So, before the place is discussed (it's pictured above), it should be said that it was really, critically important to me to get this right for FED. You know what they say: location, location, location... It's not just that, though. It's that the vibe of a place is immensely powerful in setting the tone of an experience -- almost as though its physical skeleton is also a metaphysical structure that will hold and shape the content of what the people enact within it.
OK, now that you can really tell I've been overthinking this -- I was in contact with about a dozen different venues across Manhattan. I saw intimate apartments for home hospitality, trendy art galleries, and co-working spaces. I thought, and felt, and dreamed about what the atmosphere of FED should and could be.
Then I found it: a theater. FED at its essence is centered around a "FED talk" - inspiring the guests and igniting the conversation around ideas and new ways of thinking. What better way to make this come to life than to put the spotlight (yes, literally) on the presenter?
But the location of choice is not just a theater. (It's a really cool theater.) Beyond the stage, onlookers will enjoy an intimate dining space which will allow for those deep conversations -- and did I mention a four-course meal?
What's that, you want to know the exact location? Please request more information here!
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I recently had the privilege of catering a dinner for the International Crisis Group, hosted by Daniel Pincus. The guest speaker was the UN Secretary-General’s Special Adviser on Yemen, Mr. Jamal Benomar. I was really excited to honor the theme of the night by researching and preparing traditional Yemenite food. I'd like to share some of the amazing and exotic dishes I discovered.
Into the mix I tossed some traditional Jewish Yemenite recipes that I have developed in my repertoire over time. Kubaneh is a special bread made for Shabbat -- it is a buttery, challah-like dough that is baked overnight along with hardboiled eggs. I also made ful mudammas (though you will have to forgive my creativity, as this bean dish is originally Egyptian), as well as eggplant and hummus dips, of course. And a Yemenite meal would not be complete without schug! This spicy dip is made of ground jalapeño peppers, cilantro and spices. I love these culinary adventures which make me feel somehow so close to brothers and sisters so far away. In particular, I'd like to give a shoutout to A Yemeniyah, Dr. Lamya Almas, whose recipe blog gave me tremendous inspiration. As I cooked and my house filled with all of these exotic smells, I felt like I was with her in her kitchen, even though it is half a world away. Yihna! (Bon Appetit!) This post is cross-posted from The Times of Israel Blog. * On August 28th, conflict resolution and negotiation specialist Roi Ben-Yehuda will be the featured presenter at FED: dinner parties where you are fed by gourmet food, inspirational ideas, and the company and creative energy of your matched dinner companions. The following is an interview conducted between Deborah Fishman (FED founder) and Roi Ben-Yehuda. 1. Tell me a little about your background. How did you develop this interest in studying conflict? I’m originally from Israel and came to the US (later Spain) in the late 90s. From an early age I enjoyed solving problems and being helpful to others. So studying conflict was very attractive to me. I did my graduate work in negotiation and conflict resolution at Columbia University and am currently doing my PhD at George Mason University. My dissertation topic is on the role of surprise and conflict de-escalation. I now teach negotiation and conflict resolution at Columbia and John Jay College. 2. How does your identity as an Israeli impact your interest in conflict resolution? As you might imagine, conflict is rather ubiquitous when you’re growing up in Israel. It’s not just the macro conflicts. We Israelis are a quarrelsome bunch, and conflict regularly emerges in many day-to-day interactions. So one of the first lessons of consciously living in Israel is that conflict is a natural, and even essential, part of life. It’s never a question of whether or not you will have it, but rather how will you manage it when it happens. There are destructive and constructive ways of managing conflict. So as paradoxical as it may sound, you need to make peace with conflict. Growing up in Israel helped me realize that and sparked my interest in the field. 