Why Is This Night Different?: because we're in cancun, baby!For years Jews have proclaimed "Next year in Jerusalem" at the end of their Passover seders, but a growing trend toward Pesach travel has some Jews setting their sights on future seder destinations like Mexico, Italy, and South Africa. For these jet-setting Jews, commemorating their liberation and slaving away cleaning house and home just don't mix.

A number of big cruise lines provide matzo, cater seders, and employ rabbis during Passover-week cruises, while various hotels offer strictly kosher-for-Passover facilities where holidaymakers can partake in the ritual meal. Many even offer lectures, classes, and other programs.

Here are five companies that specialize in Jewish travel and Passover vacations:

Lasko Tours: From the Eastern Caribbean to the Norwegian Fjords, Lasko gets around. Their Passover hotels include the Eden Roc Resort & Spa in Miami Beach, Florida; the JW Marriott Desert Ridge Resort in Phoenix, Arizona; and the Ritz-Carlton, Lake Las Vegas Golf and Spa Resort.

Mendy Vim's: "Charming villages, rushing rivers, rolling hills, verdant valleys, and some of the best antiquing in New England." That's what you'll get if you sign on for one of Mendy Vim's two Passover tours, hosted at the Heritage Resort & Spa and Pomperaug Golf Club, and the Waterbury Connecticut Grand Hotel, in Southbury and Waterbury Connecticut. It's all about trails and tennis, swimming and sauna, matzo and maror...

Totally Jewish Travel: These guys claim to offer the "widest choice of kosher for pesach resorts, hotels, vacations, cruises and more, all over the world," and they're not kidding. Australia? Check. Costa Rica? Check. Italy, Greece, Switzerland, Israel, Mexico, and South Africa (to name a few)? Check, check, check!

Kosherica: Whether you want to celebrate Passover in Puerto Rico or on the Italian Riviera, Kosherica offers an array of options for the globe-trekking Jew.

Afikoman Tours: Fans of the California desert might be interested to know that Elijah will be in attendance at the MiraMonte Resort and Spa in Palm Springs. Apparently the prophet likes a little Watsu with his wine.

Today we read about two strange phenomena in foreign travel – “slum tourism” andThe men of Munich: Would they make good tour guides? “counter-terrorism tourism.” Slum tourism, as it’s called in the Times, gives do-gooders and adventure-minded tourists the chance to visit impoverished neighborhoods in places like Brazil and India, offering them a more “real” perspective on life in other countries. "Counter-terrorism tours," however, as described by Slate, are aimed at police officers who come to Israel to see the country’s strategies for fighting terrorists firsthand.

While both of these travel trends raise ethical questions, they also evoke a reluctant sense of admiration at the business brains behind the tours, and their ability to capitalize on taboo subjects with a “when life gives you lemons” mentality. There’s something about the counter-terrorism tours that seems uniquely Israeli: Who else would see the business potential in even the grimmest circumstances? From a detached perspective, it’s difficult to deny the marketing genius behind these tours. As the article in Slate succinctly notes, “What can a country do when its tourist industry is eclipsed by terrorism? The answer, it seems, is to market terrorism to tourists.”

But the ethical questions still remain, shedding light on the issues at the core of both tours. They share the same basic premise: Outsiders viewing frightening situations in a brief and controlled way, then returning to their safe, comfortable lives. While slum tourism at least claims to offer some kind of improvement or humanitarian aid in exchange for its presence in the neighborhoods, counter-terrorism tours exploit a culture of violence without asking any of the obvious questions. How successful are Israel’s counter-terrorism efforts, really? What are the consequences of prolonged violence? What does this mean for people like the citizens of Sderot, for whom violence is an ever-present aspect of their lives? Ultimately, ignoring these questions trivializes the plights of those affected by terrorism and war, and turns their suffering into a commodity.

Wish you were here: Produce on sale in TeruelHola from Teruel, Spain (please don't call it "te-roo-ell" like an Ugly American, okay? Roll that "r"!), where I'm living, off and on, this spring. My beloved got a Fulbright, and I'm along for the ride, my understanding being that when you have the chance to live in a random mountain town in the middle of Spain, you do so. Just 'cause.

It's a cool town. Around Valentine's Day, when I got here, they were having their annual, massive festival de Los Amantes, which is about a medieval Romeo & Juliet (Isabel and Diego) who basically love each other a lot and both wind up dead as a result. There's a story, but it's convoluted. Romantic!

