Jihad in Hollywood: An Evening of Film, Music, and Art

Join the Columbia World Affairs Council and the CMA for a screening of Jihad in Hollywood, a short documentary on Syrian film star Jihad (Jay) Abdo and his wife, visual artist and women’s rights activist Fadia Afashe. The documentary follows their experiences as accomplished Syrians resettling in America as refugees from the Syrian crisis. The evening will include a Q&A discussion moderated by Heather Williams, a senior international/defense policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, along with a violin performance by Abdo and a viewing of selected artworks by Afashe.

—

In 2011 Abdo, one of Syria’s most prominent actors –having starred in 23 plays, 43 movies, and over 1,000 TV episodes –left his home country as his unwillingness to endorse Bashar al-Assad’s regime put him in personal danger. In America with assets frozen, property confiscated, and with a name many Americans equate with militant Islam, Abdo found himself working as a Domino’s pizza delivery driver. Since the documentary was filmed, Abdo has starred in Queen of the Desert with Nicole Kidman, A Hologram for the King with Tom Hanks, and Bon Voyage, which was nominated for Best Live Action Short Film for the 2017 Academy Awards.

At the rise of the Arab Spring in the Middle East, Fadia Afashe left Damascus for the United States to pursue a fellowship at the Humphrey School for Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, which she completed in May 2012. Afashe is a graduate of the Ismail Institute of Art with a criminal law degree from the University of Damascus and a master’s degree from the Syrian-French Institute for Public Administration (l’ena). With the assistance of the Geneva Institute for Human Rights, Afashe wrote and produced Suspended, a short film about women exposing how the laws of rape in the Arab world leave women unprotected and disenfranchised. Currently, Fadia works at the RAND Corporation and still shows her art in Los Angeles.