tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-76365001872570349362024-03-13T06:46:34.476-07:00Look Back to GalileeA HUNDRED YEARS of COMMUNAL LIFEDavid L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/03689866575986080183noreply@blogger.comBlogger172125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7636500187257034936.post-31715175672348876342016-08-13T14:49:00.004-07:002016-08-13T14:51:34.765-07:00The taxman cometh<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Here's an interesting short news <a href="http://hamodia.com/2016/07/31/tax-authority-catches-kibbutz-realities/">item</a> about potential changes to Israel's tax system aimed at privatized kibbutzes. In short, the proposal will restrict "collective" tax rates to those few kibbutzim who have maintained their communal economies (what are known as <i>kibbutz shitufi</i>) and/or have no greater than a 25% differential between the best and worst paid members. For the majority of kibbutzim who have undergone "privatization" or decommunalization" (also called <i>shinui</i> or "The Change"), members will need to pay individual income taxes rather than the collective communal tax (sometimes negligible or zero) that has benefitted kibbutzes for decades.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>Ha'aretz</i> offers an even more detailed look at the potential consequences <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/business/.premium-1.734754">here</a>.</span>David L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/03689866575986080183noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7636500187257034936.post-13092163705857717992016-08-13T14:33:00.000-07:002016-08-13T14:33:15.891-07:00Boris Johnson, kibbutz volunteer<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">While much attention over the past year has focused on the experiences (and location) of Bernie Sanders as a kibbutz volunteer, it turns out that another major politician did a tour of duty on a kibbutz: Boris Johnson, the blonde-bemopped former mayor of London and now post-Brexit U.K. foreign secretary.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">An <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.735689">article</a> in <i>Ha'aretz</i> allows his sister to describe their time together as volunteers on <a href="http://www.kfar-hanassi.org.il/akh/theplace.htm">Kibbutz Kfar Hanassi</a>. Boris wasn't exactly kibbutznik material but apparently he toughed out his initial work assignment in the kibbutz kitchen before tourijng the rest of the country and meeting Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">“He was not a kibbutznik. He was not a soldier. And he was so pale he couldn’t even go in the sun.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">He sounds (and even looks) much like I did as a hapless foreign kibbutz volunteer.</span>David L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/03689866575986080183noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7636500187257034936.post-71778845812800989632016-07-05T10:16:00.000-07:002016-07-05T10:20:30.807-07:00Cover story<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Speaking of blurbs, I also got a look at the (almost) final front and back cover design for the book — and it's gorgeous. I was thrilled by the integration of my photo (overlooking the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hula_Valley">Hula Valley</a>), the title and subtitle fonts, and the four wonderful blurbs from two academics and two fiction writers... all of whom I deeply admire for their own writing and thinking.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Thanks to <a href="http://ecwpress.com/">ECW Press</a> for the hard work — and lengthy consultations — to make this cover the best possible advertisement for the prose within.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">N.B.: One final change made after I saw this draft was removing the barbed wire on the spine, which we felt didn't suit the (mostly) hopeful spirit of the manuscript.</span>David L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/03689866575986080183noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7636500187257034936.post-9472913304559152732016-07-05T09:57:00.002-07:002016-07-05T09:57:32.132-07:00Good news from Kirkus Reviews<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">And so it begins... the anxiety over book reviews!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">With the official launch of <i>Chasing Utopia</i> still two months away, the book got its first early review from <i><a href="https://www.kirkusreviews.com/">Kirkus</a></i>, the influential trade <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirkus_Reviews">magazine</a>... and I was relieved (nay, thrilled) that the reviewer liked the book. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Read the full review <a href="http://an%20eye-opening%20look%20at%20an%20eden%20of%20eco-villages%20gradually%20giving%20way%20to%20economic%20exigencies./">here</a>. If nothing else, it gives me something to salve my ego when the inevitable lukewarm or antagonistic reviews start to come in... I've got no illusions that everyone will share <i>Kirkus'</i>s opinion about a book on a topic as deeply divided as the history of Israel.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">And I look forward to adding the final line from the review to my collection of blurbs: "</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 26px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">An eye-opening look at an Eden of eco-villages gradually giving way to economic exigencies."</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 26px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Sounds good to me.</span></span><br />
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David L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/03689866575986080183noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7636500187257034936.post-6680381365187194792016-06-07T13:52:00.003-07:002016-06-07T13:52:47.062-07:00Good Reads giveaway...<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Anybody in Canada or the U.S. who wants to win an advanced copy of my book via GoodReads, should sign up below. Spread the word!</span><br />
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<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28691808"><img alt="Chasing Utopia by David Leach" src="https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1455765307l/28691808.jpg" title="Chasing Utopia by David Leach" width="100" /></a>
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by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14230705.David_Leach" style="text-decoration: none;">David Leach</a>
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Giveaway ends June 30, 2016.<br />
See the <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/187727" style="text-decoration: none;">giveaway details</a> at Goodreads.</div>
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David L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/03689866575986080183noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7636500187257034936.post-59996362307340514042016-05-21T13:00:00.001-07:002016-05-21T13:00:47.376-07:00Review: Safekeeping, by Jessamyn Hope<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><o:p><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span lang="EN-US">Safekeeping, </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">by Jessamyn Hope (Fig Tree Books, 2014)</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">I’ve always thought great literature charts the history of missed connections—and the human struggle to repair lost opportunities or absent relations. From Odysseus’s wandering return to Ithaca, to Anna Karenina’s doomed love affair, to the social and familial alienation of Leopold Bloom, the poignancy of literary art often comes from the longings and lamentations over what-might-have-been.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Missed connections form the heart of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23130304-safekeeping#other_reviews">Safekeeping</a>, </i>a beautiful novel by <a href="http://www.jessamynhope.com/">Jessamyn Hope</a> that spans the centuries but centres largely on a kibbutz near Mt. Carmel in the mid 1990s. I’d picked up the book, of course, when I learned of its kibbutz focus, especially the setting of a community on the verge of privatization. But I fell under the spell of Hope’s storytelling, characterization and unexpected shifts in narrative focus, even as I enjoyed how she wove the history of the kibbutz movement and the state of Israel into her novel’s backstory.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The missed connections—and the emotional turmoil they cause—are plentiful in </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Safekeeping</i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">, and most gravitate around a mysterious brooch, made by a Jewish goldsmith in the 14</span><sup style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">th</sup><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"> century, of great value and even greater personal significance. There are missed connections between a grandfather and grandson in New York City; a father and son in the same district; a kibbutz-founding mother and her privatization-minded son in Israel; two pairs of </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">star-cross’d </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">lovers—a Chernobyl-scarred immigrant and a Palestinian-Israeli, a thirty-year-old French Canadian who has grown up in a mental asylum and a teenage kibbutz musician disfigured in a terrorist attack; and the equally secretive affair between a Holocaust survivor and a kibbutz pioneer during the turbulent birth of a nation.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The brooch acts as an objective correlative to evoke this sense of missed connections even as it joins the disparate characters and historical timelines of the story, like E. Annie Proulx’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Accordion Crimes</i> or the movie <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Red Violin.</i> But Hope never overplays the brooch’s symbolic significance, and many of the characters resist its allure in interesting ways while others let its raw worth corrupt their personalities. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The main narrative follows Adam, a young recovering alcoholic haunted by many mistakes, through his months as a volunteer on a kibbutz in the Galilee on a mission, to return the brooch to a once-intended-recipient, whose importance even he doesn’t fully understand. Some of the most powerful scenes, however, are short interruptions or epilogues to the story of Adam and his grandfather. In one, Hope vividly evokes the horrors and desperation of a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death_Jewish_persecutions">Black Plague pogrom</a>—and the act that sets the novel’s drama in motion. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">History otherwise works in the background to the characters’ lives: the Holocaust, the founding of Israel, the Oslo Accords and bus bombings of the 1990s, the divided reaction to the Jewish State around the world, the rise and decline of the kibbutz movement as a society of equals. There’s a depth of research, but Hope never forces it upon her readers or her characters. Toward the book’s end, the vote about privatization on the novel’s kibbutz feels, in fact, anti-climactic. More important are the last actions of her cast of characters—and whether they can breach those missed connections that have left them alone, deeply damaged or both. Some do. Some don’t. We are often left to imagine how key figures manage the trajectory of their lives, rather than having it all spelled out for us by the book’s final pages.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">And the conclusion is a masterful exercise in surprise and indirection—a novelistic risk that pays off—that left me thinking and rethinking about all the characters and their decisions that had populated my imagination for the past two weeks.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Come for the kibbutz content. Stay for the storytelling. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Safekeeping</i> is a book that you will want to pass along to friends and relations, like a small heirloom too beautiful to keep to yourself.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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David L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/03689866575986080183noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7636500187257034936.post-27575769062599593322016-03-24T10:42:00.000-07:002016-03-24T10:42:01.676-07:00The final design...<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">And one more change. The journey from inspiration to publication for this book has been long and winding. I'd count it at six years of researching and writing — and 27 years of thinking about my experiences as a young, naive kibbutz volunteer.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The path to a final title, subtitle and cover has been equally circuitous, if a bit more accelerated. The marketing folks at ECW Press came back with one more recommended change — this time to the title... I was nervous when I heard the publisher wanted to switch the title <i>again</i>. (I'd changed it three times on my own.) But then I saw the new version, matched to the sunset image from the Hula Valley, and it all just felt <i>right</i>. And then we added "Future" into the sub-title and everything clicked.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Now, I've got a pair of Advanced Readers' Copies to make the book seem even more real — I can lift it up and flip through its pages and begin to worry about reviews! </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">mostly, I'm thrilled that this story — and the stories of the many people I met in Israel and the West Bank — will finally get shared with curious readers.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">So what do you think?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>David L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/03689866575986080183noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7636500187257034936.post-14835741644254141602016-02-05T07:47:00.000-08:002016-02-05T07:50:04.515-08:00Bernie's kibbutz revealed!<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Reporters at <i>Ha'aretz</i> dipped into the newspaper archives and discovered the smoking-gun to the "Where did Bernie volunteer?" mystery: in an <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.701513">interview</a> with reporter Yossi Melman from 1990, the Bernie Sanders said he spent several months in 1963 on Kibbutz Sha'ar Ha' amakim in Western Galilee. Media are already sweeping the kibbutz, near Haifa, to learn <a href="http://forward.com/news/332946/revealed-at-last-inside-the-kibbutz-where-bernie-sanders-lived-and-learned/">more</a>, although few people seem to have any memory of the young American who worked there before the big post-1967 wave of volunteers.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Anybody want to translate the original <i>Ha'aretz</i> story? Or more importantly, tell us if </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Kibbutz Sha'ar Ha' amakim has privatized since America's Best Known Socialist once worked there?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>David L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/03689866575986080183noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7636500187257034936.post-3955015480227564972015-11-27T15:03:00.000-08:002015-11-27T15:03:17.258-08:00And we've got a winner!<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">... or at least a winning sub-title for my book. Technically, I think it was my editor who helped slash through the kudzu of potential taglines and help me arrive at the words that will appear under <i>Love & Rockets. </i>Drum roll, please!