Live from . . .

Shirley Kagan and the Library in Ram

2011-09-26T09:38:00.000-04:00

Shirley Kagan was a beloved wife, mother, and grandmother. She was also an unofficial ambassador and peace builder who I was proud to call my friend. Shirley passed away on Thursday night.

Shirley, her husband Irv, and their family had an impact on my life before I ever met them. David Kagan, their middle son, studied Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). David died in 1986 at the age of 23. He was a passionate advocate for peace and mutual understanding at a time when such positions were not in vogue. To support David’s hopes and vision, the Kagan family started a foundation in his name, dedicated to advancing peaceful relationships among people of different nationalities and faiths.

One of the Foundation’s legacies is to support a SAIS Middle East Studies graduate student to study Arabic in the summer before his or her second year. I was selected as the David Kagan Fellow for 2001 and have done my best to forge a career that advances the goals that I share with the Kagan family.

In November of 2008, I met Shirley and Irv for the first time. They invited me to deliver the annual David Kagan Memorial Lecture at their synagogue. I was running a small grant program in the West Bank at the time, and the Kagans asked me to speak about that experience and about living and working in the Arab World. Following Shabbat services that day, I shared with 200 some congregants my viewpoints about “the Human Face of the Arab World,” as I put it. I concluded by encouraging the congregation to be a part of the change they wanted to see and to collect their used books for a library in Ram, a city in the West Bank.

Ram, a city of about 65,000 people located between Jerusalem and Ramallah, was cut from Jerusalem by the separation barrier. Jerusalem was Ram’s lifeline, and the Local Council faced the task of providing residents with new schools, a hospital, and a park. With US government assistance, the Council built a library for Ram and its surrounding villages and equipped the library with a computer lab. However, the shelves of the library remained empty; the community couldn’t afford to buy books.

After my speech, Shirley enthusiastically approached me, gave me a hug, and said nonchalantly of the Ram library project, “Yeah, we’re going to do that.” Pointing to her 12-year old granddaughter, she said that collecting the books would be Sasha’s mitzvah project, or service project, for her Bat Mitzvah the next year.

Shirley, her granddaughter, and the rest of the Kagan family ran with the idea. They printed a flyer, reached out to friends, and personally collected more than 1600 books – from Pride and Prejudice to Clifford the Big Red Dog – for children half way around the world who they’d never met and who were supposedly their enemies. They cataloged each book in their apartment on the Upper West Side, put a “Books Building Bridges” sticker inside of each, and packed them into boxes.

And then they waited.

First it was a problem with the Palestinian ministry of culture. Once that was resolved, the real problems began with the Israeli taxes and customs department. The request to ship the books disappeared into a black hole that no appeal could shake free.

In the meantime, Shirley visited Ram in the summer of 2010. She braved a new world, crossed Kalandia checkpoint, and walked a courageous walk. She visited the empty library with Muhanned, the Ram Municipality’s Executive Director and Wafaa, the head of the Women’s Committee, neither of whom she met before. They placed the handful of books Shirley carried with her on the shelves, a down payment on what was to come.

Shortly after returning to New York, Shirley was diagnosed with cancer. She battled it with strength and humor. Along the way, her family continued to wait for permission from the Israeli authorities to send the books. While we pleaded for help in completing this act of selflessness, Shirley was patient and upbeat. If she ever considered this library project a fool’s errand, she never let on to me. All she had was sincere enthusiasm for the prospect of the 100,000 people in the Ram area having access to such a wealth of resources that would help to build a better life and peace.

The books were shipped to Israel last month, almost three years after I gave that speech. They arrived in Ram a couple of weeks ago. We all had a vision of Shirley and Irv reading with the children in the library. Shirley was so enthusiastic about the idea of volunteering abroad one day.

When I met Shirley and Irv three years ago, it felt like I was visiting with family I hadn’t seen in a while. Shirley was that warm and generous a person – a lot of people felt that way about her. I am sad those kids in the Ram library won’t have the chance to feel that way, too. They missed someone special, we all will.

My 9/11 story

2011-09-11T19:44:00.003-04:00

The attacks set me off to become an unofficial ambassador
Tuesday, September 06, 2011 (Pittsburgh Post Gazette)

By Benjamin Orbach

Ten years ago, I walked up the steps to my Arabic class as Nadav, a short guy from Brooklyn, bounded from the building, yelling "Someone flew a plane into the World Trade Center!" We were both graduate students at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C.

I joined Nadav and a handful of students around the TV in the building's lounge. When the second tower fell, I stood up and walked home. It was such a beautiful, clear day, yet it seemed as though the world was ending.

The previous semester, I had written my masters' thesis on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. Still, I had questions. In particular, what had led individuals to do this and how did people in the Arab world feel about these attacks? Within a year, I moved to Jordan to learn more Arabic and to search for answers.

Not knowing anyone in Amman, I wandered the city and spoke to anyone who would speak back about 9/11 and U.S. foreign policy, but also about everyday life and our hopes for the future. Over the course of a year, I backpacked through Syria and Morocco, then moved to Cairo at the start of the Iraq war.

Along the way, I continued to speak and listen -- to the Egyptian falafel cook making $5 a day, to my Jordanian barber who wanted to move to Detroit, to a young Syrian woman working in an art gallery in Hama, to so many others. I became intimately familiar with the problems of securing a life of dignity in the Arab world -- whether that's affording marriage, finding a job after graduation or carving out personal space in authoritarian states.

On a fall day in 2002, I had an epiphany about how private American citizens might help our Arab counterparts with these problems while improving our own security. As I taught Sundos, a headscarf-covered 18-year-old University of Jordan student, to use a computer, I realized that no matter what befell Jordan as a result of the war in Iraq, there would remain a role for Americans to play in building partnerships.

For Sundos, the Internet wasn't just entertainment but a tool of professional and personal empowerment. She was grateful for my help in opening a world of possibilities and was happy to be my friend.

Like people I met throughout that year in the Middle East, she differentiated between the American people and the U.S. government, seeing the American people as our country's greatest asset and U.S. foreign policy as our greatest liability. For her and many others, Americans created Hollywood and Harvard, while the U.S. government backed dictators and launched wars.

When I returned home in late 2003, I went to work at the State Department managing programs that support democratic reforms and women's empowerment in the Middle East and North Africa. I saw success in projects that paired American experts with Arab activists and leaders.

Whether it was legislative assistants from Colorado and Vermont training Algerian parliamentary staffers to draft bills or a documentary maker from Mississippi teaching activists in Bahrain to make short videos, I witnessed the American people serving as unofficial ambassadors. They supported local leaders seeking to address the educational, economic, human rights and other development challenges within their communities. In the process, they represented the diversity and strength of America.

I decided that I, too, wanted to become an unofficial ambassador and play a direct role in creating opportunities. I returned to the ranks of the American people and worked for an international development company in the Palestinian territories from 2007 to 2009. I designed and implemented a small grant program that built educational facilities, installed computer labs and provided recreational equipment to women's centers and youth clubs in isolated villages and woebegone refugee camps.

We completed projects in more than 75 communities that benefited more than 10,000 people striving to improve their lives. Along the way, I continued to represent America while learning about the daily problems that manifest themselves in global issues.

This past year, we launched the America's Unofficial Ambassadors initiative at Creative Learning, a Washington, D.C.,-based nonprofit organization. Our goal is to increase the number of American volunteers in the Muslim worldm, and we are building a community to offer them guidance and support. By the end of 2012, we hope to have encouraged 1,000 Americans to commit to volunteering for one week to one year.

In March, we released the AUA Directory, the premiere resource for researching short-term volunteer opportunities in Muslim-majority countries. You don't have to be a professional development worker to teach English in Indonesia, to build a house in Jordan, to promote public health in Senegal or to help build peace.

Frequently, I think about my walk home on that terrible, clear day 10 years ago when everything changed. I'm grateful to have found a path to making a difference and to have met so many other unofficial ambassadors who are doing the same.

Benjamin Orbach, a Pittsburgh native and author of "Live from Jordan," directs the America's Unofficial Ambassadors initiative at Creative Learning.

Unprecedented Initiative to Promote American Volunteerism in the Muslim World Announces First Volunteers

2011-05-24T16:12:00.002-04:00

Washington DC, May 24, 2011 — Creative Learning, a Washington DC based non-profit organization, is pleased to announce that Alison Horton, from Highland Park, New Jersey and Samantha Faulkner, from Lawrenceberg, Kentucky are the first winners of the America’s Unofficial Ambassadors (AUA) Mosaic Scholarship. Creative Learning launched the AUA initiative in March of 2011 to encourage and support more Americans to volunteer short-term in education, health, and other human development areas in the Muslim World. Through programs that raise awareness and increase access to impactful service opportunities, the AUA initiative is mobilizing Americans to reach across cultural differences, form partnerships of mutual interest, and build peace. By December of 2012, the AUA initiative intends to encourage 1000 Americans to commit to at least one week of service in the Muslim World.

The AUA Mosaic Scholarship will increase the number of volunteers who represent the diverse, social mosaic that is America in the Muslim World. Scholarship recipients volunteer from one week to a year, with an organization listed in the AUA Directory of Recommended Organizations. The AUA Directory provides profiles of leading organizations that send or host American volunteers serving in education, health, and other community needs in Muslim-majority countries. The AUA Directory is the premier resource for researching short-term volunteer opportunities in the Muslim World and is available free of charge at www.unofficialambassadors.com.

Both Alison Horton and Samantha Faulkner will depart the United States in June. Each was chosen from a competitive field based upon their essay submissions, commitment to service, and personal interviews. Ms. Horton will serve as a volunteer in Bangladesh through the BRAC organization; and Ms. Faulkner will volunteer in the Palestinian Territories through the Middle East Fellowship program. As part of the Mosaic Scholarship program, recipients will blog about their volunteer experiences on the AUA blog, and upon their return, give presentations within their communities. These stories and presentations will help shatter stereotypes and raise awareness for the value and impact of service.

AUA Program Director Benjamin Orbach said, “We are thrilled to support these two volunteers who will represent the best of America to communities in South Asia and the Middle East as they support local leaders in grappling with their development challenges. It is equally exciting to think about the impact that these returned volunteers will have in their home communities when they return from their service and share their experiences within their schools, faith groups, and community centers.”

Explaining why she wanted to be a part of AUA’s initiative, Samantha Faulkner said, “I think I could be a good representative of a generally misunderstood part of our country. By eliminating these stereotypes and prejudices in both cultures, we open the door to a new level of tolerance and communication that would certainly not have been possible before. I would be honored to be a part of such a mission.”

From her perspective, Alison Horton emphasized the importance of the AUA initiative by saying, “I’m so thankful for the resources provided to me by America's Unofficial Ambassadors to make this opportunity possible. I'll be working with BRAC, an incredible organization that has achieved unprecedented leaps in school enrollment, childhood immunization, food security, and infant survival in some of the most desperate communities.”

Applications are being accepted for the annual Mosaic Scholarship program through August 31. All qualified American citizens, committed to volunteering in the Muslim World through an organization listed in the AUA Directory, are eligible for the scholarship. For more details about AUA and the Mosaic Scholarship, please visit here.

About Creative Learning
America’s Unofficial Ambassadors is a strategic initiative of Creative Learning, a Washington DC-based not-for-profit organization that enhances the capacity of local organizations around the world to improve the lives of people in their communities. Through the creation of people-to-people partnerships, Creative Learning is especially dedicated to protecting human rights, supporting economic and social development, and building peace. Consistent with the program’s theme that American citizens should do more to make a difference, AUA does not seek government funding. For information about sponsorship opportunities, please contact Tracy Key at tracykeyevents at aol.com.

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My Thoughts on Greg Mortenson

2011-04-21T09:45:00.001-04:00

Pittsburgh - I watched the 60 Minutes piece on Greg Mortenson with disappointment. If you haven’t heard of Greg Mortenson, he is a humanitarian that has built more than 100 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as the best-selling author of Three Cups of Tea (co-written with Oliver David Relin). Three Cups of Tea is the inspirational story of Mortenson’s personal journey from a lost K2 mountain climber to the founder of the Central Asia Institute, an organization devoted to children’s education, primarily girls, in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

If you haven’t watched the 60 Minutes piece, Mortenson is accused of embellishing his personal story and of his mismanagement of the Central Asia Institute. He has offered a partial response to the accusations – none of which are criminal – and I hope that he clarifies further the points that have been raised.
In the interim, I have two thoughts on the subject.

Read more here.

New Initiative to Mobilize Americans to Volunteer in the Muslim World

2011-03-03T00:09:00.006-05:00

Launch of the America’s Unofficial Ambassadors Program Fills a Major Void

Washington, D.C. – March 2, 2011 – Creative Learning today is announcing the launch of the America’s Unofficial Ambassadors (AUA) program, the first initiative specifically designed to increase the number of Americans who volunteer in education, health, community needs, and civil society in the Muslim World. The goal of the AUA program is to build peace at a grassroots level in America and throughout the Muslim World by increasing the number of substantive, cross-cultural partnerships that support higher standards of living, greater economic opportunities, and increased freedoms. By December 2012, the AUA program aims to encourage 1000 Americans to commit to at least a week of service in the Muslim World.

Project Director Benjamin Orbach explained that the AUA initiative’s launch comes at a historic time. “Since World War II, our government has primarily looked at our relations with the rest of the world through the prism of government-to-government diplomacy and assistance. As we see popular-led change in Egypt, Tunisia, and other spots throughout the Middle East, it becomes clear how important America’s people-to-people relationships are and have to be in the future. Volunteering and supporting the rights and aspirations of our counterparts in the Muslim World is a way for Americans to participate in creating a better future based upon the interests we share with the rest of the world.”

From building houses in Indonesia, to teaching English in the Palestinian Territories, to supporting local organizations to raise awareness on public health issues in Senegal, there are a diverse range of opportunities for American volunteers to support citizens and leaders who seek to make a difference in their lives and their communities. Through the process of volunteering and supporting these initiatives, there is a chance for Americans to build peace and to get beyond harmful stereotypes.

Roughly 63 million people volunteered in America between September 2009 and September 2010, but less than two percent of that number volunteered overseas. A much smaller fraction of Americans volunteered in Muslim-majority countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. “One of the reasons why so few Americans volunteer in the Muslim World is that on a comparative basis, we don’t have the same number of deep familial and personal relations to those parts of the world as we do to Europe and the Americas,” said Creative Learning President Bill Kruvant. He continued, “There is much less awareness of or access to the credible and impactful volunteer opportunities that are out there, and unfortunately, there is a greater exposure to some of the exaggerated stereotypes.”

Finding the Best Opportunity to Volunteer in the “Muslim World”
To overcome this “access” issue, Creative Learning has compiled and published the first ever directory of volunteer placements that exclusively focuses on organizations that send or host American volunteers for short-term service opportunities in Muslim-majority countries. The AUA Directory of Recommended Organizations is now available and free to the public at http://www.unofficialambassadors.com.

In producing the AUA Directory, Creative Learning researched more than 1000 organizations and conducted interviews with program staff and alumni to compile profiles of leading organizations that send or host American volunteers in a Muslim-majority country for service of a week to a year. Each organization profiled in the AUA Directory has the capacity to offer safe and meaningful service opportunities. They allow volunteers to choose their country placement, and they use people-to-people partnerships in their programs, which range from building schools in Mali, to restoring historic buildings in Albania, to training local organizations in Bangladesh to use “new media.” All of the volunteer opportunities profiled in the AUA Directory are open to the public, are non-proselytizing, and are apolitical in nature. Each AUA Directory profile includes program-specific information on past volunteers’ experience, the skills a volunteer will need to succeed, and the specifics of how to apply.

A dynamic resource, the AUA Directory is an ideal starting point for interested volunteers to find the volunteer opportunity that is right for them. As the lone resource that focuses specifically on Muslim-majority countries, the AUA Directory can be an important tool in building better relations between America and the Muslim World. Orbach said, “There are terrific organizations out there doing meaningful work that changes lives, but people don’t know about them or about and how they can volunteer. With the AUA Directory, we have created the premiere resource for Americans to identify short-term volunteer opportunities that build people-to-people partnerships in Muslim-majority countries.” Kruvant added, “We can all participate in national service. Volunteering on a short-term basis is an excellent way for each of us to play a role in building peace at a grassroots level.”

