What Katie Did

IMAGINE

2011-03-03T00:10:00.000-08:00

Imagine you live in a country where most things are new, and if they are not new they are very old.

Imagine you live in a country where you labour to build the institutions you need to live a life – your daughter’s high school, a center for child development, the local pizza store, a new system for emergency medicine, a software company.

Imagine that when you buy a house the land around it has never been planted, so you yourself lay the grass, and plant orange trees, lemon trees, olive trees, and passion fruit. And twenty one vines of Cabernet Sauvignon.

Imagine living on a hill top and seeing the first supermarket open in your town, the first baby clinic, the first hairdresser, the first falafel store.

Imagine praying in an air raid shelter for twelve years, because it takes you twelve years to build a synagogue in your community. Imagine the first Friday night prayers in the synagogue when it has been built: the women crying, the men crying, the hugging and the laughing, the sense of something achieved that beats anything you have ever done before.

Imagine commuting into Jerusalem every day from Bet Shemesh, up the back road past the Soreq stream, into the hills and out by the Hadassah hospital with its helicopter landing pad on the roof. Imagine the turquoise skies on winter mornings, the yellow acacia, the pine, the wild cyclamen, and almond blossoms in the winter chill. On your way you will pass the stalagmite caves, the Nataf ancient farming community, with its terraced agriculture channels hundreds of years old, and a monastery tucked into the hillside. As you commute over the years a brand new wing of Hadassah will be built, springing up in front of your eyes.

Imagine walking up the Jaffa Road into the center of town, the pavements torn up, the shouts of the builders, construction engineers in their hard hats, the hollow cement pipes being laid into place, the traffic jams, the bus delays, the potholes in the ground, the trailing wires and then – brand new paving laid along the entire length of the street, tree saplings trees with the red mounds of “humra” laid carefully at the base of each.

And when you have lived here 25 years, when you think you probably could not experience any more building and growing and newness, the new electric trains begin to glide up and down the Jaffa Road, silent, sleek and slender on their trial journeys past the new shops and new hotels and new office buildings. Twenty children with cancer are given the first ride, because they may not make it for the grand opening later this year.

Imagine your son going to law school at the Hebrew University, where he studies Turkish law and British law and Israeli law in a building where the cornerstone was laid in 1918, while he lives in a student village built in 2008. Imagine your daughter studying Talmud in a girl’s seminary on a Kibbutz in the Jordan valley, imagine her riding her bicycle every day along neatly planed kibbutz paths to the Bet Midrash, where she will study for a year, then enter the army to work in Intellgence.

At the end of a day’s work you come home to sit on your balcony and look out at the garden you have planted, the palm trees and the bougainvillea and the rosemary and lavender and jasmine, and you sip on the Cabernet Sauvignon wine you have made from your vines, and you watch the hoopoe birds with their yellow tails, the green parakeets and turquoise kingfishers who have come to live in your garden. Somewhere a child practices on the piano, and two cats get into a fight, and you realize you had better go in and get dinner started. Strawberries have just come into season, so you might have those for desert.

Imagine there’s no countries, wrote John Lennon, but he was wrong. What are our lives without our love for the countries we live in? Especially if the country we live in lets us know, a thousand times a day, that the work we do and the children we bear and the people we befriend is something miraculous, something being carved into the universe that goes way beyond our own small, human life. No religion too, wrote John Lennon, but what are our lives if we cannot thank God every day for the newness and the oldness, the hardhats and the traffic jams, the kingfishers and the electric trains, a synagogue so ancient that only its mosaic floors remain, a synagogue so new that a wild white rabbit, displaced from its home, is still living under the cement foundations holding up the banquet hall.

Imagine life in a region where nothing is certain and nothing is promised, nothing except the passion and the commitment and the sacrifice of the people around you, their children almost as precious to you as your own. Imagine a country at war where every second of peace is treasured and loved, where every soldier in uniform dreams of the student village at Hebrew University, where every winter downpour is prayed for and celebrated.

This is your country and there is no need for you to imagine. Your grandmother had to imagine, and her mother before her and her mother too. For centuries only the imagining was possible, but now you can step out beyond imagining into the future of a Jewish country, molding it with your own hands, bringing your voice to its government and media and culture, painting your face into its landscape. Nothing you ever do – buying a new kind of cheese in the supermarket, chatting with the bus driver on your way to work, or planting a tree in your garden will feel like it is nothing. You will feel like it is everything, and you will be right.

A few hundred words ago I asked you to imagine, but I take it back.

Don’t imagine.

Just come.

THE GLOVES ARE OFF

2010-12-05T08:24:00.000-08:00

For a couple of years now, I’ve thought about writing an article called “The Gloves are Off”. But I delayed writing it, because I didn’t want to the gloves to be off, and even if they were off, I didn’t want to be the one to publicly state that they were. But now they are off, and the person who really helped us to admit that they are, is Mick Davis, chairman of the UJIA in the UK.

In a recent speech, Mr Davis berated the Israeli prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu, "for lacking the courage to take the steps" to advance the peace process, arguing that "I don't understand the lack of strategy in Israel." He also predicted an "apartheid state" unless Israel was able to achieve a two-state solution. His remarks called a furor in the UK Jewish community, with many prominent UK Jews in public positions defending his remarks, noting that it was high time “that honest and open discussions” about Israel took place in the public arena. Others Jewish leaders were chagrined or irritated and issued mixed statements, while only a very few, most notably Jonathan Hoffman of Zionist Federation and Lord Stanley Kalms, professed outright indignation.

Mick Davis's remarks are disturbing because of who he is. Browsing the internet and reading a number of his speeches, as well as listening to his address at the rally in London during Operation Cast Lead, I’ve come to the conclusion that his heart is in the right place. I’m sure he loves Israel and wants to do his best for her. I’m sure he has raised and will continue to raise significant sums for the UJIA, which will enrich the lives of many in my country. Yet he still used this language in the public forum. This means that a growing desire to openly criticize Israel is moving from the fringes of the Jewish community into the mainstream. This is the new discussion, and arguments about whether it should or shouldn’t be suppressed, are moot. It’s out there and it’s gaining momentum.

I’m assuming that as a UK-born Israeli who has spent 25 years living, working, voting and paying taxes in Israel, I can be part of this discussion? After all, if we're going to be honest and open, it's best to get a lot of stuff which hasn't quite been articulated, out on the table. But before I do this, I’m going to say that if your love of Israel is unconditional, if you've come to the conclusion that Israelis are pretty well doing the best they can and are paying the highest price to do so, and that it would probably be a chutzpa of knee-clenching proportions to tell us that we’re to blame for the failures in our region and that we have no strategy and that we ‘re not trying hard enough, then you can skip this article. But if you're thinking of joining in with this new chorus of public criticism, because you think it's heathy and productive and it's about time, then here are the two things that I, as an Israeli, would like to put across to you.

One: It’s important that you understand that there are areas of criticism where you cause grave offence, and others where your input is necessary and welcome.

In the welcome category are issues which impact directly on Jews everywhere, where I would be glad of – not criticism as such – but concerted joint effort and involvement in Israel’s affairs. For example, I don’t see the Western Wall as an Israeli issue only but as a Jewish historical and spiritual heritage that should embrace all of us. I’m increasingly alarmed at the ultra-orthodox takeover of this site, and I would love for Reform, Conservative and Orthodox women to mount a concerted campaign to claim equal and respectable space, freedom of worship, and visual access to the men’s section. Similarly, the behavior of the Israeli rabbinical courts in matters of marriage, divorce and conversion affect all of us. I think it perfectly legitimate for there to be loud and furious debate on these issues across the globe, and I would like to see rabbis the world over mobilized to this effect.

