Come Meet the “Other” at TEDxJaffa Today – Streaming Live!

September 7, 2011 - 10:07 AM by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Life, Medical Breakthroughs, Music, News, Politics, Religion, Science, Technology 

tedxjaffa TED

Watch the stream live today from Jaffa starting at 9 am EST.

It’s really easy to sit at your kitchen table in Brooklyn, Toronto, Vancouver, or Berkley and shoot off comments about the Middle East conflict. It’s harder when you live in it. It’s hard when you have to think twice about taking the bus, plane, or train because it might blow up, and it’s hard knowing that every person who shares your society with you are paying the majority of their taxes to a staggering defense budget.

I live in Israel. I live in Jaffa, Israel — a city next to Tel Aviv populated by Muslims, Christians and Jews. Some of us are atheists, some traditional and others defiantly religious. I chose to live here and it’s a crazy place. It’s not crazy because people here care about their religion, enough to fight over it or talk about it incessantly. It’s crazy because of its improbability.

In Jaffa, some Muslims call themselves Palestinians. Some Christians call themselves Israeli Palestinian Christian Arabs. The Jews are just Israelis of course, unless they come from Arab countries and they are Sephardic or those from Europe say they are Ashkenazi. You can find escaped donkeys galloping down the streets at midnight. You can find the best European chocolate cake beside a working man’s morning hummous joint. My husband says he wouldn’t be surprised to wake up one morning and find a dead body on our front porch: there is also a lot of crime in Jaffa.

But Jaffa has its charm. Its own rhythm is marked by the five calls to prayer, with the one at sunset telling my baby daughter (who is Jewish) it’s time to go to sleep. It’s got a roughness, and sharp corners, and just when you think it’s too hard to handle, you’ll catch a new smell reminding you of some other time from our collective memory when civilization began, somewhere around here.

But more than people know, Jaffa — the city of the Bible where Jonah disembarks from before getting swallowed by the whale and spat out on shore near Nineveh — is a lens through which the world can understand cultural diversity, and cultural freedom in Israel.

Today at my home the East West House we will help host TEDxJaffa under the theme the Desire to Know the Other. There is a strong line-up of people from Jaffa, like my musician husband Yisrael Borochov, but also people from Israel and the Palestinian Authority who will tell their personal and professional stories on working to know the other. One speaker survived a terror attack and was afraid to look in the mirror to see how much of her face was left; one speaker will be a successful Palestinian policeman turned businessman; and if you log on to our simulcast today (or see the videos later) you’ll meet Haya Samir, an Israeli Muslim whose family came to Israel as political refugees from Egypt. Raised as a Jew, she found out as a young woman that she was in fact a Muslim.

Haya is an Israeli diva. And we are so glad to know her. Today she will sing songs of the pioneering days in Israel – Debka Fantasia – before 1948 when young Jews met Bedouin and Arab shepherds. These pioneers longed for a culture that combined, not defined, the Middle East with European values. I think this is what the people in the Arab uprisings are coming to terms with.

Would you like to get off your chair and dance to a little music with us LIVE? Maybe meet someone whose views might change your worldview about the Middle East conflict?

The simulcast starts at at 9 am EST time today Wednesday if you are in New York City. Log on at the TEDxJaffa site to see it. Officially in Israel the event starts at 3.

Alli Meets Aladdin

The idea for TEDx in Jaffa started with my friend Alli Magidsohn, who is producing and curating the event. The fellow Jaffinian, who is from LA, was inspired to fulfill this dream after an encounter with a man (a genie?) in Sinai named Aladdin.

Her words: “We felt lucky to have the opportunity to meet and form a new friendship in an overall context that might have otherwise limited us as enemies and spoke about the area’s conflicts, spirituality, Love, and many other things together. His perspectives broadened my mind and this encounter made me realize that as an American Jew living in Israel, even opposite an Muslim Egyptian man, there is still so much more that we have in common than there is that separates us.

