Audio by Adam

Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the tip of Cape Cod was once home to one of the thriving Portugese communities anywhere in the world outside Portugal (and the Azore Islands, where most of those “Portagees” come from). Fishing was their livilhood (once mixed with whaling) was their livelihood.  But with the near decimation of the North Atlantic fishing stock, the price of real estate, the out-migration of youth, and the town’s growth as a gay resort town, these Provincetown Portuguese and their culture are disappearing. This story focuses on those who remain, what they remember, and what they see as their prospects.

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The Bedouins are ancient clan-centered nomads of the Middle East who have relied on goatherding and camels for millennia. Abraham, for example, was a Bedouin. In modern times, the nomadic way of life, which depended on free movement and embraced a culture of both hospitality and revenge has been threatened due to land enclosures and the lures of Western way of life. In this archival piece, I spent lots of time with the Bedouins of the Negev Desert, and spoke with people from several generations (including an old sheik) to plot their heritage and current predicament.   (NPR “Horizons”; 30 minutes)

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The English are one of the most endearingly eccentric group of people in earth.  This story, which I collected in Country Somerset, looks at changeringing, a world that combines math, music, churchgoing, village fellowship and the elusive “other dimension.” Lots of fun! NPR

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Even given its colonial past and present day kitsch, Hawaii remains both an earthly paradise and a place of natural numinous power.  This is evident in its variety of spiritual musical idioms. Here is a taste of some of them,culled from a Smithsonian Festival a few years back.  Aloha!

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Due to religion, socialism, the Zionist ideal, the militarization of the society, Western feminism, Arab culture and many other factors, Israeli women have complex competing factors that inform their self-image and their social roles.  This is a half hour documentary I did for National Public Radio back in the 1990s that is still relevant today.

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Oy! There are so many Yiddish words Americans (and Noo Yawkuz especially) use in everyday talking that it is really gevalt.  This is a VOA Wordmaster segment where I explore what some of those words are and what they mean. Originally tailored for broadcast to places where Yiddish has never never been heard.

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The Eye is also in the eye of the beholder. When Saint Jerome’s, a church in the South Bronx, was constructed at the turn of the 20th century, it was built by immigrant artisans, mostly from Ireland and Italy, where the human eyes were often blue. So of course, they imagined the All-Seeing Eye of God as blue also, and that’s just how they painted the giant Eye-of-God mural on their church ceiling. Now the neighborhood has changed, and almost all the services are in Spanish for the brown-eyed Mexicans who now live there. It came to be time to restore the mural, and so now God’s Eye is brown. This is the story.

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