Annie in Israel

Overdue Reflections

2007-04-25T04:23:00.000-07:00

I have procrastinated posting for nearly a year. I still call Israel home. I am a counselor on Nativ, the Conservative Movement's gap-year program for eighteen-year-old Americans, a handful of Canadians and a Dane. I still haven't officially gotten a visa, though I have made a few real, live attempts to get stamped at misrad ha'panim. I have racked up a beefy frequent flyer miles account on Continental. I eat a lot of beef now. Making up for lost time I suppose. Yesterday was Yom Ha-Atzmaut. All over Israel, the air tasted like barbecue. Metal grids of grills turned to altars of greasy, grateful offerings. For home. For here.

As broken as this home is at times, I feel it, always, in my gut. Its tangled sinews of grief and joy. On Yom Ha-Shoah and Yom Ha-Zikaron, a siren blares twice, across the country, like a shofar. Cutting through layers of everything. A rupture in time and space, a message from another world, a plea for mercy and continuity and change. On Yom Ha-Shoah, I attended a tekes (ceremony) at an elementary school with some of my Nativers who volunteer there. Calling Israeli elementary schools frenetic would be an understatement. Teachers and students voice opinions, unabashed, bells bite at ears between classes. Everything is noise and motion. But when the siren sounded, all the eight and nine and ten year olds froze. When the siren sounds, the entire country breaks and breathes. I can think of no memorial more moving.

On Yom Ha-Zikaron, all of Nativ went to Har Herzl, the military cemetary, for the National tekes. People poured into the section with the newest stones to place stones and light candles and lay gerber daisies wrapped in cellophane. I found my way to the grave of Michael Levin, a fellow USYer from Bucks County, PA, a Ramahnik in the Poconos, a Nativ alum, a para-trooper, dedicated to Israel with every everything of his being. His mother, Harriet was there, surrounded by soldiers and citizens and tourists, all changed and charged by Michael's commitment. My friend, Yoni, stood by in his beret, having recently enlisted in the para-troopers because of Mike. On Channel 10, they aired a documentary about Mike called "A Hero in Heaven." It all seems so surreal. He was at Visiting Day. And now on this visiting day, there's the memory of him - a source of blessing.

I want to understand the alchemy of turning memories into blessings. Israelis talk about the country that was served on a silver platter. I pray for one that grows from the ground, all grassroots and wildflowers. . .

A Homeland Full of Strangers: Reflections on a Year in Israel

2006-08-13T05:23:00.000-07:00

(D'var Torah delivered at the Jewish Center of Princeton, 8/12/06)

Social activist Yavilah McCoy says, “The language of social justice is a Jewish tongue.” Last September, I arrived in Israel anxious to learn how this Jewish tongue is spoken and silenced and sung in the Jewish state. As a recipient of the Nomi Fein New Israel Fund/Shatil Social Justice Fellowship and a grant from the Amy Adina Schulman Memorial Fund, I had the opportunity to intern with any organizations in Israel pushing for a more just and egalitarian society. I chose to work at Kol Ha-Isha, a multicultural feminist center in Jerusalem and Yedid's Citizen's Rights Center in Ashkelon, where I ran an after-school enrichment program for thirteen and fourteen-year-olds.

I chose to go to Israel because I wanted to become uncomfortable, to dive into the twists and snarls and hyphens of identity and religious choice in the “Jewish State.” I went with the conviction that as humans, we are copartners in the work of creation, and as Jews, it is our responsibility to repair broken world parts. I went to honor the memories and continue the stories of Amy Adina Schulman and Nomi Fein - two young women who lived by these values. One of whom, Amy Adina, grew up here in our Jewish Center congregation. I wanted to learn about and contribute to pursuits of social justice in a state that aspires to be both Jewish and democratic. A state that exists in the tangled tension between what it means to be “universally human and distinctly Jewish.”

I think of the shuk – the market in the center of Jerusalem – swirling with energy and aromas – how I collided with strangers among heaps of dried mango, candied pecans, and glistening olives. My favorite spot inside the labyrinth of the shuk is a corridor off to the side, where there is a tiny shul with old, bearded men shuckling back and forth directly across from a vegetarian Indian restaurant, opened by young Israelis returning from finding themselves abroad. You feel the force of the fusion between old and new – familiar and foreign. A homeland full of strangers.

This week’s parsha – Eikev – contains the most commonly cited mitzvah in the entire Torah. As the Israelites get closer to entering the Promised Land, Moses reiterates G-d’s commandment to them: “V’ahavtem et ha ger. Love the Stranger. For you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” I want to reflect on my experiences in Israel this year through the lens of this mitzvah. The organizations I was working with are geared towards empowering individuals and communities who are disenfranchised socially and economically within Israeli Society. They look to bridge divides along clefts of class, gender, race and ethnicity. I am thankful for the opportunities I had – as a foreigner - to meet people from all walks of life in Israeli Society – a homeland full of strangers who are always intersecting and defining each other.

When I first arrived in Israel, I met Sari Revkin, the Executive Director of Yedid. She said to me, “Come to Yedid and meet Israel.” Yedid operates 18 citizens rights centers in all parts of the country where people can come for referrals and counseling in the areas of housing, healthcare, employment and education. The centers develop programs to meet the needs of their local communities, many of which are in the periphery, socially and geographically. Simultaneously, Yedid’s central office pushes for policies to repair the systemic injustices tied to Israel’s climbing poverty rates. 1/5 of the country now lives below the poverty line. Like America, there is also a growing phenomenon of the working poor as nearly half of those living in poverty are employed.

The day before Pesach, I was preparing an English lesson for my students in Ashkelon for our after-school enrichment program, “Yesh Matzav.” “Yesh Matzav” is slang for, “There’s a chance. . .” I like to think of it as “There’s always possibility.” That April afternoon, a woman came in the door with a baby in her arms and a toddler clinging to her legs. She asked if we had any matzah. She couldn’t afford to buy the Bread of Poverty. Out of Egypt. Still a stranger.

Ashkelon is a city of 105,000 residents, the majority of whom are new immigrants from the Former Soviet Union and Ethiopia and veteran Israelis of Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) origin, whose families have lived in poverty for generations.

The teenagers I worked with are first generation Israelis – they told me stories of how their parents walked through the Sudan on their way to Ashkelon – while playing with their cell phone cameras – and obsessing over Kelly Clarkson’s latest single. In June, two of the program participants lost their fathers unexpectedly, one after another. Both Maya and Ora’s fathers had immigrated to Israel from Ethiopia in the early 90’s. They had worked tirelessly in various construction and cleaning jobs to secure opportunities for their children. At the shock of their losses, relatives and community members flooded their homes and tents set up in the yards to grieve and to comfort their families. I sat next to Maya and Ora on mats on the floor with the other Yesh Matzav participants during each of those first seven days, stuck for what to say. I fielded questions from siblings and friends sitting with them about America and the eccentricities of English, entertaining the group with the holes in my Hebrew. Women filled and refilled porcelain coffee cups, barely bigger than thimbles, stirring in sugar. They dispensed portions of spicy red lentils framed by Injera, traditional Ethiopian bread. For the next few weeks, whenever I saw Maya, she showed me a tiny keychain with her father’s picture when he was her age in Addis Ababa, a memento she kept attached to her cell phone.

Sometimes the Yedid Ashkelon center rattles as shells plummet into nearby Gaza and planes are often heard whizzing overhead. I have been more fortunate to hear the sounds of my students parsing out algebra problems with math instructor, Yoav Ben-Dror, a father of four who drove to Ashkelon once a week to volunteer after work at a Tel Aviv high tech company. I heard the sounds of pencils steered across pages, as the students practiced drawing portraits with Nadia, an artist and architect who immigrated to Ashkelon from Brazil.

For one English lesson, I chose the Langston Hughes poem “Dreams” as the text of the day. After the students read, translated and repeated the poem, Yoav shook his head and said to me, “Annie – you are very American.” Why? I asked. “You are always talking about dreams – American dreams.” He then proceeded to tell the students his dream for them - that they will go to University, the new Promised Land, that they will study what they want to study.

Before I left, I thanked the “Yesh Matzav” participants for teaching me Hebrew and imparting their grasp of Israeli culture. They responded, “We love your culture. You don’t like it when we’re mean to each other. And you always say please and thank you.” I chuckled to myself, suddenly aware of the traits that slipped into my identity growing up in America, and of the countless nuggets of knowledge that have passed between the Yesh Matzavniks and myself in gestures, in reflexes, in the pace of conversations.

