Dear Aaron and Wayne,

When was the last time you waited ten years before going back to someplace where you lived?

Ten years is exactly half my life ago. I’ve doubled my life since I was nine and ten in Haifa.

The plan was to take the train. Yonatan caught it in Jerusalem and I picked it up when he changed trains at Central Railways on Arlozorov Street in Tel Aviv. We were worried we’d miss it because Yonatan’s train was late, but he arrived just in time. We walked through four or five cars before finding two seats together. Danielle said the train is always busy on Thursdays because that’s when all the soldiers are going home. No wonder there were so many on the bus.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The train to Haifa follows the coastline to the North from Tel Aviv. We boarded a little after three and took a window booth on the Western side of the train. The view of the sun spreading smooth pinks and oranges over the Mediterranean more than made up for the fact that the sun sets so early these days. It was already dark by the time we arrived.

The Eden Hotel wasn’t hard to find in downtown Haifa. The wrinkled concierge showed us to our room, which was clean but far from luxurious. There were suggestive paintings and clippings from girly magazines in the lobby, prompting an exchange of skeptical sidelong glances between the two of us—did we see an hourly rate on the wall?—but the place was only comically sketchy and we were treated very well. A photocopied review from some travel guide or other hung framed among the soft smut. And anyway, it was a perfectly bohemian accommodation for this somewhat-pilgrimage of mine.

When was the last time you cold called someone after ten years of complete disconnection?

My parents gave me a long list of people to contact in Haifa. How to explain to them that while I’m sure all of them are very nice people who would love to see me, I wasn’t particularly interested in spending my entire weekend in the living rooms of people who were my parents friends ten years ago? In the end I made a solid decision only to get in touch with people I actually remember. And first on the list was, of course, my once best friend, Danielle Amir.

Whenever we’ve spoken of Danielle in the past ten years, my parents first recollection is of the two of us dancing in the living room of our house on Tel Maneh Street, but that’s not the only thing that sticks out in my mind. I met Danielle on my first day at Beit Sefer HaPatuach (The Open School), which I visited halfway through the school year because my previous elementary school

(I have to stop here for an aside: let me set the stage for where I am writing this entry at the moment. I’m sitting in the balcony at the theatre. It’s Monday night, and I’ve been here for the last three hours preparing for a private shindig—a high-tech company rented out the place for an office party, so computer geeks have been streaming in and picking over the table of salads and kabobs for the past hour or so. The Israeli rock cover band that uses the theatre for their concerts once a month is the main attraction of the evening, but it seems they’ve also procured some bizarre opening act—a Mizrahi drummer, who happens to be pretty good, came out and began drumming a minute ago. I like Mizrahi drumming. It’s a penetrating rhythm. Unfortunately, though, it doesn’t stop there. He came equipped with plenty of drums to go around, and distributed them for the computer geeks to play along. Ziv, who’s sitting next to me, just described the sound as something akin to “retarded children”. I wouldn’t have been the one to say it, but I wouldn’t disagree. I’m embarrassed for them. Who in their right mind gives seventy-five drums to a bunch of computer geeks at an office party? Remember how I said racism is funny in Israel? Call me racist, but a bunch of white computer geeks with Mizrahi drums is not only arrhythmic, it’s not even funny. Thank god for the free margaritas because otherwise things could get ugly. Oh god, they’re going to sing. It seems to be the recurring theme of this trip, but I’ll say it again: I am not nearly a good enough writer to be making this up.)

Where was I?

My previous elementary school was terrible.

Israeli elementary school is not like American elementary school. It’s more like an insane asylum, except that everyone’s forgotten whether the kids or the adults are the crazy ones and which group has to listen to the other, so instead they just yell at each other a lot. I remember being shocked—I was a little goody-two-shoes in my younger days, but I’d seen my fair share of misbehavior—when the class erupted into instantaneous primal anarchy the moment the teacher left the room. I’m talking kids jumping on desks, chairs, each other’s backs, each other’s heads—it was unbelievable. And I sat there, my poised little nine-year-old American self, ready to feel extremely pleased with my own model behavior when the teacher came in and it became clear that this was so customary an occurrence that it wouldn’t even be discussed let alone result in punishment for the majority of my classmates.

That would never happen in the US. All of those kids would be on so many anti-hyperactivity drugs for their “attention deficit disorder” that they would barely be able to keep their eyes open, much less bother trying to poke each others’ out.

Strangely enough, this had nothing to do with my leaving the school. In fact, the kids were pretty nice, or so I gathered from my limited ability to communicate with them. There were a few in my class who spoke English—Barak, whose older brother was friends with my older brother; Maya, whom my Zaydie referred to as “my fat friend”; and Adam, who one day tried to strangle me, the reason for which I don’t think I ever fully understood. No, it had much more to do with the fact that I’d been in Israel about six months and hadn’t learned much Hebrew, which was because the school didn’t seem too keen on teaching me. Also my teacher was mean. So halfway through the school year, my parents took me to check out a couple of other schools. One of them was Beit Sefer HaPatuach, where I met Danielle.

We were instantly friends. It’s something I’ve often observed among my students in the last five years of teaching Hebrew school, that uncanny ability children have to create instantaneous bonds with a depth adults dream of finding in a partner and spend years carefully building.

When I was about a year old, I was going through a phase where I was afraid for my parents to put me to bed every night because, I insisted, some beast or monster or ghost was lurking just under my crib and would surely devour or maim or scare me to death the moment the All Powerful Parent Hero left the room. Did they really want me to be squashed by the Great Green Hippopotamus in my closet? “Just go to sleep,” they’d say, and sing some nonsense song about seasonal agriculture, my father and mother’s respective fiscal acumen and satisfying appearance. But this was no time for singing! How could they not see the specter just under the top layer of paint? How could they leave one-year-old me, defenseless in my crib, to fend off these fiends unaided? I’d cry and cry but eventually the All Powerful Parent Hero would invariably desert me.

