Dancing toward peace.

The informative article "Palestine Embodied" (DANCE MAGAZINE, December 2003, page 70) by Chiori Santiago shows us what a well-supported Cultural Center can do for youth, even in wartime. The Ibdaa troupe is invaluable in offering youth in the Dheisheh Refugee Camp the opportunity for self-expression. I only hope that their teachers encourage them not only to express their well-founded rage, but challenge their ability to hope and have faith in the future. There are programs in theater and dance where Arabs and Jews create art together with an eye and a heart toward peace. Take, for example, Interns for Peace and Seeds of Peace.

DAFNA SOLTES STEIN

HUNTINGTON, NY

At a time when synagogue and Jewish school bombings and cemetery desecration are at the highest level since the Holocaust, it was not only inappropriate but irresponsible of you to fuel the fires of anti-Semitism by publishing an article on Ibdaa. It is clear this "troupe of teenage Palestinian dancers" on a sixteen-city U.S. tour did not come to dance so much as to sow propaganda. Ultimately, the fault lies not with the Ibdaa dancers, but with those who would exploit youth for deadly purposes. It is my grand hope that in the future the magazine will choose to focus on dance and refuse to serve as a mouthpiece for Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

ROGER GRAY

LAWTON, OK

I read with dismay your article, "Palestine Embodied." I believe that an article about a Palestinian children's dance troupe could have great merit. However, it became a political puff piece for the Palestinian cause. The article was out of context, and says absolutely nothing about how the Palestinian leadership has failed these children over the past 30 years. I suggest in the future you concentrate on writing about dance, not politics.

STUART ISGUR

FT. WORTH, TX

K.C. Patrick, Editor in Chief, responds: Thank you for your letters. We endeavored to offer an objective report on a young people's touring dance company, as we have done on African and Eastern European groups. The quotes were substantiated with video footage and reports of Americans who visited dancers' homes. There was no attempt to take sides--only to demonstrate that dance continues to provide a way of sharing cultural differences and similarities, and of preserving dignity and sanity in destructive wars.

Chiori Santiago, writer, responds: As K.C. Patrick points out, the coverage of Ibdaa was not intended to take sides in a sadly divisive debate. It was a story about dance as a language to communicate the complexities of human experience. Were the teens' comments biased? Surely, just as anyone's might be, given their origins in an experience of conflict. Still, they were an accurate reflection of a particular viewpoint, and an opportunity that this magazine would extend to those of opposite opinion. The value of such a story is to educate, to understand those whose views differ from our own; and that, for me, is a crucial step toward peace.