Music & Activism: Israeli superstar Noa (Achinoam Nini) in conversation with Professor Ben Brinner

6:30 p.m. reception. 7 p.m. program start time. RSVP here.

Center for Jewish Studies Faculty Director and Professor of Music, Ben Brinner, will interview Israel’s international singer, songwriter, and peace activist, Achinoam Nini. This is a Regents’ Lectureship co-sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies, the Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies, and the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life.

Achinoam Nini, also known as Noa, an Israeli of Yemenite descent who was raised in the U.S., is Israel’s leading international singer/songwriter. Noa’s strongest influences come from such singer-songwriters of the 60s as Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, and Leonard Cohen. These musical and lyrical sensibilities, combined with Noa’s Yemenite roots and Gil Dor’s strong background in jazz, rock, and classical music, have created Noa and Gil’s unique sound, heard in hundreds of songs they have written and performed together. Noa was chosen as a Global Leader of Tomorrow and is Israel’s Good Will Ambassador for FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN. Recently she and Gil Dor were the only artists chosen to perform in the culminating event of World Youth Day in Krakow, before Pope Francis and an audience of 2 million people. Noa has collaborated with numerous artists in the Arab world, most notably with Israeli-Palestinian artist Mira Awad, with whom she represented Israel in the 2009 Eurovision, singing before an audience of many millions in Arabic, English and Hebrew. See Noa’s website here.