One night, I was in no mood to be abandoned. I had to get through to them, fight me as they might. “There’s a big wind coming! There’s a big wind coming!” I screamed, but, predictably, they were oblivious to the impending doom. “There’s a big wind coming!” I insisted. They responded with a tune about the atmospheric refraction of light waves in low-pressure systems. What ignorance! What indifference! What injustice! “THERE’S A BIG WIND COMING!” I wouldn’t be ignored. Eventually, reluctantly, the All Powerful Parent Heroes caved and took me into their All Powerful Parent Hero Ghost-Free Hideout for the night.

The next morning, we walked around the neighborhood to survey the damaged caused by the freak tornado that ripped through our street during the night.

My parents mentioned this story to some doctors and psychologists at the time, and they were told by several of them that research indicates that very young children have been known to respond to animal instincts that adults are incapable of sensing. (I like to think that I was a psychic baby, and if I’d been a boy and born a couple thousand years ago I might have gotten something cool out of it like being declared a prophet or the son of God or the Dalai Lama or something.)

Whatever the explanation, it’s truly amazing to witness the innate wisdom of children. We don’t give them enough credit for their intuition. Mine predicted a tornado. It also drew me to Danielle on my first day at The Open School. (It also didn’t hurt that she’d spent the previous year in California and spoke fluent English, but who’s counting?)

Danielle and I were inseparable. We would play after school or at each other’s houses almost every day. We didn’t just make up dances—we had whole imaginary worlds, adventures, stories together. We were the truest friends, right from the start.

“What’s the matter?” Yonatan asked. I was sitting on the bed, phone in hand, staring at my yellow steno pad on which I’d written down her phone number. I’d found it months ago in the online Israeli phone book. It was the same number from all those years ago. I was hesitating.

“I’m nervous,” I answered simply. How was this conversation going to go? How do you just call someone after so long?

“Will she remember you?” he asked. Images of our friendship flickered in my mind’s eye—buying chocolate milk at lunchtime; dancing in a talent show; running though the tents in a campsite; playing in a park on my birthday; saying goodbye, not entirely capable of understanding that “someday” would be the next time we’d see each other and “someday” would be quite literally a lifetime away.

“Yes,” I replied instantly, “she’ll definitely remember me.”

When I first got to Israel this time around, I was very disciplined about writing every week. Now it’s been almost a month since last I wrote, and as I predicted, it only gets harder the more time goes by. There’s so much to tell, so many things happening all at once, that it just becomes so overwhelming if I slip even a little that the task of catching up seems unbearable.

It was the same with Danielle. We tried to keep in touch after I left. We wrote each other long letters—the paper kind, the kind you put in an envelope and drop in the mailbox and cross your fingers it gets there in a couple of weeks. (Keep in mind this was before the days of Instant Messenger and personal website. Even email hadn’t completely taken off—our family, always on the cutting edge, had an email address, and it was a long string of numbers we had no say in choosing and no way of remembering, which didn’t much matter because no one else who had one knew their email address either.) I still have the letters Danielle wrote to me. I remember the last one I got from her. It had some sticks of gum taped to the bottom. I had so much to tell her—I’d just gotten back from a trip to Florida—that I couldn’t write it all down. To this day, I still feel guilty about not writing her back.

I tried to play through in my head a hypothetical version of the conversation I was about to have, trying to decide what to say, what to do if her mother or father or sister answered the phone, how she’d react to hearing that I’d returned. After psyching myself up and deciding what I’d say, I dialed the number.

“Alo?” (“Alo,” a heavily-accented derivative of “hello,” is the standard Israeli telephonic greeting. And it sounded like a young, female voice.)

“Hello, who am I speaking with?” God, I felt like an idiot. I hate it when someone calls me and asks me to identify myself before they bother telling me who they are, but I couldn’t think of another way to be sure.

“This is Danielle.”

An involuntary smile spread across my face. I took a breath. “Hi, um, I don’t know if you remember me, but this is Sharon Goldberg, and—”

“Oh wow! Hi!” She didn’t need any further reminder. Of course she knew who I was. My smile widened. We talked for a long while, grateful to hear each other’s voices again and to know what’s been going on in each other’s lives. I told her about going back to the States and Hampshire and the circumstances that brought me back to Haifa, and she told me about our old friends from The Open School and her army service and the law school program she started this year. It was strange and wonderful.

“How do you feel about Hummus?” she proposed. I had her on speakerphone. Yonatan and I grinned at each other.

“We’re hummus connoisseurs!” I told her.

“Well then you have to try Abu Shaker.” We made plans to meet the next day.

We made ourselves wake up early Friday morning. In preparing for my trip to Haifa, I’d found the new webpage of The Open School and emailed the contact listed. A woman named Peninah wrote back saying she’d be happy to coordinate my visit. I gave her a call after getting off the phone with Danielle, and it turns out she was a teacher ten years ago as well, and remembered that I loved to sing. She was more than happy to meet us at the school for a tour.

We caught a bus to the Neve Sha’anan neighborhood where the school is located. It’s moved since I was there, so it wasn’t exactly a homecoming to my old classrooms, but as I explained to Yonatan as we walked from the square where the sherut (community van) dropped us off, it’s the feeling of the place that I remember most. It’s warm and welcoming and playful and happy. Started by professors at the Technion (Israe’s equivalent of MIT, located in Haifa) in the 70s, Beit Sefer HaPatu’ach is an experimental, democratic elementary school, somewhat in the vein of Waldorf or Montessori schools in the US, including a very innovative approach to peer to peer education where every grade level plans and helps execute educational activities for a younger grade. When I joined Beit Sefer HaPatuach, I was the tenth student in my class, which was a multicultural buffet of Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs, Muslims, Christians, and Bahai’i, who were mostly American. My teacher was also the art teacher (like all of my teachers in Israel, her name was Orit) and our classroom was in the back of the arts and sculpture studio. Most of the teachers spoke English, and they were more than happy to help me learn Hebrew and accommodate my levels of ability in all subjects, as per the philosophy of the school. I loved the place. “I can’t describe it,” I told Yonatan. “You just have to see it for yourself.”

