Tag: israel
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Kaddish everywhere.
“It’s different this year. Every year it’s sad, but this year, it feels different, like, I get it now, you know?” From the mouths of Israeli teens. I’m 41. I’ve been never-forgetting my entire life. I saw these images and watched these videos and heard these testimonies from Holocaust survivors standing in front of me…
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Well I just had a fucked up weekend abroad
I don’t want to talk about it right now though. What I will say is… the returning home is always something. Every time, it’s a weird breath of relief. As uncomfortable (on a technical level) as I may feel here in Israel as an immigrant, it’s a discomfort I’m naturally comfortable with because it locks…
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The privilege to choose where you’re murdered for being a Jew
A reaction from a lot of Americans (including the State Department, apparently): “You can always come here.” I do feel guilt and appreciation around this, rooted in the well-meaningness and love of my friends and family; I understand how irresponsible? selfish? it might seem: “You have American passports. You can always come on a plane…
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Dispatch after 72 hours into whatever comes next
If there’s a teudat zehut (ID card) in your pocket, it’s like this: whether you were born here or moved here a year ago, your life is intertwined with whatever is happening outside your own mind and body. Whether you asked for it or not, whether you agree with or not, whether you fully comprehend…
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Who is *really* ready for אחדות in 5783?
It’s a big week ahead. The timing shouldn’t be lost on any of us. We’re on another eve of Temple destruction anniversary. We’re on another eve of Knesset voting the judicial reform issue. Will the labor unions strike again? Is the IDF really at risk of falling apart? Will Bibi’s new pacemaker slow the pace…
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Unbalanced
It’s not the end of the world, because nothing ever is. Maybe it’s eventually the end of my world, or yours. More likely, it’s a transition into a different world, one where… one where a lot of fears become reality, where others don’t, where things we never imagined happening do happen, where things we hoped…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…