I would also love to get more of your input and expertise for our school systems and our community centers. The achievements of Diaspora communities in Jewish education and engagement, communal cohesion and responsibility, and religious diversity and creativity in the synagogue could greatly benefit Israeli society and have indeed already begun to do so. I would like to see the skills and initiatives of gifted UK Jewish professionals harnessed and adapted for Israeli Jewish life.

But there are some of you in the UK Jewish community who seem increasingly inclined to level criticism in the grave offence category, on the subject of our conflict with the Palestinians, the finalization of our borders, and our responses to provocation from Hamas and Hizballah. On these issues I believe you have no right to speak at all, mainly because you have not risked your lives and futures, and the lives and futures of your children, for Israel’s security. We may be equals in many things, but in this matter we are not equals, because we have not invested equally. We are separated by a vale of tears and an ocean of blood, mostly very young blood. In my particular case, I’m separated from you guys by two Lebanon Wars, two Gulf Wars, two Intifadas, two children who’ve completed army service and a third about to begin, seven general elections, four unsuccessful peace processes, and five terrorist organizations operating in my region. So I don’t believe that your understanding of our region is as nuanced as er… mine.

I do see that these security issues impact your comfort level in British society. But the Israeli government can hardly be expected to make tough war-and-peace, life-and-death decisions on the basis of that. Anyway, I think we’ve each chosen our level of discomfort, you and I. You chose the UK, so you get to squirm and squiggle when the BBC reports, as a deliberate lie, that there’s been a massacre in Jenin. I and my neighbours on the other hand, chose Israel, so we get to send our sons into Jenin, hoping against hope that they’ll actually come out again. Which they sometimes don’t. (Or do, but as paraplegics.)

This is why the remarks you fling in our direction leave us astonished and dismayed. We may not make a big deal of it, but we walk in shadow. The Chief Rabbi of the UK, Lord Sacks, understands this perfectly well. In a recent piece on the United Synagogue website, he writes that the debate that has erupted over Mr. Davis’s remarks are “deflecting us from the real issue”, which is that Israel’s enemies, Hamas, Hizbollah and Iran, refuse to recognize its existence as a matter of religious principle. And as long as this is the case, says the Chief Rabbi, then “there can be no peace, merely a series of staging posts on the way to a war that will not end until there is no Jewish state at all."

There are other areas of criticism where the offense is not grave, just aggravating. Take the issue of Sudanese and Eritrean refugees pouring across the open border with Egypt in their tens of thousands. The Israeli government has just allocated millions of shekels for the construction and maintenance of a new transit center for these illegal immigrants. Aryeh and I each pay 50% income tax, so with the greatest compassion in the world for these people, we’re not sure that we want to pay for their long term support, or even integrate them into Israeli society. But no doubt, when the numbers in these temporary dwellings have swelled well beyond the originally intended figures, when the babies are born and this holding facility becomes nothing more than an overcrowded slum, which it most certainly will, some Jews living outside Israel will be campaigning for the food and health and shelter of these immigrants, and they’ll be campaigning for me to pay for it.

My son spent three months of his IDF service on the Egyptian border dragging the bodies of dead and wounded African refugees to waiting ambulances because they’d been shot on the Egyptian side. One Eritrean, faint from hunger and exhaustion, sunk to his knees and wrapped his arms around Yonatan’s legs when he discovered he’d reached the Israeli side. This refugee presumably hadn’t listened to CNN or BBC, so he didn’t know that Israel was a denizen of racism and apartheid. He only knew that nobody on the Israeli side would try and kill him, and that he’d get a hospital bed for his wounds and food and shelter for his family, before being released onto the streets of Eilat to look for a job. I'm in Eilat at the moment, and all the waiters in the breakfast room of our hotel are Eritrean or Sudanese. This morning I watched them all tuck into a huge hotel breakfast, provided for the staff after the guests have finished with theirs, and I felt glad that they were getting at least this one square meal a day. If I sound like I’m presenting two sides of the argument it’s because I am. Of course this issue is ethically complex. It’s just that I find the need of Jews living outside of Israel to enlighten me on those complexities incredibly patronizing. What is their investment level in this social and political dilemma? If it’s zero, then that’s what the opinions are worth.

Point Two: What is the motivation behind this need for public criticism?

This is a very important dimension of the debate. I can castigate a friend or a sibling if I believe their behavior to be selfish or unreasonable, but if I do so in public, I will only humiliate and wound her. I would be mad to think that making her look ridiculous to others, and permanently damaging their perception of her, is going to alter her behavior or produce good results. In fact, I would only do such a thing if my friend's well-being were not the primary object. I might want to hurt her and put her down for complicated reasons of my own.

I speak for myself and many other Israelis when I say that for us, public criticism of Israel from UK Jews is suspect. We feel that it's, well, not exactly coming from the healthiest and wholest of places in the Diaspora Jewish psyche, that minefield of conflicting prejudices and loyalties. For one thing, your call for “openness” has escalated at exactly the same rate as the delegitimization and demonization of Israel by the British establishment. This vindictive ostrasization of Israel in the UK has resulted in an extreme lowering of comfort levels for the Jewish community, as we have agreed. But should it result in your shouting to the rooftops to join in with that vindictiveness? And if you join in, does it increase your status and respectability in British Society? My feeling is that it most certainly does. So you’ll forgive me if I doubt the integrity of your backing the shrill accusations of the British government and media. It’s hard for me to take you seriously, when I know what you have to gain by supporting them, and what you have to lose by opposing them.

Actually, I think that the rising levels of discomfort are an encouraging sign that the heart and soul of British Jewry is in good working order. If British Jews were not viscerally connected to Israel, the feeling would be one of apathy or contempt, not discomfort. But they are connected. To so many of them, Israel is precious and important. And why shouldn't it be? It’s a modern miracle of astounding proportions. Its achievements in medicine, agriculture, science, and hi-tech, have impacted the health and well-being of millions. Above all, it’s a Jewish country with a Jewish majority, a place where Jews don’t have to negotiate the terms of their acceptance into the mainstream, because they are the mainstream. Small wonder that Diaspora Jews are filled with a sense of happiness and safety the second they land at Ben Gurion airport. This indescribable feeling of rootedness flies in the face of the de-religionized and de-nationalized new world order we are all supposed to believe in. But what can we do? We arrive in Israel and our hearts are filled with belonging. To sever us from this profound place of recognition and unity in our psyche, to force us to feel that we have no choice but to expunge it, is to cripple us indeed. So my suggestion to you is, don’t agree to be crippled. Hold your head high, take it on the chin, fight it like a lion, or leave. Not for me or any other Israeli, but for yourself and your children.

Where does that leave us, you and I? I personally recommend that you don't criticize us in areas where you have made no sacrifice, effort or contribution. I also think that public criticism is by its very nature, destructive and alienating. If you feel validated and vindicated by blasting us on TV or in the press, then you need to ask yourself why this is so.

If however, you are determined to criticize Israel as much as you like, then I, by the same token, will feel free to criticize you as much as I like. We will call this new way of relating “Tough Love”. We will use the two-directional model, instead of the model of Diaspora Jews behaving as if their criticism is a life-saving nasty-tasting antibiotic, which Israel, the ever truculent child, refuses to swallow to heal its inflammation. No doubt, words like “Apartheid” and “Betrayal” will be used. But who knows? Every relationship in the world, if committed, must move beyond stasis and staleness into unexplored territory. Once we face each other fair and square in the boxing ring, where I suppose a different sort of glove will be used, we may surprise ourselves by ending up with more connection and commitment than we started with.