As we approached the gate, I couldn’t help but smile. The building wasn’t the same, but the bright colors, sounds of children laughing and playing, and table with snacks of muffins, pitas and shoco (chocolate milk in individual-sized plastic bags) were all exactly the same. I pushed at the gate, but it was locked.

Apparently that was the wrong thing to have done. The petite but scary-looking security guard approached the gate and demanded, in Hebrew, to know what we were doing there.

I explained that I was a student here once and I’d come back for a visit. She looked at me skeptically. “How long ago were you a student here?” she challenged.

“Ten years,” I answered plainly. She looked at me contemptuously. “I’m meeting Peninah,” I offered. She continued to stare. I looked at Yonatan for help.

Just as he was about to respond, Peninah arrived at the gate. I think a tiny boy who’d been pestering the guard alerted her to the arrival of some strange people. She told the guard to let us in.

“She said she was a student here ten years ago and came back to visit,” said the guard, by way of explanation as to why we’d been held up. Peninah smiled.

“Yes,” she told the guard, “that’s right. There here for a tour.” The guard laughed and opened the gate.

Peninah showed us around the school, pausing to ask if I remembered certain things, most of which I did. The first thing you notice upon entering the school, aside from the fact that the kids look [gasp!] happy, is that there is art absolutely everywhere. Each grade level works on an art project, and before getting sent home to mom and dad’s refrigerator where it will hang next to last week’s shopping list until it’s splattered with too much spaghetti sauce to be identifiable, the Open School constructs elaborate, colorful displays of every student’s work. There’s hardly a surface of the school that’s not covered in art. The entrance hall contained paintings by fifth grader, beautifully vibrant pinks and reds and oranges in a style that was discernibly connected but individually unique.

The first stop was the gan (kindergarten) and I can safely say that being there made me want to revert to my first grade self and live that life all over again at Beit Sefer HaPatu’ach. The kids came streaming into the hall from where they’d been playing outside, dressed in a collection of the most adorable pajamas imaginable, clutching well-worn stuffed animals, faces smeared picturesquely with chocolate.

“Is today pajama day?” Peninah asked them.

“Yes!” said a tiny girl with a stuffed rabbit tucked in her arms. “And we had a birthday party and we ate birthday cake!” That would account for the chocolate everywhere.

“Whose birthday is it?” I asked.

She looked at me quizzically for a moment without saying anything. “Don’t know whose birthday it is?” Peninah asked her. She shook her head. We all smiled, and she ran off with the rest of her class.

Peninah led us through the rest of the primary school. “When you were here, we had about 50 students,” she said. “Now we have 400. We outgrew the old school, which is why we moved here. We have two classes for each grade, and we have a middle school now too, so our classes go up through ninth grade.” It was really amazing how much the place had grown—eight times the number of students!—while still maintaining the same happy atmosphere it always had.

“We’ve also added a little animal room,” she said, showing us inside. “The kids take care of the animals and learn about them by taking care of them.” Four girls, probably around eleven years old, darted around us into the room and began picking up bunnies, ferrets, and gerbils out of their cages to show us.

“Do you want an animal too?” they’d say after we’d pet the one they held.

“Sure,” I said. One of the girls put a bunny in my hands that was softer than anything I’ve ever touched. I brought it over to Yonatan. The girl followed.

“Do you want an animal too?” she offered him.

Let me tell you something funny about Yonatan.

Yonatan loves animals. He studies biology. He has a cat, who’s mean and temperamental, and he loves her dearly. He even likes the street cats that are to Israel as squirrels are to Massachusetts (in fact when Samantha and I mentioned squirrels, he was ecstatically excited about the idea that they actually exist, despite our assurances that they’re really not that exciting) and bends down to beckon them over to him at any given opportunity. We were walking in Yafo once, and I noticed Yonatan hanging back from the rest of the group—he’d seen a cat he thought was wounded and wanted to make sure it was ok.

But here’s the funny thing about Yonatan. He’s kind of a clean freak when it comes to animals, so even though he really likes them and wants them to play with him, he won’t touch them. He’s got a thing about washing his hands. (I can just imagine my mom’s feeling of kinship towards him right now.) So he’d been politely fending off the girls with their offers of animals, and I decided to call him out on it.

“Look at this,” I said to one of the girls, giving back the bunny, “he’s a student of Biology and he doesn’t want an animal? Come on!” The girl was happy for my egging on. Yonatan couldn’t resist, so he took a gerbil from one of the girls. We claimed victory. The girls gave me high-fives. Yonatan returned the gerbil with a sidelong smile to me, and we moved on.

Peninah and I chatted about what brings me to Israel these days as she led us through the basketball courts outside. I told her about Hampshire and its similarities to Beit Sefer HaPatu’ach, and my course of study. Yonatan took the opportunity to ask about the school’s experimental nature. “Is it connected to any of the other experimental schools in Israel?” he asked.

“Not formally.” Peninah explained that the other “experimental” schools in Israel were experimental only in theory; that in practice they actually stuck to the Ministry of Education curriculum. “Here,” she said, “we only follow the Ministry of Education curriculum in English and Math so that if a student needs to switch schools, they won’t be behind. But the rest of our curriculum is innovative. We expect our students to have a lot of input in their own education.”

From the basketball courts, Peninah took us to a hall with another art exhibition, this one of the sixth grade students. Each piece featured a map of Israel and the surrounding territories, with the outline of Israel in foam and raised several inches from the rest of the map. Peninah explained that the project was from the summer during the war, and each student was asked to portray how Israel felt to them. The title of each piece served as a caption for the visual representation of their answer. Some answers were literal, like the one with a thermometer glued to the middle, the background of the raised map painted in streaks of orange and yellow, and curled yellow pipe cleaners exploding out in every direction (“Hot”). Some of the answers were only vaguely related to the question, like “Bamba”, named after the popular Israeli snack food (Wayne, I’m really sorry for this description because it’s actually not as nasty as it sounds, but Bamba is basically like the consistency of cheese puffs, only peanut butter flavored) which had a bag of its namesake junk food attached. (Someone had opened the bag and we watched kids sneak pieces when they thought no one was looking.) Some, however, were very poignant: a knotty tangle of shoelaces covered “Complicated”; crosses, Jewish stars, and crescents formed “Religions”; plastic GI-Joe soldiers marched across “War”.

