Sacha Baron Cohen is loose in Israel, and he's creating some confusion over the thin linguistic line between hummus and Hamas. Posing as his character Bruno, a gay Austrian rock star, Cohen has been interviewing unsuspecting Israeli and Palestinian political experts, leaving them flabbergasted by his "confusion" between chick pea paste and the militant political organization. This delicate differentiation has been dealt with before, most notably in West Bank Story, winner of the 2007 Live Action Short Film Oscar, and an official selection of Sundance Festival.

Hungry for more? Check out this video of Adam Sandler discussing the hummus factor in his recent flick, You Don’t Mess With the Zohan.

When Dubliner Dan Walsh removed Garfield from the classic Jim Davis cartoons, drawing attention to the peculiar life and mind of his owner Jon Arbuckle, he created an internet phenomenon which has drawn between 30,000 and 300,000 hits per day since February. Without the fat, waggish, sarcastic, star of the cartoon, all we are left with is Jon Arbuckle, Garfield's owner. Walsh would have us believe that this results in "an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and the empty desperation of modern life" of which Jim Davis, himself, is a fan.

In Walsh's distilled version, Arbuckle still says and does all he did in the original cartoon, when his life was made tougher (and often funnier) because of Garfield. He wishes for love, struggles with maintaining the house, waxes philosophical, makes dumb domestic mistakes, and tries to find joy in the everyday. Garfield no longer wryly responds to any of this because he is no longer there. And it's true, Arbuckle does seem off-kilter, lonely and unstable at times without the cat making any appearances.

But for those who can't shake the knowledge that Arbuckle is interacting with someone, his irrational behavior can actually appear profound and poetic. Another possible reading is not that he is mad and melodramatic (although I'll admit, sometimes he does seems a bit mad....), but that Arbuckle is seeking a relationship with God. Like Arbuckle sans Garfield, religious people attempt to have relationships and interact with something that cannot be seen or heard. (One can already anticipate the catcalls, "All this suggests is that religious people are also schizophrenic, bipolar, depressives!) Pleading with this intangible thing, fearing it at times, religious people occasionally find a companion, albeit one with fierce independence. Like Arbuckle in this new version, religious people incorporate this seemingly absent thing into their lives, for better or for worse.

Arbuckle's life takes on a chaotic and meandering tone. He talks to himself constantly, cannot grasp the reins of his life, and acts just plain oddly at times. If by removing Garfield from the strip, Walsh is suggesting that the cat never existed, and was just a figment of Arbuckle's imbalanced imagination, then this, too, parallels a modern notion that people manufactured God in order to have a pretext for social control (or a context for their madness). Why all the mumbling into books? Why the unscrewing of refrigerator light bulbs?

But for those who have had experiences of or deeply sense the divine, the kind of conduct that Arbuckle exhibits makes a whole lot of sense: Despite the discombobulation that Arbuckle might feel from having this "absent-Garfield" in his life, he also seems to feel a whole lot more. His paradoxical relationship with "that which isn't" expands the kinds of experiences he can have in the world and enlarges the map where he can take his extraordinary range of emotions.

In Walsh's revised strips, Arbuckle's relationship with that-which-is-absent presents a window into the complex, challenging, and beautiful relationships modern religious people build with God. It also shows us a bit how these relationships can appear loony to others. Who knew such a rich meditation on relations with the divine could be achieved with photoshop and in pastel?  Here are eight religious readings of Garfield Minus Garfield.


In this strip, Arbuckle is experiencing some kind of joy. It's rare for him to be so pleased—perhaps he just booked a ticket to go back to the farm or was successful in landing that elusive comic date. But when encountering the Other wanting to share his joy, he is clearly rebuffed. This portrays the independence of the intangible God who cannot be summoned at will or manipulated into giving comfort at all times.  Arbuckle would like to universalize his experience, or influence something larger with it—if I am feeling good, then all must be good. But try as he might, he realizes that his emotions do not determine the state of the world.

By attempting to hear the dreams of the Other, Arbuckle is attempting to make a more selfless connection with the world. It is unclear whether he actually hears any response to his question, but he understands that relationships require listening—or at the very least a place for the Other to assert itself. To try to listen to the dreams, specifically, of the Other—if that Other is indeed God or if that Other is another being—is to try to be commanded towards a vision of the world not yet established. Arbuckle is opening his own existence to include the will of another.

One of the things that religion focuses on is an understanding of death. Some, full of hubris, might believe that it can be controlled or intimidated, but that can only lead to futility, as is portrayed here. Since he appears the next day, one can surmise that his disappearance only served to remind him of his mortality, something that perhaps encourages him to live and feel more fully, as he seems capable of doing.

For a modern person, all religious expressions and moments of relationship with God do not lead to disappointment or absurdity. Here, Arbuckle seems to have found a space for his contentment.  His suggestion that he and the invisible Other “think nice thoughts” is accepted. One can imagine God appreciating the sentiment. Jewish texts portray God as responsive to the suggestions of others, even allowing people to sway God's emotions.

Truth be told, most people, even religious people, are not always satisfied by religious worship or ritual. And even though one might imagine that doing things in a special or different (read: religious) context would make things improve, it doesn't always. A boring Shabbas morning shiur is still boring with or without a flashy kippah on one's head. And sometimes one just needs to admit and accept that.

Sometimes religion entreats people to do seemingly irrational things—like walk to shul a mile in a snow storm, spend too much money on a citrus that one won't eat, cut off one's circulation with funny boxes on one's arm and head, or take off one's clothes in a marketplace if it turns out one's garment contains a mixture wool or linen. The experience, although not always pleasurable, usually leads to a good amount of deliberation about why a religious person does what one does, or why one is required to do what one does......

When humans fail, people often turn to God for comfort or understanding. Given the free will that God allows, these moments of communion do not entail asking God to change things. Jon is not asking God to cut a hole for him.  Rather, the experience of the Other is a way to have companionship in these moments when other people disappoint us.

Arbuckle's intense excitement about his three-weeks-from-now date would be cause for concern for his human friends. But here it comes across as reflective gratitude, especially given that no person is there to tell him otherwise. It almost feels like his next move is to say a bracha..... And I am sure I am mistaken, but doesn't that look like payos tucked behind his ear?

It may not seem like there’s much any of us can do to bring peace to even a relatively small corner of the world, but supporting world peace is as easy and concrete as drinking coffee or playing basketball. Here are four groups that not only work for peace, they also grow coffee, make yummy food, teach kids to play basketball, and bring young people together for a camp experience that includes conflict resolution exercises.

	Mirembe Kawomera A coffee cooperative in Uganda that grows organic, kosher, fair trade coffee. The best part: The co-op is made up of Jewish, Muslim and Christian coffee farmers all working together. In Luganda, Mirembe Kawomera means Delicious Peace.
	Peaceworks is a "not only for profit" company that makes healthy foods products produced by neighbors on opposing sides of political or armed conflicts. Plus, they donate 5% of all profits to groups working to empower the moderates in the Middle East who want a peaceful end to the war through a two-state solution.
	PeacePlayers International Founded on the premise that “children who play together can learn to live together” PPI brings kids together to play basketball, which unites and educates young people in divided communities. Currently operating in Northern Ireland, South Africa, New Orleans, Cyprus, and the Middle East, they foster positive relationships for thousands of children, helping form positive relationships, develop leadership skills, and improve their futures.
	Seeds of Peace Bringing kids together at a summer camp in Maine, and doing follow up programming in their home communities in the Middle East and South Asia, this program includes daily dialogue sessions, regular camp activities like arts, sports, and music, a ropes course, religious services for both Jews and Muslims, and a peer support program. When participants (called ‘Seeds’) go home, they attend more coexistence programs, and a conflict resolution and mediation training program.