In conclusion, I’d like to invite Jonathan Hoffman, Lord Kalms and the Chief Rabbi to dinner the next time they are in the Bet Shemesh area. In a crisis, it sure is nice to know who your friends are. Jonathan Wittenberg, who backs public debate about Israel but has at least linked it to responsibility and involvement, can join us for dessert. As for poor Mick Davis, he will not get even one bite of my fabulous lasagna.

DISSONANCE or TWO FAT BOYS An evening with Etgar Keret and Jonathan Safran Foer at Mishkenot Shaananim in Jerusalem.

2010-07-11T14:11:00.000-07:00

Last week I had the privilege of attending an event at Mishkenot Shaananim in Jerusalem. Jonathan Safran Foer, the author of “Everything is Illuminated” and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” presented an evening together with Israel's well known author Etgar Keret.

Safran Foyer opened by reading a story he had recently written called “Here We Aren't, So Quickly" (The New Yorker, June 14 & 21, 2010). I've tried to download this breathtakingly brilliant and beautiful piece on the internet, but no luck, you have to be a subscriber. I'm thinking of subscribing to the New Yorker just so I can get hold of this story. When hearing Safran Foer read it, I felt I was in the presence of something bizarre, something al-tivi (above nature) as we say in Hebrew. I don’t mean the standard cliché of being wowed by a Great Writer. I mean being in the presence of the creative force itself, an absolute gift of God. Actually I’m thinking that this kind of writing is not a gift of God, it is God, God as God presumably would like to be revealed in the astonishing things that humans can do.

In the story, which really isn’t a story in the conventional sense, Foer dispenses with characters people care about, the narrative arc, logical sequence, and even the ends of sentences having anything to do with their beginnings. Actually he dispenses with sentences entirely. Foer stands at the podium, he’s reading the story, and the audience has collectively stopped breathing. How does he do it? After all the writing that’s been written, all the books and essays and articles and poems, how can someone write something that's not like anything that's been written before?

Foer, all of 33 years old and apparently devoid of the usual arrogance and pomposity so common in successful people, wrote “Here We Aren't, So Quickly" after a long period of not writing fiction. He describes this return to fiction as “definitely not getting back on a bicycle”. With humility he depicts for us the unpredictability and fickleness of the creative force in humans. He captures a scene for us: he's sitting at an empty computer screen, unable to write a word. This is after “Everything is Illuminated” and “Incredibly Loud” have been published to world acclaim. Sometimes writing comes to the writer, and sometimes it most definitely does not come.

Foer himself appears to be not at all sure how the whole being-able-to-write thing works, but he attempts to delve into it together with Etgar Keret, making for some very interesting debate. Surprisingly, he never saw himself as a writer when he was younger. He was most moved and inspired by the visual arts and only after he experimented with these did he turn to the written word to try and achieve in writing what others had achieved in photography and painting. He explains that he doesn’t use words as a vehicle to articulate something else. The words can be a vehicle but they must also end in themselves. Preferably in a resounding crash. Sentences need to “smash themselves against a wall”, Foer explains, and Keret agrees.

Foer is intrigued by dissonance, and the way it can reveal the heart of things. Children are great at dissonance, mainly because the world is not a very coherent place for them. Foer describes how, earlier that day, he has visited the Western Wall with his four year old son. The child wants to place two separate scraps of paper into the crevices of the wall. One says, “God, you are a wonderful guy”, and the other says, “A big Mac, with cheese”.

Etgar Karat reads “Suddenly, a Knock on the Door”to us, the first story in his new book. An author sits on his couch while an armed intruder demands he produce a story at gunpoint. The author tries to explain, with the cold metal of the pistol up against his face, that this is perhaps not the best way to illicit results from an artist. Not only does the intruder disregard this, but two more knocks at the door bring a survey-taker and a pizza delivery boy into the room, both of whom add their clamourous demands to those of the first intruder. A story must be created. Now. They express no shock that the author is being held at gunpoint, on the contrary, they acquiese to the violence, they collaborate.

It doesn’t take long to work out that the story satirizes the inherent aggression in Israeli society, that everything from judicial process to social advancement must be produced at gunpoint or not at all. The audience collectively stirs nervously in its chair. Please don’t remind us about all that stuff, it beseeches Keret silently. All day we deal with this, can’t you help us to think about something else? The laughter in the audience is almost too loud, too relieved (the piece is, apart from anything else, incredibly funny).

Etgar says the force of his writing comes from his conviction that we humans are beautiful pieces of machinery created for something and that we have no idea what that something is. So we’re using ourselves as tin openers or other things, because we’ve lost the user’s Manual of what we are for. On the day that aliens finally arrive here in a space ship to try and find out what our redeeming features are, Keret says, he hopes they won’t be asking him for an opinion. “I’ll send them over to you”, he says to Foer with a wink.

Keret describes how his Holocaust survivor parents imbued in each of their three children a desire to get out into the world, to challenge it and to change it. His parents had spent their youth trying to grab the next piece of food or the next night’s shelter, he explains. This is why there was a brick wall between them and the futures they would like to have had. “My parents could only get us far as the wall,” says Keret. “but they knew that we, the children, could jump over it.” And the three of them did. Etgar’s brother became a left wing social activist, his sister became ultra orthodox and had eleven children. Etgar became a world famous author (my description). “We were all, in our different ways, doing exactly what our parents had imagined for us”, says Keret.

Hilarously, Keret describes a tour of Israeli authors through some foreign country on a bus. The authors behave no differently then a gaggle of schoolboys jostling for importance. Each describes the structure of their working day, the alarm clock at six am, the hours at the computer to complete chapter six or chapter ten. When Keret is asked about his method and his work schedule, he admits he has neither. The authors are scandalized. Keret instantly becomes, he says, “the fat boy” on the bus. He is jeered at, then ignored. “I would have been the other Fat Boy”, responds Foer.

The two fat boys, Etgar Karat and Jonathan Saffran Foer sit next to each other on the small stage and discuss their writing. Periodically, they each sip at the standard glass of water on the table in front of them. Two successful Jewish authors whose books have been translated into many languages, who share a wicked sense of humour, who dabble in nonsense and dissonance and who use sentences which smash themselves against a wall. They appear to have much in common and indeed the fond back and forth between them, the excellent chemistry in the room, confirm that they do. But their stories reflect what we have known all along, that Foer’s American-ness frees him of Israeli angst. In “Here We Aren’t, So Quickly” Foer can afford to muse about a marriage of many years, because he assumes longevity and the coupling of a life time. Karat is concerned with the cold metal touch of the pistol at our heads – produce now, live now, have children now, before we all get blown to pieces. Karat‘s parents took him to a wall so that he could jump over it. Foer’s parents had already jumped. Foer went to Princeton. (I can’t find out where Karat went to college, if at all, but I don’t think it was Princeton.) To Foer’s credit, in “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” he does craft the story of a family almost destroyed by the events of nine-eleven with extraordinary sensitivity. Not many Princeton boys would have been able to do that.

Yet Foer, on this stage and in this setting, cannot help but be that old cliché, the incredibly relaxed American Jew. There’s no mistaking him, especially when he’s sitting next to Etgar Keret. Life is good. There's no religion, no being Israeli, and no IDF. There is the intoxicating mix of Thanksgiving and Hannuka, Seder night and the Superbowl, the house in Brooklyn and the writer’s fellowship in Mishkennot Shaananim. There is Jewish identity.

