Israel Reflections 2015–Day 5: Dinner in a Druze Village

Druze-villageThroughout the trip, the students had opportunities to immerse themselves in the culture of Israel. As part of this ethnic immersion, we enjoyed a dinner in a Druze village.  The Druze religion presented both some familiar elements as well as several that were unique to us. Student Samuel Magnuson recollects the dinner, shares background on the Druze, and gives his thoughts on their culture:

On Wednesday, March 11, after a full day in which we visited the Yardenit Baptism site, Haifa University, and the Bahá’í Gardens, we went to a Druze Village near Haifa for dinner. This was one of the highlights of the trip for me because we got to eat an incredible meal prepared by one of the women in the Druze village. I will explain more about what we learned about the Druze in a minute, but I must first discuss the food. When we arrived, we entered a dining hall where we sat at tables of about eight per table. The meal was family-style, meaning that the hosts kept bringing bowls of deliciousness for us to pass around. Of note, we ate stuffed peppers with arguably the sweetest rice I’ve ever experienced. We also had stuffed grape leaves, a really tasty chickpea dish, meatballs, Mediterranean salad, and a main dish of turkey with rice. While all of it was incredible, I must say that the stuffed peppers and chickpeas stood out to me, partially because neither of these dishes are ones I have been incredibly fond of in the States. However, the way the dishes were prepared that night (possibly because of the sauce) led me to eat seconds, thirds, and maybe fourths of each of these items. I also drank several glasses of what I thought was sweet tea . . . only to find out after that this was actually date juice. Fortunately, my stomach was prepared for such an altercation at this junction of the trip.

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Mapping Out the Copyright Semicommons

Plan of a Mediaeval ManorMy previous two posts on the upcoming Nies Lecture (Thursday, April 16, at 4:30pm — it’s not too late to register!) attempted to sketch out where I think Prof. Smith is headed, based on the abstract and his previous work. In this post I want to reflect for a moment on the implications of viewing copyrights as a type of semicommons.

Copyright was born, in the eighteenth century, with a focus on who had the right to print, publish, and reprint works of authorship. That is, the concern was to exclusively reserve the manufacture of complete works — books, maps, and nautical charts — to the person who created them, or any downstream purchaser of those rights. Although the copyrighted work is intangible — it is the particular creative expression that is embodied within a book, map, or chart — for the first century or so of its existence that expression as a practical matter had a one-to-one correlation with physical objects. In that realm, it is easy to conceive of the property rights assigned by copyright, and the open access rights to the public domain, as dividing lines dividing up an imaginary space — this tract over here is the book Moll Flanders, which is owned by X; that tract over there is public domain, and thus can be used by anyone.

Over the course of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, that early, simple framework broke down as courts embraced the notion that the intangible object protected by copyright could be infringed in ways other than reprinting physical copies of the original.

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Israel Reflections 2015–Day 5: Haifa University and Sulha

Our Wednesday morning in the north of Israel started with a visit to Yardenit, a site at the base of the Sea of Galilee where it meets the Jordan River near the biblical baptism site. Then we all headed to Haifa University to meet with Professors Orna Einy, Moti Mironi, and Tali Gal–each of whom work in an area of ADR–to learn about their research. After a quick lunch with them, we then turned our attention to a wonderful guest speaker they arranged for us. In a combination of theoretical, spiritual, and academic learning, the students had the great pleasure of hearing Elias Jabbour speak about “Sulha”, or the traditional peacemaking techniques used in Arab villages throughout the Middle East.

Student Molly Madonia retells two of Mr. Jabbour’s stories and recounts his methods to making Sulha:

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