About Creative Learning
Creative Learning is a Washington DC-based 501(c)(3), not-for-profit organization that enhances the capacity of local organizations around the world to improve the lives of people in their communities. Through the creation of people-to-people partnerships, Creative Learning is especially dedicated to protecting human rights, supporting economic and social development, and building peace. Consistent with the program’s theme that American citizens should do more to make a difference, AUA is a citizen-funded initiative that does not seek government funding. For information about sponsorship opportunities, please contact Tracy Key at Tracykeyevents at aol.com.

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My Egypt Letter to President Obama

2011-02-03T15:30:00.003-05:00

You are welcome to borrow as much of this as you like and send it the White House here.

February 3, 2011

Dear President Obama,

There are times when we have to ask what side of history we want to be on. Supporting human rights and governing democratically are pillars of the identity we espouse as a country. You can argue that we risk strategic interests and stability as related to Iraq, the Suez Canal, and Israel by siding with democratic change in Egypt. I argue that we risk losing the very character of who we are, any sense of American exceptionalism, if we don’t support our friends who are willing to risk their lives, en masse, for their rights.

Support the principles that we heard about in the State of the Union. To live in a democracy is a privilege and a responsibility. As citizens, we have a duty to support others who are actively struggling for that very same privilege and responsibility.

You are the leader of the free world. Support these Egyptians and people all over the world will love and respect you. If you leave them to die to tyranny, you and we will always regret it. And our country will be weaker for it.

Sincerely,

Ben Orbach

The Mubarak Moment II: An American Duty

2011-02-03T15:00:00.004-05:00

New York -- When I lived in Cairo in 2003, I was in on the ground floor of the protests in Liberation Square at the start of Iraq War. I took pictures, I wrote an oped, and there is a chapter in Live from Jordan about the event. The security forces roughed up some protestors that day, but the whole thing was a sham. Egyptians were upset about the war, but no one cared enough to stop working, to stop eating at McDonalds, or really to alter their lives in any meaningful way.

The opposite is true in Egypt, today. Tunisians showed Egyptians what was possible in 2011, and Egyptians, long the standard-bearer of the Arab World in so many ways, couldn’t bear to live with the shame of the Mubarak regime any longer. Hundreds of thousands of people, if not a couple million people, have taken their lives into their hands to challenge the repressive authority.

At this point in the standoff, it is clear that the regime has made its internal deals and that succession has passed over Mubarak’s son. The military – Egypt’s strongest institution – would have been shamed by the father passing the baton to his son. Egyptians are proud of their history and the turning of their faux-Republic into a Syrian-styled family business would not have been acceptable. This democratic moment preempted that discomfort for the military, and its mission is accomplished. While not securing his son’s throne must surely have been a bitter pill for Mubarak, his redline is undoubtedly a refusal to die in exile as a banished villain, to be sent away like a 21st Century version of King Farouk. The regime has dug in, and the brass has little stake in a continued confrontation.

At the same time, these Egyptian everyday heroes have lived a dream this past week. They’ve come together in the power of numbers, bound by common frustrations and propelled by common hopes. When the protests first began, they never could have hoped to gather this type of lasting attention and to win back such dignity. They’ve been kicked for years and they finally stood up and said no more. Their movement has morphed, though, from making a show of pride to changing the reality of their country and the way their government operates.

Egyptians are on the cusp of changing the very premise of what is possible. That’s intoxicating. It is light and fresh air in a teeming, dark basement. This isn’t regime change from the turret of an American tank; rather it could be a renaissance of Egyptians’ own creation.

But it is a fine line between dreams and nightmares. Together, Egyptian demonstrators are safe. Alone, they will suffer. If the plain-clothes thugs who are beating protestors at this very moment succeed in clearing Liberation Square without a formal political transition in place, then it will all end. There will be no promise of that better tomorrow. Instead, there will be the lurking fear of the knock on the door. Bloggers, Facebook posters, and photographed protestors – they’ll all be vulnerable without the strength of numbers.

Egypt has one of the most notorious prison systems in the Arab World. Many contend that the ideology of al Qaeda was spawned in Egypt’s prisons, where Islamist dissidents were tortured and radicalized further. That style of abuse is what falling short of the dream means.

Yesterday, I co-wrote an oped about this moment as an opportunity for Israelis, about how those who live in a democracy need to support those who are willing to die for democracy. This isn’t just about Israelis, though; it is about us as Americans. There is no question that Egypt is an integral strategic partner to the United States, and foreign policy is based upon interests, not sentimentality. As long as Egyptians were content to go about their everyday lives and not to seek change – as was the case in 2003 – then I didn’t have much of a problem with the practicalities of having to deal with a dictator. But people are dying in the streets to remove that dictator, and journalists are being beaten and arrested to clear the scene of witnesses.

Tomorrow, after Friday prayer, will be a big day. Without the protection of the White House, I don’t think the pro-democracy forces will tip the balance.

There are times when we have to ask what side of history do we want to be on? Supporting human rights and governing democratically are pillars of the identity we espouse as a country. You can argue that we risk strategic interests and stability as related to Iraq, the Suez Canal, and Israel by siding with democratic change in this case. I argue that we risk losing the very character of who we are, any claim to American exceptionalism, if we don’t support our friends who are risking their lives, en masse, for their rights.

To live in a democracy is a privilege and a responsibility. As citizens, we have a duty to support others who are actively struggling for that same privilege and responsibility. Contact the White House, post on Facebook, stop what you are doing for five minutes, and do something to support the citizens of Egypt.

---
If you want to read a short piece about what we should hope to see in Egypt, this is an excellent analysis by Michelle Dunne.

If you want to read a beautifully written piece about the importance of this moment, this is a wonderful article by Anthony Shadid.

The Mubarak Moment: An Opportunity for Israelis

2011-02-02T12:59:00.003-05:00

It is hard to believe that Israelis are watching the scenes from Cairo with anything but dread. Yet, the Arab Awakening has presented Israelis with an opportunity to secure their place in the Middle East.

Read the rest and comment here.

Holidays Gifts, 2010

2010-12-21T10:06:00.003-05:00

December 21, 2010

New York – Another year and another lump of coal for my family. This year, I continued my practice of giving my family’s holiday gifts to organizations that support Americans building people-to-people partnerships in the Muslim World in areas of human development such as education, health, and rights. In 2011, we’ll launch the America’s Unofficial Ambassadors initiative around this concept of service at Creative Learning, and as part of that initiative, I am writing a book about Americans volunteering and serving throughout the Muslim World. With this holiday season, I decided to donate to a couple of organizations working in Africa that I came across through my research and work:

Sudan Sunrise is an organization founded by Rev. Tom Pritchard of Kansas to build peaceful reconciliation between Muslims, Christians, and Animists in Southern Sudan and to achieve the dream of former NBA baller Manute Bol. My childhood memories of Manute Bol are of a 7’6, rail-thin basketball oddity who chucked the occasional three pointer. Bol was a greater giant off the court then on it; he devoted his life to building peace in his native home of Sudan. The problems of Sudan have received considerable attention over the last several years due to the genocide in Darfur. Before the genocide, though, more than two million Sudanese in the south were killed in civil war, many by Darfurians, actually. Bol dedicated himself to reconciliation between the different faiths of the people of Sudan, and his vision of 41 schools that educate children of all religions (together) is a revolutionary concept in a place that has been torn apart over the last couple of decades. Bol was also instrumental in saving the lives of some of Sudan’s Lost Boys, orphans forced from their homes during that country’s civil war. Manute Bol died this past June at the age of 47.

There is much to admire about Bol, a professional athlete who became a celebrity but who never forgot the problems of home. There is also much to admire about Tom Pritchard, a soft-spoken pastor from Kansas who has invested all of himself, personally and financially to achieving development and reconciliation in Sudan. A month ago, I met Tom Pritchard, John Zogby, Rudwan Daoud, James Mijak and other courageous leaders from the United States and Sudan who are dedicated to building these 41 schools and creating a new reality in Sudan. Donations to Sudan Sunrise literally translate to desks, books, blackboards, supplies, and a future for Sudan’s children. You can read about Manute Bol here and watch a video about his legacy in Sudan here. One thing – don’t be misled by the moving video from NBA TV. While I hope that NBA stars will line up to support Sudan Sunrise and the construction of these schools, it hasn’t happened yet and this is an initiative that needs your support.

Another excellent initiative that needs your support and that I learned about recently is the Village Bicycle Project. Village Bicycle Project collects used bicycles and ships them to Ghana and Sierra Leone. Since 1999, VBP has sent 50,000 bicycles to Africa and trained 10,000 people to ride them. In Ghana and Sierra Leone, with local partners, they sell the bicycles to motivated individuals, teach bicycle maintenance to create self-sufficiency, and sell tools and spare parts at discounted rates. You might find it surprising that they sell the bicycles, but giving them away for free only devalues their worth in the eyes of the communities and individuals they work with. What I really like most about the project is their emphasis on women and girls. Transportation between villages is a real challenge in many countries and bicycles are a form of mobility and empowerment for women, especially. For people who walk several hours a day, a bicycle can mean the difference in going to school and working at a job.

I found out about VBP and their work in Sierra Leone through Brittany Richardson, a San Francisco woman who left her job last year to spend seven months as a volunteer teaching young people to ride bicycles in Sierra Leone villages. Brittany had never traveled to Sierra Leone before and did not know the people she would meet and work with. She taught more than 250 girls to ride bicycles, including Kadiatu Brewah, a single mother of five children (her husband passed away four years ago) in her early 30s. Kadiatu (right) now rides her bicycle to and from her farm everyday. Other girls that Brittany taught to ride and care for their bicycles were able to cut their 7-hour commute to school dramatically.

The Sierra Leone program is relatively new for VBP, and they are collecting bicycles to send a container there in January of 2011. A $25 donation translates to a bicycle and independence for a young woman in Sierra Leone. You can also donate your old bicycle at participating stores across the United States from Boise to Pittsburgh to Kenosha. Take a look at VBP's website, their nationwide list of partners, and donate here. Donate soon though, to support the growth of their Sierra Leone program and the shipment of this next container.

Do It Yourself Foreign Assistance NYT Magazine Letter

2010-11-06T08:44:00.003-04:00

My response to Nicholas Kristof's excellent NYT Magazine piece from two weeks ago, published in this week's Magazine -

Letters: The D.I.Y. Foreign-Aid Revolution
It was a pleasure to read Nicholas D. Kristof’s article on “do it yourself” foreign assistance. The efforts of private American citizens to advance human-development causes at the community level are exceptional stories that are frequently untold.

From the perspective of an organization that supports Americans to volunteer in the Muslim world, I’d like to add two things. First, this kind of service doesn’t just affect day-to-day challenges in education, rights and health. Through the creation of substantive people-to-people partnerships, we can change communities’ impressions of America, as well as our own views of the “other.” Second, you don’t have to be a “full-time hero” to make a difference.

There are opportunities to volunteer on a short-term basis to build a house, teach a class and change a life as one of America’s unofficial ambassadors. The first step is to realize that we can create change, and the next step is to find the right opportunity to do it. Thank you for helping to raise awareness.

BENJAMIN ORBACH
Director, America’s Unofficial Ambassadors
Creative Learning

Habitat's Unofficial Ambassadors in Tajikistan

2010-10-06T08:33:00.001-04:00

A short piece I wrote for Habitat for Humanity's newsletter about the unofficial ambassadors I met in Tajikistan this past July. You can read here on Habitat's newsletter or below...

New York - In July, I spent a week in Tajikistan with Habitat for Humanity. Usually, a week with Habitat means laying brick or hanging drywall. If that week is with a Global Village build, it also means connecting with another culture and helping a family in a foreign land build their life. My experience with Habitat was a little different.

I direct the America’s Unofficial Ambassadors initiative at Creative Learning, a DC-based not-for-profit, and traveled to Tajikistan as an observer. America’s Unofficial Ambassadors is a new program that will encourage more Americans to volunteer throughout the Muslim World. By building people-to-people partnerships that support local leaders addressing human development challenges, private citizens can help to make a difference, not just on issues such as education and health, but also in the way we perceive each other. The AUA initiative will raise Americans’ awareness to the value of volunteering and then help people access the opportunity that is best for them, whether that is teaching English in a Moroccan village or building a home in Tajik town.

So, I visited Tajikistan to learn about Habitat’s program and see a Global Village “Women Build” team in action. I split my time between Nurek in the south and Khujand in the north. In Nurek, I met villagers who lived at the mercy of mudslides in brittle houses until they received Habitat loans. With Global Village volunteers at their sides, they built homes that are secure from the elements. Protection from the elements is so basic; we take it for granted in the United States. They don’t take it for granted in Nurek, though. Emomali, a smiling eight year-old boy, showed me photos from the build that the GV volunteers sent him. He remembered “Karla” and “Joe” who came from America to help his family.

In Khujand, I watched six women from the United States, Slovakia, Belgium, and the UAE work alongside an earnest Tajik family. Mussabbe, the mother, is a gynecologist, and her husband is an engineer. In Tajikistan, they are a “low-income family” – Mussabbe makes $50 a month and her husband works in Russia, like many Tajik men, because it is difficult to find work at home. In a week of laying brick and mixing cement, the family and the “Women Build” team raised 75 percent of the house’s external walls. In September, the family will move into their new 5-room house and out of the 2-room house they share with ten family members.

The work of the family and volunteers and the connection they formed with each other were inspiring. After a tearful goodbye with the team on its last night, Mussabbe and her family went to the airport in the morning wee-hours to say thank you and goodbye, one more time. Such is the gratitude felt towards volunteers like Jean, a 62-year-old from Nebraska who traveled half-way around the world to be a part of creating a healthy life for a family whose mother’s ambition is simply for her son “to possess a good profession and not to go to Russia to work.”

My trip to Tajikistan reminded me that a home, whether it is in the United States, Tajikistan, or any other country, is fundamental to feeling secure and aspiring for something more. I’m looking forward to my next trip to Tajikistan, when I return not as an observer but as a Habitat volunteer with other unofficial ambassadors who seek to make a human difference.

Thank God for the Conscience of the Nation

2009-12-17T07:17:00.002-05:00

Chinatown - The camera zooms in on Hadassah Lieberman’s hands as they sort through the day’s mail. She comes across a bill from FirstCare and tears it open. $243 for ear wax removal for the Senator formerly known as Joe Lieberman’s recent blockage!

No co-pay, no more.

That $243 will be coming out of pocket!

That’s a scene from the new reality TV show, “Caring for the Conscience of the Nation … and his family.” In discussions on the Senate’s version of the proposed health care bill, the Senator formerly known as Joe Lieberman has asserted, “If the public option is in there, as a matter of conscience, I will not allow the bill to come to a final vote.”

It is only logical that if the Senator formerly known as Joe Lieberman scuttles an agreement in the days ahead and keeps some 30 million Americans from attaining health care, there are three things we have to do as a nation:

(1) Pass legislation that bars the Senator formerly known as Joe Lieberman, his wife Hadassah, his four children, and five grandchildren from carrying any form of health care. This might not seem fair. But it isn’t easy being right when everyone else is wrong. The Senator formerly known as Joe Lieberman is willing to prove it. Besides, while it might get painful when it is time for more grandchildren or a root canal, this arrangement will give the Senator formerly known as Joe Lieberman a better chance to be in touch with his public. See below.

(2) Bestow the official title of “Conscience of the Nation,” upon the Senator formerly known as Joe Lieberman. I propose a nationally televised ceremony where a council of elders led by Bob Dole, Angela Lansbury, John McLaughlin, and Rue McClanahan present the Senator formerly known as Joe Lieberman with a certificate proclaiming his official authority as the “Conscience of the Nation.” No longer will he be called “Senator Joe Lieberman” or even “Shoeless Joe” for his hi-jinks in the Dirksen cafeteria. Instead, on all talk shows, committee hearings, public events, and religious occasions, the Senator formerly known as Joe Lieberman will be referred to as “The Conscience of the Nation.”

For example, at TGI Fridays, the waitress will have to ask, “Does the Conscience of the Nation prefer soup or salad with his Johnny Walker salmon filet?” Or when he is dunking at Madison Square Garden, Marv Albert will have to yell, “YES! The Conscience of the Nation serves up a facial to Nate Robinson.”

(3) Produce a reality TV show called “Caring for the Conscience of the Nation.” A weekly half-hour show which tracks the highlights of Lieberman family’s new health-care less life -- this will blow the Kardashians out of the water! Some potential classic scenes:

· The Conscience of the Nation explaining to his grandson that he can’t ever play sports because of the risk of injury. He then presents his grandson with War and Peace and some $9 reading glasses from CVS and tells him to “grow wise like his grandfather.”