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>Chasing Utopia in a Divided Israel</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">I think "Chasing" works better than the "Stumbling Towards" (too cute, too unclear) and conveys the sense that utopia — that dream of a better society — is always something we are in search of, the greener grass on the other side, the mirage on the horizon. It also (I hope!) suggests that the book is both about the kibbutz movement's search for utopia and my own quest to discover what became of that dream, 100 years after the first pioneers created Degania.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">So, the <i>Chase</i> is on. Next up: going through the editor's notes. ANother thorough fact-check. And hopefully some cover options to mull over.</span>David L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/03689866575986080183noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7636500187257034936.post-76810618449195364532015-11-10T12:27:00.000-08:002016-07-05T09:47:49.486-07:00Helen Mirren, kibbutz volunteer<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">British acting legend Helen Mirren was recently <a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4719196,00.html">honoured</a> in Los Angeles at the Israel Film Festival and spoke about her experiences in the country—including a stint as a volunteer on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HaOn">Kibbutz Ha'on </a>six months after the Six Day War, when the first wave of foreign visitors arrived to kibbutzes across Israel to fill in for members called up for Army service to defend the country. She recalls sleeping on the beach in Eilat—a pleasure that I shared, too, although two decades later.</span><br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9Er616E8tbk/VkJS8F7snfI/AAAAAAAAKZY/X4TknytpVBg/s1600/Helen-Mirren-Israel-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="245" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9Er616E8tbk/VkJS8F7snfI/AAAAAAAAKZY/X4TknytpVBg/s400/Helen-Mirren-Israel-2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">"That visit to Israel was one of the important building blocks, in my life," she told the audience. "The courage and the commitment of those early people working on the kibbutz that I was luck enough to meet briefly. These building blocks that make personal lives and that make countries."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Kibbutz Ha'on, however, is no longer a kibbutz. In 2007, the indebted community returned its land to the state and became a <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/indebted-kibbutz-ha-on-to-become-semi-cooperative-moshav-1.224888">semi-cooperative moshav</a> instead.</span><br />
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David L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/03689866575986080183noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7636500187257034936.post-72328986546799274232015-11-09T12:50:00.001-08:002015-11-09T12:54:00.213-08:00Insert [Sub-Title] Here<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">The good—no, <i>great</i>—news: my book has a publisher and a publication date. I'm thrilled to announced that ECW Press has acquired the <a href="http://www.quillandquire.com/omni/ecw-press-acquires-book-on-kibbutz-movement-by-uvic-writing-chair-david-leach/">world rights</a> to my kibbutz book with a publication date of Fall 2016.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">The manuscript is with an editor and I am working with the publisher and production staff to hash out the cover design and final title-sub-title combo... </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">... which is the bad-ish news: I'm stumped.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">I'll be the first to admit that writing display copy was never my forte as a magazine editor. I was okay at it (<a href="https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?id=550565484995707&story_fbid=846632802055639">"Land of the Lox"</a> for a feature about indigenous fish-farming in BC!), but I also worked with other editors who were masters at the catchy title/subtitle combo. It's not easy.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">My kibbutz book has proven that conundrum. It has evolved through several title variations:</span><br />
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<ol>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>The Shouting Fence:</i> That was the title of a <a href="http://lookbacktogalilee.blogspot.ca/2010/02/shouting-fence.html">poem</a> I wrote, as a 21-year-old writing student, in the voice of a Druze man. It was briefly the working title of the manuscript and remains as a chapter title about my visit to Majdal Shams. It's catchy and dramatic—but misleading. It evokes the divisions in Israel but nothing of the utopian enterprise of the kibbutz. Nixed.</span></li>
<li><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Look Back to Galilee:</i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"> The name of this blog was the working title of this project for years. It comes form a phrase used by one of the founders of Kvutsa Degania, who urged his compatriots to return to the Kinnereth—and the Galilee—to found their commune. But as one kibbutz researcher in Haifa told me on a visit in 2009: "It sounds kind of Christian." And while it evokes a sense of memoir, it isn't especially catchy either.</span></li>
<li><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Who Killed the Kibbutz? </i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">emerged late in the process as a front-runner when a grad student read a draft and suggested the manuscript needed more narrative drive and tension. What was the throughline? For a while, I thought it was the search for who or what had led to the decline of Israel's utopian communities. (I'm still kind of fond of this title.)</span></li>
<li><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Love & Rockets:</i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"> And then a bolt from the blue. I can't even remember how I came up with this title—perhaps mining all my memories from the late 80s reminded me of the band of the same name (and it's cover version of "Ball of Confusion"—which seems apropos to the book's themes). It echoes Erna Paris's </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><a href="http://www.ernaparis.com/works/the-garden-and-the-gun/">The Garden and the Gun</a></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">, a wonderful travelogue about Israel that heavily influenced my own decision to write his book. It's the title under which I finally sold the project—so I think it stays. (Famous last words...)</span></li>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">But I still need a sub-title. Why? Because nonfiction books have sub-titles! And as Jack David, ECW's publisher, explained to me: book buying (and promotion) is less about browsing physical store shelves these days and more about discovering a book online via key word searches. And a sub-title is the best place for such key words. <i>Utopia</i> was always a key theme and therefore a key word in all my proposed sub-titles</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">I just reviewed my progression of titles and subtitles and found the following:</span></div>
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<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>The Shouting Fence: Slouching Toward Utopia in a Divided Land</i> (2009)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>Look Back to Galilee: Stumbling Toward Utopia in a Divided Land </i>(2011)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>Who Killed the Kibbutz: Searching for Hope in a Divided Israel </i>(2014)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>Love & Rockets: Stumbling Toward Utopia in a Divided Israel </i>(2015)</span></li>
</ul>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">But the sub-title isn't quite there—and could use the word "kibbutz" somewhere in its syntax. Another writer also tsk-tsk'ed the use of a gerund in the sub-title, too. So I've been on a brainstormy voyage to come up with the perfect partner for <i>Love & Rockets</i>. Here's a list of ideas (some okay, others simply awful) that have poured out of my imagination:</span></div>
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<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">The Broken Dream of Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">The Broken Promise of Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">The Promise of Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">The Problem of Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Stumbling Towards Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Slouching Towards Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Looking for Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">The Long Road to Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Cast Out of the Garden of Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Cast Out of Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Leaving Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Losing Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz</span></li>
</ul>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">The "and" between "Israel" and "kibbutz"might be confusing, though, even though the book is about the utopian impulse in the kibbutz movement (which helped to found Israel) and in Israel in general (both inspired by and a reaction to the kibbutz). I previewed some options at our Grad @ Home party last Friday and got warm response to the "lost dream" theme in some of the sub-titles, so a few more variations....</span></div>
<div class="p1">
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<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">The Lost Dream of Utopia in Israel's Kibbutz</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">The Lost Dream of Utopia in the Kibbutz</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">The Lost Dream of Utopia of the Kibbutz</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">The Kibbutz's Lost Dream of Utopia</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">The Kibbutz's Lost Dream of Utopia in a Divided Israel</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">The Kibbutz's Lost Dream of Utopia for a Divided Israel</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">The Kibbutz and the Lost Dream of Utopia in a Divided Israel</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">The Lost Dream of Utopia in the Legendary Kibbutz</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">The Lost Dream of Utopia on the Legendary Kibbutz</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">The Lost Dream of Utopia on Israel's Legendary Kibbutz</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">The Lost Dream of Utopia in Israel's Legendary Kibbutz</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Israel, the Kibbutz, and the Lost Dream of Utopia</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Who Killed the Kibbutz and its Dream of Utopia?</span></li>
</ul>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">...at which point I just want to slam down my laptop and run screaming from the room. Nothing yet feels quite right.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Any suggestions? Any favourites? Anything that can save me from the madness of subtitle writing?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Update: I'll offer a reward—and give a copy of the book when it comes out to anyone who can dream up the perfect sub-title!</span></div>
David L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/03689866575986080183noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7636500187257034936.post-3464013182751087922015-10-28T21:35:00.001-07:002015-10-28T21:39:04.466-07:00Crowdsourcing the Quest for Bernie's Kibbutz<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The search for Bernie Sanders' former kibbutz has apparently heated up in Israel. <i>Ha'aretz </i><a href="http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/news/.premium-1.682249">reported</a> that the Kibbutz Movement has taken to social media (<a href="https://www.facebook.com/kibbutzmovement/?fref=nf">Facebook</a> to be exact) to generate leads on where the current Democratic presidential candidate might have volunteered in the 1960s. Non-Hebrew speakers can click on Google translate to get some comic suggestions. The crowd might not always have wisdom, but it always has fun.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Alas, my own lead came up dry. An elderly kibbutz researcher I know from Kibbutz <a href="http://www.mefalsim.co.il/mainsite.asp?sitename=mefalsim">Mefalsim</a> (which has many South Americans) recalled an American volunteer on his home kibbutz named "Bernard" (which Sanders went by as a young man). A search through the Mefalsim archives turned up no evidence of Bernie, however.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Still, I want to stake my claim to the Sanders' Search Reward right now by saying I'm 99% he stayed on Kibbutz Mefalsim!</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Of course, the bigger question remains: Why won't Bernie 'fess up to the kibbutz where we briefly stayed? What went on there that he wants to hide? Yes, it was the 1960s. We don't need to stretch our imaginations. Perhaps it was in Israel that he learned to play the bongoes like this...</span></span><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QzmVSGFW5HY" width="560"></iframe>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>David L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/03689866575986080183noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7636500187257034936.post-5426158126095051852015-09-06T22:06:00.000-07:002015-09-06T22:06:02.212-07:00Bernie Sanders' kibbutz (an update)<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">As soon as I shared my last blog <a href="http://lookbacktogalilee.blogspot.ca/2015/09/on-which-kibbutz-did-israel-feel-bern.html">post</a> on Facebook, a writer friend who had also lived on a kibbutz pointed out a glaring flaw in my Venn diagramming. The clues from Bernie Sanders' brother and his professor friend can, in fact, all be true: Sanders' kibbutz wasn't necessarily founded by Argentinian immigrants; it just needs a significant enough influx of South Americans before 1964 to have made an impression on the young volunteer from Brooklyn.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">So a revised Venn Diagram does have the potential for an intersecting middle: We should be looking for a kibbutz (likely in Western Galilee) founded between 1910 and, let's say, 1936 that also accepted large numbers of Argentinean Jews—probably in the wake of World War Two or the founding of the state. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Any suggestions?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">So far, going through the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kibbutzim">list of kibbutzim</a> on Wikipedia, I haven'</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">t found anything that fits that bill. Few of the listings enumerate where immigrants came from after the founding <i>garin</i> or group.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">I did start a list of kibbutzim founded by Argentinean or South American groups before 1964:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<li><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mefalsim">Mefalsim</a> (1949)</span></li>
<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ga%27ash" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Ga'ash</a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;"> (1951)</span></li>