Biting into Her Beauty

In memory of Noah Orbach

And then came this tall guy and said he had been
Ordering large meals at Burger King where she was working
Just to bite into her beauty.
Her death milkeed his teeth. He no longer rips
Little packets in order to squirt
Ketchup on meat, now orphaned
In the belly of a bun.
Outside, a dry June wind heated the pot of the street,
A spoon of sun was stirring in his head as in a bowl of soup,
And memory of her was like oil boiling and turning
A cocoon potato into butterfly-fries
To be salted by a tear.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Guillotine

(Or: In regards to a Young Poet)

If one of these days you meet the Frenchman, Englishman, and German,
All brought to the guillotine, remember!
The Frenchman asked they put him facing
Upward to look death in the eye;
The Englishman wanted to bury his gaze into the ground.
With both the blade got stuck
An inch before their head sang
A farewell song to their body.
When they asked the German in what direction to put him,
He answered: "First of all, fix the guillotine."
And you,
Don't forget to stare straight into his eyes
And tell him, it's not worth fixing her who wanted
To behead your thoughts,
But you should let her dream about
The fireworks of the word blood,
Even if she decides to stop an inch before
This "impolite encounter" with
The nape or
Throat.
Remember!
The guillotine can be as small as clippers
You use to clip off fingernails
That in your love poems scratched
A page's neck.

Continue reading...

As Michelle Obama continues her "make-over" tour, jumping from an appearance on The View's coffee klatch to the cover of glossy Us Weekly (story title: "Why Barack Loves Her"), it's clear that we haven't really progressed much in the past two decades. Educated, outspoken, potential first-ladies frighten Americans today as much as they did when "scary feminist" Hillary Rodham Clinton first blazed the path from the corner office to the campaign trail.

Voters are suspicious of influential spouses—period (think Eleanor Roosevelt or Bill Clinton during the primaries). Still, every election is different and this one has the special spice of race. Though Barack Obama is the first black candidate on a major party ticket, he has one advantage that his wife does not—he's the bi-racial son of an African immigrant, while she is the daughter of African-American parents descended from slaves. And research demonstrates that white people tend to favor black immigrants over African Americans whose ancestors have been here for hundreds of years.

Prominent researchers like Nancy Foner, George Fredrickson, and Mary Waters, who study the integration patterns of black immigrants, have observed that white people seem more at ease with black immigrants than they do with other African Americans. Their research notes that black immigrants are usually described as "more polite, less hostile, more solicitous, and easier to get along with." Some of this is likely due to real cultural or socioeconomic differences (for example, Africans who immigrate to the U.S. tend to be highly educated, on average). However, there's no getting around the fact that we live in a country with a profound history of racial turmoil and that prejudice against African Americans persists in contemporary society.

The "preference" for black immigrants over other African Americans is perhaps most pronounced on our nation's prestigious college campuses, where a controversial debate has erupted about the overrepresentation of black students from immigrant backgrounds (as opposed to those whose ancestors have been here for hundreds of years). In the February 2007 issue of the American Journal of Education, researchers at Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania published findings from surveys given to 1,051 black freshmen at 28 selective colleges. They found that 27 percent of African-American students were first or second generation immigrants, which is more than double the national average for all blacks ages 18-19. The percentage of immigrants was even more pronounced at the four Ivy League schools included in this study (Princeton, Yale, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania), where 41 percent of students were first or second generation immigrants. These numbers do not include international students who identify as black.

Why are black immigrants so overrepresented on selective campuses? While it's true that black immigrants are more likely to have higher grades and test scores (as I noted, their parents tend to be more educated), the authors of the study also conclude that admissions officers may be subconsciously selecting applicants with the "sociable qualities" that they more readily perceive in immigrants over other African-American students. We can't be certain of the degree to which this bias may play a role in college admissions decisions, but it's also hard to ignore previous research that demonstrates that white people find black immigrants more "likeable."

In researching my book, Fat Envelope Frenzy, I followed five different students navigating the selective college admissions process. One of the students was Ethiopian-American, grappling with the implications of his heritage on affirmative action policies. He often talked about how he couldn't relate to the other African-American students at his Memphis high school, but he also emphasized that he didn't think that race was such a big deal. "When was the last time someone was awarded a Nobel Prize because of their race?" he once asked me, rhetorically.

If only it were that simple. It would be nice if science was objective, but the ugly truth is that scientists have contributed to racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and every other possible prejudice throughout history. Sure, no one is given a Nobel Prize simply because they are white, black or brown. But that didn't stop James Watson, who won the Nobel for his work on DNA, from claiming that black people are "less intelligent" than white people just last year.

Though Barack Obama has suffered his fair share of background-based biased attacks (He's a Muslim! He hates Jews! He'll let Iran nuke Israel!), until the Jeremiah Wright hullabaloo, he was thought of as "not black" or "not black enough." Even with her two Ivy League degrees and Jackie O hair-do, there was never that kind of debate over Michelle's racial identity. The barely restrained racism directed at her in the press is practically old news, from the covert conspiracy theories of "respectable" writers like Christopher Hitchens—who basically blamed Michelle for the Wright controversy because she wrote her 1985 Princeton undergraduate thesis about "Princeton Educated Blacks and the Black Community"—to the total tackiness of Fox News referring to her as Barack's "baby mama."

With her South Side upbringing and dark complexion, Michelle is "black enough"—unlike her husband—and maybe that's part of the reason that she isn't as popular.

I'm tired. Most of my reading time in the last few weeks has been devoted to the "Four Horseman of Atheism"-Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. And now that I've emerged from my self-imposed sequestration-blinking in the sunlight and desperate for a beer-I deeply regret ever suggesting this article to Zeek.

My problem is not with atheism per se. If someone does not believe in God, that's no concern of mine. Just as it's no concern if, say, another Jew practices a more stringent level of observance than I do. (Or a lesser one, but he'd tough to find.) My problem, rather, is with these authors, for their smugness and dogmatism. I felt alternatively harangued or patronized or downright bored. Reading their books, one after the other, was an enervating experience.

Champion of Godlessness: Christopher Hitchens

The exercise did begin well, with Hitchens' god [sic] is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Hitchens is a gifted writer, so his book is actually entertaining. He explores many of the same themes as his colleagues in godlessness-how religion leads to ignorance, oppression, and ethical confusion-but in a more diverting way, despite, or maybe due to, his rhetorical excesses. Those who read this kind of book looking to be offended will come away satisfied: Hitchens calls the God of the Hebrews "ill-tempered and implacable and bloody and provincial"; he refers to Jesus as one of many "deranged prophets." Strong stuff, but why should he pretend to be reverent?

Many people dismiss Hitchens as a bloviator, an armchair warrior against "Islamofascism." But this book, anyway, is not an anti-Muslim screed. It's a sustained argument against the broader tenets of all religions-against the infallibility of scripture and the claim that religion "improves people." When Hitchens does discuss the murderous meetings of religion and politics (e.g. Belfast, Beirut, Belgrade), it's in support of his assertions, not to score points for "The War on Terror." And he is capable of tolerance. (Although I did wonder why, if, as Hitchens suggests, he'd be fine with religion if its adherents would just "leave [him] alone," he keeps running off to participate in televised debates.)