· A minor auto accident sends the Conscience of the Nation to the emergency room with a stiff neck! The Conscience of the Nation is forced to endure a six-hour wait and 20 pages of paperwork that he can’t lean over to fill out.

· H1N1 circulates through our system, so it is time for a chicken soup cooking lesson with Mrs. Conscience of the Nation. Who needs immunizations when you’ve got kreplach?

At the end of each episode, Bernice, a snippy, short-haired, glasses-wearing British accountant will review the Conscience of the Nation’s finances. We find out how much the Conscience of the Nation paid in medical costs that week and receive updates on his financial worth as well as projections about what an extended stay in the hospital will do to his grandchildren’s prospects for higher education and/or vacations outside of Connecticut.

Each episode would also include an Andy Rooney styled address from the Conscience of the Nation. This would be a chance for the Conscience of the Nation to share his feelings about current events. I think I speak for us all when I say I’m dying to know the Conscience of the Nation’s thoughts on Tiger Woods. This segment would also be an opportunity for the Conscience of the Nation to enlighten us on the ins and outs of how we should live our daily lives. When riding the subway, when is it okay to stretch across three seats, for example?

For the Conscience of the Nation, this segment would be a grand opportunity to connect with the millions of Americans who need his help and guidance. There are so many of us who just don’t have access to the wisdom and moral superiority that the Conscience of the Nation offers so effortlessly. Of course, they’ll have to vary the time during the show that the Conscience of the Nation offers his monologue. If they are back-loaded a la Andy Rooney, some Americans may tune out before the program is over.

Pittsburgh Book Talk this Saturday

2009-11-25T10:56:00.003-05:00

New York - I'll be in Pittsburgh this Saturday for a Live from Jordan book talk at the Waterworks Barnes and Noble. The talk is in support of the Lauri Ann West Memorial Library. Barnes and Noble is donating a portion of all sales proceeds that day to support the library. Just tell them that you want them to make the donation at the cash register when you make your purchases.

The benefit for the library begins at 1 PM with Rob Rogers, the famous Post-Gazette cartoonist, doing an author talk. My Live from Jordan talk will be at 3PM. For directions, click here.

Obama Expands the “Base”

2009-06-05T03:55:00.003-04:00

Jerusalem - With a respectful but forceful tone, President Obama did what he does best in Cairo – he educated the public about the problems that we face in a way that was intellectually grounded, empathetic, and clear. If you consider the audience that President Obama was appealing to, his speech was a homerun in that it opened the door with large silent majorities for relationships based upon mutual interests.

The Cairo speech, dubbed “A New Beginning” was a policy overview of US interests in the Muslim World wrapped in a cultural overture to people of Islamic faith. President Obama quoted from the Koran and he used the language of the moment, beginning his speech with “Salaam Aleykum,” and dabbling in other cultural niceties, such as saying “peace be upon them” when referring to Islam’s prophets.

Beyond the culturally respectful framework, the speech was a clear and unapologetic overview of America’s priorities and interests amid the tangle of varying problems in the Muslim World. The President focused on seven issues: confronting extremism in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq; the Israeli-Palestinian peace process; Iran and nuclear weapons; democracy; religious freedom; women’s rights; and economic development and opportunity. With all of these issues, the President neither pandered nor preached. He explained US positions and intentions truthfully and eloquently while also clearing a path for cooperation with those who seek to partner in solutions.

I found seven points especially noteworthy in the President’s speech:

1) On the issue of confronting extremism, President Obama took on the conspiracy theorists. His stark description of al Qaeda’s actions as related to 9/11 and his delivery of the statement that, “These are not opinions to be debated; these are facts to be dealt with” was very strong. There are still many throughout the Muslim World who refute al Qaeda’s responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, and lay blame elsewhere, particularly with Israel and the Mossad.

2) President Obama implicitly acknowledged the mistakes of the Iraq war and the torture of detainees, but he did not offer apologies. This was important for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that to apologize to this audience would be to accept a false linkage concerning the Muslim World. Apologies are issued to the people who were wronged, whether by direct actions or by actions undertaken in their name. The audience at Cairo University or watching in Bangladesh or Indonesia may be outraged observers on these issues, but they don’t deserve an apology any more than a Catholic in Rome or a Hindu in Bombay.

3) Obama was masterful in expressing empathy for Israelis and for Palestinians. Similar to his comments on 9/11, his words on the Holocaust and the tone in which he delivered them were important to deflating conspiracy theories. Given Obama’s personal story and achievement, it can’t be emphasized enough what a unique messenger he is to the Muslim World, but also to the developing world. Obama has a credibility and authenticity to him that will allow many people to accept his well-constructed arguments as an authoritative source. On issues such as this one, as well as religious freedom and women’s rights, he can lead a revolution in thinking.

In addition, by raising Israeli settlements – though his actual language does not make clear whether settlements or settlement building needs to stop, a big difference – and speaking to the details of occupation, the President did something important vis-à-vis Hamas. He recognized Hamas as part of the Palestinian political spectrum and called on them to take on their responsibilities. Contrary to the wishes of many, Hamas is not a foreign usurper who will melt away. They have true local support and they will have to be integrated into any future Palestinian political framework to some degree for a Palestinian state and a peace agreement to be possible. By alluding to Palestinian unity, Obama spoke to the issue that is most important to Palestinians today.

4) On the point of supporting democracy, it was no accident that the President thanked his hosts, the Egyptian people. He mentioned al-Azhar, Cairo University, and the “timeless city” itself. He did not mention President Mubarak – a departure from protocol and a clear message. There was a lot of concern about President Obama’s choice of locations for this speech given the Egyptian government’s human rights record and almost three decades of emergency rule. This omission was as strong as any of his words on governance, human rights, religious freedom, and women’s rights.

5) Obama’s points on economic development and opportunity as well as education and women’s empowerment were significant. For Americans watching the speech, this is the area where we can come forward as unofficial ambassadors to contribute to the “new beginning” and to work on the human development issues that are the root of many of the problems that the President raised. President Obama put out some general ideas as well as some hefty commitments from women’s education to science to health issues. As is the case with the other policy points, there will have to be follow-up with programming and initiatives to make these commitments whole. As important, Americans will have to step forward to participate in these programs and to offer their time, efforts, and expertise.

6) If I were a Hindu or Buddhist watching this speech, I would feel left out to the point of being offended. The President referred to “non-Muslims” in the speech, but given the great efforts he made to weave together a common cloth of the three monotheistic religions, the exclusion of non-monotheist religions in the religious freedom section of the speech was glaring. The genocide in Darfur, the India-Pakistan relationship, and the treatment of third country nationals in the Gulf, in particular, are all areas that demonstrate a need for greater religious freedom and tolerance in the Muslim World.

7) Lastly, the speech did not contain a foreign policy bombshell. To many people around the world, Barack Obama appears to be a grand departure from previous U.S. leadership. Certainly, in some ways he is very different. But he is not a revolutionary in the sense that some in the Muslim World were hoping for. The United States isn’t going to assume the historic burden of guilt for western colonialism, transfer wealth from North to South, abandon our relationship with Israel, nor seriously consider the liturgy of populist leaders whose logic is based in schemes and conspiracies. If that wasn’t clear before, it is today.

Yesterday’s speech in Cairo was an overture to America’s world “base.” President Obama spoke to the silent majority of fence sitters – the people who are deciding how they feel about America and how they feel about their own involvement in their communities. Since World War II, and especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, America has been the world’s leader. Over the last eight years though, people throughout the Muslim World and the developing world have begun to ask questions like: is America still worth listening to and partnering with? Will America help me improve my life and my community? And significantly, is America a just power?

From the text of the speech to its delivery to the messenger himself, President Obama gave Muslims around the world reasons to answer “yes” to these questions and to be willing to judge the United States and Americans by our future actions on these outlined issues. In that regard, more important than anything President Obama said will be turning his words to deeds and his policy statements and plans into actual accomplishments. President Obama earned America a “new beginning” yesterday with that base of fence sitters, but it is up to all of us – at home and abroad, in government and within civil society – to do something with that beginning and not to squander this moment.

Obama in Cairo – An Opportunity to Open the Door for More Unofficial Ambassadors

2009-06-03T22:00:00.002-04:00

Jerusalem – Tomorrow in Cairo, Barack Obama will address the Muslim World. His speech is an opportunity to redefine the relationship between America and the Muslim World and to challenge us to personally contribute to confronting problems that threaten us all.

Presidential speeches delivered to audiences that numbers in tens or even hundreds of millions are a big deal. They are a moment for grand ideas and an opportunity to deliver a vision or political horizon. President Obama has already committed to a timetable for Iraq as well as to closing down Guantanomo; and he is also at work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These are the overarching political issues that interest a lot of the people in the Muslim World. It doesn’t seem necessary to use such a stage to re-commit to goals and processes already set in motion just a few months ago. People are looking for action on these fronts, not a repetition of promises. So what will the President say in Egypt?

I hope that President Obama will reach below the layer of international conflicts that plague parts of the Muslim World and speak about the core human development problems that afflict many Muslim-majority countries. Dictatorial and corrupt governments, the absence of economic opportunities, poor education systems, and unequal and unempowered women are characteristics of many of the countries whose populations President Obama will be speaking to on Thursday, including his hosts in Egypt (and Saudi yesterday). Throughout the Muslim World, why is it that political systems are characterized by authoritarian rule? Or that women suffer from an absence of opportunities in every sector of society? To his credit, George W. Bush asked these questions and gave a couple of powerful speeches about the universal right to liberty.

In some cases, the messenger can be as important as the message, though. For many in the Middle East, the election of Barack Obama was not just a seminal moment in America’s history, but a turning point in their own personal evaluations of what is possible in life. President Obama is the ultimate spokesperson for a campaign to build empowerment and opportunities. In each place that I’ve lived or traveled in the Muslim World, I’ve found that on a popular level, the appeal of America is its people, culture, and open system. Our foreign policies may be almost unanimously opposed, but the promise of our rags to riches stories is the stuff of dreams. And nothing embodies the possibility of America as a land of dreams more than the election of a biracial son of an African immigrant to the most powerful position in the world.

Similar to his speech on race last year, President Obama has the potential to challenge the status quo, in this case the stagnant systems and authoritarian leadership of many of the countries in the Muslim World. He could question the personal accountability of his audience and call upon community leaders and young people to lead the way in taking responsibility for creating change in their own societies.

There is no guarantee that the right rhetoric, even delivered by the right messenger will equal success though. In fact, the problems that we talk about and work on in parts of the Muslim World are more than generational problems and they require long-term commitment and incredible personal will on the part of the people who want for change to occur. For this reason, if President Obama takes up the call for empowerment and opportunity growth, his speech must address not just his Muslim viewers, but the people who voted him to office last November.

While the President sets a vision, it is up to the rest of us to follow it and work towards its achievement. In this case, this means the strategic use of foreign assistance and diplomatic initiatives by our government, but that is not enough. The missing component since the 9/11 attacks has been the lack of an American service initiative in the Muslim World. America needs more unofficial ambassadors – global citizens who volunteer or work in the Muslim World.

Unofficial ambassadors, the embodiment of America’s appeal in this part of the world (the American people), can be the difference in communities from Morocco to Indonesia. From teachers to accountants to journalists to doctors there is integral work for Americans to do with civil society and government leaders who are trying to address the pressing human development challenges in their communities. Americans who can spend anywhere from a two week vacation to a year volunteering or working in their area of expertise can make contributions that not only help address some of these root causes, but also reinforce the positive Obamania images of our country.

What exactly do I mean? My latest example of an unofficial American ambassador making a difference is my father-in-law, Louis Kushner.

A few weeks ago, Louis, an expert mediator from Pittsburgh came for a short visit and volunteered his time to an ongoing Rule of Law training program in the Palestinian Territories. Louis taught a daylong mediation seminar and simulation to judges, representatives of the contractors’ union, and ministry of Justice officials. The training was based on methods that are universal, it was useful to the participants, and it was supportive of Rule of Law concepts that enable a society to settle a dispute through mediation rather than 1) litigation in an overburdened court system or 2) other less honorable means.

In addition to the formal training, Louis connected with the 20 Palestinian men and women attending the seminar on a personal level. Louis had never been to Ramallah and he found a vibrant city rather than the war zone he expected. He remarked to me several times how the training was almost the same as if he were doing it in Pittsburgh. Some of the disputes discussed were different but a lot of the questions were similar, and the people themselves were mostly the same.

At the same time, Palestinian participants were appreciative of the opportunity to learn from an American expert and to make the professional connection. Representatives of the contractors’ union were enthusiastic about using mediation to resolve payment disputes. At lunch, when I asked one contractor if any of this was useful, he pulled out his wallet, showed me a roll of unpaid promissory notes for past work, and said “definitely.”

Ideally, Louis would have stayed for a week or ten days and taught a comprehensive seminar; one day of mediation training alone will not resolve that engineer’s unpaid promissory notes. But the creation of cross-cultural linkages and the sharing of expertise is a fine start. In the case of Louis, he now has a better concept of the problems people face here and an open invitation to return for a longer training. The Palestinians he worked with have a better idea of how mediation can work in their society as well as a connection to an expert mediator in the United States.

I don’t expect President Obama to speak about the Louis Kushners of the world in Cairo, but I hope that he speaks to them, not just to the people of the Muslim World. The election of our new President offers a unique opportunity to correct some of our post 9/11 mistakes. One of these mistakes was not educating the public about how the human development challenges found in this part of the world impact our national security. Another mistake was not encouraging Americans to do our share in addressing these challenges.

Tomorrow, Barack Obama has the chance to speak to these issues on a pretty large stage. Insha’allah, he won’t miss this monumental opportunity.

No, There is a “Muslim World”

2009-06-03T19:00:00.003-04:00

Jerusalem - In the run-up to President Obama’s address to the “Muslim World” in Cairo on June 4, a number of experts have declared that the “Muslim World” is a figment of Usama bin Laden’s ideology. They argue that by accepting a division of the world into Muslims and non-Muslims, President Obama is entering into a field of play into which we as multicultural pluralistic Americans who cherish the separation of church and state can’t possibly succeed. While this is true to some degree it is an oversimplified argument.

Americans certainly have no interest in dividing the world between us and them on any category – Muslims vs. non-Muslims, men vs. women, whites vs. blacks, etc. Our society is based upon the concept that there is strength in diversity and that there are equal rights and the rule of law for all. We do not want to force Muslims to choose their identity as a Muslim (or any other specific identity) over other ties that bind – nationality, ethnicity, gender, and world-view for example. Our society and culture succeeds through inclusion, not by making people choose A and reject B.

So, of course it is a mistake to address Muslims from Indiana to Indonesia with the assumption that each individual prioritizes foreign policy issues based upon his or her religion. The issues of Palestine, Iraq, and Pakistan are important, but for a British teenager in London whose Muslim parents emigrated from India, do these issues trump anti-Muslim discrimination? Or for a 40-year old mother of nine in Sanaa, do these foreign policy concerns matter more than low literacy rates and high unemployment rates of women in Yemen? I don’t think so.

But the U.S. President hasn’t gone to Egypt in search of a new Caliph who will represent the views of all Muslims worldwide. President Obama has demonstrated that he is culturally and intellectually aware enough to understand that the Muslim World is not a united monolithic bloc with a joint platform of priorities that transcends all other concerns. In fact, there is a pretty good chance that at some point in his speech he will offer language that praises the diversity and therefore strength of the Muslim World.

What critics of the use of the term “Muslim World” shortchange is that while there may be more divisions than connections amongst Muslims worldwide, there is undoubtedly a “Muslim World.” The Muslim World is the space and the community that is interested in issues related to Islam. It isn’t a world of borders per se, but of shared ideas and interests that range from discussions about the Koran, to “call to prayer” cell phone ring tones, to foreign policy issues related to the persecution of Muslim minorities. If not the “Muslim World,” than what should we call this intersection and collection of interests among people who practice the faith of Islam? In the same way that there is a Muslim World, there is a Catholic World, an Arab World, a Women’s World, and even a Runners’ World. The list could go on.

If President Obama wanted to go to the Sixth and I Synagogue in DC or to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and give an address to the “Jewish World” about his policy on Israeli settlements, I would be quite happy. Perhaps because of my belief that President Obama is intellectually capable of making the distinction between Jewish Americans, Jewish Israelis, and Jewish Iranians, I would be very interested in hearing the President’s thoughts on issues that jointly impact the “Jewish World” and Americans. I would hope that the President would put his policy on settlements into the full context of international law and the peace process and educate the public about the choices that America is making and why.