Hundreds of people were hanging out in full costume and roasting shit over open flames and selling tinctures. There was even a "Jewish quarter" with actors playing the three Jewish families who apparently lived here before they met their various heinous fifteenth-century ends. We hesitated before exclaiming "Somos Judios!" and were met with blank stares.

Anyway, it's far away from home. There are none of the global chains that have invaded many an international metropolis. It's quiet and chill. No one speaks English. There's a café in town that serves little cups of the thickest, crazy-good spicy hot chocolate, which you consume with a little spoon.

A fine romance: Isabel and DiegoBut it's also kind of far away from home and no familiar chain stores and no one speaks English and really quiet and ever so slightly depressing (I mean, if one were prone to depression in the first place, which I wouldn't know anything whatsoever about; I've got serotonin to spare). Ah, life: the bad in the good and the good in the bad. I know you've got to roll with travel, and that the discomforts and compromises required can yield enormous rewards. But it invariably takes me a little longer than I'd like to get into the swing of that.

And the food. The food has been a problem. I'm a hard-core vegetarian. (Skip the next few lines if you hate airtight conviction.) I think eating animals is completely amoral. It requires an inexcusably willful ignorance. It's totally irresponsible in light of our current environmental quandary, and it's just plain disgusting in general. (It also, for you self-identified Torah freaks, goes absolutely against the spirit of the laws of Kashrut. Like, one thousand million percent.)

And since the diet here consists almost exclusively of animal products (giant bloody rumps of dead pig hanging in every third store window, along with ubiquitous sausage, which in combination make me think fondly back on my first eye-opening read of The Sexual Politics of Meat) eating has been a challenge. I kid you not, they sell Pringles con Jamon in the supermarket. It's made me reflect on the many ways our food choices mark and distinguish and separate us. And how eating restrictions can be a powerful statement of personal ethics and priorities. And how adherence to personal ethics can be a pain in the ass. And also, how much I miss Perelandra in Brooklyn Heights.

Spanish boots of Spanish pleather: It's tough being veggie in SpainThankfully, after a few days of extremely crankily (sorry, babe) subsisting on bread and cheese and potatoes in some kind of orange mayo-sauce (they're not huge on greens, either), my beloved found me not only a little produce market, but an honest-to-goodness health food store to boot! (Now that, Los Amantes, is love... and no one wound up dead). I wandered the aisles caressing the tofu and green tea and seitan and olive oil soap in a trance. Life's been much improved ever since.

It's really hard to appreciate badass 15th century Mudejar architecture when you're hating on an entire country's eating paradigms, you know?

Related: From Krakow, With Love

Dear Jewcy Aficionados: Dzien dobry from the Krakow airport. I have just wrapped up an unofficial 72-hour Jewish immersion holiday and thought I would offer a few travel tips for those of you who plan on making a pilgrimage this summer. I’m guessing that many of you will be more familiar with the region’s Hebraic history before visiting Poland, but I thought you might still mildly benefit from the random observations of a lay lapsed Catholic American secularist:

• It would be facile (not to mention condescending) for me to comment on how soul-deadening it is to see Auschwitz firsthand, but I did want to share a couple of tidbits from our excellent, somber, forthright tour guide. After explaining that these weren’t my views, but that rather I had “written about Holocaust deniers” (scholarly, no…but still technically accurate), I asked if they’d ever encountered any on the tour. She said no, but added that there had been a couple of teenagers with a Scandinavian school group who espoused Nazi ideals. They were immediately sent home because it is illegal in Poland to express those views. Apparently, a professor was even fired from his job for translating a David Irving book, even after making it clear these weren’t his beliefs in the introduction. Considering the horrific immediacy of the surroundings, the free speech question never entered my mind, but I did find one thing the tour guide told me interesting. She said, “We aren’t bothered by the Holocaust deniers. We are scared by those who sympathize with the Nazis, especially amongst the young, because it is easy to influence their minds.” I guess it makes some sense, but it was striking to hear that Holocaust deniers are no big deal while walking alongside the Birkenau train tracks.

• Hot Dogs: at auschwitzI was stunned to learn that, thanks in large part to the efforts of those who been imprisoned there, the camps were opened to the public a mere two years after the liberation. Two years. So, let’s recap: In a poor, desolate country, physically destroyed by World War II, people who were left with nothing after surviving the Nazi nightmare got Auschwitz up and running by 1947 to bear witness to the atrocities they had just experienced. I think you know where I’m going with this…I realize it’s not apples-to-apples, but it sure makes the seven years of Ground Zero squabbles seem awfully small.

