Tag Archives: Israel

Hope for the Future

Posted on January 20, 2024 by rachelmankowitz

            (A Note: A wild bird – a Junco – visited for a few very cold days recently and read the hard copy of my essay before publication, leaving a few responses)

“I have a few notes.”

            As the nature of Israel’s war against Hamas changes, becoming more targeted and with fewer soldiers on the ground in Gaza, the conversation in Israel has been moving to the question of what happens the day after the war ends. (Of course there are a hundred other conversations going on at the same time, but my brain can’t process all of it. I can’t make sense of a genocide charge at The Hague, or continued terrorist attacks in Israel, or ongoing calls for Israel to stop fighting even as rockets are being fired at the north and south of Israel and the Houthis are firing on ships in the Red Sea. So, for now, I’m trying to focus on something hopeful.) Recently, I was able to watch a zoom call from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association called Holding on to Hope, which hosted leaders from three different Israeli organizations who have been working towards peace and coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians.

            One message that came through consistently from these leaders is that the efforts that are most successful are the ones that address self-interest, rather than arguing for peace from a selfless altruism. Another theme was that what happens in Gaza impacts Tel Aviv, in terms of health, and air and water quality, as well as violence, and there are no walls high enough to change that.

“Walls? Pfft.”

One of the organizations on the zoom was a joint Jewish and Arab school in Israel called Hand in Hand. The public school system in Israel separates out Arabs and Jews into separate schools, in large part as a gesture to allow Arabs to maintain their own culture and language and not have to study Jewish subjects, but over time this separation has widened the divide between Jews and Muslims and Christians in Israel. The Hand in Hand schools bring these children together to help them learn to understand each other’s narratives and grapple with how to move society towards coexistence. There are six Hand in Hand schools in mixed Arab and Jewish towns so far: in Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa, Kfar Saba, Wadi Ara, and Galilee. And the schools also work at building connections among the adults in the surrounding community.

            The representative of the Hand in Hand schools on this zoom was a Palestinian citizen of Israel, with a background in film in particular and the arts in general. His sense of hope for the future came from his belief that education is what will create the next generation of leaders, able to speak each other’s languages and understand each other’s cultures and see each other as companions on the same journey.

“A feather in feather school would be nice.”

            Coincidentally, I recently read about a new Israeli TV show (not yet available here) set in a Hand in Hand school (or something like it) in Jerusalem. The review I read in Kveller suggested that, because it’s a comedy, it often wraps up complex issues a little too quickly, but the fact that it can represent those complex issues in an entertaining way could make a big difference in what people begin to see as possible in the future.

            The second organization represented on the zoom was Standing Together, a political action organization that brings together Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel, and secular and orthodox Jewish Israelis, to work on issues on which they have common cause, as a way to build consensus and community so that over time they can begin to work together on the bigger battles yet to come.

            I’d seen a previous zoom, earlier in the Fall, that focused entirely on the Standing Together group, but I found it alienating, maybe because it was so soon after October 7th and everyone’s emotions were still so raw. This time around I heard a lot more acknowledgment of the pain and fear of both Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel, and ideas for how to bring both peoples to the table in order to create a sustainable peace.

            The third organization represented on the zoom was completely new to me, called A Land for All (previously called Two States, One Homeland). It’s a think tank made up of Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel, and Palestinians from outside of Israel, to problem solve the nitty gritty policy issues necessary for peace. The basic idea that they’ve come up with is a two state confederation, where a Jewish State and a Palestinian State live side by side, with open borders and some joint institutions. The specifics of the proposal weren’t discussed in this zoom, but the idea that some people are ready to sit together and seek workable plans for a peaceful future is encouraging.

            Except, with Israel being accused of genocide at the International Court for Justice, and Hezbollah and the Houthi rebels attacking from the north and from the sea, and hostages still being held in Gaza, I don’t know how many people within Israel are up to hearing any of this right now, which is probably why this was a zoom for American Jews.

A final peace deal between Israel and a Palestinian state has been so elusive, in part, because the two sides can’t even agree on the preconditions for sitting down to talk. Palestinian leadership wants all new Jewish settlements in the West Bank stopped, and preferably for all of the existing ones to be removed as well, as a precondition for discussing peace with Israel. And Israelis have wanted reliable promises that the terrorism will stop before they discuss the settlements, let alone final agreements on where the borders of a future Palestinian state should be. Many Palestinians and their supporters seem to believe that terrorism is the only way their voices will be heard, by Israel and by the world at large, but every terrorist attack has pushed the Israeli public further away from any belief that peace is possible, and therefore from any willingness to make difficult compromises for that unreachable peace.

            When I discussed the concept of peace recently with my synagogue school students, they weren’t thinking about Israel or even peace between countries, instead they looked at peace through the lens of family life, saying that there has to be a lot of room within peace and coexistence for disagreement, and even some bloodshed (their point of reference was fights with their siblings, so, hopefully not too much blood). They spend a lot of their time working towards peace in their daily lives, managing disputes with their friends and family, dealing with hurt feelings, and learning how to compromise, but all of that feels possible for them because they know they are safe in their homes and that people care about them and are listening to them.

            In all of the coverage on the news, and in all of the opinion articles that I’ve read and international voices I’ve heard, no one has offered a workable plan for peace that addresses what is actually happening right now. No one has come up with a way to disempower Hamas and destroy the tunnels without causing unacceptable damage to the structures and the people above ground in Gaza. In fact, the UN refuses to call Hamas a terrorist organization, and since Gaza is not considered a state and has not signed agreements to follow international law, they can’t be held officially responsible for their actions, but Israel, which is an acknowledged state and has signed these agreements, is being brought to The Hague for fighting back against Hamas. The international community has not addressed this invisibility of organizations like Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Houthi rebels, who are acting as proxies for Iran’s interests in the Middle East, and Hamas has taken full advantage of its political invisibility to press its war against Israel, which certainly didn’t start on October 7th.

