Cedar’s latest film sparkles with intelligence and droll characterizations but is hardly the kind of movie you’d expect to break out beyond its homegrown base. Yet that is exactly what has happened, making a good argument for the more local the product, the more universal its appeal: Even before its Oscar nod, the film picked up the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes, where it was acquired by Sony Classics. It will be interesting to see whether Footnote, which opens in early March in New York and Los Angeles, lives up to its early billing—whether viewers will respond with equal enthusiasm to its quirky human drama, in which Talmud scholarship and Hebrew philology feature as much as the personal lives of the characters. One of the singular pleasures of this film is the way it delves into the aches and pains of an esoteric intelligentsia, a group who don’t usually get much play in the popular media, without becoming self-conscious in the process. Cedar moves with ease from scenes featuring academic tempests in a teapot to those that give us a glimpse of the domestic backgrounds of his two main characters. Shlomo Bar Aba, who is a well-known comic in Israel, is superb as Eliezer Shkolnik, the dour academic outsider who finally—almost—gets his moment of glory, and the other roles, including Lior Ashkenazi as Eliezer’s son, a deft academic player, and Alisa Rosen, as Eliezer’s shut-out wife, are equally well-cast. The closing 15 minutes of the film, which are choreographed as much as directed, are priceless.

Last weekend, after Shabbat was over in Israel and in anticipation of the movie’s release, I spoke on the phone with the 43-year-old director at his home in Tel Aviv. Cedar, who immigrated to Israel from New York with his family at the age of 6 and later studied philosophy and theater history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and NYU Film School, is married and the father of three children, ages 10, 6, and 2.

Did the response to the film surprise you, especially given its very specific Jerusalem setting?

When it was accepted to Cannes, I was in shock. It was very hard to picture this film in a competition in Cannes. I think a lot of the people there had a similar response: that it was an odd choice. Cannes gives it the kind of exposure that’s so hard to get with a film. And then Sony buying it on the first day. It’s a narrow crack a film goes through, and Cannes is a gateway. More than a film that can only take place in Israel, it’s a Jerusalem film. Even if it had taken place someplace else geographically, it’s still a Jerusalem film. Two scholars fighting over the tiniest nuance of language: That’s what Jerusalem is—or what I want it to be.

Did you have any model for the kind of film you were trying to make?

It’s a film that can’t be compared to anything. While we were preparing the shoot, we decided that the way the father character sees the world—in extreme detail, the way a philologist looks at a text—was the way we were going to look at the story. Extremely subjectively and not considering the larger context. My previous films had left me with a lot of ideas that I didn’t know how to fit into the story; that’s the way narrative films are. Because of the style of this film, its flexibility, anything that was important to the story found its way onto the screen.

What led you to cast Shlomo Bar Aba as Eliezer Shkolnik?

There’s something about him that’s reminiscent of Peter Sellers—someone people don’t know what to expect from, although Israelis know him and expect to laugh when they see him. I had him in mind when I was writing the film, but I didn’t know him and didn’t know if he could deliver. When I met him I thought he was wrong, but during the rehearsal period and during the discussion of the character it turned out that there were so many things he identified with. He’s very connected to this kind of person.

How autobiographical is the film?

It’s more my nightmare than my life. The jealousy between a father and son—the inability to be proud of your child—is something I’m afraid of more than I actually feel.

Continue reading: Hollywood today

• Roseanne Barr announced her candidacy for the Green Party ticket. The Green Party cautioned that she’d still have to be nominated at the July convention like anyone else. [Page Six]

• Ayatollah Khamanei, Iran’s supreme leader, made an unusually blunt threat of retaliation on Israel and the United States in the event of an attack. [NYT]

• Tel Aviv: Silicon Valley of Europe. [WSJ]

• And Canada wants to make itself the Israel of North America, high tech-wise. [Reuters]

• Tablet Magazine contributor Tevi Troy’s epic paean to Ed Koch. [City Journal]

• And catch Koch talking about Israel’s future (along with senior writer Liel Leibovitz and other luminaries) on Super Bowl Sunday in New York. [92Y Tribeca]

• Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center gets an Oscar vote. No, but you should totally continue to get angry when the wrong movies win Oscars. [NYT]

• Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is mulling a run for Congress in his Republican New Jersey district. Says Shmarya Rosenberg: “Now you can hate him for another reason.” [Failed Messiah]

• Benny Morris looks at Greece and Cyprus and why they are newly friendly to Israel. [The National Interest]

• Living up to the name, Diasporist columnist Irin Carmon snapped this shot in Guatemala City’s Plaza Israel. [@irincarmon]

• Marina Weisband: she’s hot, she’s German, she’s Jewish. [Heeb]

• Three Jewish Super Bowl snack recipes. [Kveller]

• Jews of Super Bowls past. [Joint Media Service/Jewish Journal]

Where were you four years ago?

To find the place, we had to turn on a few side streets, go down a discreet staircase next to an apartment complex, and press a button beside an unmarked black door. Three short rings later, we were greeted and quickly ushered inside by a round Russian man with a shiny bald head.

“It’s exclusive,” Dasha whispered to me as we traipsed down the stairs. “They don’t want to bother with just anybody.”

Dasha, Anastasia, and Nastia, native Russians in their twenties, made the orders: pomegranate hookah, tea with milk, tea with lemon, chocolate-covered almonds, and fruit beer. Dasha, an icy blonde, and I sat next to each other at the low table while the other two women sat across from us smoking gold-tapered cigarettes.

We began with talk about the stinginess of Dasha’s recent ex. “A Russian woman should only have to pay for her candy and stockings,” Anastasia, draped in fur, informed me. As the newcomer, having just moved here from New York on a fellowship, I had Russian romance lessons to learn. We continued with necessary nastiness about his new girlfriend. “In this day and age, if a Russian woman isn’t beautiful by 30, she’s just stupid,” Nastia, very tall with black hair, said, making the case that plastic surgery solves everything. Dasha had new prospects: an Italian diplomat and a Finnish entrepreneur. “We look for foreigners,” Dasha explained.

Soon the conversation turned to me. I mentioned a few disastrous dates I’d been on since arriving and then made the typical four-single-women-at-a-lounge conclusion: “Men are impossible.” Anastasia and Nastia murmured their agreement, blowing smoke rings.

“Except Jewish men,” Dasha interrupted. The three of us looked at her. She crossed and uncrossed her legs and signaled to the waitress for another drink. “The best men are Jewish.”

I turned to Dasha. “You’re Jewish?” I asked. She smiled, fiddling with the diamond cross around her neck. “Of course I am Jew,” she said. “Jewish men are stylish and important men. And they are the most generous. You must date Jewish men.” Anastasia and Nastia nodded seriously, as though Dasha were imparting the secret to successful dating.

I leaned back and took a deep drag off the pomegranate hookah. I was in St. Petersburg—a city that 100 years ago had forbidden Jews’ residency. The only exceptions had been Jews who openly converted to the Russian Orthodox Church, or Jewish merchants with connections. In rare cases, Jews who had served in the czar’s army for 25 years were permitted to live in the city.

When Daniel Chwolson, a great early 20th-century intellectual in St. Petersburg, was once asked why he had converted to Russian Orthodoxy from Judaism, he answered: “Out of conviction.”

“Out of what conviction?” he was asked. His answer: “Out of the conviction that it is better to be a professor in St. Petersburg then a melamed [Hebrew schoolteacher] in Shklop.”

Now, in a trendy lounge, a young Jewish Russian woman was flaunting her Jewishness and her trysts with Jewish men like it was a fabulous accessory, akin to her black fur coat.

***

When thousands of Russian immigrants began flooding Israel in the 1990s, the joke was that for the first time in history, people were trying to alter their official papers to say that they were Jewish. Since my move to St. Petersburg this fall, I’ve been taken aback by a similar trend: Everyone I meet is excited to have their metaphorical Jewish papers. Jewishness has a new social currency—especially when it comes to dating.

Before my move, my sole association with Russian Jewry, like so many American Ashkenazi Jews, was that of my lineage. Unless I was discussing the refusenik movement of the 1970s or taking the occasional subway ride to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, Russian Jewry was the family photographs on my living-room walls.

In one, my great-grandfather, a Hasidic rabbi from a shtetl outside of Minsk, Belarus, looks out sternly from an oil portrait above our piano. In another, my grandfather and great-aunt, from the same shtetl, gaze with somber eyes in faded black and white. On a table in our foyer is another black-and-white photograph of another great-aunt, a classic babushka.

Russian society was deeply anti-Semitic when those photographs were taken. Pogroms were government issued. There was little to eat. I am reminded of a Yiddish shtetl song my mother, a Yiddish translator by profession, once taught me: Zuntik bulbes, montik bulbes, 
Dinstik uhn mitvoch bulbes, 
Donershtik uhn fraytik bulbes. 
Ober shabbes in a noveneh a bulbeh kuggele 
Zuntik vayter bulbes. (Translation: Sunday potatoes, Monday potatoes, Wednesday potatoes, Thursday and Friday potatoes. But on the Sabbath for a change a potato pudding.) Between this and the lyrics to Fiddler on the Roof’s “Anatevka”—overworked, underpaid—my stereotype of Russian Jewry was complete.

As I prepared to move, I thought about how my Belarusian grandfather had come to New York City 80 years ago in order to learn English and make a life for himself and his family. And as I began to study rudimentary Russian, I couldn’t shake the lingering and lovely thought that this was my grandfather’s childhood alphabet. Learning simple greetings and the words for “black tea” connected me to him and his lost world, both of which I longed to understand.

The next time I met Dasha, over wine in a fashionable, factory-style café above an art gallery called the Loft, I pried her about the comments she made at the club. She waved to various artists drinking at different tables and then turned back to me. “It’s simple. If you don’t like a man, I tell you it’s because he is not Jew,” she said in her accented English.

Continue reading: The rabbi’s daughter dances

• Jason Segel was named Hasty Pudding Man of the Year. We love you, man. [Access Hollywood]

• More confirmation that Tel Aviv is a popular gay tourist destination, this time with quotes from Tablet contributor Jamie Kirchick’s November response to claims of “pinkwashing.” [AP]

• Asking why John Mearsheimer’s blurb on Gilad Atzmon’s book in September didn’t prompt more of a backlash. [Commentary]

• Goosebumps author R.L. Stine’s favorite thriller is Rosemary’s Baby (the book, duh). [Village Voice]

• Dr. Ruth Westheimer’s tweet of the day: “Pres will be talking about US State of the Union but afterwards, or before, couples ought to talk about the state of their union.”

But not in Israel.

Most of those who blogged or tweeted about the piece were residents of Arab countries. And most of these Arab readers neglected to mention that the celebratory piece was written by an Israeli journalist and published in an Israeli political blog. Israelis, on their end, largely ignored the piece, as they do nearly everything +972 does. According to Noam Sheizaf, +972’s editor in chief, only about 20 percent of the magazine’s readers are Israeli, a testament to the growing unpopularity of its progressive politics in a nation governed by a coalition, led by the Likud, of those who place land and faith above all else.

Rejected by the Arabs, ignored by the Jews: This is the reality with which the magazine’s 15 or so writers have to contend, writing, as they do, in English for a largely American audience. The magazine’s name is no coincidence: It is a tribute to Israel’s international calling code and an acknowledgement that, increasingly, any serious conversation about Israel’s policies is to be had outside of Israel’s borders.

Sparking that conversation is +972’s purpose. The magazine was founded last August,
almost by accident, when Goldman, Sheizaf, Ami Kaufman, and Dimi Reider met in Tel Aviv and agreed to collaborate. At the time, all were working journalists—Goldman and Reider were writing on a freelance basis for a host of international publications, Kaufman was an editor at several Israeli newspapers, Sheizaf was a political columnist for the local edition of Time Out, and all had blogs in English that aimed to provide Israeli news and commentary for an international audience. What began by posting each others’ stories on Facebook quickly evolved into a joint platform. From the first, the +972 crew agreed on an unorthodox journalistic ethos: All the magazine’s bloggers have complete freedom to write whenever and whatever they want. The magazine has a top editor, but the bloggers can fire him or her if they please. And whoever comes on board does so gratis. Other writers were quick to join. The website traffic monitor Alexa shows that visits to the magazine have grown exponentially since its inception, more than doubling in the past few months alone.

The magazine’s loose, horizontal structure, however, is not altogether porous: Underlining everything +972 does is a dedication to promoting a progressive worldview of Israeli politics, advocating an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and protecting human and civil rights in Israel and Palestine. And while the magazine’s reported pieces—roughly half of its content—adhere to sound journalistic practices of news gathering and unbiased reporting, its op-eds and critical essays support specific causes and are aimed at social and political change.

“I think there’s still a chance to resolve things,” said Sheizaf, 37, referring to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “but it’s not going to happen without dramatic pressure from abroad. Left on their own, Israelis will continue the occupation and the current political trends forever.” That’s why Sheizaf caters the magazine to English-speaking readers around the world. “It’s good to internationalize the conversation,” he added. “I believe in this thing we do. I think to bring honest, grassroots voices in English out of Israel, is of the essence.”

Just what these voices might say is unpredictable. Some, like Yossi Gurvitz—a veteran Israeli journalist and former Orthodox Jew—support the one-state solution that would turn Israel and the West Bank into one nation, with equal rights for all its citizens, regardless of their ethnicity. Others, like the American-born Larry Derfner, a former writer for the Jerusalem Post, define themselves as liberal Zionists and support a two-state solution.

“I feel we have a very wide range of opinions [within the left],” said Sheizaf. “If we were more hot-headed, we’d fight each other. But compared to Israeli society and its nationalism and consensus and racism, we’re very focused. This hobby of the left, of having a fierce debate between people standing an inch away in the same ghetto, these arguments are interesting, but not enough to break the package.” And so, while +972’s bloggers often find themselves on opposite ends of their political camp’s most urgent questions, they realize that, for the most part, these differences are nearly invisible to the average American readers.

Plus, Sheizaf added, theirs isn’t an experiment just in politics, but in journalism as well: With traditional media pressed for funds and readers, the magazine’s renown—including frequent mentions in the New York Times—stems in part from its innovative journalistic practices.

Continue reading: Tear gas and Tel Aviv

Cahan, 48, grew up speaking Yiddish in Antwerp, Belgium, and is determined to save the language from extinction in the Jewish state, where he has lived for the past 30 years. He’s the first to concede he is not the best administrator: He owes roughly $40,000 to city hall for overdue property taxes, he smokes Camel cigarettes inside his library of 40,000 old books, and his meager budget provides the collection with no protection from Tel Aviv’s oppressive summer humidity.

But Cahan, who speaks Hebrew and English as well, also bears a quixotic passion for fully living in the half-dead language he loves. In summer he teaches Yiddish and performs musicals in his native tongue in Lithuania and Poland. He is also the lead singer in the band Mendy Cahan & Der Yiddish Express. On their 2005 album Yiddish Fever he sings translations of “Summertime” and “Fever,” along with other Yiddish classics and his own compositions. He whispers, sighs, and languorously wanders through the words, evoking the full range of emotion in a language often confined to old folk songs.

“After having paved the way through hundreds of years to build Jewish identity, finally we build our homeland,” he told me in English. “I find it unacceptable and wrong if Yiddish would not find its respectful, loving space.”

***

The first time I met Cahan, he was declaiming a poem by I.L. Peretz for a Russian television segment, which happened to be filming at the height of the summer’s protests in Tel Aviv. “Man!” he shouted in Yiddish, while piano accompanist Amnon Fischer read out the Hebrew translation. “Do not think life is a saloon, where everyone can push his way forward with his shoulders and eat and drink while others are watching from afar with glassy eyes and empty stomachs.”

Cahan’s receding mane of gray hair matched his bushy gray eyebrows and piercing blue eyes as he paced the stage. Behind him was a wall of books, the duplicates of works in Yiddish that he did not have the heart to throw away. At the other end of the library was a plastic pool with “a few fishelach,” as he called the fish he had brought to lighten the dusty mood. Three chairs stood together near the stage, their backs each sewn in the images of the greats of Yiddish literature: the gray-bearded Mendele Mocher Sforim, the redhead Sholom Aleichem, and I.L. Peretz, with a black tuft of hair to match his thick moustache. “We are friends, the books and I,” Cahan said. “I think they are in a better place than in a paper mill.”

A walking monument to gathering scattered pieces of a whole, Cahan wore a brown vest whose pockets bulged with two passports, four notebooks, a wallet, a yellow box of cigarettes, a city tax bill, vitamins, reading glasses, a USB drive, a mobile flip phone, tissues, a crumpled 20-shekel note, a lighter, and keys. Cahan said that when he immigrated to Israel from Belgium in 1980, he was surprised to see how sidelined his native tongue had become there.

“Many people spoke Yiddish,” Cahan said of the Israel he encountered. “They would read and meet in clubs, but it seemed as if it wasn’t a part of the whole Israeli experience.” In 1990, he started collecting books. At first, Cahan housed his collection in a dilapidated building in an industrial zone in Jerusalem. He then opened a second library in Tel Aviv. He named the organization overseeing the two libraries “Yung YiDish” in an effort to expand the Yiddish circle beyond the elderly. Yung YiDish is one of several Tel Aviv institutions—some 80 years old, and some open less than a decade—that are doing what they can to revive and preserve the tongue that once united the Jews of Eastern Europe, by teaching the language, offering theater, and printing books.

Cahan said it costs $150,000 to $200,000 to properly run Yung YiDish, but private donors provide only half of that. For the rest, he lives by the seat of his pants, begging city hall for a break on his taxes and meeting with the Ministry of Culture to ask for government funding. Cahan spreads word of his center while teaching in Eastern Europe and performing in cities around the world with significant Jewish populations. He dreams of holding Yiddish-cuisine cooking lessons. And he hopes to eventually sponsor translations of Yiddish classics into English, French, and Chinese and continue to promote Yiddish music and film. “Yiddish is more than just the shtetl,” he said.

***

Yiddish, an amalgam of German, Hebrew, and Aramaic written in Hebrew characters, was once the main Jewish dialect in Eastern Europe. But in Israel it was seen as the prime competition to the revival of Hebrew, according to Avraham Novershtern, the director of the Beth Shalom Aleichem Yiddish cultural center in Tel Aviv. “There was a conscious decision which began in early 20th century that Hebrew would be the language of the new state, and in that decision, there was violence against Yiddish,” said Novershtern. He described incidents of kiosks being burnt for selling Yiddish papers. In the 1930s and ’40s, Yiddish movies were sometimes kept from screens. Fights broke out on the streets over the public use of Yiddish.

Continue reading: Israel’s cosmopolitan heart

The doctors said there were several options this time. We could do nothing and my father would die in a few weeks. He could undergo chemotherapy, and if it worked it would give him another few months. They could give him radiation treatment, but the chances were that that would hurt more than it would help. Or they could operate and remove his tongue and his larynx. It was a complicated surgery that would take more than 10 hours, and, considering my father’s advanced age, the doctors didn’t think it was a viable option. But my dad liked the idea. “At my age, I don’t need a tongue anymore, just eyes in my head and a heart that beats,” he told the young oncologist. “The worst that can happen is that instead of telling you how pretty you are, I’ll write it down.”

The doctor blushed. “It’s not just the speech, it’s the trauma of the operation,” she said. “It’s the suffering and the rehabilitation if you survive it. We’re talking here about an enormous blow to your quality of life.”

“I love life,” my dad gave her his obstinate smile. “If the quality is good, then great. If not, then not. I’m not picky.”

In the taxi on our way back from the hospital my dad held my hand as if I were 5 years old again and we were about to cross a busy street. He was talking excitedly about the various treatment options, like an entrepreneur discussing new business opportunities. My dad is a businessman. Not a tycoon in a three-piece suit, just a regular guy who likes to buy and sell, and, if he can’t buy or sell, he’s ready to lease or rent. For him business is a way to meet people, to communicate, to get a little action going. Just let him buy a pack of cigarettes at some kiosk, and within 10 minutes he’s talking to the guy behind the counter about a possible partnership. “We’re really in an ideal situation here,” he said, totally seriously, as he stroked my hand. “I love making decisions when things are at rock bottom. And the situation is such dreck now that I can only come out ahead: With the chemo, I’ll die in no time at all; with the radiation, I’ll get gangrene of the jaw; and everyone’s sure I won’t survive the operation because I’m 84. You know how many plots of land I bought like that? When the owner doesn’t want to sell, and I don’t have a penny in my pocket?”

“I know,” I said. And I really do.

When I was 7, we moved. Our old apartment had been on the same street, and we’d all loved it, but my dad insisted that we move to a larger place. During World War II, my dad, his parents, and some other people hid in a hole in the ground in a Polish town for almost 600 days. The hole was so small that they couldn’t stand or lie down in it, only sit. When the Russians liberated the area, they had to carry my father and my grandparents out, because they couldn’t move on their own. Their muscles had atrophied. That time he spent in the hole had made him sensitive about privacy. The fact that my brother, sister, and I were growing up in the same room drove him crazy. He wanted us to move to an apartment where we would all have our own rooms. We kids actually liked sharing a bedroom, but when my dad makes up his mind, there’s no changing it.

One Saturday a few weeks before we were supposed to leave our old apartment, which he’d already sold, my dad took us to see our new place. We all showered and put on our nicest clothes, even though we knew we weren’t going to see anyone there. But still, it isn’t every day that you move to a new apartment.

Though the building was finished, no one lived in it yet. After dad made sure we were all in the elevator, he pressed the button for the fifth floor. That building was one of the only ones in the neighborhood that had an elevator, and the short ride itself thrilled us. Dad opened the reinforced steel door to the new apartment and began to show us the rooms. First the kids’ rooms, then the master bedroom, and finally the living room and the huge balcony. The view was amazing and all of us, especially my dad, were enchanted by the magical palace that would be our new home.

“Have you ever seen such a view?” he hugged my mom and pointed to the green hill visible from the living room window.

“No,” my mom replied unenthusiastically.

“Then why the sour look?” my dad asked.

“Because there’s no floor,” my mom whispered and looked down at the dirt and exposed metal pipes under our feet. Only then did I look down and see, along with my brother and sister, what my mother saw. I mean, we’d all seen earlier that there was no floor, but somehow, with all my dad’s excitement and enthusiasm, we hadn’t paid much attention to that fact. My dad looked down now too.

“Sorry,” he said. “There was no money left.”

“After we move, I’ll have to wash the floor,” my mom said in her most ordinary voice. “I know how to wash tiles, not sand.”

“You’re right,” my dad said and tried to hug her.

“The fact that I’m right won’t help me clean the house,” she said.

“OK, OK,” my dad said. “If you stop talking about it and give me a minute’s quiet, I’ll think of something. You know that, right?” My mother nodded unconvincingly. The elevator ride down was less happy.

When we moved into the new apartment a few weeks later, the floors were completely covered in ceramic tiles, a different color in each room. In the socialist Israel of the early 1970s, there was only one kind of tile—the color of sesame—and the colored floors in our apartment—reds, blacks, and browns—was different from anything we’d ever seen.

“You see?” my dad kissed my mother on the forehead proudly. “I told you I’d think of something.”

Only a month later did we discover exactly what he’d thought of. I was alone at home taking a shower that day when a gray-haired man wearing a white button-down shirt came into the bathroom with a young couple. “These are our Volcano Red tiles. Direct from Italy,” he said, pointing to the floor. The woman was the first to notice me, naked and soaped up, staring at them. The three of them quickly apologized and left the bathroom.

That evening at dinner, when I told everyone what had happened, my dad revealed his secret. Since he hadn’t had the money to pay for floor tiles, he’d made a deal with the ceramics company: They would give us the tiles for free, and my dad would let them use our place as a model apartment.

The taxi had already reached my parents’ building, and when we got out, my dad was still holding my hand. “This is exactly how I like to make decisions, when there’s nothing to lose and everything to gain,” he repeated. When we opened the apartment door, we were greeted by a pleasant, familiar smell, hundreds of colored floor tiles, and a single powerful hope. Who knows? Maybe this time, too, life and my father will surprise us with another unexpected deal.

Translated by Sondra Silverston

In Israel, every citizen has a religious classification and an ethnic classification. For the majority of Israeli citizens, “Jewish” is listed as both. It’s not a simple formality: One’s religious classification has profound effects, determining whom and how one can marry, the process of divorce, whether one can get buried in a Jewish cemetery, and whether one must serve in the army. The “state” in this case is embodied in the Orthodox Chief Rabbinate of Israel, a quirk of the Israeli democratic system that stretches back to the country’s founding in 1948. At the time, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion gave representatives of the Orthodox religious community, numbering only in the hundreds, a host of powers dramatically out of proportion to their size on the assumption that these Jews would soon turn away from the religion of the shtetl.

Ben-Gurion, needless to say, got it wrong. The ranks of the Orthodox have swelled to well over a million, yet the rabbinate still retains the sole power over deciding who is a Jew. Because of the strength of their voting bloc and the keystone role that Orthodox parties hold in Israeli coalition governments, there has never been a successful bid to challenge the rabbinate’s control.

But Kaniuk, one of the country’s most celebrated novelists, may have accidentally found a loophole. And if it gets widened by the Supreme Court in an important case now pending, it could grow big enough for a large section of the country to step through.

***

Kaniuk wasn’t necessarily trying to upend 60 years of Orthodox rule when he took his case to court this past spring. At 81, he hardly seems like a revolutionary. He walks slowly with a cane, wears large glasses, and bangs his hands on the table when he’s upset. He fought in the War of Independence and ferried Holocaust survivors from Europe to Israel in the 1940s. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages. He says he reads a chapter of the Bible every day, but he doesn’t go to synagogue except on Yom Kippur, when he sits outside behind the building to hear the melodies he remembers from his grandfather. He never goes inside for services. “Once I tried,” he told me, “but then you have to stay the whole time.”

A year and a half ago, Kaniuk welcomed his first grandson into the world. The baby’s mother is a Christian, but because the newborn wasn’t baptized, the Ministry of the Interior decided that the infant should be labeled as “without religion.” At first, Kaniuk was furious. He did not want his grandson stigmatized and unable to marry. But as he thought it through, he realized that what he really wanted wasn’t to change the boy’s status but to change his own. Kaniuk was very proud to be a Jew, but he had never been religious, so why should he be labeled as such?

The Interior Ministry turned down his request to be labeled “without religion” in November 2010 with a Kafkaesque flourish. According to Kaniuk, the government claimed that without a certificate of conversion, his official religion could not be changed. Of course, there is no way to get a certificate signifying that you have given up religion altogether.

So, Kaniuk petitioned the Tel Aviv District Court to force the ministry to act. Not only did he win his case in September 2011, but the judge wrote a remarkable opinion that provided the legal framework to defend a citizen’s right to be recognized under the law as any religion (or no religion) he or she wishes. “We face a demand for freedom from religion in the civil registry,” the verdict read. “Freedom from religion is derived from human dignity, which is protected in the basic law: human dignity and liberty. When the given law is laconic, the fundamental right shall decide, which tilts the scales in favor of the claimant and his self-definition in the registry.”

“This judge seems to have been waiting for me for 30 years,” Kaniuk said of the verdict, which was handed down on Rosh Hashanah. Kaniuk started the new Jewish year as the only Jew in the country officially “without religion.”

