27 December 2006



Any reader of this blog will quickly understand that I am missing the entire Christmas season. Looks like we got a little bit of the season spirit here.

After a long dry spell here, it began to rain last night. No drizzle, no sprinkling -- serious downpours with thunder & lightning. The rain continued through this morning...then turning to hail...then sleet...and finally at about 2pm, snow.

The snow went in and out in terms of intensity, but think snowflakes were soon covering the entire area, eventually sticking to the ground. My view from campus of Jordan got fuzzier and fuzzier with time, until it was a total whiteout. The Israeli students and staff were flipping out, getting their pictures taken outside. They all kept asking me if it felt like Christmas, which of course it did. Soon enough the Israelis, myself included, started acting like Washingtonians in a snowstorm -- freaking out. Rumors were spreading of classes being cancelled, and everyone was abuzz with what would happen with the multiple high-profile programs at Hillel tonight. By 4pm, all events and classes were cancelled, even mine which was supposed to be at one of the dorms.

WOOHOO! Snow Day in Israel! We had it comin', not getting off for Christmas.
I get on the bus, and as we pull into the winter wonderland, I turn my iPod on the random shuffle mode. What comes up as the first song? "Snowstorm," by an indie rock group named Galaxie 500, only to be followd by the Xmas carol "Joy to the World" in Arabic. Coincidence?

Getting home was surprisingly unadventurous, through the slick and mucky streets and the incredible views of this city under snow. The pictures above are from my balcony at around 6:30pm, so the lighting isn't as dramatic as it was before.

I'm still doing my homework, so as to fulfill the requirements of Murphy's Law for school to be cancelled tomorrow. My street hasn't been plowed nor treated with snow, and when I left campus, the outside walkways were filled with slush and liable to freeze over into ice tonight.

If I dare to venture outside tonigh , I'll bring the camera.

23 December 2006

I don't know what others dream in their sleep. Sometimes it's several different thoughts or experiences from the last few days that are mushed into one seamless narrative that is on par with work by Dali. And then there are dreams which fall somewhere between memories and predictions that leave me with constant bouts of deja vu.
Take the other weekend for example. I was helping lead a group of overseas students to Eilat for the weekend. Eilat is the southernmost town in Israel, located on the Red Sea, with Jordan and Egypt visible from the city center. In the past 6 months, I have had two dreams about Eilat which left me rather reluctant to go down there.
The first was connected to a beach that I grew up going to on the Delmarva Peninsula (I've taken a vow of silence in naming this place, for fear that the encroaching tourism from other locales will soon reach it). The ocean has been slowly but surely encroaching on the beach, to hte point where every few years the parking lots on the other side of the sand dunes are covered in water. My mind equated this already tiny piece of land with Eilat, with my entire extended family trying to flee the encroaching water by driving endlessly. The second was again had my entire extended family as cast, this time going on a vacation to Eilat. The land got progessively narrower and and narrower, to the point that at the last hill overlooking the town, once could see the ferries that took passengers to Eilat, which was now an island in the middle of a raging sea.
There's a lot more for me to explore in this country, and every time I take the train here I'm amazed at how big the land feels here....yet we're still talking about a country whose length is less than that when I drive with my parents from DC to our realives in Cincinnati. Part of immigrant absorption here is not just the culture and bureaucracy, but the compactness of things. Interesting that this lesson got taught through dreams.

It's Christmastime and I'm missing it intensely. I've downloaded more than a dozen songs, watched "Charlie Brown Christmas" and "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas" online, and my mom (who just arrived the other day staffing a trip here, definitely nice to see her), brought me my CD of a famous Arab singer and her Semitic covers of classic Christmas songs, and a copy of "A Christmas Story," a true classic that I grew up watching.
It's going to take a long time to get the Christmas affinity out of me. There's something about the lights, artificial happiness, and constant biblical-themed programming on cable stations that gets me very excited in a way that Passover only can vis a vis Jewish holidays. Despite living in Jerusalem, there's very little awareness and visiblity that it's Christmastime. The other week I had to go to the city center by chance, and lo and behold the main pedestrian throroughfare was decked in lights. The parallel road was covered in icicle lights, leaving me speechless. The flower stores in the shuk are selling poinsettias, almost tempting me to buy one.