I traveled between Ashkelon and Jerusalem twice a week by bus – I got used to talking to strangers and learned to elbow my way onto the Egged. I joined in as passengers shouted “Nahag! Nahag!” “Driver! Driver!” when the door nearly closed on an elderly woman or the bus overshot a soldier’s stop. I remember one particularly crowded bus ride around Hannukah time. I was standing, smushed in someone’s armpit and bucking back and forth as the bus wound its way up to Jerusalem. All of a sudden, a man shouted, “Who didn’t light the menorah today?” He began lifting tin menorahs out of a plastic bag and passing them around the bus. In that bizarre moment, I couldn’t have felt more at home.

Both Yedid and Kol Ha-Isha work in the field of hospitality – not so much for tourists – though they did welcome me graciously. But they are dedicated to opening spaces for those who are strangers within Israeli society. Cultural theorist Ash Amin of the University of Durham, expands on this notion of hospitality as a welcoming in of the stranger, that does not come from a place of pity or condescension. But rather, a hospitality that stems from mutuality and the recognition that we are all, always hosts and guests at once, our identities molded and morphed by one another. Perhaps this is what means to love the stranger. To recognize that we are who we are relative to the stranger. We are the relative of the stranger. We are the stranger. In eternal Egypts.

Kol Ha-Isha was created in 1994 as a “safe space” for women who felt like strangers in the mostly elite, Ashkenazi feminist movement. Kol Ha-Isha set out to give voice to Mizrahi women – and to other women from different, often marginalized, socio-economic and ethnic communities, religious affiliations, nationalities and sexual orientations. In recent years, Kol Ha-Isha has focused on defending the economic rights of women in Israel. It runs micro-finance projects, offering courses for women who want to start their own businesses based on a talent or passion. It is also home to a Crisis Counseling and Referral Center, and the Antea Galley – an activist artspace.

The gallery is a metaphor for the goals of the organization, its white walls constantly reinvented, nails burrowed in, plucked out, holes refilled as exhibits shift as chairs are re-arranged and the space is endlessly transformed by the women who enter and exit.

The final event I attended in the gallery was the graduation ceremony for participants of one of our micro-business projects – “Women Cook up a Business.” Against a backdrop of a ceramics exhibit by Palestinian and Jewish artists, a group of 24 graduates, women from low-income households in the neighborhoods of central Jerusalem, transformed the gallery into a banquet hall. A buffet boasted Moroccan cous-cous and simmering garlic, a potpourri of shiny tomatoes and olives. A flag marked each dish, giving credit to its culinary artist.

Women huddled around one of their classmates, Ruti, as she cut a golden-brown mushroom pastry into triangles. She explained how she mastered the color of the crust and the texture of the dish without using gluten. Three years ago, Ruti’s husband was diagnosed with diabetes. She embarked on a research campaign, experimenting with alternative flours and sugars and developing a cache of kosher recipes for individuals with special dietary needs. With the tools she acquired in the course, her new-born business has taken off, reminding her daily that it is filling a niche not only within her own Haredi, ultra-orthodox community, but in the city as well.

The name of the business “Pat V’Salo,” comes from the Gemarrah. “It means that if something is missing from someone, not to worry, they will find it,” Ruti explained to me. “It is the idea of knowing that something is there, waiting, even if you can’t get to it at that moment.” Ruti cooks from a two-room home on a tight budget, balancing her burgeoning business with caring for her eight children, from ages one to fifteen, one of whom has special needs. I asked her how she does it – she said she sleeps 4 hours a night.

I spent one sleepless night in the spring at a retreat on multicultural inclusion with members of the staff, board and various projects of Kol Ha-Isha. Israeli women spoke of childhoods in Iraq, Morocco, Siberia, India, Romania, Switzerland, Curacao, the Galilee and East Jerusalem as we engaged in a conversation on the role of Palestinian women in the organization. I was witness to the sticky, exciting and never-ending process of serving as a truly multi-colored center for women. The weekend generated more questions than anything else. Is Kol Ha-Isha a Jewish, Israeli or multicultural organization? Is multiculturalism an appropriate model for discussing relations between Jewish and Palestinian women, whose divide is one not only and not always of cultures, but of "nations?" Are we ready to embark on this process when many Mizrahi women within the organization still don’t feel like they have a voice?

I stayed up all night talking with three Israeli women my age – all citizens, not all Jewish – hailing from an Arab Village up North, from Ukraine, and Switzerland. We talked about all kinds of topics – from dating to reality TV. We spoke in Hebrew – a language that is a mother tongue to none of us.

During one staff meeting at Kol Ha-Isha, a visiting American activist came to speak with us about the challenges of working in a social change organization – She said to us, “Here, you are creating a world that doesn’t exist.” She spoke about the excitement of that task as well as the sense of loss and sacrifice as activists must sometimes choose to become strangers in the worlds they leave behind. I think of my mentor and role model at Kol Ha-Isha – Yael Arami, who grew up in a Yemenite, orthodox family in Petah Tikva. She is a Mizrahi, orthodox, feminist, social activist and former Rabbinical Student. She bounces between circles. . .resisting the voices that tell her the fragments of her identity cannot form a united whole. The words for wholeness and peace are the same in Hebrew.

Yael published her story in a book called The Flying Camel, a compilation of essays by Jewish women of Mizrahi backgrounds. In that book, Iraqi-Israeli professor Ella Shohat writes, "Some of us refuse to dissolve so as to facilitate neat national and ethnic divisions," She warns how war reduces identity to dangerous binaries of black/white, us/them.

I left Israel two weeks ago, when the war had just started to reduce homes to rubble – as the earth was opening up all over to reclaim the bodies of fallen soldiers and citizens from Haifa to Beirut. I can’t stop thinking about whether it is possible to create an Israel where war doesn’t feel so much like home. An Israel of peace, of wholeness.

I am ever grateful to the Schulman and Fein families for this year of tremendous growth, for the chance to fall in love with the strange, homey, complex and colorful country that is Israel. I want to conclude by returning to the story of Nomi Fein, for whom my fellowship is named. Nomi was Bat Mitzvahed over Pesach of 1978. She read the haftorah, from the Book of Isaiah, and built her d’var torah around the line “V Gar Ze’ev em Keves.” “And the wolf will dwell with the lamb.” A vision of the world to come. The verb – gar – to dwell or live - shares a root with the word ger – stranger. I think of the wolf and the lamb as strangers to each other and the messianic image from Nomi’s haftorah as a sign of a time when these strangers will come to practice true hospitality, acknowledging each other from a place of mutual encounter and recognition. A time when they will not only affirm the other’s right to exist, but the power each has to shape the other.

In this week’s parsha, Eikev, in addition to the commandment to love the stranger, we find the commandment to love G-d, in the text of the V’ahavta. One of the ways we are told to show our love for G-d is by hanging mezuzahs on our door-posts, at the gates of our homes. How fitting that we declare our love for G-d at the site where we may start the process of hospitality, of love for the stranger - this holy site of exits and entrances, this perilous border between us and them, self and other.

I think of the uncertainty of Israel’s borders - the nations of the Middle East that push and pull at each other’s flesh and clay– nudging boundaries, busting barricades. And I pray that strangers can learn to love each other, that wolves and lambs can dwell together – within us and between us.

May we see and be seen, hear and be heard for all that we aspire to be. May we risk it all to create worlds that don’t yet exist. May the language of social justice be a universal tongue. Shabbat Shalom.

Korah Revisited

2006-08-09T07:15:00.000-07:00

I weep for the earth opening up all over
swallowing soldiers
wrapped like babies
fresh in the world

"Strange, Suspended Lives"

2006-07-25T05:43:00.000-07:00

“I just wanted to film the strange suspended life there.” Ghassan Salhab, Lebanese Film-maker

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/25/world/middleeast/25beirut.html?hp&ex=1153886400&en=be1c981b68a49147&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Today at work, we talked about strange, suspended lives in the North of Israel. Unreported stories of businesses buckling, people confined to basements, stringing television wires, making do. There is fear that women missing work to take care of kids aren't being compensated, that the offices of social and civil service providers are dark. A 15 yr old girl was killed today in Magher, an Arab Village in the Galil when a rocket burst into her house.

