Jerusalem, the anti-Paradise

Jerusalem...such a city of contrasts. It is lovely by morning, and then gets more and more abhorrent as the hours pass by.

I was in Jerusalem yet again this morning to deal with bureaucracy surrounding my possible immigration. I had an appointment at 9, and I slept at a Jerusalem hotel where my mom was staying for a business trip. I had a nice full breakfast and set out to the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, toting my bag and a bottle of water and taking it easy in the 91 degree heat. The sidewalks were lined with trees, the roads were relatively clear, and I was enchanted by the unique smells of Jerusalem in warm weather: baking asphalt partnered with leaky old cars.

After my appointment, I met a friend for coffee and continued to revel in being in Jerusalem without hating the city, which is what I usually do there. However, once I left the cafe to catch a bus, I realized that my hate is justified, at least after noon.

As I waited for the bus at a stop designed to spread shade in the wrong direction in sunlight, a strange woman asked to use my phone. I selfishly declined. The bus took twenty minutes to arrive. Finally an extra-long Route 21 pulled up, filled with older cranky women and older ultrareligious men, with the only young people incessantly on their phones. We crept through traffic for a half hour before getting to the bus station, where to get inside I had to ward off several would-be line cutters. My seat-mate on the bus took up 70 percent of the available space. He passed out with his arm and shoulder right on top of me, and every time I moved his limb it shifted lazily back into position.

In sum, Jerusalem is like a bad one-night stand. Pleasant for a few hours, then utterly repellent.

Purim, a Peek into Israel's Soul

It's the holiday of Purim right now, which is the Israeli equivalent of Halloween. The story behind it is the following: They tried to kill us in Persia, we won, let's put on costumes and get wasted.

Naturally in an era of globalization, in a country where people weave English into their conversations, the costumes are part of the American Halloween bouquet. What I am saying is that if you thought Slut-o-ween, the idea that women use Halloween as an excuse to dress in poor taste, was limited to America, think again. I saw a woman pole dancing with an Israeli flag at a party yesterday, a definite first.

This holiday is amazing in Tel Aviv. Since Wednesday there have been huge parties, street festivals, parades every day and sometimes at night. People are blatantly taking alcohol on buses and running around the city in costume. Here are some of my favorite outfits I have seen so far:

- Devils (I can't get enough of Jews with horns)
- Nurses with red Stars of David on their hats
- Anne Frank
- Pumpkins, American Indians, and other costumes that have nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with the USA
- Palestinians
- A man with a box on his genitals. Behind the times but still appreciated.

There goes another career option

Lately I have been thinking a lot about how to turn my irrational obsession with food into cold hard cash (and warm fresh dinner). Writing seemed like a good bet...until I read this NY Times article about how all these former all-star eaters who said things like "I get my cholesterol checked for blood" are totally fat and unhealthy. Is that where my life is headed?

Hummus for the Masses

I just submitted a draft of my article on strawberries to the Jerusalem Report, and now I am shopping for more story ideas on Israeli food and agriculture. In my travels I found Hummus for the Masses - or in English, the Hummus Blog. This blogger spends his time looking for the best hummus in Israel, or coming up with reasons for eating it, like I a tooth pulled and I needed to find food I could eat without chewing.

From the blog:

For me, hummus is more than a dish. It’s a passion, an ideology and a way of life. Also, I believe hummus to be an Archimedic point, from which things may turn and change for many people.

Terrorist Attack

Tonight, a Palestinian man entered a yeshiva in Jerusalem and opened fire, killing eight and wounding dozens more in attack that required 50 ambulances to arrive on the scene. The shooting is all that's on the news, and it's also for the moment the top photo on the New York Times.

I had a self-conscious reaction to the news. I feel ambivalent about it and inadequate for not being whole heartedly disgusted by it.

Where I work, we get ten emails an hour about the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza, the ongoing violence in the Palestinian territories, the ever-present creep of settlements onto empty hilltops on the West Bank.

The first thing I heard about the terrorist attack was that it was at a right-wing yeshiva whose ideology is one of building Jewish settlements on Palestinian land. My impulse was to think that these yeshiva teachers and students are part of institutional violence against Palestinians, and that in some way, they had it coming.

Then I felt repulsed by myself. Would I feel the same way if an Israeli settler opened fire on a right-wing Palestinian school? Are yeshiva students worth any less than Gazan kids? And what of solidarity with other Jews, or at least commitment to the idea of non-violence, no matter where? Seeing as this is a political Columbine, doesn't it deserve the same round condemnation?