• Casting no aspersions on fellow tourists, but it is very strange to watch people take photos of themselves in front of the crematorium.
  

• They sell hot dogs at the Auschwitz snack bar. I’ll let that sink in for a moment... In fact, the only food available for lunch that can quickly be wolfed down before the bus to Birkenau is the hot dog. I can’t say with 100% certainty, but both my wife and I thought it was a traditional frankfurter. And we do enjoy our frankfurters. By the way, the hot dog? Delicious. It was served on this crunchy-on-the-outside-chewy-on-the-inside roll, it came with a homemade relish of big chunks of pickled onions and cabbage, and was topped off with killer tangy ketchup. From the center of Krakow, the Auschwitz tour is an all-day deal, so the sale of nourishing non-kosher concentration camp hot dogs sure seemed like one final twist of the knife.

• Krakow’s old Jewish quarter, Kazimierz has been reborn since the fall of the Commies. It’s bustling with coffee shops, restaurants, hipster hotels, bookstores, boutiques, etc., and we were told that a lot of the entrepreneurs are the grandchildren of those who were persecuted by the Nazis. That seemed reassuring. However, we stopped into an art gallery with an exhibit--a modern art black-and-white-photos-covered-in-spray-paint collage kind of thing. The picture in the window had two topless women, and the head of a bald man had been pasted over one of the ample-bosomed bodies. The proprietor told us it was a nationalistic Polish priest with a popular radio program (probably Father Tadeusz Rydzyk) who shovels “anti-Semitic propaganda.” This was not reassuring.

• Ostoya Palace Hotel: where the maids are hotWord on the Euro street is that Krakow is the hotspot for stag parties and that the town has a thriving sex trade. I didn’t notice an excess of strip bars or sex shops, but then again, we spent most of our time in the Medieval castles-and-churches section. After all, it’s an anniversary trip, and I’m old. What I can attest to, is that Krakow has an incredibly high number of beautiful, beautiful, beautiful women, including our maid at the Ostoya Palace hotel. Fellas, the dollar still owns the zloty, so you may want to take that into consideration before booking Vegas this summer.

• If you are the kind of person who can power through a full day of sightseeing, I recommend taking the Wieliczka Salt Mines tour as rejuvenation after getting your spirit crushed at Auschwitz. Basically, you walk down a labyrinth of wooden stairs (reaching some 440 feet) into a massive mine filled with statues made of salt, walls made of salt (I licked them for proof) and an enormous chapel with a giant chandelier that hosts weddings, concerts and Sunday mass. There’s even a salt lake where a bunch of drunken Austrians capsized a boat and suffocated to death a century ago. There’s also a health center on the grounds for the traditional salt bath. Salt isn’t like coal or copper: It's good for the system, and great for the lungs. Plus, it’s always a balmy 55-60 degrees in the mine, so the dudes that toiled down there were healthier than the general populace. The Nazis took Wieliczka over and used it as a munitions factory (I think that’s what our guide said) and it was the only time slave labor was ever used in the mine. During World War II, people from the nearby Plaszow camp were brought over to work in the mines. Consider this if you will: you’re a Jewish factory worker reassigned to Wieliczka in say 1940. You bust your hump in the mines for the next few years, which ironically helps with the old lifespan. And for argument’s sake, let’s assume you’re down in the middle of the Earth without much access to the goings on at the extermination camps a few miles away. I’m not saying they’re lucky; they were slaves to the Nazis, after all. However, the mine job with the clean air and the comfortable temperature had to lead to one hell of a whopping guilt complex in the Krakow daylight.

• Oldsmobil: krakow's american-themed car barI lied. Salt mines won’t do the trick. Might I suggest the “Wodka Sampler” at the U.S. car-themed bar, Oldsmobil. I don’t know what happened to the “e,” but the six shots are smooth and clean. And the owner does a great impression of an American that didn’t sound like any American I’ve ever met. Much needed jocularity, though. Na zdrowie!