There are men in uniform, boarding busses, heading north -
or south, east and west to fill in for others sent to up there, where there are cedars we sing about in psalms.

Still, Jerusalem's rhythms pulse on as usual.

Auto-Pilot
I spent the morning at Kol Ha-Isha
clicking
printing
collating
stapling

(things a machine could do if our organization had more money)

I want to be a machine today
I don't know what to feel

Tel Aviv, Midnight

Planes dart back and forth belting off-key songs
The kind taught to indoctrinate kids
And scare them out of breaking the rules

Dash L'Aza!
Dash L'Beirut!
Dash L'Aza!
Dash L'Beirut!

Couples cling on dimpled sand in the shadow of the water
A Haredi man lights a cigarette
Some one snaps a photo and I swear the world is ending

I missed the big fireworks here
Now I watch the people watching for war

It's too late to talk to strangers
So I let myself dissolve into the organism of a world
that's achy and messy and impossible to resist

War(ped)

2006-07-16T04:10:00.000-07:00

I feel like I have to say something, though truthfully I don't know what to say. I don't know how to respond to broken borders and blasted buildings - to rockets of all sorts of numbers and makes, sirens, shelters, soldiers in shrouds. An editorial in Haaretz today said this violence is different than the attacks of the Intifada, because it goes beyond busses and cafes and threatens the sacred spaces of homes. People in the North are returning to shelters carved in the ground. Parents all over this bite-sized country dread phones sounding off, commanding their kids back into uniforms.

On Wednesday, I attended a conference celebrating the creation of an index with the names of 200 Israeli women of all different backgrounds to be drafted as potential peace-makers in the event of negotiations with the Palestinians. Member of Knesset and Education Minister Yuli Tamir commented that it was the first time she felt there was truly no partner for peace. Women shouted about whether that will always be the excuse no matter what or whether circuits of dialogue have shorted beyond repair.

Friday afternoon, I paced around the shuk, forraging for a deal on hummus, for a carton of grapes and spices to mix with quinoa. I heard a woman hawking something. Before I could decode her words, I could have sworn she was yelling, "The British are coming! The British are coming!" Meanwhile tourists ordered cheese in broken Hebrew, girls with their heads covered pushed disposable candlesticks and prices on everything dropped as sunset drew closer. The only alarm was in the voice of that woman,who turned out to be pawning hot borekasim (flaky pastries stuffed with cheese, potatoes or veggies).

I'm worried about how war smears everything together. Individuals and governments, speakers of the same language, Gaza and Lebanon. Years spent designing and improving, building, organizing for civil society are smoked. Missles and rhetoric reduce things to rubble and pulp. . .

I pray for restraint, for the ability of those with power on all sides to see beyond their egos. For an Israel where war won't feel so much like home.

2006-07-01T22:40:00.000-07:00

Sunflowers

Hunched over,
Sun pinching at their necks
Waiting like refugees
with shrouded faces

There is no rain in the summer
Only blood
that passes from flesh to earth
through snarls of root and vein
to feed the shriveled skin of the sunflowers

Meduzot (Jellyfish)

Glowing globes of mystery
Thousands of universes
exhaled onto a scalloped shoreline
The sting of countless worlds that do not exist

Aussified

I want to be in a city with a grumbling stomach.
I want to roil in its appetites.
But the Jews of Vienna are pent up in Yad Vashem.

Even the ghosts here are quiet,
Strolling along trolley tracks taut as violin strings
Past the tattoo parlor on Judenstrasse,
Barely glimpsing at their monument -
A library of stone.

Vendors in powdered wigs beckon and sell,
"Bitte," "Danke," "Thank you for your visit"
As though nothing has transpired between Mozart and today

While the ghosts wave good nacht
to the gold-crusted buildings
to the marble curled like smoke.

Their silence deafens and curdles in my ears
I strike at the rock, waiting for tears.

In the News

2006-06-12T21:46:00.000-07:00

Birthwrong

Co-authored by Annie and Hannah, freelance BDH columnists

Birthright Israel recently rescinded the admission of David Ben-Goldberg to the free 10-day program when they learned of his intent to extend his stay in Israel for the purpose of joining the Japanese Sumo Wrestler weeklong "Fellowship and Peace" tour.

Ben-Goldberg, a student at Brandeis University, was shocked and outraged to learn of his expulsion from the trip. The Jewish Studies and Japanese History major had been spending all of his evenings and weekends preparing for the excursion. He had recently achieved the status of yokozuna, the highest rank for a wrestler, at the Waltham Sumo Wrestling Institute.

Birthright first became suspicious of Ben-Goldberg's plans when he requested two seats and six extra-carb meals for his complimentary El-Al flight. Birthright representatives confirmed that his removal from the program was part of a broader policy to prevent participants from "exploiting the free plane ticket to further 'non-Jewish causes.'" International director of marketing for Birthright elaborated that, "it is not in our agenda to help people find programs that aim to strengthen the claims of other ethnic groups."

"I just wanted to see the other side. Another perspective," said Ben-Goldberg, who is unable to see his own toes due to his massive stomach. "Also, Sumo wrestlers have many things in common with Jews," he asserted. "For example, during the holidays, Haredi men eat approximately the same number of calories as Sumo wrestlers. Also, without wrestling, there would be no Jews. Jacob, our patriarch, wrestled with an angel. And that's how he became Israel. Wrestling is totally the new Zionism."

A defiant Ben-Goldberg continued, "And it's not like I'm that Brown student who went to Gaza or wherever because he heard they had the best hummus. Besides, if the sumos kidnapped me and took me back to their sadogatake (stable), it would be like a dream come true." Ben-Goldberg is now trying to raise money to join the Sumo mission on his own.

Kol Ha-Isha Meets Kilroy

2006-03-08T14:39:00.000-08:00

Happy International Women's Day! I spent the holiday in Tel Aviv, with women directors from social service and social change organizations from all over the country as part of Kol Ha-Isha's project, "Women Renewing Management."

Yvonne, the exuberant facilitator, celebrated her birthday today. She brought the cloth, the multi-colored stones and the candle we used this weekend to build a small altar of sorts at the center of our circle (see previous entry). The theme was "work" as the day commemorates the 1857 strike of hundreds of textile workers in New York, demanding living wages and reasonable hours. We heard two lectures by professors at Bar Ilan University - one on unrecognized, unpaid work done by women and another on supervision and mentorship by women and for women/ how to build networks that strengthen individual women and bridge social gaps. We danced and moved and flowed to a CD called "Gardens of Eden" with the lights dimmed. Did I mention how much I love Kol Ha-Isha?

Hopping back to Jerusalem, I celebrated the chag at the Cinameteque with Nadine and Sanaa. We listened to feminist, activist Hannah Safran, speak on her new book "Don't Wanna Be Nice Girls," a history of Israeli feminism. Her words were followed by a screening of a gorgeous Dutch movie, "Antonia," from which my head is still whirling.

The following picture was discovered on Danya Ruttenberg's blog at jerusalemsyndrome.blogspot.com and created by Miriam who posted it at http://sospire.blogspot.com. I call it "Kol Ha-Isha Meets Kilroy" in memory of my role as Gladys the Riveter in my eigth grade play, "Kilroy Was Here."

Along the lines of empowerment and inspiration, I am deeply grateful for the ten days I spent at home - navigating New York with friends from Brown and Ramah, jogging with my dad along the Delaware-Raritan canal, cruising through Princeton with my mom, dining in DC, and spending a dazzling shabbat in Plainsboro with family, neighbors, roommates, bunkmates, beachmates, skimates and 2nd grade teammates. Thank you all for making me so happy!!! Please stay in touch.

As most of you know, I have trouble sitting still. Adler and I found a last minute travel deal. We are heading to Athens tomorrow for the weekend. I will bring Lysistrata to read on the plane - perhaps an appropriate text of intersection between International Women's Day and the Acropolis. . .