At the same time, Israel has declared war on Gaza in reaction to a constant rain of rockets on the Jewish towns bordering the Strip. More than a hundred Palestinians have been killed - with at least a third being unarmed civilians - by Israeli air strikes in Gaza in the past week.

There is a tendency in Israel of accusing left wingers of caring more about Palestinians than their own countrymen. A joke about Yossi Beilin, a politician with the leftist Meretz party, quotes him as saying: "It is unacceptable that a terrorist dies in every suicide attack."

I made phone calls to some friends of mine in Jerusalem to see if they were ok. One friend said this attack feels like a new phase of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that it is the first time she can remember something like this happening in Jerusalem in the last three years of living there. She's not riding buses tomorrow. I stopped watching the news when I got sick of the dueling opinions in my head and went to the kitchen to cook tomato soup and felt guilty about being more invested in the flavor mix of basil and mint than in the death count in Jerusalem.

Saggy Boob Lady

One of the major perks of living in any major Israeli city is the produce shuk (market, in Hebrew). In Tel Aviv the main one is one long avenue that begins with cheap clothing and then gives way to vendors selling fruits, vegetables, piles of herbs and greens, bags of bread, sacks of beans and chickpeas, boxes of spices. In side avenues you can find fish mongerers, less-than-appealing meat counters, and hole-in-the-wall restaurants serving classic Yemenite food.

For the story I am writing on strawberries, I have been spending quite a lot of time in the Tel Aviv Shuk HaCarmel, interviewing fruit vendors. One of the beauties of the shuk is that you see the same people standing in the same places day in and day out. You know the chain-smoking 60-year old will be there in his leather beret selling strawberries. The man I buy dried pineapple from always croaks "Od mashehu?" (anything else?) after each thing I ask him for.

But the most famous shuk character is Saggy Boob Lady, whose breasts easily reach her belt. She sells bread in the beginning of the vegetable market. But her main occupation is just being incredibly, devastatingly annoying. She hounds anyone who comes within a 20-foot radius of her bread cart. "Hey, mister, good morning! Hey miss, come here!" Two weeks ago I went to take photos in the shuk at 7 in the morning. SBL grabbed my finger and pulled me over to her stand. "Come here, miss, help me make my first sale of the morning." She has also shoved a friend of mine who was walking through the market with a video camera. It was her way of saying she didn't want to be filmed.

The best part about SBL's legacy is that you can tell anyone to meet you in the shuk by her bread cart - and everyone knows exactly whom you are referring to. Freshly arrived Americans, veteran Israelis, vendors in the shuk - it doesn't matter. In fact, this morning, I was talking to one strawberry seller and somehow SBL came up. I called her the annoying lady for politeness sake. "Oh her?" he said. "She is the worst person in the shuk. She makes everyone hate us."

An IDF of One

Any time I have to deal with Israeli bureaucracy I gird myself for a day of frustration. Usually some stone-faced woman tells you that whatever you want needs to be done in three additional steps. A prime example is my bank, which says for me to be able to switch to a branch location near my house, I have to close my account at their other location – even though both branches are owned by the same bank. It’s no WaMu.

As another step in the long process of my immigrating to Israel, I called up the IDF to see what my status is vis-à-vis army service. “You have an exemption from all military service, which we issued in 1996,” said the army rep. “Really? How do I get a copy of that?” I asked. “Oh, you mean you don’t have it? Well then, the process is very simple. Just get a notarized letter from a lawyer asking for the exemption. Then you can mail it to our office, but I would recommend coming here yourself because we can’t guarantee anything lost in the mail. We will send it to your house in two weeks.”

A friend of mine who recently did the same immigration process told me this was totally unnecessary, and that all I had to do was show up to the army recruitment office in Jerusalem.

I left Tel Aviv at 9.50. By 11 I was at the recruitment office. By 11.10 I had a stamped piece of paper saying I never have to serve. I went down the four flights of stairs to the exit, passing dramatic photos of soldiers in camouflage or holding massive guns. It was a far cry from the pimple-faced teenagers I saw lolling around the building. The hardest part of the day was finding my way to and from the office from the central bus station.

Frankly, the process was so simple and painless that I almost wanted to serve in the military. Yeah, my work hasn’t been very satisfying lately…

Now that that’s behind me, all I have to do is get my high school records and a letter from each of my parents saying where they worked from when I was age 14-17.