Extremist Atheist: Sam Harris

Anyway, if Hitchens goes overboard occasionally, Sam Harris falls in the water with disturbing frequency. In The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, Harris argues that reason (e.g. secular humanism) is in a fight to the death with the forces of irrationality (e.g. evangelical Christians and every living Muslim). This is a plausible, if not original point. There is no place for faith in political discourse, and we are facing real threats, such as an "Islamist regime" acquiring "long-range nuclear weaponry." (Or short range, for that matter.) But Harris often evinces his own form of extremism. To him, even religious moderation is a hypocritical "myth." In fact, he wants to chuck the whole thing out the window-baby, bathwater, and baptismal font (or bimah). And unless we do, he argues, we're all gonna die-we risk a global, religious-based conflict that causes the end of civilization.

Okay, I suppose that this is a possibility. But so was Y2K. And I'm still scratching my head over his limited support of-wait for it-torture. In all fairness, this issue is a small part of The End of Faith. Still, it highlights the book's bizarre mixture of rationalism and fearmongering. Harris paraphrases Alan Dershowitz, that subtle thinker, who proposed that we consider torture if, say, we have custody of a "known terrorist" who "has planted a large bomb in the heart of a nearby city." Harris himself suggests that if we can accept wartime "collateral damage"-which he defines as "the inadvertent torture of innocent men, women, and children"-then we should be able to accept the purposeful torture of guilty people. In other words, "If there is even one chance in a million that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will tell us something under torture that will lead to the further dismantling of Al Qaeda," it would be "perverse" to disallow it.

Actually, what's perverse is using extreme examples to justify an unreliable, corrupting practice. And to assume that it's possible to use torture with judiciousness. Listen, if Dershowitz's scenario comes to pass, I will personally pay for the car battery. Until then, one chance in a million is not enough.

Scientific Fundamentalist: Daniel Dennett

With Harris' apocalyptic warnings ringing in my ears, I turned, with relief, to what I supposed would be the coolly objective realms of science. "Supposed" is the key word here, for the proponents of natural selection, apparently, can be just as unappealing as its detractors. In Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Tufts professor Daniel Dennett "[extrapolates] back to human history with the aid of biological thinking." What this means, in English, is that Dennett speculates about the origin and development of religion through the lens of natural selection. For example, he explains that early "folk religions" may have served Darwinian needs-in terms of group survival through social cohesion, or individual survival through the placebo effects of superstitious rituals. Today, though, with democracy and antibiotics, we have no need for these outdated belief systems, whose benefits are "mixed" at best and "toxic" at worst.

While these ideas seem reasonable, there is something oppressive about Dennett's (and Dawkins') assumption that natural selection explains everything-that human development can only be seen in terms of competitive advantages. I admit that I am oversimplifying, and I would never argue against natural selection. I only wish to point out that irrespective of his "humble philosopher" persona, Dennett can be as smugly dogmatic as an evangelical preacher. Surely he can admit that some aspects of human behavior remain mysterious, if only because no one was around to observe their development? Probably not. The condescension, the self-satisfaction that oozes from every page of Breaking the Spell suggests otherwise. And there's really no excusing Dennett's assertion that atheists should call themselves "brights"-which Hitchens, to his infinite credit, refers to as "cringe-making."

Misfired: Richard Dawkins

I had similar problems with Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion-he, too, is hopelessly arrogant; he, too, cannot conceive of human behavior outside of the terms of natural selection. Take altruism. Why, Dawkins asks, should we want to help strangers-the "orphaned child weeping," or tsunami victims-if they can be of no direct help to us? It's an important question; one, Dawkins admits, that Darwinism doesn't "easily explain." But instead of turning to sociology or brain chemistry, he speculates that altruism is like sexual desire. We don't desire only those with whom it would be advantageous to mate. But hey, when we were baboons in "strong, stable bands," we helped and desired each other. So maybe, in humans, these are vestigial urges-maybe when you give a bum a quarter and feel strangely attracted to a surly barrista, you are experiencing Darwinian "misfirings," "blessed, precious mistakes." Maybe. Or maybe humans, having higher cognition and more complex societies than baboons, have these urges for reasons that are only related to natural selection. But why bother asking that, when we already have our theory of everything?

Most of Dawkins' book, though, isn't about religion and natural selection. Really it's an atheist tract. Or think of it as a primer, containing everything from refutations of Thomas Aquinas' "proofs" to the dubious morality of scripture. All this would be illuminating, if The God Delusion didn't read as if it were written with closed fists. Dawkins is a reputedly a good writer, and this may be evident in his other books. In this case, though, I grew impatient after the fifth time he (a) announced that a joke was coming; (b) told the joke; (c) reminded the reader that he had just read a joke. This may seem anti-intellectual: perhaps I should critique only the quality of his ideas. But style matters too. Especially when one has just read about the same topics in three previous books.

Not a Horseman: R.D. Gold

Now I must cop to another mistake. When I came across R.D. Gold's book, I assumed that he had written a kind of atheistic primer for Jews-which was why I thought Gold should ride with the Horsemen. Instead, with Bondage of the Mind: How Old Testament Fundamentalism Shackles the Mind and Enslaves the Spirit: Towards a Better Understanding of the Religious Experience Gold seems to be going for the world's longest subtitle.

Well, that and a book-length debunking of the tenets of Orthodox Judaism-which, to Gold, is synonymous with fundamentalism. An American Jew, Gold is troubled by the growing "aggressiveness" of Orthodox Jewry's proselytizing. Although there's little personal information about him, in his book or on the web, it seems safe to say that he was inspired by the Horsemen: he calls fundamentalism "one of the most noxious forces in the history of mankind." But Gold doesn't go as far as atheism, arguing instead that religion "can play a positive role in one's life-sociologically, philosophically, and psychologically."

Gold spends the better part of his book explaining that the Torah is "a fanciful account of Jewish history, not a historical record of what really happened." In other words, the Torah was not revealed at Mt. Sinai, the Exodus never occurred, there was no conquest of Canaan, and so on. In addition, Biblical prophecy, the "uniqueness of the Jewish people," and the "superior morality" of the Orthodox are all illusions or logical fallacies.

All of Gold's arguments are sound. As is the second, shorter part of the book, which presents a guardedly positive description of Reconstructionist Judaism. Here, the author also suggests that a propensity for religious or spiritual longings may be "hard-wired" into the human brain. But just whom is Gold addressing? Less religious folks like me are not going to start shlepping to shul just because "the operating system of the brain" says that it's a good idea. Nor will fundamentalists, Jewish or otherwise, be swayed by neurology.

Who's Still Reading?

Actually, the question of intended audience is a crucial one for all the aforementioned books. Only Dennett overtly wishes to cajole a religious reader into re-examining faith. The rest of them seem to be talking to people who already believe what they do. And what is the point of that? I did find it instructive to read Dawkins' speculations about morality and natural selection. But I'm not a creationist. Indeed, while I have reservations about all these books, for the most part I can't argue against their theses. That's because while I do believe in God, I also know that belief in His existence is not proof of His existence: there is no logical argument for faith.

Similarly, I know that you cannot claim a causal link between religious belief and ethical behavior. You could even argue the opposite, considering just how many religions have a long history of oppression and slaughter. Thus while I may irrationally ascribe to Judaism, I believe that religion has no place in any government or legal system. But these books aren't really about the separation of church (or synagogue) and state. These books are against religion, or fundamentalism, even though there's barely a chance in hell that an "Islamofascist" or a Kahanist or a Rapture-ready Christian will ever read them, let alone become "brights."

