry, and I’m angry at all of them.
But then you decide to—you know, like, you say, no, I’m going to make a different choice. And then you’re very grateful you made that choice, because it just transforms everything. It transforms the reality. You understand that, yes, you have a partner on the other side, that they are human, that you can choose together to create something different.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I think that’s—as I was reading and learning about the remarkable work that you are doing, there is that voice in my head, and I think you’ve been hearing it in Aspen, like, yeah, sure, sure, before October 7, could see this working, could see it as a space where people gather, but surely since then, right? Too much horror, too much pain, too much blood. Like, we’re past the point where a bit of music and a nice place can hold. How much have you felt like your work’s got harder or easier? What’s changed since this particularly intense period?
Karen Brunwasser: You know, counterintuitively, it’s gotten so much stronger in every way. Because on October 7—and on October 7, it was not clear that that would be the case. We didn’t know what would happen, right? We didn’t know if we could hold on to it. But again, there are these relationships that we’ve built where you know the person. And sometimes you find yourself—let’s say something that your side has done to the other side that you feel terrible about. And sometimes it’s the other side that is comforting you and saying, “I know that’s not you.”
And on October 7, I think that we clung to one another. Once we got through the initial shock, we clung to one another. And then there are these things. Riman called me already on October 7. One of our colleagues, Zudi, who’s a Palestinian Muslim from East Jerusalem—we had a bunch of folks that we knew from our community who were directly affected by October 7, family members either killed or kidnapped, or even people we know personally. And one of them was somebody that Zudi was supposed to host on October 9 on a tour of Jerusalem. We didn’t know him so well.
But Zudi made the choice to go and visit the shiva, which is the mourning week in Jewish tradition, for this guy’s murdered parents. And when he did that, it was so incredibly brave, because who could know how he would be received? Even if it was somebody that was open on October 6, after that, you don’t know if they’re going to scream at you and tell you to get the hell out. He went there. I was so moved. And Maoz, this guy, hugged him really hard and said, “We’re going to bring the peace.” These are extraordinary people.
But those are the things—those kind of—and, you know, Riman later came with me to the funeral for Hersh Goldberg-Polin, and we do that for each other. And these are the things that make you believe that the partnership is possible and real. And the thing is, once you walk through that fire together, you have so much more confidence in the partnership.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Riman, there is a beautiful phrase at the top of the website that says, “When all else breaks down, art breaks through.” Why do you think that the creative heart of this place is so integral to its vision of peacebuilding?
Riman Barakat: I think because it touches our humanity. Art has that power, that transformative power, but it deeply touches our humanity, and it allows us to feel and sense one another. And so when we’re together in a space listening to three amazing cellists and a violinist after something incredibly horrific has happened, and knowing that there are Israelis and Palestinians together in the room and they all know what’s going on, I think it creates that kind of transformative—it has that transformative power. And it is not black and white. It opens, I think, a lot of wounds. It allows for all kinds of emotions to be held, whether it’s joy, pain, anger, all at the same time. So, you know, I very much believe in the power of arts, and it helps us imagine what it could be like when we don’t have regular tools to imagine how it could be different.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Thank you so much, Riman.
Riman had to run for a flight. But I wanted to ask about—particularly, and you probably know the answer for Riman as well—how much pushback do you get from your community? Jewish Israelis question you or even attack you for doing this kind of work?
Karen Brunwasser: We get attacked from time to time, from one side or another. But you’d maybe be surprised that it’s not as much as you would imagine. We also are very careful. We are sensitive, and sometimes when it’s a particularly sensitive time, we know how to operate a little bit more under the radar. We try to be sensitive to what’s going on outside. And we also know that the feelings that people are feeling—whether they’re anger or fear or mistrust, all of these hard feelings that people are feeling under the circumstances that we’re living in—they’re completely reasonable. So we also don’t sort of stand in judgement of people who have doubts and aren’t willing yet to come into the space.
And so what happened after October 7, essentially, is we just started working very slowly. The first thing that we did after we had a meeting with our team—which was a very complicated meeting where people were crying, and there was—tones got a little intense; at a certain point somebody walked out of the room, somebody quit—but so it started—it always starts with the team. The team is sort of like, you know, the lab.
