"The Swimmers," directed by Sally El Hosaini, is a Netflix film based on the true tales of Yursa Mardini and her sister, Yalla Mardini. The two girls are young Syrian Refugees, who escape the civil war in their homeland to flee to Germany and chase their dream of...

My grandmother is not like any grandmother that everyone has met. My grandmother has her very own special story. She was born in the Soviet Union, in 1940, during the Holocaust. It was a very dangerous time period, and as a little girl, she saw basically, her whole...

We learned about the refugee crisis of Soviet Jews, Syrians, and the Burmese. Each story comes with tales of hardship, determination, and courage. In class, Dr. Lasevich, a Jewish refugee from the then Soviet Union, told her story of her journey to America. We watched...

On June 7th, we took a trip to Paterson, NJ, to visit different Middle Eastern shops. We started the day off at Fattal's, which was a bakery and grocery store serving mostly Middle Eastern cuisine. We tried different kinds of pita there, including plain pita with...

A country double the size of Germany, home to 135 ethnic groups, and going through the world's longest civil war is a missing piece of the world. I have only heard of Myanmar once in my life, and it was merely glossed over as "a part of Southeast Asia." Never have my...

    In 1945, my mom's father, a 17-year-old soldier of the youth military (青年军), followed the Chinese military academy to the small island of Taiwan to pursue military training. At the time, China was under the rule of Chiang Kai Shek, the leader of the...

The movie "Refusenik" created by Laura Bialis in 2007 illustrates the struggles of Jews in the Soviet Union trying to leave their country in the 1960s and 70s. By definition, Refusenik means "a person who refuses to follow orders or obey the law, especially as a...

When everyone in our Spring Intensive course was initially asked what they were most excited about for the first week, practically everyone replied ‘Chinatown!’ This neighborhood located in the Lower East Side in New York City is a huge hotpot of culture. The...

On June 5th we took a trip to Brighton Beach which is located in Brooklyn, NY. It is a place where a lot of immigrants and refugees moved from the Soviet Union in the 20th century. Throughout Brighton Beach there are plenty of Russian and other Soviet country shops....