“Other encounters in Sinai, Israel and Palestine led to further ‘broadening’, deeper respect and more curiosity, and TEDxJaffa is the manifestation of this process of personal expansion. ‘The Desire to know The Other’, for me – not necessarily for the event’s speakers – isn’t about explicit things like politics or peace or coexistence, it’s really about that desire to look from the inside, outwards, and to try to take in, understand, or somehow be enriched by exposing oneself to another person’s experience.

Log in folks at 9 am if you are New York or Toronto. All other cities: the event’s at 3 PM + 7 hours EST. Link from here.

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From Sudan to Jerusalem

January 18, 2011 - 5:49 PM by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Politics 

Refugees travel from Sudan north through Egypt to Israel

One of the hot topics in the news these past months has been the steady influx of refugees from Africa who have crossed the border between Egypt and Israel, and Israel’s subsequent response of building a fence to keep the Africans out.

With 1,000 refugees arriving every month now, the issue is not trivial. It’s further complicated by the historical Jewish imperative to treat the less fortunate with kindness and compassion and not close the floodgates.

Until recently, the subject was mostly theoretical for me. I had never sat down and actually talked with someone who had made the long journey northward and slipped across the Sinai border.

So I was very intrigued when the opportunity arose to spend a Shabbat meal with a refugee from Darfur, now living in Jerusalem and working as a cleaner. “Jack” had earlier in the day given a talk at our synagogue. He joined us at the Shabbat table of our friends Bob and Ruth, accompanied by a volunteer from the U.S. who is helping him write and edit his speaking material.

Jack was quite articulate as he explained who was fighting whom, why, and for how long. We learned about peace agreements that have been broken, and the current struggles by southern Sudan to secede from the violent north.

Near the end of the conversation, I decided to ask a tough and potentially inflammatory question. What did Jack think of the fence Israel is building? He must be against something that would prevent his country-mates from finding safe haven in Israel, I imagined. His answer surprised me.

Jack was all for the fence, he said. He understood Israel’s dilemma and explained that, as a small country, Israel could not be expected to absorb refugees indefinitely. The fence should be built…but here was the kicker: all refugees already in Israel should receive legal resident status and be allowed to work and build their families here.

What would happen to other would-be asylum seekers, I asked? There were other countries in Africa that would take in the displaced Sudanese, Jack assured us. Once word filtered south that there was now a wall preventing entry into Israel, the flow would surely stop.

I’m not sure what to make of Jack’s response. Was he presenting a politically balanced position calculated to win Israeli favor, or was he thinking only about how to make the best of his own situation, while cynically turning a blind eye to others in a similar, bleak predicament?

The fence and the African migration test Israel’s conceptions about what kind of country we want to be. Should we be a refuge for at least some of the world’s most downtrodden? Or must we protect ourselves from the slippery slope of a demographic a danger.

I don’t have an easy answer. And neither, apparently, did our new friend Jack.

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My brisket butcher

March 21, 2010 - 10:23 AM by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: coexistence, Food, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life 

I’m in the midst of a cleaning frenzy and a brisket study. It’s the pre-Passover phase and while some are sunning in Sinai, touring Italy (friends of mine) or skiing in Switzerland (another friend) during the Passover school vacation that began today (teachers have to clean their houses too), I’m completely caught up in the spring cleaning version of cleaning for Passover and planning our seder menu.

For me, this is the fun part of hosting the seder this year, getting to plan a menu that involves checking out the various recipes out there, consulting with my friend Adeena, a food writer in New York, and thumbing through my collection of cookbooks to see what I may have missed over the years. I’m confirming that we are having brisket, the question is, which recipe?

As a dry run, we made a brisket this past weekend, buying our hunk of meat at one of the local supermarkets. That’s where the story comes in. Daniel went to buy the brisket, and as he likes to do, asked the advice of the meat counter butcher. He’d gone in with his Hebrew word for brisket all prepared, ‘chazeh’, which is also used for chicken breast meat, but the butcher convinced him that what Daniel meant and what he, the butcher, wanted to give him, were two different things.