The fact that Israel is under attack from, basically, all sides, has not changed the rhetoric around the world that has portrayed Israel as a lone menace in the Middle East, causing all of the trouble.

All three of these Israeli organizations are working towards long term goals that will require consistent commitment and ongoing efforts and will not be put in place within the next few months, but the world, and the combatants on both sides, are too impatient for that slow growing peace process, and the extremists on both sides keep taking advantage of that impatience and offering apocalyptic solutions that will only work for one side or the other. Every time I watch the news I hear this ticking clock, and the absence of hope, but I know there are people out there who are thinking and breathing and working for peace, and that’s what I want to hear more about, because that’s where a livable future will come from.

A Land for All – https://www.alandforall.org/english/?d=ltr

Hand in Hand – https://www.handinhandk12.org/

Standing Together – https://www.standing-together.org/en

“Hope is the thing with feathers, right?”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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When Heroes Fly

Posted on December 30, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            I decided to rewatch When Heroes Fly, a fantastic one season Israeli drama (with English subtitles), because I found out that it was about to leave Netflix in January. The first time I’d watched the show was for my online Hebrew class, almost two years ago, with Hebrew subtitles, but it was so vivid and powerful that I understood most of what was going on, despite missing a few words here and there (and everywhere).

            When Heroes Fly follows four guys in a reserves unit who lose their leader in war. Each one deals with the loss, and the trauma of war, in a different way, but the main character, Aviv, truly falls apart. He’s away getting help when his ex-girlfriend, Yaeli, goes on a trip to South America that he was supposed to go on with here, and, it seems, dies in a car accident.

            The mystery that has to be solved, years later, is whether Yaeli actually survived the accident after all, and if so, where is she, and does she want to be found? That’s the frame of the show, but the real drama is in how each of these four men work through their past mistakes and confront themselves and each other.

            What got to me the first time I watched this show was how completely Aviv’s character resonated for me – his inability to heal, despite so much effort and time, and his self-loathing, and how others judged him for being such a mess. His physical expressions of depression and self-loathing, and that sense of truly falling apart – that was me. Even two years ago, after a lifetime of therapy, it all still felt deeply true for me. And yet now, despite grieving both of my dogs, and still having “issues,” and still feeling frightened and incapable at times, I don’t feel that wracking whole body depression anymore. It’s been receding for a long time, but until I watched this show again I didn’t realize how long it’s been since that was my daily, and then weekly, and then monthly experience of life.

            Another thing I relate to, deeply, in this show is how much these friends need each other and yet can’t quite connect or hear each other through the fog of their own trauma responses. We want to believe that if we try hard enough and love hard enough we can fix anything, but sometimes our need to help is the problem, stopping us from seeing the real person in front of us who is in so much pain.

            A new character is introduced late in the series, an Israeli detective with her own deep trauma who has to find the four men and Yaeli as part of a larger case. But she isn’t cut off from her pain, or completely lost in it, she’s strong and broken at the same time. I want to be this woman, this strong, capable woman who is also deeply attached to herself and to reality. I get the feeling that a lot of people think I already am this women. I’m not, yet, but just seeing her on screen makes it seem more possible.

            But the biggest revelation for me in watching this show now is the impact of collective trauma, which goes beyond each individual’s experience of trauma, when they are all experiencing the trauma together. As an American Jew I can try to take an “objective” view on the current war, because my family isn’t running to shelters at any moment as rockets fall, and I’m not grieving a loved one who died in the massacre or was taken hostage, and no one in my family is a soldier in this war, risking their life every day. I am Jewish, but as an American Jew I have the privilege of not feeling the depth of the collective trauma that is tormenting Israelis, and Palestinians, as they try to figure out what happens next.

            When I watch the news and do my deep dives into the history to try and understand what I’m seeing, I still find much of it incomprehensible, because I can’t see it through their eyes; I can’t feel it in my body and know the darkness that prevents clear sight on things that, from here, seem obvious. I keep trying to understand anyway, and I try not to judge the decisions and opinions I can’t understand, because I know that people who are not under the influence of trauma think a lot of things should be possible that people within the trauma can’t fathom and can’t choose.

            Interestingly, while the English title of this show is When Heroes Fly, which suggests that these four men are clearly heroic, as if they are morally unambiguous and selfless and always know what to do, the title in Hebrew is For Her Heroes Fly, suggesting that heroic behavior has to come from somewhere, from some internal motivation, beyond the theoretical goodness and righteousness we keep expecting from our heroes. These are not men with infinite courage and a willingness to die for a cause; these are men who are willing to fight for the people they love.

            People want to believe that Israel only has a right to exist, that Jews only have a right to exist, because we are supposed to be a beacon of light to the nations; and some Jews try very hard to live up to that ideal, but most of us are just people, like everyone else. Requiring Israel to meet standards of behavior that no one else can live up to is unfair and inhumane.     No one gets through wars unscathed, and Israel has had to face war after war, and then terrorist act after terrorist act, throughout her short existence. Israeli soldiers, like all soldiers, are capable of mistakes in judgment and tactics and behavior. When three hostages were accidentally killed by the IDF, Israel had to deal with that reality, because Israel itself has inhuman expectations of its soldiers and its military, just like the world at large seems to have. Israel, this tiny country, with soldiers culled from all walks of life, drafted into service as teenagers, is meant to be a perfect military machine, capable of fighting tunnel warfare without making mistakes and hurting non-fighters, even when the Hamas fighters wear civilian clothes and embed in civilian neighborhoods and buildings. The Israeli soldiers who killed those three hostages, and the soldiers who have killed Palestinian civilians when aiming for Hamas, are all going to have to live the rest of their lives with that burden of guilt and failure, not out of choice but out of necessity, because they have to fight for the survival of their tiny country. The trauma that results will last a lifetime, and will alter everything that comes next.