I make no apologies about my connection with Christmas, not when I sang carols with the overseas students while in Eilat, and not tomorrow when I listen to them on the way to work and classes.

12 December 2006

Postscript to the previous post: You absolutely have to click on the link for the Lottery here, www.pais.co.il. Click on the blue button at the bottom of the screen and you can see the taped lottery drawing from tonight. All I wanted were the numbers, and instead I good a huge dose of laughter.
In anticipation for the drawing, there's a studio that looks lie it's from the early 1990's (i.e., contemporary Israeli), with an orchestra andsingers performing everything from "The Impossible Dream" in Hebrew, "If I Were a Rich Man," "Money, Money, Money", and the drawing is set to a live jazzed-up redntion of the theme song from the promos. This is too good.
Much to my astonishment, I did not win. The most I got in one row (the ticket looks a lot like Powerball from the States, but a LOT more expensive) was two. Oh well, better luck next time, right?

11 December 2006

Tomorrow, in my required course entitled "Problems and Methodology in MidEast Studies," I'm giving a short presentation ("Refarat," the Hebraized form of "report") on the biography of the late Edward Said. I'm working on polishing up the 15-minute report now, including translating it into Hebrew (I'm not quite at level of original compositions in Hebrew).
A few things struck me as I was reading up on his life:
-For a moment, skip his politics and ideologies regarding Israel, American Jews and the West. The trained English professor was intellectually and academically dishonest. In his seminal work "Orientalism" he not only chose works that proved his already-formualted thesis regarding the West's inherent racism and feelings of superiority over the East (and thus left out even more evidence that contradicts his thoughts), but he lumped together writers and thinkers with varying levels of academic background and respectability. His insistence to generalize and leave out other, non-supporting examples sounds a lot like, um, his argument against the West's generalizing of the East.
-"Orientalism" was introduced as an upcoming topic to the class last month, so people could read it. From the reactions of students, I have to unfortunately assume they never read it as an undergraduate. Again, say what you will about the man and his influence on making my field of study one bug subjective mess in the States, but this is a pretty important book. And these students are only now reading it??
-This Methodologies class feels incredibly out of place in Israel. The class is an ongoing discussion on history and social theory, with philosphy thrown in for good measure. For a system that's that seems driven (at least by the students and administration) on final examinations and a "getin & out of class fast" policy, this class is out of place. Mind you, I think it's great.

I broke down this evening and bought a lottery ticket for tonight's big 50 Million Shekel drawing ($11.5 million). Supposedly half of Israel's adult population has bought a ticket in this drawing, whose promotion has gone on for way too long. You can see the promo at www.pais.co.il, but I'll explain its significance: The zero in the "50" is shaped like a hamsa ("five" in Arabic), a common Middle Eastern symbol meant to bring good luck and more importantly keep away the Evil Eye. Just as some people will say "tfoo tfoo tfoo" to ward off bad luck, many in ths neck of the woods will say "hamsa hamsa hamsa." The jingle, "50 Million, Let's hope it's for me" is set to the tun of a recent and famous Mizrachi ("Oriental") song that anyone in Israel recognizes.
Granted, the liberal arts-NYU alumnus-DC liberal in me wants to tear apart the promotional posters in the name of ending the commodification of the socio-economic lower class' cultural and ethnic traditions for the sake of a product that naturally preys on the lower classes...but I still haven't found the corresponding word for "commodification" in Hebrew. Not to mention I cannot stand Marxist theory.
It's interesting, I bought a ticket, and that's all for now.