Why not? Because human beings are irrational. Against our own self-interests, we smoke, we eat too much cake, and we don't save money. Against all evidence to the contrary, we believe in God, or gods, or that a savior was born in Nazareth. And we kill each other in the names of these gods. It's depressing, but I don't see how we can stop it. Even if we could, we'd find "reasons" to bash each other's brains out anyway. I'm not concerned about the apocalypse; nor, paradoxically, do I place much faith in the elevating power of reason. People being what they are-that is, venal and stupid-I can easily imagine bloody wars over the question of who is more of a secular humanist.

Suzane Adam’s acclaimed novel, Laundry, reminds readers that childhood is all too often pervaded by fears, both real and imagined, both spoken and unspoken. In this lyric excerpt, a grown woman recalls the distant torments of her childhood in the 1950s ‘beyond the forests’—in Transylvania. Sickness, slaughter, and long suppressed secrets form the backdrop for the narrator’s dark fairy tale of her youth. What begins as a closely-observed domestic scene from a lost world soon burns with feverish menace. But only by understanding her painful past can the narrator make sense of the mystery of her Israeli present.---Adam Rovner, translations editor

 

We sat on the carpet in the large room that we used for both family and guests. One large rug covered most of the parquet floor. My sister was watching me. For some reason the rug caught my eye; with concentration I methodically traced the patterns. A wine-colored border two fingers wide, a thin black stripe, a thin white stripe crossed by black lines like the teeth of people in the pictures I drew. Flowers and stems twisted in a wonderful pattern in the middle of the rug, leaves streamed from the flowers in stripes and circles, each shape changing and turning into a new shape, burgundy, black, brown, white, gold, green—an expensive Persian rug, they’d explained to me. I wasn’t allowed to walk on it in my dirty shoes. Only in the summertime did they take up the heavy rug—my mother, my father, and Anna, too, who only came to clean and iron—hanging it on the wooden fence outside, and all the neighbors passing by would stop and marvel at its beauty. My mother would put a kerchief on so she wouldn’t get dust in her braid, then she’d beat both sides of the rug with a carpet-beater made from a bundle of reeds. When she was finished, a cloud of dust was created with every sigh that came from her body. Then she brought buckets of vinegar diluted with water, and with a soft brush she gently scrubbed the silk fibers of the rug until they sparkled and gleamed in the sunlight.

It was hard to clean the rug, and I thought about this as I traced the curling flowers between me and my sister. A strange trembling seized me, as if I’d been turned upside-down by one of the winding vines, a cold wind shook me from the inside, a cave formed in my body, even though I’d only heard of caves in stories and folktales, at the bottom of that cave I felt inside me there was a heavy whirlpool of mud, like the ones I saw once when the Samush overflowed its banks. I wanted to sleep, I was so tired, I was cold, and I was hot, and my sister was crying. My sister, who was almost three, opened and closed her mouth like a dying fish that has washed ashore. My last thought was that I was supposed to be responsible for her

When I woke up, I was naked from the waist up. Dr. Ontel, Joschka’s father, was pressing his fingers to my neck and under my armpits, placing a palm on my chest. With his other hand he tapped steadily, his ears trying to interpret the echo inside my ribs. I was cold, and when Joschka’s father turned me over onto my belly and started tapping on my back, the curls that fell on my face had a faintly sour smell. The sheet and mattress were soaked with cold urine. I turned my head from side to side, examining my surroundings in terror. Beside me my mother whispered, Hush, hush, everything is fine…

***

The next day, after I’d fainted once more, I was taken away to a hospital that specialized in children’s diseases. My mother bundled me up in a fur jacket that barely buttoned over my woolen underwear and two sweaters. My father’s thick scarf was wrapped around my head, I wore flannel pajama bottoms under my itchy wool pants that I hated, plus gloves and boots. I sat like that on the edge of the kitchen chair, my body sealed up, beads of sweat dripping from my forehead and blurring my vision, waiting for Pishta, Bijou’s father, to come with the slaughterhouse truck.

The slaughterhouse truck was coming for me, I was sick, the sick went to the slaughterhouse. Even though I recognized it, its color, the sound of its engine, and even though Pishta, my best friend’s father, sat in the driver’s seat, and even though my mother stood anxiously at the open door of the truck’s cab, and even though the truck seemed to be innocent of anything wicked and evil, I refused to climb in and sit on the bouncy, brown leather seat. Bijou’s mother held my crying sister on her hip, comforting her. All the children were at school, the neighbors were busy. The street was white except for the tire tracks of the snowplows, whose blades had turned the white snow into a brownish porridge. I saw footprints people had left on the sidewalk, big and small, blurred, deep. My mother was getting angry, Pishta was in a hurry, and again I felt as though I were about to take flight. Before I collapsed again I had enough time to look at the roof of my family’s house melting into the branches of the tree that stood like a naked sentry.

In the big hospital, they put me in the second bed to the left of the door. There were ten beds in all. The large windows had bars. It was the eighth floor of the ten-storey building. A hospital just for children. The regulations were strict: we could only leave the room to use the bathrooms and once a day for a shower, according to a schedule devised by the nurses. The children were listless. Some were bald, some bloated, some gaunt. The smell of Lysol was new to me. I felt as healthy as a horse, I had an appetite, thankfully. I was pink and chubby, a stain of health among the sick. They took a lot of my blood in glass syringes. I stared at the floor the whole time, making sure my blood wasn’t dripping into a groove next to my bed. My mother didn’t understand, the doctors were not as nice as Dr. Ontel, always scolding me, insisting I lie quiet. Some of the other children slept, some of them groaned, tossing restlessly. They were quiet; they didn’t act like any children I knew. Their visitors were sent home. According to the regulations, patients were allowed visitors once a day for two hours, even if the patients were frightened, crying children. My mother rented a room from a family nearby; this was very expensive. She promised me she would come back the next day. I didn’t believe her. I was sure she was abandoning me.. The next day I was shocked when my mother’s worried face found me beneath the covers.

And there was a girl there, fragile as a baby chick, whose age I couldn’t guess. She sat rigidly straight. Her hair was not like a girl’s hair—it was just a yellowish-white down that seemed to float like a halo above her scalp. This was Marishka the artist. From her I learned that I could draw instead of faint.

The doctors bandaged my vein and went to see what was wrong with my blood. The thin, smiling nurse who always patted the children walked by the big room at all hours, peeking in to make sure everyone was quiet. I cried and cried, and when I finished crying beneath the covers and couldn’t faint from fear, and didn’t see colors swirling together, and didn’t feel any caves in my belly, I got up from the bed with its squeaky steel springs. With my healthy steps I approached Marishka’s creaky bed and sat down.

She was very thin, the skin of her hands nearly transparent—through it I could see bluish scribbles, and yellow, pink, even blotches of purple, as if the colors of the drawings scattered around her were staining her from the inside. Her eyes were two sunken brown holes. She didn’t have any eyelashes, the only color on her face that wasn’t somewhere between gray and white were her pinkish lips. From the corner of her mouth her pale tongue stuck out, decorated with little white dots. Her head tilted toward the same side as her tongue pointed, and when she moved her tongue to the opposite corner of her mouth, her head also leaned to that side, as if her tongue were helping her head keep her balance. It seemed to me that her bed was bigger than mine because she only took up as much room as a pillow, at the very top. I sat on the edge of the bed, at the end of a path of colors strewn across the white bedspread. She didn’t speak, just kept drawing with surprising concentration, ignoring her guest. Maybe she hadn’t seen me.