"wildpeace"

2006-03-07T06:24:00.000-08:00

Trunks packed with crates of oranges and salatim, rolls and cherry tomatoes, we pulled into the gravel parking lot of Neve Shalom, a village where Arabs and Jews conscientiously coexist. A group of about twenty women from the board, the staff and the various projects of Kol Ha-Isha gathered in a circle in a studio with a vanilla colored hardwood floor, women from Mizrahi, Sephardi, Palestinian and Ashkenazi backgrounds. In the center, we created a type of altar, a knotted silk cloth with a candle and a vase of kalaniyot, loud red wildflowers in season now. A woman named Viki led us in a movement workshop. She asked us to consider our cultural relationship to space; how we take up space, how much space we safeguard between ourselves and others, how we move our bodies through space. Each woman found a spot outside to reflect on these issues, sitting cross-legged beneath sun soaked palm trees, overlooking a montage of farm plots and fields freckled with wildflowers, high rise buildings on the far horizon.

We regrouped to share our experiences of space. One woman described growing up in a two room house with six people. She spoke of how she would retreat into her walkman and books, her private palace. A volunteer from Switzerland spoke of adherence to watches, of formality through distance. We discussed the use of clothing to cover the body and preserve personal space in some cultures and the zig-zagging of traditional Middle Eastern dances. Viki cranked up the volume on a boombox and in a village where Jews and Arabs assert there is room for all of us, we began moving in our space for the weekend, stepping lightly then sinking into the floor, brushing against each other and backing away. We pondered our arrivals and departures into physical, emotional and spiritual space. Each woman led the group in a movement of her choice.

We had a picnic lunch outside, women carefully arranging tubs of hummus and eggplant and salty cheese, dicing cucumbers, and dipping breads. When we returned to the space, Yvonne, the past director of Kol Ha-Isha placed multi-colored stones in a ring around the candle in the center of the space. Each woman spoke when she felt moved, telling her story, of labels and rebellions, of struggling and passing. Of childhoods in Iraq, Morocco, Siberia, India, Romania, Switzerland, Curacao, the Galilee, East Jerusalem . . .of seven languages in one home, of fighting with fathers and mothers to take on roles outside the home, of staking out rights to sexuality and spirituality and hybridity. Shedding sabra skins, women cried, reiterating painful experiences of confinement, of identity boxes and glass ceilings.

I am reading a book right now called, "The Flying Camel: Essays on Identity by Women of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Heritage." In America and Israel, Ashkenazi norms and conflict with Arab nations, have cornered and silenced Mizrahi women. "Some of us refuse to dissolve so as to facilitate neat national and ethnic divisions," Ella Shohat writes of her history as an Iraqi-Israeli living in America. "But war is the friend of binarisms, leaving little place for complex identities," she writes of her seemingly conflicting concerns for Israelis and Iraqis during the Gulf War. The identity of the Arab-Jew poses a threat to the simplistic us/them, black/white ways of thinking. Currently, half of the Jewish population of Israel is comprised of people of Middle Eastern and North African backgrounds. Since their arrival (often dislocation) in Israel in the years following the founding of the state and rupture in the region, they have faced discrimination on social and economic levels, pinned as primitive and backwards, handed canons of Jewish texts without their stories and philosophers and songs. There are still wage gaps today between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi employees in similar positions.

Kol Ha-Isha was founded in 1994 in its current form to change the elite, Ashkenazi face of the feminist movement in Israel. At the time of its establishment, there was a case in the Israeli Supreme Court regarding the rights of women to be pilots in the Israeli air force. This decision polarized the feminist movement. On the one hand, feminism promised an alternative discourse to the militarism of the Israeli army. From another angle, the women who would have the opportunity to serve this elite role in the army would most likely come from well-to-do, Ashkenazi families. Kol Ha-Isha sought to reach out to meet the needs of women from diverse backgrounds, especially Mizrahi and Sephardi women, to amplify their voices in Israeli Society. The process of integration, of becoming a multi-colored organization was frought and sticky. At the time, the founding mothers of Kol Ha-Isha decided on a model of "quarters," for ensuring that Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, Palestinian women and lesbians would be represented equally in the organization. They continue to debate the relationship between equal representation by numbers to equal clout and voice. The organization continues to search for more effective tools for resisting Ashkenazi, male, heterosexual hegemony in Israeli society.

Over the past few years, Kol Ha-Isha has focused on economic empowerment programs for women to help them cope with unemployment and deteriorating social services here. We currently run an employment readiness course and two micro-business initiatives,"A Business of One's Own," and "Women Cook up a Business," to help women turn their talents into sources of income. The projects reach out to many women from Mizrahi backgrounds as well as immigrants from Russia.

Kol Ha-Isha currently supports one project specifically for Palestinian women – a support group for students at Hebrew University, many of whom come from small Arab villages in the North to an environment dominated by Jewish cultural norms. Palestinian women participate in other projects such as a network of women directors of social service and social change organizations, and others volunteer in the Crisis Counseling Center. However, there are no Palestinian women on the staff. The idea for last weekend's retreat was initiated to discuss the role of Palestinian women in the Kol Ha-Isha and the role of Kol Ha-Isha for Palestinian women. The situation is murky in Jerusalem – because although technically, East Jerusalem is under the auspices of the same municipality as West Jerusalem, its primarily Arab residents are not Israeli citizens. What would it mean for Kol Ha-Isha to reach out to this area under occupation? Is Kol Ha-Isha an appropriate organization to assess and meet the needs of Palestinian women? Will focusing on Palestinian issues detract from the work to be done on inequalities that still pervade among Jewish women? Is Kol Ha-Isha a Jewish organization, an Israeli organization or a multicultural organization? Is multiculturalism an appropriate model for discussing relations between Jewish and Palestinian women, whose divide is one not just of cultures, but of nations? The weekend generated more questions than anything else. And a community of women committed to asking and listening and delving together.

Friday night, I sat with three women around my age, jabbering in Hebrew, a language that is a mother tongue to none of us. Sanaa grew up in the Arab town of Tamra in the North of Israel. She went to boarding school in India and is currently studying pharmacy at Hebrew University. Nadine made aliyah from Switzerland two years ago and is studying International Relations at Hebrew University. Rina came to Israel from Siberia when she was eleven and is studying social work at Hebrew U. She is one quarter Jewish by blood, and was granted citizenship according to the laws of the State, though she is not Jewish. When Rina joined the conversation, she found us sitting on her bed. "Kiboosh," (Occupation), Sanaa joked. We laughed. We spoke about frustrating laws of belonging, of being profiled at airports, about elections, about dating.

I appreciated the down-time throughout the weekend, the frequent and lingering breaks between intense sessions. I felt at home surrounded by other women with shpilkes, who couldn't sit too long without peeing or stretching or smoking. Every hour or two, we moved from inside to outside, shelling sunflower seeds, sighing, slipping into side conversations. We emptied tray after tray of sesame and tehina cookies, baked by two of the graduates of "Women Cook Up a Business."

* * *

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel speaks of Shabbat as a "palace in time." All week we obsess over matters of space, marking borders, building out and up. On Shabbat, we revel over glimpses of eternity, uncontainable, indivisible, to which every one has an equal and infinite share.

Shabbat morning was dashingly blue at Neve Shalom. I walked alone to a path through a chain of green hills speckled with wildflowers –

Red Kalaniyot punching through glass stems and surrendering,
Shimmery Rakafot positioned for landing like retired war-planes,
Tiny blue flowers popped open like eyes after bad dreams.
Roots and petals wrapping and comforting.
Bees whispering things.

Surrounded by colors coexisting, I was reminded of a line from Yehuda Amichai's poem wild peace:

"Let it come
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace."

I pray.

Only in Israel

2006-01-10T02:14:00.000-08:00

"Among the ways in which physicians hope to stimulate Sharon's senses Tuesday is to place a plate of shawarma, the sliced meat dish said to be the prime minister's favorite, close enough for him to smell it, Army Radio reported." - Haaretz 1/10/05 (. . .)

The country is waiting to mourn. When it first happened, tv's in every macolet (mini-market) flashed footage from the facade of Hadassah hospital. Now, it's as if the Prime Minister's critical, but questionable condition has faded into the wallpaper of uncertainty that is the backdrop for life here.

I keep thinking of the symbolism of hemorhaging, of blood seeping and spilling in this place, of procedure after procedure, the risks of clotting and unclotting. The words for surgery and analysis are the same in Hebrew. Who can unravel the snarled veins of this conflict? What about the scar tissue?

To Be Continued . . .

Bad Boys, Bad Boys . . .