“I have to go now,” Peninah said. Her son was returning from the army and she wanted to meet him at the bus. “But I’m sending someone else to take you around anywhere else you want to go, so just wait here.” I thanked her for her hospitality.

Yonatan and I looked around the exhibition while we waited. There was also a set of sculptures on display—incredibly imaginative clay monsters made by the seventh grade. Yonatan was particularly impressed by their intricacy and the level of skill it took. He was surprised they were made by such young artists.

Before too long, we met one of the artists. Peninah had sent us two students, a sixth grade girl and a seventh-grade boy, to complete our tour. I told them what we’d seen so far, and asked what else there was to see.

“The middle school is upstairs,” they said, and showed us their classrooms. I asked if they liked Beit Sefer HaPatu’ach, and they both answered positively and enthusiastically. We thanked them for showing us around.

As we were closing the gates behind us, Yonatan turned to me and said, “Now I see what you mean about the feeling at this place.”

Later that day, Danielle picked us up off of the busy downtown Haifa street where our little Eden Hotel was tucked away. It was amazing. She hasn’t changed much, still the same beautiful curly hair, still the same big, toothy smile. We enjoyed a scenic drive through Haifa, Danielle pointing out cool places for coffee and drinks along the way.

Abu Shaker was a little less frenzied than my own beloved Abu Hassan in Yafo, but the hummus was of comparable high quality. Their particular specialty lies in the extras they bring to the table with the hummus—salads, one the standard Israeli tomato and cucumber salad (called here “salat”), one of rice and lentils, and another of bulgur wheat with tomatoes. After sitting for a while (and doing justice to three plates of hummus, the salads, and a small bowl of excellent falafel they brought us) we decided to retire to the German Colony for k’nafeh.

Haifa’s German Colony is nothing but charming. Situated halfway up the mountain and directly beneath the Bahai’i Shrine of the Bab, it’s got an amazing view any way you turn. The old stone buildings are now chic cafes, restaurants, and nightclubs. Danielle took us to a restaurant called Fattoush (so named for a standard Arab salad) where we sat on colorful cushions in a room whose vaulted architecture reminded me a lot of the theatre.

Whenever we’re in Jerusalem, Yonatan and I have a habit of going to the shuk in the old city for hummus at either Lina or Abu Shukri followed by k’nafeh at the Jaffa Café. K’nafeh is an Arab dessert made of a crispy, thread-like pastry soaked (like baklawah) in rose water and honey, then covered with a layer of a very sweet cheese, and topped with another layer of the soaked pastry and, usually, bright orange colored sugar on top. Strangely enough, I’d never had it before, even though it’s a standard local specialty, and it wasn’t until I remembered my mom’s aversion to anything involving sweet cheese that I realized why.

With no disrespect to the Jaffa Café, the k’nafeh at Fattoush was nothing short of gourmet. Yonatan and I tried to share one, and we started off strong, but only got about ¾ of the way through before feeling like another bite would cause us to combust.

Over the delectable k’nafeh, we talked more. Danielle talked a little about her army service. She enjoyed it, she said, because she had a good job in the intelligence division. She talked about her current boyfriend who lives in Tel Aviv, a student at the university, and their political differences. Apparently he’s a right-winger, not hard-line, but certainly not liberal. She says they manage to get along well because, most of the time, they just avoid the subject. Yonatan said how much he admires that she’s able to be tolerant of his views, despite their being so different from her own. I said, simply, that I’m not that tolerant.

It’s true. I’m not. I’d never be able to date a conservative. In my relationship with Yonatan, I’m the conservative one. What does that say to you? If anything, all this reflecting has allowed me to come to the realization that I am not a wholly tolerant person. I’m intolerant of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, economic elitism, and classism. And what’s more, I’m intolerant of racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, economic elitists, and classists. I’m actually intolerant of the people, not just the ideas. I spent a lot of time last spring in my Performance and Social Justice class thinking about how the best way to affect people and change their views and attitudes is to “talk to them where they are”; that is to say, not to expect a racist to immediately drop all racist ideas if you yell “Racist!” at them, but rather to develop empathy, common ground if possible, a way in, so when you do say something it has a chance of having an effect. I still think it’s true, but I haven’t yet developed my ability to, well, not get mad.

Thinking about this issue also brought us to the conversation about the inherent differences between exactly what constitutes conservatism in American versus Israeli society. For two countries so closely economically and politically tied, it’s truly amazing how little Americans and Israelis understand about the political climates of each other’s countries. Lets not start with the myth that “Bush is good for Israel,” which, I might add, the right-wing propaganda machine has done just as fine a job convincing Israelis as it has American Jews. I usually begin with reproductive rights.

When I first meet Israelis, a lot of them ask why I came to Israel. I usually explain my course of study and that lots of American students choose to study abroad during college.

“But why here?” they ask.

“I like it,” I usually say.

“Why?” the typical respondent asks cynically. “What’s so good about it? Bombs exploding all the time, people dying—you know we all want to go to America, right?”

When you tell Israelis that there are people in the United States who think that abortions should be illegal, they absolutely flip their shit. This concept is as foreign to Israelis as a bacon cheeseburger (perhaps more so—McDonald’s is no new phenomenon here). I like to quote a statistic I took from a poll conducting in the past year which reported on attitudes towards abortion rights, broken down by ethnic group. Easily the highest percentage of any ethnic group, over 90% of Jews, regardless of denomination, support legal abortions without any stipulation of rape, incest, mother’s age or martial status, or other special circumstances. What do you mean, make abortion illegal? What is this, the 15^th century? Anyone can have abortions here. You just have to go to a committee—to see if you’re eligible for the national healthcare system to pay for it. And when I tell them that we have a rule that no federal funding may be used for abortions under any circumstances, and when I tell them we go further, we have a “global gag rule” that no NGO can receive federal funding if they so much as provide information about abortions, and when I give the final blow by sweetly reminding them that while we’re the richest nation in the world, we still have no national healthcare, do you know what they say to me, after they’ve stood gaping for a few moments?

