Israeli-Palestinian Programs
For High School Ensembles
Heartbeat’s core program, Heartbeat: Amplifying Youth Voices, focuses on the establishment and facilitation of ensembles of young Palestinian and Israeli musicians (ages 14-20 years old) who come together weekly for sustained music based dialogue programs. During these weekly sessions, Heartbeat youth explore each other’s cultures and narratives through a critical pedagogy in music education and dialogue.
Over the past ten years, the ensembles have primarily been based in Haifa and Jerusalem. Heartbeat: Haifa, created in partnership with the Beit HaGefen Arab-Jewish Community Center, brings together Arab and Jewish high-school aged musicians from the city and its surrounding neighborhoods. Heartbeat: Jerusalem brings together Israeli and Palestinian high-school aged youth from West and East Jerusalem to meet at our partner organization the Willy Brandt Center.
Meeting each week, attending two retreats, and one field trip throughout the course of the school year, Heartbeat youth musicians co-create music, engage in dialogue to raise critical understanding about the harsh realities surrounding them, and then share their eye-opening, inspiring music and understanding with their communities through concerts, workshops, and multimedia publications.
As a result of the Heartbeat process, Heartbeat youth musicians:
- Transform their attitudes towards the other side
- Reduce prejudice
- Increase trust
- Build self confidence
- Develop a keen awareness of the realities surrounding them
- Experience a profound sense of agency and responsibility to work for peace and civil rights
For Graduates
The Heartbeat Graduate Program, launched in January 2015, supports Heartbeat youth musicians and youth ensembles entering the next phase of their lives post-high school to continue their music and media co-creation in an equalizing safe space.
Post-high school life for Israeli and Palestinian youth comes with increased systemic separation caused by mandatory military service and boycott intimidation, putting additional pressures on youth musicians’ relationships and ability to co-create as equals. The Heartbeat Graduate Program provides a safe space that addresses the educational and psychosocial needs of our post-high school youth musicians to continue to have meaningful, impactful cooperation and creative nonviolent action towards social change and conflict transformation.
There are many ways to support this program. You can:
