Terms & Conditions

In 2023, Neta Weiner and Stav Marin, co-founders of the Jaffa Israel-based hip-hop band System Ali, came to Boston for a residency. What they did not know was that the events of October 7 would take place during this moment, leaving them yearning and hurting for their complicated homeland. 

This video, “I Wrote You This Song,” is a love song for Israel, written before Oct 7, and produced, informed, and inspired by their time in Boston.  

Here’s what Neta has to say about this performance:  

This show brings different areas of our work in a specific moment in time to talk about home, being at home, creating a home through music, dance, text… At the end of the day it’s all the same, and a way to talk about home and conflict, something that was so raw and present for us in that moment. It’s about insisting on finding a way to rebuild the house. 

We talked a lot about stories during the evening and insisted on the story. Understanding there is a war over stories right now, and understanding the power of different stories on the stage, all in the same volume, all on the same stage. 

This show was unique to Boston and represents what home meant to us in that moment. It combines System Ali songs, Stav’s works, “Cut.Loose” text, different generations, and a deep consideration for what’s being passed down. Talking about light and hope, and rage and trauma, that are being passed through us through our words and our bodies. 

More than all else, this is about insisting on the roots. This is where Arabic, Hebrew, and Yiddish come in. The body language comes in. It’s about not cutting off roots because that’s what we’ve been told we need to do. Arabic and Hebrew are sisters, and they need to be in contact. Sometimes contact is painful, sometimes its pleasurable, and this is life. 

Insisting on conversations – this is the title of our lives in this post Oct 7 moment.

In terms of her performance that leads this beautiful video, Stav says,

This was my first solo creation and it came from trying to understand of my own difficulty with language and speaking, and the disconnect between my Hebrew and English. As I used my body to explore the language and my own difficulty with it,  I realized that this is a deep identity issue of splitting. For me, this about the question of who the Hebrew language serves in terms of gender and power structure. 

To investigate this I tool speeches of Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant and I tried to use his grammar, vocabulary, as dance color… to try to see how his words and content charged my body, and from that I created a new body language. 

My mother tongue as I got to know it was really masculine and I tried to create a new way of relationship to bring the dialogue around gender to the stage and to bring the charge of security and art through body language and spoken language.

This video, created by HalfAsian Lens, is a 3 minute distillation of the 90-minute Studio Israel program featuring musician and 2024 CJP x JArts Community Creative Fellow Yuval Gur and post show conversation with Brandeis Middle East Studies Professor Yuval Evri at the Vilna Shul in Boston’s iconic Beacon Hill (May 2024). Studio Israel is a project of the Jewish Arts Collaborative, Hadassah Brandeis Institute, Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University, and the Vilna Shul, with support from CJP.