“What are you drawing?” I asked in a whisper, so as not to disturb her, and also so I wouldn’t break one of the hospital regulations—I still didn’t know them all. She raised her head from her notebook and stared at me the way my teacher used to look at students who disturbed him when he was in the middle of reading a book, except that Marishka didn’t have glasses, and her gaze wasn’t threatening or scary. She lifted up her notebook and turned it around so I could see the results of her labors, and said in an older girl’s voice, “I’m drawing a picture. Isn’t it pretty?” The page was crowded with lines, smudges, colors streaming into each other to make more colors and more lines. There were no blue skies, or houses with red roofs, or flowers coming out of brown earth, like in the pictures Bijou and I drew. “Is it pretty?” she asked again. Yes, the picture was pretty. She turned the page and showed me the picture upside down. “Isn’t it pretty?” I thought this upside-down picture was pretty, too. I didn’t say it out loud, but I nodded, and she carefully tore off a page and held it out to me. “You draw something, too,” she commanded. I picked up a blue pencil, the color I loved, and thought about what to draw as I chewed on the end of it. “Draw,” she insisted. “Close your eyes and draw,” she said in the firm voice of a teacher. I thought this was a silly suggestion. If I closed my eyes, how could I see what I was drawing? I tried anyway, if only out of curiosity. With my eyes shut, I scribbled with the blue pencil, then felt around for other colors without opening my eyes, until I was completely frustrated. “You’re not drawing, you’re doodling. Draw!” she said. She was so small and fragile, more so even than the porcelain girl with the goose that decorated the high shelf of the buffet at my house. She gave me another page and coolly turned back to her own drawing.

I understood she was giving me another chance. I closed my eyes and saw my mother’s smile, the snow, the rug, the Samush overflowing its banks. I drew black lines, crowding together, beside them lots of sky blue, between them paths of red and brown and two purple circles above them, from which pointed yellow horns that blended with the green at the bottom of the page. I don’t know how much time passed; when I lifted my head I felt the way I felt every time I woke up after fainting. Marishka watched me, her mouth forming a smile. “You drew a beautiful picture,” she said, and collected all the colors in a small wooden box, where she also put the notebook, without having to fold the pages. She put the closed box next to the pillow she was leaning on, groaned like a woman exhausted by a long day of work, and slid under her blanket, disappearing. Her body made such a small lump in the covers that it seemed as though the bed hadn’t reacted to the fact that someone was lying there.

The next day, during visiting hours, I asked my mother to bring me a notebook and many colored pencils. For hours that day, between the needles and the examinations, I lay on my back staring at the ceiling. For ten days the doctors tried to solve the mystery of my fainting spells. They only talked to me when they wanted me to lie quiet while they did their daily tests. I said nothing, I didn’t tell them a thing.

From Marishka I learned how to mix colors. I never figured out the secrets of her drawings, and she didn’t examine the contents of mine. Two days before my mother bundled me up and took me home, Marishka’s bed was empty, neatly made, without her wooden box. “Where is Marishka?” I asked the nurse. “She’s gone.” I was afraid to ask where.

To this day I regret not knowing what happened to her. Maybe she died, maybe today she has children. She taught me to draw.

 

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Unless you are a fan of Tex-Mex, truck with balls, scorching heat, and museums commemorating George W. Bush, there are very few reasons to spend the summer in southeast Texas. But I happen to be here visiting someone, and so I’ve taken the opportunity to sit in on his Texas A&M University class on contemporary world literature, where the focus is literature and terrorism.

For today, we read Yasmina Khadra’s The Attack (2007). Khadra (his real name is Mohammed Moulessehoul) is a former Algerian army officer turned novelist, and this novel, despite its unsophisticated writing style, does a pretty good job of getting college students to think and talk about terrorism in an unfiltered way. The only problem is that the book is so severely biased against Israelis and Jews that one wonders how unfiltered the discussion can truly be.

The storyline goes something like this: Arab-Israeli surgeon is called to the hospital where he learns his wife has been killed in a restaurant bombing. He later finds out that his wife was in fact the suicide bomber. The rest of the book, with all of its undeveloped plot threads, is about his attempts to uncover her secret life and come to grips with what he sees as her betrayal of him. The important thing to note is that it’s not that he needs to come to grips with what his wife has done to innocent men, women, and children in a crowded restaurant, but with what he sees as her personal betrayal of him.How to Spot a Jew: Is this the lesson Khadra wants to teach?

A bit self-absorbed, no?

It’s not that the novel doesn’t tell a good story or address timely issues. It definitely kept me reading, but perhaps that was also because of the all but latent anti-Semitism that kept jumping out at me. Like many people, I tend to like to stare at things that repulse me. Although I run the risk of sounding like an anti-Semitic ambulance chaser, it is difficult not to read between the lines when nearly every time Khadra’s narrator introduces a new Jewish character, he refers to his “unattractive nostrils” or depicts him looking down his “nose” at the narrator. Or, in the absence of the description of a character’s unflattering nose, he depicts them as fat, selfish, and always gobbling things up.

Those nasty Jews—always gobbling things up and looking down their unattractive noses at everyone else. I’m not quite sure how the reviewers who suggested this book depicts both sides of the Arab/Israeli conflict missed this aspect of the book. But I’m sure it’s not the author’s main point.

The main point, actually, seems to be one long, whining “what about me?” Once you sift through the rambling prose, the narrator seems to say little more than: “Why didn’t my wife think about the trouble her suicide bombing would cause me? Why do Israeli Jews stop me at checkpoints because of the way I look? Why do the Jews keep talking about their problems when it’s really the Arabs who’ve suffered?”

The narrator visits an old Israeli Jew who goes on and on and on about surviving the Holocaust, only to say, finally, “I talk too much . . . I’ll never understand why the survivors of a tragedy feel compelled to make people believe they’re more to be pitied than the ones who didn’t make it.”

Take that, you blabbering large-nosed Jewish survivor. It’s MY turn to suffer, the narrator seems to say. Everybody wants to talk about their suffering.

The point the author makes seems to be the question of why Jews are still talking about the Holocaust when Palestinians are being subjected to the same kind of evils in Israel. But the problem isn’t that the author draws attention (justifiably) to Palestinian pain. The problem is in the comparison.

Suffering is suffering. It does no good to compare one group of people’s suffering to another, or to minimize one in favor of another. I cannot blame the Palestinian boy who sees his family home bulldozed by Israeli soldiers and vows to take revenge any less than I blame the Holocaust survivor for finding it impossible to stop talking about his experience.The Prosthetic Pregnancy: A must-have for all female suicide bombers.

They have both earned the right to hate. And we are all responsible for acknowledging both perspectives. But even the right to such hate does not justify a lashing out that takes innocent lives, though this novel seems to suggest otherwise in its villainization of Israeli Jews.

The narrator says, “All too aware of the stereotypes that mark me out in the public square, I strive to overcome them, one by one, by doing the best I can do and putting up with the incivilities of my Jewish comrades.” Words of wisdom from the narrator who can’t stop himself from seeing Jews only through negative stereotypes. (Then again, note above my own heinous Texas stereotyping.)

But the person teaching the literature class tells me that while the narrator is indeed despicable when it comes to Jewish stereotyping, we are also supposed to see in him a critique of male Arab culture. The narrator’s preoccupation with his male ego and his anger over his wife’s betrayal of him on a personal level may reveal (from the author’s point of view) some of the problems of Arab male-female relationships. Indeed, at one point he goes nuts thinking that his wife may have cheated on him with another man, and suggests that such an act is worse than the suicide bombing.

The narrator, my friend suggests, cannot escape from the stereotypical Arab masculinity that forces him to see Jews with big noses and gluttonous appetites, and to see women as his private property. But sometimes he has a breakthrough: “Every Jew in Palestine is a bit of an Arab, and no Arab in Israel can deny that he’s a little Jewish.”

