Tag: israel
-
Undressing Israel.
A set of giant concrete blocks that serve as guard posts at the checkpoint near my house now has a fancy sign on it: עמדה 2 Things here have always felt concrete – heavy, burdensome, temporary but permanent – but they’re getting more and more more concrete over time and experience and murder and terror […]
-
Bleak.
Some make a habit of exaggerating the bleakness of our civil future here in Israel, many many more make a habit of not relating to it enough. The reckoning is creeping even slower than you’d imagine; bursting those bubbles is harder than you think. So tonight was the second in a series of motzei shabbat […]
-
Go forth.
What a weird twist… to be exploring Jewishness and Israeliness and what this peoplehood means these days when it’s appearing more and more difficult to understand the meaning of what’s happening in the world… …during the week we read parshat Lech Lecha. What does it mean to pick up and leave something you know? Swept […]
-
Twenty Years
Political Violence (part 1) It took place in an off-the-beaten path classroom, not a modern lecture hall. We were maybe 30 students, and the few times we had met before – maybe it was two? Three? – we had already covered some ‘basics’: what peacebuilding is, Rwanda, a bit of Bosnia. When I registered for […]
-
Hi from a new chapter in an old story.
After a year and a half of emotional exhaustion, it’s shocking and also not shocking to learn that it’s possible to be even more deeply emotionally exhausted. With each passing rocket or gunshot or stabbing or counterstrike, another slice of the next generation loses the chance to grow up not knowing what we know. More […]
-
Hindsight is, after all, 2020: My end of (the longest) year review
“It’s the year of cliche conference names! The year of too-easy cable news slogans! The year that will produce endless ‘hindsight is…’ memes!” That’s what I was saying this time last year. So here we are, and it really wasn’t. Something as frivolous as a year’s round, meaningful number just… barely came up in 2020. […]
-
The national condition of feeling stuck
Everything feels stuck. Every post on my feeds is “hoping for the best, but…” “I didn’t know what to do, so I just…” “well, nothing’s going to make a difference, so…” I sense the stuckness in the street, I sense the stuckness at work, I am pounded over the head with the stuckness over social […]
-
We cast our lot.
When people ask me why I came here, my answer is that no matter what I believe religiously I’ll always accept the fact that by being born into what I was born I have no choice but to cast my lot with the rest of my people. So even now, as there is this man […]
-
Am I supposed to be here?
It’s been 15 years since I came out to my family that I’d be moving to Israel after university finished. It was two years before the ‘disengagement’, it was during the second intifada, a couple years after Nefesh b’Nefesh started. I was searching for a lot of things, but I knew this much was true […]
-
What if we don’t wanna be the toy? A Eurovision post.
It can be so hard to be Israeli. It’s can be so hard to get shit all the time, from every direction. To never be able to ‘choose’ a side because the game is always changing and anyway, there is no side to choose; you’re at the center of it by existing where and when […]
-
At 70, you get your own Snapchat filter.
Independence is affording the time to celebrate your existence. Independence is getting your own Snapchat filter. Independence is being proud of someone you never met named Netta. Independence is the freedom to openly mourn your dead on your terms. Independence is enjoying making choices on a global scale. Independence is watching your kids grow up […]