Posted Writings

Piyyut Ensemble by Geoffrey Clarfield After the fall of the Second Temple (70 CE) the Jews were still a majority in the Land of Israel. First, they lived under the authority of the pagan Romans. When the Romans then converted to Christianity, these same Jewish communities found themselves living under the religiously hostile regime of the Byzantine Empire. This corresponds to the period of the finalization of the Talmud during the first five centuries CE. Ethnomusicologists a

Here is a new tale about an old place, the Jemaa el-Fna of Marrakech, part food court, circus and centre of sorcery and story telling. I had the privilege of spending long periods there when I made Marrakech my home in 1977, walking, sitting, watching, listening to musicians, and yes, smelling and eating the food at numerous outdoor stalls! There are storytellers in the Jmalfna who pass on the tales from the Arabian Nights and then some. This story is about various kinds of s

Kenya and Tanzania were my home for just under twenty years. I made my living there as a development anthropologist, doing research to support rural development projects which then led to more complex work in “institutional development,” and policy initiatives. My work took me to all parts of Kenya for extended periods of time, especially to remote areas. I spent much time in and around the Great Rift Valley of Africa. There I witnessed and tried to understand the transition

Gallery Views of Ancient Rome (Giovanni Paolo Panini, 1758) During this New Year of 2026, I have given much thought to the thoroughly abysmal state of academic anthropology in Canada and the United States. What began as a cautious and poorly funded early 20th-century attempt at fieldwork-based cross-cultural exploration of ethnography has turned into a Marxist/Feminist/Islamic matrix for the furtherance of radical leftist causes linked to a desire to take down modern Anglo-A

Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, Germany (photo by Geoffrey Clarfield) As a Canadian Jewish anthropologist and film producer, born and raised in Toronto, every November I honor Neuberger Holocaust Education Week. In addition to following films, lectures and seminars that take place in and around Toronto, I set myself a reading task. This year, while producing a film in Canada, Europe and Israel with Canadian film director, Igal Hecht, both of us read and reread the Lancet Commissio

Lake Naivasha, Kenya (photo by Geoffrey Clarfield) Kenya was my home for ten years, from 1985 to 1995. I was sent there as an anthropological researcher for McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. I was tasked with chronicling and understanding social change among a non-literate, non-industrialized group of camel nomads called the Rendille, who live in the desert wastes of Northern Kenya. Simply put, the Rendille, like their other pastoral neighbors the Samburu, Turkan

Silan on stage in Jerusalem He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise… Psalm 49 I have met young Israeli musician and song writer Gal Amar a number of times during the last two years. Most of these meetings were musical. That is because every year when I visit Israel, I stay in a town in a beautiful valley, hiding in plain sight on the edge of Jerusalem, which is to say, the village of Ein Kerem, the place where John the Baptist was born. There I have fallen in with a

Canaanite Sculpture-Israel Museum, Jerusalem (photo by Geoffrey Clarfield) Every year, I spend time in Israel. This year, I am here as a film producer and writer for two documentary films and two books that will be based on these documentaries, all on Jewish themes of one sort or another. And every year my wife Mira and I visit the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem. It is a marvelous place dedicated to exploring the relationship of the Bible to its wider Egyptian and Mesopotami

Mosaic Floor from Byzantine Synagogue in the Land of Israel (photo by Geoffrey Clarfield) The secular men and women, and the modern Orthodox soldiers of the IDF deserve our gratitude and praise. They have fought and continue to fight an on and off war on seven fronts, against implacable enemies of the Jewish People and the State of Israel. Many of their best friends and close relatives have died in battle or have been wounded. And, they are fighting during an exponential rise

Famous people like to come to Marrakech and why not? Winston Churchill did it. Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti did and so did Brian Jones and the rest of the Rolling Stones. There were so many and then there was me. Marrakech is the city from which we get the name of Morocco. It is a flat town whose old city is surrounded by red walls, punctuated by Moorish gates. The town is not industrial and despite the hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit it each year to get a ta