And then we said, okay, we got through the team, and we decided to hold on together. And then we just thought, who are the people in our community from both sides who would be willing, even now, just to come to FeelBeit for a cup of coffee? Nothing else—just coffee, no agenda. And we invited people, and they came, and they said, “This was really important for me. Thank you for doing this. Please do it again.” So we kept doing it. And then coffee became lunch. And then lunch, you know, it went from ten people to twenty people to fifty people. It just kept growing over the course of a couple of months.
And then by December of 2023, we realised that it was maybe time to start opening up to art again. And so we just turned again to artists from our community from both sides, all different kinds, because we work with artists that are very well known and established, some with major international careers, and some that are really just emerging out of Jerusalem’s art schools. And we invited all of them with no hierarchy. And we created a series, a weekly series called No Words, because there were no words.
And we just invited these artists once a week with virtually no budgets, because we didn’t really—everything kind of collapsed on us budgetarily. So they were volunteering to show up and do whatever they felt prepared to do in that moment, because a lot of artists weren’t ready to do anything for a while. And so they would just show up bare and raw and get on stage or put something on an exhibition wall. And week after week that happened. And we would always leave a lot of time in between whatever the artists were doing for people to just be together in the space.
At first that was very hard, and we only invited people in the beginning that we know. And then we started, you know, going public again, gently and quietly. And then it just grew, and it kept growing and growing until, you know, at this point we have bigger audiences than we did before. Many, many, many more artists that are open and willing to work with us, which is—it seems counterintuitive, but I think that what happens for people is that they can’t bear the idea of losing all hope. They have to find hope somewhere in order to keep going.
Some people really withdraw into a very defensive position—again, and I have empathy for that under the circumstances. And other people sort of rush toward the opportunity to be in a hopeful space. And there’s others that go back and forth. You know, they might show up for a little while, and we don’t see them for a little while, then they come back. And, you know, but the crazy thing is that in the last three years, we’ve had, I think, around 40,000 people at this point come into FeelBeit, in comparable numbers between Israelis and Palestinians. Yeah. Which people are really, really surprised by.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah.
Karen Brunwasser: And we’re surprised by it.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah.
Karen Brunwasser: But happily surprised.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Beautiful. You have something to bring me.
Karen Brunwasser: I do. So it’s funny, because when we go out of FeelBeit and we tell people about what’s going on there, whether it’s locally and certainly internationally, a lot of times people are really, really shocked, because it flies in the face of everything they are hearing about or could imagine about what’s going on there right now. Because there are so many horrific things going on. And so then when they hear about it, they often say to us, “How does that work? I mean, this doesn’t seem to make sense to us.” You know, if we’re in America, they’ll say, you know, “Democrats and Republicans can’t talk to each other. How is it that you two are even sitting next to each other right now?”
And we got so many sort of requests for the secret sauce that one day we gathered our team and sort of said, people are asking us how we do this. And it’s an arts organisation. It’s not an exact science. And so it’s something that has evolved very intuitively and instinctively. There’s not—like, we didn’t look at the research. We just did it, right? And so we distilled it down to seven ingredients. And then we had a wonderful artist called Nitzan Mayost design it.
And I can’t get to all of them, but I’ll just say quickly: One is Jerusalem. One is a shared home. One is equal partnership. One is trust built over time. One, of course, is the power of the arts. And a really important one is compassion over righteous indignation. I think that’s the key to almost everything. Compassion over righteous indignation. You have to let go of the righteous indignation, channel the compassion. That’s the only way for us to get through our daily lives. Because on a daily basis, something comes up that is just so impossible to deal with. And only by being compassionate, even if it’s difficult for you—that’s the only way that we get through it.
And another piece that I think is really important, and I think, you know, is really critical specifically to FeelBeit, it’s the ingredient of self-love and self-critique. I think that, you know, we often say that a healthy person is somebody that has self-love and is also able to be deeply self-reflecting. And we think that is true of societies and collectives as well. And we—Riman and I both have tremendous love for our peoples. You know, she as a Palestinian Muslim, me as an Israeli Jew. I love myself. I love my people. And she feels the same way.
Super important because, first of all, it allows you to be compassionate, also towards yourself. When there are moments where somebody on your side does something that you just feel like it is burning your soul, and it’s a betrayal—like a profound, profound betrayal of your group, what they’ve done. And at the same time, we also see incredible bravery, so much bravery and so much resilience and kindness, certainly on the Israeli side and also on the Palestinian side. So we also see that, and we want to be part of that. And we also know that if we don’t have self-love, we will not influence anything. That’s an important one for me.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, that’s so powerful, and it’s making me think about how in the Jewish scriptures—and then it’s echoed in the Christian scriptures—love your neighbour as yourself.
Karen Brunwasser: Correct.
Elizabeth Oldfield: This “as,” right? And we often get into this binary of, like, it’s either me or you, right? That zero-sum thinking, that drives us apart. And I think so much of this work and so much of the project of this podcast is inviting us into the soul work that that requires, right? Having a stable sense of self, having some steadiness—I call it deep roots—and also having wide branches, right? Also having open arms, being able to move towards the other because we’re not defensive. We’re not ashamed. We’re not easily offended, right? We know who we are. We love ourselves, in your language. What spiritual practices or philosophical practices or kind of psychological buttressing do you do personally to give you the soul steadiness to do this work?
Karen Brunwasser: You know, I live in Jerusalem, and so it sort of feels like just walking around the city—and I do a lot of walking—is something that connects me to the spiritual side of reality. It’s something that—I’ve been almost thirty years in Jerusalem. It continues to inspire me, continues to make me think. You know, we have this extraordinary terrace at FeelBeit that overlooks sort of a panoramic view of Jerusalem. And I’m sort of, you know, awestruck by it every day that I go into work.
You know, I think that I don’t have—you know, I don’t go to synagogue so much, although I miss synagogue, you know, in Israel—in part because there is—religion and state are so intertwined. There is often a lot of—there’s a development on the part of some secular Jews, like my husband—there’s sort of—they develop an animosity towards Judaism. And I grew up with a very pluralistic, open Judaism that I miss. And in my busy, crazy life, I don’t access as much as I want to, but I am in Jerusalem. So, you know, so it does come in.
And, you know, I do also—I want to say one more thing about self-love. You know, you’re British and I’m American. And I was raised—you know, I come from a family of Holocaust survivors on the one side, and on the other side, my grandfather fought three or four tours in the Pacific as a Marine, including in Iwo Jima. And I was raised to feel extraordinarily grateful for the United States and extraordinarily grateful to the UK and to Winston Churchill.
And one of the things that’s very hard for me when I come back to the States—and I don’t know exactly what’s going on in the UK, but from, you know, I’m sure, the very distorted things I see on my media feeds—it seems as if there has been a loss of self-love, you know, among some Americans for America and among some Brits as Brits. And I think that we have, obviously, in our shared histories, you know, so much that was wrong and so much that needed to be corrected and still needs to be corrected. And at the same time, you know, I think I would not be alive if it were not for the Americans and the Brits who fought Hitler. And I’m so grateful to it.
And I just hope—sometimes I see young people that don’t seem to understand the gift that they’ve been given to grow up in those societies. And I would want to say to them, you see all of the imperfections, and now it is your turn to take this gift that you’ve been given and take it forward, because these are still such extraordinary human experiments that have brought so much good to the world. And we have to take such good care of them and continue to improve them.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. Tell me what is coming up at FeelBeit now.
Karen Brunwasser: So the really extraordinary thing is that the last year in particular, a lot of artists from both sides have been coming to us not only to perform in the same space or exhibit in the same space but actually asking to co-create together, which is extraordinary and really kind of what we’ve been aiming for all along. And we were very fortunate to get a very generous grant from the European Union to create a collab of Israeli-Palestinian artistic partnership. And right now there are dozens of Israelis and Palestinians—artists of all disciplines, all disciplines—that are working on new creations.
And they’ll all be premiering in our summer festival, which is called Shift. So it’ll be a festival of all original work, and all that has been created collaboratively between Israelis and Palestinians. And we’re really, really excited about that, because we believe ultimately that what we’re trying to do is create a new culture for the land that we love so much together.
Elizabeth Oldfield: For those of us who can’t get to Jerusalem, how do we see more, hear more, listen in to what’s happening?
Karen Brunwasser: The best way is to follow us on Instagram and Facebook. We are currently renewing our website, so I apologise if folks go there and there’s not much to see. But, you know, we also invite everybody to Jerusalem between July 27 and August 15 for our festival. And at any time, really, you know, we have very open doors, and we love visitors and guests.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Wonderful. Because hospitality is something these two cultures really have in common.
Karen Brunwasser: What’s that?
Elizabeth Oldfield: Hospitality is something these two cultures really have in common.
Karen Brunwasser: Hospitality is key. Yes.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Compassion over self-righteous judgement. Is that the phrase?