We, on the outside of all of this, can have whatever hopes and dreams and judgements we want, but it is the people on the ground who will have to make it happen, and that means we have to accept who they are and what feels possible to them, as they carry this war, and every previous war, with them into the future.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Oh, But There’s More

Posted on December 16, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            As if things around here haven’t been dramatic enough, Mom finally went to see a new orthopedist in November, to check on the pain in her left leg, and the new doctor confirmed that the left hip is now at the bone on bone stage and needs to be replaced, like, now.

I keep having flashbacks to two summers ago when Mom had her right hip replaced, and ended up needing a second surgery six weeks later to fix the mistakes of the first surgery, and then had to be hospitalized again a few weeks later when fluid filled her lungs as a result of the two anesthesias. I spent that whole summer feeling like the world was crashing down, and now, after losing two dogs in two months and with Mom going in for surgery again, my existential dread is back in the danger zone.

And then came Covid.

The day before Ellie died, Mom and I went for our yearly Covid shots and quickly forgot about them in our grief. Within a week I had what I thought was a cold, and it made sense to me that I would get sick given how awful I felt at losing Ellie, so I didn’t question it. Though I do remember thinking, huh, this is the first cold I’ve had since before the whole Covid thing started.

When I finally had the energy to go out and do my chores I wore a KN95 face mask, thinking I just didn’t want to spread what was left of my cold. I went to the drug store and did some food shopping, and then I went home to take five naps. The symptoms of the cold (sneezing and coughing and nausea and feeling like my limbs were about to fall off) seemed to be over, but I still thought I should wear my mask when I went to teach the kids, just in case.

I’ve been organizing things around the living room, since Ellie’s death, so when I got home from teaching that day and was too tired to move from the couch, my eye caught on a box of Covid home tests across the room and I thought, huh, maybe I should just check. I don’t know why this thought didn’t occur to me before I went out, but it didn’t. Honestly, I’d taken so many tests over the past few years, each time I had a bad allergy day or heard about someone who’d gotten Covid, and the tests had always been negative, so it just seemed like a science experiment, and a way to use up the leftover home tests now that they were a month or two out of date.

I took the test, and it was positive. So I took another test, and it was positive too. Then Mom took a test and she was positive too, and I felt like shit. I wrote to my boss to let her know I had Covid, expecting her to be in a rage that I’d been so stupid to not think of taking the tests before coming to work, but, of course, she was kind and just asked how I was feeling and what she should teach when she subbed for my class.

I have never missed work since I started this job. It’s a very part time job, so that’s probably not as big of an achievement as it seems, but to me it’s a big deal, because I am often very, very tired and I always impress myself when I get up and out and actually manage to drive safely and even teach. I had on my KN95 mask for the two hours I’d been at school with the kids, and most of my symptoms were already gone, so, fingers crossed, I didn’t get anyone sick. But even knowing all of that, I felt like a mass murderer (I’ve been watching the news a lot, and the way the world seems to think every Jew is killing people just by being Jewish has hit me hard. My father made it clear that, as a female, I was the cause of all evil in the world, and now large swaths of the world seem to think that being born Jewish makes me the cause of all evil too, so…I’m feeling it).

I don’t know where I got Covid from, and the fact that I gave it to Mom, who was already suffering with her hip pain, just sucks. But we spent the next few days at home, rescheduling Mom’s pre-op testing appointments, and hoping for the best.

            And now that we’ve both been feeling better, at least Covid-wise, I’m back to grieving for Ellie, and being consumed by the news about Israel, and worrying about all of the doctors’ appointments coming up, and having nightmares about what will happen during the surgery, and after.

            In normal, and even not so normal times, Mom does everything she can to make things easier for me, often too much. But she won’t be able to help with anything for a while – not cooking or cleaning, certainly not errands and laundry and food shopping; and there’s no dog to help lift my spirits and put things in perspective, and it’s so dark and it’s getting cold and the world is such a scary place and…

I know I’m supposed to be an adult, with all kinds of inner resources and strengths to manage things like this, and I’m doing my best, watching as many Christmas movies as possible to distract myself, and taking each challenge one at a time, but I’m not okay. I want Ellie back and I want Mom to be healthy and I want the war to be over. Now.

The stuffed animals are keeping the dog beds warm.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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On the Coverage of the War in Israel and Gaza

Posted on November 4, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            I have been trying to write my thoughts on this for weeks, but I’ve been afraid of getting things wrong, or of bringing down anger from any and all directions. I have a fourteen page draft of a blog post that seems more like a thesis than a personal essay, but I’m not an expert on the history of Israel, or military tactics, or academic jargon, or even anti-Semitism; I care about those things, and am impacted by them, but other people will do a much better job of holding forth on those subjects than I ever could.

“Don’t look at me.”

            What I can write about is how it has felt to watch the news lately, and be on social media, being told by so many people what I should think, or do, or say in the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th, a day after the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur war. I don’t believe that Jews, or Israel, should be immune to criticism; I also don’t believe that Hamas is anything but a terrorist group (calling them a liberation group suggests a real misunderstanding both of their mission and of how they have governed Gaza for the past decade and a half). What I know for myself is that hearing about the massacres on October 7th made me worry about family and friends in Israel, but watching the gradually more toxic responses around the world, and especially on American college campuses, has been frightening. I thought for sure that the chants of “from the river to the sea,” which is a demand for the eradication of the State of Israel and its current population of more than eight million Jews, plus two million non-Jews, would convince people that this pro-Hamas reaction is morally wrong, but that hasn’t happened. I thought it was the norm to recognize the difference between Hamas and Palestinians in general, and that everyone knew the difference between Israelis living within the internationally accepted borders of Israel (like the ones who were massacred and kidnapped), and Jewish settlers in the West Bank, but no. In fact, a lot of the terminology being thrown around about Israel (colonialist, apartheid, genocide) has become mainstream in a way I never expected. Social media is powerful in creating false narratives, and even more successful in advancing partial narratives that are misleading.