3. From the conflicts you have worked on, what are some of the hardest to resolve? Conflicts become really difficult and resistant to change when they degenerate from task-based to relationship conflicts. This usually happens when a particular issue that is negotiable is ignored or mismanaged. Oftentimes, other problems then begin to attach themselves– many of them personal. When the conflict becomes about the other person as opposed to the situation, it becomes very difficult to disentangle the issues and resolve them. So another important lessons is to know what kind of conflict you are in. 4. What are the most important elements that go into analyzing a conflict? There are so many variables that can be considered when analyzing a conflict. You could look at the actors, issues, needs, narratives, environment, context, dynamics, culture, etc. However, if I had to boil it down to a top three – and here I am following the excellent research of Peter Coleman and Rob Ferguson – it would be: 1) relationship importance: How important are the other disputants to me? 2) mutual goals: Are the others with me or against me (or both)? and 3) power balance: Am I more or less powerful than them, or are we equals? The combination of these three factors largely determines our behaviors in conflict situations. 5. What is one common pitfall you’ve seen in conflict resolution, and how can we learn from it? A common pitfall that we see over and over again is people’s tendency to view conflicts as a zero-sum game: if I win, you lose, and if you win, I lose. This, of course, can be self-fulfilling. What we can learn from this is that our perception matters. Often how we see things is not an accurate reflection of the way things are. In fact, research shows that most conflicts involve mixed motives: people have incentives both to compete and to cooperate. If we move from a strictly competitive orientation, we have the power to constructively transform the conflicts in our lives. 6. What traits do you think you have or see in others who are good at understanding/resolving conflict? Great question. Besides subject-matter expertise, cooperative orientation, and analytical intelligence, I would say that the most common traits of great practitioners are: a capacity for empathy; great communication skills; comfort with contradiction; imagination; flexibility; and an optimistic disposition. Let me just say a little about each. By empathy I mean a capacity to generously imagine what it’s like to think and feel like someone else. Successful practitioners recognize that their own perspective, while valid, is inherently limited; the reality of the situation is multifaceted and complex. So they try to see things from the other’s perspective. Doing so also allows others to feel heard and understood. Relatedly, exceptional conflict practitioners also demonstrate comfort with contradiction and an ability to think dialectally. Like Walt Whitman, they recognize that humans contain multitudes, and that not every element of our identity, thought, and feelings need to neatly cohere. Such recognition allows for greater tolerance towards self and other. Interestingly, research shows that East-Asian cultures fare much better with such thinking than European-American. Another essential trait is solid communication skills. This involves expressing oneself clearly and persuasively (which assumes a degree of self-knowledge), but it’s not limited to that. Communication is also a matter of asking the right questions (being curious) and actively listening and being attuned to someone else. A great conflict resolver has to cultivate their imagination and creativity. That is, to be able to reframe problems, come up with multiple options to a given problem, and see potentialities in the conflict system that are not apparent or obvious to others. Successful conflict practitioners also demonstrate flexibility. They are able to adapt and fit the situation. As we will discuss in our FED talk, different conflict situations call for different forms of interventions, and practitioners need to be fluent in various conflict styles. Finally, great conflict practitioners have a seemingly unending reservoir of hope. I believe it was Camus who said, “Where there is no hope, we must invent it.” Great peacemakers teach us that we must sustain hope. But not just any hope. We need tough hope, at once ambitious and realistic. Hope that is tenacious enough to deal with all difficulties that conflict entails. Of course, no one possesses all these qualities in equal measure (I am still holding out hope that a conflict resolution super-hero will star in the next blockbuster). But to one degree or another, these are the traits that make conflict resolution possible. The good news is that all of these traits can be cultivated by each and every one of us. Interested in attending FED featuring Roi Ben-Yehuda on 8/28? Learn more here! It all starts with a conversation. Eduardo Placer and I were introduced through our mutual friend Daniel Pincus, and as soon as we started talking, the ideas started flowing. What is more unusual, perhaps, is what came next: we actually made it happen! This is how #onebreakfast came about: an interfaith culinary experience on the occasion of the coinciding of two fasts, Muslim Ramadan and Jewish Tzom Tammuz. Before long we brought in our friend Mohammed Alsamawi, who helped us learn what an Iftar - the Ramadan break-fast meal - is like.
