In 1992, Len and Libby Traubman invited American Palestinians and Jews to come together and begin a long term ‘dialogue’ to discover common ground, and learn about each other, creating what would become the long-running and very successful ‘Jewish Palestinian Living Room Dialogues‘. Since then the Traubmans have facilitated many other dialogue groups and multiple projects, including their latest, ‘Dialogue in Nigeria, Muslims and Christians Creating their Future’ a DVD available free around the world to any individual or organization who requests it. As part of a new series highlighting our users and their interesting stories and case studies that we will be publishing in the upcoming months, Mixonic talked to Libby and Len about their work, the concept of dialogue, and their latest DVD project.
Mixonic: How are you today?
Len: We’re really deluged with requests for the DVDs the Mixonic DVD ‘Dialogue in Nigeria, Muslims and Christians Creating their Future’. We’re getting requests all the time.
Libby: Yeah, Len is the big networker keeping track of all the names and all the people and all the new names that are hard to spell and say. Anyway it’s been very, very interesting to see who responds and what they’re doing with their lives. And we’re feeling happier and happier that we could spend the time to make the film because there is a really good response to it.
Mixonic: Let’s talk a bit about the concept of dialogue, what exactly is dialogue as it pertains to your work?
Libby: Well that’s a really important question because as you say that is exactly what we’re about is dialogue and for us and Jewish Palestinian (Living room Dialogue) where we started to learn about and define the concept and the way of communicating it became something very specific for us. But we also talk about what it is not – conversation which tends to be a little more social and shallow and dialogue is not discussion because that comes from the same root word as concussion and percussion -more bumping heads against each other and I’m thinking more about what I want to say to you than I’m listening. And it’s definitely not debate because debate is all about winning and losing and talking you into something so that I’m the winner and somebody else loses so for us therefore dialogue means listening to learn, being totally open to another person’s world view, life experience. And we say that we all come to the table with our own story which is very important and it’s not to have somebody give up their story but it’s to expand our story it’s to expand and be more inclusive and to know that there’s always more to learn from other people that have had a different life experience, so it’s listening to learn from another person and dropping all of our projections and pre-conceptions and all the things that keep us at a distance from the other, someone we don’t know.
Len: The learning is not so much about the facts, the learning, what is distinctive about dialogue is not only the quality of listening but you are there to discover the other human being that is in the room with you. So it doesn’t start with issues it starts with acknowledging the other person’s humanity and moral and equal humanity and the experience is that the enemy is one whose story we have not heard so it commonly begins with story and personal narrative.
Libby: And then there’s the hope and the feeling that once you do begin to see each other as human and equal, and you begin to build some trust with each other that enables you to then talk about things that are more difficult and that you’re less apt to jump up and leave the room or leave the relationship because you’re invested and you care about the other person even if the topics or the issues at hand get very difficult you’re more apt to stay and hang in there because of the relationship.
Mixonic: How do you apply that, for example with your Jewish Palestinian living Room dialogues, how do they work exactly and what kind of success have you achieved with that?
Len: We’re part of a nineteen year old Palestinian Jewish living room dialogue and we’re getting ready for our 238th meeting and there’s a second group a San Francisco group it’s had a hundred and something meetings over about 13 years. The success is as long as people are dedicated and continue this it works, it’s dependable and it depends on a person’s own totality. And it has expanded into many, it’s moved out across the country and across the planet and you hear dialogue, the word was rarely used when we began and you hear it all the time now, it’s fastened on to the planet, it’s not going to go away, it’s a new quality of communication and where people stay together, especially supposed enemies, it’s becoming not just nice news but it’s becoming hard news and that’s what these DVDs help with. In the past when we’ve had to help people start dialogues other places in the world, we had to send them big expensive, bulky video cassettes and now because of Bob Jacobson and team at Mixonic we’re able to do this, the quality and the economics has made it possible to transport these visual and audio models of how to communicate all across the planet and an economic way Have you heard of Elie Wiesel? He’s an educator and a holocaust survivor – he says ‘people become the stories they hear and the stories they tell’, so there are two facets to the dialogue one is doing it and the other is telling the story so others can replicate this human experience and dissolve borders and walls between them and that is what the DVDs and Jacobson and Mixonic do they help us tell the story other people can live this life and this is the beginning of the end of war.
