Seeking A More Perfect Jewish Union and Striving For Empathy

This week as part of our mifgash with Israelis from Hebrew U, we visited the Yitzhak Rabin Youth Hostel.  I knew this was going to be an emotional evening:  I was in Hebrew school when I learned that Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a religious Jew, and that event has loomed as a shadow over my relationship with Israel. This is very different from my father's generation, for whom Israel represented a safe haven in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the miracle of the Six Day War.

The "broken amphitheater" 

For the our program, we were taken into a room that we were told was designed to represent a "broken amphitheater," representing the deep divisions that Rabin's government and murder revealed in Israeli society.  We were then told we were going to see a video presentation from a projector, but no one pulled down a screen.  Instead, images and scenes from 100 years of Zionist and Israeli history surrounded us in 360 degrees.

Whether it was Israeli troops storming Jaffa Gate during the Six-Day war or impassioned rallies and peace demonstrations in the lead-up to the Oslo Accords, the curators of this presentation put the viewer directly in the middle of the turmoil.  While I had been aware of many of these events on an an intellectual level, I had never seen footage of many of them and so they weren't really alive for me.

Collecting Narratives: Podcasts I'm Listening To Right Now

A few months, I started to become very conscious of the fact that most of the media I was consuming was created by people who look and sound like me.  While this impulse is natural, it is also super problematic for someone like me interested in cross-cultural dialogue.  When my lens into other cultures is always being filtered through even the most well-intentioned white people, there's the inevitable danger of fetishizing the sense of difference and not seeing those communities as fully human.

I started to think about this deeply in the criticisms of Sarah Koenig's smash hit podcast "Serial."  In one particular article headlined, "Serial and White Reporter Privilege," Jay Caspian Kang takes aim at Koenig's cultural tourism in her investigation of the communities of Adnan Syed and Hae Min Lee. "Who among us (and here, I am talking to fellow people of color)," Kang writes, "hasn't felt that subtle, discomfiting burn whenever the very nice white person across the table expresses fascination with every detail about our families that strays outside of the expected narrative?"  I've felt my own version of this whenever Christians in Ohio would tell me "Wow, it's so cool that you're Jewish!" but it rarely occurred to me that I could be guilty of the same annoying behavior.

But this is not a post about me flagellating myself over white guilt.  This is a post about sharing some of the awesome podcasts I've discovered by voices expressing narratives I would love to see get more recognition.

Moving From The Margins To The Majority, And Trying To Stay Inclusive

From Loving the Real Israel by Alex Sinclair

I spent a lot of my childhood being an outsider.  Whether it was for my religion, my vegetarian diet, or my love of musical theatre, my identity existed outside of the norm in Youngstown, Ohio.  As I mentioned before in previous posts, my Jewish values are deeply tied to the idea that because of my people's history of oppression, it is our duty to use the advantages we have achieved to provide support to those still struggling to achieve equality. Whether it was explicitly told to me or not, I also came to be suspicious of any kind of majority and felt it was my duty to provide nuance and a voice for the voiceless.

And this is why perhaps I have always struggled in Jewish majorities--whether in Israel or New York City.   When traveling through the neighborhood that used to be the Warsaw ghetto, some girls expressed distain that anyone could live there after the Holocaust, and I felt obliged to point out that we Americans build shopping malls on former Indian land and name subdivisions after tribes.  At least we Jews have memorials commemorating our suffering--most groups simply get their histories erased.  I thought of this as exactly why my parents were adamant about sending me to public school as opposed to day school:  they wanted me to be able to relate to and empathize with a larger society than one ethnic/religious group.  If I became too comfortable only surrounded by people who are like me, would I lose the ability to empathize with others, and then become part of the problem?

And so my experience in Israel on Kesher Hadash has been an interesting one.  While I spent the last ten years feeling really isolated from the Jewish community because of my religious questioning and my issues with Zionism, for once I find myself in an environment where most of my colleagues share my views.

Reflecting On A Visit To West Bank: History, Citizenship, And The Accidents of Geography

When I am walking back to Jerusalem's city center from the German Colony area, I often like to cut through Liberty Bell Park.  Not only does it provide more compelling scenery than King David Street, it also features super cute and curious cats.  It's also a great place to observe the demographics of the city.  It's one of the few places where you see Jewish Israelis and Arab Israelis interacting with each other--there is even a plaque that states that the playground is for "All of the Children of Abraham."  On early Friday evenings, when most of Jewish Jerusalem is observing Shabbat, the park is full of Muslim families enjoying barbecues to wrap up their holy day.  Saturdays the park fills with secular Jewish Israelis looking to give their kids some fresh air.  I've often longed to know what goes on in the heads of the guys who run the ice cream truck that I always see parked at entrance, how they observe the coming and goings of the different communities.

When I returned from my Encounter trip to the West Bank this afternoon, I decided to walk back to my apartment instead of taking the taxi.  Like I have many times before, I cut through this same park and sat down to decompress this the past few days.  As I observed groups of smiling Muslim families watching their kids play on a shiny new playground in one of the nicer neighborhoods of Jerusalem, I couldn't get out of my mind the contrast in what I had only seen a few hours earlier in the West Bank village of Khalet Zakariya.  In the last several years, this village has found itself surrounded by Israeli settlements on either side.  We met with the community leader of the village, who discussed how because residents are often unable to obtain building permits, most of the houses have corrugated metal roofs so as to avoid becoming a target for demolition.  Even the minaret of the mosque remains unfinished due to army restrictions.  When roadblocks made it impossible for parents to send their children to their regular school, there was no schooling for five years until the community managed to raise money to build one there.  The tiny three-room building not only serves as a school for 45 students, but also a school, clinic, city council building and a community center.  On a hill above we could clearly see the Israeli settlement of Gush Etzion, where children where playing in front of a state of the art three story school complex.  Looking at this tiny village surrounded by the development of settlements, I couldn't help but think of the classic children's book
The Little House, about a quaint little cottage that over the course of industrial development finds itself squeezed into an urban center.