            An enormous number of Israelis who spent the past year protesting against Benjamin Netanyahu’s far right government and its attempts to peel away layers of democracy are now fighting for their country’s survival, both in the military and in thousands of volunteer efforts to help the survivors from the south, who had to escape Hamas and Islamic Jihad rockets, and evacuees from the north, escaping Hezbollah rockets. I am proud of how quickly Israelis were able to find their way forward, and worried about the choices of the military and the government, and frightened by the lack of critical thinking and journalistic ethics that seem to abound right now when facts would be really helpful. I am proud of the Haredi (ultra-orthodox) Jews in Israel who are joining the army for this war, despite a very contentious law that allows them to avoid military service in favor of study, and I’m angry at some Jewish settlers in the West Bank who think they have a religious right to hurt their Palestinian neighbors.

            But I can’t fix any of those things. I cannot vote in Israel, and I can’t call every reporter who takes Hamas’ word without evidence and remind them that that’s just stupid. I can only be here, living my own little life in New York, and sending prayers to my family and friends who really need it right now.

“I pray all the time, Mommy.”

            At my synagogue, on Long Island, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about how we find comfort right now, since that’s really all we can control. We’ve had speak ups, to share our grief and confused feelings, and vigils, for the survivors and the dead and the missing and all those on the ground who are still in danger. One of the rabbis from my synagogue joined a group of New York rabbis for a short trip to Israel, to show solidarity and to learn more about what’s going on. I think, right now, many American Jews, because we are further away from the danger and, in most cases, experiencing less direct trauma, are wishing for ways to reach peace. But we, I, have no idea what the military realities are, and what it will take to make Israelis safe again. I refuse to tell Israel what they should do, though, of course, I have questions.

            I have a lot of trouble with people who equate the horror of a massacre perpetrated on civilians and a war conducted, or at least trying to be conducted, under the set rules of war.

            My focus has been on finding podcasts and articles that can help me understand more of what it feels like to be in Israel right now, so that I can be more empathetic, and to reassure me that Israel is a real place and not this cardboard cutout of evil that often gets portrayed by Pro-Palestinian activists on American college campuses.

            Israel Story, a great podcast in English that shares stories from all segments of Israeli society, has been posting short interviews with Israelis in different sectors during the current war. In the past, Israel Story has covered many Palestinian stories with empathy and clarity, humanizing and coloring in details of lives we often don’t get to hear about. The archives are full of those stories, but right now the most powerful of the short interviews I’ve heard was with a father who rescued his teenage son from the music festival in the South of Israel after the massacre had begun. www.israelstory.org/episode/sivan-avnery/                I’ve also been listening to podcasts from a school in Jerusalem called the Shalom Hartman Institute which has done a lot of work bringing together religious and secular, American and Israeli, and finding ways to have difficult conversations that are productive and even inspiring. I also watched a webinar interview with Yehuda Kurtzer, the president of the Institute in North America, that addressed what it feels like in Israel right now, and how liberal American Jews are dealing with the current news environment. https://youtu.be/Glia_tSZqmo?si=g3Fr8T4XR_D7Qkwk

            I go to the Forward and the Times of Israel and the Atlantic for articles that help me understand the issues involved. Here are links to two of the many articles that I’ve found helpful: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/why-is-israel-being-blamed-for-the-hamas-massacre/

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/gaza-hospital-explosion-misinformation-reporting/675719/?utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

            I go to Kveller and Nosher and My Jewish Learning for a break from the news and a chance to remember that there is still Jewish joy and silliness, and comfort food, and so much to learn about being Jewish that has nothing to do with politics or war.

            But most of all I go to music. I have a ridiculously long Israeli music playlist on Spotify filled with music from Ishai Ribo and Hanan Ben Ari and Yuval Dayan and Keren Peles and Jane Bordeaux and Ofra Haza and Arik Einstein and David Broza and Hadag Nachash and Hatikva 6, and I keep finding more musicians and more music to remind me that there is more to Israel than this war.

Hanan Ben Ari – https://youtu.be/z27MZP_4P_U?si=uu7wqn1pEn6cRdd8

Ishai Ribo – https://youtu.be/7mmu6EzLZfM?si=egySHSIHEU0ckn7t

Jane Bordeaux – https://youtu.be/5t59s1sa1oc?si=o2XozKDDdpCiaSFA

Yuval Dayan – https://youtu.be/V4qsi4V-NFY?si=FqlWyWA40AIKhBYA

            So that’s where I’m at right now. I’m still trying to write out my thoughts on the war itself, and the history that led to it, mostly for my own clarification, but the rest of the time I’m taking a lot of deep breaths, and listening to voices across the spectrum, when I’m up to it, and listening to music when I’m not.

            I wish everyone Besorot Tovot, good news to come, and comfort and understanding until that time comes.

“Paws crossed.”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Cold Case

Posted on October 21, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            I’ve been re-watching a show called Cold Case on the Roku streaming channel. When I saw it on there a few months ago I remembered feeling safe in the hands of the writers and actors on the show, so when I needed reassurance, with the grief of losing Cricket and watching the recent events unfold in Israel, I started watching the episodes from the beginning, often instead of watching the news.

The magical Cricket

The premise of Cold Case is that this particular Philadelphia homicide squad focuses on cases that have been left unsolved for years, even decades. More often than not, the storylines hold secrets that couldn’t have been told in their own time, either because of the prejudices of the day or the inability of the traumatized people involved to speak up. Music helps to set each episode at a particular place and time, and we see the scenes play out both in the past and the present to bring the story to life, but the real power of the show is in the way the detectives genuinely care about what happened to these people, even so many years later, as if they really believe that every life matters and every story deserves to be told.

            I remember so many times in graduate school, both for writing and for social work, when the lesson was the opposite: that no one life really matters that much. In social work, the focus was on the collective – the family, community, institution, etc. – as opposed to the individual. And in writing workshops it was all about the beauty or cleverness of the writing, or the complexity of the plot or the nuances of the sentence structure or variety of descriptions; there was a lot of active disrespect for people whose telling of their own stories was still raw or full of emotion, and there was even more anger at people who wanted to tell stories that “have all been told before,” which often referred to stories about rape, sexual abuse, domestic violence, and eating disorders, not coincidentally stories that are often told by women.