***

The case made national news, and it quickly ignited a public conversation. A few days after the story broke, Oded Carmeli, a 26-year-old poet, posted an event on Facebook calling for Israelis who also wanted to be labeled “without religion” to meet on the roof of an abandoned building on Rothschild Boulevard that had been used as a community center during the August tent protests. There, he planned to have everyone sign affidavits in front of lawyers asserting that they wanted to be “without religion” as well. Carmeli figured that if he could gather a big enough group, then he could take all of their papers to the Interior Ministry together and it would be harder for the government to turn them down.

“Even in the first few hours I saw the attending numbers jump up,” Carmeli told me of watching replies roll in. “I think I sort of hit a nerve.” Expecting a crowd, Carmeli called a pair of lawyers he met during the tent protests, and they offered to attend the event and witness the signatures.

Continue reading: A movement grows

New York: Comedian Jackie Hoffman takes on all that is sacred this time of year with her new holiday show, Jackie Hoffman’s A Chanukah Charol. Spoiler alert: She gets visited by the Ghosts of Chanukah Past, Present, and Future (Dec. 11, Dec. 18, Jan. 2, 7:30 p.m., from $35). Shlemiel the First, a klezmer musical set in Chelm, the village of fools imagined by Isaac Bashevis Singer in his stories, opens Tuesday at New York University’s Skirball Center, with regular performances through the end of the month (through Dec. 31, showtimes, from $30). On Tuesday night, Lower East Side gallery and bar CultureFix hosts the Christmukkah edition of Acoustic Nights, featuring young performers doing their best to celebrate the mash-up holiday made famous by nebbishy The O.C. character Seth Cohen (Dec. 13, 7:30 p.m., free). On Monday night, Lou Reed reads from—and signs copies of—his book, The Raven, based on his 2003 Edgar Allan Poe-themed record of the same name, at Brooklyn’s BookCourt (Dec. 12, 7 p.m., free).

“Die, Nazi Scum!” is a real exhibit, featuring Soviet TASS propaganda posters created from 1941 to 1945, currently on display at the Andrew Edlin Gallery (through Jan. 7). Taking the comical-turned-serious cue from Yeshiva University’s current exhibition about comics by female Jewish artists, today the Rubin Museum unveils “Hero, Villain, Yeti: Tibet in Comics,” an extensive exhibit about the various ways Tibet has been depicted in comics since the 1940s (through June 11, $10).

French director Jean-Luc Godard gets his due at the French Institute Alliance Française Tuesday, with three films—Charlotte and Her Boyfriend, All the Boys Are Called Patrick, and Jean-Luc Godard par Claude Ventura—screening throughout the day (Dec. 13, 12:30 p.m., 4 p.m., 7:30 p.m., $10). I Miss You, the 2010 film about two brothers from a Jewish family in 1970s Argentina, the younger of whom is sent to live in Mexico after the older brother, an antigovernment activist, disappears, screens Sunday and Wednesday as part of Iberoamérican Images at the Museum of Modern Art (Dec. 11 5 p.m., Dec. 14, 4 p.m., $12). Joseph Brody’s biography was the starting point for director Andrey Khrzhanovsky’s at-times fantastical film Room and a Half, a semi-fictional account of the writer’s life; it screens Tuesday at the JCC Manhattan (Dec. 13, 7:30 p.m., $11)

Elsewhere: It’s the battle royale—at least for four Massachusetts-based klezmer groups—as they face off Sunday for “Klezmer Conquest: A Battle of the Bands” at Temple Aliyah in Needham. We’re rooting for the Shpilkes Klezmer Band (Dec. 11, 7 p.m., $5). In Philadelphia, learn more about the late writer and activist Grace Paley when Lilly Rivlin’s documentary, Grace Paley: Collected Shorts, screens at the National Museum of American Jewish History. Rivlin will stick around for a discussion afterward (Dec. 13, 7 p.m., $12). The Washington Jewish Film Festival ends Sunday, but there’s still time to catch a Saturday-night screening of Love During Wartime or a Sunday matinee of sports documentary The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg (Dec. 10, 9:15 p.m., $11; Dec. 11, 2:30, $11). The Oklahoma City Museum of Art continues screening Lars Von Trier’s actually very Jewish film, Melancholia, this weekend, with five chances to see Kirsten Dunst’s mesmerizing performance and encounter Alexander Skarsgård as something other than a vampire (Dec. 9-11, $8).

The Art Gallery of Ontario hosts a celebration of Marc Chagall on Wednesday—an evening of performances by local musicians and performers in conjunction with the ongoing exhibit “Chagall and the Russian Avant Garde,” which closes next month (Dec. 14, 8 p.m., $22.50). In Chicago, do as Mayor Rahm Emanuel does with a visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where composer Andrew Bird and sculptor Ian Schneller have installed horned speakers made, ever so industriously, from recycled newsprint and dryer lint (through Dec. 31, $12).

Abroad: Following the final concert of his European tour in Tel Aviv on Tuesday, Leonard Cohen’s son, Adam, makes no bones about the enormity of his father’s legacy with a midnight discussion titled, “In The Shadow of My Father Leonard” (Dec. 13, 9 p.m. concert, $48; Dec. 14, 12 a.m. discussion, free with registration). Also detailing the challenges of defying norms from within, the traveling exhibit “Transcending Tradition: Jewish Mathematicians in German-Speaking Academic Culture,” currently on display at Beit Hatfutsot through Wednesday, opens in Haifa the following Saturday.

Sharon Lockhart takes on the work of Israeli choreographer Noa Eshkol with a film installation opening Tuesday at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem (through Apr. 30, admission $13). A must-see exhibit at Paris’ Grand Palais National Gallery tells the story of the Steins—Gertrude, Leo, and Michael, that is—the American family whose patronage of Picasso, Matisse, and Cézanne helped solidify a new era of modern art (through Jan. 16).

Tips: culture@tabletmag.com

December 1999: “George W. Bush, the front runner in the race for the Republican presidential candidacy, has declared that he will move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem the day he is inaugurated as U.S. president. Bush was speaking at a large gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition in Washington.”

New York: Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer’s beloved children’s book The Phantom Tollbooth turns 50 this year, with a sold-out birthday party at the 92Y proving its enduring lovability. Celebrate, sort of, Stalin, with John Hodge’s oddly intriguing new play, Collaborators, about a dissident writer commissioned to write a play for the dictator’s 60th birthday (Dec. 2, 7 p.m., $25). Start the weekend with a visit to The Duplex tonight in the West Village, where New Jersey native and rising star Rachel Millman will be singing, accompanied by keyboardist Daniel A. Weiss (Dec. 2, 9:30 p.m., $10). Then on Saturday, for a reminder of the challenges facing Jewish musical stars of yesteryear, go see Samson Raphaelson’s play The Jazz Singer before it closes next weekend (Dec. 3, 3 p.m., 8 p.m.; Dec. 4, 3 p.m., $22). Or, stick around after Millman’s set, and see if the raven-haired chanteuse might join you.

The Heist Project premieres a one-woman dance show featuring works by five international choreographers, including the Israeli-born Idan Sharabi, a member of Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company, this weekend (Dec. 2, Dec. 3, 8 p.m., $25). The Alvin Ailey dance theater begins a nine-show run of Minus 16, a work by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin, starting next Friday (Dec. 9, 8 p.m., $25 and up).

On Sunday, prep for the season—however you spend it—with Julie Weiner, the Jewish Week’s “In The Mix” columnist, who’s scheduled to discuss holiday tips for interfaith families at the Museum of Jewish Heritage (Dec. 4, 11 a.m., free). Alternately, prep for your inevitably harrowing December travel on Tuesday, at a showing of Je T’aime, I Love You Terminal, an Israeli love story that begins as a young man waits for a flight at the Prague airport. The screening at the JCC in Manhattan includes a discussion with Dani Menkin, the film’s director (Dec. 6, 7:30 p.m., $11).

Elsewhere: In Connecticut, Jonathan Adler is opening one of his whimsically chic home-décor stores in Greenwich. But will the shop feature items found in the “Haute Hannukah” collection? (One dachshund menorah, please.) In San Francisco, the Tikva Records pop-up store opens, stocked with Jewish records and hosting very groovy events through the end of December, when it shuts down. On Sunday, Basya Schecter leads her band, Pharaoh’s Daughter, in a concert sponsored by Denver, Colo.’s Mizel Museum, in conjunction with an art sale (Dec. 4, 1 p.m., $25). Because nine hours couldn’t contain the entirety of the material Claude Lanzmann collected for his seminal, long 1985 film, there is Shoah: The Unseen Interviews. It will be screened twice this week in Chicago. The Wednesday screening at the Chicago Public Library is sold out—there will be a standby line for unclaimed tickets—but Tuesday’s Glencoe screening isn’t, yet (Dec. 6, 7 p.m., free).

Abroad: Jerusalem’s black box theater, Way Off Productions, puts on Yasmina Reza’s Tony Award-winning play, Art!, with eight performances through the end of December (Dec. 3, Dec. 6, Dec. 8, 8 p.m., $13). For the children, Truly Scrumptious is a mini-musical featuring unrelentingly catchy songs and the kind of fantastical plotline accepted only in children’s entertainment (Dec. 8, 8 p.m., $21). This weekend’s Jacob’s Ladder Festival in northern Israel features a smattering of international musicians—and an American comedian who goes by the name Jewmongous.

Tips: culture@tabletmag.com

• A J Street founder and board member allegedly met with Hamas officials while reporting on smuggling operations in Gaza. [Washington Jewish Week]

• In 1980, Richard Brody ran into Woody Allen at Mott Street restaurant Sam Wo’s. Absurdity ensued. [New Yorker]

• In other Allen-family news, 23-year-old Ronan Farrow—child of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow—won a Rhodes Scholarship to study international development at Oxford. Another winner was Princeton senior Miriam Rosenbaum, who will study bioethics at Oxford. [Jewish Journal]

• The Times takes a bike tour through Tel Aviv. [NYT]

• Marvin Hamlisch sold his Park Avenue apartment and moved out of New York City. [Observer]

Three things happened in the fall of 1990 that changed my life forever.

The first—and by far the least significant—was the first Gulf War, which inspired Saddam Hussein to hurl his missiles at Israel. As if in some strange ghost dance, most of them landed within a two-block radius in a small suburb of Tel Aviv, forming a nearly perfect circle around my home. At dusk, which was usually just before the missiles would hit, I’d run up to the roof to see if any were visible on the horizon. Then, with the first siren, I’d rush down to the concrete-walled bomb shelter that in those days was my room, and I’d wait for the all-clear. Mornings were spent strolling the streets and looking for shrapnel, cool shreds of metal with Arabic inscriptions in red and green. The missiles were antiquated, their aim poor, and the damage minimal, which made the first Gulf War the best starter war a child could wish for: just consequential enough to convey a real sense of dread, but incapable of the sort of devastation that leaves nations and boys scarred for life.

But the war’s discrete charms—carrying your gas mask with you everywhere you went, keeping an atropine injector handy in case those threatened chemical warheads ever materialized—were nothing compared to the season’s twin colossal discoveries: sex and drugs.

I was a few months shy of my 14th birthday, and my first taste of hashish was like a second, and far more palpable, bar mitzvah. Someone had given me a joint, and I smuggled it past my mother and grandmother and down to my subterranean, bomb-resistant room. I realized the momentousness of the occasion, and with a rigid sense of ritual that only awkward teenagers can so earnestly conjure, I thought that an appropriate soundtrack was de rigeur. The same enabling friend had also given me a tape with a suggestive painting of a banana on the cover, and one song on that album, I saw, was called “Heroin.” Understanding very little about what set one drug apart from another, I figured that heroin and hashish were virtually the same thing, and that a song celebrating one would do just fine as I experimented with the other. I put the tape in my yellow Sony Walkman, stuck the ear buds in, pressed play, and lit up.

What happened next isn’t worth describing. Unless you’ve done drugs, or listened to the Velvet Underground, or done both simultaneously, or done both simultaneously when you were almost 14 and with Iraqi Scuds making their final pre-flight preparations en route to your neighborhood, you just won’t get how holy and filthy it felt, and how enlightening. Two hours later, the alarm sounded, and my mother and grandmother rushed down to my room and shut the heavy steel door behind them. I was panicking, convinced that the reek of burnt hash still lingered. It never occurred to me that we were all wearing gas masks.

That afternoon changed me forever. I listened to my tape endlessly: “Venus in Furs,” “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” “I’m Waiting for the Man”—all Velvet Underground songs were about drugs or sex. And because I had no more of the former, I wanted to try the latter.

A few weeks later, I did. The girl was a sweet 16, and even though neither of us had done much more than breathlessly sneak a few fingers under a bra or down the pants, I felt I had to project a sort of secure masculinity, calm and seductive, and take control of the historic moment. I told her I had just the tape to put us both in the right mood. We undressed, turned off the lights, and I put the Velvet Underground cassette in her tape deck. If “Heroin” was such a befitting song with which to get high, I thought, surely it worked just as well for getting laid.

Four or five minutes in, with Lou Reed’s guitar and John Cale’s electric viola fighting like small, bleeding animals and Maureen Tucker’s drums as hypnotic as an underwater tribal trance, the Velvet Underground had given me the perfect score for scoring: The music was just as hysterical, desperate, insecure, elated, and terrified as I was, or as is anyone, I believe, who’s losing his virginity way too early and for all the wrong reasons.

Obviously, then, I spent much of my adult life thinking about the Velvet Underground and about what makes it such a stellar band. There are many obvious answers to this question, and some not so obvious ones, but there’s one I think deserves serious consideration: What made the Velvet Underground so great was religion—or, more specifically, the fact that its three most influential founders were a Jew, an Episcopalian, and a Catholic who together created the sort of perfectly balanced rock theology we haven’t seen before or since.

The Catholic, of course, is Andy Warhol. In Songs for Drella, the haunting tribute to Warhol that reunited Reed and Cale after years of animosity and alienation, the two recalled their mentor’s state of mind in a song called “Work”: “Andy was a Catholic, the ethic ran through his bones/ He lived alone with his mother, collecting gossip and toys/ Every Sunday when he went to Church/ He’d kneel in his pew and say, ‘It’s just work, all that matters is work.’ ”

Continue reading: It takes three

East: It’s like they can read our minds! The Film Society of Lincoln Center presents “Jew Wave,” a fairly thorough collection of “Jewish” films–Annie Hall, Funny Girl, Goodbye, Columbus among them (Through Nov. 13, $13). The Other Israel Film Festival begins Thursday with a series of searing films and two opportunities to see David and Kamal, the story of an unlikely friendship between two 9-year-old boys in Jerusalem, before the festival ends next Thursday (Nov. 12, 4 p.m., free; Nov. 13, 3 p.m., $12). As part of New York’s documentary film festival, DOC NYC, Michael Feinstein joins director Sarah McCarthy Tuesday for a screening of her film, The Sound of Mumbai: A Musical, which chronicles a heartwrenching performance of the famed musical by children in the slums of Mumbai (Nov. 8, 6 p.m., $16).

Lebensraum, Israel Horovitz’s play about a modern-day German official who decides to invite 6 million Jews to move to Germany, continues its off-Broadway run at the Abingdon Theater, promising an absurdly thought-provoking performance (through Nov. 20, Tues-Sun 7:30 p.m., Sun 3 p.m., $25). At the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park, John Turturro performs a reading of Primo Levi’s scientific essay, “The Mark of the Chemist,” with The New Yorker’s Joan Acocella, Monday (Nov. 7, 7 p.m., $20). Sarah Silverman joins Judy Gold on stage Wednesday after Gold’s self-consciously titled off-Broadway comedy show, The Judy Show (Nov. 9, 8 p.m., $65). Israeli sibling musical troupe 3 Cohens performs this weekend at the Village Vanguard, with two jazz shows a night through Sunday (Nov. 4 through Nov. 6, 9 p.m. and 11 p.m., $25).

Ronald S. Lauder’s collection of German, Austrian, and French art from the third century to the 21st is on view at his Neue Galerie (through Apr. 2, 2012, $20). Willem de Kooning is the topic of the day at de Kooning Now, a day-long conference Friday at MoMA about the artist’s work (Nov. 11, 10 a.m., online tickets sold out). Germany Is Your America, an exhibit curated by England-based writer Michael Bracewell, seeks to be exactly what it sounds like, and its run has been extended at the Broadway 1602 gallery through Dec. 15 (Tues-Sat., 11am to 6 p.m., free). The Soviet Jewry movement gets the curatorial treatment with Let My People Go!, an exhibit at the Museum of Jewish Heritage (through Mar. 2012, $12 admission).

This year’s Jane Jacobs Forum features a discussion on “Women as Public Intellectuals: The Legacies of Jane Jacobs, Rachel Carson, and Betty Friedan,” moderated by Robin Pogrebin on Tuesday (Nov. 8, 6:30 p.m., free with RSVP). Israeli poet Admiel Kosman discusses his poems with his English-language translator, Lisa Katz, Wednesday (Nov. 9, 7 p.m., $10), while Annie Leibovitz heads to the Union Square Barnes & Noble to discuss Pilgrimage, her new photography book (Nov. 9, 7 p.m., free). The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation hosts Much Ado About Noshing, a fundraiser featuring Calvin Trillin talking food and neighborhood with the Russ & Daughters family over smoked salmon and, hopefully, bagels (Nov. 7, 6 p.m., $250). Runners take off Sunday morning for the New York City Marathon, and in that communal athletic spirit, Run for Your Life, filmmaker Judd Ehrlich’s documentary about marathon pioneer Fred Lebow, airs several times over the weekend (Nov. 5, 1 p.m.; Nov. 6, 7:30 a.m., 12 a.m., on New York’s Channel 13).

Polish artist Waldemar Tatarczuk, the founder of the Performance Art Center in Lublin, Poland, gives a lecture Wednesday at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts, where he is a visiting artist (Nov. 9, 12:15 p.m., free). In Washington, the Washington Ballet wraps up four days of performances of The Great Gatsby at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater on Sunday; catch one of the five shows before then (through Nov. 6, from $20). Former Chicago Sun Times architecture critic Lee Bey exhibits his photographs of the Windy City, offering a unique look at changing times and evolving neighborhoods (through Jan 9, 2012, free). In Philadelphia, the Cirque du Soleil brings its latest mind-bending physical creation, Quidam, for six shows through Sunday (Nov. 10-13, from $36).

West: Paul Buhle discusses Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular and the New Land, the illustrated book he co-edited with Harvey Pekar, Sunday at San Francisco’s Jewish Community Library (Nov. 6, 1:30 p.m., free). On Wednesday, Josh Kun talks music, specifically Jewish and African-American music from the 1930s to the ’60s, at the JCC East Bay as part of the 27th Jewish Music Festival  (Nov. 9, 7:30 p.m., from $12). New Yorker writer Ian Frazier discusses his latest book, Travels in Siberia, with Jonathan Bass at San Francisco’s Herbst Theater (Nov. 8, 8 p.m., from $17). Senna, the high-speed story of the life and tragic early death of Brazilian motor racing champion Ayrton Senna, screens Thursday to Sunday at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art (Nov. 10, 7:30 p.m.; Nov 11-12, 5:30 and 8 p.m.; Nov. 13, 2 p.m., $8).

Abroad: Dancers take the stage in Tel Aviv during the Curtain Up Dance Festival, which runs through next Saturday (through Nov. 12, various locations, $16). On Sunday, the Jerusalem Theater screens the must-see film Sarah’s Key (Nov. 6, 6:30, $10) and later features the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra performing “Jewish Music at Its Best”(Nov. 6, 8 p.m., call for tickets).

Tips: culture@tabletmag.com

Start with location. Like the J14—the catchy name for the Israel protests, taken from the date, July 14, when they began—the Occupy Wall Street activists have staked out their turf in the heart of the American banking industry. In Tel Aviv, hundreds of protesters railed against the high cost of housing by setting up tents in the area of the city that houses Israel’s largest banks, specifically on Rothschild Boulevard, an exclusive street named after Baron Edmond James de Rothschild, member of the famous Jewish banking family and a patron of Zionist causes. In Lower Manhattan, the Occupy Wall Street protesters have made their base two and a half blocks from the New York Stock Exchange in Zuccotti Park. While there are no tents allowed, hundreds of protesters have made the park their temporary home, camping out in sleeping bags despite rain and the early autumn chill. Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv houses Independence Hall, the site where Israel’s Declaration of Independence was signed in 1948, and Zuccotti Park has been rechristened “Liberty Park” by the protesters, and it is just a few yards away from Ground Zero.

Demonstrators are quick to explain that the movement, Occupy Wall Street, is leaderless. This same lack of leadership characterized the August protests in Tel Aviv. (Yes, Daphne Leef, a 25-year-old film editor, was credited with sparking the protests when she pitched a tent in a Tel Aviv square to draw attention to the price of rent in Israel. But she remained a symbol more than a leader.) This lack of real leadership has, at least so far, resulted in a fuzzy ideology and a dearth of concrete demands from the Occupy Wall Street crowd. In the small hours of Tuesday morning, to take one example, I watched as a 24-year-old protester named Chris from Brooklyn tried to explain the movement’s goal to six of New York’s finest:

“The reason is bigger than you can possibly understand,” Chris said.

“So, explain to it to us,” one of the cops responded. “I work this job because I have a pile of bills to pay. What’s your side?”

“It’s not about the small scale,” Chris said, unable to articulate a better reply. “You don’t understand.”

“That’s where the difference is—between reality and your side,” the cop said. “It’s time to move along.”

This inarticulateness has provided lots of fodder for blistering satire. (“Because if there’s one thing New Yorkers never ignore,” Stephen Colbert quipped on his show, “it’s people sleeping in a park.”) At the same time, this big tent has served Occupy Wall Street, which has drawn a broad-yet-disparate coalition much in the way that the Tel Aviv protests did. Taking a lap through Zuccotti Park, you’ll hear snippets of conversations about the environment, gay rights, police brutality, the Iraq War, Afghanistan, the drone program, tax cuts, foreign aid, and more. But the single overarching theme of the protests has been corporate greed. It is this one-note song of economic inequality that has so far allowed a collection of students, the unemployed, activists, anarchists, immigrants, and union members to form a coalition. They say they represent the 99 percent; the wealthiest 1 percent, they point out, controls 40 percent of the country’s wealth.

Similarly, by avoiding divisive political issues such as settlements, the status of Jerusalem, the future of the West Bank, policy toward Iran, and financial subsidies for the ultra-Orthodox, and focusing on one issue—the untenable cost of living—J14 was able to unite Jews, Muslims, Arabs, Christians, Druze, gays, the religious, the secular, the left-wing, and the right-wing in common cause. In its final rally on Sept. 3, 2011, 400,000 people participated—roughly 6 percent of the country’s population.

“We work for the richest retailer in the world,” a man from upstate New York who works at Wal-Mart said in Zuccotti Park on Monday. “And yet their employees make jack shit.” He wore a hoodie, which partially covered a neck tattoo of the Hebrew letters aleph bet gimel, which he claimed was an acronym for “everybody’s equal.” On the other side of his neck were four Hebrew words, which meant “God’s earth, God’s planet,” bisected by a tree in the shape of a cross.

“There’s a lot of love,” an unemployed Occupy Wall Street protester named Donna told me. On Monday evening and in the early morning hours Tuesday, I saw what she was talking about. The sound of drums and guitars gave the space the feeling of a carnival. A quick tour of the plaza revealed a surprising abundance of provisions: Anarchists with logistical acumen! There was more food than could be eaten, and no one knew from where it had come: deli sandwiches, Pop Tarts, apples, bananas, coffee, and bottles and bottles of Poland Spring. There was talk of donating the excess food to homeless shelters. Countless supplies had arrived via UPS and from strangers dropping off supplies throughout the day. There were tarps to sleep under and aluminum and cloth blankets for campers. A compost station had been set up for leftover food. Two protesters sat rolling cigarettes from mounds of tobacco, offering regular or mint. I was offered a free umbrella. A similar camaraderie pervaded the Tel Aviv protests this summer.

In Zuccotti Park, a medical team roved the plaza giving out vitamins. A sanitation crew kept the square clean. Protesters used the bathroom in a nearby McDonald’s. “They’ve been very nice to us,” Anya, who came from Iowa for the protest, told me. “The workers are part of the 99 percent.” At 1:00 a.m., a bounty of McDonald’s cookies and coffee arrived.

I met a guy named Max, sipping McDonald’s corporate coffee. “I work for the U.N. now, doing geospatial analysis,” Max said. He was more than a little drunk, skeptical of the movement, and may or may not have been telling the truth. “I was watching the Russians today on the Internet. And they are following the protests closely.” Max said he lived nearby and had just dropped by to check out the scene. “The protesters have … no mission,” he told me. “It’s like they are fighting a ghost.”

The same could be said of the Tel Aviv protests, which nevertheless galvanized an apathetic Israeli generation into political engagement.

It isn’t only my son who learned something these last two months. I, along with hundreds of thousands of other Israelis also learned a thing or two, the most important being that if the people who gathered in this land want to continue living as one nation, they have to work at it. During the last decade, Israeli society has become radically polarized. Many talk about the Tel Aviv bubble, but it’s not just Tel Aviv that has cut itself off from the rest of the country. The religious are continuing to move away from the secular, and the Israeli Arabs, who always had a hard time identifying with the Zionist country, find it even harder under a hostile right-wing government.

In retrospect, the fact that almost all of the various groups in this divided society could stand shoulder to shoulder and shout the same slogans is nothing short of a miracle. In the not very distant past, those same groups had occupied the same space only to clash and hurl insults at each other. For the political establishment, facing a divided, despairing public has always been very convenient. But this summer, this despair turned into hope. And hope, it seems, is one of the greatest enemies of politics in our region. It’s easy to understand the hysteria of all those lazy politicians who have been trying for years to make us believe that their only job is to slow down the inevitable downhill slide.

Something else I learned this summer is that democratic responsibility does not end with casting a ballot every four years; democratic responsibility also requires the public to take to the streets in order to remind its elected officials to be attentive to the will and needs of the voters throughout their terms and not only when they need their votes. For years, we were taught that every demonstration or protest undermines the country and sends a message of weakness to our enemies, but this summer we learned that that was indoctrination by a system that wanted us quiet and obedient so it could continue doing whatever it wanted.

Looking back, it’s clear that this summer was nothing short of a civics lesson that an entire nation taught itself, and that we won’t be able to understand and sum up its many implications for quite a few years to come.

This summer’s revolution was neither political nor pragmatic; it was a consciousness revolution, and as with a stone that has been thrown into a lake, the extent of the ripples it creates cannot be predicted. The people who make up the core of this struggle are in their mid-20s, and in the past, many in that group, disgusted and despairing, wouldn’t exercise their right to vote. Quite a few of this new cohort are students, future doctors, economists, engineers, and lawyers. Have the self-centered, get-rich-quick dreams that some of them conjured up been transformed into something else? Will the process they have been part of, which proved that change is possible, give birth to thousands of new social, political, and economic initiatives? I will be very disappointed if it doesn’t. And this summer was a time when the word “disappointment,” one of the most popular words in the geopolitical region in which I live, simply vanished from our vocabulary.

Soon the autumn chill will be upon us, and winter rains will follow. But even they will not be able to wash away the new hope and the shared knowledge of all those who marched together these last two months: that this summer can be repeated, and that if it isn’t and the town squares remain empty forever, we have only ourselves to blame. Because the final thing I learned this humid and amazing summer is that those who refuse to take to the streets and dream alongside their neighbors are taking the risk that their dreams, just like my son’s goldfish, will die of loneliness.