If you think I am saying this bitterly, and with envy, you would be wrong and also right. I’m not bitter, because I’ve accepted in the last five years or so, that there will always be the Jews who do and the Jews who don’t. Live here, I mean. I felt bitter only when I felt the need to cross that bridge, back and forth and back and forth, trying to engage, persuade, create empathy, feel empathy, get respect, give respect, work out the relationship. Today I can no longer cross the bridge, nor do I want to. Don’t get me wrong, all my beloved diaspora friends and family - my arms are open wide. The guest room is waiting, here at our home in Bet Shemesh for anyone who wants to come stay. But I can’t go across the bridge to you where you guys are any more, out there. I have Gilad Shalit, the flotilla(s), the last Gaza war and the next Lebanon war, Obama and Iran, the hatred of Israel in every crevice of academic and political life in Europe, and J street, on my mind right now. I’m not bitter at all, but I have done what people do in times of crisis, turned inwards to take care of my own. And by my own I mean all Israelis, including Arab Israelis. Because they at least do. Live here, I mean.

You would be right about the envy. On my first and only walk through Central Park a few years ago I decided that in my next life I would like to be a Jew in New York. I’m not sure that there is anywhere really better and happier to be Jewish. Just put me in a Brownstone house in Brooklyn, I ask God, when it comes to my rebirth. Preferably with a good bookshop and a Macy’s round the corner, and a credit card of course. I could attend Yeshiva University or Stern College. I could celebrate the end of my exams around a table in Starbucks, drinking extra large mocha vanilla almond chocolate frappe lattes with my friends. I could crunch my feet on golden autumn leaves in November, watch the snowflakes fall and the tinsel hang in every storefront at Christmas time. I could go look at the statue of liberty whenever I wanted, and I could put my phone to my ear just to hear, over and over, a very polite woman saying “Thank you for using AT&T”. Why would I want any other life? I’d have to be mad, right?

Unless there was an Israel. Israel in flight with her broken wings, Israel with her fabulous successes and gut clenching mistakes, Israel with her acute water shortage and her drip irrigation, her Nobel prizes, her tire-burning Haredim, her sex crazed presidents, her Ethiopian kids in tenements, her Ethiopian kids getting their paratrooper’s wings. Israel of the Western Wall (not the Wailing Wall as Safran Foer so engagingly calls it), the Security Wall and the Holocaust Wall with Etgar Keret and his siblings jumping over it. Israel with her first Intifada and her second Intifada and the third one that’s probably just around the corner. Israel engaged and disengaged, Israel on CNN and the BBC, Israel at the UN and Israel in Haiti. Israel holding on and holding on.

Holding on for dear life.

With such an Israel to be embraced and loved and supported and built, with such an Israel for stomach ulcers and migraines and nodules on my vocal cords, with such an Israel for my children and their children and their children too, there’s no way that Brooklyn could tempt me with her siren call. And I'm glad that I opted for Israel in this life, because by the time my next life rolls around, Israel may not be around.

That’s why, looking out at the stage where these two wonderful men are sitting, I’m with Etgar all the way. He’s got Israel under his cracked fingernails, and so do I. He hasn’t been buffed and polished by that accomplished manicurist, Brooklyn New York. Of course, Etgar might be longing for Brooklyn, you never know. Perhaps he and Jonathan have already arranged a house swap.

Not that I don’t appreciate Jonathan, I really do. I hope this post has shown how much I do. Not only does he write fantastic books, but he’s also so likeable that I’d like to kiss the top of his head and say “Bubeleh, you did good”. And yet (as his wife Nicole Krauss would say). He’s a world away from me, and I from him. He's never had to pull a gas mask over the head of that lovely four year old he took to the Western Wall this morning. In Israel you do get to appreciate dissonance, but not from books.

Etgar and Jonathan sit on a stage talking about writing at Mishkenot Shaananim, and they both make you glad to be human. I say get rid of all the politicians, and let’s get ourselves some real people to lead the world. Jonathan could take over from Obama, and Etgar could replace Bibi. That way, we might have something nice to say about ourselves when those aliens finally arrive.

Elton's Voice

2010-06-23T22:05:00.000-07:00

Okay.
I admit it.
I've never been to a rock concert before.

No, I mean a real rock concert.

Apologies to Yehudit Ravitz, Shlomo Artzi, Achinoam Nini and Bet HaBubot. I really loved your concerts, guys.

But what I mean is, I've never been to the concert of an internationally acclaimed musician before. I couldn't afford the Paul McCartney tickets, and all the other musicians boycotted at the last minute, bless them. We won't go into that whole subject now, but these people make me laugh with their self-importance. They all come from countries where you're not wondering every minute of the day which war is going to break out on which border, and which of your kids will have to go fight. So they kind of think that their music is earth-shatteringly important, as opposed to say, life and death.
I can just see Bibi calling a cabinet meeting and announcing:
"Elvis Costello cancelled. We need to change government policy right away."

Anyway.

My friend Caron took me to the Elton John concert last week. We both just turned 50, and we spent a lot of years doing sensible stuff like raising kids and building careers, so we figure it's time for us to start going a little wild. You have to understand, orthodox girls brought up in the 1970s in Golders Green, London, didn't get to have a youth. We didn't experiment or rebel. We didn't go to pubs or bars, G-d Forbid. We didn't dance. Anywhere. We didn't smoke. Anything. We did, however, have an Elton John LP called "GoodbyeYellow Brick Road", which we played again and again on our mono record players. We sat in our bedrooms and we sang along with "Saturday Night's Alright", and "Candle in the Wind", and our hearts soared. Why would we not go to see Elton John?

However, I have to admit that I'm new to the whole concept of concert going.
I'm new to the 2 hour wait to get into the parking lot at Ramat Gan Stadium.
I'm new to the fact that the police won't let me take my huge thermos of vegetable soup into the concert with me.
"But it's soup", I plead with the policeman at the barrier.
"Keep it for Shabbos", he says, waving me away.

Once Caron and I are comfortably settled into our seats, I'm finally getting into it. Looking down at the thousands of people pouring in to the stadium, and sipping on a very cold Heineken (it's a very hot night), I'm trying to work out why a strange plastic stick has been left on all our chairs.
"It's your light stick", says Caron, knowledgeably. "You have to wave it during the concert".
I snort with contempt. Wave it during the concert, indeed. What am I, five?

Anyway.

Gorgeous Elton hits the stage just after dark, and what can I say, the man is a god. What is it about him? Is it just that he's so much fun? That he hasn't just come to sing, but that he clearly loves connecting with his audience? That his voice is even better, even stronger and even clearer, then when we all first bought our Yellow Brick Road LPs 35 years ago?

Of course Elton does make the mistake that they all make, by kicking off with a few songs that are Not His Most Famous or are From His New Album. I want to say: Elton, boychik, you know what we came for. Cut the ----, and do the Yellow Brick Road.
And he does. But before he does, he clears his throat to make a little announcement.
"It's really great to be here", he says, and the crowd cheers. Elton's been pressured by pro-Palestinian groups to boycott the concert, which he has refused to do.
"Ain't nobody going to tell us what to do", he adds, and the crowd roars.

Elton. It's not only that you haven't lost your voice. You also haven't lost your Voice, it seems. Amazing.

I rummage around on the cement floor for the light stick I so lightly threw aside. I can't get it started, I can't get it lit, I can't get the green fluid to flow into the star at the top. Caron has to help me. But once that light stick is on, man, I'm waving it. I wave it for 2 and half hours, all the way through "Daniel" and "Rocket Man" with Elton's breathtaking piano jazz solo in the middle, and "Crocodile Rock" and "Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word." And when Elton comes on at the end for his encore, and the 50,000 people in the stadium all sing "Your Song" together with him, I can't wave it because I'm crying. I just can't remember the last time I was moved so much by a musician and his music.

In retrospect, I'm trying to understand why Elton didn't give in to the pressure and why he did come to Israel and did give the concert. Is it that he has a soft spot for Israel and the Jews? Is is that he understands that the situation is much more complex here than the black and white picture painted in the UK press? I would like to think that it was both of these things. But it's much more likely that 1) he is completely his own person, and doesn't like being told what to do and 2) he is a consummate professional (Caron's point) and would never cancel a concert at the last minute.

