Society – Thirty Seven East

Listen to the Women and Girls of Iran

January 1, 2023January 13, 2023by JC Agid1 Comment

Listen to the Women and Girls of Iran

It was gigantic and staring at me. Everyone around seemed as mesmerized by it as I was: an eye, wide open. It was staring at the sky, too, and it covered most of the steps of Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park at the far end of the oblong Roosevelt Island on the East River, an unlikely urban cable car stop away from Manhattan. In the background, lurking in the shadows, stood the 39-story United Nations building, proud and self-confident.

In that park, at the bottom of the steps that morning of November 28, 2022, every spoken word and every single stare were targeted at the United Nations, at the United Nations and Iran.

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Jumai Victor

January 12, 2022January 17, 2022by JC AgidLeave a comment

JUMAI VICTOR
Entretien avec Bernard-Henri Lévy, à l’occasion de la première américaine à New York de son film
Une Autre Idée du Monde—The Will to See à New York le 16 janvier 2022.

Jump to the English version of this post below: Click Here

À la fin de l’année 2019, Bernard-Henri Lévy rentre du Nigeria avec un reportage d’une force rare. Il décrit les actes meurtriers, odieux et terroristes d’un groupe « plus ou moins liés à Boko Haram », « des islamistes d’un genre nouveau » : les Fulanis. De village en village, ils attaquent, brulent et assassinent les Chrétiens du Nigeria. Bernard-Henri Lévy nous présente une de leurs récentes victimes, Jumai Victor. Cette femme, « une évangéliste », se recueille sur une tombe, celle de son mari et de ses quatre enfants assassinés. Elle survit à cette attaque. Enceinte, les Fulanis ont épargné sa vie, mais certains d’entre eux lui ont tranché, l’un après l’autre, les doigts, puis la main et l’avant-bras.

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Are You Game?

January 1, 2022March 7, 2022by JC AgidLeave a comment

ARE YOU GAME?

French Version of this post, click here.
Special thanks to Delphine Schrank for editing this story

They didn’t just want to give to their favorite foundations. Some New Yorkers wanted to have some fun while doing it, playfully bidding for things both secret or less than significant. In the end, the cost matters less than the price of elegance.

What about you? Would you take the gamble and surprise a gathering of bow tied, long-dressed revelers, the accoutrement of traditional New York galas whose ‘in-person’ season just wound down with the closing year? How much would you be willing to pay to blindly acquire the contents of an evening clutch or a surprise bag – to promote Franco-American friendship?

It all started with a challenge, “un pari” in French. Un jeu, a game.

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Lola’s Race

November 13, 2021November 14, 2021by JC AgidLeave a comment

LOLA’S RACE

As the sun rises over the Verrazano bridge, Mirjam Lavabre, a woman entrepreneur and single mother of one, is warming her muscles up at Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island. Grey sport pants and a blue tee on, she is wearing runner’s bib 25341.

Mirjam leads a group of French friends, all about to pass the starting line of New York Marathon and engage on the 26.2-mile iconic race.

They are not just running to challenge their physical capacities; they are also raising money for First Candle foundation in memory of Mirjam’s daughter, who 15 years ago passed away of the sudden infant death syndrome. Her name was Lola, and it is written on capital letters on Mirjam’s arms, visible to the thousands of runners and supporters as she races through the five boroughs of Manhattan.

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Art: Never Forget

September 19, 2021September 22, 2021by JC AgidLeave a comment

Art: Never Forget
English edited by Delphine Schrank

Who could have imagined in March 2001 that when the Taliban gleefully blew up the three giant Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan, their appalling act of cultural vandalism was just a prelude to the assassination less than six months later of Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, the country’s iconic resistance leader, and just two days after that, to the attacks of September 11? Silent vigils to the endless vicissitudes of human history, these storied sculptures had survived countless previous attempts to ransack or raid them since their creation sometime between the 4th and the 8th century.

More recently, Islamic State terrorists, or ISIS, made a central mission of destroying the archaeological sites across Syria and Iraq—art, the collateral victim of anger and stupidity.

Archaeologists had previously dismembered many of these relics and transported them to major Western museums—art, the collateral victim, or assumed booty, of powerful nations, human vanity, and plunderers too.

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