<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metzer" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Metzer</a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;"> (1953)</span></li>
<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahan,_Israel" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Bahan</a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;"> (1954)</span></li>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><div>
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Nothing that could be confused as one of the oldest kibbutzim in Israel....<br /></span>David L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/03689866575986080183noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7636500187257034936.post-90563195842534477492015-09-06T10:42:00.003-07:002015-09-06T10:52:11.278-07:00On which kibbutz did Israel feel the Bern?<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Okay, I'll admit I haven't paid much attention to the <i>looooong</i> silly season of U.S. presidential nominations south of the border, beyond the Donald Trump memes floating across the Internet. I've been more engrossed by our own national elections here in Canada, especially the prospect of pro-Israel left-wing leader Tom Mulcair forming our country's first NDP federal government.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br />
However, I couldn't ignore the growing momentum of the David vs. Goliath campaign of Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont and lone U.S. socialist (as he's often billed), and the whole <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/feelthebern?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Ehashtag">#FeelTheBern</a> viral campaign to wrest the Democratic nomination from Hillary Clinton. What intrigues me most, of course, in the many profiles of Sanders—including <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/magazine/21Sanders.t.html?pagewanted=all">articles</a> and <a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Sanders.html">bios</a> that pre-date his presidential bid—are the casual mentions that the progressive Jewish politician volunteered on a kibbutz in Israel back in 1964. But the articles never, ever name the kibbutz.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Only Sanders knows which kibbutz taught him socialism can work</span></td></tr>
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I was intrigued. So were others. The Hunt for Red Bernie's Mystery Kibbutz was soon on. And yet so far, no luck. We've all struck out. Bernie Sanders and his press folks have declined to answer inquiries about which kibbutz he stayed on, perhaps because Sanders has already suffered from ridiculous <a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/06/nprs-diane-rehm-asks-bernie-sanders-about-israeli-citizenship-rumors-208583">accusations</a> that he is a dual Israeli-American citizen.</span><br />
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So let's piece together the clues so far to which of Israel's 270 or so <i>kibbutzim</i> Sanders might have worked.</span><br />
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<a href="http://www.tabletmag.com/author/jchana">Jas Chana</a>'s <a href="http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/192931/bernie-sanders-story">"Straight Outta Brooklyn"</a> for <i>Tablet Magazine</i> is an excellent primer to the life and times of Bernie Sanders. Chana outlines how, after graduating with a poli sci degree from University of Chicago and working for the Head Start program in New York City, Sanders and his brother Larry decided to travel to Israel for a bit of adventure. Here are key details from Chana's story</span><br />
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<span style="color: #2c3138; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large; line-height: 22.4px;">Both brothers decided to spend their time in Israel living and working on kibbutzim. Bernie arrived in Israel first and was there for six months total; Larry showed up four months after Bernie’s arrival and didn’t leave until 1967. In that time, Larry met his first wife and lived on two kibbutzim: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matzuva">Matsuva</a> in the north and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yotvata">Yotvata</a> in the south. Unfortunately, no one I spoke to for the purpose of this article had any idea or recollection of the name of Bernie’s kibbutz. However, <a href="https://www.uvm.edu/~religion/?Page=sugarman.php">Professor Richard Sugarman</a>, a religious-studies professor at the University of Vermont, one of Sanders’ closest friends, and the man who encouraged him to run for mayor of Burlington in 1980, told me it was one of the “oldest kibbutzim.” </span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Chana's interviews with both Professor Sugarman and Larry Sanders give the profile the most detail in any story I've read about how the kibbutz experience might have shaped (or at least confirmed) Bernie Sanders' beliefs in mutual aid and social justice. During his stay, Sanders was apparently curious about kibbutzniks economic plans, how socialism could work, how communal life gave parents more free time, and even just watching fellow Jews as farmers.... he had grown up in Brooklyn, after all. Sanders felt the kibbutz was "a utopian form of existence" (according to Sugarman) and proved that socialism could be put into practice (according to his brother).</span><br />
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But on which kibbutz—and from which federation—did he learn these lessons?</span><br />
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<a href="http://forward.com/author/naomi-zeveloff/">Naomi Zeveloff</a> traipsed through Israel to find out—and the <a href="http://forward.com/news/320344/my-quixotic-hunt-for-bernie-sanders-kibbutz/">title</a> of her article for <i>Forward</i> makes clear her lack of success. "The name of Sanders’s kibbutz might seem like a minor detail, but it’s important," she writes. "Among other things, it could build on our understanding of his formative years."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Her interview with Sanders' brother gives a teasing clue, when Larry tells her that he thought Bernie had stayed on "a kibbutz near the Mediterranean where there were a large number of Argentine volunteers in the 1960s." Through various sources, she zeroes in on three kibbutzim: Zikim and Sa'ad (near Gaza), and Ga'ash in central Israel. She spoke to several kibbutz representatives I'd also met during my travels (Dudu Amitai at Givat Haviva and former MK Avshalom Vilan). Unfortunately, because Sanders arrived in 1964, before the big influx of volunteers that followed the Six Day War of 1967 and the subsequent bureaucracy to track these new arrivals—Zeveloff could find no record of Bernie's visit. She also had no luck contacting members at the three kibbutzim she identified. A dead end. So she has out a call for clues—both in Israel and through <i>The Forward</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">In Israel, <i>Ha'aretz </i> put its own reporter on the case, but the title of Judy Maltz's article also reveals her frustrated quest: <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/.premium-1.674364">"Mission Impossible? Finding Bernie Sanders' Kibbutz"</a>. She wondered, as she set off, if she could track down an old-timer from the kibbutz where Sanders stayed who "might recall his hot romance with the gorgeous young kibbutznik who refused to return to the United States with him". (Shades of <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091652/">Not Quite Paradise</a>....</i>) </span><br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cwTvNtBeA-Q/Vex21_MkmtI/AAAAAAAAKXI/B1MAMmr0nGE/s1600/Not_Quite_Paradise.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cwTvNtBeA-Q/Vex21_MkmtI/AAAAAAAAKXI/B1MAMmr0nGE/s200/Not_Quite_Paradise.jpg" width="140" /></span></a></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">She hits all the right offices: the Kibbutz Movement, the archives of Yad Tabenkin and Yad Ya'ari. Nothing. Emails and messages to Sanders and his media advisers come up empty, too. Even Professor </span><a href="http://www.uvm.edu/~sgutman/huckspage.htm" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Huck Gutman</a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, a longtime friend and co-author of Sanders' political memoir, doesn't know. "The only person I know who knew Bernie then was Larry," he replies.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">So Maltz spoke with Bernie's brother, too, and he repeated the somewhat vague clue he gave Zeveloff: </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">“I am pretty sure it wasn’t the Negev. It had a number of South American members. I remember Bernard being impressed by one of the kibbutznik’s explanation of how they would transform Argentina. Without any reason to believe I am right, I would guess near the Mediterranean coast.”</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">So Maltz rounded up a dozen kibbutzim that fit these clues and emailed their names to Larry. But no bells ring, although Bernie's UK-based brother also admits: "I don't the name is stuck anywhere in my brain." Dead end.</span><br />
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So, let's examine the sparse clues and see if we can "profile" the potential locations for Berne Sanders' formative socialist—and Zionist— experiences:</span><br />
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<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Not the Negev</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Near the Mediterranean Coast</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">members from Argentina</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">one of the oldest kibbutzim</span></li>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Another potential clue: Larry Sanders' stay in Israel overlapped with his brother's by two months but it sounds like they never actually spent time together in Israel—or visited each other's kibbutzes.<br /><br />Larry stayed on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matzuva">Matsuva</a> near the Lebanese border (and the Mediterranean) and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yotvata">Yotvata</a> just north of the Red Sea, so I'm tempted to rule out any kibbutzes in close proximity to either of these regions, as I think Larry would remember if his brother had stayed on a kibbutz near his own.<br /><br />Using Larry Sanders' others clues, we can triangulate a few possibilities, as Zeveloff did, of Argentinean kibbutzes near the coast... although I'm surprised that <a href="http://www.mefalsim.co.il/mainsite.asp?sitename=mefalsim">Mefalsim</a> didn't make her cut. It was founded in 1949 by Argentinian immigrants, not far from the coast... or from the Gaza Strip. That would make a curious coincidence, as Mefalsim is also just minutes north on <a href="https://www.google.ca/maps/search/mefalsim+google+maps+israel/@31.4698475,34.550409,12.34z">Highway 232</a> from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be%27eri">Kibbutz Be'eri</a>, where Michele Bachmann—the other <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/Kibbutz-finds-note-from-volunteer-Michele-Bachmann">presidential candidate</a> to do time on a kibbutz—volunteered in 1974. Mefalsim is technically in the northern Negev, so perhaps it should be disqualified for that reason—although it's further north than Sa'ad, which did make Zekeloff's short list. Still, I've got a note to a contact there to see if I can find out more.<br /><br />The bigger problem? <br /><br />Larry Sanders' clues (Argentinean kibbutz near coast and not Negev) don't square with the single mysterious detail from Professor Sugarman (one of the oldest kibbutzes). The kibbutz movement began in 1909, with Degania. By 1939, there were 73 kibbutzim, most of them concentrated away from the Mediterranean in the Jezreel Valley, the Hula Valley, the Beit Shean Valley or around Lake Kinnereth (aka the Sea of Galilee). More problematic: I don't know any kibbutzim founded by South Americans before the Second World War; most were started with the immigration from South America after Israel's independence in 1949.<br /><br />Here's the rub: If we assume both Larry Sanders' clues to be true and Professor Sugarman's hint, too, we end up (as far as I can tell) with a Venn Diagram with no overlapping middle. So who's right and who's wrong?</span><br />
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<tr><td><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MZanq8DCAsQ/Vex4O2JF5iI/AAAAAAAAKXQ/qQX5sZoFSqY/s1600/Venn%2BDiagram.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="217" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MZanq8DCAsQ/Vex4O2JF5iI/AAAAAAAAKXQ/qQX5sZoFSqY/s400/Venn%2BDiagram.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">Argentinean kibbutzes by the sea / oldest kibbutzim</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Larry Sanders admits his memory is fuzzy, but the detail about Argentinian kibbutzniks seems so precise, he can't have fudged that. The two kibbutzes Larry lived on were founded by Germans and young native-born Israelis, so he hasn't transposed his own kibbutz kibbutz experiences for Bernie's. </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><br /><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And yet Professor Sanders is an acclaimed Yale-trained scholar of Jewish philosophy—i.e., not one to casually toss off half-remembered "facts" about an old friend's time in Israel. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br />Dead end. Or at least a puzzling crossroads.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">And so the quest to find Bernie Sanders' kibbutz only grows more mysterious. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Dear fellow questers: Shall we put a wager on it? The first to find where American socialism's last great hope once learned the ropes of communal life gets an extra week off from dining-room duty...<br /><br />Ready, set, go!</span></div>