“How do you want to cook it?” asked the butcher, an Arab guy.
“In the oven, for about two or three hours,” answered Daniel.
“It’s for Shabbat?” asked the butcher.
[This conversation was taking place on Thursday morning.]
“Yes, it’s for Shabbat, but we’re cooking it tonight,” said Daniel.
“That’s good, because once you cook this, it can be frozen and still taste good in 40 years,” said the butcher.

Who knew? He then proceeded to make small cuts in the meat, telling Daniel to stick cloves of garlic inside. The rest of the recipe including braising it, adding water, and then baking it for another hour at the most, with vegetables and onions. I modified his recipe slightly, braising it in oil, removing it and then sauteing onions, carrots and celery in the same pot, adding crushed tomatoes at the end, and then baking the whole lot for at least an hour and a half.

I have to say, it was stupendous, particularly when you were lucky enough to get a slice with pieces of the slow-cooked garlic inside. I’m debating between this recipe and a wine-based brisket for the seder. But we will definitely be returning to our Arab butcher and his patient, garlic-loving hands.

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On the road again

March 16, 2010 - 9:13 AM by · 1 Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Israeliness, Life, Travel 

Israel may be a relatively tiny country, but we’re doing some heavy-duty travelling in the next few days.

Tonight, it’s a family wedding in Ariel, in the West Bank near Petah Tikvah, only a comparatively short hour plus drive from Jerusalem. Then tomorrow, we’re making a trek down to Sde Boker in the Negev for the swearing in ceremony of my daughter’s IDF unit upon completion of their first phase of basic training.

Many combat units have their ceremony at the Kotel in Jerusalem’s Old City, but maybe because this is a mixed unit of men and women, the rabbinical authorties decided that they didn’t want the two sexes near each other at the religious site. So, we’re looking at a two-three hour trip each way for the hour-long ceremony. Of course, we’d drive all day for this moment, but a quick jaunt to the Kotel would have been nice.

And then, Sunday morning, we take off for the 4-hour drive to Eilat, where we’ll park the car, walk to the border crossing control center and enter Egypt for a few days excursion in Sinai, inaugurated by a sure-to-be wild taxi ride down to Nuweiba.

But I hope that will be the only thrills we’ll experience on the roads. I’m going to drive alertly, responsibly and defensively whenever I’m onthe open Israeli highway – or stuck in traffic on the blocked Israeli highway. Let’s hope that my countrymen do the same.

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Sinai-bound

March 11, 2010 - 1:23 AM by · 1 Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Holidays, Israeliness, Life, Travel 

Is it only in Israel that going on vacation can turn into a political act? Or at least one with nationalistic implications?

We needed a family vacation, and decided to get away before Pessah. Despite the infinite holiday possibilities that await us in our backyard of Israel, we talked about going abroad – maybe because of the fact that my wife hasn’t been out of Israel in about five years.

But, when you’re on a tight budget, there’s not that many options – Turkey, Greece, Jordan, Cyprus… or Sinai! We had been down south of our border twice – once on a camping trip on a visit to the region in the late 1970s when Sinai was still under Israeli control, and then about 11 years ago, when we took a wonderful family trip to a resort in Nuweiba, a paradise between the Israeli border and Sharm el Shek.

The responses we received when we told people we were planning to return to Sinai ranged from ‘take me with you’ to ‘how can you go there? There are travel warnings,’ ‘it’s not patriotic to leave Israel and spend your money in Egypt,’ ‘what if there’s a terror attack?’

Well, first of all, there are terror alerts every time I step out my door. Secondly, Nuweiba has some of the most dazzling coral reef and tropical fish north of Sharm, and I’m planning on spending most of my waking hours snorkeling along with it. Thirdly, it’s a great value, much, much money less than a vacation would cost in Eilat, for instance.

As much as I love Israel, I think it can do without my vacation shekels for a one time fling in Sinai. So, get ready, here we come!

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