I have similar hopes for President Obama’s address to the Muslim World. The President has already committed to an Iraq timetable and the closing of Guantanamo – two of the biggest political issues of interest in the “Muslim World” – so maybe he will address some of the human development problems, such as the absence of personal freedoms and economic opportunities that characterize life in many Muslim majority countries. Or perhaps he will discuss the gap in understanding that has grown between the general American public and Muslims since the 9/11 attacks. These are both worthy topics. There is little reason to express outrage about the proposed audience and to deny Muslims all over the world as well as Americans the opportunity to hear more about these issues and hopefully chart a course in dealing with them.

Waltz with Bashir

2009-02-21T06:36:00.004-05:00

Tel Aviv – With the academy awards approaching, I’ve decided that the best film I saw this year was Waltz with Bashir, nominated for best foreign language film (Hebrew). An animated documentary, Waltz with Bashir presents the experience of war in a unique and powerful way.

While the impending doom of the Sabra and Shatila massacre pervades the movie and pulls the viewer towards the culminating final scene, Waltz with Bashir is about the experience of young men sent to war. The story is told through the lens of (writer, director, and producer) Ari Folman’s struggle to recollect his wartime experiences. When a friend tells Ari about his reoccurring nightmare in which a pack of Lebanese dogs races through Tel Aviv to find him, Ari is confronted by his own nightmare as well as an inability to remember his time in Lebanon 20 years earlier.

In Ari’s nightmare, he and two other young men float ashore to downtown Beirut, M-16s in hand. The city is dark, lit only by the light of flares, drifting like shining feathers to the street below. The three young men rise naked from the water and look like a cross between emaciated concentration camp survivors and gangly teenagers. Ari and his two comrades don army uniforms and glide through the streets of war-torn Beirut, presumably in the direction of Sabra and Shatila. This nightmare sets Ari in motion on a journey to remember what he did in Lebanon, in particular during the 1982 massacre of the Palestinian refugee camp.

If the film was comprised of actual video interviews and newsreel clips, it would be a collection of soul-searching testimonies and horror-filled depictions of war and death. It would appeal to a select audience and be difficult content for everyone else. For this reason, the film’s animated style is remarkable. The animation presents the brutality and trauma of war in a way that allows all viewers to absorb the full picture, beyond the gore. The curly locks of a child beneath the rubble and the flies swarming the glassy eye of a fallen horse remain disturbing, but the animated versions make the images bearable and allow the viewer to consider elements of war beyond the in-your-face destruction.

While the animated style dulls the carnage of war, it deepens the humanity of the film’s main characters. As the now bald, long-haired, or bearded men recall their days as young men in Lebanon with vivid flashbacks, the age is clear on their faces and the scars shine through in a brilliant and simple way. In particular, Ari’s eyes, as well as those of his friend Carmi, have a depth to them that would be hard to achieve with live footage. The animated “sets” are equally remarkable, capturing the drama of each moment in an impossible way. There are poignant shots of Ari standing outside his car in the rain at the Tel Aviv port, of a Palestinian man with a cross carved into his chest being driven away in the back of a truck, and of the Beirut coast lit up at night by those drifting flares.

Further, the documentary’s animated style masterfully reinforces the message of “boys sent to war.” The animation accentuates their youth and irresponsible behavior, as Israeli teenagers machine-gun their way across southern Lebanon, crush parked cars with their tanks, and drink themselves into the night on a boat off of the Lebanese coast. For some reason, the sometimes jerky and sometimes repeating movements of the characters make the involvement of teenagers in the details of war more heinous. Watching a young Ari and his comrades float naked towards Beirut’s darkness, I couldn’t help but think of child soldiers in Africa. They are more like lost boys than an invading army.

It would seem that several of the boys remain lost 20 years later – the characters ring true and offer insight into another part of war. Carmi, the exile, is a boy genius who made a fortune selling falafel in Holland. Ronny, the “anti-hero,” is the now bald boy whose tank was blown up, his comrades killed, and who escaped, alone, swimming south along the Mediterranean coast. And then there are the traumatized ones, too, like Boaz who is haunted by the ghosts of the Lebanese dogs he killed years before and Ari, who in his dreams emerges again and again from the Mediterranean under the lit-up Beirut night.

Military service is compulsory in Israel and there isn’t a generation here who hasn’t had combat experience in the state’s 60-year history. Of course, mandatory service (in this case in Lebanon) is not a pass for shrugging off individual responsibility for one's actions, an area that Folman does not explore in this film. However, beyond this point, Waltz with Bashir successfully offers a sliver of insight into the effects of war on citizen-soldiers. With today’s news cycle, there is no shortage of coverage of the terrible impact that war has on civilians, most recently in Gaza in this last round of fighting. While the psychological trauma of soldiers returned home does not compete with the massacre of civilians and the destruction of cities and homes, Waltz with Bashir is successful in making clear that young men sent to soldier for their country are victims, too.

Black and Gold Cupcakes, a Breakfast of Champions

2009-02-02T14:39:00.004-05:00

Tel Aviv - It turns out that American football and the Super Bowl are not the biggest draw at 1AM on a work night in Israel. We invited about 25 Americans, Israelis, and Palestinians to our Steeler party last night and the turnout was a little less than what we expected.

It didn’t bother me at all that some of our guests took turns napping in the back room. Ashley made delicious Steeler cupcakes with black and gold jimmies, the terrible towels were waiving all game, and we even shot off some fake Chinese firecrackers in the living room. I don’t think the neighbors minded at all. I’d already woken them up with my yelling.

Most importantly, we won. What a moment of exhausted satisfaction. By the time we made it to bed it was 6:15AM.

As I wrote to the Sports Guy in his Friday Chat (unpublished for some outrageous reason), “With two minutes left in the fourth quarter, down by four, I’ll take ‘Ben’ over Warner any day.” The guy is a winner – a totally clutch player. For the last two decades, the Steelers have won despite the play of their quarterback. This year, our defense was like something out of Greek mythology, but we were the best last night because of our quarterback.

Put Ben Roethlisberger on that list of champions with Montana, Elway, and Brady. It is a list of legends, of multiple Super Bowl winning-quarterbacks, who shouldn’t be counted out until the clock hits zero. Now Roethlisberger, like Montana and Brady before him, has turned what seemed like inevitable victors to stunned losers under the brightest of lights and on the grandest stage. Like Elway, he has lifted a city, and in this case a nation, to a place where anything is possible. At the same time, he grabbed the state of Arizona and ripped the beating hearts of adoring fans straight from their chests. Their dreams of a victory parade, Rose Garden photo ops, and believing that their one shining moment had come, evaporated into the Tampa night with Santonio Holmes' Swann-like catch.

What an unbelievable game, what an extraordinary finish. Troy Polamalu put it best: "We're the first to win six [Super Bowls] and the way we've done it, with humility, is a great example to carry forward. It's a team that has really taken on the personality of its city. We're very blue-collar, and very hard working. And very nasty as well. This game was so amazing. You are seconds away from me crying in the locker room, and [the Cardinals] being out here. I can't believe it.''

He wouldn’t have been the only one crying, not by a long shot. To love Pittsburgh's teams is to remember red-eye mornings that followed the exploits of Larry Brown, Francisco Cabrera, David Volek, and Jason Goheen. But not this year. Our super season ended with the ultimate outcome. There is a lot to relish between now and the start of training camp this summer.

Yet, even with the championship won, it is sad to see the season end. I might get more sleep, but Sunday nights will not be the same. And I’ll miss those Espn.com Monday mornings these next six months…

Of course, the good news is that until baseball season starts and the Pirates roll into town, there is always room to hope for more. Pitt basketball is #3 in the country and Dejaun Blair had 22 rebounds against Notre Dame on Saturday. March Madness is right around the corner :)

Steeler Fever and the Super Bowl

2009-01-29T11:41:00.006-05:00

Jerusalem – It doesn’t matter how old I get it, how far I travel from Pittsburgh, or how much responsibility they give me when I get there. I can’t picture a fall Sunday without the Steelers or imagine a Monday morning that doesn’t involve the Pittsburgh Post Gazette sports section.

I’m sick. I’m totally sick.

I live seven hours ahead of Pittsburgh and watched 13 games this year. I missed two others because I was on international flights. The blessing of having a good team and cable TV is that with ESPN, FOX sports, and Middle East TV--a Christian satellite channel--I’m almost guaranteed Steeler coverage every week. There have been a lot of late games this year, with 4:15 games starting at 11:15 here and usually going to 3AM. For our Sunday night and Monday night games, I set my alarm for 3:30 or 4 and then go straight to work after the game ends. As David Puddy said, clad in Devil face paint “You gotta support the team.”

The playoff schedule has been tough so far – an 11:45 pm start time for the Chargers and 1:30 AM for the Ravens. I took a nap before both games, drank some coffee, and then jumped on the sofa throughout each game, panning for luck, screaming at the TV, and waiving one of our Terrible Towels (we have like six of them). When Troy Polamalu scored in the fourth quarter against the Ravens, my screams of joy woke up half of the apartment complex.

Post-victory euphoria has carried me through some bedraggled Monday mornings these last few months. My Monday ritual starts with reading the Post Gazette’s coverage front to back. I then hit ESPN.com to check whether they’ve given the Steelers sufficient credit for their greatness. With certain exceptions (Merrill Hoge), the praise there could be more effusive for the Black and Gold. The Sports Guy has been a hater most of the year – probably because the Steelers win late and close and don’t usually cover the spread. My Steeler sickness reaches beyond the sports pages though and into the world of semi-talk radio. I say “semi” because they talk and I listen to pre-recorded podcasts.

I spend a lot of time commuting. During the campaign, I must have listened to every Fresh Air, Talk of the Nation, and Political Gabfest recorded. The euphoria of the election left me ODed on politics, though, and I’ve traded Jim Lehrer for Tony Kornheiser. PTI with Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon is great – they’re funny, outrageous, and sufficiently appreciative of the Steelers. There is no excuse though for the time I spend listening to ESPN’s Football Today, a show filled with puddle-deep analysis and minutiae scraped from Bob Costas’ editing room floor. Still, they might say something about the Stillers, so I tune in for as much as I can bear.

I told you, I’m sick.

Every Monday, I try to squeeze the Steelers into my work meetings. That might be ok if I worked in the Athlete’s Foot at Monroeville Mall. But I work in the West Bank, with Palestinians, in villages. No one has ever asked me about why Jerome Bettis was nicknamed “the Bus” or when the lob to Weegie Thompson ever actually worked. Usually, the best I can do on this front is when I’m asked where I’m from; I always answer (in Arabic) “Pittsburgh -- we have the best American football team in the country, the Steelers.” People nod sagely, sometimes confused. Other times they smile at the mention of football. Palestinians love soccer.

Several months ago, I went to the first ever Palestinian-hosted national game. It was at the newly minted Faisal Husseini Field just outside of Jerusalem in Ar-Ram. The roofs of the buildings surrounding the packed stadium were crammed with cheering fans. FIFA officiated the game, stamping it with international legitimacy. As the refs took the field, a Palestinian friend turned to me with tears in his eyes, and said, “FIFA… I can’t believe FIFA is here!” Palestine tied Jordan 1-1; but there couldn’t have been more enthusiasm in the air had the team qualified for the World Cup. National aspirations and soccer – combined together it was a moment of sheer joy.

Is that what it is for me and the Steelers? I love being from Pittsburgh, but it is more than Pittsburgh pride that has me bouncing off the walls in the wee hours of Monday morning. The Steelers do it right. They don’t show up the other team with antics. They aren’t flashy. They are tough and determined and their team effort is beautiful. In years past, we won with defense and a bruising running game. This year, our defense is again legend-worthy, but our team has a clutch toughness. We own the big-play and gut games out in the midnight hour.

In the 70s, the Cowboys were dubbed “America’s Team.”

Whatever.

The Cowboys haven’t won a playoff game in years and now have a reality TV show.

There is something very American about turning ordinary dreams into extraordinary greatness. That’s the Steelers, Pittsburgh, and the Steeler Nation -- that’s how we see ourselves or at least how we’d like for it to be.

Around 1AM on Monday morning, I’ll be waiving my terrible towel in the Holy Land.

Steelers 24, Arizona 20.

We win, America’s Team.

Ryan Kushner, an Unofficial Ambassador from Pittsburgh to Palestine

2008-12-20T10:18:00.007-05:00

Jerusalem – Ryan Kushner, a professional film editor from Pittsburgh, brought some New York and Hollywood to Beit Sahour and Ramallah last week. Ryan, who is also my brother-in-law, came to visit us for a post-Thanksgiving break. His trip was full of the usual tourist highlights – Ryan walked the ramparts of Jerusalem’s Old City, hiked in the Mitzpe Ramon crater, and went for a run along the beach in Tel Aviv. He ate cheese fresh from the goat on a Jerusalem-area farm, floated in the Dead Sea, and even visited mini-Israel, where he “saw it all … small.”

What was different about Ryan’s trip, though, was that Ryan served as an Unofficial Ambassador, volunteering his time and expertise to two Palestinian non-governmental organizations, in Beit Sahour and also in Ramallah. In Beit Sahour, Ryan spent a few hours at the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement – an organization that does community service projects and also streams daily local news on their website. PCR just completed a three-week training course on how to develop and produce public service announcements. Ryan was able to follow up on the recent training and spoke about his own experience working in film and on PSAs. He also demonstrated how to color shots in Final Cut Pro, and answered specific questions about other editing techniques.

In Ramallah, Ryan visited the Palestinian office of DPK Consulting and met with a group of interns who will produce two PSAs about the recent successes in reform and modernization of the Palestinian justice sector. Ryan offered suggestions for organizing their video projects, spoke about key elements of pre-production planning, and screened examples of both a successful and non-successful PSA. Together, the group brainstormed ideas and direction for their projects. Perhaps most importantly, in both places, Ryan offered each group a continuing resource (himself) for questions and feedback.

While Ryan didn’t solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while he was here, the couple of days that he spent volunteering in the West Bank made a difference both for the people he worked with and for himself. The little things that Ryan and other Unofficial Ambassadors contribute on visits like this and on longer trips add up to real and positive change at the grassroots level. Not to sound cliché, but in the absence of major political solutions, those little changes are big.

On a professional level, Unofficial Ambassadors fill gaps in a substantive way. Ryan offered his Palestinian counterparts something tangible – the people he met now have a better idea of how to approach the challenges that they face in their work. On a personal level, Unofficial Ambassadors represent an America that wants to engage with other cultures. In many parts of the Middle East, locals make a distinction between the U.S. government and the American people. While most are critical of U.S. foreign policies, they admire the American people, who they view as representatives of a land of opportunity, freedoms, and innovation. To the Palestinians he met – people who are likely critical of U.S. foreign policy but who don’t have everyday contact with Americans – Ryan offered a first-hand example of the positives of the American people. The Palestinians who met Ryan went home and told their families that they met an American from a place called Pittsburgh who was nice and cool and who helped them with their work. In a part of the world where anti-American polls are off the charts, that’s a beginning.

It isn’t a one-way street, though. Ryan benefited from the experience, too. He had never been to the West Bank before, and now, whenever he hears about the Arab-Israeli conflict, the separation wall/barrier, or mention of Ramallah in the news, he will have a visual. He’ll know that the place is not a war zone (though it has been at times), but rather a city of hilly, twisting streets with office buildings, coffee shops, and restaurants. He’ll think of the real people he met, who work in the same field as him, face similar work-related problems, and may not be all that different on some of the other issues, too.

While I believe that Ryan enjoyed all the tourist activities -- especially mini-Israel where a petite elephant squirted water from its miniature tusk in Ryan’s general direction -- his Unofficial Ambassador moments in the West Bank made his trip special, for him but also for others. The more exposure that everyday people here and in other places around the Middle East have to Unofficial Ambassadors through organized volunteering programs or through the individual efforts of journalists, teachers, or in this case, film editors, the better off we all are back home.

Last year, instead of giving my family gifts for Hanukkah, I made contributions to organizations that do the work of Unofficial Ambassadors. This year, supporting the economy may be a heroic deed, but I imagine that these organizations are hurt by the economic meltdown, too. In addition to the worthy groups that I contributed to last year (listed below), I’ve added Peace Players International, an organization that I recently learned about that also works with children. If you can’t volunteer your time -- and you can do that through organizations like Cross Cultural Solutions -- consider spreading the holiday spirit and contributing to one of these groups:

Peace Players International brings together kids in conflict areas through basketball. I visited their project this past week in Jerusalem and watched 8-10 year-old Israeli and Palestinian girls learn about each other’s holidays and then play basketball games together for two hours.