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David L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/03689866575986080183noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7636500187257034936.post-80820272701247218422014-11-10T10:30:00.001-08:002014-11-10T10:42:25.043-08:00The Big Picture about Jerusalem<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Yesterday, I took my eight-year-old son and his friend to an IMAX showing of the documentary <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tejeDb_5WWs">Jerusalem</a>. </i>I doubt it was their favourite IMAX: <i>Vikings</i> or <i>Lemurs</i> were likely more to their taste for armoured battles and funny critters. But I left the expansive theatre unexpectedly moved by the words (narrated by <a href="http://www.jpost.com/On-the-Web/From-Middle-Earth-to-Middle-East-Benedict-Cumberbatch-voices-new-documentary-on-Jerusalem-323453">Benedict Cumberbatch</a>) and eight-storey images of the National Geographic profile (written, directed and co-produced by Canadian <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/imax-jerusalem-doc-explores-city-through-young-eyes-1.2563008">Daniel Ferguson</a>) of the Old City of Jerusalem, </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">its ancient history and contemporary life, the </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">sacred home to three major religions and geographical nexus between the civilizations of Africa, Asia and Europe. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">I’ve visited the city at least 10 times over the last 25 years, perpetually drawn through the stone gates and into the Escher-like labyrinth of the walled city. But I had never seen Jerusalem from the hovering and zooming aerial perspectives of the IMAX team, nor explored its subterranean depths—the ancient water springs that allowed its first peoples to settle on these rocky heights—or, in the unintentionally loaded phrase of one Israeli archaeologist in the film, the city’s “layers of occupation.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Likewise, the digital recreations of the landscape before settlement, the complete structure of the Second Temple, or the Temple Mount before the Dome of the Rock was erected allowed the architectural and religious history of the city—impossible to disentangle—to unfold in mere minutes. And the film brings to vivid life on the <i>very</i> big screen the pulsing music and song of the modern city, the chants of the faithful, the rituals of the holy days—Ramadan, Passover, Easter—that fill the narrow streets with celebrants who pour down from the hills and into the ancient city. Enough even to touch my own agnostic heart.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Unlike many IMAX features, <i>Jerusalem </i>doesn’t force too much of a saccharine narrative onto its cinematic showpieces. The threads of the three faiths—Jewish, Muslim and Christian—are joined through the lives and voices of three real teenage girls who live in or near the city. The city’s long history of conflict is acknowledged but not dwelled upon, and the three girls’ hopes for peace in their city remains shadowed by their acknowledgement that the three faiths remain isolated from each other in their geographical, spiritual and political quarters. The movie’s concluding image—a fine touch I won’t spoil—emphasizes the tenuous, ambivalent theme of reconciliation in a historically burdened and deeply divided city.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">It’s a movie worth seeing, for anyone interested in the Golden City, especially as Jerusalem descends into new levels violence, with Palestinian <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/israeli-settlements-in-jerusalem-increasing-tensions/">protests</a> over increased Jewish building in East Jerusalem, and <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/violence-jerusalem-trips-deep-fears-among-israelis-282534">vehicular attacks</a> and <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/10/israeli-woman-killed-palestinian-stabbing-attacks-rising-tide-violence">stabbings</a> in and around the city. Any hope for peace or even just stability in Israel and Palestine needs to address the paradox of Jerusalem and the obstacles of its various orthodoxies. Each side in the conflict must learn to transcend its narrow interests and internecine suspicions and see the big picture. It’s hard to imagine a bigger picture of Jerusalem right now than the one projected on <a href="https://www.imax.com/movies/m/jerusalem/">IMAX screens</a> around the world.</span></div>
David L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/03689866575986080183noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7636500187257034936.post-27099204755912755752014-07-30T22:19:00.001-07:002014-07-30T22:20:06.861-07:00Life on (and Leaving) a Border Kibbutz<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Even half a world away from the conflict in Gaza, in an area code as safe as Khan Younis is deadly, I still feel the weight of helpless despair as I comb through the news—on Twitter, via Facebook, dominating the nightly news and newspaper headlines—broken only by fits of outrage as I want to argue (and sometimes do) with one person or another on the Internet for posting a status update or a link that I find blindingly one-sided, naive or outright hateful. As if my words—or theirs—could have any meaningful effect on the outcome of the endless violence an ocean away. As if anything we say could take away the pain and suffering already inflicted and sure to come on all sides.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Then I turn back to my own life here in Canada. And try to finish a book about the kibbutz movement.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">So I was intrigued to read <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/.premium-1.608108">this story</a>, on the front page of <i>Ha'Aretz—</i>which I stumbled upon first, of course, in my Facebook feed—about the Jewish-Israeli border communities, most of them kibbutzim like Nir Am, that dot the frontier with the Gaza Strip. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Yes, the situation and carnage are far worse in Gaza itself. But reading the account of kibbutz residents fleeing—many for the first time, despite years of threats—struck home, as I've visited many similar communities on the northern border and a few (like Urim and Kfar Aza) close to Gaza. Destroying the so-called "terror tunnels" built by Hamas terrorists to infiltrate these communities, or to carry out a kidnapping like that of <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/misc/tags/Gilad%20Shalit-1.476999">Gilad Shalit</a>, was one of the purported reasons Israel launched its attack on Israel. (Of course, there are plenty of competing theories about the "real" reason for the conflict—from destroying Hamas to securing natural gas—that range from the plausible to the downright loony.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">This quote—about border kibbutzim turned into ghost towns—stood out:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">One Israeli security official with long experience of operations in Gaza refers to the phenomenon as “the biggest success of Hamas that nobody is talking about.”</span> </i></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The voices in this story echoed many of the kibbutzniks I've spoken to on my visits to Israel: the nostalgia for a time when Israelis once visited and shopped—and even had Palestinian friends—in the West Bank and Gaza. And how that seems like a dream time lost to the shadows.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The story also highlights the stark difference in reactions between the secular kibbutzim, from which many members have evacuated around the so-called "Gaza Envelope", and the one religious kibbutz of Alumim—still communal, still sticking out the dangers together. That same trend has played out in the larger kibbutz movement. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">It's also a reminder that religious nationalism, not secular socialist Zionism, is what motivates the "new pioneers" in Israel — like the always controversial settler movement in the West Bank (and once in Gaza) that pose one of the biggest political challenges to resolving the Conflict. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>David L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/03689866575986080183noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7636500187257034936.post-38060526242527806702014-07-21T21:42:00.002-07:002014-07-21T22:02:58.948-07:00War Diary from the Gaza Envelope<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>[This excerpt from my book-in-progress seems tragically all too relevant given the latest violence in Gaza.]</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">After my visit to the Arava Desert, I drove north out of the desiccated rift valley, headed west, dipped into and rose out of the earthen maw of the Rimon Crater, and then continued across the moon prairie of the Negev Desert. On the dusky pink horizon, Israeli tanks kicked up veils of dust. Approaching the coast, disoriented by nightfall, I missed a highway turn-off and unknowingly drove toward one of the gates to the Gaza Strip. Then I spotted a sign. A panicky U-turn corrected my navigational error before the Army checkpoint and the barbed-wire wall that contained the impoverished coastal enclave of Palestinians.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The next morning, I headed out from my room on Kibbutz Urim. A mammoth satellite dish dominated the skyline of a military base near the kibbutz. In the distance, above hemmed-in Gaza, hovered several white balloons, like weather gauges although more likely rigged with high-tech gear to eavesdrop into the Palestinians' communications networks. By the time I reached the outskirts of Sderot, my nerves felt jangly. I was half-expecting a rocket to drop at random on the bingo card of the urban grid of Sderot.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The blue-collar city of<b> </b>24,000 is like the Cleveland or Detroit of Israel. Sderot might get praised for its heartland values, but it remained the butt of hard-luck jokes from big-city snobs. A nice place to be <i>from</i>, but you wouldn't want to live there. Or visit. Or pass through. The general attitude was summed up in an episode of <i>Arab Labor, </i>the caustic TV comedy described as "Israel's <i>Seinfeld"</i>—except with a sharper bite. In one episode, a Jewish-Israeli photojournalist tries to woo a feisty Palestinian lawyer by promising to follow wherever she might move: "For you, I would live in Nazareth, I would live in Nablus…" He lists Arab cities no Jewish-Israeli would ever venture, except in an Army vehicle, before delivering the punchline: "I would even live in Sderot!" Ouch.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Sderot was established in the 1950s, a kilometre from the Gaza Strip, as a transit camp for Kurdish and Persian Jews, and grew into a "development town," a euphemism for communities hastily erected to house waves of new immigrants: mostly Moroccans in Sderot, followed by Ethiopians and later Russians from the Caucasus. The city remained out of mind for most Israelis until 2001. During the Second Intifada, Palestinian militants fired crude unguided, short-range rockets (known as Qassams, after the military wing of Hamas<i>) at</i> Jewish settlements within Gaza, border kibbutzes and eventually Sderot—more than 2,000 rockets by 2008. A "code red" warning gave residents 15 seconds to sprint to the safety of a bomb shelter. In 2007, the Israeli government gave special privileges to Sderot and nearby kibbutzes and towns within seven kilometres of Gaza—what became known as the "Gaza envelope" or, more cynically, "Qassamland." After Gaza became the international symbol for the plight of the Palestinians, the Jewish side promoted Sderot into the role of civic martyr. When Justin Bieber toured the Holy Land, the Israeli Prime Minister's office tried to rope the Canadian teeny-bop star (and evangelical Christian) into meeting fans from Sderot, a goodwill gesture with a political bent. (Bieber balked.) "What about the children of Sderot?" became a refrain to justify any action by the Israeli Army. In late 2008, after an uptick in rockets, the IDF launched the Cast Lead assault on Gaza and 1,400 Palestinians died. By 2011, the Israeli military had deployed the "Iron Dome" missile-interception system to protect the city, even as the municipal government teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Sderot would seem, then, a shaky foundation on which to construct a new utopia. And yet one of the most ambitious attempts to reboot the kibbutz had broken ground amid the city's maze of bomb shelters.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">I expected a city under siege. My route through Sderot took me past nondescript scenes of concrete buildings and red-tiled rooftops like dozens of other towns I'd visited in Israel. Shopping malls and apartment blocks. A community college and wide boulevards. Not a bombed-out shell. Not the Stalingrad-by-the-Sea I'd expected from newspaper headlines. Yes, I spotted graffiti-decorated concrete shelters. But that was all. The cobbled sidewalks and tree-shaded crescent of Kibbutz Migvan might have been a suburban lane in Anywhere, USA. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">But appearances can be deceiving. This was, I would learn, a city straining under the psychic pressure. Life as a symbol wasn't easy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">I parked the car and met Nomika Zion, one of the founders of Migvan. She showed me her book-filled townhouse and walked me through the kibbutz—a street of similar houses, with a shared building for meals and meetings, an open yard and volleyball net for recreation, and smaller top-floor apartments for younger members. I had to adjust my image of what a kibbutz should look like: no cotton fields, no orchards, no farm equipment, no factories, no country vistas and swimming pools, no barbed wire encircling the grounds. No drunken volunteers. Migvan looked more like one of the "co-housing" developments that were sprouting in progressive European and North American cities: Copenhagen, Berkeley, Vancouver. (The Danish founder of the international co-housing movement had been inspired, in part, by the kibbutz movement.) Migvan took the co-housing model one step further. They didn't just live together and eat together. They kept a common purse, too. Like the first kibbutz, everyone pooled their earnings. </span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-bWv0Zato_8g/U83wEcbfbEI/AAAAAAAAJ38/slsW3_3WCIc/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-07-21+at+9.59.20+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-bWv0Zato_8g/U83wEcbfbEI/AAAAAAAAJ38/slsW3_3WCIc/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-07-21+at+9.59.20+PM.png" height="332" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nomika Zion, co-founder of Kibbutz Migvan in Sderot</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Nomika had been born, like many of her neighbours, on a traditional kibbutz and raised among kibbutz aristocracy, political leaders and left-wing artists and intellectuals. Now in her 50s, she still had the liquid fire of her early idealism, as we spoke in a quiet office room. Her dark hair fell in coils past her shoulders, and her kohl-shadowed eyes pulsed between humour and sadness, outrage and inspiration, as she outlined the rocky journey she had taken to get here, from a rural kibbutz in the Jordan Valley to an urban commune next to the Gaza Strip. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">"I grew up in a very political family," said Nomika. Her grandfather, Yaacov Hazan, was a legend in the Labor movement, a founder of Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek and the Artzi Kibbutz Federation, and an elected M.K. in the first seven Israeli Parliaments. Her grandmother edited a psychology imprint for a publishing house. Her mother worked as a journalist and theatre director; her father was a public figure who career-hopped between socialist politics and avant-garde theatre. Nomika's early years bridged the pastoral idyll in Kibbutz Reshafim, where she'd been born, and her parents' cosmopolitan friends and colleagues in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. "I grew up in the kibbutz but also in bohemia, with actors and writers," she recalled. "I developed social sensitivity at a very early stage."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">As a young girl, she saw that kibbutzniks' ideals weren't always reflected in their behaviour. Reshafim was near Beit Shean, a development town, like Sderot, populated with poor Jewish immigrants of Mizrahi origins, from the Arab countries of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. There was little communion between the well-educated, well-connected Ashkenazi members of Kibbutz Reshafim—children of European immigrants—and the dark-skinned arrivals from North Africa.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">"The kibbutz surrounds itself with a fence—and that fence becomes a wall. I'm talking about an emotional and mental wall," Nomika told me. "And a profound conflict started to develop between the people from the kibbutz and the people from the development town."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">One Shabbat, when she was 10, Nomika invited several Mizrahi girls from Beit Shean to visit the kibbutz. When they arrived, boys from her school threw stones and taunted her guests: "Get out, you dark Moroccans! You Beit Sheanites! We're going to call the police!" The girls ran away, and Nomika never saw them again. Three decades later, she felt haunted by the incident.