Either way, for many reasons I'm not likely to experience another concert like this one. And I'm not likely to forget the power, passion, and sweetness, of Elton's voice.

PS - Tip for future concert goers over the age of 50: The pointy edge of the star at the end of the light stick, is also great for cleaning your gums.

Erez's Letter

2010-06-13T06:50:00.000-07:00

To Whoever Receives This Letter. June 2010

My name is Erez Menashe. I'm a teenage boy, 17 years old, from Ashkelon, Israel. All my life I have been brought up on values of honesty, compassion, and respect for others - no matter what religion/age/gender, or skin color. Until now I believed that these are not only Jewish values but universal values, and that like me, the whole world strives for justice, equality, brotherhood.

Now I see that the world is hypocritical. Citizens of countries of the world, their leaders, international organizations, and the media – everyone is hypocritical and two-faced. Because there is one law by which the world is judged and another by which Israel is judged. There is no justice, no equality, no brotherhood. The world is not objective and does not strive for justice, but only for someone to blame! The world sees only one guilty party, and that's us – the State of Israel. When other countries fight, attack, injure, the world clicks its tongue and doesn't really do anything. Bloody massacres in Africa, victims and hundreds of refugees and no-one talks about it, it doesn't even hit the news headlines. On the other hand, sticks and stones in Bilin…. Where is the proportion??

For eight years rockets were fired on people in Sderot before the Israeli army went into Gaza to stop them. Eight years! What other country would allow their people to be fired on without defending them?? When our army then attacked the rockets launchers, we were accused of breaching international law but when they fired from Gaza on our civilian population, even on schools and kindergartens, that was OK?? Was that not a breach of international law?

And now, this flotilla from Turkey to Gaza, which was riddled with terrorists hidden amongst the protestors, once again the world was hypocritical. First you screamed at us without even checking to see what really happened, and whether we really were to blame.

Why was there no flotilla to Darfur, Sudan and Ethiopia? They are starving in Africa, not in Gaza. You are being manipulated and you don't even know it. So maybe the world is not hypocritical, maybe it's just stupid.

I'm still young, and no, I have not yet lost hope. I hope and believe that other young people like me will grow up and show more responsibility and curiosity to seek out the truth. I hope they will not see the world in simple black and white because the reality is a little more complicated than it first appears.

Yours,
Erez Menashe

Longing for Peace

2010-04-27T23:03:00.000-07:00

Today, while driving into town, I saw two little Arab girls walking to school. Ma'aleh, where I work, is situated on Shivtei Yisrael Street, which is pretty well the dividing line between east and west Jerusalem. I stopped at the traffic light and two little girls, aged about 11, crossed the road in front of me. They were wearing their school uniform - dark blue trousers and light blue three quarter length tunics. Each girl had glossy black hair braided down the length of her back. And suddenly I felt such a longing for peace.

I've lived in Israel for 25 years and peace has never, ever seemed further away. Today, on the radio, I heard a statement by American Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in which he said that Hizballah, armed by Syria and Iran, now has more rockets than most governments. The next war is coming, it seems. As an Israeli, I am trying to imagine how it will be. Will Hizballah from the North and Hamas from the South both attack at the same time? Since Operaton Cast Lead a little over a year ago, Hamas has been smuggling arms into Gaza through the the networks of hundreds of tunnels it has built between Egypt and Gaza. Do we have enough soldiers and technology to defend ourselves if we get attacked on both borders simultaheously, God Forbid? Will both my older kids, aged 22and 20, be called up if they do? (Yes, they will).

Well, I have two "comforting" thoughts. One: if we try to destroy any of the tunnels smuggling rockets into Gaza, we will always have some young woman like Rachel Corrie to stand on our bulldozers and get killed trying prevent us from doing it. And then people in the US and the UK can write plays about what a heroine she was, and even have a ship named after her. Two: If Hizballah should decide to start a war and use all those rockets it has been stockpiling to target Israeli towns, we will have thousands of people marching through Trafalgar Square in London shouting "We are all Hizballah!". Such a fabulous world we live in.

And still I am longing for peace. I am going to keep in my mind, the picture of those two little Arab girls walking to school. I am trying to imagine such a life in this part of the world - Arabs and Jews going peacefully about their daily lives together without fear or animosity. I was glad to feel that feeling of longing in my heart again this morning.

It's nice to know it hasn't been burnt out of me completely.

The six million, this time around

2010-04-12T00:04:00.000-07:00

I just heard the two minute siren for Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Day.

It's ten in the morning here, and we're all busy at work. As the siren begins, the chatter stops, and each of the seven of us at our different desks stand to attention.

What goes through my head during that time? The answer is, everything. Everything I have ever seen, ever heard and ever read about the Holocaust. The stench of it, the crowding of it, the starvation of it, the death of it, the sadism of it, the endless, endless tears shed by it, all wrapped around by the deep hatred which caused it; -all these compete for a space, for a visual image in my head. All this while the siren sounds.

This year, the siren for me is a warning, too. The depth of this hatred surrounds Israel now, threatening to engulf her. The hatred is back, dressed in new clothes. The six million this time is the six million Jews of Israel, a thorn, an anathema, an incovenience, an obstrucution and a provocation to the nations of the world.

But there's a difference this time. Israel is the end place. From here we do not run, and we do not hide. From here we are not powerless, we are not surprised, we are not silent, we do not beg. From here, the place where we've built everything from nothing, had our children taken by vicious enemies, grown our fruits and vegetables and flowers, made some of the most famous medical advances of the 20th century, and prayed at the Western Wall, from here we face that old, old hatred face to face. Whether or not we will prevail is in God's hands. But the starting point is different.

Ajami - The Puzzle of Belonging

2010-03-21T10:04:00.000-07:00

Scandar Copti aggravated plenty of Israeli Jews and even some Israeli Arabs by his remarks about not representing Israel when his film was nominated for an Oscar.

He said:

"I am a citizen of Israel but do not represent it. I cannot represent a country that does not

represent me."

My first response to Copti's remarks was the same as that of many Israelis – Funny that it didn't stop you from taking all that lovely Israeli money to make the film, hun. But on second thoughts I've decided that it's fine with me that Copti feels that way.

The money, by the way, is a BIG deal in Israel. Israel makes maybe six feature films a year, sometime three, sometimes two because arts funding is so dire over here. (As opposed to the US, where there is fabulous funding for movies, but no national health service).

Hundreds of filmmakers, scriptwriters and producers submit their projects every year, without success. Even successful directors, who have won prizes and made excellent films in the past, have a great deal of difficulty getting a second project funded.

"Ajami", funded by Israeli government money, meaning funded by income tax deducted from my own salary, was undoubtedly awarded the necessary foundation grants because of its outstanding script and because of the years of painstaking research that went into its creation. However, since none of these decisions are ever apolitical, we can assume that "Ajami" also got a million dollars of Israeli tax payers' money because Copti's voice, indeed the city of Jaffa's voice, was a voice that the Israel Film Fund wanted to be heard. The Israeli film establishment is super-left, and the last three Israeli films to be nominated for an Oscar are highly critical of Israel, of course. We have never, ever, seen a feature film about an Israeli Jewish family reeling from the impact of injuries sustained by a parent or child in a terrorist attack, even though civilian Israelis have been shot, stabbed and blown up since 1948. Strange that.

But for our purposes, none of this is relevant. Copti is entitled to feel that he doesn't represent Israel, and that it doesn't him. His feelings, living in a minority culture, are perfectly normal. If I look back at my upbringing in the UK, I see that I never felt that I belonged. A child of Britain with a British passport, I didn't feel that I represented Britain or that it represented me. The British government paid for my education, my health, my dental treatment and my university degree. Such a "chutzpa" for me to feel I didn't belong!

