Sabra Webber: There’s about 200,000 Arab Americans in Ohio, of all the immigrant groups that’s probably the one that’s the most misunderstood and the most othered. And I thought, well, who’s on the front line for this kind of experience would be Ohio high school teachers, especially. And that’s when I applied for the Ohio Humanities Council grant, hoping that some teachers would be interested in, especially in the Arab American experience just because of all the tension that’s been surrounding that Arab American community.

I think it’s really important to bring in the voices of the people themselves and, especially the artistic voices of the people themselves that you’re talking about. And in different media, so we used film, we used…I assigned a book of poetry, I assigned a book of short stories. And then, I also brought in Alan Jabbour who’s Arab American, but is known because he started the Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in Washington years ago. And he was the first director of it and he’s a fiddler.

Alan Jabbour: And now, I’m going to play ‘Ducks on a Pond’ which I’m declaring to be foodways in the making.
(fiddle song)

Sabra Webber: The teachers cannot specialize in Arab Americans, but at Ohio State we have people who can specialize in something that narrow, you know Arab Americans or Arabs in my case. But there’s so many different kinds of specialties all across the university and I think that that’s one of the things that we have to offer here at Ohio State and I think that’s one of the things that the Ohio Humanities Council was looking for when they gave me the grant to do this teachers’ institute.

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