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Meet the post-Zionist Zionists- Sivan Fridman

by adminin Politics, Writing

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Mondoweiss, December 28, 2009

This is the first installation in a seven-part series. See the above link for details.

It was the avocadoes that made Sivan question things. The moshav she grew up on had three varieties—Haas, Fuerte, and HaNatoush. “HaNatoush,” Fridman repeats. “The abandoned.”

As a child, she didn’t understand why avocadoes would bear such a name. But when she rode horses through the fields, she noticed other abandoned things. There were stone remains of a village. They reminded her of the Old City in Jerusalem. “You don’t realize that they’re sort of new,” Fridman recalls.

When Fridman was 14 and attending school on a nearby kibbutz, she learned about the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. “I thought it was a kind of avocado. It was a shock to realize these lands were ‘abandoned’ in 1948.” Fridman became aware, too, that Palestinians hadn’t left their land as willingly as the agricultural nomenclature might imply.

Upset about this part of her country’s history, Fridman looked up the property records of her moshav. She was happy to learn that some of the land was purchased from Arabs in 1933, including the plot her parents’ house was built on. “These lands were legally owned,” she says. But some were not.

For Fridman, the granddaughter of four Holocaust survivors, “coming to terms with everything was a process.”

Her understanding and definition of Zionism changed. But it wasn’t abandoned. “Being a Zionist is something primal for me,” she says. “It’s who I am; it’s who I was raised to be.”

Today, Fridman, 29, is a counselor for a program that brings Jewish volunteers from the Diaspora to Israel to work with needy populations in Tel Aviv and Yafo, the adjacent Arab city.

Some of these visitors end up staying, becoming “immigrants, not olim,” Fridman emphasizes. Though she dislikes the term “aliyah” because it implies exclusivity, she is not ashamed she has facilitated immigration. “I don’t think we [Jews] shouldn’t live here. But the meaning of Zionism isn’t to build settlements,” Fridman says. “The meaning of Zionism is to fight for how you want the country to look.”

Fridman points to Tel Aviv, hotbed of activism and host to organizations like that she is employed by, which emphasizes pluralism, social justice, and Judaism’s humanistic values. This is the future of Zionism, she says. “The new kibbutzim are in the cities.”

The series was printed in its entirety in the Fall 2009 print edition of Zeek, Israelology, which was distributed to J-Street conference attendees.

Arabic slang is sababa in Hebrew

by adminin Writing

ruvikrosenthal1The National, December 26, 2009

Have a seat at a café in Tel Aviv, known as the “first Hebrew city,” and your waitress will welcome you with ahlan, a standard Arabic greeting. Place your order and she’ll say sababa—”cool” to Israelis; “urge for a lover” in literary Arabic. When your meal comes, you might enjoy it so much that you’ll call it wahaat, “one” in Arabic, a Hebrew exclamation for singular, outstanding.

Ruvik Rosenthal, writer of a weekly column about the Hebrew language and author of the Comprehensive Slang Dictionary comments, “Arabic is queen of Israeli slang.” Rosenthal estimates that Hebrew-speakers use approximately 700 such words as part of their everyday speech.

Although slang changes with time, Hebrew peppered with Arabic isn’t a passing fad—Arabic had a firm foothold in the language long before Israel was established in 1948, Rosenthal explains.

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UAE charity brings art to Palestinian children

by adminin Middle East, Writing

dsc08143 The National, December 26, 2009

“Finish green!” a six-year-old Palestinian girl exclaims in English, dropping a pastel crayon onto the table and raising her open hands into the air.

She reaches for blue and turns back to the paper before her. Volunteer Michael Cooper, 30, crouches next to her. Using his fingers, he teaches the girl how to blend one color into the next. Her small hand follows his.

When Cooper stands, he’s got broad smudges of green and blue on his face. “It’s all part of the job,” he comments.

But it’s not a job at all. Cooper is one of 12 volunteers who will spend the next week donating their time, energy, and enthusiasm to 70 Palestinian kids who attend the Hermann Gmeiner School in Bethlehem. About half of the children are part of SOS Palestine, a program that provides a home and education to youth from troubled backgrounds.

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It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas

by adminin Miscellaneous, Writing

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The Jerusalem Post, December 25, 2009

Zara’s display of a Christmas tree sparked controversy and anger throughout Israel last week. Following complaints from the public, the Spain-based fashion chain changed their window decorations, removing symbols associated with the Christian holiday and, in some places, adding candlesticks to mark the local holiday.

A post-chanukah stop at Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Center found Zara’s windows empty of any winter cheer. But Christmas decorations were still about—HaKol Beh $, the dollar store on the ground floor, had a modest stock of Santa-decorated school folders, greeting cards, and bits of plastic greenery reminiscent of Christmas tree trimmings.

Pointing to the faux branches, owner Rachel Tzioni says, “I add them to my hannukiah. It’s pretty.”

In the past, such decorations were purchased mainly by foreign workers and Russian immigrants, Tzioni says. But in recent years, Tzioni has observed that a growing number of Jewish Israelis are stopping by her store to pick up a little bit of red and green for their home.

“It’s not our holiday,” she says. “But it’s another reason to party.”

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Exploited Thais in no man’s land

by adminin Migrant workers, Writing

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The National, December 19, 2009

Over two dozen Thai laborers have spent the last three weeks in the custody of Israeli authorities. But they are not under arrest. Following a complaint on their behalf from Kav LaOved, an Israeli NGO that advocates for foreign workers, immigration police freed the laborers from conditions that some critics liken to slavery.

The 28 men were employed on a farm in the south of Israel, within sight of Gaza. There, despite the fact that Israeli labor law mandates all employees receive at least 36 hours of rest a week, they were forced to work seven days a week—even during wartime.