Why didn't I? Two main reasons:

One – I worked quite hard at not belonging. I practiced a religion not practiced by the British majority (my choice), I was passionately and idealistically devoted to Israel’s growth and development, not Britain's, (my choice), and as a result I felt somewhat separated from many normal aspects of ordinary British life (my choice).

Two – Britain made no attempt whatsoever to make me feel that I belonged. In the Britain of the 1970's, Judaism, the experience of Jews in society, their beliefs and practices, and their contribution to British Life, were barely acknowledged or discussed. In the late seventies and early eighties the Israel-hatred began in the British press, and every morning before breakfast I would be reading Robert Fiske's perspective on the Lebanon War. It was enough to make any Jew pack their bags and leave. Then there was the Holocaust. Don't be fooled by all the Holocaust stuff going on today. For all the years I was growing up, the Holocaust was considered to be a boring, let's-put-it-behind us topic, and was never mentioned. To the point that, on my first Holocaust Day in Israel, watching every single person in the street come to a dead halt during the siren, I wept like a child. Not for the Holocaust itself, but for the recognition of the Holocaust.

Minorities often feel they do not belong to the country where they live. Often but not always. The United States is a spectacular exception to this rule. Many orthodox Jews feel totally American, as do many Hispanics, African-Americans and Muslim Americans. But this is not the rule. Usually, minorities feel like minorities, and Christian Arabs living in a predominantly Jewish country are no exception.

Now we could say that Britain has failed its Jewish minority in many ways. So many of us felt we did not belong, and left for Israel, the US or Australia. Why was it so easy for us to go? Our American counterparts had much greater difficulty in leaving the country of their birth. We can surmise that the comfort level of a country's minorities, their sense of belonging in that country is probably a test of how well grounded the democratic values in that country are. We can certainly suggest that the UK has failed its Jewish minority in some ways. The Chief Rabbi sits in the House of Lords on the one hand. And on the other, thousands of British Jews do not feel wholeheartedly British and do not feel a sense of belonging. Especially those Jews who actively identify with a Jewish community and who live their lives Jewishly, in some way or other.

Similarly, if Scandar was born and raised in Israel, and is an Israeli citizen, but does not feel he represents Israel or that she represents him, then we can suggest that Israel has failed its Palestinian Christian minority.

But the other side of the argument also applies. Scandar Copti has probably worked quite hard at his Palestinian-Christian identity in Palestinian-Christian Jaffa in the predominantly Jewish state of Israel, just as in the nineteen seventies I worked hard at being an orthodox Jewish Zionist in a predominantly Christian UK. The question is whether Copti ever wanted to feel Israeli or be Israeli, and whether if he did, he was actively prevented from doing so. He certainly got $1,000,000 to make his film, in a circumstance where hundreds of Jewish Israeli directors were turned away.

We all make choices about how much we will melt into the majority, and how much we will keep ourselves apart, and what sacrifices must be made in each case. For myself, I got tired of being in the minority, of being different, of not being part of the mainstream of anything. I did the multi-cultural bit, living in an apartment with a Moslem, a Christian and a Hindu at university, and it was wonderful. I loved those women and I still love them today. But in the end, it was too hard for me. I wanted and needed belonging, and I moved to Israel because it felt normal to be Jewish there. It did not feel normal in the UK. You could say that this is a limitation of my personality and you could be right. It is almost certainly a limitation of the UK. But all I can say is this: I've done multi-cultural and I've done belonging. Belonging's better.

However, belonging brings with it a new kind of responsibility- I'm part of the majority culture now. And that means that I have to take care of my minorities. I have to be noticing them and listening to them. I have to be working towards a certain level of comfort for them. It's probable that I can never give them belonging. Perhaps Palestinian Christians would only feel a sense of total belonging in a Palestinian Christian country. But as an Israeli citizen I need at least to be concerned about their rights, their education, and their standard of living.

As for Scandar, he too has some choices to make. He can stay in Jaffa, feeling a relative sense of belonging in the Palestinian Christian community in which he lives. He can be aggravated for the rest of his life, if he so chooses, by the fact that the Israeli establishment is not sensitive to the needs of his community. He can work hard to right that as much as he can. He can campaign for Jaffa residents to be better treated and better understood. Many Jews in the UK have made this choice. Or, he could move to a country where Palestinian Christians feel much more at home. Where is that I wonder? It would have been Lebanon once, but the influence of Hezbollah and it's backer, Syria, has made that country unrecognizable to many Arab Christians. And I have the teeniest inkling in my stomach that when a Palestinian Muslim State comes into being, Palestinian Christians will not find much belonging there either.

Meanwhile, we can celebrate that Copti was given Israeli money to make his film. And if it's important to us that Copti will feel, next time around, that he "represents" Israel, then we will all have to work a lot harder at noticing, and feeling, the lives of Palestinian Christians in our country. Conversely, if Copti himself wants to represent Israel and it to represent him, then he also has some work to do. He will need to connect with our government, promote dialogue, and use his Israeli citizenship and high profile to achieve these things. In a few years he could run for the Knesset, and try and work wonders for the city of Jaffa from there. The question is whether or not he wants to. It's up to us, and it's up to him.

AVATAR

2010-03-09T01:50:00.000-08:00

March 8th 2010

The Academy Awards are taking place right now. I mean Right Now in this Space-Time Continuum. I know, because I heard some prizes being given on the radio this morning. James Cameron did not get Best Director nor did Avatar get Best Film. Katie Bigelow got best film for “Hurt Locker”, and I for one am delighted that a woman director finally got recognized in Hollywood.

But I kind of hoped Avatar would win.

It’s a good thing that when I went to see Avatar a couple of weeks ago, I had heard a lot of scathing reviews. That way, I had no expectations. A friend of mine, a fellow graduate from film school, told me that Avatar actually made her angry.
“ Three hours of techno 3-D garbage and not a single redeeming thing about the script”, she snapped. Hmm.

We people who went to film school can be pretty snotty about films. When we go to the cinema we tend to look for things like, er, content.
So I wasn’t actually considering going to see Avatar. Or if I went, I would go in disguise so none of my film school friends could see me there.

The 3-D thing was a particular turn-off. I mean duh, the whole point of cinema is that it’s a two dimensional medium. The script, the directing, the acting and the cinematography have to be so good that viewers are completely sucked into this 2-D world. 2-D is the language of cinema and it’s a language that viewing audiences first began to learn about 200 years ago, when the Lumiere brothers traveled the world showing the first moving pictures on screen. When those audiences in the 1820’s first saw a train coming towards them on film, they ran out of the cinema thinking that it was going to burst through the screen and into the auditorium.

Nowadays, we’ve all internalized the film language of 2-D. We don’t run out of the cinema because that creature in Alien 2 might sneak around the back of the screen and hide in the toilets. And we certainly don’t need stupid 3-D glasses to go see a film. Or perhaps we do. Perhaps we did all sit through Sophie’s Choice and Godfather saying: “Man, this film would have been so much better in 3-D”.

Probably my prejudice against 3-D is that I see it as part of the overall process of the dumbing down of cinema. So much of what we see coming out of Hollywood is lowest common denominator stuff, the kind of thing that 14 years olds enjoy. Not that I’m knocking 14 year olds. I respect them totally. It’s just that their minds and souls are not, er, fully developed.

My son, Yonatan, who was once 14 but is now Thank G-d 22, has no patience with my film school snobbery.
“C’mon Mom.” he says. “You’re going to judge Avatar without even seeing it? You know better than that.”