It’s unclear what we’re supposed to think in regard to this character. I find him to be pathetic, self-absorbed, and downright despicable. But students in the class tended to be more sympathetic toward him. And I guess that is the danger of this novel—if the author meant to critique Arab culture’s own biases, it’s not altogether clear. My fear is that this novel does more to reinforce negative stereotypes than critique them.

 

If I Were a Rich Mag: is print media broke? American Jewish Life closed its doors for the last time this past week. Asked for a reason, editor (and, ultimately, the sole full-time employee) Benyamin Cohen told the Forward that "[u]nfortunately, this is just not the right economy for a print publication," and that, effectively, print media is dead.

I seem to remember Sir Salman Rushdie saying the same thing about the novel in the New Yorker. Only, when Rushdie said it, he was taking a dig at the folks who’d been saying that same thing ever since the novel was born.

Earlier this year at the Israeli President’s Conference, Jonathan Safran Foer spoke about how there’s already a projected date for the last home newspaper to be delivered. He ridiculed the idea of that -- the idea of getting up-to-the-minute news from print media, he said, has long expired. But, said Foer, there will always be a place for the experience of a Sunday New York Times with coffee and a bagel.

The same, I think, is true of magazines, whether Jewish, hip, or geeky. The big science-fiction magazines are hurting, too, but there’s a whole crop of new magazines that are positively leaping like lemmings to take up the slack, and soaking up the market's readership.

There might be several reasons why "Jewish Rolling Stone," as the Forward called it, ultimately failed. Lilit Marcus, who wrote the Forward article, notes that "two freelancers confided off the record that they were 'strongly urged' to resell pieces they had written for the July/August issue of AJL."

As a former AJL staffwriter herself, it's not hard to guess who one of the freelancers Marcus alluded to might have been. I know it sucks for writers to find out their papers are closing -- I was certainly bummed to hear about AJL's demise, partly because they still haven't paid me for an article they ran months ago. I just got the obligatory End of Service letter, and guess what? They've offered to kindly pay a fraction of what they owe. It sucks, but I know it could be worse. At least they're offering.

With all due respect to the recently departed, it seems like there's still a space in this world for some Jewish magazines -- the O-inspired Jewish Woman magazine is doing a fair job on that corner of the market, and Heeb and Guilt and Pleasure aren't showing any signs of going anywhere. Meanwhile, former editor Benyamin Cohen isn't moping around at the gravesite; he's already at work hyping his next project, the memoir My Jesus Year, will be released in October.

Under the provisions of Israel's Law of Return, more than 120,000 Ethiopian Jews have settled in the country over the last three decades. Many of these Jews arrived during the 1980s and 1990s, when, in response to civil war and famine in Ethiopia, the Israeli government mounted massive rescue operations. Operation Moses in 1984 and Operation Solomon in 1991 airlifted over 85 percent of Ethiopia's entire Jewish population to Israel.

All of the immigrant groups who have settled in Israel have encountered problems integrating into Israeli society, but minority ethnic groups have often had a particularly hard time. Unlike many of their central and eastern European brethren, the new Ethiopian olim arrived without educational qualifications or job skills. Coming from a subsistence economy, they often found themselves ill-equipped to work in an industrialized, first-world environment like Israel. Besides having to start virtually from scratch economically, Ethiopian Jews (like the Mizrachi immigrants two decades before them) have found themselves consistently confronted with prejudice, discrimination, and racism from both Israeli society and the country's political establishment.

While vast amounts of government money have been poured into absorbing these immigrants, progress has been slow. Figures released in 2007 show how serious the socio-economic disparities still remain between Israel's Ethiopian population and the rest of Israeli society: Ethiopians live in impoverished neighborhoods, face sky-rocketing unemployment, and have the highest high-school dropout rate of any Jewish group in Israel. With average per capita income among Ethiopian Jews standing at NIS 2,000 a month, Ethiopians' salaries are around half those of all other Israeli Jews, and considerably lower even than those of the country's Arab population. Ethiopian youth often fall behind in basic skills like reading, writing and arithmetic early on in their education. As a result, around 40 percent of Ethiopian adults of employable age don't have an education beyond elementary school level. In deprived neighborhoods, drug use is increasing dramatically and criminal activity, practically unheard of among Ethiopian Jewish communities before they came to the country, is on the rise.

 

Yuvi's Story

Yuvi Tashome arrived in Israel as a young girl during Operation Moses in 1984, when some 33,000 members of Beta Israel were airlifted to the country from refugee camps in the Sudan in a dramatic rescue operation orchestrated by the Israeli government and the Mossad. Two and a half years ago Yuvi, now in her early thirties, was among the co-founders of a community in Gedera that runs initiatives to help the town's underprivileged Ethiopian population.

Before moving to Gedera, Yuvi worked for many years in programs run by the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI), designed to help integrate Ethiopian youth into Israeli society. "When I was working with Ethiopian kids there" she tells me, "I began to realize quite how serious the gaps were that exist between Israeli society and Ethiopian society here in Israel."

"As an Ethiopian immigrant in Israel, you have to erase everything Ethiopian in order to be Israeli. For example, when you first get here they erase your name and give you a new one. When we arrived they asked me my name and I replied ‘Yuvnot.' The girl didn't understand what I said, so she said ‘OK, from now on you're going to be Rahel.' So I was Rahel until after my army service. All through my childhood I wanted to be Israeli so much, so I was Rahel, my accent was Israeli, I didn't like Ethiopian food, only Israeli food, I dressed Israeli and so on. The Ethiopian part of me was completely pushed aside. I didn't want to deal with it".

Instigated by the majority Ashkenazim, official absorption processes have often failed to account for the particular social and cultural needs of minority ethnic groups. Yuvi points to this identity crisis experienced by so many of the Ethiopian olim as a significant contributor to the alienation inadvertently fostered among the Ethiopian community by the Israeli establishment. "When two Ethiopian kids are speaking Amharic in class" she says, "the teacher will intervene and force them to speak Hebrew. When parents come to the school, the teacher will often have to translate what he says to the parents to their child, or vice versa. If you ask an Ethiopian youngster about Ethiopia or about his Ethiopian name, he'll say ‘I don't have any Ethiopian name--only Israeli'. I think it's a big problem. I think that this is a big part of the underlying cause of a lot of the things that are happening to Ethiopian youth--the crime, the drugs and so on".

It was only when she finished her army service and started working with Ethiopian youngsters in the SPNI that Yuvi herself began to reconnect with her own Ethiopian identity. "SPNI is about hiking," she says, "it's about knowing the country. When I was hiking with the kids and we talked about the history or the geography of Israel we'd always need to speak about Ethiopia. Let's say we talked about the mountains around Nazareth, we'd find a similar area in Ethiopia and draw comparisons with that. This way, once you've helped them draw out their Ethiopian identity, the Ethiopian kids who didn't want to hear about Nazareth would listen because you begin with Ethiopia, and Ethiopia interests them.

"So, of course, to work with the kids I needed to go home and ask my parents all about Ethiopia, about the hiking there, about the plants, the animals--everything I wanted to use when I was teaching the kids. This was the first time I'd really asked my parents anything about where we'd come from".

Yuvi's decision to set up a community in Gedera, which is home to around 1,700 Ethiopian families, was born of her desire to work with the youth population of one neighbourhood in particular, Shapira. "I used to work with a lot of the kids in Shapira when I was in SPNI," she told me, "and it seemed that something very strange was happening there. Every year the situation with the neighbourhood's youth was getting worse and worse. If in the first year they smoked cigarettes, in the second it'd be alcohol. If the second year it was alcohol, the next it would be drugs. I began to feel that I was investing a lot of time and energy here and something was not moving, so I wanted to figure out what it was."