• One last note for my fellow American travelers. We aren’t as popular these days, as I was reminded late one night in the land of my ancestors. A sousy Irish bride told me she had never been to “the States” and didn’t care if she ever did. Then she snarled, “Thanks for George W. Bush.” And this was the day after she got married. And this was after a friendly half-hour chat with her husband about New York City architecture and the Philadelphia Eagles. And the Irish are suppose love us. (Note to the County Cork gent who inquired: No, Bill Clinton is not generally regarded as one of the five greatest Presidents of all time.)

So, to the kid from the Oregon private school on the World War II trip--the one in the Jewish bookstore in Kazimierz who insisted on hectoring the young sales girl with variations of, “When the Nazis came, why didn’t they just pretend they weren’t Jews?” You know who you are. The clerk patiently responded about the importance of religion, the poor uneducated populace, the powerlessness… She was being sincere. You were being a dick. That ain’t helping our cause. From one former punk teen to another, you’re better than that.

And she was hot. You sniveling little fuck.

From Cracovia with love,

Patrick J. Sauer

Related: The Connoisseur's Guide to Internet Anti-Semitism

Jet Set Barbie: kicking leukemia and lymphoma's ass!Love to travel? Hate Leukemia and Lymphoma? If you answered "yes" to both of those questions, then I strongly advise you to mosey on over to Global Traveler magazine, where they recently launched a huge auction to benefit the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

The travel-themed auction goes through midnight on May 30, 2008, and includes items ranging from business class airline tickets, international hotel stays, spa treatments, and luggage, to rounds of golf and wine.

The goal: To raise $100,000 for LLS, which fights leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin's disease, and myeloma.

Smoke and mirrors: The Mega Event stageIt’s day two and we’re at the “Mega Event,” which is a show and dance party held for every Birthright group currently in Israel. (They come from all over: Argentina, Brazil, Australia, the UK. Not every Birthright group attends a Mega Event, but we were one of the lucky ones to be in town for this one). It’s like the Jewish version of Jesus camp and it’s freaking the shit out of me.

The show itself is a mixture of propagandist speeches and wannabe Cirque du Soleil performers, like drum bangers and net crawlers. The singers are apparently famous Israelis. One looks like Fabio, and I can’t say I enjoy his Hebrew wailing. Emceed by an MTV Europe VJ, the entire show is an assault on the senses: Flashing, neon Stars of David illuminate the faces of Israeli stars as they lead the entire group in Hebrew songs. Innumerable Birthrighters follow along with the aid of transliterated captions projected onto huge screens, and everyone dances and cheers with a terrifying, ferocious passion for all things Jew.

Part of the crowd: What if you don't share the audience's enthusiasm?After a while, Israel’s Minister of the Interior speaks, and it feels like he’s trying to convince us all to move here. Afterwards, Lynne Schusterman takes the stage. She’s one of Birthright’s biggest donors, and she wants us to believe that Israel is our homeland. She tells us about bringing her kids here because she wanted them to feel connected to Israel in this very way. But the purpose of this can’t be that they want us to move here after the trip, right? I certainly don’t feel like this is my homeland. And I certainly don’t feel like I want to move here. In fact I feel no connection to this place at all. I feel more connected to London, simply because I so loved drinking Guinness at picnic tables at 11:30 a.m., and cheap shopping during July sale season. Israel doesn’t have beer or shopping like that, and it looks decrepit and third worldish.

The scary Hebrew variety show finally ends, and we’re invited to a dance party. Now, give me some flashing lights, good house music, a touch of video art, and a sea of hot foreign men and I’m a happy gal. We dance and mingle with aggressive, swarthy Jews for as long as we can bear, and the whole event lasts about two hours too long.

Finally: The speeches end and the party begins Truth be told, the dancing is a welcome distraction from how anxious and guilty the show made me feel. Two of my gal pals, Ashley and Lynn, tell me that the stage performance inspired them and that they were almost moved to tears by certain songs. The show reminded me that I’m supposed to be here to explore my Jewish identity, but that’s not why I came. I’m here simply because I love to travel and this is a free trip halfway around the world. Israeli tax dollars and money from rich people like Schusterman are being spent for me to do this, but their efforts and resources only make me feel more disconnected, because the whole religious element of this trip scares and turns me off so much. Maybe if they played hard to get I’d be more susceptible to their efforts.

I feel like a fraud.