Mixonic: How did you get started with the DVDs and how did you come up with the concept, what’s the process from concept to production?
Len: We’ve produced since 2007, because of the advent of the DVD we’ve produced 5 DVDs, so Mixonic has been central to this next step in pioneering the public peace process across the planet.
Libby: In each case, all the films have been made to demonstrate like Len just said, ‘we become the stories we hear and the stories we tell’ so for a long time at the beginning of our dialogue group coming together we would take from the group and do panels, live panels in schools and universities and it became obvious that we couldn’t just keep doing that all the time, a lot of people couldn’t take off from work to go to a classroom and so at some point we said you know if we had a movie where we could describe what we’re doing and have some exemplars we could get this out much further than just a few of us from the dialogue being able to go and schedule a time in a classroom or, and we were being invited to travel like to campuses in southern California and up the coast and other places and we said we can’t afford to have people travelling all around doing this because we’re not a money organization, we’re not a funded group so the idea came up that we really needed to make some movies that demonstrate what we do in the process and it first started with as Len said with that original VHS which was a news clip from MSNBC that came in our house and viewed a dialogue meeting and they made a ten minute story and that was how we kind of launched sending information to people who found the website and were asking for material on how to do it themselves.
Len: So then CNN came in and ABC, everyone started coming in, the newscasters started coming in, we never reached out to any of them, they all found the dialogue and they saw this is news so they came in and they each gave us copies of their broadcast that they did, their news broadcast and we started putting those together on the VHS tapes. And then what really happened was that at a wedding reception in Santa Cruz we talked to a filmmaker who said ‘ have you ever thought of making a purposeful film of yourselves?’ and we hadn’t so we hired him as the sound person and another woman that he worked with as the video producer and they came to a camp, a peacemakers camp in the California mountains where we brought together hundreds of Palestinians, Israelis, Muslims, Christians and Jews and that was our first film called ‘Palestinian Peacemakers, Palestinians and Jews together at Camp’ and Mixonic made our first DVDs. That was in 2005, then in 2006 we were on our way to do one of these panels Libby was describing at Washington High School in Fremont California and at the last minute we just thought we should bring a film crew with us, we’ve never done that at the schools, so we phoned Marigold, our filmmaker and at the last minute really she brought a team into the high school, nothing was planned, nothing was scripted and Mixonic did that DVD as well. Isn’t that right Lib?
Libby: Yeah we’ve had people who edit and film but Mixonic makes all the DVDS.
Len: That was ‘Dialogue at Washington High’. And this is the new one, January 2012, ‘Dialogue in Nigeria, Muslims and Christians Creating their Future’. So these Mixonic DVDs are all over the planet now and we mail these free of charge, and that Mixonic can do this economically for us allows us, you can imagine a video cassette used to cost us maybe $2.50 or $3 a piece to make and these cost us a lot less than that. And also to mail a DVD is almost like mailing a letter itself, it’s just a thrill. The films have gone out to over 5000 individuals and 2100 different organizations in 1300 cities in all 50 states, 81 countries on every continent. So Mixonic has been a dependable, partner, brothers and sisters, stress-free confidents in telling stories that matter.
To read part II of the Traubman’s inspirational story, please click here, Mixonic Profile: Dialogue in Nigeria – an Interview with Libby and Len Traubman Part II, and stay tuned in the coming months for more profiles on our fascinating Mixonic customers and the way they are using Mixonic products to make things happen in their world. Like us on Facebook for the latest blog updates and for your chance to be our featured profile.