2005-12-03T09:34:00.000-08:00

Adler and I took a little stroll around the old city today. Near the Jaffa Gate, men in dusty jeans push carts towering with "bagele," huge hoops of carbs and sesame seeds. Craving a snack, we lift a bread coil off of the stack and grab a small packet of zataar spice to give it some personality. We sit on a stoop of Jerusalem stone, watching Franciscan monks pass next to Israeli women in tank tops and sunglasses, tourists with cameras clipped to their belts, kindergarteners chasing each other, girls skipping in long skirts and ponytails. We tear off chunks of bread and carefully sift the green zataar powder into the doughy crevices. Scrumptious.

An Israeli soldier approaches us and stares at our sandwich. He proceeds to inform us that he saw green flakes falling onto the ground from across the road and assumed we were preparing a slightly different kind of snack. One that is illegal in most places other than Amsterdam. There is indeed a party in Israel's multi-party system whose entire platform is the legalization of marijuana. Rumor has it Peres was thinking about joining the "Green Leaf" team before Sharon welcomed him to "Kadima."

All the World is a Mustache Contest

2005-11-25T17:59:00.000-08:00

Amir Peretz won the Labor Party Primary a few weeks back. Labor pulled out of the government coalition, Sharon left Likud to build a new party and elections are scheduled for March. Peretz could potentially be the first Mizrachi Prime Minister. He is a fiery leader whose parents came to Israel from Morocco and built a life for their family in the development town of Sderot. Peretz was the head of Israel's Histadrut, or Trade Labor Union. He laments the fact that right wing and left wing have come to connote the location of borders rather than the plight of single mothers. He is anxious to bridge the deepening cleft between the haves and the have-nots here. But most importantly, he is known for his bold facial hair choices, his indispensable and voluptuous dark brown mustache. Instead of ribbons, stickers, pins or lawn signs (not that there are so many lawns in this country), I propose that Peretz' Labor Party distributes stick-on mustaches to willing and unwilling supporters. I'm convinced that mustaches are even cooler than the skater hair-dos all the guys had in Middle School.

In Ashkelon, I have been participating in a community organizing project. The idea of the project is to empower citizens of Ashkelon to reflect on their city, dream up changes they want to see and to make them happen. During the first meeting, the facilitator of the course asked the group to brainstorm leaders. A few immigrants from the former Soviet Union in the class shouted out, "Lenin," "Stalin," "Marx," in rapid succession. There's something about communism. And there's something about mustaches.

I saw Peretz speak at a Peace Rally/ memorial service on the 10th anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin's death. Kikar Rabin was filled with people, teenagers lighting votive candles, red strings dangling from blue cotton scout shirts. Enormous banners stretched across clumps of people, crying, "Geneva Accord!" and "Peace Now!" Kiosks brimmed with activists peddling pins and pamphlets and stickers. Israeli musicians played. The crowd sang along. The Clintons paced across the stage, live from New York. Bill Clinton proclaimed his love for Yitzhak, his hope for the region and delivered his tagline, "Shalom Haver." He also most certainly sang along to the Hatikvah.

There is a sense of nostalgia in this country for the moment before Rabin's death. At the rally, his face was broadcast on enormous screens winging the stage. Balloons and faces blurred in the background from 1995 that could have easily been mistaken for the gathering some ten years later. Only the society is older now, and tired. Sabras with shiny eyes. I think about the kiwi I tried to peel for Shabbat dinner last week that was too ripe and oozed out through the crack in its skin. There was an urgency in the shouts for peace from the speakers - a craving that smokes with tire fragments, mangled metal and parts on pavement - on all sides of a dreary concrete wall.

Enough Already! I wish I could shout.

The mc called for a moment of silence in memory of Yitzhak Rabin, grandfather and father to a whole nation, even its kids who hadn't yet learned to read when he was gunned down. 200,000 people exhaled. And to my sincere shock, not one cell phone rang.

I've spent the past week at the Antea Gallery at Kol HaIsha hanging and advertising a new exhibition that will open this Thursday. It includes art by Israeli and Palestinian women about human rights in times of armed conflict. The title of the exhibition, "And turn into a single scream!" comes from a poem written by one of the artists. All of the private despair, families stripped, livelihoods bulldozed and blitzed swirling "into a single scream" dense enough to birth the universe all over again.

I am thankful for my freedom of movement. I went for a run the other day wherever I wanted to. It was raining diagonally. I had worn shorts without thinking. People at intersections reacted to my outfit, "You're not cold?" "It's not summer!" Though my Jewish mother is more than a Mayflower's ride away, total strangers have no qualms about stepping into that role.

Thank you for listening.

"Becoming Uncomfortable"

2005-10-29T03:22:00.000-07:00

Sur Bahur*

Swollen bags, punctured bed foam,
mangled wires, blank bottles
The van gasps like a horse with broken pipes
Heaving us over hills
Along creeks of trash
There’s no-where left to put it these days
A guy with gelled hair sips a coke through a straw
The stoop of MacChicken is crowded
A tiny boy drops his notebook from a pile
heading for stairs
I knock and point through tinted glass
At the laminated cartoon faces
at blocky smiles
accidentally abandoned
He stares and goes.

* Sur Bahur is an Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem

__________________________________
Hadera

The boy wanted to be confetti
and firework buried in sky
Spraying scalding oil, violet streaks of cabbage
Tomato pulp and cellophane seeds
in a cocktail of invisible enzymes

Now the men scramble for pieces of flesh
as if it were Bar Mitzvah candy

Headlines remember
those bound
by the covenants of their fathers
________________________________________________________________
"What the hell is going on in Jerusalem?"

Friday morning I joined the organization Ir-Amim (City of Nations) on a study tour of Jerusalem's tense and tangled borders. We drove along the municipal boundary of the city, observing the places where the "Jerusalem Envelope" portion of the Separation Barrier intersects with, swells beyond or contracts inside this political line. Ir-Amim was founded two years ago by some of the leading Israeli players in civil rights and legal advocacy. The organization operates with the understanding of the symbolic and political weight of Jerusalem in any future Israeli-Palestinian settlement. Ir-Amim seeks to expose and confront the realities on the ground in the shared city. They advocate for the cessation of settlement expansion in the city and work with political associations in Arab East Jerusalem to build infrastructure. They analyze each section of the barrier based on the criterion of security, human rights and long-term political implications.

As the bus first departed for the parts of the city Israelis rarely venture into, Amos told us that the tour would not provide answers and would most likely leave us more confused. The Jerusalem of ancient myth was the navel of the world, the source of creation, of law and order, of gurgling chaos. The city is at once fractured, with half of it hidden from view of most Jews, and economically, culturally and topographically impossible to sort. Ir-Amim works to problematize the Jewish mantra of an “Undivided Jerusalem.” They use the analogy of a divorce to describe their political work in pursuit of parity and pragmatics in a two state solution.

When the state of Israel gained control of Jerusalem in 1967, it also annexed 70,000 Palestinian people. Since that point, the government has strived to maximize its stake in land and increase the Jewish population. Today, Arabs comprise one third of the city’s population. In an earlier blog entry, I wrote a bit about the legal status Arabs of East Jerusalem. To reiterate, these non-Jewish Jerusalemites are known as permanent residents. They pay taxes to the Israeli government and are entitled to social services. They can vote in local elections, but not in national elections. Neither citizens of the P.A. or Israel, they are virtually nobody’s constituents. As I witnessed on the tour, there is a huge disparity in financial resources allotted to the Jewish and non-Jewish neighborhoods of the Israeli capital. Shredded tires, cardboard boxes and plastic bags line the roads of East Jerusalem, which are in dire need of paving.

When we boarded the mini bus for our tour, Amos Gil, the executive director of Ir-Amim handed each participant a map - a blur of green and blue and red lines, light-blue and yellow blotches depicting the Green Line (the pre-1967 borders), the Municipal Boundary, the Route of the Barrier, Israeli and Palestinian built-up areas as well as planned settlements.

We climbed out of the van at different vantage points where we looked at the impact of the security fence on people’s access to their communities, to employment healthcare and education. We also discussed the efficacy of the wall in preventing terror attacks and international reactions to different sections of the route.

A hole was left in the fence near Bethlehem so that Jews might have access to Rachel’s Tomb. In 2004, a man crossed through this gap to carry out the bombing of the # 19 bus in Jerusalem. Also vital to note is that no terror attacks have been carried out by residents of Israel/East Jerusalem.