Previously: Day 1, or Orthodox Hippies and Badass Babes

Next Up: The Wall Between Us

 

Israel is trying to sex up its image. The July issue of Maxim Sexy Israel: Maxim's "Women of the IDF" feature was cooked up in the Israeli consulate led with a spicy photo spread of the "Women of the Israel Defense Force"—an idea pitched to the magazine by the Israeli consulate in New York. And Kobi Israel's homoerotic photographs of Israeli male soldiers have helped give the country a sexy, queer image around the world.

Recent statistics show that these efforts to sex-up Israel's image are working. Tourism to Israel, which virtually ceased for a few years during the height of the Second Intifada, has returned to normal.

But many of these new tourists want their itinerary to include a glimpse of Israel's decidedly unsexy side, too. Two colleagues of mine recently made a trip to Hebron, the city in the West Bank in which Palestinians and Israeli settlers live with their hair standing on end, baring teeth at one another ready for attack. The trip was organized by Breaking the Silence, a group of former Israeli soldiers, who show tourists what the Israeli army is being asked to do to protect the settlers and cow the local Palestinian residents into submission. One person described it as a twisted Disneyland, another as a zoo, watching people live their lives sealed off behind barbed wire.

By far the most popular stop on the socially responsible travel itinerary is the Separation Barrier dividing Israelis from Palestinians. In the past three years I have been invited dozens of times to More Sexy Israel: Kobi Israel's homoerotic photos of IDF soldiers have enhanced Israel's standing on the queer travel circuitparticipate in these trips.

The separation barrier, or "wall" as it is often referred to, runs much of the length of the West Bank, weaving in and out of the Green Line that serves as the internationally recognized border of Israel. Building of the wall began with Ariel Sharon's government as a response to the Second Intifada, ostensibly to protect Israelis from violent Palestinian incursions. For most Israelis and Palestinians, the barrier has become its own de facto border, despite insistent denials from the Israeli government that the barrier is intended to mark a border.

In Jerusalem, the wall is at its most notorious as it scars the landscape with huge twenty foot slabs of concrete. One can see the wall from many parts of the city, and several different political groups have created tours of the wall for visitors.

The number of organizations getting involved in "socially responsible tourism" grows each time I return. Almost all the tours are led by left-of-center social change organizations who try to shake the complacency of travelers who only experience Israel as a normal tourist destination with its ancient ruins, museums, good restaurants, hotels and beaches.

The feminist group Machsom Watch, which monitors the checkpoints for Israeli human rights' violations, takes visitors to see the checkpoints that regulate Palestinian movement. Breaking the Silence takes visitors to the Wall and to Hebron. Ir Amim (City of Nations), Women in Black, Rabbis for Human Rights, Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, and others all offer their own tours of the effects of the Israeli occupation.

Israelis, on both the right and the left ends of the political spectrum, take the tours to better understand what is happening within their own country. Most of the international tourists who participate are like me, people who spend much time in Israel, who engage the country deeply, and are troubled by some of its politics andNot So Sexy Israel: The separation barrier attracts more tourists every year policies.

There are also one-time tourists, of all religious and ethnic backgrounds, sometimes Europeans, sometimes American Jews, who have seen the standard tourist sites like the Old City and historic ruins, but who now want to see in person the places which they read about on a regular basis in their local newspapers.

And for American Jews who usually see travel to Israel as a form of identity travel, the tours are a way of showing them the implications of racialized occupation, as well as the harsh reality of what Israel as a state does in the name of the Jews.

The best, most sophisticated tours show not just the hardships that the wall imposes on Palestinian residents—who are now on occasion separated from their jobs, schools, and family by concrete—but also what motivated the Israeli government to put up the wall in the first place: very real fears about violence carried out by Palestinians living just miles away.

Socially responsible travel recognizes that tourism is too often about not engaging the place to which one travels. It's instead about searching out fantasies like those in the photo spreads of Maxim. But tourists have power: they can support or destroy local economies, and support or resist political and social situations that a traveler might find reprehensible at home. When tourists spend their dollars in countries like China visiting the Great Wall and the Forbidden City, should they also be invested in encouraging political change by meeting dissident journalists and Falun Gong members?

Separation barrier tourists, both Jewish and not, are choosing to engage, to see political realities that are usually masked by the tour guides on their overly air conditioned buses that zoom from place to place. In the future, as people become more sensitive to the political implications of their travel choices, perhaps a visit to the separation wall will become a standard stop on the average tourist's visit to Israel.

Continue reading...