Translated by Sondra Silverston

In Los Angeles, on the heels of the recently released Sholem Aleichem documentary, actor Matt Chait dramatizes the stories of I.L. Peretz in a self-styled “dramedy” called The Stories of Isaac Lieb Peretz, with musical accompaniment by Lior Kaminetsky, at the Complex (Sept. 10-Oct. 9, starting at $15). For a different comedic interpretation of a young Jewish man’s life, Long Island native and Syracuse University graduate Tyler Gildin performs stand-up comedy tonight at the Brokerage Comedy Club in Bellmore, NY. (10:30 p.m., $12).

Tonight, New York’s Rubin Museum of Art screens Leni Riefenstahl’s 110-minute glorification of Hitler’s propaganda machine, Triumph of the Will—or, as it’s more purely known, Triumph des Willens. A viewing will prepare you for the inevitable chatter about Madonna’s new film, W.E., out Dec. 9, which thanks Reifenstahl and John Galliano in the credits. The event is—aptly, confusingly—free with a $7 bar minimum. Downtown, also tonight, 92Y Tribeca will screen Top Secret!, the 1984 World War II satire featuring the earnestly deadpan (and thin!) Val Kilmer and created by the exclamatory funny guys Abrahams, Zucker, and Zucker, who brought the world Airplane! (10 p.m., $10).

Little Shalimar, a “Lebanese, Jewish, WASP, Kentucky Colonel” musician/dj/instrumentalist from Flatbush opens for fellow Brooklyn musicians Red Baraat at The Mercury Lounge tonight (Sept. 8, 10:30 p.m., $15 in advance, $20 at the door). On Saturday night, SoCalled, a Canadian band once repped by Jdub Records, brings Klezmer rap to Drom, in the East Village, as part of the 7th New York Gypsy Festival (Sept. 9, 8 p.m., $10 in advance, $15 at the door). The festival, which starts tonight, also features Frank London’s Klezmer Brass All-Stars (Sept. 17, Drom) and runs through Sept. 29.

New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage brings together the restaurateurs behind Rosa Mexicana, JoeDoe, Arcadia, and Tocqueville for a discussion a week from Sunday about the book Beyond Borscht and Bourekas: Celebrating Modern Jewish Cuisine, at the museum’s site in Battery Park. The moderator is cookbook author Jayne Cohen; expect a panel that reinvents gefilte fish, as Tablet Magazine has been suggesting for years. (Sept. 18, 2:30 p.m., $12-$15). A week later, a few blocks north, where the original real housewives of New York lived, the Henry Street Settlement reintroduces you to the 1905 version. Resident residence expert Jane Ziegelman, author of 97 Orchard joins historic gastronomist Sarah Lohman and regular historian Suzanne Wasserman for strudel-making and Manischewitz cocktails. Paging Jill Zarin (Sept. 25, 3 p.m., $19.05).

The testimony that didn’t make it into Claude Lanzmann’s nearly 10-hour film Shoah gets an airing Tuesday at the 5th annual Cleveland Jewish FilmFest, sponsored by the Mandel Jewish Community Center (Sept. 13, 7:30 p.m.). Before The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg was just another child actor with Polish immigrant parents. He starred in Holy Rollers—screening Thursday in Cleveland—and is fluent in Polish (Sept. 15, $9). In New York, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, in collaboration with the Polish Cultural Institute and the Polish Film Institute in Warsaw, cobbles together recent polish cinema for a run from Sept. 9 to Sept. 15, at the Walter Reade Theater. Zbigniew Cybulski, “the Polish James Dean,” stars in Night Train (Sept. 9, 4:30 p.m., $13) and Goodbye Until Tomorrow (Sept. 11, 12:15 p.m., $13).

Hamlet inspires New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for the title of “Infinite Jest: Caricature and Satire from Leonardo to Levine,” opening Tuesday and featuring political works by the caricaturist David Levine and artwork by the Broadway illustrator Al Hirschfeld. Bob Dylan—the painter—shows work inspired by his travels through China at Gagosian on the Upper East Side—the first time the musician’s art has ever been featured in New York (Sept. 20-Oct. 22).

New York has Fashion Week; Tel Aviv has Fashion Weekend, starting Thursday at HaTachana (The Station), the former railway station turned hip hub. The Tel Aviv Home and Design Exhibition follows on the coattails, Sept. 20-24, and the 5th annual Beersheeva Wine Festival starts pouring Carmel, Golan Heights Winery, Yaffo, and Tsfat HaAttika, Thursday at the Negev Museum (Sept. 15, 6:30 p.m., $13).

Tips: culture@tabletmag.com

“We’re passionate about the history of this house,” Valerie Bigot, the ambassador’s wife, told me as a white-jacketed waiter served us coffee on the oleander-filled terrace overlooking the sea. Bigot recently gave me a tour of the house, accompanied by Oded Rapoport, the son of its architect, who told the dramatic tale of how his father and his client together created one of the most fascinating 20th-century dwellings in the Middle East.

The story begins at the Tel Aviv Rotary Club, established in 1934 with a membership one-third British, one-third Arab, and one-third Jewish. There, soon after the club was established, Mohammad Ahmed Abdel Rahim, one of Jaffa’s wealthiest residents, met Yitzhak Rapoport. After seeing an innovative hospital design by Rapoport on a nearby street, Abdel Rahim asked the Ukrainian-born architect to design his new house.

Abdel Rahim owned vast citrus groves and flour mills and was a major exporter of Jaffa oranges. He was open to new technology, and, like the Jews in Tel Aviv, he wanted a forward-looking home with modern amenities. But he also wanted to adhere to his own religious and cultural customs. In response, Rapoport began to devise a minimalist exterior in the spirit of the Bauhaus. The interior was designed with a clear separation of public and private realms, with distinct areas for men, women, and children.

Soon after the ambitious project got under way, it became ensnared in tensions between Arabs and Jews in British-ruled Palestine. But the two men were committed to the project. To ensure his safety during deadly Arab riots in 1936, Rapoport would drive to the neighborhood of Manshiyeh on the outskirts of Jaffa, where he would disguise himself in Arab dress. There, he would be picked up by Abdel Rahim and brought to the construction site. Rapoport would spend the night and work the next day overseeing the execution of his design—all the while being introduced to his client’s other guests as a relative from Kuwait. The following night, Rapoport would return to his regular life in Tel Aviv.

“Abdel Rahim had already broken ranks with his cultural milieu to build a Modernist house,” Oded Rapoport told me later in his office, where he spread out a file of documents relating to his father’s life. “He couldn’t afford to be seen with a Jewish architect.” Let alone one who was—unbeknownst to Abdel Rahim—also a spy.

***

It was an open secret that Abdel Rahim was the treasurer of the Arab group orchestrating the uprising and attacks on Jewish civilian targets in Palestine. What no one knew—or at least no one knew inside the emerging structure in the Ajami area of Jaffa—was that Rapoport was also involved in the fight, as a senior officer of the Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah. During his frequent stays with Abdel Rahim, the architect overheard conversations about planned Arab attacks to protest against Jewish immigration to Palestine, and he would subsequently inform the Haganah about their plans.

The design and realization of the house, meanwhile, kept Abdel Rahim and Rapoport in collaboration, and they remained steadfastly protective of one another—but their histories would continue to intersect in complicated ways. After completing the residential commission, Yitzhak Rapoport went on to design a flour mill for Abdel Rahim and warehouses for his many business interests. During the 1948 war, the flour mill’s tower became a strategic post for Arabs, and Rapoport was in the Jewish military unit that blew it up—using his knowledge of the site to determine exactly how to topple it.

Abdel Rahim was able to enjoy living in his new house for only a decade. He was part of a small group that signed the declaration of Jaffa’s surrender to the Jewish troops, and, during the Israeli War of Independence in 1948, his family fled to Lebanon. According to Oded Rapoport, Abdel Rahim left for Beirut with his family, but a nephew of his, Hasan Hammami, says his uncle stayed alone in the mansion for over a year under house arrest before going into exile.

In any case, before the ceasefire, Abdel Rahim transferred ownership of his property to Rapoport, fearing he would lose all claim and have it expropriated. At first, the architect was incredulous, asking, “Why leave it with me? You have family.” Other Arabs, too, remained in Jaffa.

The wealthy man replied, according to Oded, “I don’t trust any of them. I trust you.” He gave Yitzhak Rapoport a proxy for his entire property, even as the architect became Haganah’s chief engineering officer for the Tel Aviv district. “‘I know the Jews will win the war,’” Abdel Rahim told Rapoport.

At war’s end, the newly established Israeli government attempted to nationalize the property, but Oded Rapoport’s father refused to comply. “This is mine,” he told his fellow Zionists. Oded Rapoport explained: “They tried to convince him to drop it. They said, ‘We need it. We’re a new country.’ My father said, ‘I gave of myself to the country, I fought, I gave what was expected of me as a patriot. But I cannot betray my friend.’ ”

In 1949, the French government purchased the house from Yitzhak Rapoport to serve as the official residence of its ambassador to the fledgling Jewish state. The architect then passed on the money to Abdel Rahim, traveling to Naples in the 1950s to meet with him and complete the transfer. Abdel Rahim died in Lebanon in the early 1960s, and Rapoport gradually lost contact with the family as personal communications between Israelis and Arabs became increasingly suspect.

Arab residents of Jaffa have periodically cast doubt upon the story of whether the property was actually sold, most recently in interviews in a 2006 documentary by filmmaker Gadi Nemet broadcast on Israeli television. French authorities counter that Abdel Rahim appointed Rapoport as his agent, that the Foreign Ministry in Paris bought the four-bedroom house from the architect at full market value, and that he, in turn, gave the proceeds to the original owner. I recently confirmed that a transaction of some kind took place by locating the original bill of sale for 20,000 British pounds at the Tel Aviv municipal land registry office.

Yitzhak Rapoport died in 1989. Oded Rapoport took over his practice and has helped successive French ambassadors carry out minor renovations to the original residence. “Whenever a new ambassador arrives, I get a call,” said the younger Rapoport.

***

By the last odd twist of fate in a story littered with them, Oded Rapoport’s experience with Arab architectural commissions has ended up mirroring that of his father. In 1983, Oded designed a house in Gaza for a Palestinian friend. The project got under way during the First Intifada, and the client would meet Oded every other week at the border crossing between Israel and Gaza and then safely ferry him through barricades to a construction site in a car that flew the flag of the Red Crescent.

The client was Akram Matar, an ophthalmologist who ran an eye clinic in conjunction with Israeli doctors. Matar, a wealthy Muslim who studied in England and Germany, wanted a modern house in the upscale Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City, and in the process of designing the project Oded Rapoport and his wife became good friends with Matar and his wife.

Sometime after the house was finished, and following the Oslo accords, Matar invited Rapoport—a pilot in the Israeli Air Force—to Gaza for a celebration at his home in 1994. “We came to the main gate accompanied by the Palestinian police in a convoy,” Oded recalled. “Suddenly Yasser Arafat came in. It turned out to be a surprise birthday party for Arafat.”

The architect doesn’t know what happened to his design in the 2009 bombardment of Gaza during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead. Matar’s children had become more religious as Islamic fundamentalism gained influence in Gaza in the late 1990s. “Somehow the circle was closed,” Oded said quietly, before explaining that Matar died 10 years ago. “Unfortunately, personal stories are so different from the national story.”

Judging by the tidal wave of bombastic accolades that has swept through the Israeli and international media in the past few weeks, it is quite understandable why the unambiguously self-centered origins of Israel’s tent-city protests have been so obstinately ignored. With Haaretz already anointing the mass demonstrations “The Israeli Revolution” and novelist Amos Oz declaring the movement to have “surpassed its ancestors,” why would anyone actually examine—let alone question—the inglorious origins of the most glorious event in recent Israeli memory? Even the sober-minded communitarian philosopher Michael Walzer was apparently overtaken by what he witnessed in Tel Aviv. “This is the first uprising, anywhere in the world, against a successful neo-liberal regime,” Walzer recently wrote, explaining that “the crisis has to do with inequality and injustice, and the search for communal justice.”

But beyond the balloon of egalitarian rhetoric that has been strategically inflated by media-savvy protesters to mobilize public support, it becomes painfully clear that the altruistic spectacle of the current public myth originated as an explicitly egotistic venture. The young urbanite Israelis who have been engaging in “tent warfare” for the past month did not do so to protest the “neoliberal regime,” as Walzer and others would so dearly love to believe; they did so rather because they were unable to enjoy their accustomed neoliberal pleasures to the fullest. And as tempting as it may be to mask self-interest behind abstract moral pretensions, the only social justice the protesters have ever been truly eager to obtain has been that which is reserved for themselves.

***

Let us first examine what by all accounts has become the dominant message propelling the recent demonstrations: “The Nation Demands Social Justice.” What exactly constitutes this so-called “nation,” and who has the right to speak for it? It appears that the self-declared Israeli bourgeoisie, as represented by the well-educated 20- and 30-year-old urbanites spearheading the movement, have quite naturally taken the latter role upon themselves. By deflecting attention away from Tel Aviv they have succeeded in transforming the protest from a limited sectarian affair into a national outcry for change. And yet despite their seemingly noble efforts at advocating national unity in pursuit of “social justice,” one should not overlook the fact that in the past few years, the one thing this same Israeli bourgeoisie continually, and consciously, failed to do, was to unite on behalf of those less fortunate than themselves.

Well before the so-called ills of neoliberalism and privatization against which tens of thousands of Israelis are so passionately united had driven the price of housing in metropolitan areas to record heights, countless groups were already engaging in a desperate struggle for survival. First there was the months-long stand-off between disabled Israelis whose meager benefits had become so debased that they had no choice but to camp out in front of the Ministry of Finance for over 10 weeks in order to pressure the government to rescind some of the cuts. There was the electrifying protest movement generated by Vicki Knafo, the then 43-year-old single mother, whose perennial inability to support her children launched her on a 120-mile trek from her home town of Mitzpe Ramon in the Negev to Jerusalem to protest decreasing government benefits. Knafo’s struggle was also aimed at halting the continued socioeconomic deterioration of Israel’s non-urban periphery, which has long suffered from government neglect. In 2007, it was the Holocaust survivors’ turn to mobilize, as hundreds of aging survivors and their families joined forces to protest the abject poverty into which they were forced by diminishing government pensions. Finally, and most recently, was the struggle among residents of S’derot and neighboring southern towns surrounding the Gaza strip to lobby the government to safeguard their schools and build adequate shelters that would allow them to attempt to maintain some kind of normalcy in the face of incessant rocket fire.

Each one of these social movements was widely supported by the general public. And yet none ever succeeded—despite repeated attempts—at mobilizing the mass support they required to effect meaningful social change. The geographic, socioeconomic, and ethnic divides that have split Israeli society and prevent mass mobilization became clear during the 2006 Second Lebanon War and the 2008 Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, when tens of thousands of Israelis living along the northern and southern frontiers were huddled into bomb shelters while the restaurants and bars in Rothschild Boulevard—the Bastille to this contemporary Israeli Revolution—were as busy as ever.

Such historical reflection is not a petty attempt to belittle the social agenda of the ongoing protest movement in Israel; but it is merely an attempt to examine the actual motives of the protesters in the streets. Waving the banner of “communal justice” after consciously alienating yourself from large parts of the national community for so long is not only opportunistic but also hypocritical. One does not need to be a great skeptic to question the sincerity of those who have suddenly taken upon themselves the liberty to speak on behalf of a nation in which they have wanted little part. Large sectors of Israeli society and its periphery have been crying out for over a decade to the self-declared Israeli bourgeoisie to ask for support in pressuring the government to alleviate their pain. It is only now, as that pain has begun to trickle into that bourgeoisie’s own pockets, in the relatively mild form of decreasing purchasing power and rising rents (as opposed to living in abject poverty and huddling in bomb shelters), that the privileged urban Israelis responsible for this latest civic awakening are finally willing to listen.

***

While rising housing costs may have initially driven a group of young Israelis last month to pitch a tent in Rothschild Boulevard and spark the flame of revolution, it is their own desperate search for self-fulfillment that has kept them there. When a mock Guillotine was placed in the heart of the Rothschild encampment last Wednesday, it served not merely as a provocative spectacle but also as a boost to the self-confidence of these highly self-conscious performers, who play to the cameras at every opportunity. In the end, the all too conspicuous images of solidarity, showcasing secular and ultra-Orthodox or Arab and Jew embracing, not to mention the constant analogies to Paris 1789, are a testimony to the fact that as much as the protesters may be trying to prove their inflated sense of self-accomplishment to the greater public, they are primarily trying to make themselves believe in their own historical import.

“We have finally awakened” has become a favorite maxim among the younger protesters. “This is not about housing” declared a young Israeli journalist. “It is a welcomed attempt at patricide.” Similarly, calls for “regeneration” and “rebirth” have suffused the mock-revolutionary jargon, with some going as far as to declare these protests as “the renaissance of the Israeli spirit” and “Israel’s second Independence Day.” Itzhik Shmuli, the head of the national student union, has been even more explicit about his generation’s newfound and self-congratulatory sense of empowerment: “From now on, the young people will shape the government’s vision.”

While analysts have described the demonstrations as “an effort by the youngest Israelis to recapture an older, more egalitarian, more idealistic, country that their parents lost,” their own rhetoric suggests that they are actually attempting to do the exact opposite, and to create something completely different. Even without an intensive psychoanalytic evaluation, it should not be too difficult to diagnose the all too obvious generational neurosis that plagues the young Israelis who began this fight: guilt. Although their neighbors in Tahrir Square have indubitably had a profound effect on these self-styled revolutions, it is not the Arab spring as much as their own guilty conscience that has shamed them into action. When the Histadrut Labor Federation chairman, Ofer Eini, recently lamented that Israel had “lost the compassion of the socialist state,” which has been transformed into what he called “not simply capitalist, but capitalist swine,” it undoubtedly struck a nerve with many young Israelis who could not but help feel responsible for this perceived moral degradation. As one tent-dwelling Tel Aviv student-protester recently explained: “Something in Israeli society is lacking; something is wrong with our collective priorities.”

Much like Douglas Coupland’s Generation X—the materially driven American generation that matured in waning stages of the Cold War and in the shadow of the Baby Boomers and the Greatest Generation—the current cohort of 20- and 30-year-old Israelis appears to be suffering from a similar sense of historical banality. Unlike their grandparents, whose selfless devotion to a greater good helped found the Jewish State, and their parents, who were responsible for defending it in large-scale wars, young Israelis today feel more like the prodigal son, who has selfishly squandered his inheritance. Born after the 1973 War, young Israelis have been liberated from the existential phobias of their parents and accordingly are primarily focused on themselves. In Tel Aviv, an astronomical 34.8 percent of Israeli youth do not serve in the IDF. For the majority who still join, a military service that included two morally ambiguous wars, in Lebanon and the West Bank (each of which lacked a national consensus backing it), did more to burden their conscience than to replenish their pride. If in the past Israelis could always derive a sense of self-fulfillment by serving the state, the younger generation was left to serve itself.

When the tents are finally packed up and stored away, Israel’s summer of discontent may yet end up accomplishing real things—trust-busting, rent control, and a reawakened civil society among them. But it may also do lot of collateral damage by instilling in Israelis a false sense of unity around a misleading agenda cobbled together to buttress the protesters’ own overwhelming sense of self-importance. The puerile and incoherent demands being voiced in the streets (cut taxes but expand the welfare state; remove tariffs and raise the minimum wage but sustain full employment; eliminate university tuition but improve faculty benefits), are emblematic not only of the conflicting sectarian interests comprising this bloated social movement but also of a wishful thinking that stubbornly refuses to recognize its own contradictions and will therefore never make good on its promises.

Deep cleavages continue to polarize Israeli society. The fact that most Israelis agree on lower rents and higher wages (who wouldn’t?) should not belie their continued disagreements about what really matters. In an inversion of Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation that Americans argue as much as they like about all secondary questions because they have already come to a basic agreement about primary ones, Israelis seem to be wasting their limited civic capital by arguing over secondary matters while the burning fundamental issues remain unresolved.

With the promised U.N. General Assembly vote on Palestinian statehood just over the horizon, which threatens a resurgence of violent resistance—a third Intifada—Israelis may very well have spent the summer mobilizing for the wrong cause. Lower housing prices, cheaper cottage cheese, and affordable diapers are all good things. But considering the existential challenges facing the Jewish state, they are the wrong ones, at least for now. Without a sustained—and painful—national dialogue that would once and for all engage the deeply rooted divisions in Israeli society, and without attempts to resolve the future of the settlements, the possibility for Palestinian coexistence, and the status of Israel’s own growing Arab population, the young bourgeois Israeli revolutionaries so adamant upon ushering in the rebirth of a reunified Jewish state will inevitably wind up like most misguided idealistic revolutionaries before them: in bitter disappointment.

The tents—designed as places for students to engage in thoughtful dialogue about Middle East issues, particularly as the September U.N. vote for Palestinian statehood nears—also signify an effort to make the issues in Israel, such as the housing protests, more tangible for U.S. college students.

JTA reports:

“The tents, set to go up for a full day sometime in late September, are part of Hillel’s response to the expected vote on Palestinian statehood at the United Nations in September. The tents might involve a video link with speakers as well as other common resources, but each campus on its own will decide the crux of the tent’s activities. Hillel has not yet chosen which campuses will get a tent.

‘The tent has got flaps, but at the same time it’s open,’ Wayne Firestone, Hillel’s president, said in his plenary address at the conference. ‘It’s open in the sense that we want to be open and inviting to students that want to engage in conversations about Israel that we are so passionate about, and we refuse to allow ourselves to be marginalized and polarized by those on the edges and outside the tent.’”

Hillel to launch its own tents for Israel [JTA]
Related: House Proud [Tablet Magazine]
In The Middle [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Rent Rage Sweeps Israel

“I came here to sleep even though my boyfriend tried to tempt me with air-conditioning and ice cream,” Ben Barak said. “My lease ends on August 18, and from my point of view I’ll stay here after it ends and sleep here every night.”

Ben Barak is one of more than 400 Israelis who pitched tents on Rothschild in the last three weeks to protest the high cost of housing in Israel. The usually tidy center of Tel Aviv’s banking district has been transformed into a pop-up urban festival, drawing thousands of people each night to strum guitars, drink beer, and listen to lectures. It has spawned a nationwide uprising that saw 150,000 protesters on the streets Saturday, saying that under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s economic system, they cannot pay their bills.

Netanyahu convened a task force to find solutions to the housing crisis and to lower the tax burden of the middle class in Israel. It is another sign of the government’s concern over the protests, which grow each week to include the secular and religious, left and right, Jews and Arabs. Last week Netanyahu canceled a one-day trip to Poland and unveiled a list of housing reforms aimed at students. But the protesters rejected those overtures, saying they will not get at the root of Israel’s growing social inequality. Now Israelis wonder whether, like the Arab Spring, the tents will get them real gains, or if the protests are one long summer party.

“We work hard, we pay taxes, we go to the army and we contribute to society,” said Noemi Seroussi, 24, sitting on a couch on Rothschild Boulevard one night last week. “We need the government to ensure we have the basics, like housing and food at reasonable prices, public transportation, and everything a person can expect in a democratic state.”

***

The heart of the tent city is on the nearly mile-long boulevard that stretches from the Habima National Theater to Independence Hall, where David Ben-Gurion signed Israel’s Declaration of Independence. The boulevard is named for Baron Edmond James de Rothschild, scion of the wealthy French Jewish banking family and a philanthropist who underwrote significant portions of the Zionist settlement project. Today Israel’s major banks are headquartered on and around the street.

Traffic moves in two lanes around a wide center divider where pedestrians and cyclists make their way over grass or sand. On the last Tuesday in July, every empty patch was occupied by a tent. One tent bore a sign, “Rothschild the corner of Tahrir Square,” a nod to the protests that fueled the Egyptian revolution. Another announced yoga at 7 a.m. and 11 p.m. Volunteers ate at a shaded kitchen, complete with four generator-powered refrigerators and piles of donated fruits, vegetables, sugar, and coffee. A string quartet played Haydn on a street corner. At 11 p.m., dozens of bikers and rollerbladers whizzed past the camp, cheering on the activists.

“We only sleep in the tents,” said Kochavit Kdoshin, 34, a painter in Tel Aviv who joined the protest. “We live in the public space. It’s amazing.”

The following morning, the camp looked like a 12-block hangover. Activists without tents sprawled on mattresses and old sofas. Others groggily read newspapers and books in the glaring July sun. Itay Auerbach, 26, lounged on a sofa and perused the headlines of Yedioth Ahronoth, the Israeli daily, the front pages plastered with photographs of the tent camp.

“The really interesting stuff is what’s happening right here,” Auerbach said.

Protests and demonstrations are common in Israel, but they are nearly always focused on issues of war and peace. Yair Sheleg, a research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, said the recent deadlock in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks has created a space for activists to confront domestic issues.

“The public discourse is changing,” Sheleg said. “All the time we dealt mainly with the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we didn’t pay attention to the economic issues.”

While Tel Aviv’s strong left-wing stance on the Palestinian cause can alienate more moderate or right-wing supporters, the tent city protesters’ demands for affordable housing have been a hit among mainstream Israelis, enjoying the support of 87 percent of the public, according to a poll by Haaretz.

“People ask about the Israeli miracle, about how it can be that when all over the Western world there so many problems with debt and budget balancing, Israel seems to be the miracle,” Sheleg said, referring to Israel’s prosperity. “So, Israelis think that there is a lot of money in the national economy, and they also want their share in this fortune.”

Indeed, Israel is fast becoming one of the world’s most unequal economies. This year, Israel became the 34th member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of economically advanced countries. Yet it ranks fifth in income inequality, driven in part by the low employment of ultra-Orthodox men and Arab women. Moreover, housing prices have risen faster than incomes, according to a study by Dan Ben Shahar of the Technion Israel Institute of Technology. Ben Shahar found that between 1989 and 2008, the number of standard monthly incomes needed to purchase the average home rose from 47 to 60.

Economist Ayal Kimhi said housing is expensive because construction has lagged behind population growth. But the demand for public housing may be misguided. “In the bad old days, when the government set all prices, the government would build apartments itself,” Kimhi said. “But price-controlled housing means you get the lowest quality.”

The activists calling for cheaper housing do not mind. On Wednesday, 200 demonstrators from the Jerusalem tent camp marched to Netanyahu’s private apartment in the Rehavia neighborhood, carrying two tents aloft and banging pots and pans. “Ben-Gurion lived in a barracks,” they shouted. “Begin lived in three rooms! Bibi needs three apartments!”

Tal Dwek, 25, did not march with the protesters because he was strapping a double mattress to his car. He studies medicine at Hebrew University and is moving in with his parents because he cannot afford his rent and tuition.