For one, it traditionally seems to involve a lot of hearty meat dishes. I knew that for the menu I wanted to go classic Middle Eastern - read: homemade pita, smoky babaghanush, garlicky hummus, and clearly some tangy muhamarra, a paste of grilled red pepper and walnuts with vinegar and spices. Along with that goes bourekas, stuffed savory pastries filled with spinach and potatoes. So I compiled some meat masterpieces that I felt fit the bill. I wanted representation from the myriad and complex traditions of all the voices we would have at our table. I went with sofrito, a Jewish comfort food of chicken simmered with spices and fried potatoes until it's falling-off-the-bone tender. Next I added maqluba, a Palestinian casserole of lamb, rice, cauliflower, and eggplant which is flipped upside-down before serving. For good measure, I threw in a Persian pot of beef with stewed fruit and exotic spices. Of course, to honor Eduardo's Cuban roots, I also prepared moros y cristianos, rice and black beans. And the feast would not be complete without sweets - I made baklava, and attayif, sweet yeast pancakes doused in rosewater syrup, which I found featured in an Israeli cookbook's Ramadan section. One minor detail which I forgot to mention: I had to prepare all of this while fasting! (You will recall that the whole point of this exercise was to mark the breaking of a fast... which means there must be one to begin with...) For me this was not as hard as it may seem, as to me cooking is in many ways a creative art in and of itself, in isolation from its connection to eating. Moreover, I always value the close connection between religion and food. What we eat, when, how - and with whom - can be a rich form of expression of our spiritual state, our heritage, and our identity. I will declare that the #onefast recipe was a success! Everyone gathered, ate, and communed. At the end of the evening I asked one guest whether this was what a traditional Iftar is like. "Forget Iftar," was the reply, "This is much better!" Now I don't just mean that in the Jewish yenta sense - namely, that I ensure everyone is continuously assaulted by astonishing arrays of home-cooked dishes, cakes, breads and assorted other vittles which for various reasons, ranging from the personal to the geo-political, they find challenging to refuse. That definitely happens, though.
The way I see it, we are all fed by each other. This doesn't only refer to feeding for our physical sustenance, even if it's always nice when that happens. It's also about feeding off of one another's energy and ideas. We've all been there: that one talk, conversation with a friend, or meetup and suddenly your mind is churning in overdrive with new worlds of possibilities that have just dropped open before you. Since the power of people connecting and good ideas spreading has always made me mentally jump up and down screaming, "More! More!" I've worked on a concept I called networking-weaving: connecting people to each other and with social, financial, and informational capital so that they could achieve more together than they could alone. To me, that's being fed by each other at its best and most effective. It may seem that there is more potential for this connection to occur today than ever before. You're always one click away from the next video, email or Facebook post that is about to change your life! Problem is, the ceaseless bombardment of online content offering the promise of connection threatens to render it all into useless noise. Perhaps even more significantly, the problem is that the instant accessibility of anyone, everywhere leads us to ignore the people who are here and now. I fervently believe that, as social creatures, we will never stop craving quality, in-person interaction, and that will always be the form of connection that is most vibrantly inspiring, the most personally touching, and the one best able to tend to our souls such that they feel fed. Did somebody say "FED"?! Yes, perhaps I do have a one-track mind, but I do think it all comes down to food. Even food itself for me is not about the concrete and physical. I first became interested in food in the context of its preparation for Shabbat dinner. The idea of following recipes passed down from generations and countries across space and time that convene here, at this very moment and at my very own table, has a transcendent and spiritual significance for me. I obsess over recipes from across the globe not only to bring in unique, phenomenal flavors and techniques, but also as a way of exploring other traditions and understanding how they conceive of food in their lives. I enjoy hosting large dinner parties because preparing feasts of elaborate and endless courses provides the perfect occasion not only to reach new culinary heights, but also for friends to convene and consume it in each others' company. Contextualizing the food within this larger social experience elevates it from the uncommonly-well-prepared to the extraordinary. At FED, I hope to create that unexpected in-person experience you didn't know you were looking for. After learning a bit about you, I will match you with a dinner on a topic and with diverse companions that I feel will be synergistic. The magnificent gastronomic dinner experience will also include a guest sharing a novel take on a topic for the evening and some dialogue around it, as well as opportunity for more informal conversation. We can gain the inspiration, motivation, and dedication that we need to fulfill our dreams and make progress in this world through our interactions with others. How will you get FED? |
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