“What?!”

            But on Cold Case every story matters. It matters what happened to a young woman who dressed as a man during prohibition; and it matters what happened to an autistic boys’ parents, even if he can’t tell his story in words; and it matters who shot a little black girl on the playground, and how a teenage boy who was thought to be a criminal was killed on a rooftop. It matters who loved who, and what went wrong and why. It has been such a relief to sit on the couch with Mom and Ellie and watch this show and feel that our sympathy can be unlimited, and that there are endless stories that can and should be told.

            I don’t think I recognized, when I watched this show the first time around, more than fifteen years ago, that it resonated so deeply with my own story; my childhood has often felt like a cold case, moldering in a file box somewhere. So much of the drama of my adult life has resulted from a crime that never received justice, and I’ve had to fight off the insistence (from others but also from within myself) that my story doesn’t deserve the attention I give to it, and that what happens to me, or people like me, is inconsequential. I still speak up because I know that there is healing in being seen and heard, but the fight has been exhausting. Except, when I watch the detectives connecting with each victim, through their own troubled lives, I feel reassured that they would have cared about what happened to me too. And for a few hours at a time, I don’t have to fight, because I know I matter; I know that we all matter.

“I matter too. Right, Mommy?”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Another Summer of Hebrew

Posted on July 8, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            I started a new online Hebrew class for the summer, and my new Hebrew teacher is down to earth and clear and friendly, so I am hopeful that the class will be good and productive. But this is going to be my last Hebrew class for a while, because it’s expensive, and with another oral surgery coming up, and the pause on student loan debt repayment ending in August, I need to keep costs down; but also, I feel like I can’t focus on the classes during the school year anymore. I need more rest days, in order to recover from my work days, or else I won’t be able to work much longer.

“You should just stay home with us all the time.”

            I still love learning Hebrew, and I’m hoping that this last class will give me more confidence to continue learning new vocabulary on my own. Maybe I’ll even start writing in Hebrew and see how my voice translates.

            Writing in Hebrew is one of the few things we haven’t worked on in these classes from Tel Aviv, where the focus is on conversation skills and reading newspapers and watching TV. I think I would write poetry in Hebrew, because the language is so conducive to poetry, with all of the rhyming words and onomatopoeia and the leanness of the language overall. I gave up on writing poetry in English after too many discouraging teachers telling me to write like someone else, but maybe with Hebrew I could start again with a blank slate.

            I still want to become fluent in Hebrew, but I think if I take more classes I’d like to move towards Jewish learning in general, rather than Hebrew in particular. The focus in these classes has been on how Hebrew is spoken in Tel Aviv, with very little discussion of things that are recognizably Jewish, rather than Israeli. For me, Hebrew and Judaism are deeply intertwined, but Modern Hebrew has become a secular language, used for every mundane and profound purpose in daily life in Israel, and it feels like, as a result, some of the meaning has been stripped away.

I still want to learn more vocabulary, but I wonder if the words I really want to understand are the ones in the Hebrew Bible, or in the prayers, so that I don’t have to rely on someone else to tell me what they mean. I don’t want to lose sight of Modern Hebrew, and the way it has embraced so many different cultures and absorbed words from Arabic and English and French and Russian and more, I just want to re-invest in the connection to the past, where it all comes from.

I’m still not sure where all of this learning and exploring will take me, or how, or if, I will make use of it in my writing or my teaching, but sometimes learning is worth the effort just for its own sake, for the way it challenges our perceptions and widens our vision of the world and ourselves.

And maybe next summer, or when/if I start feeling better and have more energy, it will lead me to something more.

“Just make sure you take us with you wherever you go.”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Planning My (Eventual) Trip to Israel

Posted on March 11, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            Ever since my High School best friend visited from Israel, back in January, I’ve been thinking about what we’ll do when I finally get to Israel. I think the biggest result of my almost two years of online Hebrew classes from Tel Aviv, and watching so many Israeli TV shows to practice my Hebrew, is that I’m much more interested in visiting smaller neighborhoods and meeting the people than I am in going to the traditional tourist sites. For example, I really don’t want to get up early in the morning to hike Masada, or even take a cable car to the top to watch the sunrise, because I’ve seen more than enough pictures of the view, and because I’m not sure I want to celebrate a place where so many Jews felt like their only option was to commit suicide in order to avoid being captured.

I’m reluctant to go to the Dead Sea (Yam HaMelach in Hebrew), because… bathing suits, and because I usually have one wound or another and the salt stings. But I wouldn’t mind going further south, to Eilat, because there’s supposed to be a spectacular underwater preserve, where you can snorkel or go on a glass bottom boat ride to see fish and coral, and then you can go to the Dolphin Reef to swim with dolphins. But again, bathing suits, or a wet suit, which is just as bad.

Of course, I’ll need to go to Jerusalem for a few days, just to see if I fall under its spell. I’m kind of hoping I will, because it sounds like an incredible high the way people describe it, though I don’t want to get the official version of Jerusalem Syndrome, which includes psychotic breaks and believing you are Moses or Jesus or someone like that. More likely than not, I’ll get to the Wailing Wall, look around, realize I’ve seen it all in pictures and videos already, and then spend the rest of my time at the Mahane Yehuda Market.

“Do they have food?”

            Time of year will make a huge difference in what kind of trip I can take, because if I have to go in the summer I will not be able to spend much time outdoors. I’ll just go from one taxi/bus/train to another, and one hostel to another, carrying buckets of ice to toss over my head in case of emergencies.

            I found an Israeli tour guide on YouTube, named Oren, who does tons of videos: on how to plan trips to Israel in general; and how to manage public transportation, and how to navigate the weather, and the people, and the supermarkets, etc. He’s an opinionated guy, and I don’t always agree with his point of view on politics, but he’s knowledgeable and detailed, and funny, and he really loves Israel.

