School Subjects & Jewish Jobs
June 24th, 2010As I was growing up, my whole wide world was Jewish: Jewish camp, Jewish synagogue, Jewish youth group, Jewish neighborhood. From nursery all the way up to the end of twelfth grade, I attended Jewish day school. I lived, ate, and breathed Jewdom, and inevitably all of my friends were Jewwy Jews, just like me. I didn’t choose that life, mind you, it was chosen for me by my parents, and once I graduated high school, my universe expanded to include the ethnocultural communities that had always existed only a bus ride away, just beyond the pale of the Jewish settlement pattern. Now, looking back upon that era, when there were never fewer than three or four David’s in a room at any one time, I can reflect upon the various advantages and disadvantages of living in a sheltered shtetl, the equivalent of a tiny little village nestled inside of a multicultural metropolis.
Between Ridicule & Acceptance
June 20th, 2010The hour-and-a-half-long documentary Earthlings starts off with a statement of fact that will resonate with anyone who has ever taken an active role in a social justice movement. There are three stages in the response to Truth: At first, Ridicule. Then, Violent Opposition. And finally, Acceptance. That’s the way it always is with the fight for civil liberties, and that’s the way it was exactly fifty years ago when four Black students sat down at a cafeteria in North Carolina and ordered food, expecting to be served just like anybody else. Racism isn’t over, not in the United States, and not anywhere else in the world, not by a long shot. But at least the most obvious and obscene manifestations of it, the Jim Crow laws, have been obliterated for good.
It’s Not Only Baseball
June 9th, 2010Now that all of the airlines have changed their rules and have started charging passengers an arm and a leg for every pound of luggage over the legal limit, you really have to weigh every item that you consider bringing to Israel, both literally and figuratively. But just as travel regulations have changed over the years, so has the Israeli consumer goods market; there’s no more need to smuggle several pairs of Levi’s jeans in your trunk, all of the big-name brands have set up shop here, and are only too eager to take your hard-earned shekels in exchange for overpriced merchandise. Nowadays, the only items that still aren’t available in Israel don’t show up on the retail shelves due to cultural differences. And chief among them are the thick mitts made out of cow, with webbing between the thumb and index finger — the consumer product commonly called baseball gloves.
Piece & Food Security
June 6th, 2010Man cannot survive on bread alone. But he certainly cannot survive without bread… or at least its nutritional equivalent. Once upon a time, our ancestors simply wandered through the rainforests and picked fresh fruit out of the air, or dug protein-rich nuts out of the ground, and ate them on the spot. We can simulate the same hunter-gatherer foraging experience when we meander up and down the aisles of Whole Foods or some other supermarket, and help ourselves to marinated olives, or sample one of half a dozen different kinds of croissants. Certainly, the food cycle has come full circle, and we once again find ourselves in the gastronomical Garden of Eden, able to almost effortlessly satisfy our food requirements.
Water Has Enemies
June 1st, 2010Sometimes when I am scanning news items, I have a weird out-of-body experience. I read some story that’s buried in the electronic equivalent of the back page, and I can’t understand why it isn’t one page one, on the top of the page. In really big bold letters. Every single day, for at least a year. Zooming out of our solar system, I picture in my mind’s eye what we must look like to a race of aliens from another galaxy. When I feel connected to gOd, I wonder if she feels frustrated by our infantile myopia.
Housing and Homefullness
May 27th, 2010Two weeks ago while walking down Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, between the swanky coffee shops on Shenkin and the monstrous office towers of the financial sector, I came upon a public art installation sponsored by one of Israel’s biggest banks. It was a series of sculptures intended to represent housing alternatives. Some of the displays were symbolic, abstract, metaphorical musings on the meaning of house and home. Others were attempts to shock passersby by assembling the shelter from unconventional materials. But least one of these was a realistic structure that could actually have practical application.
The Devorah Silin and Samuel Heinrich Winograd Workshop Center
May 23rd, 2010It is rather unusual for an online giving platform to engage in raising a large gift to construct a new workshop room. We were happy for JGooders to do that and help NA LAGA’AT get this generous gift of 120,000 NIS from the Deborah Silin and Samuel Heinrich Winograd Fund.
The NA LAGA’AT Center in Jaffa includes a theater emsemble of deaf and blind actors, a café with deaf waiters, and a “Dining in the Dark” restaurant with blind waiters!
Women Can Do It, Too
May 18th, 2010Life on the material plane is full of all kinds of contradictions. It’s impossible to always walk the talk; inevitably, there is going to be a gap between what we say and what we do. If you slip up once in a while, it doesn’t discredit every single thing that you stand for. But at the same time, there has got to be some consistency in your rhetorical arguments. If I’m able to poke holes in your propaganda without even working up a sweat, then you had better go back to the drawing board and start plugging up those holes in your internal logic. And if you try to force your imperfect ideology down my throat… then to paraphrase John Wayne, I’ll make such a stink that you’ll be walking in and out of your Yeshiva with gas masks.