I squirm uncomfortably, because I always taught the kids never to judge a film without seeing it. That sounds pretty obvious, but debates often rage over films that the people debating them have never seen. Life is Beautiful and Waltz with Bashir come to mind.
That’s why I made myself go and see “Titanic” even when something in my bones told me it was going to be terrible. And it was. It was truly terrible. Hail me. The only human on the planet who thinks that Titanic was lowest-common-denominator teenage garbage. Not the ship, that was for adults, but the movie.

So I’m sitting in the movie theater with Aryeh before Avatar begins, dressed in a penguin outfit so none of my film school friends will see me. You can tell by the set of my shoulders that I’m not going to enjoy this film. Certainly not wearing these ridiculous glasses.

Well – here’s my take on Avatar. It’s absolutely wonderful. Mostly because the sheer visual beauty of it is breathtaking. And yes – the 3D is sensational. It’s perfect for this genre. It’s true that you wouldn’t want to see Cabaret or The English Patient in 3-D, but 3-D would have been great for Star Wars, or The Maitrix.

It’s not the 3-D that won me over though. It’s the sheer genius level of human creativity that went into it. Avatar is about Other Beings on a faraway planet. The planet has flora and fauna which are completely different to ours. Along come the human invaders, who for some reason all look like George Bush and all have a southern accent. They say things like: “We have to fight terror with terror”. The humans exploit and destroy and uproot in order to get at a valuable mineral which is located under the tree village where the natives live. Bad, bad humans. Good, good natives. Who hates the human race? I do. Because They’re Blindly Destroying Their Own Planet Without Thinking About The Future.

Okay, so the script isn’t super original. America hates itself over the invasion of Iraq, and once you get over that, (which Aryeh couldn’t, for the entire film), you can settle down and enjoy the movie. And like I said, it’s the sheer visual beauty of it that’s breathtaking. It’s as if the director and animators are inviting you to take a magic carpet ride, and you do. You’re like a child watching animaton for the first time, and you’re filled with the wonder of it.

Every single beautiful piece of art and originality I saw in this film made me think about the ordinary humans sitting at their computers who just made the whole thing up. It's my opinion that that’s harder to do in cinema than in written literature, because every single idea you have has to be brought to full visual reality. In Avatar, all the gorgeous hi tech science fiction sequences about the technical world we might one day live in, and all the birds and flowers and monsters and trees in the movie, so lovingly crafted, are just people’s imagination. We wouldn't be able to see into their imagination unless they were capable of carving out into reality, those hazy shapes and colors and movements.

The script does have its predictable moments, and I enjoy driving Aryeh crazy by guessing what the end of each sentence in the dialogue will be. When the hero kneels by the Mother Nature Tree, he prays for victory over the invading human army. I turn to Aryeh and say: “…Tree, I’m gonna need your help.” The hero sighs and says: “Tree, I’m gonna need your help”. Aryeh has usually moved to a different row in the movie theater by the end of any film that we see together.

Here’s what’s the most moving about Avatar. If you forget the whole Iraq thing, it’s a love story, and the love in it is completely convincing. I’m not giving away the end of the movie, but it says some powerful things about how we love the soul of a person (or alien).

So please, do go and see Avatar. If you see people dressed up in various disguises, it’ll be my friends from film school. Just pretend you haven’t seen them.

PS I don’t really want to go and see “Hurt Locker”, which will be more Iraq breast- beating. But I can already hear Yonatan frowning down the phone. “Mom?” he’ll ask. “Are you really going to judge “Hurt Locker” before you’ve even seen it?”

Life is different when you're Kosher

2010-03-07T11:10:00.000-08:00

People who don't keep kosher feel, and view the world differently than people who do. Now don't get defensive. I'm not using words like "better" or "worse". I'm using "different".

I've just got back from a few days in the UK, where I presented two Ma'aleh events, one in Hendon with the Emunah organization and one at Birmingham University Hillel.

On Friday morning, my Mum took me to the new VanGogh exhibition at the Royal Academy. Entering this beautiful historic building for an exhibition full of priceless art, I take note that there's no gum-chewing security person at the entrance checking my bag. Strange that. The UK is different in this way than, say, Israel. Must be because they've never had terrorism over there.

Anyway, we walk around the different rooms, taking in the sumptuous pictures, which are accompanied by exhibits of the actual letters the artist wrote to his brother and sister about his work. There's a lot of new stuff there I've never seen before, and it's mostly gorgeous. He did love to use a spot of colour, that Vincent.

One picture attracts my attention - it's a painting of 2 huge orangey brown crabs, looking very undead. In fact, they look as if they're waving their huge pincers around and are about to leap out of the canvas to bite us all, two hundred years after VG painted them. Says something about his gift, doesn't it?

Still, I'm intrigued by this - what an earth made VG choose them as a subject? Not the most aesthetic of creatures, or the most aesthetic of paintings. I retreat backwards to see if I can glean some insights from the other, more knowledgeable, members of the public. I notice two young women standing respectfully back with a look of awe as they contemplate the crabs.

"Crabs... look at that!" says one woman to another, and they stare at the picture.

After a pause, the 2nd woman replies "Makes you hungry, doesn't it?"

We Kosher people you see, that would not be our first reaction to a picture of two crabs. Would it be fair to say that the dietary temptations for you non Kosher people, are a teensy bit different from ours? Take prawns for example. I mean those
segmented fat pink worms that you guys put in cocktails sometimes. Your mouths are watering, right?

That's exactly my point.

PS. VG died before he could paint his next project, a plate of chopped liver.

A cool, objective look at the Dubai scandal

2010-02-22T12:14:00.000-08:00

February 21st 2010

Today I took the bus from Jaffa Road to the Central Bus Station.

I haven't taken a bus in a long time, but Aryeh needed the car.

Yes. Aryeh and I live, operate and work in the world with one car. As do most of our friends. The great thing about having one car is that you develop fantastic powers of negotiation. For the past 5 years, since my son Yonatan got his license, the 3 of us have sat around the dining room table at night negotiating over Who Gets The Car. We each have to say: "I need the car the most because..."

Anyway, here I am boarding the number 20 bus on the Jaffa Road in downtown Jerusalem. It's very crowded and I struggle to get to the back where I can hang on to a yellow pole and sway back and forth in unison with all the other passengers. Out of habit, I scan the face, body language and clothing of every single person standing or sitting in my vicinity. Why? Because that's what I learned to do for four years during the Intifada of 2000-2004, when I was commuting back and forth to film school, and was afraid of getting blown up on the bus every day.

I was very, very lucky not to get blown up, but other people were not so lucky. A lot of young people got blown up, and a lot of old people got blown up, because they use the buses the most. Lots of school children got blown up, because that's who the buses are packed with at rush hour every morning. One schoolgirl was on her way to a swimming competition, because she was a swimming champion. After the bomb, they were only able to identify the body by analyzing the shreds of fabric from her swimsuit.

In those days I would get on the 20 or the 6 or the 21 outside Jerusalem Central Bus Station, and I would try and work out which seat would be least likely to get me killed. I couldn't sit at the front because some bombers would panic as soon as they boarded and detonate right away. I couldn't go to the middle of the bus because so many bombers would the choose the middle as the place to detonate, causing maximum damage to the front and back of the bus.

At night on the news, there would always be footage of the latest blown up bus to look at. I would try and calculate from the wreckage, which seats had been the safest and which had been the deadliest, on that bus.

Usually I would make my way to the back of the bus, figuring that most bombers would lose their cool and detonate before reaching the back. And I would always scrutinize my fellow passengers very, very carefully, at the same time, of course, that they were scrutinizing me. If I saw any dark skinned young man travelling alone with a backpack, I'd get off the bus and just walk the rest of the way. And that would happen say, five times a week.

Today I scanned all the faces on the bus and I felt relatively safe.