No More Victims assists American communities in providing direct assistance and medical treatment to Iraqi children war victims. In the process, the organization creates personal linkages between the Iraqi children (as well as their families) and the community that has sponsored the treatment for the injured child. Their website has inspiring stories from Greenville (SC) to Pittsburgh to the Portlands.

Land Mines Blow and Adopt a Mine Field are two organizations that combat the heinous and continuing problem of landmines in post-conflict, developing countries. $3 to produce, $1000 to remove -- Landmines maim or kill 15,000 – 20,000 people a year, a third of them children.

Critical Exposure is an alternative for those looking to give to a good cause that benefits kids a little closer to home. Critical Exposure buys cameras for inner-city kids, trains them in documentary photography, leadership, and advocacy, and gives them a platform and the tools to raise awareness about the conditions in their public schools. $35 provides a student with a 35mm camera. Their website has some terrific student photos.

Happy Holidays to all -

Beatlemania in Tel Aviv

2008-10-04T20:22:00.000-04:00

Tel Aviv – A little more than a week later and the Beatle’s invasion can still be felt on Shankin Street, Ibn Gvirol, and along the Ayalon Freeway. From the windows of passing cars and descending from the second and third stories of downtown apartments come the sounds of All You Need is Love and Let it Be.

Last Thursday night, somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 people converged on Park HaYarkon in the heart of Tel Aviv to hear Sir Paul McCartney in concert. In the days leading up to the concert, the local papers covered the legend’s comings and goings. He visited the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem, his entourage spent about $110,000 on hotel rooms, and streets were closing to prepare for the thousands of pedestrians trying to make up for lost time.

In 1965, the Israeli government banned the Beatles from performing in Israel, fearing they would corrupt the morals of the country’s youth. Earlier this year, the “ban” was formally lifted and an apology was issued to McCartney, Ringo, and the families of John Lennon and George Harrison. Forty-three years later, it was Islamic militants who tried to keep McCartney away. A radical preaching from Lebanon threatened McCartney’s life for performing in Israel. To the joy of Israelis, Sir Paul paid the threats no mind.

VIP seats in the open air HaYarkon Park went for about $1500 and the cheapest seats – on the lawn, where I swayed with thousands of others – were about $150 a pop. My wife bought the tickets and I only found out how much they cost the day of the concert. Had I known the bill, I probably would have missed something rare and beautiful. With the U.S. economy melting down and people losing their homes, it is hard to write these words, but Paul McCartney live was worth at least a few nights of pasta at home and the sandwiches I’ll be eating for lunch for a while.

At about half past 8 last Thursday night, he burst on to the stage and sang Hello, Goodbye. Under two towering video screens that projected his image into the night, with a slideshow backdrop of flashing oranges and yellows, he belted out the lyrics and the crowd loved him for it.

Maybe he starts every show that way – I don’t know – but I suddenly realized that I was at a Beatles concert. True, it was just a single Beatle with one of the greatest cover bands ever (honestly, I’m not even sure if they have a name), but it occurred to me that I was watching history. Those clips I’d seen over the years, of the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show, being chased around the world by hordes of screaming women, and performing against seemingly every possible backdrop, and here they were, right in front of me!

Okay, okay, it was just one Beatle, but I found it overwhelming to think about the people he’d met over the last forty some years, the places he’d been, and the things he saw. In 1965, when he and the others never made their trip here, Israel was a farm-in-the-desert country, its existence threatened by its neighbors. The civil rights movement was ascendant in the U.S. as we sunk into Vietnam. And Paul McCartney was a 23 year-old kid with the world in the palm of his hand.

So much is different, some is very much the same; unquestionably, Paul McCartney held the crowd in the palm of his hand. He started speaking in Hebrew, thanking us and wishing all a happy Jewish new year. Later in the show, in Hebrew, he dedicated songs to his late wife Linda, George Harrison, and John Lennon. As A Day in the Life, the tribute to John Lennon, wound down, McCartney broke into a chorus of All We are Saying is Give Peace a Chance. The crowd erupted, hands in the air, we chanted along not wanting the night or the moment to end.

He thrilled the crowd with “Ahlan, Jude.” Like a pinball bouncing around, McCartney switched instruments between guitars, the piano, and a little mandolin. When he played Live and Let Die the concert was transformed into a pyrotechnic bonanza with fireworks blasting into the sky. My favorite part of the two and a half hour show was when he sent the band offstage and crooned Blackbird. The crowd sang along softly, waiving their cellphones in the air. No longer a farm-in-the-desert country, Israel is a high tech capital and people are just as likely to have a blackberry as they are a lighter, at least with this cost of admission.

On a Thursday night in Tel Aviv, with boundless energy, eyebrows reaching upwards, and his face fixed in a smile, Paul McCartney took 40-some thousand Israelis and assorted expats to another place and another time. And at the end of the show, after a couple of encores, he wished us a Shana Tova and Ramadan Karim, and sent us off humming into the night, a part of history.

Americans Overseas: Register to Vote and Request an Absentee Ballot Here

2008-10-04T04:54:00.003-04:00

Tel Aviv - I thought 2004 was going to be the most important American election of my lifetime. The way the last four years have gone, it turns out that this election is more important. Next month, we have a chance to regain our country's future and to deal with the challenges that we face to our national security, civil liberties, and economy.

The road to recovery starts with voting, though. The deadlines to register from overseas are fast approaching. Pennsylvania's deadline is October 6. If you are living overseas and haven't registered yet, please visit the website below. It will only take 10 minutes to fill out the forms. If you need to request an absentee ballot, you can do it there as well.

Lastly, please forward this website to the Americans you know who are living overseas and the Americans you know that have friends overseas. As we saw in 2000, every vote counts.

Here is the website: http://www.fvap.gov/

Squirrel Hill Native Recognized for Work in Middle East

2008-10-02T07:56:00.002-04:00

Tel Aviv - The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote a nice article about Live from Jordan and the Linowitz award that I received in September. Given that the Post Gazette is the homepage on my computer and its sports page is the first thing I read in the morning, I'm humbled. Thank you -

Here is the article:

Squirrel Hill native recognized for work in Middle East
Thursday, October 02, 2008

By Dev Meyers
Fluent in Hebrew and Arabic, Benjamin Orbach has traveled around the Middle East. But he admits he often finds himself "talking incessantly" about the Steelers.

A self-appointed, unofficial ambassador, Mr. Orbach is committed to presenting the Arab world with a wholesome and caring picture of Americans.

In September, his accomplishments were recognized in Washington, D.C., when the National Security Education Program presented Mr. Orbach with its 2008 Sol Linowitz Award.

Mr. Linowitz was a diplomat and major supporter of international education and NSEP.

NSEP is a major federal initiative within the Department of Defense and is designed to build a broader and more qualified pool of U.S. citizens with foreign language and international skills.

The goal is to strengthen national security and competitiveness by forming a partnership with the U.S. education community through language and cultural initiatives.

Mr. Orbach, 33, who grew up in Squirrel Hill, studied Arabic in Jordan as a Boren Fellow. His experiences as a Boren Fellow formed the basis for a book, "Live from Jordan: Letters Home from My Journey Through the Middle East" (Amacom Books, 2007).

Each year, NSEP honors one Boren Scholar alumnus and one Boren Fellow alumnus for their outstanding federal service and academic achievement.

Boren Scholarships provide funding for U.S. undergraduate students to study in areas of the world that are critical to U.S. interests and underrepresented in study abroad. Boren Fellowships provide funding for U.S. graduate students to study and conduct research in these same areas of the world.

Mr. Orbach worked for three years for the State Department in the Office of the Middle East Partnership Initiative and for a year as the MEPI coordinator at the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem. He is currently Creative Associates International's resident country director for the West Bank and Gaza.

Mr. Orbach, a 1993 graduate of Pittsburgh Allderdice High School, earned a bachelor of arts degree at the University of Michigan and a master's in international relations at Johns Hopkins University.

"In all of my travels to the Middle East, when I was a student and when I was a U.S. government official, I kept in mind that I was from Pittsburgh and representing the people of Pittsburgh," he said.

"I'm very proud of where I'm from and the values that I grew up with, and I've certainly confused more than a handful of people with my incessant talk [in Arabic] about our mighty football team."

Mr. Orbach has traveled to 12 countries.

"I've represented the priorities and programs of the United States to hundreds of people in the region as an Arabic-speaking American who cares about their needs, aspirations and the relationship between our respective countries and people," he said.

"The official awards are excellent achievements, but I am most proud of the positive impression that I've left -- through words and deeds -- with these great people who are the future of the region and whose attitudes and opinions matter greatly to the national security of America."

His mother, Linda, of Squirrel Hill, is "thrilled" that her son has been recognized for his work.

"He has many gifts and has received many opportunities," she said. "But what really matters is he is making the most of them -- and for the greater good."

"Live from Jordan" explores key issues in the Middle East, such as anti-Americanism, the absence of peace, Islamist terrorism and the causes of 9/11.

At the same time, the book puts words to the beauty and color of everyday life in Egypt, Jordan and Syria -- the camel markets, deserts, nightclubs, coffee shops and people.

"While I was living in Jordan and Egypt, and especially after I returned in the late summer of 2003, I was appalled by how the administration took advantage of our country's knowledge gap rather than took the opportunity to educate the public on the issues and engage Americans on solving our problems," he said.

Mr. Orbach encourages Americans to get involved and become unofficial ambassadors.

"People in [the Middle East] make a distinction between U.S. foreign policy -- which they are adamantly against not just for idealistic reasons, but because it has an impact on their everyday lives -- and the American people.

"Mariah Carey, Mark Twain, Martin Luther King, Michael Jordan, our democratic processes, minimum wage, our rags-to-riches stories -- these are all icons and things that provide hope and are the picture of American people.

"When Americans come and bring our processes, education systems and entertainment icons in the form of the Peace Corps, Doctors Without Borders, other development work, cultural and educational exchanges and other international volunteer efforts, it not only humanizes America, but empowers our friends to improve their communities and lives."

Mr. Orbach's father, Alexander, a teacher in the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Religious Studies, is impressed by "Live From Jordan."

"[It] is not only informative, it is eloquent in its careful and considerate depiction of a world that we too often stereotype in extremely negative and frightening ways," the elder Mr. Orbach said.

"The book also reflects the maturation of an engaging young man who, through the course of these experiences, evolves from a naive observer into a confident commentator on a culture and on communities that, while seemingly distant from his own, still share many similar human aspirations."

For more information about NSEP, go to www.nsep.gov/initiatives/index.html.

For more information about Mr. Orbach, go to www.benjaminorbach.com or www.benjaminorbach.blogspot.com.

Dev Meyers is a freelance writer who can be reached at suburbanliving@post-gazette.com.
First published on October 2, 2008 at 6:13 am

Bilerico Project Review of Live from Jordan

2008-09-29T23:00:00.002-04:00

Tel Aviv - The Bilerico Project reviewed Live from Jordan earlier today. You can read the full review, "An American in the Middle East," here.

Benjamin Orbach Wins NSEP’s 2008 Sol Linowitz Award

2008-09-19T06:56:00.001-04:00

Benjamin Orbach Wins NSEP’s 2008 Sol Linowitz Award
Award Ceremony Honors Author of Live from Jordan

Washington, DC – September 19, 2008 – Benjamin Orbach, the author of the acclaimed Live from Jordan, will receive the 2008 Sol Linowitz award from The National Security Education Program (NSEP) at a ceremony on September 22, 2008 in Washington D.C.

Each year NSEP honors a Boren fellow alumnus and/or alumna for outstanding service and achievement through the Sol Linowitz Award. NSEP is a U.S. government-funded program to strengthen national security through initiatives that improve critical foreign language proficiency and cultural expertise. Since 1992, NSEP has awarded David L. Boren Fellowships to support graduate students studying language and culture and conducting research in countries critical to US interests. The Boren Fellowship builds a broader and more qualified pool of U.S. citizens with foreign language and international competence.

Benjamin Orbach, a 2002 Boren Fellow, studied Arabic in Jordan and then Egypt after evacuating from Amman with the start of the Iraq war in 2003. Over a 13-month period, Orbach took his study of Arabic from the classrooms of universities and language institutes to the coffee shops, markets, deserts, and night clubs of Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and other parts of the Middle East. Along the way, he discovered everyday people with problems that he could relate to and a world more complicated and more beautiful than many Americans imagine. Live from Jordan: Letters Home from My Journey Through the Middle East (AMACOM, 2007) is the incredible story, told via his eloquent, thoughtful, and irreverent letters home, of Orbach’s 13-month journey through the Middle East.

Former Middle East envoy Dennis Ross called Live from Jordan “an extraordinary picture of attitudes in the Arab world.” Ross said, “Orbach is a wonderful observer.... and in reading his book—and absorbing his letters—it is possible to gain a better appreciation of our problems and possibilities in the Middle East."

Peter Bergen, author of Holy War Inc. called Live from Jordan, “humane, well-informed, and charming.”

Library Journal reviewed that Live from Jordan “is an optimistic work, one that informs Americans about the everyday problems experienced by Arabs and . . . that promotes the idea of real dialogue in and with the Middle East.”

Orbach, currently the Resident Country Director for Creative Associates International in the Palestinian Territories, said, “I’m honored to receive the Sol Linowitz award. The year I spent living, traveling, and studying in the Middle East was one of the formative experiences of my life. It led me to write a book, to serve in government, and to work in the field of development – all different paths that with the same dedicated goal of helping others on behalf of my country.”

NSEP will present the Sol Linowitz award to Orbach at a ceremony to be held on September 22 beginning at 6:00 pm at the Liaison Capitol Hill hotel located at 415 New Jersey Ave., NW, Washington, DC.

Media wishing to attend should contact Laura Porter, NSEP Communications Strategist at porterL2@ndu.edu or 703-696-9598.

Benjamin Orbach is available for interviews through The Rudy Agency. Contact Maryann at mak@rudyagency.com or 970.577.8500.

Words to Mouth

2008-09-13T01:30:00.004-04:00

Jerusalem - Check out this recent interview with Words To Mouth, an Internet talk show and companion blog. The highlights: Live from Jordan, Big Hair, and surprise Polish-American art shows in your apartment.

6 Under-the-Radar Destinations In The Middle East

2008-06-05T14:35:00.005-04:00

The great pyramids of Giza, the pink facades of Petra, the blue minarets of Istanbul, and the storybook walled cities of Jerusalem and Damascus are some of the highlights that lure travelers to the Middle East. If you make it to these postcard spots, you won’t go home disappointed.

But there is a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Jerusalem called Rahmo, where they serve the best kubbe soup this side of an Iraqi or Kurdish grandmother’s kitchen. And deep in the Western Desert, between the oasis of Siwa and Egypt’s border with Libya, there is a place where the stars shine brightly and rocket across the sky.

Whether you are traveling in pursuit of history, good food, nightlife, nature, spirituality, or the journey itself, here are six suggestions for lesser known stops across the Middle East that will make your trip truly one-of-a-kind.

Click here and read more at Matador Trips.

Egyptian Paradise

2008-05-24T14:21:00.001-04:00

The warm breeze blows in from the Red Sea as I lie on a thin mattress, wrapped in a pale sheet on the sandy beach. Basata, simplicity in Arabic, is about 20 kilometers north of Nuweiba in Sinai, the peninsula south of Israel and Jordan, east of Suez, and across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia.

Read more about "Egyptian Paradise" at Matador Trips, click here.

Travel Moments Backpacking in India

2008-04-24T14:33:00.004-04:00

Jerusalem -- An essay from India, just published in Brave New Traveler, about those precious, vivid, and sometimes rare travel moments. Read the essay here.

If you can't picture it, check out these pics from Kerala, set to Jimmy Cliff. They are from the same trip, just further south.

The Marrakech Show

2008-03-29T07:20:00.004-04:00

I was in Marrakech, Morocco last month for work. In addition to the conference I attended, I spent two eight hour days in Djemaa al Fna -- Africa's most fantastic square, filled with snake charmers, fortune tellers, henna artists, dancers, drummers, diaper-clad monkeys, medicine men, and thousands of locals dressed in colorful jedi-like robes.

Take a look at Djemaa al Fna in this photo essay:

Music by Rusted Root (from Pittsburgh).