“You should move here! Things here aren’t nearly that bad!”

It speaks to the larger issue of mutual ignorance, which is also manifest in the pervading impression among Israeli leftists that the majority of American Jews are right-wing. (Another issue entirely is perhaps the equally disturbing impression among American Jews that the majority of American Jews are right-wing, but lets not get into that now.) It’s astounding. Decades of history of American Jewish radicalism, Socialism, and the overall trend of Jews to be liberal. Why? Because Jewish values are liberal. The fact that the current incarnation of the Jewish state does not follow all of those values (and lets also give credit to the fact that it certainly does take care of the widows, orphans, and other less fortunate members of society a hell of a lot better than the US) does not negate the fact that as modern politics defines liberalism—even radical liberalism—Jewish civilization upholds liberal ideas. And even with current leadership, such as it is, convincing American and Israeli Jews alike that Republicans are better for Israel (and God knows how they got to that one—this government has had NO diplomatic engagement whatsoever, while the two administrations to garner the most progress in the region, Carter and Clinton, were both Democrats) the overwhelming majority of Jews, once again, voted Democrat. Jewish values are liberal.

Voters are funny.

Voters do things that aren’t in their best interests. It’s the unavoidable byproduct of democracy: people aren’t actually smart enough or informed enough to make their own decisions about complex social and economic issues. For one thing, incumbency is the number one determinant of any election’s outcome. The incumbency rate in all US elections is well over 90%. Why? Not because incumbents are always better than challengers. It’s usually because of the pathetic fact of the power of name recognition: the voters have probably heard of the incumbent candidate before, and therefore are more likely to vote for them.

My suitemate’s boyfriend (he certainly does appear a lot in these stories, doesn’t he?) has a friend over for a visit. The other night, his friend declared to me that he doesn’t believe in politics, he believes in economics. “People won’t vote for someone who takes money from them,” he proclaimed. That’s ridiculous, of course. If that were the case, no one would ever vote Democrat. Democrats always favor taking taxes, increasing them when necessary. Republicans always favor reducing taxes. The voters aren’t nearly aware enough to know that neither the proposed tax cuts nor increases will affect anyone who makes under seven figures a year. And as I said before, incumbency trumps pretty much everything in pretty much any race.

Another interesting fact? Up to a certain, very small percentage of people at the top of the economic ladder, the more money you have, the more likely you are to vote Democrat. This, of course, is bizarre, because Democratic social and economic policy are far more proactive and beneficial for those of the middle and (especially) lower classes. So the argument that “people vote with their wallets”, in this day in age, seems to me patently absurd.

In Israel, it doesn’t even come close to being true. Instead of two major policy areas, social and economic, Israeli political parties have the additional burden of the “Palestinian Question”. In practice, the particular party’s response to the “Palestinian Question” tends to be the only issue that really matters to the voters, or that matters over any and all else. People here are living with the effects of occupying another nation and nobody is pleased with it. It’s referred to here simply as the “matzav”, or “situation”, and whether you favor a complete and immediate withdrawal from the territories and an immediate cessation of military incursions into Palestinian territory or gathering all the Jews of the world to colonize the entire biblically mandated Land of Israel (which, I might add, extends to the Euphrates river—so there’s plenty of people to displace along the way), you’re looking for a political party that will make some change in favor of your proposed solution. And with a completely different view of partisanship—because Israel is so geographically small, regional representation doesn’t exist here, and political parties are elected instead of individuals.

In recent years, political parties in Israel have tried to tout other parts of their respective platforms to draw attention away from the fact that none of them have made any progress on the “Palestinian Question” in recent years. Even the hilariously named “Aleh Yarok” (Green Leaf) Party, whose platform, predictably, focuses on legalization of marijuana, is trying to sell themselves as having a comprehensive agenda. But because of the matzav, no work can really be done on social policy outside the “Palestinian Question”. The Aleh Yarok party didn’t win any seats in the last election, and I don’t think anyone is under the illusion that smoking up is going to help anything.

A couple weeks ago, I was explaining to Yonatan exactly what it was I did last summer in DC, and I remembered the pocket copy of the Bill of Rights (with the additions of the 13^th, 14^th, 15^th, and 19^th Amendments) from the ACLU that I keep in my wallet. I took it out and started explaining them to Yonatan. He was amazed from the First Amendment onward.

“You mean, anyone can say anything they want?” he asked, astounded. “If I want to stand in the street and say ‘George Bush is a big fat asshole’, I can?”

“Yes,” I replied. I went on to explain the freedom of expression interpreted from the freedom of speech.

“So if I wanted to burn an American flag, I could?”

It was an excellent segue into some of the issues I worked on this summer, the proposed flag-burning amendment being one of them. I explained some of the intricacies of the three-branch government and the bicameral legislature, and the codified and solely traditional differences between the House and Senate. He finds it fascinating, and, like me, on principle, he’s been convinced that the American system of government—in theory, not always in practice—is pretty good. He’s amazed by the concept of liberty in the constitution, and noted that in Israel, it’s not only illegal to deface an Israeli flag, it’s illegal to in any way change or parody the Israeli national anthem.

This is just too much. Lets play a game of categorization: there are two countries, A and B. One constitutionally guarantees its citizens the right to say whatever they want about how terrible the country is; the other prohibits altering in any way the national symbols of the flag and anthem. One prohibits the establishment of a national religion; the other has an established national religion but fully upholds individual religious freedom. One provides safe, legal, easily accessible abortions to its citizens and federal funding for them when cases require it; one denies funding to nongovernmental organizations who so much as provide information about obtaining abortions.