Some things I’ve learned from Oren: they don’t stamp passports in Israel, because then it would be difficult for people to travel on to Arab countries, so instead you get a paper called an Electronic Gate Pass that you have to keep track of; the New Israeli Shekel, Known as NIS or “Shach,” equals about thirty to thirty five American cents; you need an adapter for any American electronics (hair dryer, electric toothbrush, etc,); you will need an Israeli provider’s sim card for your cellphone in order to have Wi-Fi, outside of a hotel/hostel that provides it for you; March and April are the best time to go to Israel, but any time after October is okay, because the winters are mild; The preflight security interview at El Al can be intimidating and annoying, but you’ll survive; buy traveler’s insurance; keep the Jewish holidays in mind when planning your trip, because there’s no public transport on Shabbat and holidays in most of the country, and flights into the country are more expensive leading up to the big holidays; only go to the Negev in the winter, otherwise you will burn to a crisp; you need a guide of some kind in order to visit the old city of Jerusalem, but there are group tours, apps, and guide books if private tours are too expensive, and keep in mind that Jewish and Christian tours are very different; in an emergency dial 101; don’t be surprised to find yourself standing next to an Israeli soldier carrying an Uzi.

            Recently, I’ve been getting really interested in seeing the north of Israel, because I know so much less about it, and because it is not as hot as the south, but Oren has fewer videos about the north, so far, so I had to go to Wikipedia and other sites for information.

            Haifa is the big city in the north of Israel, and there’s an Israeli saying that goes, “Haifa works, Jerusalem prays, and Tel Aviv plays,” which doesn’t make it sound very exciting, but it has the only underground rapid transit system in Israel, called the Carmelit (Tel Aviv is in the process of building its own). And it’s also one of Israel’s mixed cities, with a significant population of Arabs and Jews living in the same place, with Arab Christians, Arab Muslims, Druze and Bahai communities, plus a lot of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, and even an ultra-orthodox minority. So it seems like it’s worth a visit, and it could be a good jumping off point for visiting other parts of the North. Haifa is also one of the few cities in Israel where buses operate on Shabbat.

I want to see Tsfat (Safed), which is known for art and mysticism; and Akko (Acre), which is an ancient city with remnants from the Hellenistic-Roman period, and the Crusader period, and the Ottoman period; and then there’s Tiberius, which was founded in 20 CE by Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great, and became a hub for Jews after the destruction of the second temple (and where the Jerusalem Talmud was put together); and there’s Mount Hermon, bordering Lebanon, which is the one place in Israel that gets enough snow for skiing in the winter (but since I don’t ski I’m not sure why I’d go there, except to cool off); and then there are a lot of Kibbutzim and Moshavim to visit, with fruits and vegetables and cheeses and mushrooms galore.

“I like cheese!”

But it’s all still up in the air, especially when it’s so much easier to watch videos of all of these places on TV. And I’m still dragging my feet about getting my passport renewed, though, partly because of my reluctance to have my picture taken, and partly because it’s one more appointment I’ll have to make and organize and get to. And the thing is, I don’t really want to go to Israel alone, or plan a whole trip by myself, and I can’t expect my friend to abandon her family for weeks at a time just to keep me entertained. My synagogue is planning an Israel trip next year, in the spring I think, but it’s bound to be expensive and involve a lot of walking, and visiting places I don’t particularly want to go, and it would require me to make up my mind far in advance, which I seem incapable of doing.  So, in the meantime, I’m watching Israeli movies and TV shows: on my Kan 11 app, or the Izzy streaming channel, or just on YouTube. At the very least, by the time I get to Israel I’ll know the best places to go for Chummus.

“Have them send all of the food here!”

Some of Oren’s Israel videos:

The 10 Most ISRAELI Things You Don't See On the News (14:33) https://youtu.be/q4lmXwqGDHg
The Israeli Supermarket (11:54) https://youtu.be/OFUximyJ3rI
Running the Dead Sea Marathon (10:14) https://youtu.be/THKJDJQUww4

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Piece of Hebrew/Piece of French

Posted on January 7, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            I recently found a YouTube channel called Piece of Hebrew and I’m a little bit addicted. I’ve been making YouTube lists for everything lately, for videos about Jewish history and Israel for the teenagers at my synagogue, for guided meditation and exercise videos for me, for Hebrew language shows of all kinds for me (and for any of my students who eventually want to improve their Hebrew). And each time I find one good thing, I find ten more that are sort of on topic, or not really, like videos to add background to my Jews around the World curriculum (there were a ton of virtual tours during Covid), and videos to help people plan trips to Israel (I found a really good Israeli tour guide whose videos are helpful and entertaining), and, of course, as soon as we watch a new show in my online Hebrew class I have to go to YouTube to see if I can find more episodes (there’s a great series about Israeli chefs in cities around the world and a bunch of the episodes are on YouTube, with Hebrew subtitles).

“We’re never going outside again.”

            So, somewhere in there I found the Piece of Hebrew videos, hosted by an Israeli Hebrew teacher named Doron, where he talks about Israeli musicians and TV shows and movies, all in Intermediate level Hebrew with English subtitles. And then I watched some episodes that included Elsa, his live in girlfriend who made Aliyah to Israel four years ago from France and became fluent in Hebrew, and then I found out that she has her own YouTube channel called Piece of French, which is in intermediate and advanced French and all about her life in Israel, and in France, and on vacation, and with her family.

            So now I have five or six pages of links to videos, all of which I want to watch right now. Part of the fun is getting to know the two of them and their dog, Bilhah, and how they met, and how and why they started their channels, and then what their lives are like in Israel on a daily basis: with videos on gardening and shopping and camping and whining about random things, all in French or Hebrew, with English subtitles.

“Does Bilhah bark in Modern or Biblical Hebrew?”

            My current online Hebrew teacher was even mentioned in one of Doron’s videos, listing his five favorite Israeli female singers, which probably encouraged me to watch more videos early on, now that I think about it.