“There are very few scholarships, and no discounts,” he said. “I hope this story will blow up. It’s about time people said, ‘Enough.’ ”

The nationwide protest Saturday was the latest in a line of demonstrations. On Thursday, 4,000 parents walked their children down Rothschild Boulevard in a “stroller march” against the high cost of raising Israeli children. On the last Saturday of July, as many as 10,000 people marched through Tel Aviv demanding affordable housing. The next day, 1,000 activists picketed the Knesset in Jerusalem. The momentum of the protest is striking. Inspired by the tent camps, Tzvika Besor created a Facebook page calling for a strike yesterday. “I’m 36, married with a year-and-a-quarter-old son. I bought an apartment in Givatayim. With a crazy 30-year mortgage,” Besor wrote. “I plan to strike because I have had enough.” His call drew 18,000 online supporters within four days, along with a pledge from Israeli mayors to stop municipal services Monday in solidarity with the protesters.

The protesters say they feel empowered by the Arab Spring. At the rally in Tel Aviv a week ago, activists held placards that read “Assad, Mubarak, Netanyahu.” They called out, “The people want social justice!” in the same cadence as the Arab Spring battle cry of “The people want to topple the regime!”

“People paid with their lives in Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria for the right to live in freedom,” said Eyal Tarchitzky, an activist on Rothschild Boulevard. “I see these people as an example. They got to the point where they couldn’t live anymore, and they made some major achievements.”

The problem is that no easy solutions are in sight. Kimhi said the tent protesters are riding a wave of confidence a month after a successful consumer boycott of cottage cheese led the three Israeli dairy corporations to cancel a price hike.

“It was very simple,” Kimhi said. “The government didn’t interfere, and the manufacturers decided to lower the prices. There are only three or four manufacturers. But housing is a huge market with lots of players. There won’t be a decision by three or four landlords to lower rents.”

The vagueness of the protesters’ goals may also limit their ability to promote change. With many groups—students, parents, and more recently, settlers and Arabs—involved there is no clear vision, researcher Sheleg said. “Only if [the protesters] articulate their demands and plans can the government negotiate with them,” Sheleg said. “But if this is a general emotional protest against the system, the danger is that after some days or weeks, the government will give them nothing because they will be satisfied with nothing.”

But a focused protest could potentially kick the legs out from Netanyahu’s coalition, said Mario Sznajder, chairman of Hebrew University’s political science department. He said that though the protests haven’t yet gained enough momentum, they have the potential to create enough problems in the ruling coalition to bring about early elections.

Whatever its results, the tent uprising has inspired a national discussion of values that for some is already satisfying. Nevo Ben-Knaan is a 31-year-old sound engineer who lives near Rothschild Boulevard. The tent protesters asked him to join them on the first day, but he declined. “I said no, I’m not political,” he said. “But slowly I saw this is not political at all. It’s much more than a hang out. People hang out in malls, bars, and concerts and it all costs money. Here there’s a real connection, where you can talk to each other.”

Last week, Ben-Knaan sat on a bench along Rothschild Boulevard with tents lining the grass in front of him. Behind, a man lounged in an orange hammock. Down the boulevard, in a makeshift living room, 80 activists hashed out a vision for their revolution, working off a document called “Vision for the Revolution: Draft Four,” where eight numbered clauses called for equality, freedom of religion, a right to housing, and sustainable growth.

Ben-Knaan said, “Discussions like this about social issues haven’t happened since Rabin’s assassination.”

My wife and I went to that demonstration. The people around us looked optimistic and excited. There were children taking part in the demonstration with their parents, and they imbued the event with the confusingly festive air of a picnic or a rock concert.

The media says the middle class is the core of this struggle.

“The middle class is the easiest group to screw,” Alon, a demonstrator pushing a baby carriage, explained to me, “It’s hardest for them to take to the streets; the poor can go all the way—they have nothing to lose anyway. The rich can hire lawyers and lobbyists and who knows what else. But the middle class is stuck there in the middle: without the economic power required to oil the system, but with just enough to worry about losing what it has. That’s why they’ve been milking us dry for years. But it’s over now.” Alon was talking about the housing crisis and money, but I could sense something else underlying his words, something that is shared by all the people I spoke to at the demonstration: how alienated they feel from the Knesset that is supposed to represent them. Isreal’s parliament pushes through, on a daily basis, laws favoring the settlers, the ultra-Orthodox, and other groups skilled at lobbying and manipulating it. It has never engaged in any dialogue with the tens of thousands of people who decided one evening to take to the streets.

It’s no accident that the demonstration was called for the same evening as the finale of Kochav Nolad, A Star Is Born, the Israeli version of American Idol. The message transmitted by going head-to-head with the finale of the highest-rated TV program in the country is that living alongside the shallow, arm-waving, brainwashed Israel is another Israel, a quiet, round-spectacled Israel, and he wants to remind his elected officials as well as himself of his existence. It’s funny to see how this group of people, in their cool, trendy clothes, feels so unrepresented: It contains artists, lawyers, academics, doctors—not the types you stereotypically find shouting about not having their voices heard. But in the Israel of 2011, these are precisely the people who can’t find themselves any genuine political representation. The people demonstrating here are exactly the same people who don’t feel quite comfortable with the flood of new laws, such as the recently passed boycott law, that limit basic freedoms.

Many demonstrators see themselves as apolitical. Despite the fact that they came here supposedly to talk about housing issues, their concerns run much deeper. The suffocation they feel isn’t caused so much by a shortage of square meters as by their frustration about not being counted by those who hold the reins of the country and are steering it to some very unpleasant places.

Standing on a traffic island in the middle of Ibn Gevirol Street was a young woman whose red hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She was holding a cardboard placard that said in beautiful, rounded handwriting: “My message is too complicated for this placard.” I don’t know how many of the tens of thousands of people walking past her stopped to read it, but for me, that placard most precisely represents the tent protests.

It’s hard to know whether this protest will develop into anything significant. It all depends on the placard the red-headed girl decides to hold up at the next demonstration, whether the protesters will, in the end, be able to formulate their protest into the kind of clear, sharp messages that those people pretending to represent them will not be able to ignore. If all that comes out of this protest is dissatisfied consumers complaining about the cost of housing and cottage cheese, it will fade within weeks. But I want to believe that more will emerge.

As Alon said right before he disappeared into the throng of demonstrators, “The poor fight for food. I may have food but I am hungry.”

“What are you hungry for?” I asked.

“For a country that is a little less heartless,” he said, and gave the baby, who had just woken up, a bottle. “One that doesn’t try to push only a culture of power and force, but also a culture that values compassion. Being a Jew isn’t just being a settler, you know; being a Jew also means having compassion. I swear. You don’t believe me? Go home and Google it.”

Translated by Sondra Silverston

I am a sucker for stories about tough Jews. So, I special-ordered a copy of Higher Judo from my local bookstore and have since read it twice. The martial-arts genre has long been overpopulated with books heavy on technique and light on theory. The best of them may include a brief history on particular moves or the art itself. But what is almost uniformly missing is a thoughtful discussion on proper body alignment, how a martial art should inform and better our lives, and how to convert intention into successful action. This book has them all.

Feldenkrais’ martial-arts study helped give birth to the Feldenkrais Method, a philosophy of human movement. In Feldenkrais’ first four books on jiujitsu and judo, he began introducing concepts that would reach their apotheosis in Higher Judo. Social constraints, he wrote, have stunted our physical development. We are stuck in an infantile stage in how we use our feet (predominately for upright carriage), how we react to falling (which begs for a “more adult independence of the gravitational force”), and our lack of a more thorough “development of our space adjustment in all directions from the origins of our movable co-ordinate system.” What is the best way to overcome these liabilities? Judo, he argued, the way of gentleness.

Feldenkrais’ introduction to the martial arts is a terrific story. As a 16-year-old, Feldenkrais and 300 other young Jews created the Haganah to protect the settlers of Tel Aviv against attack by neighboring Arabs. A German boy in the group taught him and other members jiujitsu techniques. They began practicing every evening. Three months into their training, their settlement was set upon by Arabs armed with swords and knives. Feldenkrais and others put their jiujitsu to the test, and it failed them miserably. Those who had not studied jiujitsu survived the assault by running and hiding. Those who attempted to use jiujitsu, either with their empty hands or sticks, were routed. Half were either killed or injured.

The experience led Feldenkrais to experiment with more realistic training methods and, eventually, a system that worked off a simple, observable premise. “If I am going to hit you with a knife, what would you do? Put your hand up? Therefore, this is the point to begin,” he wrote. “We will train the people so that the end of their first spontaneous movement is where we must start.”

Feldenkrais set out to make the experiment as realistic as possible. He staged attacks on each member of the group, armed and unarmed, and recorded their reactions on film. From that data he devised and trained the Haganah in techniques that flowed intuitively from their initial distress responses. After training for three months, members were instructed to take a one-year hiatus. Then, Feldenkrais re-tested his students’ reactions to attack. To his delight, most could still effectively reproduce the moves. It took another two or three years to perfect the training regimen, and in 1921, funded by the Haganah, Feldenkrais published a book on his fighting system in Hebrew and distributed it to all the members of the self-defense force.

During the next several years, Feldenkrais worked as a laborer, completed his high-school diploma, and worked for the British survey office as a cartographer. In 1930, he wrote a second book, Autosuggestion, while rehabilitating a knee injury he suffered playing soccer. In 1931 he returned to his first topic and wrote a book on self defense titled Jujitsu. In the meantime, Feldenkrais had relocated to France to study mechanical and electrical engineering.

One day in 1932, his landlord in Paris brought him a newspaper announcing that Jigoro Kano, who at the time was a director in the Japanese Ministry of Education, would be holding a judo demonstration. (Kano had coined the term judo to describe an ethos rather than a system of self defense. Many of the throws and locks of the older Japanese martial art jiujitsu would remain, but broader goals of moral education and self perfection were added.) Feldenkrais knew only that judo was a martial art connected with jiujitsu, but decided to attend.

Because of the government dignitaries present, including the Japanese ambassador, security was tight, and Feldenkrais was refused admittance. Undeterred, he returned home, collected the self-defense book he had published in Hebrew, and tried again. He wrote his plea on a card, attached it to his book, and asked a doorman to deliver it to Kano. After waiting for 15 minutes, he was escorted to a seat where he could watch the demonstration. When the demonstration finished, someone approached Feldenkrais and asked whether he would be willing to join Kano for dinner.

The dinner was also a demonstration. Kano had taken an interest in a particular knife-disarming technique in Feldenkrais’ book and asked him to perform it using a real knife. Feldenkrais performed it successfully several times, leading Kano to say he’d consider it for the judo curriculum. He was, however, critical of other moves and Feldenkrais’ book in general, calling it “not very good, but interesting.” Two days later Kano invited Feldenkrais to join him for lunch. This time he extended an offer, as Feldenkrais relates in Embodied Wisdom, of a collection of his writings. “Look, I think you’re the kind of man who will succeed in bringing judo to Europe. We have tried three or four times and it was a failure. I believe that you have the stuff, but you can’t go on teaching that junk you have in your book. You have to learn proper judo. We will see to it so you have the time you need. We will send you an expert from Japan who’ll teach you judo.”

Feldenkrais in Tel Aviv.
Courtesy of the International Feldenkrais Foundation Archive

In his collected writings, Mind Over Muscle, Kano gives a somewhat different account of his meeting with Feldenkrais. According to Kano, it was Feldenkrais who approached him to arrange a meeting. Kano also makes no mention of the knife-disarming technique that Feldenkrais described, instead recalling how he himself demonstrated a choke on Feldenkrais to illustrate the concept of seiryoku zenyo, or maximum efficiency.

Feldenkrais would continue to study, teach, and write about judo and jiujitsu throughout the 1930s, receiving his black belt in judo in 1936. In 1935 he published a French version of his jiujitsu book titled La Defense du Faible Contre L’Agresseur, or the Defense of the Weak Against the Aggressor, and in 1938 published the ABC du Judo, all while studying for a doctorate in engineering, working as a research assistant under Frederic Joliet-Curie at the Radium Institute, conducting atomic fission experiments at the Arcueil-Cachan laboratories, and doing research on magnetics and ultrasound.

In 1940, when the Germans took Paris, Feldenkrais fled to England. There, too, he plied his skills in science and the martial arts, conducting anti-submarine research in the British Admiralty as well as publishing a self-defense manual Hadaka-Jime: The Core Technique for Practical Unarmed Combat in 1942, to be used by the British military.

After the war, Feldenkrais began to turn his attention to what would become his Method. His years of walking on submarine decks had taken a toll on an old knee injury, and, in an effort to heal himself, he devoted more of his study to anatomy, physiology, kinesiology, and biology as they related to movement. His last book on the martial arts, Higher Judo, would overlap with his work on the Feldenkrais Method, much to the merit of his Method.

Higher Judo’s scientific descriptions of judo’s underlying principles do not make it dull and bloodless. They make it sing. Feldenkrais’ prose is elegant and mantra-like: “You have more direct control over your own body than your opponent’s. Make good use of it.” “‘Immobilization’ and ‘holding’ do not describe the actual state of affairs—they convey the idea of finality and fixity that do not exist in action. An immobilization is dynamic and constantly changing all the time.”

The bulk of Higher Judo is given to ground-grappling techniques, and that, too, sets it apart. Most judo instruction gives short shrift to groundwork, favoring instead the high amplitude throws that can earn instant victory. Even Kodokan Judo, a book by the sport’s official sanctioning body, gives a scant 21 pages to groundwork. The complexity and variety of groundwork cannot be captured in a single text, and Feldenkrais acknowledges that. He trains his focus more on the most common positions and a series of attacks and counters that flow from each. Some will be familiar to anyone with a background in the grappling arts. Others are fresh. And a great many, including leg locks and neck locks, have all but disappeared from modern-day judo because of their danger in training and prohibition in competition, or, as Feldenkrais surmised, a lack of qualified instructors to teach them.

As Feldenkrais devoted himself more fully to his method, he also became more critical of the trend he saw in modern judo practice. It is an age-old lament: The traditional way is better; the new way, with its promiscuous awarding of black belts, its imposition of weight classes, and its reliance on strength over efficiency, has made a mockery of the art. And he was right. The most striking thing about judo, and its most alluring aspect as a martial art, is that it “ignores inheritance as a factor of importance. We do not find that size, weight, strength or form have much connection with what a man can learn so long as it is within the limit of his intelligence.”

In 1951, Feldenkrais returned to Israel and made it his permanent home until his death in 1984. The land, like Feldenkrais, had gone through many changes in the 30 years he had been away, but Feldenkrais found continuity. He resettled in Tel Aviv and taught his method in the apartment where his mother and brother once lived, traveling to Europe and North America to spread his Method. But in Israel, instead of teaching other young Jews how to defend their settlements, he was content to teach Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion how to stand on his head.

Robert Slatkin, a consultant to the Japanese Ministry of Finance, holds a black belt in Brazilian jiujitsu.

A gas explosion (pitzutz gaz) in the coastal city of Netanya late last week killed four people and left dozens of families homeless. Residents and the Israeli media alleged this week that negligence was the cause, citing multiple complaints to city hall, the gas company, and the fire department. Yedioth published a transcript of pre-blast exchanges, including the comments of a city inspector who turned back firefighters on their way to the site of the leak, telling them: “The gas smell has gone, there’s no need for you to come.” The dead included three teenage girls, French immigrants who had been handing out Shabbat candles after a Torah study class at the local Chabad House, and a 28-year-old Israeli Arab restaurant worker who had recently bought a suit for his upcoming wedding. Maariv called the fiasco a “mehdal bo’er,” which means a failure or oversight that is both “burning” and, more colloquially, “urgent.”

Israel’s continuing cottage-cheese revolution has prompted questions about the overall high cost of living in the country, as the dairy issue filters up from the grassroots to the government. “Why Does Cottage Cheese Cost Half As Much Abroad?” Israel Hayom asked on its cover, adding: “That’s the Question Being Asked in the Knesset and the Cabinet.” The financial newspapers Globes and Haaretz’s TheMarker also looked at the cost of other products and services in Israel, with Globes finding that Israeli consumers pay “almost two to three times as much as others around the world in monthly expenditures,” including for fuel, food, and telecommunications, though Israelis earn considerably less than in other developed countries. TheMarker reported that Colgate toothpaste costs 50 percent more in Israel than in France and that the stick-shift Suzuki Alto compact car costs as much in Israel as the larger Jeep Patriot costs in the United States. Israelis even pay more for local products—such as Elite’s Must gum—than Americans pay for Israeli imports. As Globes noted, the kosher gum costs 85 percent less in the United States.

Erez Efrati, a former bodyguard to the army’s chief of staff, appealed an eight-year jail sentence for dragging a woman into the bushes, beating her, tearing her clothes, and attempting to sodomize her after his bachelor party in Tel Aviv in 2009. In his defense, Efrati said he got confused and “behaved as if she were a mehabelet,” or female terrorist.

Israel’s Labor Party is claiming 55,000 new recruits from its recent membership drive—although, according to a Channel 2 investigative report, at least 10 percent of the new members have also joined the rival Kadima or Likud parties, rendering their Labor membership invalid. Writing about the alleged Labor corruption, which included improper payment of dues and registering ineligible voters, one liberal blogger wrote: “None of this should come as a surprise. Labor, after all, is the farcical recurring of the tragedy of Mapai, the mega-party that ruled the state for its first three decades.”

Israel Week in Review will return in September.

The argument started after Skinny left. She said it was crazy to bring a cabbie you barely know into the house to use the bathroom. I said it was mean not to. After all, the entire field of taxi transportation is based on consideration of the passengers’ feelings. Those cabbies drive around the streets all day without toilets on board, so where did she expect them to relieve themselves, in the trunk? As long we focused on her claim that I was crazy, the discussion was quite civilized. But the minute I brought up the opposing hypothesis—that maybe most of humanity invites cab drivers to use their bathroom, and only the bad people among us, like her, for example, think it’s weird—the decibel level began to rise.

It ended with our making a list of six mutual friends who we would ask the same question: Did you ever invite a cab driver to come up to your apartment to use your bathroom? If the majority said yes, I could keep on inviting cabbies into our home. If the majority said no, I’d stop. And in case of a tie, I could keep on inviting them up, but I’d have to apologize to my wife for saying she’s a bad person and give her a foot massage every day for a week.

We asked our six friends. They were all on her side. But what do you do if you’re in a cab with a driver who really, really needs to go to the bathroom, I asked each of them. You just look the other way? You pay him and say, “Keep the change, man, and keep driving till you find yourself sitting in the middle of a little puddle”? It was only then that I realized that I was endowed with the unique and absolutely insignificant power to sense when people need to go to the bathroom. It turned out that to me, things like that were as transparent as those glass doors of the bank my wife keeps crashing into, while the rest of the human race is totally insensitive to the status of other people’s bladders.

This happened 11 years ago, but last Friday, driving to Amnon’s wedding at Kibbutz Shefayim, I remembered it. Amnon and I work out at the same gym. The only reason I know that his name is Amnon is because the first time I met him, the gym owner said to him, “Hey, Amnon, how about trying a little deodorant?” And after a second’s pause, he added, “Tell me, Etgar, that smell, isn’t it criminal?” I told the gym owner that I didn’t smell anything, and ever since, Amnon and I have been sort of friends. The truth is that when he gave me an invitation the last time I bumped into him, I was a little surprised. But it’s like a subpoena—the minute the envelope touches your hand, you know you have to show up. That’s the thing about wedding invitations—the less you know the person inviting you, the more obligated you feel to go. If you don’t show up at your brother’s wedding and say, “I couldn’t come because the kid had chest pains and I took him to the E.R.,” he’ll believe you because he knows there’s nothing you want more than to be there with him on his big day, but if it’s an Amnon you hardly know, he’ll realize right away that it’s an excuse.

“I’m not going to the wedding of some smelly guy from your gym,” my wife said, her tone determined.

“OK,” I said, “I’ll go alone. But next time we argue and I tell you that—”

“Don’t say I’m a bad person again,” she warned me. “I hate it when you do that.”

So, I don’t say it, but I think it, all the way to the wedding at Kibbutz Shefayim. I won’t be able to stay for very long. The invitation said the chuppah would be at 12 and at 1 p.m. there’s going to be a screening of my former student’s film at the Cinematheque in Tel Aviv.

With the usually light Friday noon traffic, Shefayim-Tel Aviv takes half an hour, tops, so I’m sure I’ll be covered. Except that it’s already 12:30 and the chuppah is showing no signs of starting. The student who directed the film has called three times to ask when I’d be there. More accurately, he called twice and his older brother, who I don’t even know, called the third time to thank me for agreeing to come. “He didn’t invite any of his other teachers to this screening,” he told me, “just family, friends, and you.” I decide to cut out. After all, Amnon saw me here, and I’ve already given a check.

As I get into the cab, I text Gilad that I might be a few minutes late. He texts me back that it’s OK. They have some technical problems, and the screening will be delayed at least an hour. I ask the cab driver to make a U-turn and go back to the wedding hall. The chuppah has just ended. I go over to Amnon and his bride and congratulate them. He hugs me, looking really happy. It wasn’t nice for my wife to say he’s “smelly”; he’s a great person with feelings and all that, but the truth is that he does have strong body odor.

During the screening, I get a text message from my wife. “Where are you? The Druckers are waiting. Shabbat starts soon and they have to make it back to Jerusalem.” The Druckers are friends who have become religious. Years ago, we used to smoke together. Today we mostly talk about kids. They have so many. And all of them, thank God, are healthy and sweet. I sidle toward the exit. Gilad saw me come in. That’s enough. In an hour, I’ll text him that it was great, that I had to take off after the screening. Sitting near the exit door is Gilad’s brother. He looks at me as I leave. His eyes are wet with tears. He isn’t crying because of me; he’s crying because of the film. With all that pressure, I didn’t notice that they were screening one. If he’s crying, it must be really good.

On the cab ride home, the driver talks constantly about the riots in Syria. He admits that he doesn’t know who’s against whom there, but he’s excited about all the action. He talks and talks and talks, and the only thing I’m really listening to is his body. The guy’s dying to pee. When we get to my house, the meter shows 28 shekels. I give him 30 and tell him to keep the change. From the street, I can see my wife on the balcony laughing with Dror and Rakefet Drucker. She’s not a bad person.

Translated by Sondra Silverston.

African migrants have been flowing across the Egyptian-Israeli border in increasing numbers since the mid-2000s. The Israeli Interior Ministry estimates there are 33,000 Africans in Israel today. At least 1,200 arrive each month, although there was a dip in January and February during the unrest in Egypt. More than 80 percent are from Sudan or Eritrea, and those migrants say they are fleeing genocidal persecution in Sudan and indefinite mandatory military service in Eritrea. Israel grants them entry because according to international law the migrants hold protected status and cannot be returned to their countries of origin. But only 140 of these African migrants have refugee status in Israel, said Sabine Haddad, a spokeswoman for the Interior Ministry. Another 600 Sudanese migrants received temporary residence in 2007, entitling them to work and receive benefits. The rest reach Israeli cities, mostly Tel Aviv, and search for work and housing. And although Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pledged to close his country’s porous border and build a 10,000-bed detention center for the migrants already here, those proposals will take time to be effective. In the meantime, the ambiguous Israeli policy of granting migrants entry but little else is leading to hostility, crime, and homelessness in Tel Aviv’s poorest areas.

On a Saturday night in February, Haileh Tewelde, 29, and Sami Bisrat, 21, walked around Lewinsky Park, their hands shoved deep in the pockets of hooded sweatshirts. They were killing time before going to sleep next to the library in the park, where a canvas awning would shield them from rain. They had arrived in Tel Aviv the day before. Bisrat wore brown sandals even though it was cold. Neither man had a blanket.

A few feet away, Abdulkarim Yawab Ibrahim, 24, leaned against part of a children’s playground, sipping from a can of cheap beer. Next to him, Ahmad Ismaile, 27, played Sudanese music off a tinny cellphone speaker. Rats crawled across the rubbery grey playground flooring. The two Sudanese men had arrived in Tel Aviv five months earlier and had not found work or housing. Ibrahim said his brother bought his five-shekel (about $1.40) cans of beer, which he said keep him warm before going to sleep.

William Tall, the representative of the United Nations High Commission on Refugees in Israel, says the Jewish state follows international law when it comes to granting entry as protected individuals to Eritrean and Sudanese migrants, meaning they cannot be deported from the country. But Tall says Israel has not interviewed all the migrants to see whether they meet criteria to be considered refugees. They are stuck in limbo in Israel, and that limbo is made worse by a spottily enforced ban on working. By contrast, France, Italy, England, and Spain have interviewed and granted refugee status to an average of 80 percent of the African arrivals claiming asylum, he said, meaning the right to work and access medical and social services. Israel, on the other hand, regards the bulk of the African migrants as illegal aliens until proven otherwise.

“There’s a hardening environment toward them here,” Tall said. “We say [Israeli politicians] need tools to deal with the different categories of people, whether they are economic migrants, asylum seekers, immigrants or infiltrators who are people trying to come to Israel to do harm to the state.”

Yet the situation could be worse, Tall said.

“When you talk about crime or people sleeping outside, it’s actually a small percentage compared to the amount of people in the country,” he said. “What happens now is the government will catch them, and if they are determined to be Eritrean or Sudanese, they release them from Ketziot [prison], give them bus tickets to Beer Sheva, and they make their way to their own networks. Is it a good and proper situation? No, they should be cared for. But on the other hand, they can go wherever they want and work.”

For the Israeli government, though, the newcomers are not refugees but infiltrators who must be stopped. “It’s clear from all the data that the overwhelming majority of the people coming to Israel are not asylum seekers but economic migrants,” said Mark Regev, a government spokesman. “Israel is a country built on immigration, but it has to be legal immigration. We can’t have borders people just cross at will.”

***

On his first two nights in Tel Aviv last November, Eritrean activist Kidane Tukue also slept in Lewinsky Park. Other newcomers sprawl on the floors of the nearby central bus station. About 45 women can find shelter at the African Refugee Development Center or in the 250 beds provided by local churches.

“The thing I hate most about Israel is they label us as bad people,” Tukue said. “The government lets us come here. On the border they welcome us, they send us to Tel Aviv, but they don’t care for us. They complain we are intruders and threats. We are helpless people.”

Tukue, 25, worked as a civil engineer in road construction in Eritrea. He now lives in Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv, and works in a factory about 15 miles south. He is also on the five-member Eritrean Political Asylum Seekers Committee, a Tel Aviv group that helps teach new arrivals English and helps them adjust to life in Israel. Tukue fled mandatory open-ended military service in Eritrea in 2006 and spent a year in Sudan and two and a half years in Libya before trundling toward Egypt in a two-week odyssey spent packed 20 people to a sedan. In Libya, Tukue said, he tried to sneak across the Mediterranean Sea to Italy about six times, but each time he was caught by Libyan police.

“When I left Libya in 2010, we had no choice,” he said. “We couldn’t work, we couldn’t live safely, and we saw that Israel is the only solution to our life.” Once he eluded trigger-happy Egyptian border guards, Tukue stumbled across the frontier before being picked up by Israeli border police. “That was the best experience we had yet in Israel, they hosted us like humans,” he said. “They gave us first aid, water, food, everything.” But since then things went downhill.

“I thought Israel could be a democratic, secure country to live in,” he said. “But it is not as I planned.” In fact, the African influx is not as anyone planned because Israel has never faced a wave like it. And while asylum seekers continue to stream in, no interim government policy has been enacted to stem the tide until more permanent immigration policy and infrastructure can be put in place.