Which of these doesn’t fit?

Fun fact: did you know that in Israel, prisoners in Israeli jails get weekends off every so often, the frequency of the vacation depending on the severity of the crime? True.

By the time Yonatan, Danielle, and I finished our conversation about the appalling state of reproductive rights in the United States, I found myself in the presence of two Israelis slightly less appalled with their government than they were before. We’d managed to finish our k’nafeh—Danielle had barely managed half of hers—and it was time for us to go to dinner at the home of some old family friends.

Danielle gave us a ride. As she dropped us off in front of the Karlins’ building, Yonatan asked, “Will you remember which apartment it is?”

The memory of closing a door behind a little girl with beautiful, curly hair and a big toothy smile flooded back to me. “Yes,” I said, “I know which one it is. It’s the last place I saw Danielle ten years ago.”

We stayed at the Karlins’ house for a few days before we left the country because our tickets to leave didn’t exactly coincide with the end of the lease on our Haifa house. I’d said goodbye to my best friend in their doorway. Things do come full circle, I thought.

“I’m not eating anything,” Yonatan said clutching his stomach as we approached the gate.

“They invited us for dinner,” I replied, despite the fact that I could hardly move myself, “you can’t not eat.”

We had a lovely evening in the end. It was nice to see the Karlins again. After dinner, Amira Karlin gave us a ride back to our hotel after dropping off her mother, Aliza, who insisted we drive by way of the “panorama”, a street running along the top of Mount Carmel (upon which Haifa is built) with the best possible view of the city, from the highest tier of the Bahai’i gardens on down to the ocean. Once again, it was strange and wonderful, and I felt at home.

The next day, we set off to explore the Bahai’i gardens. Covering a massive amount of land in thirteen formal terraces, the Bahai’i gardens fulfill the vision of the Bahai’i prophet who stood on Mount Carmel and had a vision of gardens. The central point of the gardens, the Shrine of the Bab, is only open in the mornings and the entirety of the gardens are only accessible by guided tour, so we were planning on just walking around the lower part of the garden that’s open for casual exploration. Since the busses in Haifa work on Shabbat but are not particularly regular, we decided to walk. Three sharply dressed Bahai’i men stood by the gate at the bottom.

“Efshar l’hikanes po?” I asked.

The young man looked at me blankly. “English?”

I smiled. “Can we go in here?”

“Sure,” he said, and, handing me a pamphlet, ushered us in.

The Bahai’i shrine and gardens are probably the best-known attraction in Haifa. We didn’t stay long, but walked around a little and took some pictures. It’s really beautiful. Memories of the tours given to my class at Beit Sefer HaPatu’ach by the parents of my Bahai’i classmates came flooding back to me. We watched the city lights begin to twinkle as the sun set and Shabbat came to an end.

The last stop on our agenda was to return to my old neighborhood, Ahuza. We walked down to the German Colony below and caught a bus to Merkaz Horev, the shopping mall where I used to spend countless hours as a child. It looked the same, save for a large security barrier that now runs the length of the courtyard in front. The bakery where my mom used to send me on Friday morning to get challah for Shabbat was still there. The area has bloomed in the last couple of years, and now has lots of chic bistros and cafes all around. The Karlins had told us that the best sushi in Haifa could be found on Horev street on the way towards my old house on Tel Maneh, so even though we’d been eating plenty of falafel (the falafel in Haifa is by far the best in Israel, don’t ask me why) we stopped at Tatami for dinner. Afterwards, we asked directions towards Tel Maneh.

If I’d followed my instincts, we wouldn’t have had to ask for directions. I remembered the way. We took a left on Mapu from Horev, down to the circle where it intersects Tel Maneh, and then around to number 40. On the way, I was asked for directions to the hospital twice, and was proud to be able to provide it easily—it’s right across the street from my house. Memories came back to me as we walked. The little girls’ elementary school on the right; the stairs next to our house that led down the mountain; the mail alcove off the side of the driveway where my brother and I used to hide from the gusting wind as we waited for the bus in the winter—it was all familiar. My nostalgia was palpable. Yonatan watched me intently. As we approached my house, he said, “Welcome home.”

I didn’t try to go inside the house—would you? It’s kind of weird to just knock on some stranger’s door and tell them you used to live there ten years ago, isn’t it?—but I didn’t want to leave before saying hello to our neighbors, Sylvia and Namir Yihiye. Surprisingly, they recognized me, and welcomed me inside. We sat and drank tea for a while and caught up.

There was no daylight left by the time we started back for Jerusalem. As these things tend to work out, we missed the last bus by a hair and had to take a bus to Tel Aviv and another one to Jerusalem from there. We were exhausted by the time we got back to Yonatan’s house. It was a truly lovely weekend.

We returned to Jerusalem because Yonatan’s little sister, Anat, goes to a performing arts high school and invited me to see her dance at the school’s open house. She’s very talented. We even got to see a bit of her own choreography, which was really impressive. It was nice to get to share that with Yonatan and his family after he accompanied me on this very personal journey to my once home.

You see? This is what happens when I don’t write for three weeks. I end up with this monstrosity of an update. I’m going to just take a second here to personally congratulate you if you’ve actually managed to read this up to this point. I’m writing this in Word, and this is page 15. I’ve promised myself I won’t write more than five more pages. We’ll see if I can hold to that. I made a list of the things I still want to write about, and I’m going to start with Nazareth.

I have no internet in my room. I can’t remember if I’ve bitched about this before, but at Israeli universities, you don’t get a lot of standard things you get at American universities, like internet in your room. Not even wired internet. I’ve got nothing here. It’s a problem. So my only option is to go downstairs to the “study room”, a windowless icebox with a few broken desks and ONE functional power outlet (that’s right) because the internet works there. More often than not, I choose to sit outside on the floor. I don’t like to have to be quiet all the time, and I don’t like not being around people and enclosed for long periods of time.