            Of course, now I feel like I’m way too far behind in my French, much farther behind than I thought I was, and I worry that I’m not far enough ahead in Hebrew either, and I should be watching these videos for hours every day to improve. And I’m already overwhelmed with my actual work, and trying to figure out how to get everything done between naps, which is probably why I got so deep into the YouTube videos in the first place, because I could watch them on my phone, lying down.

“We love nap time.”

            It’s so nice that the world has adapted to my chronic exhaustion by providing so much passive entertainment, but I wish I could be well enough to actually go to France and Israel (and Italy and Spain and Japan…) and see everything firsthand. Especially the food. I’d really, really like to taste all of the food for myself.

“Me too!”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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The New Hebrew Semester

Posted on November 26, 2022 by rachelmankowitz

            I’ve been in the same online Hebrew program from Tel Aviv for more than a year now, but each semester feels like a new experience, with new challenges. For the first session of this semester, back in late October, our new teacher spoke quickly and mostly in Hebrew, only clarifying a few words in English here or there, and yet, I was able to follow most of it. A year ago I would have been lost and intimidated and now I’m not. I’m still not fluent, but I’m much closer.

“Mazel Tov.”

            One of the obstacles to overcome each semester is the renewed feeling that I’m the worst student in the class and have the least interesting life and the least impressive resume. My teachers keep telling me that I’m underestimating my fluency, but I’m the one inside my head, grasping around in the dark even for the words I thought I knew well. I do fine with homework and conjugations and vocabulary, but making conversation is hard enough for me in English, with all of my social anxiety, it’s that much harder in Hebrew, with the words endlessly trying to escape from my brain. Generally it takes me a few weeks to remember that everyone in the class is a flawed human being, just like me. I wish I could have mastered this lesson by now, but I guess I should be grateful that it eventually kicks in at all.

I’m still not sure what my goal is in studying Hebrew. Is it about going to Israel for a visit? Or just wanting to learn about Israel in more depth? Is the next step in my journey secular or religious, an activity, or more studying? I just don’t know.

“Don’t go anywhere without me, Mommy.”

This semester we’ve started to read Facebook posts in Hebrew, and other instances of natural Hebrew existing in the wild, to build our reading comprehension, but it has the effect of making me feel like an alien and uncool, now in two different languages.

            One of the new things we’re doing this semester is that instead of watching one TV show from beginning to end, we’re watching single episodes of reality shows (not like “Married at First Sight,” which we watched in a previous class and that I keep trying to wash out of my brain), getting to hear different accents and different vocabularies with each show.

            The first thing we watched was an episode of a show called “Makers,” where a team of creative craftspeople made new hearing aids for a hard of hearing singer, so she wouldn’t have to deal with so much static when she put her headphones on in the studio, and then they created a smart house set up for a pair of born-deaf adult twins who needed help knowing when someone rang the doorbell or when the alarm clock went off. They put light strips in every room, even in the bathroom, and programmed the lights in different colors for each alert: like the phone, or the door, or the sirens telling them to find shelter when rockets came from Gaza. And for one of the sisters who struggled with getting up on time, they attached a light fixture to her alarm clock that gradually grew brighter the longer she ignored it, and then if she was still sleeping, a fan would go on and blow in her face to finally wake her up.

Makers

We also watched an episode of a show called “On the Napkin,” about Israeli chefs, and the episode we watched was about a Japanese cook in Israel, married to an Israeli man for forty years with three adult children, and now she’s serving homestyle Japanese dinners in their dining room/restaurant every night, sourcing tofu and mushrooms and greens from nearby farms.

But the story that really got to me was from a show called “The Recording Studio.” The episode we watched was about a twelve-year-old autistic boy who wanted to record a song for his longtime teacher’s aide. His parents came with him to the studio, but he explained everything himself, telling the host of the show that his aide was so special to him because she’d spent years teaching him how to relate to his non-autistic classmates, teaching him how to speak their language so that he could live in their world and make friends. He said that it would take a degree in psychology to learn the autistic language, so he had to be the one to learn how to understand them. During rehearsals, he not only played piano and sang, he also made sure to communicate as clearly as possible with the host and musicians about what he wanted, and confronted them when they were making assumptions about what he could and couldn’t do, or which truths he could and couldn’t handle.

When his aide finally came into the studio, he hugged her and introduced her to all of the musicians, and then he sang the song with the band, and his teacher and his parents were in tears. It was so clear that she really had set him free from a lonely place, and that she had taught him how to relate to other people and feel connected to them, while still being himself.

Sometimes, out in the real world, I feel like that autistic boy, trying to translate all of my thoughts and feelings into a language other people can understand, and wishing they could speak my language instead, whatever that is. So maybe that’s why I am so drawn to learning languages in the first place, and why I’m working so hard to learn Hebrew in classes full of other people with their own internal languages and stories to share. Hearing about the countries they live in (Israel, Holland, Spain, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Poland, America, Croatia) and the reasons why they want to learn Hebrew (planning to move to Israel, already living in Israel but wanting to speak the language, discovering a Jewish identity, trying to make peace with a Jewish childhood, wanting to talk to Israeli grandchildren, joining an Israeli dance company, or, very often, marrying an Israeli), helps me to feel hopeful that one day I will find the words to say what I mean and, in the meantime, other people will work hard to understand me, just like I work hard to understand them. And the hard work feels worth it, whether I become fluent in Hebrew or not, because the process itself is helping me create connections all over the world, and in my own brain, to help me understand myself.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

50 Comments

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An Israeli Reality Show

Posted on June 4, 2022 by rachelmankowitz

            I’m not a huge fan of reality shows. I do watch things like Project Runway and Top Chef, because I like watching what the contestants can create and how they are able to create it, but even the commercials for any of the Real Housewives of Wherever shows or The Bachelor and The Bachelorette make me nauseous. So I wasn’t thrilled when my current Hebrew teacher (in my online language classes from Tel Aviv) said that the Israeli show we’d be watching as a class this semester, to practice our Hebrew listening skills, would be a reality show called Married at First Sight (Chatunah MiMabat Rishon, in Hebrew).