You know why? Because we got them. The bombmakers and the masterminds and the organizers and all the eighteen year olds who couldn't wait to get recruited. We got them all, pretty well. We took them on, and we dismantled their networks and we rocketed their bomb factories and we listened to their phone calls and blocked their bank accounts, and when any of their top brass forgot to be vigilant, we assassinated the hell out of them.

As well as doing all of this, there was the small and simple matter of involving our children in this fight. That's right, all our little boys, the ones who had been playing with meccano and lego and playmobile on the living room floor. The ones who loved reading Tintin and Asterix or the Israeli equivalent, and who gobbled their Frosties for breakfast every morning before getting the bus to school. All our beautiful boys - the ones who were on Ritalin and the ones who weren't, the ones who loved football and the ones who were too nerdy for sports. The ones who wore kipppot and tzitzit and the ones who didn't. We waited till they turned eighteen and then we put them in uniform and trained them to use weapons and taught them to speak Arabic, and they went into every one of those viper's nest towns like Jenin and Ramallah and Nablus, usually during the night, and they arrested every single person hiding a weapon or in possession of explosives. When your children were at university doing law or medicine or engineering, our children were in those towns. Every night.

As for the big shots, the cowards who were recruiting teens to do their terrorist work for them but who didn't get their hands dirty themselves, the ones who travelled around Jordan and Syria and Egypt and who hid in safe houses and got themselves new identities - we got them too. In Gaza and in Tulkarm and possibly even in Dubai. They will never, ever be safe from us, and we will get every last one of them.

We don't know for sure if Mahmoud Mabhouh was assassinated by Israel, but as an Israeli I sure as hell hope so. He was a key player in smuggling weapons into Gaza from Iran. Weapons to fire on our civilian populations. Special long range rockets for hitting Tel Aviv. Guns and mortars for terror attacks.

So if any of you are feeling outraged about the Dubai assassination, go ahead, you're entitled.

You probably weren't using the buses here between 2000 and 2004.

Gee but it's great to be back home

2010-02-22T12:10:00.000-08:00

February 17 2010

There are 3 things that I always find in the fridge when I’ve been away on a trip:

1) A glistening, hexagonal shaped mould on the zucchini

2) The cheap mayonnaise instead of the Helman’s

3) 0% yogurts in flavors like cappuccino or cheesecake, that nobody has eaten, is eating or will eat.

Also, the dining room table has always been mysteriously converted into Aryeh’s office.

But- it’s great to be home.

Superbowl Sunday

2010-02-22T05:45:00.000-08:00

SUPERBOWL SUNDAY

It’s Sunday in Los Angeles – Superbowl Sunday. Superbowl Sunday is a big day for the Los Angeles Jewish Community. It’s up there with Yom Kippur, or Seder Night. How do I know? Because I'm here with a delegation from the Ma’aleh Film School for 10 days of screenings and events, and we haven't been able to book a single screening on Superbowl Sunday. There is no synagogue, JCC, campus, Jewish organization or private home that would consider holding an event on this holy day. That’s because every single member of the Los Angeles Jewish Community, from age 7 to 77, male or female, Ashkenazi or Sephardi, orthodox or reform, is mad about American football. And that means that nothing, absolutely nothing, can be scheduled on Superbowl Sunday.

I’m trying to think if we have a parallel in Israel? I don’t think so. Let’s say the Los Angeles ballet company were coming to Tel Aviv and they wanted to schedule a glitzy performance on Yom Kippur. It would be no problem. They would get 1,500 people. And if all the theaters were closed, someone in Herzliya would do it at their private home.

What I’m trying to say is, there isn’t a single event in the Israeli calendar where you could get all Israelis to agree on the importance of that once event. Certainly not a sporting event. If the event had something to do with Humus, (the chickpea dip, not the terrorist organization) you might get a consensus. Humus is the great Unifying Factor in Israel. I’m not kidding. Arabs eat it (they invented it). Ultra-orthodox Jews eat it. Trendy Tel Aviv lefties eat it, and Settlers eat it. The Green family eats it on a Friday night with fresh whole wheat challah, so there is never any room for soup. There might be some exceptions though. There’s a Russian Orthodox monastery right next to Ma’aleh and I’m not sure the nuns there eat Humus. Those nuns look a bit anemic to me. I’ll make sure to send around a tub or two.

I do remember one time when practically every Israeli in the country was watching the same thing on TV, and that was when Ilan Ramon, the Israeli Astronaut, was broadcasting from the inside of the space shuttle. I get such a pain in my heart when I even think about Ilan, who died in the space shuttle explosion, and his gorgeous beautiful son, who was killed piloting an IAF plane only a few months ago. I hope G-dash-D is holding them both really tight up there. I hope He’s hugging them for all the Israelis who want to hug them but can’t.

I take it back when I say that all of Israel was watching Ilan’s broadcast. The ultra-orthodox were probably not watching. I think they were out demonstrating in Tel Aviv, against the Los Angeles ballet company performing on YomKippur.

THE PICO KOSHER DELI AND OTHER SPIRITUAL MATTERS

It’s Superbowl Sunday and my colleagues, Neta and Pazit, have gone to Disneyland for the day. I’m feeling SLIGHTLY better, after two days on antibiotics. I've had strep throat and a high fever, (that's right, on a business trip), so I didn't go.

So here I am alone in a hotel room. My knees are improving, they’re now chopped liver consistency and I can sort of stand up. But with the sore throat and feeling like death and all, I’ve had nothing to eat for four days.

I’m sitting on my bed in the hotel room feeling a little low, because I just spoke to Pazit, and she and Neta are about to go on the “It’s a Small World” ride which I haven’t seen for thirty years. All seventy two TV channels are showing ads for the Superbowl, or past Superbowls, or men in suits predicting what will happen at the Superbowl, or crowds of laughing and delighted people in New Orleans laughing and being delighted about the upcoming Superbowl. (The Saints did win by the way.)

I’m sitting on the bed thinking:

“What would I love to eat right now, if I had to force it down just to get some nutrition?”

And I realize there’s only one way to find out.

Ten minutes later I’m walking on my chopped liver knees down Pico Boulevard, which is around the corner from the hotel, and where all the kosher eateries are. I call Tali our events organizer, whose superb brain we are using to produce the film festival.

“Tali,” I say “I need a corned beef sandwich, for medical reasons. Where do I go?”

Without missing a beat, Tali says:

“You need the Pico Kosher Deli”.

Pico Kosher Deli is awesome, there is no other way to describe it. It is a dream of a deli, and the people who work there only speak in Hollywood movie language. They call out things like:

“Ira, that’s one corned beef on rye with pickles and coleslaw to go.”

The corned beef looks like it’s from a movie and so does the rye bread. Even the coleslaw looks like it was scripted. The coleslaw should have a sign next to it saying:

INTERIOR. DAY. COLESLAW.

All I can say is, if you are ever having doubts about your Judaism, you need to visit the Pico Kosher Deli. Come to think of it, I don’t think it’s a co-incidence that the Aish HaTorah building is just up the road. Those Aish people know what they’re doing. First, they spend six months putting people back in touch with their Jewish roots. Then they send them down the road for a corned beef sandwich. After those two experiences, no one has any problem believing in G-dash-D.

So. I’m back in my hotel room sitting on the bed, watching the only channel I can find that doesn’t have the Superbowl on it. It’s the health channel, showing hour after hour of pregnant women giving birth to premature babies who almost die but don’t.

I unwrap the corned beef sandwich, which is about six inches high, the coleslaw is glistening in its little plastic tub, two elegant long pickles are laid out on the greaseproof paper, and I’m sipping on a diet coke. On TV, premature twin girls named Shauna and Shannon have just been born, and they’re going to be okay.

You know what?

You can keep Disneyland.