14 July 2007

Thursday was Part One of my Arabic final which would entail solely of translating an article into Hebrew with the use of dictionaries. Called in the entirely original Hebrew an “unseen,” this type of testing baffles me. If there were vocabulary words we had to know in advance, or if there were questions about the article that needed to be answered, this would prove an important test; while knowing how to effectively translate is an important skill, somehow three hours of thumbing through a dictionary seems like a waste of time.
As if the style of testing wasn’t frustrating enough, the first sentence of the article summed up everything wrong with Arabic education in this country: “What’s Israel’s differentiation between an ‘agent’ and ‘spy’”?
I grew angrier and angrier as I translated the article, as it was clear we’re learning Arabic for the sake of working in the security services in the near future. Never mind understanding our neighbors in the way Spanish is taught in the States, let alone getting some history, culture, and society enrichment…we need to learn how to translate from the Arabic “the two spies were sentenced to seven years, one of which was commuted.” I left the test foaming at the mouth, cursing the school out as I made my way home.

How did I get over this? By going to an open house of a new degree program at the Interdisciplinary Center, the first private university in Israel. After a long time of planning and waiting, they’re finally ready to open an MA in Government program with a focus in either Diplomacy & Conflict Studies or Counter-Terrorism with an optional research track. My two good friends from NYU and I went, salivating over the program and its teachers. The registrar of the program is a fellow NYU graduate; the classes sound incredibly interesting; the place bills itself as an elite insitution of higher education; the three of us together again in a self-described elite school.…I know I’m not content at Hebrew U and often fantasize about leaving without a definite plan, but the morning at the IDC in Herzliya seemed to fit together.

Shabbat was spent eating at friends’ and catching up on sleep. Saturday was filled with cool breezes rushing through my apartment, carrying along with it the bells from the Monastery of the Cross, located in the nearby valley and thought to be the spot where the tree from which The Cross was made grew.