            Oy, God help me.

            The logic behind her choice was that she wanted us to practice listening to how people really speak Hebrew in daily life, with all of the repetitions and slang and run on sentences, as opposed to the scripted Hebrew of the comedy and drama shows I watched (and loved) in previous classes. And I can see her point. But…

            The gimmick of this particular show is that the couples don’t meet until they are under the Chupah (the wedding canopy). There’s a three member team of psychologists who interview the candidates and choose the pairings based on their deep knowledge of humanity, I guess, though they are limited in their choices by who is willing to be on a reality show like this in the first place.

“Are we on a reality show?”

            And then we, as an audience, get to know the future bride and groom and where they work and who their friends and families are, and we watch them trying on wedding dresses and suits and talking to the psychologists, and then the families and friends meet at the wedding venue, and then the bride and groom come out and finally meet each other for the first time under the Chupah.

The wedding ceremony itself is sort of Jewish-wedding-lite, except, they still have the “groom” stomp on a glass (an important symbol meant to remind us of the loss of the first and second temples in Jerusalem, so that even on our happiest days we still remember our saddest days), and even that much feels icky.

            We’re watching the fourth season in class, which means that this show has lasted quite a while, and a lot of people seem to enjoy it. This season was filmed during Covid, so there are face masks here and there, and they probably did a lot of Covid testing behind the scenes, and the only place the couples could go on their honeymoons, outside of Israel, was the Seychelles, for some reason.

“Can we go to the Seychelles? Do they have chicken there?”

            So far, every time one of the brides has been introduced at the wedding, her soon to be groom has been blown away by how beautiful she is, which gets under my skin. The women that are chosen are all thin, of course, and the makeup and hair people are excellent, and the dresses are beautiful too. The guys look a bit more average, though none of them has a beer gut. For me, all of this adds to the ugh-factor, because I am not skinny or perfect, and I don’t have a team of makeup and hair people on call, and I’d still like to believe that someone could fall in love with me, but shows like this keep telling me it’s not possible.

            Following along with the almost-like-a-Jewish-wedding concept, the couple first gets to spend some time “alone” together, with a cameraman, when they go to the Yichud room (the togetherness room) after the ceremony. This is a custom in orthodox, or strictly orthodox, weddings, where the Yichud room is the first time the bride and groom are allowed to be alone together without a chaperone, and therefore finally get a chance to hold hands, or even kiss (there isn’t much time for anything else, but now that they’re married they can do whatever they want). On the show, this really is just a time for the new couple to talk to each other for the first time and exchange small bits of information, like, I have a dog, I have ten tattoos, or I smoke (which, I guess, is still a thing in Israel).

            Then there’s the party, with all of the music and dancing and friends and such, and everyone comments on how wonderful the match is, just to reassure themselves that this whole thing isn’t crazy.

            Then the couple goes to an apartment for the night, to talk and eat and put on their wedding rings and find out where they’re going for their honeymoon (The Seychelles? Oh my God! Who knew!), all filmed by a camera person, or camera people. And then, at some point, the camera people leave and the door is closed for the night. Thankfully.

            So, each week in class, after we’ve watched the week’s episode on our own, we discuss what we liked, didn’t like, didn’t believe, laughed out loud at, wanted to scream about, etc. It’s such a silly show that our conversations about it end up being mostly fun and silly too, though there is quite a lot of backseat diagnosing (because some of the brides and grooms are crazy), and there are always a lot of questions about what the team of psychologists could have been thinking by putting these two people together. Oh, and all of this discussing has to be done in Hebrew.

            Not surprisingly, I can’t relate to most of the people on the show. They are presented to us as the most charming, gorgeous, successful and ambitious people, almost as if they are all the same person, though, clearly, they aren’t. The one thing they do have in common, though, is a willingness to have their intimate relationships recorded and aired in public, which I don’t understand.

I remember how awful it felt when I had to do a sleep study at home, and along with wearing all kinds of monitors I had to keep a video camera aimed at me twenty-four/seven, in case I had some kind of cardiac or neurological event and they needed to see what I was doing when my numbers went wonky. I hated knowing that some stranger might eventually be watching me sleep, eat, or watch TV, though the likelihood that even one person would ever watch a small part of the tape was really low.

“That was a really boring movie.”

            And even if I could tolerate being watched all day and night, I would be deeply suspicious that my “groom” would just be saying that nice/patient/compassionate thing because the cameras were on him and he wanted to look good on TV, and once the cameras stopped the real person would be an asshole and I’d feel like a fool.

            My teacher this semester is a beautiful, young, charming, funny actress/student from just outside of Tel Aviv, so in a way this show fits the energy of the semester overall: lots of silliness and fun, and nothing too deep or serious. She herself, she says, has not been tempted to try out for the show, and prefers making fun of the people who do, which makes her more relatable. She’s always friendly and full of praise for our attempts to speak Hebrew, and never negative or hurtful, but still, part of me worries that this reality show is telling me what real Telavivians are like, and if I go there, which I really want to do, they will rip me apart. Though that could be my old stuff playing up again, from back in elementary school when the beautiful, competitive, well-dressed girls in my class hated my guts.

There’s also the disorienting fact that while this is a reality show taking place in Israel, there is no sense of the politics, or violence, or the social divides between Jews and Arabs and between secular and religious Jews. Even in my lovely, fun, cheery Hebrew class this semester, we still had to talk about the terrorist attack that happened in Tel Aviv recently, where sirens and ambulances and death took over the city for a while. But those things don’t come up on the show, or at least, they haven’t so far.

Hopefully, as the season goes on, there will be a little bit more reality in this reality show, and maybe one or two people I wouldn’t mind meeting in real life. But even if nothing improves on the show, I’m definitely improving my Hebrew listening skills, and learning more about how real Israelis talk when they don’t have a script; which has been reassuring, actually. Clearly I’m not the only one who struggles to find the right words.

“Don’t worry, Mommy. I have trouble with words too.”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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