Ethiopian to Israeli: Photojournalist Ricki Rosen, in her book documenting the transformation of Operation Solomon’s Ethiopian Jews into Israelis, shows how many of these Jews are encouraged to erase their Ethiopian past for a new Israeli identity ."There are many programs aimed at helping Ethiopian society in Israel" Yuvi explains, "but basically they're not working. After five, six, twenty years, things here are not getting better. I began to realize that the main problem is that the motivation for everything was coming from outside--from the government, from foundations and so on. Within the Ethiopian community itself, there's no real motivation to do anything. It's just a cycle of poverty and disempowerment."

"When I talked to my parents about their life back in Ethiopia I was amazed, because they were so activist, they were so motivated," Yuvi tells me. "But here it's the opposite. People are just sitting and waiting--waiting for what, I don't know. In Ethiopia, if you don't work, you don't eat. It's as simple as that, so the motivation's there already. It's built in. Basically my friends and I decided that we needed to come up with ways of getting the motivation for change in the Ethiopian community here to come from the families and the kids themselves."

 

Garin Kehillati

The community Yuvi and her friends established calls itself garin kehillati, or ‘seed of community.' Comparisons have been made in the past with the urban kibbutz concept, but the basic idea behind Yuvi's project is to bring people to live together in an extended neighbourhood community bound not by kibbutz-style economic communalism, but by a common ideological mission. Today, two and a half years since the garin first took root in the town, its initial nucleus of three families has evolved into two separate neighbourhood communities. Yuvi's alone now consists of eleven families, six of whom are Ethiopian immigrants, the rest sabra Israelis and Russian olim.

The communities run a variety of local-level initiatives in the surrounding area, including educational and social projects, a community garden and a non-profit organization, Haverim Bateva, all of which aim to restore a sense of belonging to the town's alienated youth by strengthening their Jewish Ethiopian identity. Every two weeks, the families meet for Bet Midrash (communal study), during which they learn about Ethiopian religion and culture, study other cultures and belief systems, discuss social problems, and share ideas about the future direction of the community and its role in helping the surrounding society.

"Everyone who wants to come and be a part of our community basically can," Yuvi says. "I don't think that there needs to be a separation between Ethiopian community and the other families living here. We're all the same; all of us are immigrants. It doesn't matter if you're black or white, religious or not religious--as long as you accept and respect the other, you're welcome. The first thing is to see the other, and to know the other." The community, she tells me, is in a permanent process of evolution and still developing all the time. "We're constantly asking ourselves how we can improve what we're doing. For example, with eight children in the community, we're now talking about opening a kindergarten and bringing in Ethiopian kids from the neighbourhood to be with our own children."

In addition to the eleven families, the community counts among its number thirteen young people from the neighbourhood aged between 20 and 25, all of whom are volunteering in the locality, half of them as permanent members of the garin. "We started to work with this group three years ago," Yuvi says. "This year, six of them go to university, so we we're very happy about that. That's a real success story for us."

Reluctant to leave Gedera, this group goes to college in the town and comes back home in the evenings. As Yuvi explains, this was an important part of the idea behind beginning the garin in the first place. "Like many other families across Israel, the Ethiopian families living in this neighbourhood have been trapped in a kind of cycle. The stronger kids from the neighbourhood always end up leaving to go on to university, so the ones who stay behind are the ones drinking, the ones who dropped out or who didn't go through the army or whatever. So when you're a young child growing up here, these are your role models. The idea of having this young community staying in the neighbourhood is to provide alternative role models for the younger kids, and already it's working. It's really working."

 

Grassroots vs. Political Change

Yuvi doesn't consider herself ‘political.' She doesn't vote, and, although she identifies more with leftist elements within Israeli society than any other, she has little faith or interest in party-politics as an agent of social change. Although the community's evolution wasn't exactly an ideologically-motivated process, the various initiatives established by the group came into being as part of a calculated attempt to bring local organizing away from local government and back to the grassroots.

"In the neighbourhood that we're talking about," Yuvi tells me, "people just don't feel like it's their own. As an example, about a year ago a group of soldiers from a nearby army base wanted to do community work in Gedera, so they came to Shapira. Without bothering to ask anybody from the neighborhood what they needed, they decided to paint the buildings. So they come to the neighbourhood at 10AM, and when their two hours was up, they just stopped painting, dropped everything and went. The neighbourhood looked like trash.

"About a week later, there was a huge picture of those soldiers with their brushes in one of the newspapers, with the caption "Ten soldiers giving back to the community" or something like that. I was so angry! Apart from anything else, how could someone have the nerve to come and paint my house without asking me?!

"So I asked the people living there why they would do something like that, and they say ‘oh, it's like that all the time here. If the mayor says it's OK, then there's nothing we can do. We don't have any power to resist that. A few people just have to go and clean everything up.' So we started thinking about ways of dealing with this. The first thing we did was to create a parents' group who wanted change, as a way of fighting against this tendency to just accept everything that anybody in authority said. If, for example, a teacher in the local school said ‘your child is not allowed to do this, this and this,' and because of that the child ends up quitting school and dropping out, all too often the parents would just say ‘oh OK,' roll over and accept it. NO! You don't need to say ‘oh OK' if you don't agree with it! There are a lot of other solutions!"

When Ethiopian immigrants began to settle in Israel during the early 1980s, their dream was to integrate and become accepted in their new homeland while at the same time retaining their own unique character, identity and values. It's a sad but very real indictment of Israeli society that they've been rewarded for their unparalleled devotion to this country with the racism, prejudice and discrimination that their communities continue to face to this day. The work being done by Yuvi and her friends in Gedera not only betrays ongoing concerns about the disempowerment of the Ethiopian community in Israel, but highlights the importance of grassroots action and local community involvement in creating meaningful and lasting political change in the face of a government and state unwilling, and often unable, to take care of its own people.

ART

Cover Photograph : Children of the Beta Israel Community. Wallaka, Gondar District, Ethiopia, 1984. Photographer: Doron Bacher. Beth Hatefutsoth Visual Documentation Center.

Ricki Rosen's book, Transformations, is accompanied by an informative text by Micha Odenheimer. The book largely celebrates the journey of Ethiopiann Jews to Israel. The images depict, in a generally positive way, the urge to assimilate into Israeli society.

MIRIAM AND HER BROTHERS

And the Lord said unto Moses: ‘If her father had but spit in her face, should she not hide in shame seven days? Let her be shut up without the camp seven days, and after that she shall be brought in again.’ And Miriam was shut up without the camp seven days; and the people journeyed not until Miriam was brought in again. (Numbers 12:14-15)

Beyond the camp in her tent, she lies,
A leper, whiter than the moonlight
Slanting in. She cannot catch

The bleating of babies, of sheep,
The blast of trumpets. Too far to hear
Goldsmiths hammering

Flowers and vines on the seven-branched lamp,
She is spared the seventy
Old men babbling prophecies,

The chorus weeping for Egyptian
Fish, cucumbers, melons,
Garlic, whining for meat.

Their retching from the rotten quail
Does not reach her. She hears no men
Grunting, no women snoring

She itches, aches, burns,
Yet the desert wind, hoarse and relentless,
Sings to her. With sand, it cools

Her wounds. She will heal,
Away from Aaron, who also
Whispered against the dark wife

Of meek Moses, perfect Moses,
Favored by the Pillar of Cloud.
Face-to-face, God singled her out

From her brothers— “If her father had
But spit in her face!” Let Aaron
Beseech Moses, and Moses beg

God for her sake! Oh, family!
Shamed? Unruly daughter,
She finds her voice.