In the absence of a government policy for asylum seekers, Tel Aviv created an organization called Mesila, where 22 part-time staff help migrants register children for school and navigate life in the city. Social workers and art and educational therapists aid the children in processing the trauma of relocation. About 800 children of asylum seekers learn in Tel Aviv public schools. Mesila Director Tamar Schwartz said the organization’s 2.5 million-shekel (about $700,000) budget is funded by donations from foundations, businesses, and individuals, including the Joint Distribution Committee. Tel Aviv covers the remaining 20 percent.

African asylum seekers mainly land in the grittiest areas of south Tel Aviv, such as Hatikva, a neighborhood that has long been the heart of Israel’s underworld, with a reputation for drug use and delinquency. Police commander Yoram Ohayon, whose Yiftach district includes Hatikva, the Central Bus Station, the southern Florentin neighborhood, and historically Arab Jaffa, said the arrival of an impoverished group of newcomers to a crime-ridden area has only made matters worse. Last year, Tel Aviv police established a new 78-officer Lewinsky Station in south Tel Aviv, near the Central Bus Station and Lewinsky Park. Two of the officers are Ethiopian-Israeli police officers who speak the Eritrean language of Tigrinya.

In the last quarter of 2010, that new police force opened some 2,000 criminal files. Four-fifths of these involved Africans, Ohayon said. The most common crimes were property theft and trade in marijuana and hash, which carry lighter sentences than those for dealing hard drugs like cocaine and heroin. However, Ohayon said, there has been a moderate increase in crime over recent months, and evidence of a budding trade in harder drugs. He also said he had identified two African drug trading gangs. Of nine murders reported in the sub-district from 2009 to 2010, five involved African perpetrators, one a Chinese man, and the other three Israelis, he said. In January and the first half of February, police shut down 50 brothels in the neighborhood—some little more than a bed in a room. The prostitutes are Israeli women, but “a serious portion” of their clients are African, Ohayon said. And because the migrants do not receive refugee status or state privileges, they do not have identity cards or public records save for a database of DNA and biometric information the police are slowly cobbling together, case by case.

“It’s the nightmare of every police commander,” Ohayon said. “You’re dealing with people with no faces, no names, no identity papers, and no evidence.”

Ohayon said the Africans’ housing problems are also reaching the police. In December, a homeless Eritrean woman with two children slept on mattresses in Ohayon’s reception room at the Tel Aviv police headquarters for two nights until the city welfare office found them housing. Ohayon complained that this welfare work wasn’t his job. “I need to catch thieves and criminals, not be dealing with Similac,” he said.

***

Shlomo Maslawi is one of the most vocal critics of the government policy on African migrants. He grew up in a two-room shack in south Tel Aviv as the fourth of 13 children born to Iraqi parents. Now he is a city council member from the Likud party.

“You think the city has a solution for the tens of thousands of Africans?” he said with skepticism. “Tel Aviv can’t deal with her own residents.”

Maslawi said the migrants cram into apartments, raising rents for young Israeli couples in Hatikva. Not having work leads to idle time, he contended, while abundant Eritrean-run bars offer a place for the migrants to spend it. Maslawi complained that Hatikva’s residents fear walking around at night because of drunk or homeless vagrants. Maslawi’s idea is to close the border and send the migrants already in Israel to work on kibbutzes. He said he has not proposed it to any Israeli body because “there’s no one to talk to.”

“They have no housing, no work, no access to education or to health services,” Maslawi said of the African migrants here. Remembering his own impoverished childhood in Tel Aviv, he said about his family, “We had these conditions, but at least we had basic services. And we didn’t come in these numbers. This is a population bomb.”

But while Maslawi parses his frustrations in terms of the need for humanitarian services and work, his sympathizers have brought out the ethnic tensions of Jewish neighborhoods. In July, 25 Tel Aviv rabbis signed an edict preventing Jews from renting to African “infiltrators” and foreign workers. Shortly after, 10 Tel Aviv real estate agents signed a petition agreeing not to rent to African migrants as well. Mayors in the cities of Eilat and Arad echoed calls to expel the migrants. In December, Maslawi organized a protest called “Send the infiltrators home!” that drew more than 1,000 Israelis to Hatikva’s vegetable market to slam the government’s slow response to the thousands of migrants arriving in Tel Aviv. Knesset Member Michael Ben-Ari, who also grew up in Hatikva, called from the podium for the government to give each migrant $200 and a plane ticket home. “These people are not asylum seekers, they are foreign invaders,” Ben-Ari shouted.

“I didn’t invite him,” Maslawi said of Ben-Ari. “We just say, whoever is illegal is illegal. Period.”

Refugee aid organizations reacted swiftly to the march. “This creates discrimination and a racist situation,” said Yohannes Bayu, who directs the African Refugee Development Center. Bayu, from Ethiopia, has refugee status. “It’s laughable that Israel has recognized around 140 refugees when Israel is a country established by refugees. This is what happened in many European countries to the Jews who were not accepted, kicked out, and not given their rights not long ago.”

But Maslawi brushes off the accusations. He said the Israelis who advocate for the migrants do it from the comfort of plush areas of Tel Aviv, far away from sidewalks teeming with unemployed, frustrated migrants who crowd schools and vital children’s vaccine clinics. “This problem isn’t in their house,” he said.

The migrants agree with Maslawi and Ohayon that the current situation is unsustainable. Activist Tukue organized a protest in December against the government’s idea to build a detention camp, currently in planning, said a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Defense. In March he organized a 200-person demonstration against the Eritrean embassy, calling for an end to the draconian regime. Without refugee status, Tukue said he struggled to find work. He said he has written to his brothers in camps in Ethiopia and Sudan, telling them not to come join him. Asked about Maslawi’s idea to send the migrants to kibbutzim, he said, “Sure. That’s a good idea.” Moreover, he said, he doesn’t want to stay in Israel forever, but rather until the Eritrean political situation improves.

“If this regime leaves the country, or is overthrown, I would prefer to go back to my country, because I know my country is my home and I can go travel everywhere legally,” he said.

Tukue said he has taken advantage of living in Israel’s culture capital and danced in drag at the raucous annual Purim holiday street festival in south Tel Aviv. But the daily grind of eking out his existence in hostile territory is wearing on his patience.

“Whatever we are, whatever status we have, even if we are strangers, [Israel has] to deal with us. We are just asking them to host us for some time until our country gets stable,” he said. “And everybody I know on the committee never imagined Israel can be like this nation. We had some other idea.”

“Simple Twist of Fate”: For every Israeli sports team that has tried, and almost succeeded, and eventually failed to advance in any important international tournament.

“Maggie’s Farm”: For former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who is always on the lookout for a good real estate deal.

“Somebody Touched Me”: For former President Moshe Katsav.

“I Shall Be Released”: For Marwan Barghouti, the popular Palestinian leader, currently languishing in an Israeli prison.

“You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”: For Defense Minister Ehud Barak, quitter extraordinaire.

”You Gotta Serve Somebody”: For the evangelical Christian tour groups.

“It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding”: For every child, Israeli and Palestinian, needlessly dying while leaders keep on missing opportunities and breaking promises.

“Subterranean Homesick Blues”: For Gilad Schalit, the Israeli soldier held in some subterranean basement in Gaza, homesick and, more importantly, probably actually sick.

ENCORE:

“Gates of Eden”: For the Messiah, who has not come yet.

“The Mighty Quinn”: Because when He does come, everybody’s gonna jump for joy (and maybe he’ll even be an Eskimo).

“Girl From the North Country”: For Golda Meir, Wisconsin’s own and still a rock star.

Dylan Show Confirmed for June in Ramat Gan [JPost]

Suggestion boxes in Tel Aviv.
Dana Shai

Do you want to make a suggestion? This is the simple question the New York-based public-art collective Illegal Art has been posing to people on city streets since the spring of 2002, when, following the Sept. 11 attacks, the artists first deployed their clipboards, pens, and cardboard boxes in parks and sidewalks across New York City. The premise is straightforward: Write down and submit your suggestion—any suggestion—about anything you like. Since then, Suggestion Box has traveled to Florida, California, Brazil, South Africa, England, Spain, and Italy and will soon be traveling to China, gathering suggestions on things mundane, profound, irreverent, and goofy.

Last January, the group brought the project to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem with the assistance of Eran Zaharoni, the founder and director of Haifa-based ArchiBlender, a local public art and architecture group. The results—in Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, and English—provide a snapshot of contemporary thinking in the Holy Land. Flip through them. Your suggestions are welcome.

“Build a space station by the Western Wall.”

“Ethiopia is a good country,” Chani said in halting English outside his new home when asked why he wanted to leave Africa. “The government is good. The main problem is that everything is expensive.”

Chani is one of the last 8,000 Ethiopians claiming Jewish roots who will immigrate en masse to Israel, following a government decision in late November. It marks the end of a dramatic transfer of Ethiopia’s entire 2,000-year-old Jewish community, which began fleeing pogroms and persecution in 1970s. In covert operations in 1984 and 1991, Israeli pilots flew 22,000 Ethiopians to the Jewish state in overflowing airplanes. Since 1991, Ethiopians known as Falash Mura have claimed Jewish roots and the right to immigrate, although their ancestors converted to Christianity in the late 19th century. Until November, these Falash Mura gathered in transit camps in Gondar, Ethiopia, while Israeli officials debated whether to accept them. November’s decision, which requires the new immigrants to convert to Judaism upon arrival, marks the end of that debate.

But as the newest immigrants arrive and settle in Israel, the 120,000-strong Ethiopian-Israeli community has seen only limited success in integration.

According to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, in 2008 the unemployment rate of 13.8 percent among Ethiopian immigrants was more than double the national average. Ethiopians were statistically younger than the overall Jewish Israeli population, with four times as many single-parent families. While 17 percent of Jewish Israelis were on some sort of welfare, Ethiopian-Israelis receiving state support ran at 61 percent. Their children scored lower on school tests and were more likely to drop out of high school than their veteran Israeli counterparts. This is surprising because a third of Ethiopian-Israelis were born in the Jewish state, which would seem to portend better integration.

Activists point to this data as an indicator of the government’s poor preparation for helping the immigrants’ transition from simple agrarian villages to urban Israeli life. “The Ethiopian-Israeli community is probably in the worst shape of the Jewish population in Israel,” said D’vora Greisman, a spokeswoman for the Israeli Association for Ethiopian Jews.

When Ethiopians first arrived, Greisman said, the community developed some strength that has since waned. “There has been a stagnation,” she said. “This new wave of immigration seems to be following the same footsteps of those who came over 20 years ago. They are going back to poverty-stricken neighborhoods. The government has not switched policy.”

But others take a different view. David Yaso trekked from Ethiopia to Sudan over six weeks on his way to Israel at age 14. He and his family arrived in Israel in 1981 and spent a year in the Atlit absorption center near Haifa before moving to public rental housing in the southern city of Beer Sheva. After three years in boarding school, Yaso enlisted in the army as a paratrooper and served for seven years. Since 1993 he has worked in the Ministry of Immigration and Absorption, helping newcomers from Ethiopia adjust.

Yaso’s immigration was not flawless. He said he donated blood every three months until 1996, when the state admitted that all Ethiopian-donated blood had been discarded for fear of AIDS. Yaso brought 11 buses of furious Ethiopian immigrants to Jerusalem to protest and has not donated blood since. Still, as he looked at photos from a trip he took last year to retrace the steps he took as a teen, he said the move was worth it.

“My father worked as a farmer, a weapons maker, and a blacksmith,” Yaso said in his Jerusalem office. The white walls were covered in sketches of Ethiopian tools and certificates of recognition for his work. “We were never hungry. But to tell you I would get to the place [of responsibility] I am today in Ethiopia—no.” This kind of advancement, he said, “is only in Israel and Jerusalem.”

Israeli immigration policy has evolved since Yaso arrived. According to Jewish Agency spokesman Michael Jankelowitz, in the past, non-Ethiopian Israelis ran the absorption centers. Now the directors share the same roots as their charges. Moreover, Yaso noted that the state has stopped assigning Ethiopian-Israelis public rental housing in favor of grants for mortgages. Ofer Dahan, who oversees the Jewish Agency’s Ethiopian project, said the Jewish Agency is trying to give new immigrants more tools for success, from practicing school registration in the absorption centers to offering technical courses and career counseling. Beginning in April, his organization will open classes in Gondar to prepare the new immigrants for Israel. They will learn Hebrew and Judaism in Ethiopia, which should help them make a faster transition.

In the Mevasseret Zion absorption center in January, a class of 14 older men and women who had moved to Israel eight months earlier learned a list of words beginning with “aleph,” the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Few wrote; they were barely literate. Their teacher, Arega Tadesse, immigrated in 1987 and spoke to the students in a mix of Hebrew and Amharic, the language of some northern Ethiopians. Another room in the center had a “supermarket ulpan,” where students learn to identify packaged goods like rice, soap, and microwave pizza. Volunteer Adar Sharon said that while the older generation rarely strays from homemade injera, or sour flatbread, their children demand the same industrial food their Israeli classmates eat at school. The immigrants are allowed to stay at the center for two years, after which they receive a grant of up to $135,000 to buy a house elsewhere, Dahan said. Many leave earlier if they find jobs, which are relatively easy to get in Jerusalem. Those who stay longer risk losing their mortgage grants.

Chani, the nurse who just arrived, hopes to find a job nursing in Israel—once he learns the language. He does not know where he will live, but he is considering Jerusalem. His brother-in-law, who immigrated two years ago, has already found work manufacturing drugs at Teva, Israel’s largest pharmaceutical company.

But not all absorption centers are alike. Jankelowitz said there are 21 centers processing Ethiopians in Israel. These immigrants are separated from immigrants from the Western world, he said, because many come from rural areas and are illiterate and unfamiliar with money or basic modern home appliances like stoves and toilets. The Mevasseret Zion center houses the newcomers in one-story houses; students wander the center’s large campus in the winter sun. Other centers are less attractive. Some are tall, crumbling blocks, like the Kalisher absorption center in Beer Sheva. In 2008, immigrants from the northern Beit Alfa absorption center protested in Jerusalem, complaining they could not get jobs because they were marooned in a pocket of poverty eight miles from the nearest city. Their children traveled 40 minutes each way to school because the state required them to study in Orthodox academies, while the nearest city, Beit Shean, refused to enroll them. In response, the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption pledged to find more convenient solutions to the children’s schooling.

Some of the Falash Mura immigrants arriving in the coming years will be put in Beit Alfa and Beer Sheva, Jankelowitz said.

Moreover, second-generation Ethiopian immigrants highlight the difficulty of sustaining successful policy after the first wave. A slew of nongovernmental organizations developed to serve the community, ranging from policy think-tanks to training programs. Ethiopians have an Israeli television station. In 2008 Israel officially recognized the Sigd holiday, which Ethiopian Jews celebrate 50 days after Yom Kippur to commemorate accepting the Torah. That year the government also pledged 700 million shekels (about $200 million) for a five-year Ethiopian aid program. A year later, the Israeli government announced that 30 civil-service positions would be earmarked for Ethiopian-Israelis, in addition to 15 reserved the year earlier.

But according to IEAJ spokeswoman Greisman, despite all the programs, Ethiopian college graduates struggle to find jobs. Last April, private-school administrators in the city of Petach Tikva, east of Tel Aviv, refused to accept some Ethiopian children, triggering cries of racism. And the housing grants stipulate where the immigrants can live, including some of Israel’s “worst, inner-city, disgusting and drug infested” neighborhoods, Greisman said, although she declined to name them. Yaso said these restrictions aim to avoid segregation by dispersing Ethiopians nationwide.

Arnon Mantver is director-general of the Israeli arm of the Joint Distribution Committee, which helps needy Jews around the world, using funds donated mostly by North American Jews. He also headed the Jewish Agency’s Immigration and Absorption Department during the mass immigration to Israel from Ethiopia and the Former Soviet Union. Today, he says, Ethiopians have “islands of success” in early childhood education, college attendance, and women in the workforce. Moreover, the army has proved a great leveler, with 90 percent of boys and 69 percent of girls joining the force, far more than mainstream Israelis. Although there are still large gaps between Ethiopians and the wider Israeli public, Mantver chalks that difference up to the challenge of integrating immigrants from the third world into a competitive, Western economy.

“I thought it would take 10 years,” to integrate the Ethiopian immigrants to Israel, he said. “I see after 20 that the problem is not solved.” Mantver said that North American Jews, who pressured the Israeli government to accept the Falash Mura, must make a redoubled effort to close gaps. “We don’t want to create a black underclass in Israel,” he said.

Veteran Ethiopian immigrant Adiso Zahay praised the Jewish Agency’s plans to emphasize jobs, which he said was a weak point in the past. Zahay supervises the Ethiopian National Project, a donor-funded organization that runs after-school and education programs for children. He noted that the new immigrants, who will have lived off donations for years in camps in Gondar, will need a particular push.

“Don’t just give mortgages,” he said. “It is crucial to get employment for the Ethiopian community. If we in Israeli society—the veteran Ethiopians and the state—if we discount this point, we will create a situation where the immigrants will not work, their children will learn from their parents to be parasites, and we will educate a generation that will not know how to work.”

• Ad copywriter Phyllis K. Robinson died at 89. She came up with the immortal slogan, “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s Real Jewish Rye.” [The Awl]

• The world asked for another profile of Marty Peretz in winter (and in Israel), and the call was answered. [NYT Magazine]

• An interesting take on the Palestine Papers from Matt Duss. [Wonk Room]

• Peru became the eighth South American country to recognize the state of Palestine along the 1967 borders. [Reuters/Haaretz]

• Tel Aviv! Dolphins! [Haaretz]

This day is taking way too long.

Michael (his name and that of the other refugees in this article have been changed to protect their security) is waiting on a kibbutz to go home to Sudan. Until he quit his job, he would commute from the kibbutz where he lives to the resort where he works. On 12-hour shifts, he would serve gelato, lattés, and microbrews on the main drag in Eilat, where all walks of diaspora rub elbows: Americans on birthright trips; Russians who’ve made aliyah; E.U. citizens who summer in Israel; Sudanese and Eritrean asylum seekers who, after crossing the Sinai on foot, are working service jobs that fuel Eilat’s tourism industry.

But that source of cheap labor in Israel is drying up. One hundred and fifty Sudanese have already returned to what they hope will be a vision of prosperity and peace in an independent southern Sudan, liberated after this week’s referendum. There are 14,000 Eritreans in Israel who could fill the shoes of Sudanese workers who repatriate, but Israel is implementing a new policy that prohibits work for those who entered the country illegally. Now, Israelis who employ illegal workers will face prohibitive fines.

In November, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a “humane solution” for the thousands of illegal African workers who will lose their jobs: They’ll be “housed” in a holding facility, and provided with food, shelter, and medical care—until they are deported. Netanyahu said that migrants fleeing persecution will be allowed to stay in Israel. The holding facility for African migrants will likely be built deep in the Negev, near a former prison camp for Palestinians. Israel is also constructing a security barrier along 90 miles of the Egypt-Israel border, to stop the flow of Africans trafficked through the Sinai.

Michael would rather try to build a new Sudan than keep struggling in Israel, which has turned out to be a dead-end road for most African Christians and Muslims who come here. Last week, he showed me the blue U.N. refugee-registration card he used in Egypt and told me, “It doesn’t work in Israel.” When he was living in an Eilat apartment complex called The Palace, immigration police knocked on his door at 3 in the morning, arrested and detained him for 24 hours. Once the new holding facility is built, Michael expects more late-night raids to round up Africans—now for indefinite detention.

The Knesset’s information branch reports that there are over 24,000 “infiltrators” and asylum seekers in Israel: almost 19,000 Sudanese and Eritreans, the rest from Central Africa. Up to 7,000 of these are in Eilat, where Mayor Yitzhak Halevi is on a “Save the City” campaign to rid his town of Africans. In a July press conference, Halevi said Israel has become a “heaven for infiltrators.” He added that those who are changing the demographic composition of Eilat are de-valuing properties, committing crimes, spreading diseases, and “getting drunk and frustrated.”

Many Israelis in Eilat echo Halevi’s xenophobia. One gelateria customer, according to Michael, demanded that someone other than the African serve his cone because he didn’t want to get diseases like malaria. Michael’s former kibbutz-mate Emmanuel has already returned to Sudan, with help from Charmaine Hedding, the blonde Norwegian who escorted 150 Sudanese on a flight to Juba, on December 13. Hedding had launched Operation Hope, an emergency relief effort of the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem, in 2006, when Sudanese refugees began flocking to Israel, after an Egyptian police raid on a Sudanese tent city in Cairo exacerbated their security problems in Egypt. She worked with Israeli relief organizations to place Sudanese Christians on kibbutzim and in apartments, getting them jobs at hotels and construction sites. Now, Hedding is organizing more repatriation operations to Juba, as soon as Southern Sudan re-opens for travel after the referendum.

Michael told me the referendum isn’t an occasion to celebrate; it’s a time to pray, to pass through it without going back to war. He is from Abyei, the oil-rich region on the border between North and South Sudan, contested territory that could be the fault line of a separated Sudan. Already, nine people have died in clashes between militias who are fighting to keep the oil fields part of North Sudan and warriors who want South Sudanese independence, with the oil. Referendum balloting in Abyei has been postponed indefinitely.

***

In July 2005, when I started following stories of Sudanese refugees who came to Egypt, hoping the United Nations would resettle them, I heard a prophecy on a Cairo balcony. Outside a Sudanese family’s apartment, I spoke with Gabriel and Lazarus, days after their hero John Garang, leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement died in a plane crash. They were sure the Sudanese government assassinated Garang, though the BBC was reporting no evidence of foul play. Southern Sudanese youth were rioting in Khartoum, throwing bottles and smashing windows of Arab shops. Government security was shooting back. Gabriel wondered if they would go to war again. “Who’s God going to send next for Sudan?” he said.

On his way over, Lazarus had stopped to drink an orange Fanta—not because he was thirsty, he told us, but because that was the deal he’d made with God. He wouldn’t drink or eat anything, wouldn’t move or talk to anyone, until God showed him something. For two days, he was lying on his bed, searching the Bible: Nothing, from Exodus to Leviticus, was encouraging him, nothing—until he turned to Isaiah 14: The Lord has founded Zion, and the poor of his people shall find refuge in it.

“God protected Israel in Egypt,” Gabriel told me. “Then they went home. That’s how we feel.”

The next exodus story I heard from Gabriel was in Jerusalem, in June 2009, when he showed me the sneakers he wore to cross the Sinai. Like thousands of other Sudanese refugees in Egypt, Gabriel and a friend paid Bedouin smugglers to lead them across the desert. They don’t go because they expect Israel to be their promised land. They go because Sudan is not safe, and Egypt is no place for refugees. They go because they’ve heard, from history and holy books, that Israel is a decent place for strangers.

When Gabriel visited the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, he had a flashback to his childhood in southern Sudan that made him feel sick. If he’d had a camera during the war, he would have taken a picture like that—“exactly,” he told me. That was a photograph from Auschwitz. What exactly did he see? “They didn’t have food,” Gabriel told me. The Jews have survived, he said—they have Israel, because they keep telling these stories. That’s what the Holocaust means to Gabriel. Remembering everyone who died, by name, so it will never happen again. When he saw that photograph of Jews starving at Auschwitz, he had an epiphany: “These are the people who will understand us in this world.”

When Gabriel and his friend made it across the border, Israeli soldiers gave them food and water. Then the soldiers took them to Beersheba Prison. After a few months, they were released, on temporary visas, to a manpower agency that supplies Israeli hotels. They started out in Eilat, moving lounge chairs from King Solomon Isrotel to the beach. Gabriel moved up, to Jerusalem’s four-star King David Hotel, where he’s been promoted to head waiter and, he told me, once met Billy Graham.

In Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Gabriel has met Israelis who understand Sudanese refugees—like the Hebrew University student group Advocates for Asylum. He goes with them to lobby against the proposed anti-infiltration bill, that would legalize imprisonment of Sudanese migrants as “enemy nationals,” since Sudan and Israel are formally enemies.

Gabriel arranged for me and a Jerusalem Post reporter to stay with three of his Sudanese friends in Eilat: Michael, who treated us to mango gelato on the boardwalk; Joseph, who cooked us chicken-ginger stew; Simon, who gave us his room, because we were there to write their stories. And I wanted to tell a prophetic tale: how they walked across the Sinai to get out of Egypt—until they ran into another people’s Zion.

We were guests in a refugee’s room, and I was looking through his stuff: the Oxford Intermediate English instruction book and the Wordpower worksheets on the desk; the New Covenant Prophecy edition of the Bible, on the bedside table; the soap and shaving cream in the bathroom; the socks and condoms in the drawer. Someone left us bottles of water and Fanta, two tall glasses, and two straws on a tray beside the bed. And on the floor, two electric fans were blowing on the sheets, cooling our laptops and digital cameras and voice recorders full of interviews of women whose names we asked to spell aloud before introducing ourselves, and of men whose names we couldn’t get. They were afraid to let us take their picture waiting on the side of the road for someone to pick them up for day labor. Michael’s Employee of the Month certificate was hanging in the hallway, next to a Hebrew prayer for the home. Joseph was on the couch, watching a Jackie Chan movie. Simon was out trying to walk an ache out of his tooth.

***

When I returned to Eilat this summer, I went to the Aldo Gelateria Italiana, on the dim hope that I’d find Michael still working there. He was just beginning his shift. He made sure I sampled the apple sorbet, his favorite, before serving me a scoop of pistachio. And, like the summer before, he wouldn’t let me pay. I tried to insist—I knew the 12 shekels would come out of his paycheck—but he said no. “This is my place, so I help myself,” he said. I tried again, holding my money out, until I saw his face change: His forehead furrowed, his pride hurt by my refusal to receive his gift. I put my money away.

Kibbutz Eilot, near Eilat, houses more than 100 Sudanese asylum seekers.

Michael isn’t living with Joseph and Simon anymore. The landlord raised the rent, so they had to give up the apartment, he told me. Now, he lives on Kibbutz Eilot, which houses over a hundred Sudanese asylum seekers, in block units on the parched land fenced off from the pool. The area used to be a hostel for backpackers who came to the kibbutz until it was converted to a Sudanese housing enclave. The apartments are around a courtyard, where there’s a volleyball net and a clothesline strung between two headless palm trees. In the center, there’s a street lamp curving over an empty crib, a shopping cart, bikes lying on their sides. An abandoned unit holds a detached toilet seat, a pair of child’s shoes, and red finger painting on the wall.

Just over a fenced-in hill is the Magic Sunrise Club, a luxury hotel where Israelis swim in the pool and Africans in gray sweatshirts that say “steward” clean the glass elevator. Michael told me about the three branches of the stewardship team: room and dish cleaners, window cleaners, and bus boys. Africans don’t work as waiters at the Sunrise Club.

Israelis in Eilat are used to Asian migrant workers—mostly Filipinas who take care of the elderly, and Thais who work in farming and construction. They began arriving in the late eighties, with the outbreak of the first Intifada, to replace Palestinian day laborers. A local who serves cappuccino at the Eilat bus station told me how he sees the difference between African and Asian migrant workers. The Asians just come to work, and they go back, he told me. “The Sudanese want healthcare and education,” he continued. “They come dressed like they’re from the United States. They come and take, and they don’t give. If we let them, this won’t be a country for the Jewish people.”