Jerusalem Stories

2008-01-26T02:32:00.000-05:00

Jaffa – On Thursday night in the Old City of Jaffa, I went to a place called the Arab-Hebrew Theater to see a performance of Jerusalem Stories, first in Arabic and then in Hebrew. Jerusalem Stories is an innovative idea in conflict resolution. It is a collection of Jerusalemites’ narratives, told in theatric monologue form, about their personal struggles, feelings, and losses inside the holy city.

Over three hours, six stories were recounted with much passion. Among them, there was an elderly muhajiba woman who traverses checkpoints daily to sell olives and dried fruits at Damascus Gate, a Kipah-wearing bus driver whose bus was bombed by a young suicide bomber, an aggrieved Palestinian man whose nephew was killed by the Israeli army on the day that Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount, and a distraught Israeli mother who lost her young son to Palestinian suicide bombers in downtown Jerusalem.

What’s unique about these Jerusalem Stories of sadness and suffering are how they are told. There were actually two performances. First, the talented Mazin Safadi and Hiba Muffatesh delivered all six of the monologues (three Israeli and three Palestinian) in Arabic. Then, after a thirty-minute break, and to a different audience (with some exceptions), the equally strong Royi Nave and Hava Ortman performed the exact same six stories in powerful fashion, in Hebrew.

Since I stayed for both performances, I had the chance to hear, in Hebrew, about the muhajiba woman’s struggle at checkpoints and with Israeli soldiers. Similarly, in Arabic, I listened to the story of an Orthodox Israeli woman recite her favorite of the tehillim or psalms, which she reads for the victims of terror. At moments like these, the presentation was paradoxical, in a smile-inducing way, which was not altogether natural.

That wasn’t the case though for the stories of the deaths of Magdy or Assaf, young Jerusalemite boys, a Palestinian and an Israeli, struck down during the al-Aqsa intifada. As the actors playing Magdy’s uncle, first in Arabic and then about an hour and a half later in Hebrew, expressed the anger and grief of the loss of a loved one outside of the expected sequence of life, the language melted away. The story stopped being Arabic or Hebrew and it was just about the tragedy of the death of a boy. It was the same for the death of Assaf. The grief on the Arabic-speaking actress’ face and the distress in her voice as she described the absence of her son and the void in her life was moving. It wasn’t Israeli or Palestinian -- it was purely human and very sad.

And I guess that is where the conflict resolution comes to force. People identify, rather easily, with the suffering of their own kind. Carol Grosman, the project director and chief storyteller, and Mohammed Thaher, the project’s Palestinian director, have taken an innovative route. In addition to the stories there are post-performance facilitated discussions, other educational workshops, and a photograph exhibit. The stories, though, are the centerpiece, and they bring each community, in their own language, face-to-face with the horrors they know and carry around, but also with the tragedies and difficulties of the other community, which they may not have previously seen or recognized. To watch these stories recounted, in such a meaningful way, one can’t but walk away with an idea of the other’s loss and suffering as well as a sense for each people’s attachment and affection for Jerusalem.

The Jerusalem Stories convey a powerful message, but I was just a few steps outside the theater when I was reminded that there is so much more than conflict, pain, and suffering here. Walking through Jaffa’s Old City, I passed sweeping views of the Mediterranean Sea and downtown Tel Aviv. The Old City’s cobbled streets were quiet and the Mediterranean breeze made me feel like I was in Southern Europe. On my way to my car, I passed Abu Lafya, an Israeli legend of a bakery in Jaffa.

During the day, Abu Lafya is bustling. Arabic and Hebrew speaking customers swarm the counter and order fresh pastries that are baked in gigantic fired-ovens and filled with cheese, zatar, potatoes, eggs, and other favorites. Tonight, though, Abu Lafya was still. Abu Lafya family members sat in plastic chairs behind the counter drinking tea. I ordered a potato pastry in Arabic from a youngish guy with gelled black hair. A middle-aged guy with glasses came up beside me and ordered his pastries from the same young man, but in Hebrew. We each got the same thank you and good night, but in different languages.

The pain of the stories inside the theater, the tales of personal heartbreak, spiritual commitment, national love, and justice denied are all true, but there are so many other stories of co-existence and normal daily life, that are also true and less frequently told. There are lots of stories here, of all varieties.

My stories will be interrupted, though, for a little while. I’ve got to take a break from the "Live from ..." blog to work on larger projects. Full-time work is more than full-time, and I have to ration and channel my words, at least for now.

Until my next "Live from ..." column, all the best-

Heartbreak, Again

2008-01-07T08:38:00.000-05:00

Jerusalem – Yesterday, at a little before 7AM, the Steelers’ season ended in gut wrenching fashion.

The last few weeks have been a struggle for my favorite team. We’ve lost a key player each week, and with each individual loss, the team has taken a body blow. Willie Parker broke his leg; we could no longer run the ball. Aaron Smith tore his bicep; we could no longer stop the run. Marvel Smith had back surgery; we could no longer protect the quarterback.

Still, the Steelers have heart. It was only two years ago that the team sliced through the playoffs, won three games on the road, and made the big plays in the big game to win the Super Bowl. Despite a blowout loss to the Patriots earlier this year, I wanted to see the Steelers get another shot at the best. You can’t count out a champion, no matter what the odds – nobody wants to play an elimination game against die-hards like Hines Ward and James Farrior.

Still, when I woke up at 3AM on Sunday, I knew that it might be my last chance to watch the Steelers for eight months. Thankfully, ESPN broadcast the game live. Clad in my 2006 Super Bowl t-shirt, I was so happy for the normal sized screen that I didn’t even mind that ESPN showed the same two soccer commercials at every break.

For 3+ hours, we watched the Steelers leave it all on the field against Jacksonville. Their second half comeback was poetic; it was almost impossible to believe that we could lose. The impossible happened, though, due to a terrible play-call, a missed tackle, and a game-winning field goal that knocked the wind out of me until this morning.

After the game, I folded up my Super Bowl t-shirt, crawled into bed, and buried my face in the pillow. I slept for four hours and spent the next 24 hours in my own personal salt mine.

There’s no longer a reason for me to check ESPN.com in the middle of the day for a new Steeler story. The playoffs go on, but not for us. Another year goes by for Ward, Farrior, Casey Hampton and others. Great players can’t stay great forever. The window of opportunity closes, and we’re left with memories of passes batted down in the end zone, special teams break-downs, interceptions at the worst moment, and championships that could have, should have, might have been won.

So how does a fan recover from a game that he had no impact on? It’s not like I can review film and figure out how to cheer better, or that I can switch shirts or buy a new Terrible Towel. Well, “context” and “hope” are the bitter pills that people like me swallow on days like today.

This morning, I was emailing with a lifetime Red Sox fan. Before the Sox won two World Series in the last four years, my friend lived through 40 years of following a team best known for its curse. As I collected his e-sympathies, I realized again why our 2006 Super Bowl win was so special.

The 90s were filled with great Pittsburgh teams that couldn’t write their names in the books. Setting aside Mario Lemieux and a Penguin dynasty cut short by injuries, we loved a Steeler team that lost three AFC Championships at home to inferior opponents over an eight-year period (including 2001), and a Pirates team that lost three consecutive pennants at the start of the decade. The final time, the Pirates choked in such a life- draining way (the Francisco Cabrera moment) that radio stations put psychologists on the air the next morning to help the public deal with the trauma and depression. For good measure, since the turn of the century, Pitt basketball has made it to the Big East Championship game six times. We’ve won once.

It adds up to a lot of disappointment. As a fan, you get up for these championship or playoff games. Especially in our case, you imagine your small market team dropping the hammer on the Yankees, Patriots, and UConn Huskies of the world. But it just doesn’t happen often enough.

Sometimes dreams do come true, though. And when you have moments like Antwaan Randel El completing a gadget-play pass to Ward to win the Super Bowl, all those sour defeats make winning that elusive championship taste so good. I’d guess that it might even taste better than championship moments that have become an end of the year habit for some spoiled fans.

The other bitter pill that we swallow at moments like this is called “hope.” It is cold out now, but only four more months to the NFL draft. Young stars like Ben Rothlisberger, Willie Parker, and Troy Polamalu who are just reaching their prime are reasons for optimism. And between now and the start of training camp in July, Penguin Phenom Sidney Crosby may well take over the NHL. And maybe, despite Pitt’s December injuries, Sam Young and Dejaun Blair will put the program on their backs and carry it to that elusive Final Four.

Sigh.

So, that’s it for the 2007 Steelers season. Next year, I hope.

Hold the Public Praise, Please

2008-01-02T13:17:00.000-05:00

Jerusalem – Last night, I was on the edge of my seat for 2.5 hours, watching a re-broadcast of the Main Event of the World Series of Poker (WSOP). Jerry Yang defeated Tuan Lam to win $8.25 Million cash.

The WSOP is the biggest poker event of the year. It takes place in Vegas, has more than 50 events, and finishes with a no limit Texas Hold’em tourney. To qualify, a player needs to win a satellite tourney or post the $10,000 buy-in. 6,358 professional players, internet poker sharks, and garage game hopefuls participated this year leading to a huge pot (Lam won $4.8 Million as runner up).

2.5 hours of WSOP led me to two conclusions:

First, poker attracts a diverse group. The final table included a Dane, a South African, a Brit, and a Russian, all ranging in age from 22-62. The final two players were both refugees. Yang, a Laotian-American therapist and social worker, came to the United States in 1979. He spent four years in a camp in Thailand, where two of his siblings died. On the other side of the table was Lam, a Vietnamese-Canadian who worked as a laborer for a metal company and who was a refugee in an Indonesian camp.

What are the odds? I only wish Bob Costas covered poker so that I could know how many times a refugee has won the WSOP in odd-numbered years, at night.

In the match’s closing minutes, Lam’s supporters pulled out a Canadian flag and waved it patriotically, a la those annoying backpackers who sew flag-patches to their bags to distinguish themselves from Americans. In a Rocky IV moment, Americans in the crowd chanted “USA, USA” for Yang, the Laotian refugee turned Californian.

The second thing that occurred to me during the WSOP was how much I hate the invoking of Jesus (or any other God) at sporting events. I wanted to cheer for Yang – he donated 10 percent of his winnings to Make-A-Wish and other charities, making him a stalwart unofficial ambassador – but he kept calling upon Jesus for help throughout the match.

In tight situations, he’d kiss a picture of his family, and then say things like, “Lord, have a purpose for me to today,” or “Jesus, make us a believer.” After winning the showdown, Yang would thank Jesus, and his family in the stands would call out “Hallelujah!” At one point, Yang went head to head with Lee Watkinson, a 40-year-old from Washington. As the two faced off, the camera flashed between Watkinson’s wife who had her hands clasped together and was vocally asking for Jesus’ intervention and Yang’s family doing almost the exact same thing.

It was an internecine poker Crusade. Unlike when Yang eliminated Alex Kravchenko and his boisterous Russian cheering section, this was a showdown between fellow congregants believing that Jesus had a direct stake in their win.

Even here in the Holy Land, I find it both divisive and pretty self-involved to believe that God is taking an interest in poker flops and game-winning touchdown drives. Nothing makes me reach for the remote faster then a post-game interview that starts with a star or a coach thanking God or Jesus. It is hard to believe that God cares so much about converting a 3rd and 16 but not about stopping genocide in Sudan.

Last year, after the Colts won the Super Bowl, I was feeling happy for Tony Dungy, the first black coach to win the big game and someone who comes across as a very decent man. When asked how it felt to be the first black coach to win the Super Bowl, Dungy responded, "I'm proud to be the first African-American coach to win this. But again, more than anything, Lovie Smith [the Bears Coach] and I are not only African-American but also Christian coaches, showing you can do it the Lord's way. We're more proud of that."

Click.

Did all the Colts players do it the “Christian way?”
Were the teams the Colts beat comprised of infidels and polytheists?
And, how did the Colts non-Christian fans feel about Tony Dungy’s post-game speech? If I was a Colts fan, I’d feel left out for no reason.

Think I’m making a big deal over nothing?

How about if your boss ended each meeting at work by thanking God for enabling him or her to be your supervisor? Or how about if Tony Dungy were a Muslim and looked into the camera and stated the Islamic equivalent, “Allahu Akbar!” I wonder if that would have gone over with football America in the same accepting way.

Religion and belief are wonderful, but bringing them into the public space and forcing them on to others – whether that is the intent or not – is more often divisive than uniting. In America, religion is a personal and private thing, something that I realize from living in the Middle East, that we sometimes take for granted. So, if you win the Super Bowl, the WSOP, or anything else, I’m not against you thanking God for giving you the strength to win. I’d just like to ask that you save the thanks for your place of worship, a private moment with like-minded individuals, or your own self-reflection.

Steel Crazy (after all these years)

2007-12-20T12:53:00.000-05:00

Jerusalem – Yesterday began Eid al-Adha and Tuesday is Christmas. Rather than slaughtering a sheep or attending Midnight Mass, the ritual I’m most focused on will take place at around 4:30 tomorrow morning. That’s the time that I’ll be waking up for the second half of the Steelers-Rams game.

There are two weeks left in the regular season and the Steelers basically need to win out to win their division. When I started this blog, I intended for it to be about Live from Jordan, travel, culture, people, and my little obsessions – Mexican food, Big Hair, and the Steelers. “Living on the Seam” in Jerusalem has yielded some colorful posts, but I’ve fallen down on the Steeler front.

I thought there would be posts about new coach Mike Tomlin and his separated-at-birth resemblance to Omar Epps, the heroism of Hines Ward, and a petition drive to get rid of Steely McBean, the embarrassing mascot introduced at the start of this season. But I haven’t written a single post dedicated solely to the Steelers, and the season is slipping away. So this week’s blog is devoted to my favorite team and my love for them from thousands of miles away.

When I lived in Jordan, I listened to the games free on NFL.com or Yahoo. I have memories of Myron Cope screaming “Yoi and double yoi” while the call to prayer echoed outside. 1:00 games were the best. With a seven-hour time difference, it was my own primetime Sunday night football. Night games that started at 11:15 or 4AM were problematic, however. You gotta support the team, though, the next day in Arabic class be damned.

Besides Myron Cope’s retirement, things have changed in the last four years -- it is no longer free to listen to the game. I bought NFL Game Pass from Yahoo for about $200, which allows me and other fans outside of the country to watch a game a week on the Internet. Because Yahoo’s service is inconsistent, I’ve also subscribed to radio broadcasts with NFL Field Pass ($9.95/month) as a backup.

Silly you say?

Well, this last week, despite selecting the Steelers-Jaguars game on my menu, Yahoo broadcast the Miami-Baltimore game. I had a full meltdown. The only people who wanted to see the Dolphins-Ravens were the top five picks of next year’s NFL draft. I spent much of the first half of the game IM-ing with the Yahoo help team (who were helpless) and refreshing my screen. For the second half, I listened to the streaming voices of Bill Hillgrove and Tunch Ilkin while I wrote an angry email to customer service. The bitter loss to Jacksonville didn’t make it any better.

Still, in a few hours, I’ll be getting up to see what the Steelers have left in the tank after two awful losses. Why go through work on Friday in a stupor just to see the Steelers play the Rams you ask? Well, there is something special about football and the Steelers for Pittsburghers.

The Steelers transcend sports in Pittsburgh; they represent the heart of the city. I think it goes back to the 70s when mills were closing and unemployment numbers were skyrocketing. The Steelers won four Super Bowls and gave people a diversion that swept them away. The Steelers were America’s best, better than the glamor-boy Cowboys. They won with a style of toughness and grit that embodied the city. The Steel Curtain defense and guys like Jack Lambert and Mean Joe Greene represented the qualities of Pittsburgh’s everyday – and in many cases, unemployed – heroes.

The tradition continued in the 80s and 90s, as the mantle was passed to Carnell Lake, Greg Lloyd, and Rod Woodson. They didn’t win the Super Bowl, but the Blitzburgh defense made us proud. And then, along came Jerome Bettis, the Bus, who just kept hitting defenders again and again until he ran them over. Pittsburgh has never had the “Run and Gun,” “West Coast Offense,” or Sharpie moments (which I admit are creative and funny). Instead, the Steelers have won consistently over the years by being tougher than their opponents.

For a working class city like Pittsburgh, success with that style of play has generated a love affair that has few comparisons in all of sports. I read a story the other day about a widow who brought her husband’s ashes to the game last week. It was his dying request to see a game at Heinz field and the family couldn’t afford tickets or the trip from New Hampshire. Donors helped out. In the realm of things Steeler, such stories aren’t out of the ordinary.