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Righteously Tasty: The Ezekiel 4:9 family of productsI was tickled when I discovered Ezekiel 4:9 in my local grocery store. Finally, two of my favorite things—contemporary religion and whole grain cereal—were combined within one scripture-clad box. With a recipe inspired by the corresponding biblical passage, Ezekiel 4:9 cereal combines the ingredients—wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet, and spelt—directed by God to the prophet Ezekiel. Had I found the true “staff of life,” as advertised?

Of course, I had to take it home and see for myself. Little did I know that only a few weeks later, New York Magazine would give the cereal a four-out-of-four star rating, and that I would be regularly enjoying the breakfast product. To learn more about Food for Life, the company behind the Ezekiel 4:9 brand, I spoke with Gary Torres, Food for Life’s Marketing Director.

How did Food for Life come up with the Ezekiel 4:9 brand, and what was the development process like? The people of Food For Life have always had a passion for natural foods. As bakers and believers in scripture, we felt it necessary to produce the nutritious bread described in Ezekiel 4:9, as well as many other products, such as 7-grain and other whole grain breads and granolas. The first breads were produced in the mid 1940s.

What was it like to take a recipe found in the bible and to turn it into an actual, marketable product? Did you run into any obstacles? Making Ezekiel bread came naturally at Food For Life. We were immediately convinced of the nutritional value of this unique yet timeless bread. Although this bread is now widely distributed, marketing Ezekiel bread over the years has not always been easy. Because of the Biblical/Scriptural reference, it has definitely experienced its share of both good and bad attention. Not everyone agreed that a bread product named Ezekiel 4:9 was a smart idea, nor did everyone agree that a bread should have scripture on it. We believed that both were appropriate.

So Food for Life sees the brand as fulfilling a specifically religious purpose, as well as a nutritional one? Ezekiel 4:9 bread has never been produced to fill a religious purpose. Rather, it's a nutritionally superior bread produced by divine inspiration. Ezekiel 4:9 Hot Dog Buns: Hebrew National never had a better companion

Have religious groups generated any particular interest in the product? Since we are a Jewish site, I have to ask if there is any Jewish connection—have you had any requests from Jewish or other religious groups or vendors? Yes, of course, some have... the Kashruth kosher supervision, Kof-K of Teaneck, NJ as well as other religious communities and organizations have generated support for Ezekiel bread. Though Food For Life has no religious affiliation, we are ever-anxious to serve our customers. Specifically, we have been asked to produce this product under orthodox designation pas yisroel which we have done.

The Ezekiel 4:9 cereal was described as “righteously tasty” in New York Magazine last week. Do you think part of the cereal’s high nutritional value and good taste can be attributed to the fact that the recipe came from the bible? Was this cereal destined to be? Absolutely! Ezekiel 4:9 cereal is made with only simple ingredients and contains only the specified grains, legumes, and seeds as God gave to Ezekiel (documented in the Holy Scripture verse: Ezekiel 4:9). It is quite amazing to experience its uncommonly good taste and nutritional profile. Since this product is not fortified with additives, we can draw no other conclusions for the basis of its nutritional value and flavor.

Speaking of how God directed Ezekiel, you don’t cook it the same way (over burning animal waste) as Ezekiel did, do you? Surprisingly, we receive that very question quite often. It seems that many are curious to find out just how authentic our Ezekiel 4:9 bread really is! However, please be assured all Food For Life products, including Ezekiel 4:9 bread, are baked using modern or conventional baking methods.

Ezekiel the Prophet: not afraid to cook with some dungThank goodness! Readers will be happy to hear that. Food for Life also has a Genesis 1:29 brand, inspired by the passage in which God instructs Adam and Eve to use “every herb bearing seed…for meat.” You guys obviously took a few liberties with the recipe. How did you go about choosing the ingredients for this product? Yes, we've taken some common and other uncommon grains and seeds from nearly every continent on the earth and combined them together in Genesis 1:29 bread. Through the inspiration of the verse Genesis 1:29, we have developed a bread after the original grain-based diet given by God which features "A world of nutrition in Every Slice". This bread is packed with grains and seeds!

Sounds great! Does Food for Life have any upcoming plans for additional varieties of biblical food? Perhaps, you never know what is coming next! Stay tuned!

“What do Gali Girls got that we don’t got?” asks a vaguely BarbBFFs: Gali Girl and pal dressed as Queen Estherie-ish cartoon doll.

“Uh…clothes?” responds her sarcastic teddy bear friend.

Thus concludes the online ad for Gali Girls, a line of frum-friendly dolls for strong, independent, Jewish girls. These American Girl–esque dolls and their “looks just like me” marketability made their debut on the creepy toy scene in November 2004, but their recent mention on BuzzFeed has the whole internet wondering what the heck we’ve been missing. Did I mention the ad was created by Jewish Robot and features the music of Shlock Rock?

Each doll comes with a bio book and matching outfit, matching Magen David bracelets, a hand-painted, wooden faux Shabbat table, a fill-in birth certificate in Hebrew and English, and a suitcase filled with Shabbat candlesticks. It’s a gantseh metsieh, dahlink! Of course, there's a whole host of accessories for purchase, including a Queen Esther costume, a Shabbat kallah (Sabbath bride) dress, or for the truly progressive, a suitable pants suit.

Perhaps, like American Girl, Gali Girl will soon offer actual store locations where the female future of Judaism can enjoy kosher dining and live musicals such as Fiddler on the Roof and The Diary of a Young Girl.

Make Sure Your Chairs: have armsAh, wedding season: Weekends fill up with nuptials as our friends and relatives (and maybe even a few of us) march down the aisle and get hoisted up on chairs to wave napkins and hope they don't get dropped. Weddings are beautiful and fun, but as anyone who has ever watched Bridezillas can tell you, they rarely go off without a hitch. Here are some tips for anyone who wants to avoid common Jewish wedding disasters.

1. Check Your Hebrew: If you’ll be having any Hebrew text on your invitation or program, and if you’re not really comfortable with the language, have the text proofread by someone who can catch typos, grammatical errors, and other miscommunications. I’ve seen invitations where ‘I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine’ became ‘My father is my beloved’s and my beloved is mine’ because of a typo. And a ketubah where ‘bride’ became ‘easy girl’ because of a spelling error. Don’t trust the artist or printer to be your Hebrew language expert.
2. Read Your Ketubah: If you’re going to have a ketubah, read the translation ahead of time to make sure that you’re both okay with it. As I’ve written before, it’s kind of a bizarre document, and many couples are uncomfortable with the traditional text. This is the kind of thing you want to talk about months before the wedding, especially if you’re having a ketubah made just for you. You don’t want to hear it read at the wedding and think, “That’s not very romantic.” Be prepared.
3. Test Drive the Glass: There are few things more embarrassing than watching while a groom haplessly stomps on a napkin over and over until the crowd finally hears a satisfying crunch. If you want to use a glass, try a very thin champagne flute. Or cheat and use a light bulb. Remember to save the shattered glass so you can have it made into a mezuzah for your home.
   
4. Find Chairs With Arms: You will be hoisted into the air, and if you have arms to hold onto, you’re less likely to fall or feel unsteady. It’s also good to have some strong friends and relatives on hand.
   
5. Choose Seven Friends: The seven wedding blessings need to be said under the chuppa following the grace after the meal. You may want to give the honor of the first seven to various family members, and the second seven to good friends. Just make sure whoever you ask is comfortable reading Hebrew out loud in front of a lot of people.