Rakefet Goren, a disheveled social worker responsible for the Sudanese children on Kibbutz Eilot, has her own dream for the new Sudan: a kibbutz near Juba, and Muslims, Christians, and Jews living in peace. Goren imagines Sudanese living like Israelis, not having to run anymore. She has contacts in Juba, those who’ve returned from Kibbutz Eilot, who are willing to help her make a haven for southern Sudanese, like Israel has been for Jews.

The Sudanese at Kibbutz Eilot are not Jewish, but the children study Hebrew with Israeli children in the kibbutz school, dress up for Purim, and decorate sukkas. They celebrate Ramadan and Easter, too. Rakefet told me her work is exhausting. But, “You see the child?” she asked, showing me pictures of a little Sudanese girl in wings. “They give me energy for the whole day.” Our interview got interrupted by a kibbutznik named David, who walked in Rakefet’s office and plopped a newspaper on her desk. It was Eilat’s weekly paper, with an article on demonstrations against African “infiltrators.” Local citizens were yelling support for the mayor’s “Save Eilat” campaign and making more strident accusations: They’re raping our women and infecting our children with disease.

Kobi Arad, the emergency-room physician at Yoseftal, the only hospital in Eilat, says he’s never examined an Israeli woman raped by an African man. He’s seen no cases of African-on-Israeli violence, but many victims of black-on-black crime. He says Africans don’t spread disease in the city. Some have tuberculosis and other infectious diseases, but these are well controlled in Israel. As a volunteer with Physicians for Human Rights, Arad offers treatment for illegal Africans. “We improvise,” he told me. Once, he transported blood samples from a group of Darfuris with HIV to the PHR office in Tel Aviv, in his own car. Another time, he examined a Sudanese boy who had crossed the Sinai with a carved wooden leg—an improvised prosthetic Arad replaced with a new one.

Arad’s kids are classmates with Sudanese children at the Kibbutz Eilot school. Muhammad, a high-school-aged boy from Darfur, was among the first Sudanese refugees to come to Eilat. This spring, he’ll be the first African to go on the traditional Israeli 11th-grade study tour of Auschwitz. “He’s not much of a Jew,” Arad says, “but he’s had his own holocaust.”

Ashley Makar, a master’s student in divinity at Yale and an editor at Killing the Buddha, is at work on a book about African asylum seekers in Israel.

In most of Israel, December 25 is just another day. Banks and stores are open, people go to work (when it doesn’t fall on Shabbat, as it does this year), and nary a Christmas tree is to be seen.

As for Christmas lights, you’re more likely to see them strung in a sukkah than decorating the streets or one of the scraggly little Arizona cypress trees the Jerusalem municipality hands out at Jaffa Gate before hag hamolad (“holiday of the birth”), which Israelis also refer to as Krreeestmahs.

Outside the predominantly Christian areas and those that feature prominently in the Jesus narrative, like Bethlehem and Nazareth, there lies a pocket of red suits and tinsel that is crowded with Christmas shoppers. But those shoppers aren’t the Christian Arabs you might expect in what is, after all, the cradle of Christianity; they’re the migrant workers who flock to what has become the de facto Filipino section of Tel Aviv’s cavernous and labyrinthine central bus station, which doubles as a down-market mall.

The migrants from the Philippines are generally women working as caregivers for the elderly, and they have become so closely identified with the job that the term Filipiniyot, or Filipinas, has become virtually interchangeable with “caregiver.”

At least some Filipiniyot seem to have made themselves at home in the Jewish kitchen. According to “Ziv,” the screen name of one woman posting on a message board, her own grandmother’s fantastic latkes may actually have been eclipsed by those made by the “Filipinit” who now lives with the grandmother.

Eating comes up more than one might expect in online discussions of Filipinyot. Religious Web surfers posed questions on at least four different “Ask the Rabbi” sites regarding whether they were allowed to eat food cooked by a Filipina or drink wine she had touched, in light of religious restrictions on food prepared (and wine touched) by non-Jews. (The answer: It depends. Of course.)

Sometimes the Filipinit in question isn’t even from the Philippines. In one halakhic query, the questioner specifically states that the caregiver is from Nepal, but the headline refers to a “Filipina maid.”

Taken together, the questions highlight one facet of what it means, at least for some, to be Jewish in a Jewish state. As Jewish American celebrities like Matisyahu, Jon Stewart, and Adam Sandler bring the Hanukkah underdog to the Christmas-celebrating masses, many Israeli Jews have little notion of what exactly “the Christmas spirit” might be and have had limited contact with the goyim—at least until the day comes when grandma needs a Filipinit.

Shoshana Kordova is an editor and translator at the English edition of Haaretz. She grew up in New Jersey and has lived in Israel since 2001.

Earlier: On Fire
Cast Lead
Refugees
On Strike
‘Politi’
Abducted
‘The Peace Process’
No Confidence
‘After the Holidays’

The area outside of the coffee shop is peppered with images and slogans that could only be found in Israel: a map of the country with the Palestinian areas removed; a soldier with the slogan “no legs, no problems”; a stencil of the national anthem, with the words changed (“the land of Zion and Jerusalem” has been replaced by “the land of Palestine and Jerusalem”). And, though Nocturno is a favorite hangout for art students from the Bezalel Academy, it’s hardly the only such canvas.

Graffiti has long been the focal point of the collective imagination here. In one form or another, it can be found everywhere from Hebron to Bethlehem, engaging both Israelis and Palestinians from all points on the political spectrum. Famously, it has also attracted scores of high-profile outsiders with statements to make, including the biggest names in the graffiti and street art worlds.

Israel has long had a unique passion for exchanging slogans in the street. In 2007, the country’s best-known hip hop outfit, Hadag Nahash, penned a tune in collaboration with the novelist David Grossman. Titled “Sticker Song,” it took its lyrics from the bewildering array of political slogans that can be found on bumper stickers up and down the country.

“These slogans are like capsules of Israeliness,” said Sha’anan Streett, the frontman of Hadag Nahash, when I met him at Nocturno. “They mirror the rhetorical ping-pong which is becoming a substitute for proper debate in a country that has lost any sense of hope.”

A similar sentiment haunts the walls 40 miles west, in the very different city of Tel Aviv. Locals have grown accustomed to images of the “Character,” a spindly, black-and-white vision of fragility, always struggling under an invisible weight, with a heart-shaped hole in the center of its chest. The Character is the creation of an Israeli artist who goes by the name Know Hope.

“The Character expresses the complex burden that Israelis grow up with,” said Know Hope, at his studio in Jaffa. “I weave moments of human fragility into a political statement.” Some of his best pieces, he said, are on the separation wall. One portrays the Character having his severed arm sewn together by a bird. Another has him pulling bandages out of his heart-shaped hole, on which is written: please believe. Later, beside a downtown café, I find another of his pieces: the Character holding a weeping bird to his mouth, as if about to breathe life into it—or devour it.

Several hours north, in the settlement of Hebron, the graffiti looks quite different. In 2001, the IDF closed down a Palestinian market that was built on disputed land, as it had become a flash-point of violence. This has had a profound impact on the local economy, and now the place is a ghost town. On the rows of boarded-up shops are strings of spray-painted Stars of David, accompanied by belligerent slogans, the most radical of which—“death to the Arabs”—has been (badly) painted out.

In the Palestinian territories, the graffiti is dramatically different again. According to Matt Rees, a crime author and former Jerusalem bureau chief for Time magazine who accompanied me across the checkpoint, graffiti in Palestine tends to be linked to the militant groups. Slogans there are color-coded according to faction, he said: Yellow for Fatah, red for the PFLP.

On a recent afternoon, Rees and I passed through a little-used checkpoint into the West Bank. As we entered the Duheisha Refugee Camp, all around us were graffiti portraits of Intifada-era martyrs. Most prominent of these was an imposing image of Ayat al-Akhras, the third and youngest female suicide bomber, who lived her whole life here. The unsigned portrait, completed in 2002, has been recently given a fresh lick of paint.

Perhaps the most famed piece of graffiti in the region is located on the nearby partition wall, a part of which has become a Mecca for international graffiti artists since the reclusive British sensation Banksy painted here five years ago.

Banksy’s work brought the region prominence and with it the possibility of commercial advantage. Rees introduced me to two Palestinians, one of whom said he used to be a bodyguard for Yasser Arafat. They took us to a location where they had stashed a piece of a wall from someone else’s house. On it is an original Banksy: a soldier frisking a donkey. Although they worry about Palestinians being compared to animals, they wanted to sell it. “We will use the money for the children of Palestine,” the ex-bodyguard told me.

But graffiti in the region doesn’t only get inspiration from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—it’s also used as a language for domestic Israeli issues. In Jerusalem, in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Meah She’arim, the anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Neturei Karta sect has plastered the neighborhood with anti-statehood slogans.

“God wants the State of Israel to be totally dismantled,” says Yoel Kroiz, a leading figure in the radical organization. “Since the establishment of the State of Israel, we haven’t had one day of peace. Jews should be living as a minority within a Palestinian state. That’s the only way to end the conflict.”

Kroiz, who was detained last year for an alleged tear gas assault on a woman he considered immodest, sees himself as part of a long tradition. In his cluttered quarters, he showed me his dust-covered collection of Orthodox street-posters, which stretches back over 90 years. Among the religious edicts and signs protesting the desecration of ancient graves is his anti-Zionist collection. “We mourn the existence of the State of Israel,” says one. “Arabs, yes, Zionists, no,” reads another.

On a wall a little further down the road, the two extremisms are in collision. “Death to the Arabs” has been scrawled on a wall by a member of the hardline settler movement. An ultra-Orthodox radical has crossed out “death,” changing the slogan to “Palestine to the Arabs.” The conflict of views here—all types of views—is nowhere as clear as on its ancient walls.

Jake Wallis Simons is a U.K.-based novelist, journalist, and graphic artist.

Yaakov “Kobi” Shimoni, also known by his stage name, Subliminal, didn’t sign that letter. As the self-proclaimed father of Israeli hip-hop, Subliminal has become over the past decade by far the most prominent solo hip-hop artist in the country, acquiring a fan base of thousands of teens and young adults—many of them Israeli soldiers. Subliminal has performed to sold-out arenas in Israel and the United States and has sold over 150,000 records (from a variety of solo, duet, and collaborative projects), an impressive number in the modest Israeli market. The business daily The Marker estimated that his latest solo album, Just When You Thought It Was Over, grossed well over 4 million shekels (about $1.2 million) in combined album sales, ringtones, and downloads, which places him among the top-earning Israeli musicians today.

Although a rapper by name, Subliminal radically defies the archetypical characteristics of traditional hip-hop performers. He doesn’t drink, smoke, do drugs, or fight, and he preaches against these things in his music. Sporting a self-styled wardrobe he refers to as “chic-Zionism,” his bling is a colossal diamond-covered Star of David necklace. He wears baggy pants, oversized knee-length jerseys, and sideways baseball caps—the style of a “gangsta rapper” without any of the “gangsta” features. Like a reformed rapper who lacks those rebellious qualities that for good or bad may actually make rap interesting in the first place, Subliminal offers his fans a sterilized hip-hop spectacle: Snoop without the weed, Eminem without the rage, or Tupac without the guns.

What Subliminal lacks in belligerency, though, he makes up for with his signature trait: patriotism. In the wake of the Ariel controversy, Livnat, the culture minister, publicly chastised Israeli artists for their politicization of art, calling on them instead to “leave the political debate outside the realm of culture.” But Livnat’s request was as unreasonable as it was futile, as Subliminal’s immense popularity proves.

In the past, critics have viewed Subliminal’s mass appeal with an elitist suspicion that led them to dismiss him as a populist rightwing extremist. But with such broad strokes, critics also forfeit the chance to explore the complexity, contradiction, and outright confusion that characterizes Subliminal’s music, lyrics, and public persona, and the problematic political culture that he represents. For anyone seeking to understand Israel’s right turn in recent years—a trend exemplified by the government’s decision to require loyalty oaths from its non-Jewish population—Subliminal’s music seems like a good place to start.

***

How does a nice Jewish boy from the Tel Aviv suburbs appropriate a cultural form of protest once reserved for inner-city black youths? I sat with Subliminal one evening this August, drinking coffee in a quiet bistro in the modest northern Tel Aviv neighborhood where he grew up and still lives, just a few houses down from the home of Kadima party leader Tzipi Livni. He is dark skinned and wide bodied, with a trim beard and black clothes, and the first impression he gives off—by his own admission—is the air of an Arab. If not for his Cheshire-cat smile, he could easily be mistaken for an intimidating figure. (“When I go abroad people are always surprised to meet me,” he said. “No one believes Jews could look like me.”)

The son of immigrant parents—his father fled Tunisia and his mother Iran—Subliminal, 31, came of age during the chronically unstable days after the Oslo peace accords. Like many teenagers at the time, he listened to American rappers like Public Enemy, N.W.A, and Notorious B.I.G. Like other youth around the world, Subliminal found a message to which he could relate in those rappers’ dissident culture and protest lyrics. “I have always been a proud Zionist,” he explained. “But when I was growing up, being a Zionist was tantamount to being the outcast. The prevailing vibe around me was more in tune with the anarchic messages of [popular Israeli rock artist] Aviv Geffen and his motto that we were ‘a fucked-up generation.’ ”

In Subliminal’s eyes, Geffen’s controversial call to not serve in the army epitomized “negativity.” As a result, Subliminal started writing lyrics challenging those peacenik attitudes and adapting them to the rhythmic riffs he had been precociously composing since he was 12. “Hip-hop was a godsend that gave me the tools to wage my own protest,” he said. “A protest on the side of good and in favor of all those ideals that no one was talking about anymore, like Zionism, Judaism, and traditionalism.”

By the end of the decade and after completing his military service, Subliminal fused his tough-guy image to his original mix of quick phrases, patriotic paeans, and electronic beats, often augmented by a catchy melodic chorus. Local record producers took note. Together with his former partner Yoav Eliasi, known as “The Shadow,” and several other collaborators, Subliminal has recorded four studio albums and a number of chart-topping singles in the last 10 years. He has also founded his own hip-hop record label, called TACT.

Unlike American hip-hop, which developed in stark opposition to anything that could be associated with the establishment, Subliminal’s self-proclaimed “Zionist hip-hop” has always followed an inverted model. (He half-jokingly told me, “I am the establishment.”) While Public Enemy called on listeners to “fight the power,” Subliminal instead decided to join it. “This is Israel, not America” he explained. “If I see a cop chasing someone down the street, odds are, you will see me running along to help out the cop.”

Subliminal makes no apologies for borrowing from hip-hop’s musical form while leaving its combative lyrical content behind. His long-standing cooperation with government institutions remains a noticeable source of pride for him. Over the years, Subliminal has worked with the prime minister’s office, the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of Education, and numerous charities that benefit the Israel Defense Forces. He has recorded songs to help prevent traffic accidents. In support of Holocaust education, Subliminal teamed up with renowned violinist Miri Ben-Ari to make a hip-hop version of the sacred Jewish prayer Adon Olam. His songs have a palpable pedagogic quality that can sound like a public service announcement, with explicit suggestions to get a job, study hard, stay off drugs, avoid violence, and respect women. As one of his latest singles preaches, “Whoever acts well, lives well.”

***

Subliminal’s unprecedented success came with a price. His institutional solidarity, nationalist lyrics, and jingoist theatrics often lead him to perform on flag-draped stages to chants of “Who here is proud to be a Zionist?” Israeli critics have branded him a fascist, a right-wing extremist, and a hip-hop sellout. An editorial on the popular Israeli news site Walla went as far as to call for a boycott of his music. “I have been called a fascist, even a Nazi, but I could never really understand why,” Subliminal said. “The truth is that what the media has always thought of me is the opposite of what the average man on the street was thinking.”

Talking with Subliminal has the feeling of listening to a man dictate his memoirs. He has a personal anecdote for every question and an endearing family story to go with any answer. Although at times unabashedly self-aggrandizing (“I am not ashamed to say that I am by far the best hip-hop artist in Israel,” he told me) and occasionally simplistic and infantile (“Why can’t people just say that I am good?”), Subliminal’s words are passionate and his intentions seem sincere.

Listening to all of his music at once can feel like taking in a full DVD box set of after-school specials, with a broad set of subjects: hope, patriotism, strength, unity, order, faith, and peace. There is no mention of hatred, racism, Islamophobia, Israeli occupation, or other touchstones of Israeli radicalism. The image of violence—the sine qua non for any self-respecting extremist—is unequivocally presented in a negative light and shunned rather than sanctioned by his music. “When a song makes a left-wing stance they call it protest,” says Arye Avitan (aka “Tchulu”), who owns a chain of hip-hop clothing stores and is a veteran music producer who has mentored many young rappers, including Subliminal. “But when it suggests something remotely right-wing, they immediately call it fascism.”

Subliminal’s earliest hit, “Live Day by Day” (co-written with Eliasi), debuted just as the Oslo accords began to fall apart, and the lyric “The country swings like a cigarette in Arafat’s mouth,” elicited a barrage of criticism, even though the idea echoed what prominent left-wing politicians like Ehud Barak were saying in speeches at the time. Subliminal bemoaned the selfishness, crime, poverty, avarice, and fanaticism that have pervaded Israeli society (“We are all at fault that everything here sucks”), but his song sounded less like a right-wing anthem and more like Tupac’s popular rendition of the Bruce Hornsby classic “The Way It Is.”

While Subliminal’s lyrics may send out mixed signals, his personal convictions are much less ambiguous. “When Rabin was murdered, I cried for days like everyone else,” he said. He adamantly also denied being “a right-wing artist” and further claimed that if he thought the Palestinians could be trusted he would support “doing everything possible” to secure genuine peace. In response to radical right-wing activists attending his shows, Subliminal began performing with the Israeli-Arab rapper Tamer Nafar, though the two have since fallen out over Nafar’s increasing anti-Israeli militancy. Maybe most surprising was to hear that Subliminal’s ideal political party was Kadima under Ariel Sharon—the same moderate centrist party that led Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005.

***

Subliminal prods critics, but in his music there is no discernible, distinctive political agenda. Instead, there are only crude nationalist emotions guiding listeners through a wasteland of broken promises from both the left and right. But if Subliminal does not fall squarely under any prevailing political category, then where do we place him? The rapper himself defines his political identity as Zionism. But less than reflecting a cogent set of ideas, Subliminal’s Zionism seems to symbolize an internal confusion.

Two distinct themes emerge in Subliminal’s music. The first is disappointment with the peace process. In “Live Day by Day,” Subliminal sings: “Ask me where we’re at, it’s nowhere; living in a land without peace, where everyone is sinking into a dream.” In his catchy hit “Tikva,” from his and Eliasi’s 2002 album, The Light and the Shadow, this theme continues: “You promised us a dove, but instead a buzzard has swarmed from above. We are living in a dream, talking about peace but still squeezing on the trigger.” And from the hit song “Divide and Conquer”: “To think that an olive branch symbolizes peace? Sorry, it doesn’t live here anymore; it’s been kidnapped or murdered. Where is God in all of this?” But this recurring pattern of disillusionment doesn’t so much express an inherent objection to the peace process as reflect disappointment in its results. After all, Subliminal, like most Israelis today, once embraced a two-state solution on the basis of land for peace.

Listen to “Tikva”:

The second distinctive quality of Subliminal’s music is that it is tied to the past. Disillusioned by the present, Subliminal has found inspiration in old Israeli pop hits and traditional Jewish hymns, and this remixing of old songs with new beats has become one of his trademarks. Haaretz critic Amos Harel has called Subliminal’s musical realm a “third-rate gangster’s paradise.” But unlike his hip-hop heroes Puff Daddy, Jay-Z, or Coolio, who he at times appears to imitate, Subliminal romanticizes—instead of resurrects—the past.

He has remixed “Flowers in the Barrel,” a victory song from Israel’s 1967 war, originally recorded by an IDF army band, and the Hanukkah chant “Banu Hoshech Legaresh,” which celebrates the Maccabees. But the most famous display of his retro style is the hit single, “60 Years Old,” released two years ago on Israel’s 60th anniversary, and featuring the legendary kibbutz chorus “The Gevatron.” The remix orientalizes an early-1980s folk hit with an onslaught of derbekkeh drums and swirling ethnic background vocals, and it layers on lyrics with nostalgic longings:

We learn from our experience,
So let’s remember what once was, and do it right,
Let’s take responsibility, ’cause this country is ours,
We won’t accomplish anything, if we don’t remember where we come from

In choosing a song originally written as an apotheosis for the mythologized kibbutz, Subliminal has sought to appropriate the implicit qualities of strength, solidarity, and sacrifice, which are embedded in that myth. The cultural critic Rubik Rosenthal has called this rendition an adequate reflection of the “chaos” gripping Israeli culture, because it suggests “a chain of values that have almost nothing in common with contemporary Israel, nor with its conceivable future, but rather maybe with what once was her past.”

“I want us to live like people here used to live way back,” Subliminal said when I asked about his excessive nostalgia. “I am my father’s son. And I want to preserve the traditions from my father’s generation. In his time, people cared about each other and about the state of Israel. Today, an entire generation has forgotten that, and it’s my task to help them remember.”

***

There is something in Subliminal’s reconstruction of the past into a grand palliative for the present that is much more reminiscent of conservative political thinker Edmund Burke than rapper Biggie Smalls. The disillusionment from the unfulfilled promises of peace, and the consequential longing for a mythologized past to alleviate the disappointment, are neither fascist nor populist traits but rather conservative ones. Subliminal’s unwavering dedication to the stability and continuity of the state and its traditional institutions, his reverence for Jewish heritage and faith, his profound commitment to family, and his uncompromising respect for law and order, have the markings of an archetypical conservative ideology. Irving Kristol famously described neoconservatives of postwar America as having been “mugged by reality”—a fitting label for the disenchanted generation of Israelis to which Subliminal belongs.

That such a label doesn’t fit all or even most Israelis does not undermine the fact that it speaks to enough of them. In the wake of last year’s parliamentary elections, Haaretz observed that the most distinctive characteristics of the current Knesset is that it is more right-wing and younger than any before it. The rise over the past decade of what Subliminal refers to as his own “mass movement”—primarily made up of younger Israelis—certainly helps explain why.

Like with any conservative ideology, the attempt to navigate the present through the past is destined to leave many Israelis mired in contradiction, as Subliminal himself remains. “I think that being pro-Palestinian is a very good thing,” he told me. “But I also think that being anti-Israeli is something against which I am willing to fight until my last drop of blood.”

Consistently ambivalent, Subliminal claims that brains and not brawn will resolve the conflict; yet every idea he offers in one way or another falls back on force. When I confronted him with the timeless Israeli dilemma—is it good to die for your country?—he answered, hesitantly: “No, it’s not good to die for anything, period. But, if you have to die for something, it might as well be for something as important as that.” This recurring oscillation reflects the immaturity of those Israelis who want everything but are willing to give up nothing. They dream of a genuine peace but are not prepared to sacrifice in order to gain it. They believe that only overwhelming military power can guarantee Israel’s security, while overlooking the fact that their continuing corruption by such power may contribute to their insecurity in the first place.

Subliminal’s pacified hip-hop won’t resolve any of these dilemmas. But political demands still saturate Israeli popular culture, which suggests that art may yet open a window of imagination through which politics could one day redeem itself. That Subliminal’s next album will probably not provide us with any solutions doesn’t mean we should not keep listening, and hoping, that at the very least, it will help us better understand the complex problems at hand.

Listen to an unreleased Subliminal track, “Fuego”:

Yoav Fromer is a New York-based journalist and a former columnist for Maariv.

But, Kazin argues, we shouldn’t be surprised: Writers, the sort of cats who see the world with all its vivid intricacies, and who are accustomed to winning our praise for delivering precise and moving portraits of life, may be forgiven for assuming that they can do with political ideas what they do with words. That is to say, let us not be surprised that the same Ezra Pound who so vividly described the scene in a Paris Metro station—“The apparition of these faces in the crowd;/ Petals on a wet, black bough”—also, in his infamous World War II broadcasts from Fascist Italy, imagined the Jews as belligerent profiteers and President Franklin D. Roosevelt as biologically inferior to Aryans.

Why do we forgive our writers their feats of folly? Because we believe, like Shelley, that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” and because we take Pound at his word that he and his colleagues are the antennae of the race. We not only forgive our writers their political transgressions, but, for the most part, we celebrate them; the writer as political crazy is the writer we’ve come to expect.

Yet as the essayist Eliot Weinberger noted in “The Arts and the War in Iraq,” having come of age with neither existential nor economic crises to guide their upbringing, many of our writers, even the finest among them, have come to see their art as a sterile, commercial pursuit, one largely uninterested in the making of meaning. This is why we no longer have Robert Lowells, Dwight Macdonalds, Norman Mailers, Allen Ginsbergs, politically and morally committed in life as well as in art. Can you imagine Jonathan Franzen trying to levitate the Pentagon in protest of the Iraq War? Or Nicole Krauss leading a march of thousands on the National Mall in support of, say, immigration reform? In lieu of the armies of the night, we’ve settled for the solitary individuals of the late afternoon, polite and clever and opinionated and terribly disengaged. Weinberger correctly observes that “the Cheney-Bush II era has not produced a single poem, song, novel, or artwork that has caught the popular imagination as a condemnation or an epitome of the times.”

***

Out of such dire straits, American intellectuals eager to once again huddle around a thriving and politically active vanguard of writers may consider looking to Israel for comfort. There, it seems, the writer is king. In 2006, for example, the novelist David Grossman, having recently lost his son in the Lebanon War, thundered to a crowd of tens of thousands gathered in Tel Aviv, accusing the government of lacking a vision and losing its way. Grossman is also sporadically present in the weekly demonstrations against the questionably legal expropriation of Arab homes in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.

Together with his close friends, the novelists Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, Grossman frequently writes open letters to Israel’s political elite, publishes political tracts in newspapers, and infuses his novels with what the critic Susan Willis termed portents of the real. His most recent book, To the End of the Land, features a mother embarking on a prolonged hike, adamant in her belief that her soldier son will be safe so long as those army officials whose job it is to notify parents that their children have died in action can’t find her at home. Praising both Grossman’s work as a novelist and as an activist, the Frankfurt Book Fair awarded him its prestigious Peace Prize earlier this year and applauded him as “a symbol of the peace movement” in Israel.

The designation was intended as a laurel, but it is more poignant as a statement of fact. Together with his two prominent colleagues, Grossman is very much a symbol of the Israeli peace movement, a movement as earnest as it is ineffective. But even as the peace movement fades, the three writers who are so closely identified with its efforts gather encomiums from fellow writers and critics the world over. The praise, alas, is undeserved.

To understand this contentious statement—Grossman, in particular, is a secular saint of sorts among many literati in Europe and the United States—let us revisit the moment, late in 2007, when the novelist was awarded the Israeli prime minister’s Emet Prize for Arts, Science and Culture. Having expressed his strong criticism of then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in his Tel Aviv speech the year before, the novelist told the ceremony’s organizers that he would accept the prize but would not shake Olmert’s hand. The prime minister was informed, and remained seated when Grossman claimed the prize. Asked later why he didn’t shake Olmert’s hand, Grossman replied, “for obvious reasons.”