Karen Brunwasser: Over righteous indignation.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Compassion over righteous indignation, self-love and self-critique. Many other lessons I will take from this conversation today, Karen.
Karen Brunwasser: And us from you. Thank you so much for having us, really.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I’m so grateful to have had that conversation, to have had a bit of time with those two amazing women, especially as one of them had to run to the airport and was really squeezing me in. And what struck me is the extraordinary power of actions that we often overlook. We can really feel, I think, a lot of despair about geopolitics, about armies and violence and money and power. And yet FeelBeit and these two women are imagining something and making imaginable a different way of being in the world that is extremely costly, right?
This is not fluffy. This is not “hold hands and say kumbaya; everyone’s nice, really, aren’t they?” This is two people—one of them raised in a city that’s been so—she talked about it feeling very broken: waves and waves of violence, waves and waves of terror, waves and waves of distrust. And right there, in the heart of that city, creating a place for beauty and for music and for friendship. And—oh, I wish there was a word that sounded less soft, right?—this extraordinarily subversive, quiet, upside-down power.
There was this moment when Karen said there was a real danger that the city would spin off its axis. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I feel like the world is going to spin off its axis, that the bubbling, the boiling is too much. Everything’s going to spin out of control. And she said that what holds Jerusalem together in those moments is getting into a taxi and immediately trying to signal to someone that they don’t need to be afraid of you. Saying, you know, “Isn’t this terrible?” Making the effort—knowing that everyone’s prickly, everyone’s tense, everyone’s afraid—and making the effort not to withdraw from people but to move towards it.
It sounds like it’s almost small talk, where it’s these tiny signals that we’re in this together. These tiny signals that this is all of our city. These tiny signals that I’m not going to assume I need to distrust you; I’m going to assume I can trust you unless I have evidence to the contrary. And I think she literally said, like, that held the city together. It is that that ensures the city doesn’t explode. These tiny things.
And that FeelBeit has thrived and gone on to be a place even after October 7, even after all that we have seen in Gaza—a place where people from different communities come and they have a cup of tea together and they make music together. And it’s a set of these tiny decisions, right? These tiny, soft interpersonal things that we cannot put on graphs or Excel spreadsheets or make big policies about, right? The decision to go to a funeral—if you’re a Palestinian, to go to a funeral of an Israeli hostage, even though you know that you might get, like, rocks thrown at you there. The decision of a Jewish person to go to a funeral of a Palestinian who had been killed in Gaza. The moral courage to say, I am not going to let this almost gravitational force that is pulling us apart be the boss of me. I’m going to hold on to something deeper and older, even in the face of people thinking that I’m a traitor.
You know, Riman talked about anti-normalisation, and there is real subtlety there, right? About who we work with, who we’re seen with, who we humanise. I think about that all the time with this project. But I always come back to: actually, any human needs humanising, because that’s how we remember who we are.
And it made me think about our lives and the kind of friendships we have and the effort that we are putting into signalling to someone, you don’t need to be afraid of me. And remembering that it’s not always who we expect, right? I think how much my parents’ generation sometimes feel a bit afraid of younger people, of people that they think will look down on them, of people that they feel left behind by in terms of technology or whatever it is. And then sometimes younger people feel afraid of older people because they think they’ve got all the power. Whatever it is—people on the other side of all of these issues that we find so painful, all of these questions politically and religiously that we’re figuring out.
I think I certainly spend so much time thinking about my reaction to people, like, I’m annoyed by you, or I want to roll my eyes at you, or I don’t feel welcomed by you, or you’re not my kind of person, and therefore there’s naturally a gap here. But my first and foremost priority is making sure you know you’re safe with me. You know I am not a threat to you. You don’t have to be afraid of me. And the way we signal that is with curiosity and with warmth and with question asking and all these soft skills, right? These little moves that we can make to move towards each other.
And again, how much everything comes back to food and art and putting people around tables—the things that humans have always done and that we forget to do when we’re afraid. And how much they can break the spell of us being afraid. I have a friend called Dougald—Dougald Hine, who was on the podcast a long time ago—and he talks about being people prepared to improvise currently unimaginable worlds. And I think for a lot of people looking at the news, an Israeli-Palestinian art centre on the border of East and West Jerusalem sounds a bit unimaginable. And these two women have made it imaginable—not by losing hold of their identities, not by agreeing on everything (you even hear them disagreeing, which I love), not by having hatred of their own group or their own religion, but by being together. And there’s real power in it.