Some interesting legal muddles have surfaced in village of Beit Sahur, which is just south of Jerusalem and adjacent to Bethlehem. The route of the fence annexed the tip of this village into the city of Jerusalem. Under this context, the Israeli government arrested people who had lived in this area all their lives for being in Jerusalem “illegally,” without Israeli resident status. Human Rights organizations are battling the Israeli government in court over a clause known as the Absentee Property Law. According to this doctrine, if land-owners are no where to be found, the government reserves the right to confiscate their land. Near Beit Sahur, the fence has blocked people from accessing their farms and olive groves.

In the North of Jerusalem, within the municipal boundary, there is a village called Kafr Aq’b. Its residents have always been Jerusalemites. The separation fence cuts the village off from the city, leaving the land linked, instead, to the area of Ramallah though the residents identify Jerusalem as their center of life. Everyday, 6,000 students must cross through checkpoints within Jerusalem to get to school. When the separation barrier is completed along its proposed route, like the residents of Kafr Aq’b, 55,000 of the 230,000 Arab Jerusalemites will be on the wrong side of the fence.

In some places the barrier is built of gray, concrete panels that jut out in a spine along the sandy hills. In other places, the barrier is a shorter span of barbed wire and chain links, fifty to seventy meters wide, with a road in the middle for military use. We saw the most famous chunk of the barrier, which runs along the hem of Abu Dis. Its image was slapped on front pages around the world when Israel began construction of the wall in 2004, creating an international public relations disaster. I remember seeing it in South Africa under the headline, “Apartheid Wall.” The monotone cement is covered in spray paint:

“From Warsaw Ghetto to Abu Dis Ghetto.”
“No for Another Wailing Wall.”
“Love Everybody. Hate Apartheid.”
“Seattle is with Palestine.”

It is the last Friday of Ramadan. Police jeeps and Israeli soldiers patrol a slot in the barrier as lines of people wait to get through to Jerusalem. Only the ones with blue identity cards can pass.

I like Ir-Amim’s rational approach, its focus on pragmatics, on people’s day-to-day realities amidst a conflict held hostage by zealotry. At this juncture, I think it is crucial for the Israeli government to provide infrastructure and adequate civil services to its East Jerusalem residents. Because of their lack of political clout, international pressure is a must. One of my goals in this blogging endeavor is to try and present the complexities of the situation in this country, frequently glossed over by the media and omitted from Hebrew School curricula. Please write me with comments and questions. I have volumes of my own. Brown President Ruth Simmons said that the only way we learn is by becoming uncomfortable. I’m learning like crazy.

MONTH IN REVIEW

2005-10-27T01:58:00.000-07:00

SINLESS BIRTHDAY

When I told people my birthday fell on Yom Kippur this year, they responded with speechlessness and sympathy. No frosted cupcakes or frothy beers for you this year. Just judgement, fasting and flagellating. It turned out to be one of my favorite days in Israel. On a day where we are obsess over transformation, hopeful and fearful, the entire city transforms. Normally, the roads near my apartment are busy with cars and trucks and busses spitting fumes. Most people wait for the electronic man to blink green before even thinking about crossing the street as the drivers are a bit agressive in this country. Jaywalking here could be a sport in the X-Games. Elisheva, my supervisor from Shatil gave the social justice fellows photocopies from a book about cultural exchanges between Americans and Israelis. One page contained a diagram of an Israeli parking lot and an American one. In the rendering of the Israeli lot, cars were parked in all different directions, on top of sidewalks and blocking each other in. What a country. Anyway, on Yom Kippur, no one drives. Instead, the streets are full of kids full of glee pedaling bicycles and circling on scooters. My favorite vehicle I spotted was a tricycle on a stick. Parents pushed kids along the paved surfaces of the busy Emek Refaim and General Pierre Koenig Streets. Couples in white flowy clothing walked with dogs. A group of teenage girls sat gossiping in the middle of the street. The city stopped to breathe. It was a refreshing day. After the sun slipped down and the gates swung shut, I celebrated being 22 with a delicious meal at the Jakar household and a gathering at a bar/movie theatre with new and old friends.

The country has been swept off its feet the past month, spinning from one chag (holiday) to the next. Wooden, leafy booths have descended on every kosher restaurant in the city, on balconies and in backyards. Many pilgrims have flocked to the city for the festival of Sukkoth. Some have even tried to lay the cornerstone for the Third Temple. A few nights ago, I dined with fellow Ramahnicks in the sukkah of the Seyah Family, who spent their first summer in Lake Como, PA this year with their three ridiculously adorable sons. Sheryl Seyah happens to be in the catering business. We reminisced about Ramah while nibbling on baked brie, roasted artichoke and goat cheese dip and plum torte. I am thankful for the Ramah connection - I have bumped into shlichim (Israelis who worked at camp) in coffee shops in my neighborhood, at bus stops in Ashkelon. I spent Rosh Hashannah with the Jakar and Brown families, who I grew up with at camp and the holidays felt like home.

GRAIL FOR SALE

I spent the beginning of sukkoth wandering in the desert, land reputed to be the grazing and stomping ground of the Israelites en route to the Promised Land. I took a four day trip to Jordan's Hashemite Kingdom with Hannah, her friend Ben from Morocco (from Philly) who is getting his Masters in Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University and Moshe, a frisbee playing geology buff studying at Ben Gurion University. Hannah is an Arabic wiz, which was not only vital in terms of getting around, but made the trip much more fun as she received multiple marriage proposals by men floored by her linguistic talents.

We crossed the border at the lip of the Red Sea, walking from Eilat to Aqabba. We hopped in the car with a "Turist Driver" we met a few steps into Jordan, who set us up with his friend Zeidan, who runs a Bedouin Meditation Camp in the patch of desert known as Wadi Rum. Zeidan drove off the road into a small village to fetch Mahmoud, who would be our guide for our day and a half of trekking in the desert. Zeidan and Mahmoud squeezed into the driver's seat together, speeding down strrips of road to Wadi Rum. I am mildly obsessed with the desert. Ever since I spent Passover in Namibia in 2004, I can't get enough of the red sand, dimpled dunes and towering ridges.

We arrived at the Bedouin Village inside the gate to the Wadi Rum nature reserve. Zedian offered us "shia," tea in his pink concrete home. We sat on cushions on the floor with floral patterns. On the wall, a picture was proudly displayed of Zeidan shaking hands with the King, the Crown Prince Abdullah. Many of the residents of the village had four-wheel drive vehicles parked in front of their homes, as guiding tourists through the desert is the main source of income for the village. We climbed into the back of a truck with a canvas roof and gripped the metal sides tightly as Mahmoud took off, spraying sand. There were footprints and hoof marks and jeep tracks in the grainy expanse. We stopped to see some Nabataean writings, to hop over boulders and to scale a shiny pumpkin colored dune. We arrived at the Meditation Camp for sunset. Mahmoud prepared more shia for us. He dug a pit of sand in which to roast shiny onions and potatoes, chicken (which I abstained from) and a stew of scarlet tomatoes, eggplant and cauliflower. The next morning we hiked back to the village. Upon arriving inside the border, the call to prayer blared from a speaker at the mosque. Each phrase stretched out in all directions, ricocheting off the massive faces of rock sourrounding the village.

We made our way to Wadi Musa (The Valley of Moses). As the story goes, somewhere around here, Moses struck the rock to get water for the parched Israelites and was consequently denied entry to the Promised Land. Wadi Musa is also the hub for tourist accomodations for people on their way to the lost city of Petra. We checked into a colorful hostel called the Valentine Inn, with tinsel decorations and posters imploring, "Smile!" The hotel boasted a 3JD (Jordanian Dinar) dinner buffet with over 20 salads and a "movie by consensus" every evening, which incidentally, always turns out to be Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. At the entrance to Petra itself, you can visit the Indiana Jones Snack Shop, its marquis decorated with sketches of Harrison Ford and Sean Connery. The Treasury at Petra is probably most famous for its role as the Temple in the film. Tourists like us flooded the dusty roads of Petra the next morning to gawk at the architectural wonders, columns carved from stone with rust, golden and violet swirls. Apparently Brown professor, Martha Joukowsky, was in charge of excavations at Petra. One of the many vendors selling drinks and jewelry inside Petra told us that there was a Brown University flag at the monastery. We ascended a trail that coiled around cliffs in search of this Holy Grail. We found only a lone donkey, grazing in front of the stone structure.