Speaking to The National through a translator and under the condition of anonymity, six of the men discuss their experiences of Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli offensive against Gaza that occurred last winter. “We could see the rockets during the war—one dropped 50 meters away from the farm—but we were not allowed to stop working,” says Sak, 36.

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Don’t give up the fight

by adminin Miscellaneous, Writing

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The Jerusalem Post, December 18, 2009

Led by over one hundred NGOs, thousands of people gathered in Tel Aviv on Friday to unite under the banner of human rights. The rally, organized by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) and timed to coincide with International Human Rights Day, centered on the theme “en matsav!” (no way!). The slogan was intended to express the idea that the erosion of democracy and infringement of human rights is always unacceptable, in any circumstances.

In a public statement regarding the demonstration, Yael Maizel of ACRI said, “They tell us human rights are a luxury for peacetime. They tell us not to be naïve, that security comes first…. We need to remind Israeli leaders and the general public that there is no security without human rights; that there is no way we will tolerate racism and discrimination in our communities and that we will not allow our democracy to fail us.”

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A series of Jewish encounters

by adminin Miscellaneous, Writing

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The Jerusalem Post, December 18, 2009

In the spirit of Jonathan Rosen’s The Talmud and the Internet, the Jewish Encounters Series marries subjects that readers might not expect to see between the covers of one book.

“The series knits together different impulses,” Rosen, creator and editor, comments.

A joint imprint of Nextbook and Schocken, Jewish Encounters began eight years ago as an initiative to bring classic works of Jewish literature to American libraries. The enterprise quickly morphed, however, into a dynamic project that offers history, biography, and culture “filtered through a contemporary sensibility,” Rosen says.

“We’re engineering encounters between Jewish writers and subjects,” Rosen explains. “They’re personal encounters—and the writer’s journey is part of the reader’s journey.”

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At home and abroad

by adminin Israel, Writing

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The Jerusalem Post, December 18, 2009

Ordering coffee in Hebrew and taking in the view of the Old City from the Mishkenot’s restaurant, Jonathan Rosen appears comfortable in Israel.

But his easy posture doesn’t reflect his emotions—Rosen, who is happy to call himself a Zionist, doesn’t feel entirely at ease.

“I feel cut off by the language,” the American Jewish writer and editorial director of Nextbook confesses, almost wistfully. Despite Hebrew school, two years of Hebrew as an undergraduate at Yale, and additional study while a grad student at Berkley, his Hebrew, in his own words, “stinks.”

In Israel to participate in Kisufim, the Jerusalem Conference of Jewish Writers, which was held from December 7 to 10 at Beit Avi Chai and Mishkenot Sha’ananim, Rosen strikes as the embodiment of this year’s theme—exile, language, and the Jewish writer.

Despite his physical distance from Israel—Rosen lives in New York City with his wife, a conservative rabbi, and their two daughters, aged 10 and 6—he feels a deep connection with the country. “Israel is central to the survival of Judaism,” he says. And because his paternal grandfather died in Buchenwald and his paternal grandmother was shot to death by the Nazis, Rosen was “aware of the precariousness of Jewish existence from an early age.”

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Trauma unit

by adminin Miscellaneous, Writing

day_after_night Review of Anita Diamant’s Day After Night

Haaretz, December 4, 2009

After the darkness of the Shoah, in the last days of the British Mandate, waves of Jewish immigrants flooded Palestine’s shores. Their numbers far exceeded the quotas set by the British, and these new arrivals — most coming by boat from Europe, a few traveling by foot from the Arab world, but all of them considered illegal — were rounded up and sent to detention centers in Palestine and Cyprus, where they waited for the British to decide their fates. One such internment camp, at Atlit, just south of Haifa, serves as the setting for Anita Diamant’s latest work of fiction, “Day After Night.”

Atlit, Diamant writes in the opening pages, “offered a grim welcome to the exhausted remnant of the Final Solution, who could barely see past its barbwire fences, three of them, in fact, concentric lines that scrawled a crabbed and painful hieroglyphic across the sky.” She draws on first-hand reporting for this description — a 2000 visit to Atlit, today a museum, gave her the idea for the novel.

Diamant is best known for “The Red Tent” (1997), which became an international bestseller. That book, in which the author took as her premise the biblical story of Jacob’s daughter Dinah, recasts Dinah’s woeful tale as one of feminine strength and triumph.

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A taste of home

by adminin Migrant workers, Writing

november-019The Jerusalem Post, November 20, 2009

Halo-halo, the Filipino dessert of American-style shaved ice, Spanish dulce de leche, and Asian mung beans is an edible example of the Philippines’ unique layering of cultures. On the weekends, you’ll find halo-halo at impromptu stands in Tel Aviv’s Tachana Merkazit—and if you take a stroll through the surrounding neighborhood, you’ll see a similar stacking of flavors in the eateries that cater to Israel’s foreign workers and African refugees.

Pinoy-Namaste, with its blended Filipino-Nepali name, seems a good place to start. Anchoring a corner of the Central Bus Station, this restaurant and party hall serves favorites from the Philippines like kare-kare and lechon kawali. Kare-kare is a thick, peanut-based stew, peppered with beef, oxtail, and vegetables. Depending on the cook’s home region, this heavy soup is sometimes punched up with chili and mouth-puckering calamansi lime juice.

Lechon kawali is made from small cubes of pork belly. Fatty and soft, the bits are boiled in water spiked with garlic and salt. Next, the meat is deep fried to a golden brown. Under the guidance of owner Ruby Sukjai, Pinoy-Namaste dishes up lechon as juicy and crisp as it is in the Philippines.

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