 

Iran ranks 18th in the New York Times' round up of the top travel destinations of 2008. Find out which place made it to number one on this list of vacation favorites and newcomers.

Keep kosher? Travel a lot? Find it frustrating when you're in a new town, feeling famished (and farmisht), and haven't the slightest idea where the closest Glatt Kosher eatery is? Have I got a pre-Hanukkah gift for you. Yitzie Katz, a food lovin' Orthodox Jew from Queens, has launched Kosher Restaurants GPS.

The idea came to him when he noticed that kosher restaurants weren't showing up on his own GPS device--even when he pulled up right in front of them.

Because he travels frequently for work, Katz completed his research for personal use and then decided to share it with others.

“Anyone who travels for work or vacation and is adhered to a strict
code of kashrut needs help when they leave their home,” said Katz,
whose database includes more than 1,000 restaurants and 2,000 minyanim
in the U.S. and Canada. “There are also people who need a minyan on a
regular basis, especially if they have a yahrzeit and must have a place
to daven.”

And just how much will the list and software cost you? It's on the chai side, at $18.

So, sometimes you find yourself someplace in the world without a clue as to what, if any, Jewish community is around you and once you're there, what are you going to do, walk around the street asking? Well, you might, stranger things have happened, of course. Or, you might not even think to look around some places for other MOTs, wrongly assuming we'd be nowhere in sight. However, in all my travels, I have been pleasantly surprised, again and again, to meet and befriend our peeps all over the place.

So, sort-of-regularly, I'm going to do some of the homework for you and focus on different Jewish communities here and there we don't often hear much about. Yes? Great. And to start things off, we're heading to Omaha to catch up with the 6,500-member community.

Omaha: A nice artsy, progressive, Jewy place to visit. Who knew?

Now, I visited Omaha a little over a year ago for the first time--the (Downtown) Omaha Lit Fest is a great time, by the by-- and decided I loved the place with its art and culture, like this wonderful progressive stronghold in the middle of, well, fields.

To travel deeper next time you find yourself in Nebraska, see who you can find of the Jewish community of Omaha-- touch base with The Jewish Federation of Omaha, swing by the Omaha JCC, hit this site that the Federation offers for answers to questions like, "Can you keep kosher in Omaha?" (yes), "Are there any Jewish Day Schools in Omaha?" (yes) and get the scoop on the choices of shuls in Omaha: Temple Israel (Reform-- and they have a gift and Judaica shop), Beth El (conservative-- and they have a gift and Judaica shop, too), Beth Israel (orthodox), a Chabad center (where just last month a challah-thon took place!) and Beyt Shalom (reconstructionist). Then, there's the Kripke Jewish Library, and since you're there, pay a nice little visit to the Rose Blumkin Jewish Home for the elderly (they have a mikveh you can use there, if you call, fyi) and to the Friedel Jewish Academy to meet b'nai Omaha.

Go get your shalom bayit on, wherever your travels take you.

Finally, an image to burn Yentl out of my head. David Shneer wraps up his voyage throThey're So Over Her: In Buenos Aires, girl Torah scholars don't have to dress like boy Torah scholarsugh Jewish Buenos Aires with a stop at Belgrano (Latin America’s answer to the Upper West Side) and goes to services led by a smoking-hot female rabbi in a clingy green dayglo shirt and painted-on black pants. No wonder the shul was full of teenagers. Jewish continuity may not be as tricky as it seems.

Plus, there’s some stuff relating to the 15th anniversary of the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy, and about how Argentinian Judaism has influenced American Judaism, stuff like that.

Read it here.

On Friday night, we went to Belgrano—Buenos Aires’ answer toGet Over Yourself: New York not the source of EVERY innovation in Jewish life the Upper West Side—for Kabbalat Shabbat services at Comunitad Bet El. How geeky Jewish is that! I wanted to visit the place that revolutionized Friday evening services at synagogues throughout the Americas, and even in Israel. Yes, for once, Jewish cultural capital flowed in the other direction, and Buenos Aires taught New ...

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Yesterday, at 2pm, I was nearly arrested for taking a picture of a synagogue. Just two hours later I plugged into a nascent group of Yiddish scholars who are reviving the language in the same way as happened in the States 10-15 years ago. I’ll let you figure out which is the best, which the worst. Gregg and I decided to walk through the old Ashkenazi immigrant Jewish neighborhood, Once, which houses three premiere pieces of Buenos Aires Jewish architecture—the huge old Ashkenazi synagogue, the old Sephardic synagogue, and AMIA, the Jewish cultural center that was blown up in 1994 and has since been rebuilt. Once now serves as the home of black-hat, ultra-Orthodox Buenos Aires Jewry. We took the subway a few stops to the neighborhood and emerged in Shmattaville. For those of you who have a hard time with Yiddish-inflected English, a shmatta is ...