Through frequenting the floor outside the computer room, I met Majd, an Israeli Arab student at the university. Majd is Christian and originally from Nazareth, and he has a pen pal in Charlotte, North Carolina, who he talks to over the internet while listening to Christian rock or Country music. An Israeli Arab sitting on the floor and listening to Dolly Parton ranks pretty high up on the “what the fuck?” scale of things I never thought I’d see in Israel. We bonded over his connection to North Carolina and his music—I wouldn’t be caught dead listening to Country, but it really did bring me home—and through our friendship, he offered to take me to his hometown and show me around. So one day after my Hebrew ulpan, Majd and I caught a sherut to Nazareth. His dad picked us up from the center of town.

There’s nothing quite like some family hospitality after a long time without a proper kitchen. Have I mentioned the cooking facilities here? They’re practically nonexistent. I have access to a two-burner countertop gas stove and about a foot and a half of counter space. Storage is plentiful, which is unhelpful because I have nothing to store—I wasn’t really going to buy a whole new kitchen set just for the three months I’m here—so I generally use the one pot and one pan that belong to my suitemate, but of course, she has preferential use of them and isn’t particularly accustomed to sharing. Keep in mind I didn’t have a stocked kitchen over the summer either and had to borrow basic necessities from my knight in shining armor, Wes, because I broke up with my boyfriend and moved out of the [fully equipped] apartment we were subletting after just one day in DC. I manage, of course, and continue to cook as best I can, but the lack of a real kitchen is the one thing that’s starting to make me a little homesick.

Majd’s mom, Khuziama, has no want for a better kitchen, and she proved this aptly with the feast of Middle Eastern food she presented at our arrival. It was unbelievable. Hummus, tabouleh, stuffed grape leaves, salads, rice and vegetables, lentils, pita—we were two very happy college students.

After lunch, Majd began to show me around Nazareth. We went to all the main sites—the church on the site where Jesus supposedly lived, the church where Jesus used to preach, the church on the highest point of the mountain with its spectacular view of the city below. We talked as we walked around, Majd explaining the significance of the various symbols and texts.

“I’m the only true believer in my family,” Majd said. “A lot of people are Christian in religion, but don’t really believe.” He came to his own determinations about how Christianity is meant to be practiced and doesn’t define himself by any particular denomination, although the specific issues he had firmly decided on mirror major divisions in the church. For one thing, he thinks baptism of infants doesn’t make any sense and was recently baptized himself in the Jordan river. He also has a few words for the use of icons in the Catholic church. As we walked through the largest church in Nazareth, he pointed out large illuminated sculptural paintings on the walls, one from each major country. “They’re all Mary,” he pointed out. “See? Christianity says you can only worship one god. But all you see here is Mary. Where’s Jesus?” He had a fair point. Divine feminine aside, it was a little strange that the major figure depicted in the paintings was Mary, and if Jesus appeared at all it was only as a baby.

I love being shown around by a native. It was Wednesday evening and most of the stores in the Nazareth shuk were closed, but we walked through anyway on our way to the Synagogue Church, a tiny cobblestone building where Jesus is said to have preached. There was some confusion with the guard at the entrance, who didn’t want to let us in while a priest was speaking to an American tour group. Majd spoke to the man in Arabic and apparently the guard told him something about it being disrespectful, and told us to wait outside. “That’s very Christian of him,” scolded Majd under his breath to me as we turned to sit down. Eventually they let us in. The place was miniscule and unassuming, and the light danced prettily from candles set around the room. I didn’t take any pictures for fear of the guard’s retribution.

As the sun set, Majd took me to the tayelet (promenade or boardwalk) along the top of one of the hills, and we enjoyed a fantastic view of the Nazareth city lights. It was getting late, so we decided to return home after one short stop. His father runs a little sandwich shop and asked Majd to pick up a few chickens from the chicken market. Vegetarian that I am, I was uninterested in the meat, but took the opportunity to buy some flat Arab-style pita and a huge container of Arabic coffee.

On my first trip to Jerusalem to visit Samantha, I bought a finjan, or Turkish coffee pot, in the Old City shuk. Turkish coffee is standard fare in Israel, called simply “black coffee” as opposed to Nescafe instant coffee. I love Turkish coffee. It’s my secret weapon for waking up and making it through my 8:30 Ulpan. When we lived in Israel before, my dad, it seems, also fell in love with Turkish coffee. He warned me not to overuse it, as it’s traditionally sipped in miniature ceramic cups, because, as he said, “after a while, I’d have one cup and I could feel my insides vibrating.”

Turkish coffee is ground extra fine and is properly mixed with cardamom and a few other spices. The coffee is boiled in the hourglass-shaped finjan, and then taken off the heat, mixed with sugar, and allowed to sit for the grounds to settle. The shape of the finjan and its long, curved spout keep most of the grounds out of the cups, but some always manage to sneak through. Without the finjan, Turkish coffee may be prepared by adding hot water to a generous amount of grounds in an individual cup, adding sugar, and allowing to sit to let the grounds settle—but one must always beware what Samantha calls the “greedy gulp”, trying to take the last delicious sip of the coffee, because it will invariably result in a mouth full of mud.

Arabic coffee is not the same as Turkish coffee. It is ground a bit courser, not brewed as strong, and is mixed with a spice called “hil” which adds a smoky flavor. It’s prepared in a different kind of pot, a smaller bowl with a long handle. I’d only had a few opportunities to try Arabic coffee, so I bought some. The only available container was a one-kilo plastic jar for 20 shekels, or about $5. I couldn’t resist.

Goodies in hand, we made our way back to Majd’s house. “Before we go,” he said, “you have to try my mom’s labaneh.” That’s right. He said it. Homemade labaneh. I’ll be damned if it wasn’t one of the most delicious things I’ve ever tasted. Labaneh is a soft cheese derived from yogurt and prepared either in containers like hummus or rolled into balls and kept in a jar filled with olive oil. You can’t get good labaneh in the US. Even at the Arab markets, the labaneh is always too hard. Fresh labaneh is amazing. I refused to leave without the recipe and detailed instructions, which Majd translated from his mother’s Arabic and I wrote down furiously. Khuziama was pleased that I was interested in making my own labaneh and gave me a special cloth bag for squeezing out the water in the final stages of the process. I was extremely grateful.

