Tag: israel
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Not normal (part 2)
It’s day 3. When it comes to processing, sometimes it takes a while. I think the closer to home it is, the slower it goes. To put it another way: maybe it’s a bit too twisted that I’m reading the insanity playing out in Iraq in an effort to not read the no-news from back…
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Not normal.
It’s sadly a familiar feeling. Refreshing the news every hour and every hour thinking, ‘fuck.’
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And you think *America* takes its guns seriously?
Oddly, it’s much cheaper to purchase a mineral-water gun.
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Workshop in Advanced Citizenship
There’s nothing to make you feel more a part of a society’s special mosaic than to find yourself arriving at the sealed entrance of the Unemployment Office, joining a small mob of people across all of Israeli demographics, all staring at the printout sloppily taped to the heavy doors… …that the ministry is on strike.
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Oh Chanukah, oh Chanukah, come… on, diaspora mama.
Well here’s a first. Last week the kids and I were in the kitchen making latkes (that was also a first, and it was kinda obvious). Playing in the background: a Chanukah songs cd my mom had brought from the States. So, you know, some kind of boy’s choir-esque English-Hebrew mix. We were singing along;…
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It’s a bird! It’s a plane! Yeah, it’s a plane.
Universe, if you know how liable I am to get distracted, why would you send low-flying planes buzzing past my window, across the street from my house… for two hours?! First, I was all, go go go WARPLANE! Then I was all, go go go FIREPLANE! Finally, I concluded, it’s really probably just go go…
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Getting your feet (ritually) wet: An American-Israeli’s mikvah story
Perhaps, for a taharat-mishpacha-keeping American-Israeli olah (female American immigrant to Israel who keeps laws of family purity), nothing else can quite epitomize the cultural differences of here and there better than… the mikvah. Because I got married in Israel, my mikva knowledge and experiences have been molded here. The closest I got in the States before…
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Organ donation in Israel: the good, the bad, the depressing, the options
So… what happens after we die? One thing we know for sure – (ok, two things, for starters, our bodies decompose after some awkward nail and hair growth) – one sure thing is that we leave behind the living. The healthy living. The barely living. The newly living. The next in line. Organ donation is…
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On Jews, Jerusalem, Women and Walls
Note: Reflections based on my rare February and March 2013 trips to the Kotel. Based on today’s news, I figured today’s as good as any to post. I’ve been to the Kotel, the Western Wall, way too many times in the past year. Previously, I had a comfortable average of maybe once every two or…
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Speaking up.
It won’t be long before Jewish parents of school-age children no longer remember the point. The memory becomes a faded square of yellow fabric, eventually disintegrating under museum lighting. The pictures, cliche. The speeches, routine. It’s probably already true to some degree, but most of us are young enough to remember the first time we…
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I see what you did there, Anwar Sadat…
Oh, you know, just minding my own Zionist business at the IDF museum in מתחם התחנה in Tel Aviv (gorgeous area, go sometime), when in a room about Israel’s generals I notice a photograph symbolizing hope, future, and cold peace… Ho hum, just having a grand time with my ex-arch enemy. What’s that? The pattern…