Last night, a torrid downpour cooled off the hot-tempered evening rush hour before we headed out for dinner with German (pronounced Herman) Vaisman, the founder of Keshet, one of two lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Jewish organizations in Buenos Aires. You know a city’s Jewish community is vibrant when it has not one but two gay Jewish organizations. I know German through my participation in two sometimes competing and sometimes overlapping global mafias—the gay one and the Jewish one. Granted, these mafias do not generally extort money or leave horse heads in people’s beds (at least not that I know of), but they do form a network of mutual, communal interdependence among those who identify a certain way. Wherever I travel, I know that I’ll have some form of community by networking with one of these two groups—or, as with this trip, both. In ...

It’s easy to spot a Jewish place in central Buenos Aires. I learned that this morning, when my husband and I walked by the Buenos Aires Holocaust Museum. Visiting the museum was the last thing I wanted to do, but I did want to see it from the outside. How would a Holocaust museum present itself inJust Look for the Barricades: Author's photo of Buenos Aires Holocaust museum this city’s classic turn-of-the-century landscape? The museum is on a busy street in central Buenos Aires, and halfway down the block, not seeing anything obviously museum-like, I ...

When I was 18, I traveled for months in Turkey, Turkish Kurdistan and Morocco. The Middle East is always interesting for a girl alone, but for a one with an agenda it can be particularly informative. And agenda I had! I was going to combat Islamic Anti-Semitism, one unwilling listener at a time.
Throughout most of my Middle Eastern travels, I was proudly, vocally Jewish.
In Williamsburg I’m an atheist. But, in Diyarbaker, scarcely had I been introduced to someone- whether liberal college student or 70-year-old mullah, and on I was. “I’m Jewish!” I would chirp, big smile even though I was wearing a full coverage outfit in 90 degree heat. Bemused?: This imam was the victim of one of my speeches.

Responses varied.

“As long as you believe in god,” said an earnest matron in Marrakesh.

In Mardin, along the Syrian border, an engineering student had a different reaction.
“Are you not Israeli?”
“No”
“Do you speak Hebrew?”
“No”
“Were you in the Israeli army?”
“No”
“Do you want to kill all Muslim babies and take over the Middle East?”
“Certainly not”
“Lets have tea”
He called me for the next three years, promising me that I could keep my Jewish faith in marriage, and even call our son Isaac.

In the holy city of Sanliurfa in Eastern Turkey, a very friendly kilim salesman and me were talking about New York. “The bombing, terrible”, he said, greatly sympathetic. “The Jews all knew and escaped”
Seizing my chance at conversion, I let loose with a long harangue about conspiracy theories, Judaism, and how many, many Jews died on September 11th. “Would you like more tea,” he responded.

In my experience, Anti-Semitism is rabid in the Middle East. Hanging out with a family in Fez, I heard children’s chanting out the window. “What are they saying?” I asked, imagining some picturesque local custom. My friend Fatima giggled. “They’re telling the dirty Jews to go into the sea.” In 2003, in between coverage of the anti-Bush protests, TV stations blared constant footage of Israeli tanks demolishing Palestinian homes. But they were always just described as “The Jews”.

But the Anti-Semitism was oddly theoretical too, and my big mouth never got me in trouble. Confronted with an actual Jew, most people got over it rather quickly. At 5’2, I look pretty harmless. And never, as in France, did people continue ranting about “The Jew” once they knew where I came from.

I haven’t been back to the Middle East since 2004. I wonder how it is now, if I’d still get the same response.

ISRAELIS KEEP OUT: A sign posted at a guesthouse in Thailand In Nyaung Shwe, a tiny town in the middle of Myanmar, my native guide Chris is dropping jokes over pitchers of Mandalay beer. “Why does Israelis”—he’s already laughing—“Why do they have such big noses?” I beat him to the punch line: “Because air is free.” Amazement, then a laugh from my new friend. “So you hate them too?” After backpacking around Southeast Asia, I know it’s not just Chris who has a problem with Israelis. ...