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">"It's an emotional wound in my heart," she said. The pain reminded her that human conflict springs from an ignorance, a lack of human contact, that well-meaning abstractions can't overcome. Later, at her kibbutz high-school, Nomika's peers were all high-achieving students from the same background, cut off from the country's cultural or political diversity. "When people don't meet each other, they start to develop stigmas and stereotypes and prejudices toward each other. And this is what happened to us." Kibbutzniks were locked in an echo chamber, a suburb for socialists, in which they never heard opposing points of view. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">"You build your identity in the reality of conflict," observed Nomika, "much better than in a homogenous society where people all come from the same ideological roots, the same background, the same mentality. And we were a very homogenous society." </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">During a pre-Army year of civil service, Nomika worked with high-school drop-outs. In her second year in the IDF, she taught in the slums of Netanya, a coastal city north of Tel Aviv. "Very violent young people—teenagers," she recalled. The year was 1981. The rancour of a national election split Israel into factions: Labor Party supporters versus the Likudniks, Ashkenazi versus Mizrahi Jews, secular versus religious Israelis, kibbutzes versus development towns. In Netanya, Nomika represented everything the kids from impoverished immigrant families had learned to despise. "I remember so much hostility and hatred and violence toward me—not as Nomika, but as a symbol," she said. "So I realized I had to make a major change in my life and try to create a true dialogue with these young people."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Many of her friends had left the country. Nomika stayed home. She worked briefly as a journalist. She taught in a kibbutz high school. For three years, she worked in the offices of the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement. She convinced parents and school officials to remove kibbutz students from the homogenous high-school system to study for a year instead in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, among non-kibbutz peers. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">"The idea was to expose them to a different reality, different voices. To break the wall that we had built around ourselves," said Nomika. "This was the seed of the urban kibbutz."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">That idea, however, took a few years to germinate. She began to talk with friends from college about founding a new social model of living together—neither the lonely crowd of the multicultural city nor the isolated collective of the old kibbutz. Something different. A fusion. An evolution. An <i>urban</i> kibbutz. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">"It was only a title. An empty word," she admitted. "We had to build the vision of what it would be about."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">One friend brought another. A nucleus coalesced around the notion of a city commune. They met every month and organized cultural evenings and seminars with readings and debates, how to build this new society. Typical hippy-dippy stuff. People came and people left until, as Nomika recalled with a smile, "after two and a half years, we said, 'Okay—it's time to give birth!'" </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">But to what? And where?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">There <i>was </i>an urban kibbutz, in a poor neighbourhood of Jerusalem, named Reishit, founded in 1979 by former members of Nomika's home kibbutz. Reishit had been an inspiration. So her group visited Jerusalem as a possible location. They considered Holon, too, an industrial suburb south of Tel Aviv. Nomika suggested they add Sderot to the short list. Then they debated the options: <i>Where could they do the most good?</i> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">They voted. Sderot won. Everyone who didn't like the result left the group. A core of six remained. "Young, very ideological!" Nomika raised her fist and smiled at the memory. "We decided to come here because we wanted to make some <i>tikkun</i>—personal and social <i>tikkun</i>, yes?" She asked if I understood the Hebrew word for "repair" or "heal."<i> </i>"The first goal was to repair the damage and build a new relationship with the people from the kibbutzim and the people from the development towns."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">"Sderot today is a multicultural and multi-tribal city," said Nomika. "So what do you think we have in common?"</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">I didn't know. It wasn't politics obviously. It wasn't religion. It wasn't social status or ethnicity.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">"The ultimate answer, of course, is the rockets. <i>Qassams</i>!" Nomika laughed darkly. "External threats always unite people."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Sderot had enough to worry about with its rapidly growing population, its mix of immigrants, its poverty and exclusion from mainstream Israeli life. Then, in 2001, the city added downpours of rockets to its forecast. The Second Palestinian Intifada broke out, more violent then the first, with bus bombings and Qassams and infiltrations. Sderot was the closest, densest urban centre to Gaza. And a target.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">"Eight years we were living under Qassams," recalled Nomika. Thousands of rockets and mortars dropped on the streets and buildings of Sderot. The Israeli Army responded with devastating air and ground attacks. Still, the rockets rained down. Even after the Israel's unilateral pullout from Gaza in 2005, the citizens of Sderot felt anxious, depressed, eager to escape. Rates of crime, substance abuse and divorce rose in the city. A 2007 study revealed that half the residents suffered from symptoms of post-traumatic stress; nearly two-thirds admitted they would flee Sderot if they could afford to. A tenth had already abandoned the city. (Other residents with a dark humour posted a banner that read, "I came to Sderot because it enchanted me," punning on <i>Kassum</i>—the Hebrew for "enchant"—and <i>Qassam.) </i>Worst of all for Nomika was the hardening of attitudes toward the Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere by the citizens of Sderot, even her fellow kibbutzniks. In January 2008, the conflict was at a low point. Upwards of 50 rockets hit the city every day for a month, without respite. The wail of sirens was a soundtrack to daily routines. Citizens kept one foot ready to spring into their personal shelters—a requirement, since the 1980s, in Israel's building code—when they were at home. They kept an eye out for the nearest bomb shelter when they walked the streets. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Like others, Nomika felt helpless under the barrage, without a voice. So she and a fellow Migvan member gathered 20 people from Sderot and nearby communities to discuss their feelings about the situation, how the tit-for-tat reactions between the militants in Gaza and the IDF had only escalated. "They hit, we hit back. Always stronger and stronger. And we were trapped in this vicious violent cycle which never stops." They named their new group <i>Kol Aher, </i>or Other Voice. The members connected with citizens in Gaza who shared their hope. The two sides couldn't meet in person so shared stories via phone and email. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">In late December of 2008, the IDF launched Operation Cast Lead. Residents of Sderot cheered as Israeli fighter jets dropped deadly payloads on Gaza. Two families left Migvan for good. "Because the relationships are so close here, it's like cutting an organ from your body," said Nomika. "We didn't know if we were going to survive as a community." Other members would have abandoned Sderot were it not for a loyalty to the disadvantaged populations of Sderot they served. Within the kibbutz, political tensions percolated among friends once united by progressive beliefs.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">"The people of Migvan became very extremist," said Nomika, her voice tinged with disappointment. "The war brought a lot of tension to our community. It was better not to talk about it, because to confront other people all the time just leads to a dead end. I can feel the tension today."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Staying quiet didn't come naturally to Nomika, so she wrote an open letter to the government about life as a citizen under siege with a front-row seat to the deadly fireworks of Cast Lead. She acknowledged her own anxiety about the Qassams but argued that changes in her friends and neighbours—in her homeland—scared her more. "I am frightened," she wrote, "we are losing the human ability to see the other side, to feel, to be horrified, to show empathy. With the code word 'Hamas' the media paints for us a picture of a huge and murky demon that has no face, no body, no voice, a million and a half people without a name."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">She did not want anyone to believe the war was for her benefit, as a citizen of Sderot. "Not in my name and not for me did you go into this war," ran a line that would become a chorus. "The bloodbath in Gaza is not in my name nor for my security." The newspaper editor who published her letter used that phrase as a headline. Overnight, her <i>cri de coeur</i>, so out of tune with the martial demands for payback from other corners of her country, went viral on the Internet. Her "War Diary from Sderot," as it became known, was translated into more than 20 languages as it jumped from website to website, from nation to nation. Television crews showed up on her doorstep. She did a half-dozen media interviews—every day.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">"I started to get so many responses from all over the world and from Israel," she recalled. "People said, 'You are our echo—this is the saner and human voice we are afraid to express because everybody supported the war.'"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">She also received threats, accusing her of treason. But the positive reaction affirmed her belief that hope might lead out of the darkness. Her friends in Other Voice offered a forum for views not always welcome on her own kibbutz. On any kibbutz, for that matter.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">"This is a very significant group for me because my friends, my so-called leftists, are not leftists any more," said Nomika.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">A gardener in Migvan, one of the kibbutz founders, a man who had once been so opposed to serving as a soldier in the West Bank that he went to jail for six weeks as a conscientious objector, had spoken to Nomika about the situation in Gaza. "If they shoot one Qassam," he told Nomika, "we should destroy the whole village." </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">"What about the women?" she replied. "The children?"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">"I don't mind," he said. "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The encounter chilled Nomika. "This is the new game in this region," she told me. "Completely changed. And this is what happens to people. What the Conflict did. It has left a profound mark on their souls."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Nomika Zion remained active in Other Voice, a public spokesperson, in Israel and abroad, against military action as the sole option to keep Gaza in check. In January 2013, the <i>New York Review of Books</i> published a translation of another letter she wrote, addressed to Prime Minister Netanyahu, in protest of yet another military operation against the people of Gaza. "We will continue to raise another voice in the dwindling light, as we wait anxiously for the next bloody round," she promised her country's politicians and an outside world that has grown numb to the endless news cycle of violence in the region.</span></div>
David L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/03689866575986080183noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7636500187257034936.post-88228468459795562862014-06-30T22:25:00.001-07:002014-06-30T22:35:09.866-07:00The horror, the horror<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Despite its inevitability, it was the worst of all possible news today, from the West Bank, with the </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/01/world/middleeast/Israel-missing-teenagers.html?_r=0" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">discovery of the bodies</a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"> of the three yeshiva students not far from Hebron. Eyal Yifrach, 19, Naftali Fraenkel, 16, and Gilad Shaar had been last seen hitch-hiking from a Gush Etzion intersection. Israeli authorities had gotten a cellphone call from one of the panicked boys, but botched the response—and several have since been dismissed or demoted. Two Palestinians, associated with Hamas, are the leading suspects but have yet to be caught as the IDF and Israeli Border Police scour the West Bank. All hell is about to break loose.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Two of the students had been studying at the yeshiva in <a href="http://www.kfar-etzion.co.il/">Kibbutz Kfar Etzion</a>. Coincidentally, I’d been working on a chapter—hopefully, the last in my book—about my visit to Kfar Etzion in December of 2012. To put it mildly, I’d be struggling with this chapter. And avoiding it for as long as possible. Almost everything is controversial in Israel/Palestine. But the combination of religion and an Israeli settlement in the West Bank is doubly so. And yet Kibbutz Kfar Etzion, and the people living there, represent to me the deep complexity of “The Conflict,” and how there are no easy solutions.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">It’s also why, amid the unbearable sadness of the news—and what has already been a forceful and fatal Israeli military response to the original kidnappings—I don’t have time for the social-media posturing on either side of this deep divide. The tit-for-tat calls for revenge. The whitewashing of terroristic murder by a crude accounting of past deaths and historical injustices. Or the belief that the killings were inevitable, maybe even justified, because the students were living and studying on occupied territory.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">A fact of the matter: Kibbutz Kfar Etzion is not going anywhere in any realistic peace agreement. (Even if the words “peace agreement” seem like a wild fantasy right now.) The settlement was built before the War of Independence, and fell on <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/02/massacre-marred-birth-israel-independence">May 14, 1948</a>, and 157 defenders of the village—all but four—were executed by Arab Legion and irregular forces. In 1967, after the Six Day War, the kibbutz was re-established, led by rabbi <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/world/middleeast/hanan-porat-jewish-settlement-leader-dies-at-67.html">Hanan Porot</a>, who had lived there as a child. Any peace agreement will likely draw its lines around the borders of the Etzion Bloc, just as negotiators must wrestle with what to do about Ariel, the city of 18,000 that squats in the centre of the northern West Bank and disrupts the contiguity of any future Palestinian State. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Other Israeli settlements might get uprooted, like those in Gaza during the unilateral disengagement. But smart money says the Etzion Bloc and Ariel are there to stay. No kidnappings or murders will change that. No international <a href="http://www.bdsmovement.net/">BDS</a> movement will convince the residents to move or the government to move them. Kfar Etzion will remain and must be reckoned with, realistically, in any debate about the future of Israel and Palestine. </span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Eliaz Cohen (left), poet & peace-maker of Kfar Etzion</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span class="s1">During my visit there, I spent the afternoon with Eliaz Cohen, a religious poet and social activist who lives on the kibbutz. He is as complex, if not more so, than Kfar Etzion itself, and I will save a full profile of Eliaz for my book. In an <a href="http://972mag.com/a-settler-for-the-right-of-return/10969/">essay of his own</a>, he once linked the revival of Kfar Etzion to the plight of the Palestinians: “</span>The unique characteristics of the return to Kfar Etzion offer a preparatory model for returns yet to come—this time, perhaps, returns by Palestinians. In whatever scenario comes to pass … we must not allow further dispossessions of residents of this land, whether Jewish or Arab, anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">He also published a <a href="http://www.amazon.ca/Hear-Lord-Poems-Disturbances-2000-2009/dp/1592643132">book of poems</a>, translated into English, written during the worst years of the Second Intifada. I will quote at length from one poem called “News” to cast light on these days of darkness:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>The news on the radio said</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>another terrorist attack at the Kisufim</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>and a woman met her death</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>(which until now was lost in the valleys)</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>*</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>they also said:</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>at the government meeting they will discuss the threat of earthquakes</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>(unaware that the earth is already trembling)</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>*</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>a wayward bullet is searching for its soft address</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>I saw a man seeking brothers all along the way</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>in the analytical mind a red light went on long ago</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>the weather will come in desolation and ruin</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>*</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>the sea will be calm when at length we reach it with depleted strength.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>And that’s the end of the news.</i></span></div>
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David L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/03689866575986080183noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7636500187257034936.post-4322966544880412002014-02-16T21:12:00.002-08:002014-02-16T21:56:35.138-08:00A kibbutz in Africa<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">During my research, I've been curious about the impact of the kibbutz as an idea and an institution beyond the borders of Israel. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Living or volunteering on a kibbutz has shaped the lives of tens of thousands of non-kibbutzniks, of course. But the idea of the kibbutz, as a communal settlement, has never really been successfully transplanted — not on a large scale — outside of the nation where it was founded.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">I'd heard that it played a role in shaping the early ideas of the Danish co-housing movement. And I'd stumbled across Jewish <a href="http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/60701/home-away-from-camp-newmans-kibbutz-yarok-is-a-place-to-relax-learn-and-wor/">summer camps</a> and an <a href="http://www.artkibbutz.org/">art colony</a> and a briefly lived <a href="http://www.jtnews.net/index.php?%2Fnews%2Fitem%2F9491%2FC22%2F">intentional co-op in Seattle</a> that all wore the label of "kibbutz". Even an <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Features/A-kibbutz-environment-in-Costa-Rica">eco-resort</a> in Costa Rica. A</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">ll were relatively small scale. None truly reflected the revolutionary communalism of the original kibbutz.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">One of the most intriguing kibbutz-inspired communities is the <a href="http://www.asyv.org/">Agahozo Shalom Youth Village</a>—and, alas, I only learned of it from the obituary <a href="http://forward.com/articles/192010/anne-heyman-jewish-philanthropist-dies-in-florida/">notices</a> of its founder, Anne Heyman, who died recently in a horse-riding accident. Heyman had founded the youth village, in Rwanda, as a way to help and to help the many orphans, now adults, who had lost their parents in the horrific genocide in 1994.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Heyman, a New York lawyer and Jewish communal activist who was born in South Africa, viewed Israeli kibbutzes that took in Holocaust orphans as a model for coping with the hundreds of thousands of children orphaned by the Rwandan genocide.</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">She had looked back at history, to the lost generation of the Holocaust, and how the kibbutz movement had welcomed these orphans into their sanctuaries. She had seen the power of the communal ideal to provide the support — nurturing relationships, meaningful education, and purposeful work — to help repair the unfathomable losses suffered by these children, to help them find a path to a hopeful future out of the darkness of the past.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The Agahozo Shalom Youth VIllage is perhaps the best example I've found of the kibbutz dream evolving and taking a new yet equally inspired form in soil far beyond that of Israel/Palestine. It's so tragic that the woman with the vision to make it a reality has died, so young (just 51), before she could truly see what it might grow into. I only hope that it, too, survives her passing. </span><br />
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David L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/03689866575986080183noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7636500187257034936.post-45314298856075943102013-07-16T16:09:00.000-07:002013-07-16T16:11:24.453-07:00Kibbutz controversy on Findhorn<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">I've been shamefully neglecting this blog, while busy with teaching—and also finishing the manuscript whose research this blog was set up to track! In short, the first draft of the book is nearly done. It's too long—by nearly 100,000 words—but then again, there's a lot to say about the kibbutz, its 100+year history, and the utopian impulse that continues to spring from this experiment in radical sharing.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Last month, I travelled to the north of Scotland, to the <a href="http://www.ic.org/icsa/about.html">International Communal Studies Association</a> triennial gathering, in the fascinating New Age community of Findhorn—a place that deserves a book entirely of its own. (In fact, it has <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Magic-Findhorn-Paul-Hawken/dp/055323403X">several</a>.) The last ICSA meeting had been in Israel, to mark the centennial of the kibbutz movement, and it was there that I had met many research contacts and experts in kibbutz studies.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This time, I'd agreed to give a paper on how the lessons of kibbutz architecture and design might be applied to improve the community life and reduce the ecological impact of run-of-the-mill suburbs (like the one I grew up in). It was, to be honest, a reworking of the <a href="http://tedxvictoria.com/">TEDxVictoria</a> talk I gave in 2011:</span></span><br />
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I also led a fun workshop / design charrette / hackathon called "Greening the 'Burbs," which encouraged participants to brainstorm in groups to generate ideas on how to retrofit suburbia for a greener future. About 20 people took part and came up with wonderful concepts, including neighbourhood "skill-sharing" sessions, "defencing" backyards, edible community gardens, and a "boutique" (like Findhorn's) where people can drop off unwanted clothes and other goods—and pick up (rather than purchase) "gently used" items. Think of the neighbourliness that develops when you spot someone wearing your old sweater! (Check out all the conference abstracts <a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/22754825/Book%20of%20Abstracts.pdf">here</a>.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In a pique of over-enthusiasm, I'd also agreed to give a literary reading, from my book-in--progress, at an evening event called "The Great Sharing". The selection I'd brought was a darkly comic excerpt from a chapter about a strange and charismatic German volunteer named <a href="http://www.lostamigos.com/members-detail.aspx?id=83726710-ee4f-48e6-9144-28c34d4cd30f">Wolf</a> and his raucous birthday party on <a href="http://www.shamir.org.il/">Kibbutz Shamir</a>—which ended with the night sky lit up by flares, over northern Israel, as the IDF tracked down and killed (as we later read in <i>The Jerusalem Post)</i> several Palestinian insurgents from Lebanon. The chapter was a reminder that for all of our drunken volunteer revels, we were still living in a land forever on the edge of violence. I'd read the excerpt, to good response, at our faculty literary evening last spring. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But then a mini-controversy erupted at Findhorn. And it centered on the kibbutz. And Israel. And the Palestinians.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Even here, in the far north of Scotland, it turned out that this divisive issue could threaten to over-shadow an academic gathering advertised as a way to discuss and promote "communal pathways to sustainable living"....</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What happened? </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A group called the <a href="http://www.scottishpsc.org.uk/">Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign</a> had got wind of the ICSA conference and noted that a number of Israeli academics and kibbutz members were attending. (In fact, the ICSA has been founded and has its main office based in Israel.) They planned to protest. Those of us in attendance noticed something was up when police cars appeared during the opening day of the conference. At one point, two Scottish cops inspected a bulletin board on which photos of every presenter was pinned. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Are they looking for one of us?" we joked. "Is there a criminal in our midst?"</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Details of their "investigation" leaked out. First as rumour, then as fact. The police wanted to make sure any protest was peaceful. The visiting Israelis had been briefed about the SPSC and its intentions.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I never saw a protester in the flesh, but I did spot a couple of cars labelled with signs and fact-sheets putting forward the SPSC's position. Later, a kibbutz-based professor whom I knew complained that the SPSC website had explicitly targeted him under an article titled <a href="http://scottishpsc.org.uk/index.php/zionism/since-1948/a-zionist-state/mass-dispossession/1575-findhorn-community-proudly-hosts-supporters-of-ethnic-cleansing">"Findhorn Community 'proudly hosts' supporters of ethnic cleansing"</a>. Tensions were rising, even if most non-Israelis were largely unaware on the online attacks on the conference and Findhorn. Organizers—already stretched with running a major international conference—were meeting with the SPSC, members of the Findhorn community sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and the Israeli attendees to broker a compromise. An anonymous leaflet about the issue, dropped off (and then quickly removed) on dining-room tables before a meal, only sparked more concerns.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the end, both the Findhorn Foundation and the ICSA board (which I had just joined) hammered out <a href="http://www.findhorn.org/programmes/454/#.UeWyuGR4ZEk">statements</a> about the controversy. Both were read aloud at the conference's final event.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And my literary reading? Well, I decided to scratch my name from the reading list for the Great Sharing, an hour before the show. People would likely prefer to hear the musicians do their thing anyway, I figured. I didn't need to throw fuel onto a fire that was already making kibbutz colleagues feel uncomfortable and was distracting from the discussions about intentional communities and sustainability. (The organizers of both the conference and the talent show both agreed.)</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yes, there is a good panel discussion to be had about the kibbutz movement's checkered relations with the Palestinian people, the role the kibbutz played in both establishing the state of Israel and (to a lesser degree) extending its reach into the West Bank and Gaza. My book research has dealt, in part, with some of the failures of the kibbutz—and some of the efforts of new utopians and kibbutzniks—to bridge that divide. People like Anton Marks, of <a href="http://www.kyovel.org/">Kvutsat Yovel</a>, who was at the conference to talk about the urban kibbutz movement and its social-justice efforts—and who went to prison as a conscientious objector rather than serve in the Occupied Territories. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">However, I don't think the SPSC was especially interested in having such a nuanced conversation on the issue. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'm trying to tackle it in my manuscript, knowing full well that my take on the topic will likely please neither side in a debate in which Black shouts down White and vice versa, while Shades of Grey cower in the corners and try to get a whisper in edgewise.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Perhaps a panel session at the next ICSA conference, in 2016, might tackle the thorny problem of the kibbutz's relationship with the Palestinian people from a variety of angles, historical and contemporary. It could be a way of moving past the Israeli/Palestinian debate as a litmus test for ideological correctness and instead engaging in a genuine debate about how to build peace by cultivating truly inclusive communities. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Utopian? I sure hope so. Because that's what the ICSA—and my book—is all about.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>David L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/03689866575986080183noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7636500187257034936.post-11433281308253061142012-10-24T21:59:00.003-07:002012-10-24T22:00:32.067-07:00Kibbutz divorce from Labor?<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">For years, kibbutzes in Israel reliabley delivered the votes of their members to the left-leaning Labor Party (and its predecessors) in exchange for a guaranteed seat in the Knesset and (back in the days when Labor actually formed governments) a hand on the levers of the power. That decades-old wedding may be headed for divorce court.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">News out of Israel suggests that the Kibbutz Movement is pissed off by a proposal, by new Labor head and former journalist <span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px;">Sheli Yachimovich, to combine the guaranteed seats for each the Kibbutz Movement and the Moshav Federation into a single seat that would represent the whole spectrum of Israel's communal settlements. That doesn't sit well with kibbutzniks, who always saw themselves as more ideologically committed as pioneers than the wishy-washy cooperative farmers on the moshavs—even if most kibbutzes have since "privatized" and operate far more like moshavs (or even gated country suburbs).</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The article can't resist a poke at the puzzling distinction between a kibbutz and a moshav—a huge difference to kibbutzniks but a bewildering hair-splitting to everyone outside their fences: </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">"An old joke best explains the distinction between a kibbutz and a moshav: if a kibbutznik had enough, he’ll probably move to a moshav (easier communal rules); but if a moshavnik had enough – he sure as heck is not moving to a kibbutz (even more stringent communal rules)."</span></span></blockquote>