The Israeli media reveled in this scrap of theater, but, examined on its own merit, Grossman’s bout of disobedience grows pale and small. The man who in 2006 appealed to throngs of demonstrators, who decried “Israel’s quick descent into the heartless, essentially brutal treatment of its poor and suffering,” who spoke out against “this equanimity of the State of Israel in the face of human trafficking or the appalling employment conditions of our foreign workers, which border on slavery, to the deeply ingrained institutionalized racism against the Arab minority,” the best that man could do just a year later was refuse to shake another man’s hand. To sit the whole thing out—as Robert Lowell, for example, did when invited by President Lyndon Johnson to attend the White House Arts Festival in 1965—seemingly never occurred to Grossman. Nor did any other act that would have carried him over the threshold of the nice.

Of course, it would be foolish, even brutal, to expect anyone to become anything they’re not. When I interviewed Grossman on a recent afternoon in his American publishers’ offices—his evening would include an interview with Charlie Rose and a well-attended event with Nicole Krauss at the New York Public Library—the novelist, welcoming and sweet, began with an anecdote by way of warning. It’s the old hasidic tale of Reb Zusya, who, lying on his deathbed, has one more bit of wisdom to impart. When I die, Zusya tells his students, God will not ask me why I wasn’t more like Moses; he’ll ask why I wasn’t more like Zusya.

What the anecdote means to Grossman—what his definition of the ideal writerly self might be—became clear toward the end of the interview. Many floors below, the sun reflected off the Hudson River, and Grossman, as smiling publicists floated in and out of the room, spoke about the way his latest book was received around the world. It stunned him, he said, to hear people in the United States and elsewhere say they hadn’t realized how difficult and sad life in Israel really was. The problem, Grossman added, is that many Israelis hadn’t realized that either.

“Because we don’t understand the price we pay for life in a disaster zone, we don’t do enough to change it,” Grossman said in Hebrew. An author, he argued, “must always remind us that there’s an alternative. If you asked me what’s the thing that propels me to political action, it’s the desire to constantly remind that there’s an alternative, that people won’t think that there’s some sort of divine act that condemns us to kill and be killed, that we’re lords of our fate. We need to massage and revive the frightened and ossified consciousness of Israelis and Palestinians and remind them that they’re not condemned. Our story could be written differently.”

Which brings us back to the same question that plagued Pound and Oppen and nearly anyone who has ever made a living observing the world and committing his or her insights to print: How to rewrite reality?

***

For Grossman, for Oz, for Yehoshua, the solution is more statements, more letters, more talk. Last week, for example, the three signed a letter in support of an artistic boycott of the newly opened cultural center in the settlement of Ariel. Receiving the Siegfried Unseld Prize in Berlin this September, Oz (who shared the prize with Palestinian professor of philosophy Sari Nusseibeh) delivered a touching speech about the importance of the two-state solution. In October, in Paris, appearing alongside philosopher Alain Finkielkraut and Green politician Daniel Cohn-Bendit in support of a dovish new Jewish lobby, Yehoshua did the same.

Paradoxically, the more celebrated the three authors are in Israel and elsewhere in the world, the more moribund the values on behalf of which they so adamantly speak appear. If politics is an act of imagining better endings to our shared story, Oz and Grossman and Yehoshua aren’t being terribly creative.

Luckily, others in Israel are. For the past few months, for example, Ilana Hammerman, an award-winning translator and editor, has been smuggling Palestinian women and girls out of their besieged villages and towns, taking them for a day out on Tel Aviv’s beach. Most of these women, despite having been born and having lived their entire lives just a few miles away, had never before seen the Mediterranean; their joy at this shard of normal life is great. Hammerman, of course, is breaking the law: In smuggling the women she runs afoul of Israel’s intricate policy of border control, enforced by roadblocks and checkpoints. Yet Hammerman believes that the moral duty of allowing fellow human beings the chance to run barefoot on the beach is paramount. She has inspired scores of Israeli women to follow her example by taking a novel approach to reality: Instead of railing against injustice, she showed her peers what life could look like if we cared enough to perform small acts of kindness to benefit those people that Israelis usually see only as foes.

Even without breaking the law, it’s not difficult to imagine other creative political stories for the three to compose. They could, like playwright Shmuel Hasfari, promote the claim that because the Jewish settlements of the West Bank were never legally annexed by Israel, any measure of cultural activity there—from the selling of books to the performing of plays—should be subject to a foreign licensing agreement; such an act would send a clear message and serve to undermine the legitimacy of settlements, a premise all three authors, to some extent, strongly support. Or they could arrange for forums where real Israelis might meet real Palestinians, an increasingly rare opportunity for both sides these days. Many more alternatives, some more intricate than others, suggest themselves; but Oz, Yehoshua, and Grossman steer clear of the real and stick to the purely symbolic.

This should surprise no close reader of their work. If there is one thing that binds the three’s different styles and sensibilities it is the nearly religious adherence to symbolic structures, grand metaphors from which all meaning is meant to unfurl. Oz’s famous My Michael, for example, tells the tale of a woman married to a kind but unthrilling man—a geologist, in case his connection to the land of Israel was too subtle to grasp—and who sinks into fantasy to escape her anxieties. These fantasies involve Arab twins with whom she had played as a child in Jerusalem. The dreams sometimes get steamy—what else can The Other do than appear naked in our shower and allow us to relieve ourselves of our urges and fears? A woman escaping her fate is, of course, also the subject of Grossman’s latest novel. It is also the theme of Yehoshua’s The Liberated Bride, in which a young woman bolts out of a marriage after one short year and in which her judgmental mother-in-law is a judge and inquisitive father-in-law, the one who refuses to let go of the past, is a historian. There are other books, and other similarities, but, with few exceptions, the following generalization still stands: Oz and Yehoshua and Grossman tell stories of men and women who are wrecked by reality, who try to escape it but can’t, who do their best and discover that their best isn’t enough.

The same could be said about their political sensibilities. Grossman described it best. “It’s not that I think that suddenly Jews and Arabs can walk hand in hand towards the sunset,” he told me. “That’s not the case. But I think there’s a place somewhere in between the Hollywood ending and being tossed into the sea. There is nuance. And that’s where we need to go, to those places where we can have a life that is possible, where we could slowly douse the flames and control the madness, no more.”

But the madness, as artists should know better than most, is often all that there is. The madness starts wars and writes great novels and propels throngs of people to either love or hate their fellow man. And the madness is what we need writers for, because the madness is sublime and without it there is much that matters but not much that can move us.

***

The direction we move in is, of course, up to the writer’s own conscience, and it hardly dictates allegiance to the left. The poet Yonatan Ratosh, for example, proved better than most that the lyrical was political when he founded his ultra-right-wing Canaanite movement in 1939. Calling for the struggling Jewish state to abandon its religious foundations and return instead to the archaic, pre-biblical, pagan civilization of the region, Ratosh did violence to the carefully constructed prose of his contemporaries; his name, which he gave himself (he was born Uriel Shelach), is a play on the Hebrew verb le’ratesh, to tear apart. He selected as his themes the myths of prehistory, and he wrote lines that were terse and muscular and sounded like the beat of ancient drums.

Although the Canaanite movement was short-lived, it attracted a committed cadre of writers—Benjamin Tammuz, Amos Kenan, Aharon Amir—that went on to shape Israeli culture from the 1950s onward.

A more recent example is Moshe Shamir: Having abandoned his socialist upbringing and becoming one of the standard-bearers of the settler movement, the writer co-founded the right-wing Tehiya party and briefly served as a member of Knesset. His political madness—shortly before Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, he likened negotiating with the Palestinians to collaborating with the Nazis—echoed his literary sensibilities. His novels were a thunderstorm of short, strong sentences and searing social criticism. He was inspiring as both a legislator and a writer because, politically and aesthetically, he was on fire.

The mission, politically and aesthetically, of Grossman, Yehoshua, and Oz is very different. It is, as Grossman told me, to douse the flames, to control the madness. This is why they produce so much symbolism, and this is why so many of their protagonists are running away from life. The alternative would be to fight like hell and dream up wild, new paths to redemption. As leaders, as writers, Israel’s three most famous writers, unlike several of their less heralded peers on the left and on the right, have failed to do just that. Rather than hail them as paragons, anyone committed to the future of the Israeli peace movement would do well to thank them warmly for their concern and hope for a writer to come along and write a better ending to this mad, mad story.

Yet there’s something that would give him even more joy.

“A synagogue,” he says. “I’ve seen a lot of synagogues get built, some by great architects, but I still think I could do it better. It would mean a lot to me, both as a Jewish American and an architect, to be able to build my own.”

Meier has designed practically everything else: museums, skyscrapers, and beach houses. He has put his sleek glass-and-white stamp all over the world, a minimalist look that has won him the profession’s highest awards and a movie-star clientele. Yet behind the celebrity lies a privately religious man who has never strayed far from his Newark Jewish roots, and two projects underway are providing Meier ample opportunity to reflect on this identity.

Tonight, Meier will unveil an exclusive line of ritual art to be sold through New York’s Jewish Museum. The launch of these menorahs and mezuzahs coincides with the construction of his first project in Israel, a residential tower in Tel Aviv.

A rendering of Richard Meier’s Tel Aviv tower, to be completed in 2013.

Courtesy Richard Meier & Partners.

Both projects carry deep meaning for Meier. People who have sat at his seder table describe a man who savors tradition. Yet this is a side the public rarely sees. Despite wanting to build his own shul, Meier rarely attends services and doesn’t belong to a congregation. Raised Reform, he went to synagogue only on High Holidays when growing up, and today he sees no need to worship outside the home. “Being a Jew means believing in God,” he says. “It means to think things outside of yourself are more important.”

I caught Meier in between trips to Tel Aviv, and he looked tired sitting in the living room of his Upper East Side apartment. The duplex is filled with decorative items of his own making; being a perfectionist, Meier likes everything to be just so, and he has fashioned things like chairs and dishware for home use. He has also made his own menorah.

“I made it because I needed one,” he says.

In fact he made two, in radically different styles. First there’s the one you would expect from a minimalist, a stark lamp of polished stainless steel. It looks just right in the kitchen, which, true to the Meier brand, is blindingly white.

Then there’s a grim-looking lamp in tin that commands a place of honor in the study amid his favorite architecture books. This “Meier Lamp” was originally produced for the Israel Museum in 1985, and a limited edition of $1,000 reproductions will be introduced at tonight’s event. The architectonic pewter candle-holders resemble heavy chess pieces, a big departure from Meier’s customary spare style. Each candlestick signifies an architectural style from moments of persecution over 4,000 years of Jewish history. They range from the expulsion of Egypt through the ages until the concentration camps of Europe.

“I was trying to express the collective memory of the Jewish people,” Meier says. “They serve as reminders of the pogroms suffered by Jews and their strength through the ages.”

To match the menorah, Meier designed three mezuzahs in silver that will retail for $125. I inspect the entrance to see if there’s one hanging there, but the doorpost is bare. “I can’t figure out how to attach them to the door frame,” Meier admits sheepishly. “It’s steel. If I bore a hole I need something behind it. I’d probably have to use crazy glue.”

He’s a world-famous architect and he can’t figure that out? Meier insists he’s serious.

He finds it easier to redefine the Tel Aviv skyline, where his 32-story glass structure is due to be completed in the autumn of 2013. While a fan of the Bauhaus buildings that surround the spot, Meier hopes that he will shake up Israeli architecture much as he did with his iconic Greenwich Village edifices a decade ago.

But what does it signify to leave a mark in Israel? Meier parses his words carefully, presumably because talking about politics is bad for business. He’d much rather talk about the nightlife—Meier is an inveterate restaurant-goer—which he believes makes Manhattan look sleepy.

“It’s complicated,” Meier says finally. “If you live there, you probably have a different view than if you just read about what’s going on. I spent time with some young architects, and you learn what they go through day by day. Going to work, they travel with submachine guns in the back of their cars.”

While the tower pleases him as an aesthetic exercise, because of the play of light and the sea, he admits that it doesn’t carry the significance of a public building like, say, a synagogue.

The desire to build a shul dates back to 1963, when Meier curated an exhibit on American synagogues for the Jewish Museum. He felt particularly inspired by the work of a fellow modernist, Louis Kahn, and the thought has lingered since.

What a Meier synagogue would actually look like, should it ever arise, would depend on the context, he says. Meier factors in the surrounding landscape when drawing up blueprints. It’s safe to guess that the structure would be white, with lots of glass. But that is getting ahead of ourselves, Meier says. “No one has asked me to build one.”

Judith Matloff teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She is the author of Home Girl: Building a Dream House on a Lawless Block.

• Do we really need that second day of Rosh Hashanah? [JTA]

• President Obama, as seen through the eyes of President Ahmadinejad’s supporters. (Eerily similar to President Obama as seen through the eyes of Tea Partiers.) [Guardian]

• The PLO Envoy complained that Yale’s recent conference on anti-Semitism was “racist propaganda.” [JTA]

• Our condolences go out to parenting columnist Marjorie Ingall on the loss of her grandmother. [Marjorie Ingall]

• Tel Aviv has been nominated for Sexiest Place on Earth for gay travelers. It is going up against Toronto (really?), Barcelona, Vegas (really??), and Rio. [Ynet]

Three-day weekend. How does it feel?

I am now apparently in hell. Or it’s just August in Tel Aviv. A child’s vacation from school, the unbearable temperature and humidity, the thousands of loud French tourists who fill every public space that doesn’t have a locked door: They all create a critical mass that sucks every drop of the will to live right out of you.

Lev, my 4-and-a-half-year-old son, feels pretty much at home in the depths of hell. He wanders around our house nervously with his blue eyes and a white tank top shirt covered with a huge sweat stain, looking like he’s either about to slap someone or yell out, “Stella!” but he does neither. Instead, he just comes up to me every 10 minutes and asks, “What’s the plan for today?” I don’t answer right away. Stalling for time. The concept “plan for today” usually leads to one of the following three possibilities:

1. Unpleasant rubbing up against 100 kids in the roped off one-meter-square play area in the mall. (At least it’s air conditioned.)

2. Splashing around in the murky liquid of the neighborhood kiddie pool that’s the temperature of urine and smells even worse. (“But Daddy, I didn’t bite. We were just playing dolphin and shark.”)

3. Watching a stupid 3-D movie. (Idea for a startup: inventing glasses that give the plot some depth when you put them on.)

I decide to rebel against my fate and say to Lev, “Today we’re just going to stay home and have fun.” The idea of “having fun” is vague enough to challenge the child.

“How can you have fun at home?” he asks. “That’s a riddle,” I say in a didactic tone, “and you have to guess the right answer.”

Lev thinks for a minute and suggests a solution. “Ambush Mommy with a water gun?” I shake my head. “Play vase soccer again?” I signal that this answer isn’t the right one either. Lev gives it one more try, “Then maybe to dig a giant hole in the living room and cover it with the rug, and when Uncle Ram falls into it, we’ll dance around him and sing ‘We caught a ram!’ ” When that effort doesn’t succeed either, he gives up.

“When I said ‘have fun,’ ” I explain, “I meant that we’d sit together here on the rug, just the two of us, drink lemonade, and talk to each other.” “Talk to Daddy?” Lev says contemptuously. “Talk to Daddy? That doesn’t sound like much fun.” “You say that,” I argue, “because you never did it. Let’s try it for a minute and see.”

Lev likes the lemonade I made. That’s already a good start.

“What do you want to talk about?” I ask him as we sip together. “The Ten Commandments,” Lev suggests. “A good subject,” I nod admiringly. “What do you want to say about the Ten Commandments?” “That Mommy’s silly and makes up a whole bunch of weird commandments that aren’t there,” Lev says. “What commandments, for instance, did she make up?” I ask. “You mustn’t kill,” Lev says. “But she’s right,” I tell Lev. “There really is a commandment like that.” “Daddy’s silly too,” Lev giggles. “There’s no commandment like that.” “Sure there is,” I insist. “It’s the most important one.” “Then how come” Lev asks, still smiling condescendingly, “every time we turn on the TV, they’re always talking about people killing each other?”

I momentarily consider entering into a profound philosophical discussion about the human psyche, but it’s too hot for that. Instead of answering, I shout, “Who wants to see Wonderpets?” and turn on the TV. It’s a shame that you have to go through the news broadcast to get to the kids’ programs, and before I can switch channels, we hear a report about an Israeli who’s been arrested in the United States as a suspected racially motivated serial killer.

“You mustn’t kill,” Lev bellows, laughing, as I zap to the safe haven of the kids’ channel. “Daddy’s silly,” I say, ruffling his hair as the door bell rings. Standing in the doorway is Uncle Ram. He’s holding a 640-page typed manuscript of his life story in rhyme. He’s come all the way from Nahariya to bring me a copy to read. It would’ve been a lot more fun if, instead of talking, we’d dug that hole in the living room.

Translated by Sondra Silverston.

Pearce’s words echo one side of a similar debate in Israel surrounding some 1,200 children of illegal migrant workers. Here, cynics call them “visa babies” because Israel’s long-standing policy against the deportation of minors provides protection to parents who lack legal status. Interior Minister Eliyahu Yishai sees these Israeli-born children as a threat to the character of the Jewish state and hopes to expel them this summer, along with their parents. Critics have slammed the move as inhumane. They point out that the children attend local schools, speak Hebrew, and celebrate Jewish holidays.

Two weeks ago, some 8,000 protesters—mostly Israeli, with many migrant laborers—gathered in the courtyard of the Tel Aviv Museum in a last-ditch effort to prevent the deportation. Classmates stood in support of the friends they might see expelled. Mothers could be overheard explaining to their children, in the gentlest way possible, why the deportation might happen.

The event came in the wake of the news that a governmental committee, convened to determine the children’s fate, recommended permanent residency. A final decision from Yishai could come any day now.

Organized by the grassroots movement Israeli Children, UNICEF Israel, and Israel’s National Student Union, the protest was an emotional appeal to the government. Under the banner “We don’t have another country,” the 1,200 children and their supporters raised signs that read “Don’t deport us,” and “Children of Israel.” Two young Filipino girls held a message, written in Hebrew: “Israel is my home. Here I learned to read Hebrew. All my friends are here. I am an Israeli child.”

Israel is home to approximately 300,000 migrant laborers, most of whom come from Asia. Filipinos, Indians, Sri Lankans, and Nepalese are usually caretakers to the elderly; Chinese are generally employed in construction; Thai are found in agriculture. The Interior Ministry estimates that 250,000 of these workers are illegal.

Israel began replacing Palestinian laborers with foreign workers in the late 1980s, during the First Intifada. The foreign population grew steadily from there, ballooning during the early days of the Second Intifada.

A growing community meant babies. While these children are allowed to attend Israeli schools, they receive few state benefits. Unlike children born on U.S. soil, who automatically become U.S. citizens, children born in Israel are granted neither citizenship nor permanent residency. And although many children of foreign parents would like to serve in the Israeli army, service does not make soldiers eligible for citizenship in Israel, as it can in the United States.

The current attempt to deport this group of children is part of a larger campaign to clear the country of illegal migrant laborers by 2013. The state also aims to gradually reduce dependency on legal foreign workers, as well. But in 2009 alone, the Ministry of Interior issued 120,000 work permits to foreigners.

While some do overstay their visas, migrant laborers can also lose their legal status if they quit, are fired, or if an employer dies.

Both legal and illegal workers are protected under Israel’s labor laws. But abuses often go unreported as most migrant laborers are frightened by the threat of losing their visa. And one of the biggest difficulties facing migrant laborers and their advocates is that there are no laws to battle, since all of Israel’s policies regarding foreign workers are set by the Ministry of the Interior.

The policies are draconian. Migrant laborers who enter into romantic relationships in Israel are likely to lose their residency permits if the Interior Ministry gets wind of the bond. And a worker who gives birth in Israel is forced to pick between her visa and her baby—keep one, lose the other. This is a choice most of the 1,200 children’s mothers have had to make.

Also problematic is the Ministry of the Interior’s tendency to ignore the rulings of the Israeli Supreme Court. In 2006, justices struck down the binding arrangement and likened it to “modern day slavery.” In 2007, the Supreme Court recommended that the state change the policy that effectively punishes migrant laborers for having families. But to date the Ministry of the Interior has not amended either.

Oded Feller, an attorney at the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, says that migrant laborers and their children “should be treated by law, not regulations and policies of the Ministry of the Interior.” He adds that the state shouldn’t make decisions as crises arrive and should have laws—not policies—regarding non-Jews. “As long as Israel will have migrant workers,” Feller says, “we’ll have children born and raised” in Israel.

As the foreign population has mushroomed, Israel has increasingly relied on aggressive enforcement procedures. A wave of arrests and expulsions battered the foreign community in 2002 and 2003. Families were torn apart as Israel expelled men in hopes that women and children would follow. A Filipino woman whose husband was not deported during this period claims that her husband sleeps in the car at night for fear that immigration police will discover him.

In July 2009, the newly formed Oz Unit took to the streets to crack down on illegal migrant laborers. Oz, Hebrew for strength, also began enforcing the previously ignored “Gedera-Hadera” policy, which forbids African refugees from living in the center of the country. Deportation of the 1,200 children and their parents was scheduled for August 1.

South Tel Aviv, home to thousands of migrant laborers and African refugees, was hard hit. The Oz Unit aggressively pursued foreigners, rounding them up by the busload and taking them to detention centers. Many of those arrested were African refugees or single mothers, two groups ineligible for deportation.

After a public outcry, the “Gedera-Hadera” policy was canceled. But as July drew to a close, the fate of the children remained undecided.

Massive protests were held. The children donned shirts with the words “Don’t deport me” hand-written in Hebrew. Israel’s small community of Latin American workers held signs saying, “No hay niños ilegales,” there are no illegal children—an image we could end up seeing in Arizona.

President Shimon Peres penned an emotional letter to Yishai, asking him to cancel the expulsion. “Who, if not a people who suffered embitterment in the lands of exile, should be sensitive to their fellow man living amongst them?” Peres wrote, according to Haaretz.

Drawing on his visit to a South Tel Aviv school attended by many of the children, Peres continued, “I heard Hebrew ring naturally from their mouths. I felt their connection and their love for Israel and their desire to live in it, to serve in its army and to help to strengthen it.”

In the eleventh hour, the government delayed the deportation for three months. In November, Netanyahu announced that the children could finish out the school year. Still, hundreds of illegal migrant laborers have been deported, and thousands have left voluntarily. This once-vibrant neighborhood—filled with impromptu markets, food stands, and the chattering of workers and refugees—is now depressed.

In her modest apartment outside of Tel Aviv, Judith, a domestic helper from the Philippines, says she is most worried about her children, aged 8 and 15. “They don’t know how to leave,” she says.

Judith and her husband Eldy, who is also Filipino, have been in Israel for almost two decades. They lost their visas a few years ago when their employer left the country. Their Israeli-born and -raised kids don’t speak Tagalog. Like most of the 1,200 children, they speak English with their parents and Hebrew with each other.

Michelle, Judith and Eldy’s teenage daughter, says, “I want to go to the army, I want to study here. I feel Israeli.” Indeed, her dress, cadence, and mannerisms lend Michelle the air of an Israeli.

But during Christmas, Judith was afraid to put a tree in the window. “We’re afraid to walk on the street,” she says. “We live like criminals.”

Mya Guarnieri is a freelance journalist and writer based in Tel Aviv.

• Later this month, Netanyahu will become the first Israeli prime minister to visit Canada since Yitzhak Rabin. [Arutz Sheva]

• Manhattan’s Union Square will be the site of a massive Sukkah competition this September. [Sukkah City]

• More on the new Dubai Murder Mystery suspects: One is an Israeli citizen who is wanted in New Zealand for passport fraud. [Haaretz]

• A New York-style deli settles down in the relatively exotic realm of … Tel Aviv. [Forward]

• Tonight, the unofficial poet laureate of New Jersey Bruce Springsteen and the onetime official poet laureate of the United States (and Nextbook Press author) Robert Pinsky will discuss Pinsky’s poem “Jersey Rain”. You get three guesses as to which state this event is taking place in. [INJersey]

‘And my machine, she’s a dud/She’s stuck in the mud/Somewhere in the swamps of Jersey.’

• An overview of Tel Aviv’s eclectic, advanced dining scene. [WP]

• In New York City tomorrow night? Tablet Magazine columnist Josh Lambert is moderating a pre-Shabbat discussion with novelists Gary Shteyngart and Amy Sohn at the 92nd Street Y’s Tribeca branch. [92Y Tribeca]

• A good profile of T. Alan Hurwitz, who is the first Jewish president of Gallaudet University, the school for deaf and hard-of-hearing students in Washington, D.C. [Forward]

• Holocaust survivors who subsequently moved to Israel have a cancer rate 17 percent higher than that of European-born Jews who left before or during World War II. [Reuters/The Province]

• In Belgrade, Serbia, there is a campaign afoot to make a monument out of a Modernist 1930s fairground turned Nazi concentration camp (where over 7,000 Serbian Jews were murdered) turned seedy nightlife district. [NYT T Magazine]

Tiger Woods returned to golf today. As of this writing, he completed the front nine of the Masters’s opening round at -3, a five-way tie for third place. After all that has happened, it’s at least worth remembering why so many people care about him in the first place.

Who is Anat Kamm?

Her mother is a senior civil servant at the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare, where she works with the handicapped; her father is a tourist guide. Born in Jerusalem, Kamm joined the Israel Boy and Girl Scouts Federation and attended one of the country’s most prestigious high schools, the Hebrew University Secondary School, known as Leyada, graduates of which include the writers David Grossman and Meir Shalev. Acquaintances describe her as opinionated, very assertive, and politically active from a young age.

Some saw in her the makings of a future political leader. Though by no means a member of the anti-Zionist left, she has throughout her life demonstrated an acute concern with social and political justice, acquaintances say. Her interest in journalism blossomed in high school, where she began writing for several youth publications.

After graduating she began her compulsory military service in the office of Maj. Gen. Yair Naveh, then the head of the Israel Defense Forces’ Central Command, which has responsibility for military operations in the West Bank. Having shown promise in Naveh’s office, she was sent to an officer training course, which she failed to complete because, she told friends, she realized she didn’t want to be an officer.

When her service ended in spring 2007, she found a job at Walla, one of Israel’s most popular news and entertainment websites, owned partially by Haaretz and primarily by Bezeq, a major Israeli telecommunications company. Then, working as Walla’s media reporter, she covered, in autumn 2008, a meeting of Haaretz journalists and editors then trying to organize into a trade union, which the owners of Haaretz did not want to recognize. The meeting took place in the central hall of Tel Aviv’s Beit Sokolov, or Journalists’ House.

At the meeting, she approached the Haaretz investigative reporter Uri Blau, a relatively young man in his mid-thirties, who began his career at a local paper in Jerusalem. Though Kamm and Blau were from the same city, they had never met. Kamm, who admired Blau’s writing, told him she had stolen copies of secret documents during her military service at the office of the head of the IDF’s Central Command. Sometime later she gave Blau some of the documents, which she had been holding for 18 months. (A first attempt to hand off documents to Yossi Yehoshu, a reporter for Yediot Aharonot, failed.) Haaretz published articles based on a few of them not long after, in November 2008.

Kamm’s motive, colleagues say, was to expose the IDF’s egregious violation of Israeli law, clear evidence of which was in her dossier. Of its 2,000 documents, 700 were classified as “top secret” and only a handful were used by Haaretz. But sources familiar with the case say the most damning of them were used in Blau’s reporting.