Our final destination on our Jordan jaunt was Amman, "a modern Arab city." We arrived in the afternoon. Moshe's father's colleague's brother Mohammed met up with us at our hostel in Amman the evening we arrived to give us a special tour of the city. He pointed out the Roman Ampitheatre, the monstrous U.S. Embassy, the largest in the Middle East and then led us on a pilgrimage to the Mecca Mall. During Ramadan, the city comes to life after sundown. The mall was packed with people. Children concentrated on cups of gelato. Men in Kafiyas wandered into the Timberland store. I saw a poster for the Chappelle Show DVD. A blend of tradition and change. There were women in hijabs (head scarves) and women with hair loose on their backs. In other parts of the city, it is rare to see women in cafes or restaurants at all. I was most struck by the Starbucks booth in the middle of the mall, with special marketing for the Ramadan season. "Share this special time. Gather. Enjoy," was scripted over an image of a the new Creme Brule Latte, its whipped cream dome huddling between silhouttes of mosques. Capitalism is indeed the universal language.

RAIN DANCING

The month of holidays drew to a close Tuesday evening, with the holidays of Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, squeezed into one day in Israel and spread over two days in the Diasporic world. We prayed for rain and danced with Torahs as we finished the cycle and rolled the scroll back to the beginning. I really love the prayer for rain. It courses through the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and Aaron mentioning the role of water in their lives and asking for water in ours "for a blessing, not a curse," and "for life and not death." (I'll be on the lookout a version that includes the matriarchs). This prayer spoke loudly to me after months of twirling tentacles of hurricanes tearing up homes in New Orleans, Mississippi, Texas, Mexico and Florida. Also, while guarantees of sunny days don't make me sad, I know the desert is thirsty. For the last round of holidays, I was content to celebrate our dynamic entanglements with nature and text in Jerusalem.

JOB DESCRIPTIONS

Prior to my tiyul (trip) in Jordan, I was a non-profit tourist for 6 weeks in Israel. There are so many issues in this nation(s)-state the size of Jersey, I'm dizzy often. "Seven Year Old Blames Sharon." Sometimes I think I am reading the Onion. A seven year old girl who was evacuated from Gaza has stopped eating as a form of protest against the Prime Minister. This makes national headlines?

At first I thought I wanted to work directly on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - but the types of projects I have the opportunity to do with other organizations seem more interesting and challenging. I will be working with two different organizations. One is called "Kol HaIsha," which literally translates as "The Woman's Voice." The name plays on the Rabbinic prohibition of women's voices in spaces where men are praying. It's a multicultural feminist organization in downtown Jerusalem that provides crisis counseling, small business training for women from all ethnic/religious/socio-economic backgrounds and sexual orientations. The organization does public advocacy work for women's rights, economic justice and ending violence against women. It is home to the Antea gallery, a women's artspace, which explores controversial issues and recognizes the voices of new artists. I think I will be doing public relations work, grant-writing and programming for the gallery. But I'll keep you posted.

The second organization is called Yedid, which means friend. Yedid runs 18 citizen's rights centers around the country, in communities where many people are economically and socially marginalized. Yedid's goal is to help people help themselves, to become engaged in social issues and to break the cycle of poverty. People can come into Yedid for information and referrals regarding rights in terms of housing, employment, healthcare etc. The centers only have one permanent staff member each, the director. Otherwise, they are staffed entirely by volunteers. I'll be interning at the center in Ashkelon two days a week. Ashkelon is south of Jerusalem, on the coast and the city population is 40% immigrants, mostly from the Former Soviet Union and Ethiopia. I will be coordinating an afterschool program in Ashkelon. I will also be working on a community organizing initiative there with a guy from L.A. who has extensive background in labor organizing. I look forward to learning from him and from listening to the stories of people from all different backgrounds who are living Ashkelon.

WISCONSIN CHEESE

The Wisconsin Plan is a hot item on the agendas of many non-profit organizations in Israel concerned with economic justice. Israel recently imported America's Welfare to Work Program, along with private companies to implement it in 4 cities including Ashkelon, Jerusalem, Nazareth and Hadera (the site of yesterday's suicide bombing). These are among cities with the highest rates of poverty in a country where one third of children live below the poverty line. The program here is called Me Ha-Lev, which translates as "From the Heart." The way it works is that participants must report to the Wisconsin Center in their city for 30-40 hours a week in order to receive welfare benefits for their families. At the center, people wait to receive referrals and training and if they are unable to find employment, they are placed in mandatory community service positions. The Workers Advice Center in Israel identifies some of the major flaws of the Wisconsin Plan in Israel on its website. Along with the privatization of social services comes business incentives for the companies in charge often at the expense of the workers. The companies who run the Wisconsin centers increase their profits by cutting welfare costs. One of the major ways to scale back government welfare expenses is to deny benefits to people who fail to meet the program's requirements. Two thirds of Wisconsin plan participants are over the age of forty, making it more difficult for them to find work. Others are disabled or sick, single parents or Arab women, for some of whom working outside of the home is contrary to cultural values. In addition, the plan includes no vehicles for the creation of employment opportunities in non-professional sectors in Israel. It also has the potential of generating further unemployment by providing free, volunteer labor to charity organizations. I expect to learn more about the plan, especially the impact it is making on individuals and communities in Ashkelon. I just wanted to fill you in on a major economic justice issue in the country.

Ikea is the New Jerusalem

2005-10-03T06:16:00.000-07:00

“Pikak” is the word for traffic jam in Hebrew. As you approach the exit for Netanya, intervals between cars and horn blasts shrink. The pikak lasts until you reach the blue corrugated walls of the Ikea warehouse that calls to travelers, to home-owners and permanent residents. Once inside, you can pace and pause and examine tableaus of possibilities for living rooms and kitchens, bathrooms and children’s bedrooms. The colorful products, shelving units, area rugs and stainless steel kitchen tools are imported mostly from Europe. Bins of plastic extension cords in electric orange and ice trays with star shaped molds. Votive candles, plasma television screens, swiveling desk chairs, framed mirrors. Ikea- The store for all things homey in the homeland.

I have a map of Jerusalem. It’s a 26 page atlas that outlines the neighborhoods, the streets, the museums and the post offices. On some pages, the details fade as your eyes move toward the right side. The area of the city known as East Jerusalem isn’t included in this record of my home city for the year.

Residents in mostly Arab East Jerusalem have the choice whether or not to pursue Israeli citizenship. If they are not citizens, they are permanent residents, though they may have been here before Israel was a state. According to the law, the Israeli government claims the right to demolish homes erected without permits. However, it has become increasingly difficult for residents of East Jerusalem to acquire building permits. Home demolitions have become more and more common in the past few years.

While the separation barrier has thwarted some terror attacks, especially in the area of Jerusalem, it has severed communities and cut people off from needed economic and cultural resources. Meanwhile, policies on the table propose a swelling of the borders of Jewish Jerusalem with a new settlement area known as E1 to boast thousands of homes and even hotels. Annexing this area between Jerusalem and Maalei Adumim (a West Bank settlement) can only further hinder the chance for relationship repair between Israelis and Palestinians.

I think what is most disturbing to me is that I would never know about any of this unless I wanted to hear about it. Who is at home in this city? What does it mean to be at home? What does it have to do with Ikea? In South Africa, I remember a piece of art called “Home Sweet Home,” which was made up of pillows embroidered, “Keep out,” and a welcome mat woven from barbed wire. Basically, it tore open the contradiction of a home that must be secured like a fortress. A militarized compound will never feel like home. Welcome to the Homeland.

But as Gili, the director of one of the organizations I visited remarked, “I can’t afford not to be an optimist.” So I am still running around meeting with different organizations trying to figure out what social justice means and how I want to be a part of it. For a long time, I have connected it to being heard. In South Africa, I studied language policy because I wanted to know what language had to do with access to resources and how marginalized languages could be considered resources. I wanted to know how people could make their voices heard.