When you arrive at Pittsburgh International Airport, a statue of Franco Harris making the “immaculate reception,” greets travelers (click for video). Next week will be the 25th anniversary of the play that launched the Steel Curtain’s dynasty. What other city celebrates the anniversary of a play?

The Steeler Nation lives in Pittsburgh, across the country, and around the world. With the demise of Pittsburgh’s economy in the 70s, many Pittsburghers took their terrible towels to the road. As a result, there is a Steeler bar in every major American city and road games in some cities take on a home-game feel because of the number of Steeler fans in attendance.

When I lived in D.C., I followed the Steelers run to the 2006 Super Bowl at the Pour House in Capitol Hill. The Pour House is three stories of Steeler Bar packed with the Black and Gold faithful. It was the next best thing to watching at home. I drove home for the big game, though. My buddy Joe flew in from Boston and we watched the Super Bowl in a bar downtown. When Hines Ward caught the winning touchdown, it was the realization of a childhood dream. We danced in Pittsburgh’s snowy streets with people we didn’t know. Our generation had a championship too.

I’ve been a part of the Steeler Diaspora for 14 years. I imagine there is something great about a Pittsburgh Monday morning after a win. In Jerusalem, as I set the alarm to get up for the game this week, there is something equally great about tuning in from afar. While I didn’t lose a job in the mill and I am too young to have first-hand recollections of Lambert and Mean Joe, following the Steelers is being part of a storied tradition that is associated with all the good things of home.

Holiday Gifts

2007-12-10T09:46:00.000-05:00

Jerusalem – The best gifts this season are being given by unofficial ambassadors who are using their resources – both financial and human – to make the lives of strangers better. Their efforts are providing hope not just for the people who they are helping, but for us all.

I decided that I’m not giving gifts to family and friends this year (and this is the first time that I’m sharing this information with them). Instead, I’m donating money to several organizations that are doing inspiring, humbling, and wonderful work with and for children. For family, friends, and other devoted Live from … readers, if you were trying to figure out what to buy me for Hanukkah, please make a contribution to one of these organizations instead:

No More Victims is a non-profit organization that assists American communities in providing direct assistance and medical treatment to Iraqi children war victims. In the process, the organization -- which has an all volunteer staff -- creates personal linkages between the Iraqi children (as well as their families) and the community that has sponsored the treatment for the injured child.

I found out about No More Victims by way of a front-page story in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette about Abdul Hakeem, a nine-year old boy from Falluja, Iraq who returned to Pittsburgh this last week for follow-up medical treatment. Doctors at Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh volunteered their services to repair his jaw, face, mouth, and eye. Prior to the original surgery, he couldn’t chew food well and had stopped going to school because other kids were making so much fun of him.

You can watch videos about Abdul Kareem and other similar stories from No More Victims by clicking here. Frankly, I wasn’t able to watch without getting choked up – not just from the beautiful story of a life saved, but also from pride in the Pittsburgh community. Regardless of your views on the war in Iraq, a donation to No More Victims – and even better, an offer from your community to take on a case and to help – can go a long way.

Another way to help child victims of war is by addressing the issue of landmines. I raised the landmine issue a few months ago on this blog and we tried to get a golf accessory company to donate to the cause. They never responded to our encouragement. Obviously, my Uncle Ed is not getting their product as a Hanukkah gift. Instead, $169, the cost of the product, is going to landmine victims.

Landmines maim or kill 15,000 – 20,000 people a year. Many of these victims are kids at play. Other times, these are family breadwinners, trying to work or access drinkable water. Landmines Blow and Adopt a Mine Field are two organizations that are making a difference on this problem. Follow the links for each to donate.

In one of my Live from Jordan radio interviews, I met Ali el-Hajj. Ali is an Arab-American, about my age, living in South Florida who came up with the idea of the Bethlehem Christmas Project after a recent visit to Israel. He, other Americans, Israelis, and Palestinians will be delivering Christmas gifts to Palestinians in Bethlehem from December 7 - 15. The project is bigger than just the individual gifts, though. On their website, they have a blog that details the experience as it happens and they are also working with Code 81 Films to put together a documentary that will hopefully take this great effort by a few individuals to a larger audience and promote mutual understanding.

I want to mention another great project working with children that is worth your attention and donations. This one is domestic, but it is an idea that would be wonderful to take abroad. Critical Exposure is a U.S. non-profit organization that buys cameras for inner-city kids, trains them in documentary photography, leadership, and advocacy, and gives them a platform and the tools to raise awareness about the conditions in their public schools. Critical Exposure has worked in four states as well as in Washington D.C. They have a terrific website that has more information as well as students’ pictures.

You can donate online at Critical Exposure's website and you can also participate in Jared and Stacey Schwartz’s project to raise money for them. All you have to do is go to their Audio Exposure website, and add your favorite song to a mix that they are making. They are donating $1 for each song added.

So, my holiday message is to be an unofficial ambassador and to give your time, your expertise, or a financial contribution. Whether it is one of the causes listed above, Darfur, or something else, it makes a difference, both on an individual and communal level. As everyday Americans, there is a lot that we each are able to offer to not just improve our standing abroad, but to make our shared future better.

Happy Holidays!

Friar on the Road: A December Rant

2007-12-05T19:52:00.000-05:00

Jerusalem – Last night, on my way home from a Bat Mitzvah in Haifa, I was almost run off the road, three times. That isn’t bad. It is a two-hour trip each way and one potential incident every hour and twenty minutes is much better than what I face every morning on my 2.5 mile, 20 - 30 minute commute to work.

The driving here is awful.

According to Israel’s National Road Safety Authority, there were 428 fatal crashes leading to 480 deaths inside the Green Line in 2004 (most recent stats). There were also 3,091 drivers involved in “serious crashes.” That might not seem like a lot by American standards, but by Israeli standards, that is a ton. By comparison, 471 Israeli civilians, inside the Green Line, were killed by Palestinians between the start of the second Intifada (9/29/2000) and the end of last week.

I only realized the extent of my developing road rage a few weeks ago when I took a cab home from the Pittsburgh airport. The experience was nothing short of lovely. The driver and I talked about the Steelers for a solid half hour – the success of Mike Tomlin, Ben Rothlisberger’s comeback, and our distaste for the newly created mascot, Steely McBeam. As we spoke about the prospects for the Steelers’ post-season and cruised past yellow and red leaves on a wide-open three-lane road at a steady 55 mph, I realized that I was relaxed in a car for the first time in months.

Traffic was moving, there was no one bearing down on us from the right or left lane, and the traffic that did pass us (on the left no less!) used turn signals when changing lanes. When the road was empty, my fellow Steeler fan didn’t gun the engine and go 85 mph. We had a connection not just to our destination but also to other cars on the road.

What do I mean by that?

In Israel, the only thing that matters is your destination. There are speed limits and other cars, but for too many Israeli drivers, everything is about getting there (wherever it may be), as fast as you can. There is no driving etiquette – zero, zilch, bagel. Honk, cut off, honk, swerve, honk, make a u-turn, and honk some more. Just do whatever it takes to get to your destination three minutes earlier.

The worst thing that you can be in Israel is a “friar,” Hebrew for sucker. Little guardian angels fly around here, sit on people’s shoulder and scream, “al taytseh friar!” or don’t be a sucker! I’m convinced that the “al taytseh friar” factor affects how people drive.

If you let someone in ahead of you, you’re a friar.

If you wait in the turn lane to make the turn, you’re a friar.

If you don’t block the intersection at rush hour, you’re a friar.

Every morning on my way to work, I wait in a designated left hand turn lane to cross a major street. The lane usually has 10 to 15 cars in it and it takes two to three light changes to make the turn. Without fail each morning, per every light-change, at least one car drives all the way to the front of the line and shoots into the intersection before the first car and cuts it off. Actually, usually two cars do this per light, with the first one going fully perpendicular to the line of waiting cars. What are you going to do, T-Bone him? A couple of weeks ago, a van carrying kids pulled this move right in front of me. That’s great. They must have been late to homeroom.

The swerving and passing is just as bad. It is all a game of chicken with drivers thrusting between lanes and lurching into intersections. They put the onus on you to slam on the brakes or your car will be in an accident. Mopeds are the worst. They fly in and out of traffic, brushing between side mirrors and weaving back and forth between lanes.

I have a good friend in Pittsburgh who used to own a VW Jetta with a broken driver side window. Anytime he’d want to roll down his window and yell at a driver who’d irked him, he’d have to fumble around in the ashtray, grab the handle, attach it, and then roll down the window. Frequently, the driver would get away before the window had made it down and my friend would be left shaking his Jetta window handle at the windshield.

I wish I had a window handle to shake.

Instead, I pound the horn; long honks, double honks, and the rapid-fire repeater with a long blast of “I hate you” at the end. I swear, I point my finger, and then I grip the steering wheel until my knuckles turn white. I yell at the radio and the fingernail-on-the-chalkboard morning show DJs from RAM-FM (the only English language music station and the subject of a different diatribe).

And then, when I’m done, after a 30-minute, 2.5-mile drive full of fluster, I arrive at work to start my day.

Pittsburgh Today Live

2007-11-23T13:00:00.000-05:00

Pittsburgh - The Book Tour II has finished, and I'm home in Pittsburgh for a couple of days before returning to Jerusalem. I have a little bit of a turkey or maybe book tour hangover, but I was still able to get out of bed this morning for an interview on Pittsburgh Today Live.

To watch the interview, click on this link. Here, on the right, is a picture of me speaking with the nice hostess of the show, Kristine Sorensen. I think I was explaining to her how I make some of my favorite shadow puppets or I could have been telling her about my last bad haircut.

The best part about the interview was when Kristine asked me to explain to the hometown crowd about the Heinz Ketchup Eaters. If you haven't read Live from Jordan, the Heinz Ketchup eaters are the elites of the developing world who cruise around town in their Lexus Jeeps, wearing designer jeans and eating burgers covered in Heinz Ketchup. I'm now waiting by the phone for either John Kerry's wife (Theresa Heinz) or the CEO of Heinz to call.

The Book Tour II – Adventures at Jewish Community Centers Across America

2007-11-16T09:10:00.000-05:00

Richmond - “Who are you here for?” I asked the driver of the stretch limo outside my Miami hotel.

“Orbach.” The 40-something driver replied, as he gave me the once over – New Balance sneakers, worn jeans, and a button down shirt with a wingy collar.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, Orbach. Is that you?”

“Yes it is,” I said with a big smile as I handed him my bag and stepped up to the glory.

My Miami-Fort Lauderdale limo ride might have been the highlight of my Jewish Community Center book tour. It’s too bad I fell asleep during the ride; that shining moment could have lasted longer. Or I guess the moment would have lasted the same amount of time, but I would have been awake for more of it.

Whatever. I’m exhausted.

Last night wrapped up my Jewish Book Council tour. I visited five cities in five days and shared with mostly Jewish audiences my experience of living the American-Arab relationship 24-hours-a-day for a year following the 9/11 attacks.

When people hear that you are on a book tour, they think of limo rides and top-shelf hotels -- like the Jefferson in Richmond, the beautiful 5-star hotel where my very kind hosts put me up last night. But there are a lot of airport security, frozen Lender’s bagels, and dirty-sock-detection moments, too. There is also the “expectations of a grand performance” aspect. I guess you eventually adjust to it, but there were a couple of nights that had me wishing I could juggle or tap dance.

It probably isn’t the same for all authors on the Jewish Book Council tour, but my topic is a little different, especially given the audience. For example, in Richmond the night before I arrived, EllyAnne Geisel presented “The Apron Book: Making, Wearing, and Sharing a Bit of Cloth and Comfort.” In Deal, NJ, I was part 2 of a doubleheader with the very funny AJ Jacobs, author of “The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible.” That was a tough act to follow.

I speak about the diversity that I found traveling to different places in the Arab World, the conversations I had with young men about their future, the daily struggles that “bus riders,” i.e. the common man faces in Egypt, Jordan and other places, and – most important to me – the popular opinions that people hold of America and Americans. From Cherry Hill to Miami, I received some excellent questions about the difference between the opinions of young people and older generations; the status of women in each Arab country; and popular views on terrorism in general, and the 9/11 attacks in particular. In a couple of places, I stayed 30 or 45 minutes after the talk ended to answer the bubbling questions of curious readers. So, I found that there was definitely some interest in what I had to say, but there was also some hostility.

For some vocal book-talk goers, my message and experience missed their desired mark. My shades of gray in explaining the anti-Semitism that I found, and the differences I sketched between places with a history of Jewish life and places where Jew = the Israeli army (in the minds of locals) were more exacerbating than satisfying. In almost every setting, there was a request for me to explain what I mean by the word “Palestine.” I was also asked in almost every stop about Arab countries’ education curricula, popularly viewed (here) as dehumanizing Jews and demonizing Israel.

I took away two main things from these book discussions with American Jewish communities. First, from the post-talk comments and the follow-on emails that I’ve received, there is an interest and a skeptical hope for better interactions with the people of the Arab World. Second, the everyday people in Jordan, Egypt, Palestine, and Syria have a long way to go in creating a more positive impression of their communities among Jewish communities in the United States.

Just as Mark Twain, Mariah Carey, and the Matrix make it to the Middle East, the information flows this way too. Egyptian newspaper cartoons, various countries’ textbooks, and stories of honor crimes are common knowledge on suburban Jewish Main Street. I’ve written a lot about the role unofficial American ambassadors should play in the Middle East. It is clear that there is a role for unofficial Arab ambassadors to be playing here, too.

-------

For those wondering, my limo riding etiquette is terrible. When the driver sneezed, I said, “Bless you.” He didn’t hear me, so I yelled it, not wanting him to think that I was too good for such niceties. Except, when I yelled it, he just looked at me funny, like I was some kind of religious freak doling out the goods. Worse, perhaps, when we pulled up to the hotel in Lauderdale, I didn’t wait for him to open the door. I just hopped out, like a jack-in-the-box. The hotel doorman, from the look on his face, thought I was going to attack him.

Big Mexican Food, Little Hair

2007-11-12T22:01:00.000-05:00

Eatonwood, NJ – The waitress deposited the black granite bowl of fresh salsa and the basket of warm, fresh chips before me. As Jerry Seinfeld once said about his reaction to fresh bread in a restaurant, “it was like I was alone in a hotel room in Milwaukee.”

She was lucky to get her hand away fast enough.

It has been too long since I had a good Mexican meal. Israel is a nice country, but I haven’t found a decent burrito, nacho, huevo, or enchilada in four months of searching. I tried to pretend like I had a good burrito a few months ago. But who was I kidding? There were no beans or cheese, it was a wrap (made by a nice lady), and I was desperate.

It wasn’t a hotel room in Milwaukee, but I was alone in the dining room of a Mexican restaurant somewhere near Deal, NJ last night. The restaurant had a small bar area with a couple of TVs, and I would have bellied up, but there were eight obnoxious JETS fans screaming their faces off. The JETS weren’t playing, but there were fantasy football issues at stake. Clad in green shirts and JETS baseball hats, they needed Peyton Manning to throw six touchdowns, not six interceptions. They wanted LaDanian Tomlinson to run for four touchdowns, not four yards. Obviously, the outcome of the game didn’t matter.

So I sat in the empty dining room and attacked my food. Not just for the speed and ferociousness with which I ate those chips and then my enchiladas, but for my anti-social tendencies, I felt a little like an axe murderer who hadn’t eaten in a few days. I finished my food in seven minutes and then had to wait for George, the town’s cab driver to come back and get me.

While I waited, I positioned myself so that I could see half of a TV through a little window into the bar. I sat there quietly, in my coat, for 25-minutes while the JETS fans lived it up in the bar.

Waiting.

Axe murderer.

I just haven’t gotten much sleep since I wedged myself into the second to last row of a Tel Aviv-Atlanta flight in the wee hours of Friday morning. Tired, cranky, and a little sick, the prospect of hearing “J-E-T-S JETS! JETS! JETS!” from close range was enough to make half a TV screen ok.

Besides a good Mexican meal, my trip home has also included a good haircut. My overgrown mullet has been corrected. “The September Surprise” i.e. “the Massacre at Damascus Gate,” i.e. my latest bad overseas haircut, never really grew in. The sides just didn’t come back and the top and back kept getting longer. This past year, Israel started professional baseball and football leagues. If they do hockey, I would have been a first round draft choice on looks alone. They at least would have found room for me as a mascot; until Friday afternoon, I looked like the missing Hanson brother.

My brother’s wedding is next week and those pictures are going to be for life. I couldn’t take the risk of having the haircut fixed in Israel. So I waited for my trip home and went to Gino’s in Squirrel Hill. Here’s an exact quote from Gino:

“What happened here in the back?”