Blau revealed that in March and April 2007, while Kamm was working at the office of the IDF’s head of Central Command, the army’s highest ranking officers knowingly planned to violate a 2006 Supreme Court ruling that forbade the assassination of Palestinian militants when their arrest was possible. In April 2007, the IDF’s Central Command received permission to assassinate an Islamic Jihad leader named Ziad Malaisha. The assassination, Kamm’s documents reveal, was planned and approved in meetings with the head of the IDF’s Operations Directorate, Brig. Gen. Sami Turjeman, and the IDF’s Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi.

Summaries of the meetings reveal that the officers were aware of the Supreme Court ruling they would soon violate. The assassination, which was postponed because of the April 2007 visit of U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, took place in June 2007, the month Kamm left the army.

Israel’s military censors approved Blau’s article, finding that its publication would not damage Israel’s national security. Yet an intention to do such damage is precisely what Kamm is now accused of.

Whether or not Blau’s article damaged Israeli national security, it appears to have ruffled the feathers of quite a few senior officers: Soon after its publication the military ordered what was then called the Department of Field Security and is now called the Department for the Protection of Information to open an investigation. Ashkenazi, the chief of staff, had said after the Lebanon War of 2006 that it was his mission to end leaks from high-level officers.

The investigation of the leak at Central Command, an operation codenamed “Double Take”—a reference, some believe, to the army’s intention to prosecute both Kamm and Blau—lasted a year before Kamm was arrested. Until then, her life appeared perfectly normal. She moved to Tel Aviv, where she studied history at the university and continued to work as a journalist for Walla.

In September 2009, Israel’s domestic security service approached Blau, who consulted with Haaretz’s lawyers and agreed to cooperate with investigators, who wanted him to return the documents. In return, Shin Bet agreed not to indict him and not to use the documents as evidence against his sources. Now, however, the agreement appears to have broken down, as Haaretz and the Shin Bet accuse each other of violating it. Blau, meanwhile, went with his girlfriend on a previously planned trip to China.

When the investigators found Kamm in late 2009—after obtaining her phone records, which are believed to reveal communication with Blau—she had been a civilian, which is to say outside the jurisdiction of military investigators, for two and a half years. Her case was referred to the Shabak, Israel’s domestic security agency, which promptly called her to a police station, where she was interrogated and is believed to have confessed to leaking the documents. Under Israeli law, providing classified documents to a journalist is no less treasonous than providing them to a terrorist group or foreign government.

After Kamm’s arrest, a court in the city of Petah Tikva issued a gag order forbidding any Israeli media from reporting on the case or on the existence of the gag order. Kamm’s family hired two lawyers, Eitan Lehman and Avigdor Feldman, an articulate leftist and prominent litigator who had previously defended Israel’s most famous accused spy, Mordechai Vanunu, who was sentenced to 18 years in prison for revealing details of Israel’s nuclear weapons program. Kamm was granted permission to serve her house arrest at her Tel Aviv apartment and her mother’s home in Jerusalem, and to continue working at Walla. The judge who issued the gag order, Einat Ron, had served as a colonel in the IDF’s military prosecutor’s office. In 2001, Col. Ron made headlines as the IDF’s chief military prosecutor when she chose not to open a criminal investigation after finding that a group of soldiers had violated army regulations by killing an unarmed 11-year-old Palestinian boy.

Despite the wide coverage of the case in international media, Ron had for months refused to lift the gag order. Pressure from the IDF and the security services forced a higher court to lift it today. But a lifting of the gag order will not ensure leniency in Kamm’s trial. The judge overseeing that trial, Zeev Hammer, is known to be very friendly to the security establishment.

Uri Blau, meanwhile, has not returned from his trip to China. As the case unfolded, he moved to Britain and refused to return to Israel to face interrogation. A lawyer from Haaretz went to see Blau in Europe, where he had gone after visiting China. Haaretz was then negotiating with the authorities to see if he could return without facing arrest. The authorities refused.

CORRECTION, April 8: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article erroneously described the noted Israeli author David Grossman as a physicist. It has been corrected.

Yossi Melman covers intelligence and military affairs for Haaretz.

The United States Embassy in Tel Aviv, in a prime beachfront location at 71 HaYarkon Street, is six stories tall, not including the mysteries on its roof. Israeli intelligence operatives and journalists have for many years suspected that atop the embassy and perhaps in its basement are sophisticated surveillance systems that keep a close electronic eye on the Jewish state. Certainly, as is standard in most any U.S. Embassy, there is a suite of offices comprising the CIA station, its staffers given diplomatic titles such as “second secretary.” No attempt is made to hide their identity from Israeli authorities because this host government is considered friendly.

Friendship between nations, especially in the volatile Middle East, is not naïve. The Mossad and other Israeli security agencies, as well as top politicians, assume that the United States routinely listens to their phone conversations, copies fax messages, and intercepts email messages—data known in the spy business as comint (communications intelligence)—and also gathers sigint (signals intelligence), which involves analyzing data transmitted on various wavelengths by Israeli military units, aviation manufacturers, space launch sites, labs suspected of doing nuclear work: any defense-related facility that puts out signals. This assumption is strengthened by the fact that more than 20 years ago, embassy officials approached Israeli authorities with a request to rent office space in the Mandarin Hotel, on the beach north of Tel Aviv. Permission was denied, because that location is on a precise east-west line barely a mile from Mossad headquarters (inland at the Gelilot highway intersection) and a bit farther from the equally secretive military intelligence codebreaking and high-tech surveillance Unit 8200.

If Israeli counterintelligence—the spy-catchers at Shin Bet (the domestic security service known to Israelis as Shabak)—really wanted to check the roof or the basement on HaYarkon Street, perhaps they could break in to the building. In 1954, U.S. security officials at the embassy found microphones concealed in the ambassador’s office. In 1956, bugs were found attached to two telephones in the home of an American military attaché. Shin Bet also made crude attempts to use women and money to seduce the U.S. Marines who guarded the embassy. However, in the view of top Israeli intelligence insiders, the mystery of the roof—even though they have noticed that some antennae and equipment are covered—is closer to an urban espionage myth. The United States can easily park signals-intercepting ships in the Mediterranean near the Israeli coast; the U.S. National Security Agency controls plenty of spy-in-the-sky satellites and can watch and listen to most anything on the NSA’s agenda.

Indeed, there is no doubt the Americans regularly listen in to the private communications of the Israeli government and military. Hebrew linguists are trained and sought after by the NSA. The clearest case of such U.S. spying on Israel came to light in 1967, when the U.S. Navy’s ship Liberty was attacked by Israel’s air force during the Six Day War. Thirty-four American sailors were killed, and many of the survivors say their mission was to gather comint and sigint about Israeli and Egyptian military moves and plans. Most of them think the attack was intentional, to blind and deafen that particular NSA intelligence operation, but Israel firmly denies it.

Being in the business of collecting information, intelligence agencies know very well that everyone does it, friend or foe. Certainly the CIA station, based in the embassy, busies itself with clipping newspapers, harvesting web articles, recording radio and TV broadcasts, talking with Israelis, analyzing the results, and reading between the lines. Yet our image of espionage usually means running agents: recruiting people to betray their country for money or other motives. “In my 21 years in the agency, I never saw any official request for us to go recruit Israeli citizens,” says Robert Baer, a longtime case officer in the Near East Division of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. “They don’t have to,” said a former head of the Mossad who asked not to be identified by name. “They can get—and probably do get—whatever they want, because we Israelis don’t know how to keep secrets. We are talkative, and the CIA has great access to all levels of the Israeli government.”

***

While the CIA and Israel’s intelligence community have enjoyed close liaison in recent decades, cooperation has not always been the norm. From its founding in 1948 as a socialist country led by immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe, the State of Israel was perceived by the CIA as part of the hostile Soviet sphere of influence. In 1951, David Ben Gurion toured the United States, met with General Walter Bedell Smith, Truman’s director of central intelligence, and convinced U.S. intelligence to give Israel a try. A highly personal relationship between the intelligence communities was forged, and James Jesus Angleton, who would become legendary for his obsessively suspicious counter-spy campaigns, was put in charge of the U.S. side. Israeli intelligence assigned Amos Manor and Teddy Kollek, who later would enjoy decades as mayor of Jerusalem, as his counterparts.

“It wasn’t easy to persuade the anti-communist Angleton that we could be friends,” Manor told us before his death two and a half years ago. “Even I was suspected by him, that I was a Soviet spy.” Manor, an Auschwitz survivor, had emigrated to Israel from Romania, which became a communist country after World War II. Over sleepless nights at Manor’s apartment on Pinsker Street in Tel Aviv, the Israeli did his best to keep up with Angleton at whiskey-sipping and chatting about the world. The two men became close friends, laying the foundation for CIA-Mossad intelligence cooperation as Manor proved to Angleton that what had been considered an Israeli disadvantage could be turned into a great advantage: Israel’s population of immigrants from the Soviet Union and its East European satellites made the country an indispensible source about everything that interested the CIA at the height of the Cold War, from the cost of potatoes behind the Iron Curtain to plans for new aircraft and ships there. The great turning point was the secret speech in Moscow in 1956 by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denouncing Stalin’s crimes. A Jewish journalist in Poland procured the much-sought-after text and gave it to Israeli intelligence in Warsaw. It was quickly delivered to the CIA.

Still, while cooperating in anti-Soviet operations, the two countries had some conflicting interests. Desperate to have a qualitative military edge over its Arab neighbors, Israel ordered agents to steal U.S. technology. From the 1960s until the late 1980s, American law enforcement busted several conspiracies run by Israelis to procure defense and high-tech secrets and even components for Israel’s suspected nuclear arsenal. This clandestine work was not done by the Mossad but by military officers and by a small Defense Ministry unit known as Lakam (Lishka le-Kishrei Mada, the “science liaison bureau”), which also ran Jonathan Pollard, who is now serving a life sentence for espionage.

In the late 1950s, the prime target of American suspicion in Israel was the Negev Nuclear Research Center near Dimona, which was constructed by the French as part of a secret deal linked with the Israeli-French-British invasion of Suez, Egypt, in 1956 that took President Dwight Eisenhower by surprise and greatly angered him. The CIA was assigned to find out what the Israelis were up to in the Negev Desert. The station chief in Tel Aviv in the 1960s, John Hadden, told us he would make a point of driving as close as he could to the nuclear reactor and occasionally stopped his car to collect soil samples for radioactive analysis. Shin Bet was obviously tailing him, and an Israeli helicopter once landed near his automobile to stop it. Security personnel demanded to see identification, and after flashing his U.S. diplomatic passport Hadden drove off, with little doubt there were big doings at Dimona.

When Americans were permitted to enter the Dimona facility as part of a deal with President John F. Kennedy, “it cost us a hell of a lot of money to arrange it so their inspectors wouldn’t find out what was going on,” the late Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban told us, as quoted in our book Friends In Deed. False walls were erected, doorways and elevators were hidden, and dummy installations were built to show to the visitors, who found no evidence of the weapons program secreted underground. [Sentence deleted by the Israeli Military Censor.]

Nuclear gamesmanship did not spoil the progress of friendly connections between the two intelligence communities. John Hadden set the pattern for all future CIA station chiefs in Tel Aviv by spending most of his time in open liaison activities, cultivating ties with Israeli officials in all fields. Hadden remembers attending a diplomatic dinner in 1963, when he was well aware that Israel, then an austere nation, saw Americans as hard-drinking and garrulous. Usually keeping his CIA-taught language skills to himself, he heard the hostess say hopefully to an Israeli colonel that if Hadden kept imbibing perhaps he would talk too much. The puckish spy smiled and surprised his hosts with his decent Hebrew: “Nichnas yayin, yotzeh sod!” which means “Wine goes in, a secret comes out!”

The next two decades would see gradual growth in mutual confidence, as U.S. interests in the Middle East increasingly matched Israel’s concern with Arab radicalism and Palestinian terrorism. Yet in 1985, when Jonathan Pollard was arrested at the gates of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, by coincidence the CIA was assessing a “walk in”: an Israeli officer, Major Yossi Amit, who had served in a secretive military intelligence unit. As far as we know, Major Amit was the closest the CIA got to recruiting an Israeli as an agent. In his hometown of Haifa, Amit met a U.S. Navy officer who introduced him to the CIA. Amit offered his services as an experienced case officer who had run Syrian and Lebanese networks. He flew to Germany and spent time with CIA operatives and a psychologist, who used a polygraph and other tests to judge his credibility. This evaluation was handled well away from the CIA’s Tel Aviv station, though a counter-terrorism officer stationed in Tel Aviv was part of the team in Germany.

Amit claims that he did not intend to betray or spy on Israel, but he might have been willing to help the CIA in various Arab countries. He was arrested by Israeli authorities, tried in secret, and served seven years in prison.

***

In the 1990s, with an Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty and Israeli-Palestinian negotiations brokered by the United States, the CIA’s involvement in the region leapt forward. The Tel Aviv station was enlarged and given duties far beyond liaison with counterparts in the Mossad. The CIA’s new assignment was to turn Yasser Arafat’s secret police and commando units into a professional entity that would be pro-peace, pro-American, and in effect agents of influence for the CIA.

George Tenet, as deputy CIA director before getting the agency’s top job, was given the task in 1996. As Tenet wrote in his memoirs, At the Center of the Storm, he was reluctant, but it was an order from President Bill Clinton and he understood: “Security was the key. You can talk about sovereignty, borders, elections, territory, and the rest all day long; but unless the two sides feel safe, nothing else matters.”

The agency launched into this mission by staying, at first, within the confines of its longtime expertise: meeting with security chiefs, arranging trips for Arafat’s secret police to be re-trained in the United States, providing surveillance equipment aimed at countering the rise of Hamas radicalism, and coordinating all this with Israel’s Shin Bet and military.

The CIA station chief in Tel Aviv from 1995 to 1999 was Stan Moskowitz, a 40-year agency veteran who kept trying to mediate the inevitable disputes. Mossad officials did not like him, not because of his role in the peace process, but because they felt that—perhaps because he was a Bronx-born Jew trying to overcompensate—he kept himself at a frosty distance from the Israelis. This view is reflected in the memoirs of a Canadian-born Mossad operative using the pseudonym Michael Ross. In his book The Volunteer, Ross describes Moskowitz as “a self-important Beltway climber who drove around Tel Aviv in the back seat of a white Mercedes sedan.”

A former Mossad station chief in Washington who knew Moskowitz as a CIA research director before he moved to Israel had already noticed that Moskowitz had problems with the Jewish state. “Unlike other CIA officials who readily agreed to meet me, he was always very reluctant to do so,” says the Israeli, who asked not to be named.

After some years, Mossad men say, they came to nickname Moskowitz “the anti-Semite.” Though the title was exaggerated, annoyance with Moskowitz helps explain why an Israeli newspaper broke the unwritten rule of not naming the CIA station chief, when it wrote of Moskowitz in an article about the negotiating sessions with the Palestinians. Moskowitz died in 2006, a year after retiring.

***

A Palestinian uprising, the second Intifada in early 2001, found the CIA sucked into a new and more urgent role in mediating the volatile negotiating process that had blown up at Camp David in the summer of 2000. Meeting with presidents, kings, and prime ministers is nothing strange to CIA station chiefs around the world, but negotiating with them in a prolonged process was entirely different—especially when the stakes included an escalating wave of suicide bombings and Israeli retaliations. President George W. Bush, new to his job, assigned George Tenet to stay at the CIA and focus on that mission.

“Tenet was even more reluctant this time,” says a former Mossad chief who prefers to remain anonymous. “But he obeyed the orders.”

A different perspective comes from Reuel Marc Gerecht, a clandestine CIA officer in the Middle East in the 1990s: “Some in the agency relished the limelight,” he says. “Others thought it was a mistake. Tenet relished it, obviously.”

Tenet’s point man in Tel Aviv was Jeff O’Connell, the station chief who replaced Moskowitz. The Mossad had more respect for O’Connell, first because he did not have what they perceived as the conflicts of being Jewish. Second, before moving to Tel Aviv, O’Connell had been stationed in Amman, Jordan. The Mossad was highly familiar with how the CIA had cultivated intimate relations with King Hussein’s intelligence services, to the point that the Mossad was envious—thinking the CIA was even friendlier with the Jordanians than with Israel. It was a thinly veiled secret that Hussein himself had been on the CIA’s payroll in the 1960s.

One tool for O’Connell was his fluency in Arabic. He would gather Jibril Rajoub and Mohammed Dahlan, the two security chiefs of Arafat’s forces, with Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter and his deputy, Ofer Dekel. O’Connell’s Arabic seemed to be even better than Dekel’s, and the five men would exchange pleasantries and even jokes, yet overall the American seemed amicable and cooperative with both sides. Dahlan has nothing but praise for the CIA and then-director Tenet.

Acting friendly is a routine and shallow part of espionage tradecraft. Their business in this case was deadly serious: finding some mechanisms to help save the Oslo peace process. They were carrying out their political masters’ orders, and O’Connell seemed almost desperate, though businesslike, in the quest to stop the fabric of negotiations from entirely unraveling. Occasionally the head of the Mossad, Efraim Halevy, would take part, so as to protect the foreign espionage agency’s traditional turf as liaison with the CIA. And in 2002, O’Connell helped to end the Palestinian siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, by mediating with Israel’s army and Shin Bet.

Around the same time, a former CIA operative claims, the agency had a smaller station working within the United States Consulate in Jerusalem, which is responsible for official American activities in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Melissa Boyle Mahle, topping off a 14-year undercover career that included recruiting agents throughout the Middle East, deployed her experience and her Arabic in a new post-Oslo liaison relationship with the Palestinians. It is believed that she cultivated agents and informants, who were paid for giving the United States information and analysis. From the point of view of Israeli security personnel, Mahle was a minor player, and they doubted that she was making any reliable headway in the volatile West Bank and Gaza. Mahle was forced to leave the CIA in 2002 for what she calls “an operational mistake” that she cannot talk about; one published account says she did not tell her superiors some personal details of contacts with agents. (She declined to comment for this article.)

The uprising continued. Peace efforts collapsed. O’Connell’s successor was Deborah Morris. Aside from the obvious breakthrough of being the first woman to be station chief in Tel Aviv, Morris failed to make much of an impression on her Mossad contacts. Thomas Powers, writing about the CIA in The New York Review of Books, said some in the agency groused about her promotion at one point to deputy Near East chief in the Directorate of Operations, complaining that Morris had never run an agent and “she doesn’t know what the Khyber Pass looks like but she’s supposed to be directing operations.”

The CIA station in Tel Aviv was heavily involved in attempts, after Yasser Arafat’s death in 2004, to keep his Fatah faction in charge in the Gaza Strip. The Bush Administration and the Palestinian Authority, now led by Mahmoud Abbas, seemed to fail to see that Hamas would win the Gaza elections of 2006. Though official motivations remain unclear, many Gazans believe that the CIA was ordered to help Abbas stage a coup d’etat in that narrow and destitute seaside strip. Whatever those efforts were, they backfired. Hamas gunmen were the winners, and Gaza continues to be an infectious splinter spoiling peace efforts.

***

With the fade-out of negotiations, the CIA returned to its traditional role, far from the limelight, while the CIA’s cooperation with the Mossad intensified as the Bush Administration launched its War on Terror after Sept. 11. The Tel Aviv station was enlarged yet again, with more than 10 staffers representing the major departments at the headquarters in Langley, Virginia: operations (meaning covert action), research, counter-terrorism, and counter-proliferation, with its focus on Iran’s nuclear work.

It is a mark of the respect that Mossad officials have for the incumbent station chief that they refuse to give his name or describe him, beyond this: He is “very professional” and “businesslike.” More significant for what will happen in the Middle East in the near future is this observation: that the American is very close to Mossad director Meir Dagan (who has had his post for an unusually long period, nearly eight years) and together they have brought U.S.-Israel intelligence cooperation into new areas—and, frankly, to new heights.

Israeli methods that had been condemned worldwide are now embraced by the CIA. Infiltrating extremist organizations, recruiting agents by applying pressure in every conceivable way, tough interrogation and imprisonment, and targeted assassinations had been hallmarks of Israel’s battle against Palestinian and other Arab terrorists; now the United States wanted to score similar successes against al-Qaeda and its associated jihadist groups. U.S. and Israeli officials, while refusing to confirm details of any joint operations, suggest they have been involved in clandestine missions aimed at a shared target: Iran’s nuclear program. [Two sentences deleted by the Israeli Military Censor.]

These efforts build on some scattered but significant successes even before Sept. 11. Information from Israeli intelligence had been instrumental in joint Mossad, CIA, and FBI missions that thwarted Hezbollah and al-Qaeda plots as far afield as the Midwest and Azerbaijan. A Lebanese immigrant in Dearborn, Michigan, automotive engineer Fawzi Mustapha Assi, was arrested in 1998 for allegedly trying to provide Hezbollah with $120,000 of electronics gear. Well-informed Israelis say a Mossad case officer was sent to CIA headquarters in Langley, to coordinate the flow of information that the FBI could use for the bust. To the chagrin of the Mossad, Assi fled to Lebanon after an American court released him on $100,000 bond. That same year, covert CIA officers teamed up with Mossad field personnel in the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan. Israel, focusing on Iran’s support for terrorist organizations, had eavesdropped on plans for a meeting between an Iranian intelligence man and three Egyptian jihadists who were linked to the planning of the al-Qaeda bombings that devastated the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The Mossad shared the information with the CIA, and both agencies sent operatives to work with the Azeri security services, who arrested the men.

***

“Israel runs circles around the CIA when it comes to Gaza and the West Bank,” ex-operative Robert Baer says about collecting and analyzing raw intelligence. “There’s virtually nothing we can offer Israel about the Palestinians.” On the other hand, the CIA does not depend on the Mossad for its global war against al-Qaeda. The Americans have better sources for that in the Middle East, including the Egyptian and Jordanian security services. Gerecht, a former CIA officer, says the agency appreciates its relationship with the Mossad, “but the Israelis value it more than the Americans do.”

Baer feels that “the Israelis think we’re dummies.” Not true. The fact is that Israeli intelligence people speak with high respect of their American colleagues’ brainpower, professionalism, and devotion to their work. The Israelis also give the CIA credit for “not stealing agents—unlike the British MI6.” If the CIA works on recruiting an Arab, for instance, as a paid informant but finds out the Israelis are already running him, they will either back off or come to the Mossad to ask for permission to share the agent.

In all of this history—including decades of converting suspicion to cooperation—has the CIA merely been executing each president’s policies or pursuing the agency’s own view of the Middle East? This is a sensitive subject. Critics contend that the CIA is always pushing an agenda based on convoluted distortions, disrespecting human rights and cynically pursuing American strength at all costs. However, though perhaps with some minor exceptions, the CIA seems to be a loyal organization that adheres to lines set by its political masters in Washington. It wasn’t the CIA’s fault or intention that its mediation efforts exploded into a new Palestinian intifada. And when Israel started its secret nuclear program, the CIA pursued all the clues because the White House ordered it to.

“The agency is not a remote calculating machine,” says Gerecht. “It has its passions, and depending on the issue those passions can be deployed. Senior officials in that bureaucracy often have strong views and like those views to be considered.” But, he adds, “The agency is not much different from any other major foreign policy national security institution, such as the State Department or the Pentagon. Depending on the issue and the place, the CIA can have input in creation of policy, and it is staffed with human beings who want to have input.”

According to Gerecht, CIA staffers tend to see the Middle East through an Arabist prism—“about where State was, around 20 years ago.” He says that if you were to visit the office of a typical station chief in the Near East Division, you would likely find autographed pictures of the late King Hussein or some senior official in an Arab intelligence service, but hardly anything indicating a sentimental attachment to anything or anyone Israeli. This is only natural, considering that there are many Arab nations, leaders, and CIA stations, and only one Israel.

Gerecht contends that “the common theme is that they’d want the U.S. to coerce Israel more in the peace process,” a view that he feels comes from contacts with “elites in places like Beirut, Cairo, and Damascus.”

The truth, however, is that almost everyone in the United States government would like to see a stable Middle East. And if that means concessions by Israel, though not at the expense of its security, it is not exclusively the CIA that would work enthusiastically for that outcome.

Yossi Melman, who covers intelligence and military affairs for Haaretz, and Dan Raviv, a CBS News correspondent, are co-authors of books including Every Spy a Prince: The Complete History of Israel’s Intelligence Community, The Imperfect Spies, and Friends In Deed: Inside the U.S.-Israel Alliance.

The truth, alas, was less piquant: agents were finally able to ascertain that Teitel was driving a pregnant neighbor to the hospital at the time of the community center shootings. Nevertheless, Teitel expressed his support for the horrific act, and told investigators that he had selected his nom de guerre, the Black Bear, as a clear message to Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Nethanyahu to act against Israel’s gay citizens.

Yaakov Teitel’s Investigation: The Confession, the Strange Alibi, and the Plans for the Next Murder [Haaretz, in Hebrew]

Abroad, Guardian columnist Seth Freedman recalls being a student at a London Jewish day school when Rabin was killed, and teachers framing his assassination as “not the Jewish way … let the unenlightened and barbaric Arab states around us settle their differences via the sword.” While “Judaism certainly does not allow for such base behavior,” Freedman writes, viewing the murder “as a one-off aberration rather than the culmination of years of incitement and provocation was to take a dangerously out-of-context view of the event, and—by continuing to do so even today—those making such assertions run the risk of similar attacks being carried out in the future.”

Stormy Weather Postpones T.A. Memorial Marking Rabin Assassination [Haaretz]
Analysis: Religious Zionism Confronts Rabin Legacy [JPost]
School Flyers Against the ‘Rabin Legacy’ [Arutz Sheva]
The Far Right Wrath That Killed Rabin [Guardian]

$6m. Gift Earmarked for TA’s Museum of the Jewish People [JPost]

That’s fine, we suppose, but we’re puzzled that it took so long before Fonda got around to re-reading the document that has caused her so much grief. (Maybe it was part of the lesson Rabbi Shlomo Schwartz, of the Chai Center, apparently gave her on teshuva.) But never mind, she managed to disengage from the protest just in time to miss yesterday’s press conference, at which Canadian filmmaker John Greyson—who pulled his work from the Toronto festival altogether—reiterated their complaint that the Tel Aviv celebration was just propaganda for Israel that papered over the harsh realities of the Palestinian conflict. Meanwhile, Jewish groups ran ads in the Los Angeles Times and the Toronto Star that read, “Anyone who has actually seen recent Israeli cinema, movies that are political and personal, comic and tragic, often critical, knows they are in no way a propaganda arm for any government policy.” We’re assuming the signatories—who included Jerry Seinfeld, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Natalie Portman—read it thoroughly before they signed.

Expanding the Narrative [HuffPo]
Seinfeld, Sacha Baron Cohen and Natalie Portman Slam Toronto Film Festival Protest [Haaretz]
Earlier: Toronto Film Fest to Honor Tel Aviv, Controversially

Religious Council: Don’t Buy Moroccan Shofar [YNet]

Israeli filmmaker Udi Aloni, who is part of the group calling for the boycott, called on Israeli filmmakers to join in. “Israeli filmmakers shouldn’t feel defensive,” Aloni told Haaretz. “They should say to their Canadian colleagues, ‘we stand with you, we don’t represent [Israeli foreign minister Avigdor] Lieberman, we represent the resistance.’ You can’t have it both ways.”

Toronto Festival: Directors protest Tel Aviv Tribute [Haaretz, in Hebrew]