The school in Khalet Zakariya, with the Israeli settlement Gush Etzion school in the distance

Wherever You Go, There's Always Someone From Ohio--Even In The West Bank

It's always a thrill to find something unfamiliar when you're in an unfamiliar place. I get really excited when I am traveling and I meet people from Ohio. People who understand my context of growing up on the edge of the midwest, who were shaped by economic stagnation of the rust belt and hold hold self-evident the truth that cookie tables (including buckeye candies) are an integral part of any celebratory gathering (this also applies to some extent to people from Detroit and Pittsburgh).   In my life in New York, I've met fellow Ohioans while working at Trader Joe's, Amnesty International and the Dramatists Guild of America.  

The last place I didn't expect to meet an Ohioan was on a tour of West Bank.  

To back up:  I just got back from a tour of the West Bank town of Bethlehem with an organization called Encounter.  Over two days we met with various individuals active in Palestinian society, from filmmakers, to educators, to two young women who started the first yoga studio in the West Bank that gives classes to people with special needs.  In our last session, we met with a guy named Sam Bahour, a Palestinian-American working to develop the high-tech industry in Ramallah.

"I was born in Youngstown, Ohio," he began and I squealed in delight.  

After the discussion, he told me he grew up in Liberty, only a few minutes from the Jewish Community Center where learned to swim and attended Hebrew school.  One of the things that often makes me hesitate in approaching intercultural work is the fear of fetishizing the Other.  What is the line between reaching out to people from different backgrounds because you are generally interested in their stories or because you just want to feel special as a white person?  Essentially: how do you avoid being completely awkward? Meeting a Palestinian who happened to be from my hometown went a long way to overcoming some of that awkwardness, giving me a personal way into the conversation.  Now whenever I am able to take a day and go to Ramallah, I will actually have someone specific to talk to and visit.

Sam Bahour and Me

I'm not totally proud of feeling comfortable just because I met someone who dresses and talks like me.  In an ideal world, I'd like to think I should feel comfortable to talk with Bahour as I would with any of the people in the Palestinian villages we visited that lies sandwiched between two Israeli settlements.   

Who Owns Jerusalem? The Cats

Those of you who follow me on Facebook may have noticed something about my feed since I moved to Israel:  I take a lot of pictures of cats.

On the surface, this isn't that unusual--cats are adorable.  I am certainly not alone in this observation. There is even an Internet Cat Video Festival held in Minnesota and Brooklyn every year.

Still, I've gotten a bit of strange looks from some people here over my fixation on Israeli street cats, which are after all as common as rats or squirrels in the U.S.  On many levels, these are hardly the cuddly house cats people keep as pets.  Frequently they can be seen foraging in dumpsters.

And yet I find them irresistible.

My Shabbat Struggle

The journey to Kesher Hadash so far, has come with numerous adjustments. There's the Hebrew, for one. The other big adjustment is living as a full-time student and not taking any part-time work.  As a member of the over-achieving "Lean In" generation, prioritizing personal and creative growth over income is extremely difficult for me, but it feels good to give this gift to myself (with thanks to the generous support of the Jim Joseph Foundation).  

My status as a full-time student also means that for the first time in about four years, I have a regularly scheduled two-day weekend.  During most of my time in New York, my two jobs have meant taking days off whenever I could--lately some combination of Tuesday/Friday or Thursday/Saturday.  While not having regular weekends sometimes made it hard to make plans or do things like take classes or get involved with a synagogue, I also enjoyed having days off to break up the monotony of my work week.  The other big upside to having downtime in the middle of the week is I got to enjoy empty grocery stores and open library hours while everyone else was at work.  

But now I am here, with two days off in a row every week that I don't have to negotiate for fear my hours might get cut.  One lovely benefit to this has been that every Friday evening since the beginning of January, I have observed some kind of Shabbat minyan. Those have ranged from the soaring melodies at Shira Hadasha (even though the whole gender separation thing kind of ticked me off) to the energizing drumming in Kol Haneshama's monthly Rosh Chodesh renewal service.  This past weekend at our group shabbaton by the Dead Sea, one of my classmates led us in a beautiful activity that had us at one point identifying different meaningful Hebrew words from one of the prayers and chanting them at different pitches all at once.  I experienced the kind of spiritual transcendence I've only received in glimpses during kirtans at the Bhakti Center in New York.  

With my soul filled up with warmth on Friday, I can then look forward to taking Saturday to catch up on the rest of my life.

Except it's Jerusalem.  And nearly everything is closed. 

When I was living in Germany Colony, I was absolutely dumbfounded walking down the main drag of Emek Refaim.  While 24 hours earlier the street had been bustling and lined with people sitting at sidewalk cafes, now every shop and cafe (with the exception of McDonald's) was completely closed. I felt like I was one of the last survivors of a post-apocalyptic Ray Bradbury short story or zombie film.

A family walks over the dormant light-rail line on a typical Jerusalem Saturday