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Of course, the Labor Party bickering, amid polls that show right-wing Benyamin Netanyahu likely to form another coalition in the next election, only underscores the growing disfunction of the Israeli Left and the profound loss of influence (even among traditional allies) of the once powerful Kibbutz Movement.</span></span>David L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/03689866575986080183noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7636500187257034936.post-37080960854391190932012-05-07T14:35:00.002-07:002012-05-08T10:55:25.751-07:00Comics without Borders: Review of Guy Delisle's Jerusalem<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br />Guy Delisle’s new graphic travelogue, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.ca/Jerusalem-Chronicles-Holy-Guy-Delisle/dp/1770460713/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1336426472&sr=8-1">Jerusalem</a>: Chronicles from the Holy City </i>(<a href="http://www.drawnandquarterly.com/">Drawn & Quarterly</a>, 2012)<i>,</i> is framed with images of a plane arriving and then departing. In between, he recounts a narrative of the year he spent in East Jerusalem, Israel and the West Bank with his wife, who was assigned there for Medecin sans Frontieres (and who remains a distant presence, perpetually busy with her NGO work, throughout his book) and two young kids, Louis and Hanna, who occupy far more of his time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />A Quebecois animator and graphic novelist, <a href="http://www.guydelisle.com/english/index_en.html">Delisle</a> strikes a wry, self-deprecating persona: a kind of bumbling house-hubby Everyman, naive, prone to faux pas while also quietly judging people based on how much they know and like comics. In Jerusalem, the world's most complex city—an urban jigsaw puzzle drawn by Franz Kafka and die-cut by M.C. Escher—he finds an endless supply of paradoxes and ironies to befuddle him. What has become "normal" in Israel, East Jerusalem and the West Bank appears in all its tragedy and folly when described in minute journalistic detail. But the “journalism" practised by Delisle is as much eavesdropping and observing as researching and interviewing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />His sense of bewilderment begins when old Russian man with concentration camp tattoos lifts up and calms his crying daughter on the plane. It continues when he says “Shalom!” to the driver who picks them up at Ben Gurion Airport—and realizes he should have said “Salaam!”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />The next day, an MSF officer tries to explain the political-geographical complexities of the city after Guy and his wife get settled into an apartment in East Jerusalem: They are in the capital of Israel according to the Israelis but in the future state of Palestine according to the international community, many of whom consider Tel Aviv the capital of Israel.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />“I don’t really get it,” Guy reflects, “but I tell myself I’ve got a whole year to figure it out.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />By the end, though, it’s hard to know if he knows whether he has come closer or farther away from understanding the funhouse mirror chamber of identity and ownership in this densely packed (with people, with cars, with history, with religion) urban space.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />He finds himself constantly caught off-guard by the the quirks, the rituals and the conflicts of all three major religions: the wail of the muezzin that wakes his daughter just after she goes to sleep; taking his family to lively West Jerusalem, only to discover it completely deserted on shabbat (“It reminds me of Sundays in Pyongyang,” he says); feeling guilty about munching an apple on Ramadan; the literally and figuratively Byzantine politics of the various Christian denominations jostling for influence (sometimes physically) over the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; or leading a comics seminar for veiled Muslim women, who are studying to be art teachers yet are prohibited by their religion from drawing people or animals.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />When he mentions to a shawarma shop owner, in East Jerusalem, that his girlfriend “works for Doctors without Borders,” there is a long pause, as the owner slices off strips of meat, and then replies: “There’ll <i>always</i> be borders.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />Delisle tries to negotiate, as an outsider, the perplexing political nuances of life in East Jerusalem. He checks out a supermarket in a nearby Jewish settlement but resists buying his favourite cereal (Shredded Wheat, which he can’t even get in France) so as not to support the controversial West Bank settlements. But then, as he is leaving, he spots “three Muslim women loaded down with bags". He visits protests at the checkpoints around the Separation Barrier and sketches the wall obsessively.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />He gets moved most noticeably from his otherwise resolute neutrality—more a knowingly ignorant curiosity than high-minded journalistic objectivity—by three separate visits to Hebron: one led by an MSF staffer; another by a member of Breaking the Silence, the NGO that records testimony from Israeli soldiers; and a third by a right-wing religious settler who elides or even contradicts the stories Delisle has heard on the other tours. (The settler mentions only one of the city’s two infamous massacres.) The bitter separation between the tiny Jewish community and the larger group of Palestinian citizens of Hebron is poignantly symbolized by the netting strung over the souk, to catch garbage hurled onto Arab passers-by by angry religious settlers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />The month by month chronology of his family’s year in East Jerusalem gives the book an anecdotal quality, which gains resonance with repeated images or visits to different sites (like Hebron, or the wall, or Tel Aviv). No single incident acquires more prominence—not even Operation Cast Lead, the IDF assault on Gaza midway through his stay, which draws NGOs, like his wife’s, into a flurry of activity. Delisle’s later attempts to negotiate access to Gaza for himself get rebuffed when officials find out he is a comic artist. The imbroglio over the Danish cartoons of Mohammed has been in the news; Delisle also wonders if he hasn’t been mistaken for the more politically motivated comics journalist <a href="http://www.fantagraphics.com/artist-bios/artist-bio-joe-sacco.html">Joe Sacco</a>. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />One mini-chapter that most resonated with me is Delisle’s first visit</span><span style="font-size: large;"> to Ramallah</span><span style="font-size: large;">, driven there by an acquaintance form the Alliance Francaise. “I’m quite surprised,” he notes. “I thought Ramallah would be a dead city, crippled by the conflict.” He meets a Palestinian animator who says it is easier for him to “get to London than travel five km to Jerusalem” for work. A foreign correspondent tells him: “Ramallah is like the Tel Aviv of the West Bank. People are freer and more open-minded here.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />Then Delisle’s acquaintance, who still has other business, suggests he take a bus back through the army checkpoint to East Jerusalem—technically, not allowed under MSF rules. What follows is the darkest page and a half of the book (literally, in the inky shadowing of the frames): 10 panels, without any text, in which Delisle depicts his claustrophobic point-of-view amid the crush of people queued to pass through the barred-in checkpoint for bus and foot traffic through the Qalandia checkpoint. (It immediately brought back my own memories of an hour and a half lined up at the same checkpoint.) He emerges into the light from the prison-like enclosure with a swirl of incomprehension over his own cartoon head. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />That scene could be a metaphor for the book as a whole: a wise narrative filled with insightful observations that only prove how darkly puzzling and incomprehensible life in the holy—and wholly divided—city of Jerusalem really is. <i> </i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Jerusalem</i> is a must-read for anyone interested in this part of the world. (Download a preview <a href="http://www.drawnandquarterly.com/shopCatalogFeatured.php">here</a>.) </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I realize, of course, that there is not a single mention of a kibbutz in his book. But that fact is also telling: Delisle's chronicle is about life in modern Israel, and especially the city of Jerusalem, and the kibbutz, as an institution that long symbolized the modern Israeli, is now increasingly divorced from and irrelevant to this reality.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>David L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/03689866575986080183noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7636500187257034936.post-10425415856152465802012-05-01T13:19:00.000-07:002012-05-01T13:20:40.241-07:00RIP: A man of peace<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;">It was great shock that I read, via Twitter, of the <a href="http://nswas.org/spip.php?article1023">death</a> (at age 60) of Abdessalam Najjar, one of the founders and leaders of Wahal-al-Salam/Neve Shalom—the village of Palestinians and Jews located near the Latrun Monastery. I'd interviewed him, in 2010, and found him a remarkable man: super-smart, funny, wise, an engaging storyteller, and a committed man of peace. </span><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;">I spoke to him for more than an hour, and knew throughout talk that I had to try to squeeze as many of his words as possible into my book (should I ever finish writing it). </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Born in Nazareth, Abdessalam—perhaps more than anyone I met on my different trips—exemplified the utopian spirit of the original kibbutzniks. He had taken the path less travelled and chosen to live, in peace if not always harmony, with the people who he'd been taught were his enemy. He had helped to create in the "Oasis of Peace" a model that proved that Arabs and Jews could sit together and talk about their different situations, their competing narratives and grievances, could live together, could go to school together. That the walls of hate (and concrete, too) that had been erected too hastily could be pulled down, brick by brick.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;">I included a short <a href="http://lookbacktogalilee.blogspot.ca/2011/02/q-with-abdessalam-najjar-oasis-of-peace.html">transcript</a> from our interview earlier on my blog. But Abdessalam had so much more to say—to me, to the world. It is a profound loss to his homeland and for the hope for peace over violence in Israel and Palestine.</span><br />
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<br />David L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/03689866575986080183noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7636500187257034936.post-13741275190627251232012-03-21T12:20:00.000-07:002012-03-21T12:20:27.105-07:00News from Oz<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
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<span style="font-size: large;">[Yes, it's finally time to emerge from my teaching shell and update my blog!]</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">A new book by Israeli author <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos_Oz">Amos Oz</a> is cause to celebrate for any lover of world literature. But for a kibbutz-o-phile obsessed with the inside story of communal life, a fresh collection of Oz’s wry, ironically observed stories of life set on a rural commune can seem heaven-sent. And then you realize it’s still only in Hebrew. Which you don't read.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"> <br />Oh well, at least the weekend magazine of the newspaper <i>Ha’aretz</i> has published a <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/amos-oz-i-get-up-in-the-morning-and-ask-what-if-1.418823">long interview</a> with the the 73-year-old ex-kibbutznik and elder-statesman of Israeli letters about his life, his politics, his literary influences and his new anthology of stories, <i>Between Friends</i>, set on apocryphal Kibbutz Yikhat. (Why it is so hard to find this level of literary discussion, let alone 5,000 words devoted to a writer, in a Canadian publication is another story…)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />In the article, Oz talks about the utopian dreams of the kibbutz founders:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The first ideal of the kibbutz was sharp: to transform human nature instantaneously. Effectively, they [the founders] set out as a youthful camp, in the innocent belief that they would remain 18 and 20 forever. A camp of young people who were liberated from their parents, from all the prohibitions and inhibitions of the Jewish village and Jewish religion − a camp in which everything is permitted, suffused with perpetual ecstasy, and where life is always at a peak. You work, argue, love and dance until your strength runs out. It was childish, of course. In time, it became dulled. And then what came to the fore were the constants of human nature. The vulnerability, the selfishness, the ambition, the materialism and the greed. It was a forlorn dream, imagining that it would be possible to triumph over all those forces, be reborn and create a new human being without the shortcomings of the old one</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />He discusses why he left Kibbutz Hulda (because of his son’s health), and how his new collection allowed him to reflect on what he left behind, good and bad:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">There were a few things I didn’t like about kibbutz life. But I feel the absence of those things that I did like. And in this book I wanted to go back and look at them. Especially at the loneliness in a society where there is (supposedly) no place for loneliness. In a few of the stories a situation is portrayed of “almost touching”: People very nearly touch, but something blocks it. Like in the painting by Michelangelo where finger almost touches finger.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I am very curious about loneliness and grace, or a moment of grace amid loneliness, because that is a description of the human condition. The stories are set on a kibbutz, but they tell about universal situations, about the most basic forces in human existence. About loneliness. About love. About loss. About death. About desire. About forgoing and about longing. In fact, about the simple and profound matters which no person is unfamiliar with.