I’ve been collecting recipes since then. I’m still on the lookout for the perfect hummus recipe, and I’ve found a number of different theories which I’ve yet to test, partly because I don’t have a pot big enough to boil the chick peas for long periods of time. I’m planning on buying a special ful pot at the shuk in Yafo this week, so maybe I’ll get a chance to try it out then. Speaking of which, I’ve gotten an excellent ful recipe from my friend Margaret’s mizrahi boyfriend, who claims to make excellent ful. I suppose the time of reckoning will come once I buy the pot and try it out.

Majd and I caught a ride to the bus stop with his oldest sister. The bus was extremely late, and we waited over an hour outside, but it was a warm night and the perfumed breeze—“Jasmine,” Majd identified—blew gently through the Nazareth streets. We contemplated hitching a ride, but in the end decided it would be impossible to find a car who wasn’t hostile either towards an Arab man or an American woman, so instead we took funny pictures with the sign we made reading “Tel Aviv” in Hebrew and Arabic and waited for the bus to arrive.

A few more stories, and then I promise I’m done.

Last week, I got a text message from Yonatan that he’d be available to talk earlier than expected because his lab was cancelled due to a labworkers’ strike. This is extremely common in Israeli universities. First of all, there is a National Union of University Students that actually does hold student strikes to advocate for the students’ interests. Recently, a lot of strikes have been held in protest of proposed increases in tuition. Students in Israel pay about 9,000 shekels per year in tuition—approximately $2,500—but since many are in their mid-twenties when they begin because they have just finished their military service, and taking into consideration the difference in average annual pay in Israel, it’s not as small a sum as it seems to Americans (*ahem, especially those that go to a $42,000 a year college, ahem*). And what’s more impressive is that the students know enough, care enough, and are active enough to strike to preserve access to higher education at below-ridiculous figures.

In my morning Ulpan last Thursday, our teacher mentioned there was a two-hour strike planned for teachers and students together, from 12:00 to 2:00, precisely when my Arabic class is held. So I trekked over to the Rosenberg building to ask if we’d be having class or not. I met a fellow student from my class on the way. He said we probably wouldn’t, considering it wasn’t only the students but the teachers as well on strike this time. I mentioned to him how strange it is to me that the students here strike.

“What, you mean no one strikes in American universities?” he asked.

“No,” I replied, “not at all.” That’s not entirely true. Students do strike over political issues every now and then. But we certainly don’t strike over tuition, and we certainly don’t have a union.

“Why not?” he asked. “There aren’t any problems?”

I feel this is the opportunity to quickly update you on the state of my classes, which remains unchanged since my last update. I would strongly advise future Hampshire students not to take classes through the universities and instead to study through private community organizations. My Arabic class, while nice enough, has caused me to learn very little Arabic. And my Hebrew class only frustrates the hell out of me by robbing me of my most productive late-night hours because I have to wake up for class at 7:30. Anyway. I really wish I hadn’t taken these classes, because I could be spending my time doing much more productive things.

For example, I’ve been working lots of shows at the Theatre and using my Hebrew a lot. I got to see a play in Arabic last week, Shiyadati Shadati, (Ladies and Gentlemen), for the most disrespectful audience I’ve ever seen—a rambunctious group of High School students from an Arab high school in Jaffa who talked loudly during the entire show, walked in and out of the theatre without regard for the actors, waved illuminated cell phones from the audience, picked up chairs and moved them around during the show, and patently ignored their teacher who was trying to keep them under control. I understood from watching this play that my Arabic is pretty poor, and while I’ve picked up some phrases here and there, I haven’t really learned a lot of the spoken language since I’ve been here. This week I’ll return to the theatre to work once again on my favorite show, Horef B’Kalandia, and may try to bring a group from my ulpan to see the show.

I’m really proud of the work I’ve been doing at Windows. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve completed the organization’s first ever comprehensive budget, for the 2007 year, which accounts for about 3,000,000 shekels. Until now, they’ve had individual programmatic budgets, but never one complete one for the whole organization. I feel I’ve really accomplished something there. Then I constructed a general grant application with short and long summaries of each program the organization works on, which can be adapted for any grant in the coming year. I updated information about the programs and rewrote poorly-phrased language so that the document is now highly polished and readable, while conveying a strong message about the impact of the organization. Additionally, I gave the whole thing a new style format, for which I researched principles of typefacing and typographic design, and came up with a very professional looking protocol for the grant applications. It’s nice to see some tangible results from the work I’m doing for Windows.

Next time, I’ll tell you about going to see the screening of Encounter Point, the documentary made about Windows and a few other innovative peace organizations in Israel and Palestine. For now, I’ll tell you that copies of the latest issue of Windows Hebrew-Arabic Magazine for Youth are on their way to your mailboxes, and I hope you’ll enjoy taking a look even if you can’t read it. This issue, the magazine’s 22^nd in ten years, will be translated into English and Italian in the coming weeks, and I’ll definitely pass that along to you as well.

There are still things I want to do before I leave. It’s weird to think that this is my last week in Tel Aviv, and I want to make the best of it. I’ll likely spend lots of time in Yafo and my newly discovered Neve Tzedek, a chic neighborhood with odd shops and slick cafes just north of Yafo. I’ll be packing my things on Saturday even though I’m not leaving for another two weeks, because I will be heading to Istanbul for a week, from the 2^nd to the 8^th. I feel I’d be wasting the opportunity to travel more while I’m here if I didn’t take advantage of the easy travel here—my round-trip ticket to Istanbul cost about $240 out of Tel Aviv.

And besides, who knows how long it will be before I’m back again?

~Sharon

Labels: Aaron-Wayne Bulletin, israel