Over Rosh Hashanah, we read the story of the akeda, Tomorrow, we will read about Avraham binding his son Isaac to a sacrificial altar. Knife in his hand, we read, a messenger of G-d instructs him not to follow through with the slaughter. He sacrifices a ram instead and learns he will be blessed. At this point, Avraham names the site where all of this transpired. We read: “Avraham called the name of that place: YHWH Sees. As the saying is today: On YHWH’s mountain (it) is seen.” (Genesis 22:14)

In my last blog entry, I wrote about people trembling when they saw Jerusalem, her towers and citadels rising in the distance. Perhaps, they had the experience of being seen. Among Jerusalem’s mythic identities, it has been called the site of Gan Eden. From an underbelly of chaos, the world’s structures swirled into being. Here, Adam and Eve first imagined themselves “seen.” Perhaps, holiness has to do with being seen.

Here in the cosmic navel of the world, people are struggling to be seen and to be heard, too often silencing and erasing the voices and visions of others. In a book about the genocide in Rwanda and its aftermath, Phillip Gourevitch writes, “Power largely consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality.” Narratives are everything here. By adopting them, people possess the power to invalidate others.

One of the places where I hope to intern is called the Museum on the Seam. Its façade is scarred with bullet holes from the two decades it served as a military outpost (1948-1967). The museum touches West Jerusalem and East Jerusalem, the ultra-orthodox neighborhood of Mea Shearim and more secular neighborhoods, the Old City and the newer parts. The museum uses “the language of art” to promote dialogue and understanding across borders. A block away from the museum, I saw Hebrew letters spray-painted on a wall in blue calling for “Death to the Arabs!” Both times I visited the museum, groups of soldiers sat discussing the Israeli Declaration of Independence, the promise of equality and the reality on the ground. No weapons are allowed in the museum. When I climbed the winding staircase up to the roof I saw that the soldiers had abandoned their guns in a pile, high up in this in-between place.

Last night, the grocery store near my neighborhood was packed. Women in scarves and wigs and hijabs filled carts with liters of pepsi and tubs of humus and loaves of honey cake, stocking up for Rosh Hashanah and Ramadan. A baby gummed at a roll, perched in a shopping cart. A bottle of wine slid off a shelf and shattered. A worker quickly mopped it up, then loaded more liter juice bottles on to the rapidly emptying shelves. For Jews and Arabs, now is the time for family and faith and new beginnings.

For this New Year, I wish for all of us the courage to break down the boundaries in our lives to seeing and being seen, hearing and being heard.

First Impressions

2005-09-23T15:10:00.000-07:00

I write from “the belly button of the world,” Jerusalem. I have been in Israel exactly a week now, and in the city I face when I pray, since Sunday. The first night I was in the city that is the center, I had a huge craving for schnitzel. As many of you know, until this year, I had been a vegetarian since I was nine-years-old. My family came to Israel and stayed on a vegetarian Moshav for a few days. I met a girl named Be’eri who was around my age who didn’t eat meat. I decided I did not want to eat animals either. In the midst of senior year of college, fighting inevitable transition and craving self-initiated change I started slicing apart hunks of white meat. Here, so much of the meat is kosher, so I thought I might as well try a chicken sandwich with herbs and veggies and a shmear of sweet chili sauce. So I did.

The next day I wandered, like a good Jew, trying to learn the city. On the way back to a friend’s apartment, where I am staying temporarily, I passed a protest. A scroll of images was stretched across a small square of concrete, depicting the tragic fates that befall cows and chickens on their way to people’s bellies. The group had panels and pictures comparing the slaughter of animals to the murder of Jews during the Shoah. First, I thought about how this argument could only possibly be made this way in Israel. Then I thought, I’m in Jerusalem – this is a sign that I should say no to shnitzel, even though I’m not sure I believe in signs.

The signs here are in Hebrew and English and Arabic by law. The Hebrew language is thick with layers, like Jerusalem’s foundations, its winding walls of brown and peach stones. Words of Torah flicker in neon juices. Letters are loaded and locked like oozies. To make “aliyah” does not just mean “to immigrate,” it means “to ascend.” One cannot simply immigrate to Israel without ascending, if the Word has its way. I am not just from America - I am from “The land of the covenant.” Everything spoken in modern Hebrew has Biblical connotations, whether intended or not. By opening my mouth, I embody a 2,000 year-old narrative and write myself into it.

More on language . . .My favorite line from Kabbalat Shabbat is “Shamor V’Zachor B’Dibbur echad.” In two parts of the torah, the commandment to observe the Sabbath is worded differently. At one point, we are charged “Shamor” – take care of the Sabbath, and at another time, “Zachor” – remember Shabbat. Commentators, in explaining the change in wording of the same tenet of our faith, deduce that God gave both instructions in one utterance.

I did not only choose to major in linguistic-anthropology for the fancy name. I really find our ability to use language and symbols to be a fascinating and spiritual thing. I like to think that humans, who may believe we are created in the image of God (though not intelligently designed), imagine our God to be one with the power to code all sorts of meanings into one utterance.

I hope to study some Jewish texts while I am here. I am taking a class on “Psalms” at the Conservative Yeshiva on Sunday afternoons. I went with a friend to Pardes Monday evening and we studied this week’s Torah portion. It was invigorating to be in a room full of people of all ages and backgrounds parsing out messages from all sorts of books with voices and hands. Pardes is located above a Mazda dealer in the area known as Industrial Talpiyot, not far from the neighborhood where I’ll be living. Motzei Shabbat (Saturday night), I’ll move into an apartment in Baka. It was carved out of an artist’s studio. It has hard wood floors and a merpeset (balcony). The neighborhood is funky and close to friends. I’ll write more on this next week.

I am afraid of commitment. It took me a few days to let myself fall in love with Jerusalem. In the Psalms class, we looked at Psalm for Monday (48), which talks about the magnetic and overwhelming energy of the city. The authors describe people trembling like women in labor as they advance towards Jerusalem, the geographical and spiritual high-point of the land. “Count her towers, review her ramparts, scan her citadels,” it is written. Tiny pomegranates grow in yards here. If you leave your windows open at night, you may hear your neighbor practicing shofar. Citadels and towers mingle with espresso bars and cinemas.

I’m still in the process of figuring out where I will be working. I’ve been exploring some options dealing with community organizing and civil rights for individuals and communities who are marginalized here including new immigrants and Arabs. One of the organizations, Yedid, has eighteen citizen’s rights centers all around the country. They also run various language enrichment programs for kids. Meuravut (meaning inclusion) is focused on building grassroots networks of parents from different cultural backgrounds who will advocate for the rights of their children in the educational system.

Otherwise, I’m just dabbling, bumping into people from multiple walks of life, jogging to learn the street names. It’s like a Biblical storybook land here. And I’m eating lots of hummus and the best cucumbers ever. Shabbat starts earlier here than the rest of the world – so I gotta go and clean and shower.

Much love. Wishing every one a meaningful Shabbat. Praying for healing and wholeness for America during this time of uncertainty and scary weather.

Stay in touch.
Email: annerlewis@gmail.com
Phone (from U.S.A.) 011-972-52-302-3548
(from Ha'aretz) 052-302-3548

2005-09-14T12:03:00.000-07:00

A poem I wrote about Israel in 2002 . . .

Holy

Sometimes I dream of the desert and forget it’s not real. Then I wake up and forget that it’s real and that I crushed chalky plates of sand under my boots and that a fine layer of dust settled into my pores, all salty and wind-tossed and my hair smelled like salty wind and stuck to my fingers when I tried to run them through.

I wore a sarong and the wind tossed it around and in my shadow I looked like a princess, skirt and hair rippling, faceless, colorless, just flowy, transparent, salty wind grains woven. They kept pressing names, but it didn’t need one because it was my inside out. Flutterings of last butterfly wings and one string of pearls that floated down generations. Each grain, six million, more.

Breath of spices and almonds, dried apricots, maroon fingertips popping pomegranate beads. Different tongues riding exhaust and rubber on pavement. Tzahal olive green always at attention. Barrels of olive juice with scuffed scoopers. Plastic trinkets, bright candy wrappers, whole fish dangling upside down. Gooey cinnamon filling dripping into pants of air. Salty wind grains woven to blocks, edges rounded, and mortar mossed. Solar powered flecks.

Aretz Zahav. Artzeinu. Why do they/we crush you like chalky plates, unravel you, scatter your wind gems, puncture your wings, throw glass through your stones? Yet you clutch us to your breast and we drink you unconditional. What’s parched and cracked, you bloom.