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />He explains how curiosity can make us more “moral”—that, in effect, literature’s ethical function isn’t necessarily to teach us lessons but to let us see the world through another’s eyes:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I think a person who is curious is slightly more moral than one who is not curious, because sometimes he enters into the skin of another. I think a curious person is even a better lover than one who is not curious. Even my political approach to the Palestinian question, for example, sprang from curiosity. I am not a Middle East expert or a historian or a strategist. I simply asked myself, at a very young age, what it would be like if I were one of them.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />He admits he still has no regrets about living (and leaving) on a kibbutz. Writers will be especially interested to hear Oz discuss how communal life offered the ideal milieu to develop his literary ear and eye:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I do not regret it for a second. I regret a few of the experiences my children underwent on kibbutz. There were some hard bits, but I left Hulda without anger. For me, the kibbutz was an ultimate university of human nature. I spent 30 years with 300 people in intimate proximity. I saw everything − them and their lives − and knew their secrets. If I’d spent 30 years in Tel Aviv, or New York, I would not have had the slightest chance of becoming so intimately acquainted with 300 souls. The price was that they knew more about me than I would have wanted them to know. But that’s a fair price. In terms of my writing, I learned much of what I know about human nature on kibbutz.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />And I love his metaphor for how he has come, if not exactly to praise the kibbutz, then definitely not (like so many critics in recent years) to slay this once-legendary institution:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Unlike others, I am no longer slaughtering sacred cows. There was a time when I did. Not today. Besides which, in every cowshed there is one sick old cow left, surrounded by a herd of exultant, gung-ho slaughterers. I am almost always on the side of the cow. It’s not that I don’t know what a foul smell that cow gives off. And it’s not that I worship it. But between the cow and the slaughterers who gather around − I prefer the cow. I am talking about Zionism, the kibbutz and the labor movement.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>David L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/03689866575986080183noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7636500187257034936.post-88336292399356497002011-12-21T10:26:00.000-08:002011-12-21T10:40:40.365-08:00Living in Glass Houses<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br />If it walks like a kibbutz and talks like a kibbutz—or rather, <i>looks</i> like a kibbutz and <i>works</i> like a kibbutz—then surely it must be one, no? That was the question I puzzled over, on my recent trip to Israel, when I stayed for four days and nights on the fascinating community of Nes Ammim.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />First a correction: In a <a href="http://lookbacktogalilee.blogspot.com/2011/11/on-road-again.html">blog post</a> from the road, I hastily described <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nes_Ammim">Nes Ammim</a> as a “German-run kibbutz”. People there, who had googled my blog, quickly corrected me. Yes, there are Germans among the leaders and volunteers. But Nes Ammim was founded, in the early 1960s, by Dutch and Swiss citizens, led by Dr. Johan Pilon from Holland and Dr. Hans Bernath from Switzerland, both physicians working in the Galilee. Americans volunteers arrived later, as well as a steady contingent of Germans—but only after German nationals were finally permitted to visit Israel. (A basic history can be found <a href="http://www.nesammim.com/inner.php?section=history&lang=eng">here</a>.) But German-run? Hardly! </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"> My confusion, perhaps, is understandable. Nes Ammim confuses the basic definition of a kibbutz. When most people picture a kibbutz, they imagine a rural settlement of secular Jews, founded by blue-shirted pioneers inspired by the ideals of utopian socialism. Marxist farmers with bronzed arms and short-shorts. (Yes, there are a handful of religious kibbutzes, but they never played as large a role—except for Kfar Etzion—in the mystique of the kibbutz movement.) People never imagine a village of blonde Christians growing roses. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />Nes Ammim isn’t even on the radar among kibbutzniks within Israel. When I told Israeli friends and acquaintances that I was visiting a kibbutz of European Christians, they gave me incredulous looks, as though I’d said I was staying with the Tooth Fairy: they had never heard of Nes Ammim. In fact, after four years of intense research into utopian communities throughout the region, I only stumbled across the website for this community by accident, a couple of months before visiting.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />On my first afternoon in Israel, in late November, as I entered the grounds of Nes Ammim, it certainly felt like I had arrived at a kibbutz. There were the surrounding fields, the gate (open) and guardhouse (empty), a swimming pool and a carpentry shop, a dusty ring road and winding pedestrian paths, the rudimentary tin-roofed volunteer cabins, with everything focused on the the dining hall and office complex at the centre of the property. The kitchen has a bit of a split personality on Nes Ammim. Most of the kibbutz’s revenue now comes from its guest house, popular with Israelis escaping the summer heat and Europeans escaping their own winter, so the kitchen prepares food for tourists in the restaurant as well as residents and volunteers in a more barebones, buffet-style communal dining hall. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />The original kibbutz movement had two goals: establish the borders of a future state in Palestine for the Jewish people (ie, Zionism) and create a new model for living in equality (ie, utopian socialism). </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />So what was the founding vision of Nes Ammim? Obviously not the first: Israel existed by the time the idea for Nes Ammim arose. And the second? Perhaps only tangentially—certainly the spirit of radical sharing was in the air at the time. But the founders of this unique community had a more specific goal in mind: to create a community within the young state of Israel that would help Europeans and Christians, and especially European Christians, emerge from the dark shadow of the Holocaust, from millennia of pogroms and anti-Semitism, and heal the deep chasm of suspicion with the Jewish people. It would be a new community, modeled on the successful Jewish invention of the kibbutz, where dialogue groups and encounter sessions between leaders of the two religions could take place. The name of the kibbutz—<i>Nes Ammim</i>—means “a banner for the nations” and comes from the Book of Isaiah. It refers to God’s promise of everlasting peace in paradise for all the people on earth, which will be announced by such a sign. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />The idea for Nes Ammim earned the support from kibbutz leaders (it would become an associate member of the movement) and Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. However, influential rabbis worried that Nes Ammim would be a front for evangelizing Christians trying to convert Israeli Jews. They opposed the plan—and the community—for many years. Once rumours circulated, thousands of people in nearby Nahariya marched in protest, too. The founders only got government permission to settle the property, purchased from a Druze sheikh, after they signed an agreement that promised never to proselytize. Every new volunteer must sign a similar “no-preaching” contract.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Swiss Family Kibbutznik: the famous bus at Nes Ammim</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /><span id="goog_1325565736"></span><span id="goog_1325565737"></span>In 1963, a Swiss family drove a rickety old school bus with faulty brakes—a “gift” from Israeli friends—off the heights of Nazareth and across the untilled fields of the property. They parked on a hill: the bus would become the first building of Nes Ammim. It remains today as a museum and a reminder of its ad-hoc origins. Slowly, residents and volunteers who moved to and lived on Nes Ammim earned the trust of their Jewish neighbours, in part by never abandoning the settlement during the six wars that threatened the nation. Eventually, Germans—who weren’t even permitted to visit Israel during its early years—were permitted to stay as volunteers in the 1970s. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />Nes Ammim developed a communal economy around avocado orchards, olive groves and its famous “glass houses”: greenhouses that deployed the horticultural expertise of Dutch residents to grow and sell roses. Bouquets of Nes Ammim roses became a sought-after decorative element at receptions for visiting foreign dignitaries. While the settlement was always intended to be permanent, residence there wasn’t. Leaders stayed on Nes Ammim for perhaps five or six years at most and then returned home. Volunteers usually lived there for a year or less. The kibbutz followed this pattern for years, slowly growing, adding buildings and residences, while new people cycled through and gave it energy and life.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />Like the rest of the kibbutz movement, though, the turn of the millennium saw Nes Ammim suffer an identity crisis. The community could no longer compete with cheap flowers imported from Africa and had to shut down the glass houses—for decades, the signature feature of its economy. The violence of the Second Intifada and the Second Lebanon War cut into bookings at the guest house.The population of European families moving there had declined and many of the houses were being rented out to Israeli tenants.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">And there were existential questions, too: What was the purpose and value of this place, 40 years after its founding? The European attitude toward the state of Israel—once wracked with guilt, now more aligned with the plight of the Palestinian people—was also shifting. How should Nes Ammim react to these changes? Could it evolve with the times?</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />I had walked unknowingly into the midst of this debate. For the last few years, Nes Ammim has focused not only on dialogue work between Christians and Jews, but also between Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews. The site of the kibbutz, leaders realized, could be used as neutral ground (or as neutral as any ground gets in Israel) for different groups within the country to meet and talk and build trust. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />Nes Ammim had just broken ground on an even more ambitious project. Like almost every other kibbutz in the country, they are building a rural subdivision to be marketed to outsiders. Unlike almost every other kibbutz, Nes Ammim plans to use a new law that allows community settlements, in the country’s north and south, to interview and select residents—to screen newcomers, in other words—as a way to populate a mixed neighbourhood of Arabs and Jews, much like <a href="http://lookbacktogalilee.blogspot.com/2011/02/q-with-abdessalam-najjar-oasis-of-peace.html">Neve Shalom/Wahat-al-Salaam</a>. (This law has proven <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_settlement_%28Israel%29">controversial</a>, and come under legal challenge, because it has been used to exclude Arab residents interested in moving into Jewish settlements. Of course, membership by vote has been the kibbutz model from the very beginning.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />Not everyone I spoke with at, or associated with, Nes Ammim was keen on these changes. Some doubted that the community would attract enough Jewish residents to balance the population of this new neighbourhood. Others worried that Nes Ammim would lose the European character that had made the place unique, and with it, the focus on healing the division between Christianity and Judaism, between modern Europe and modern Israel, which has only grown in recent years. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />The young Dutch and German volunteers I met on Nes Ammim, however, seemed excited by the prospect of change. Their experiences on the kibbutz had been enriched, they told me, by the opportunities to see and hear about the complex nature of Israel from multiple perspectives: to learn Hebrew from native speakers, to tour the Holocaust Museum at the nearby <a href="http://www.gfh.org.il/Eng/?CategoryID=231">Ghetto Fighters Kibbutz</a>, to teach English to kids at the next-door Arab village, to meet school groups from both sides of the conflict, to visit the West Bank, to realize how many shades of grey exist behind the black-and-white stories of the region they were fed by the media back home. (I was envious of the rich experience these volunteers were getting on Nes Ammim, a far more intimate and honest look at life in Israel—especially the mixed Arab-Jewish region of Western Galilee—than 99.9% of foreign visitors will ever encounter.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />Nes Ammim was a place, sleepy as it might seem, that will always attract a whiff of controversy. How can you bring different religions together and not expect some friction? Perhaps that tension between its harmonious aspirations and its contentious reality is best symbolized in the sculpture that rests in the foyer of the kibbutz’s “church”. The building itself has been largely stripped of evidence of any faith or denomination. No cross, no icons, nothing but chairs facing a bare altar. The entrance, with a koi pond and rock garden in its centre, has the aura of a Zen Buddhist sanctuary more than anything else.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />Then your eye is drawn to the sculpture in the pond, like a nativity scene floating on a disc. Three sets of ten figurines face a central pillar with three doors. The terracotta-coloured figures are arranged in a V-shaped 1-2-3-4 pattern, like bowling pins, aimed toward the three-doored hub. A closer inspection reveals the particulars of each faith in the figurines’ genuflections: Muslims prostrate on the ground, Christians kneeling, Jews—a minyan of them—standing, heads bent, holy books in hand. </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A pool for prayer: the many-layered sculpture at Nes Ammim</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The symmetry of the design is meant, of course, to suggest a harmony between these faiths, a place of coming together. It isn’t always read that way: Why does one door look more open than the others? What is meant by the hierarchy of the figures’ stances: standing, kneeling, prone? And as a few visitors have asked: Where are the Druze? The Ba’hai? Aren’t there more than just three faiths in the area?</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />I was told that the kibbutz members had to erect the low wire barrier that surrounds this installation because curious observers and anonymous sculpture critics, either by accident or design, kept inspecting the set-up and knocking over the figurines. You can see where the heads of decapitated worshippers have been glued back on. So now, in Nes Ammim, a place of faith and healing, a Christian utopia for Jews and Muslims, a fence must guard even this representation of their equality before the Almighty, this microcosm of the community’s higher ideals. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The sculpture is, quite literally, a “floating signifier”—a symbol even more symbolic than it was originally intended.</span></div>David L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/03689866575986080183noreply@blogger.com1