Israeli Arab Goes Viral With 328 One-Minute Videos
For the past 328 days, Nuseir Yassin has been traveling the world – from Nigeria to Myanmar, the Philippines to Mount Fuji – making daily one-minute videos that shine a light on the people, places and passions he comes across: good, bad and in-between.
The style and format – quick cuts, an engaging delivery and snappy subtitles – have helped make the videos go viral. Some of his mini-films have earned 25 million views.
“I just wanted to do something that felt meaningful,” Yassin, 24, an Israeli-born Palestinian and Harvard graduate who goes by the name Nas. “I realized that I’d lived 32 percent of my life and there was so much more I wanted to do.”
He wears a t-shirt bearing an image of a battery charger showing 32 percent of life complete.
In the early stages, Yassin felt his videos were sometimes touristy – “look at this place,” “how cool is this?” – but now he structures each more carefully.
In recent days, he has explored the social gaps between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs, efforts to bring both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict together via culture and security issues in Israel.
“I’ve learnt how amazingly flexible people are,” he said. “I’m enjoying it.”—Reuters
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
