Videos
Over the years, I have made, produced and been interviewed in various videos. Here is a selection of them.
March 31, 2010: Coffee House TV interview with Tom Block, Event Organizer of the First Ever Amnesty International Human Rights Art Festival. Tom is an human rights advocate artist. The famous producer Norman Lear is the Executive Director of this event. The festival will be held in Silver Spring, Maryland, April 23 -25, 2010. Courage Network is an official partner of this event.
January 26, 2014: This is the opening five minutes of La Bestia: Sweet Mother, a multi-media production performed at the Theater at the 14th Street Y on January 26, 2014, in New York's East Village. The work was written and produced as part of the Fellowship LABA program, Laboratory for Jewish Culture.
December 29, 2013: From the recording session of "La Bestia: Sweet Mother, a Jewish Troubadour's Tale," a CD that grew out of the multi-media theater, music and dance project as a LABA Fellow at the 14th Street Y (New York). Becca Weiss (singer) and Desiree Miller (cello) created the music to go with my libretto.
June 25, 2011: The Rumi Forum presented "Shalom/Salaam: A Story of a Mystical Fraternity" with Tom Block
Tom Block spoke on his forthcoming book, "Shalom/Salaam: A Story of a Mystical Fraternity" (Fons Vitae Publisher, Louisville, KY, 2010) , which traces the virtually unknown story of Islamic mystical influence on the development of Jewish mysticism for over 1000 years. Mr. Block's introduced this story, exploring how Jewish thinkers and mystics, from Moses Maimonides (d. 1204) in Egypt to the Kabbalists in Spain (13th century) and the Holy Land (15th century), turned to their Islamic cousins for spiritual inspiration, as well as specific manners of understanding the relationship with the Divine. These medieval Jewish thinkers irrevocably turned Jewish worship, meditation and synagogue practice in the direction of their Islamic cousins. By the 18th century, when the Baal Shem Tov was developing Hasidism in eastern Europe, he was attracted to the same medieval Jewish thinkers who had, in turn, depended so much on Islam for inspiration. Although he didn't realize it, his interest in specific medieval Jewish thinkers and systems of thought continued the "Islamicization" of Jewish worship, an influence which still reverberates through Jewish practice to this day.
May 16, 2016: Here is a short video of me working in Mezzrow, my favorite Greenwich Village listening room, drawing the bassist.
May 16, 2016: Here is a short video of me working in Mezzrow, my favorite Greenwich Village listening room, drawing the bassist.
February 24, 2017: Interview about the International Human Rights Art Festival with New York's WPAT 930 Multi-Cultural Radio's Teddy Smith.
November 16, 2018: A brief introduction to the "Celebration of Justice" event at the International Human Rights Art Festival @ the Wild Project (East Village, NYC). This evening's event, uniting art, society and the spirit.
February 14, 2018: Tom Block, founding producer of the International Human Rights Art Festival joins Bob Lee on Bronxnet’s “Open,” for a preview of the event designed to celebrate poetry, nature, beauty, and Black men.
October 26, 2009: This short documentary of my work was made by students in Docs in Progress, a film school in Silver Spring, MD.
December 25, 2002: Friends of the Homeless (FOTHOC). From 1995-2010, I developed and ran this project to give away gift bags to 100 homeless people in Washington DC every Christmas. We involved children and families from the neighborhood to pack and distribute the bags.