I just don’t know.

Gino fixed me up and I’m now ready for the wedding. But here’s an interesting twist – they confiscated my hair product at the Pittsburgh airport yesterday on my way to my first book talk in New Jersey. It was 150ml and the limit is 100!

Aside: In Israel, where a guard checks your bag at the entrance of every building, you don’t have to take your shoes or belt off at the airport. Here, I think we are one step away from walking through airport metal detectors in our underwear.

I understand that we are working off of the premise of “fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me,” and I cooperate because people are doing their jobs and the intent is right. But when you are on a plane, do you feel safer because you know all the other passengers have had their shoes and belts run through a metal detector? Or can you fall asleep because you know that the person next to you doesn’t have more than 100ml of contact lens solution or hair gel with them? I just hope some would-be terrorist doesn’t try to get on a plane with a bomb stuck up his ass.

So, they took my gel -- which left me at a NJ supermarket last night trying to find some product. There were so few choices that I ended up with Queen Helene Cholesterol Conditioning Styling Gel. According to the back of the tub I bought (no travel sizes), I am now conditioning and protecting my over-processed and chemically treated hair with Cholesterol.

Talk about living dangerously, forget backpacking through the Middle East, I’m rubbing cholesterol into my hair!

I guess I really only have one question, whose cholesterol is this?

Jewish Book Month

2007-10-30T11:58:00.000-04:00

Jerusalem – After six mini-altoids, my tongue was encased in a minty fresh numbness. The room was hot and I was glad to be wearing a sports coat. It covered the pools of nervousness spreading through my shirt. There was an audience of about 120 Jewish Community representatives and 35 authors packed into the Hebrew Union college sanctuary last June at the Jewish Book Council audition in New York.

The Jewish Book Council is an organization that is devoted to the promotion of Jewish-interest literature. In advance of Jewish Book month (which occurs the month before Hanukkah), the JBC invites a hundred or so authors to a gathering where each writer has two minutes to convince an audience of representatives of Jewish communities from across the country that he or she is worth taking home, for a book talk to the community.

I happened to arrive late to the audition. I actually fell asleep on the subway, going the wrong way no less. So after rushing in late, I sat stuffed between a couple of fellow authors whose last names were somewhere in that meaty part of the alphabet, between “Michaels” and “Rosen,” and waited my turn. A short female MC with glasses and a no-nonsense demeanor introduced each author, announced who was "on deck," and then relinquished the floor for exactly two minutes. As each author pitched, the MC held up signs indicating that one minute was left, then 30 seconds, then 10 seconds, and finally that time was up. Once time was up, she stood and walked towards the podium, quite effectively signaling to the gasping author of the moment that his or her time was up.

It was nerve wracking to watch. What made it worse was that all the other writers' topic were so different and so much more connected to Jewish things than mine – there were books about teaching the bible, combating anti-Semitism, preparing a spiritual Friday night dinner, and telling the history of Jewish sweatshop workers in America. Further, the other authors seemed so accomplished. This one had won Jewish book of the year three times, that one had a public television show, and something like five of them had radio shows. And here I was, psyched to have hit the top 7000 books on Amazon the week before, that is after I’d bought 20 books myself. As my neighbor’s shaking legs made me seasick, I couldn’t help but get nervous about how my “human face of the Middle East” shtick was going to go over with an exclusively Jewish crowd and whether I would be able to get it to go over in less than two minutes.

I had prepared a two-minute speech according to what I guessed people wanted to hear. But when it was mercifully my turn, I stood up, popped in another mini-altoid, and winged it. I apologized for being late, I made fun of my ability to fall asleep on public transportation in any country, I referenced my Safta in Queens and her homemade Matzah ball soup, and I simply said that Live from Jordan was about the questions we all had on 9/11 and my pursuit of answers to those questions.

Somehow, it worked out. There was a lot of interest in me and in Live from Jordan.

Maybe it was because I was different than the other presenters; I like to think that I said something funny. Or maybe it was just that I seemed young and unattached and some nice people wanted to bring me home to meet their neighbor or niece. After the event, there was a buffet dinner and a chance to meet the representatives of different communities. I was speaking to a young woman in her 30s from the Atlanta Jewish Community Center and somehow it came up that I had just gotten engaged the week before. Her face literally fell and she said, “Oh.”

After a pause, she added, “I had the perfect girl for you. Mazel Tov.” She then walked away.

I wasn’t invited to give a book talk in Atlanta. But I was invited to NJ, South Florida, Richmond, NY, and Philly (sort of), and I’m looking forward to a trip home in about a week. If you are in the area, please stop by. Here’s the schedule:

• November 11, 2:30 PM, Betty & Milton Katz JCC, 1301 Springdale Rd. Cherry Hill, NJ

• November 12, 7PM, Ruth Hyman Jewish Community Center of Greater Monmouth County, 100 Grant Ave., Deal Park, NJ 

• November 13, 8PM, Dave and Mary Alper Jewish Community Center 11155 SW 112th Ave., Kendall, FL 

• November 14, 7:30 PM, David Posnack Jewish Community Center, 5850 S. Pine Island Rd., Davie, FL 

• November 15, 7PM, Weinstein Jewish Community Center, 5403 Monument Avenue, Richmond, VA 

• November 19, 7PM, Bay Terrace Jewish Center, 1300 209th Street, Bayside, NY 

• November 20, 7:30 PM, Shir Ami Bucks County Jewish Congregation, 101 Richboro Road, Newton, PA 

So Smart or So Ridiculous?

2007-10-20T16:59:00.000-04:00

Jerusalem – My bonus time in the Rhodes airport gave me a chance to do some thinking. In between writing my blog and text messaging my (coincidentally Greek) friend Chronis who I was supposed to play poker with that evening, I had the chance to ponder some of life’s bigger questions. Here are four of them:

• What is the attraction of duty-free shops at the airport?

The Johnny Walker, Marlboro, and Cadbury are still marked up, even if you aren’t paying taxes. So, where does duty free euphoria come from? Nine Russian-speaking men and women polished off a bottle of Absolute Vodka and Bacardi Rum in 45 minutes at Gate 11 while I waited for my flight. As they did shots, snapped pictures, and hurled bawdy encouragement at each other, it occurred to me that perhaps some alcohols aren’t available for them back home. Maybe random gates at the airport are the equivalent of a hometown bar that they remember with nostalgia.

In my little world:

Boris, stretching out on a set of attached red airport chairs: “Ahh, Gate 11, they only serve the good stuff, not that awful rail vodka we drink at home, in the cold.”

Natasha, lounging on a set of chairs across the aisle: “Oh, yes. The times we had at Gate 11! I wish it could last forever!”

(In the background, an intercom voice whines, “Last call for flight 732 departing for Kiev. All passengers please board at Gate 12.”

Boris: “Last call! Last call for alcohol!”

On the other hand, if it were a question of denial at home, wouldn’t there be some cartoon-like character smoking five Marlboro reds at once, or eating bricks of Cadbury chocolate?

• Where does belly button lint come from?

My theory: undershirt lint intermingles with chest hair and then seeks out a nice warm spot to call home. But does that mean that people who don’t have chest hair don’t have belly button lint build up (BBLBU)? And what about people with outies? Are they immune to BBLBU? What if you have an outie, but chest hair too -- what’s the belly button occupancy situation? Of no surprise, Wikipedia has an explanation.

• Do foreigners come to the United States, get terrible haircuts, and bemoan their follicle miseries to their friends back home?

“I can’t believe he evened out my mullet!”
“Where is my line? This gradual fade is wimpy!”
“She straightened my home perm!”

If yes, then it means that if there was a fashion police, there couldn’t be a fashion Interpol. We have no common standards. There could be no agreement on who deserves a ticket, and in more severe cases, who needs to be extradited and incarcerated.

• What would it take for the smart car to succeed in the United States?

All over Rhodes, there were little fuel-efficient cars with names I’d never heard of before. I felt like Gulliver, surrounded by a fleet of Lilliputian bumper cars. Of course the headliner of them all is the Smart Car.

One day in Germany, a couple getting divorced couldn’t decide on who would get possession of their prized, new-aged, lime VW Bug. The couple, Helga and Bob Lingen, went to arbitration and the judge told them to cut the Bug in half; they each would get a slice. Unlike the Solomon story, they agreed. Helga got the back seat and trunk – she turned it into a hand-puppet theater. She is now performing Hamlet with a couple of argyle socks in a Stuttgart park. Bob Lingen got the front half of the Bug. A few little red wagon parts later, the Smart Car was born.

Honestly, the Smart Car just looks silly. It counterbalances its ridiculous appearance with practicality and fuel efficiency, though. It gets 60 miles per gallon (5mpg better than the Toyota Prius), costs $12,000 ($10,000 less than the Civic Hybrid), and it is 2.5 yards long – meaning that if it was an NFL running back, it would get cut during the preseason.

I pay 250 NIS ($62.50) to fill up my Subaru Forester here in Israel, and that is after a 50 percent discount on gasoline because I don’t pay the national tax! With such a financial gasoline burden, would I ever consider driving a Smart Car? Good thing for me, my cheapness will never be put to the test – I’m too big for the Smart Car.

Other, smaller, Americans will soon face this very question. The Smart Car will be available in the U.S. in a matter of months. Will gas guzzling SUV driving Americans, whose cars are a part of their patriotism, ever buy the Smart Car? Or will we just pick those Smart Cars up and throw them at each other like crumpled cans? I guess it depends on how desperate the gasoline situation becomes back home. I just don’t know.

If you have answers to any of these questions, and you don't work for Wikipedia, speak up!

My Life and Times Stranded at a Greek Airport with an Israeli Charter Group

2007-10-10T05:59:00.000-04:00

Rhodes – He was looking for someone to wag his finger at, to make an accusation. Dressed in black, his sliver hair swept across his forehead, there had to be someone new for him to bark at somewhere in the terminal. He’d made a point out of making a point all day. The best part about being delayed 11 hours on our return from Rhodes was not being him.

At 7:40 on Sunday, our Israeli charter group found a sign in the lobby of our hotel that said we’d be delayed three hours. Whether this was the opening act of a strategic ploy by Tsila our travel agent, or information that she actually thought to be true, I’ll never know. Either way, I learned a lot about the behavior of aggrieved and desperate charter groups over the next fifteen hours.

10:40 came and we were told that the delay was now until 2:30. While I worried about missing my 5:00 poker game, others in the group grew more cranky. The man in black paced the lobby, staking out a claim to the most suffering. He led a small group of vacationers who employed “peer around the corner” bus-stop logic. While others sat by the pool or went to Rhodes’ quaint old city, they waited in the lobby, believing that it would put them closer to their destination.

When Tsila showed up to answer questions, the man in black led battle cries of “People have to work tomorrow!” and “We need to get home!” He jabbed his finger like he was Robert Deniro in Taxi Driver.

At 3PM, they took us to the airport – probably at the hotel’s request, as abandoned vacationers had taken over the lobby, some sleeping off hangovers on the green pleather couches. At the airport, the group stampeded into the security line. It was like a game of Bingo where everyone has the same card and the person who gets to the front of the podium first is declared the winner.

To me, the worst thing about the Middle East is fighting with locals in line while carrying stuff. Unencumbered, I can hold my own, but weighted down with luggage, I’m toast. I get packed into the middle, where strategic angling movements are impossible. Or I’m flung to the margins, with no one agreeing to stand behind me and validate my position.

The line just didn’t go anywhere though, and when it finally did, it led to another amoeba shaped line to check bags, and then another line for passport control. At the passport control line, European citizens cut in front or went to a special line for EU passport holders, infuriating our group. There were mumbles of special anti-Israel treatment and a yell of “Where is Tsila? She is scared of us!” Tsila had disappeared a few hours earlier, collecting her new charter group and ridding herself of our plight. $385 for three nights in Rhodes didn’t include her soul.

By 5PM we had reached the gate area. I can’t say a specific gate because there was still no information about our flight. The vacationers bomb-rushed duty free, worried that they’d missed their chance at tax-free whiskey, perfume, and cigarettes. Little did they know that they would have the chance to shop to their hearts’ content.

Over the next five hours, we sat at gates and we went through a Lord of the Flies like lifecycle short only of the murder. If Tsila was there, however, I can’t confirm that she would have made it. There was frustration with the lack of information about our flight. There was panic, hunger, and feelings of abandonment. There was an attempt to organize and issue demands. There was a period of quiet after the good-natured Greeks gave us each a cheese sandwich, a bottle of juice, and a piece of chocolate pound cake. There was tiredness and resignation as people slept on the red benches of gates 10, 11, and 12. There was sorrow at a missed poker game and the opportunity to watch the Steelers beat the Seahawks 21-0.

There was rumor-mongering as passengers called home and reported back to the group of vacationers. “My mother said they are sending a plane for us at 8:30!” called out one guy. “My brother said that a plane was arriving at 8!” yelled another. And then there was debate about the sources of information. Laughing, the first guy demanded that his mother had never been wrong in her life, she was a Polanit (a Polish Jew)!

And of course, there was continued anger led by the man in black who stalked the terminal and confronted anyone in a uniform, demanding answers and justice. Periodically, he’d press his mug against the windows of the gate, block the fluorescent glow of the overhead lights with his hands, and look for signs of the El Al plane that would take us home.

Throughout it all, time stood still. The clocks in the terminal were stuck at noon. At one point, the PA system turned against us as well, crackling loudly and intermittently. Was it all a psychological experiment?

Sometime after 10, an El Al plane landed on the Rhodes runway to the cheers of the abandoned vacationers. We were saved from another Duty Free shop meal of chocolate Riesens, cinnamon pita chips, and black olive dip. As the wheels of the plane touched the ground, solidarity was lost, though. For the umpteenth time that day, the vacationers swarmed into a fitful line, trying to be the first to get home.

The Holiday Season III – Jerusalem’s Ramadan Nights

2007-10-03T18:30:00.000-04:00

Damascus Gate – Amid the parade of Jewish holidays – it is now Sukkoth – Ramadan is still going strong. It really is the holiday season here.

Israel is celebrating Sukkoth this week, a 7-day holiday that centers around building outdoor, booth-like structures in which Jews eat, hang out, and in some cases sleep. Sukkoth’s roots trace to the exodus from Egypt and the 40 years of wandering in the desert. Sukkoth is a pilgrimage holiday, and in the days of the Temple, Jews traveled to Jerusalem to make religious offerings. Today, Jews from all over Israel (and actually the world) still travel to Jerusalem. While they don’t make sacrifices, they sure cause a lot of traffic jams.

I took some visiting Pittsburghers to the Old City yesterday and the Jewish Quarter resembled the French Quarter during Mardi Gras, except without the beads, floats, or debauchery. Okay, it wasn’t Fat Tuesday, but there was a band and I’ve never seen the Jewish Quarter so crowded. Israel’s chief Ashkenazi and Sephardic rabbis were at the Western Wall yesterday, too. A mob of stroller-pushing well-wishers swarmed them and security had to push back the crowds. It was a scene more reminiscent of a concert than a holy place.

Jewish pilgrims aren’t the only people in town these days, though. Jerusalem is the third holiest place in the world for Muslims, and tens of thousands of Muslims have come here for Friday prayers, break-fasts, and celebrations.

When I lived in Jordan, where more than 95 percent of the population is Muslim, everyone fasted or at least appeared to fast during Ramadan. The holiday was in full effect everywhere. Besides the closed restaurants and lack of food in public, afternoon crankiness and lethargy (which accompany fasting) hung in the air.

Here, things are different. Similar to Jordan, the work schedule has changed, there is a conspicuous lack of public snacking in East Jerusalem, and break-fasts have become regular events on my social calendar. Still, the impact of overlapping Jewish holidays on Ramadan in the Jewish state creates an interesting co-existence and some surreal scenes.

Walking home Monday night, I came across one of those scenes, a lively post-break-fast celebration in the Damascus Gate area. Since the start of Ramadan, Damascus Gate has been adorned with lights and half moon decorations. At about 8PM, though, there was more going on than the usual outdoor market. Vendors sold ground meat and chicken kababs from smoking hibachis. Young men hawked boiled corn, calling out “dooriya!” At impromptu coffee shops on the landings of the Gate’s entrance, men with gelled spiky hair and others with less hair drank tea, coffee, and sahlab, a milky and nut-filled drink. Some of them smoked water pipes as huka attendants stood nearby, twirling iron hot coal baskets and keeping the flavored tobacco fires burning.

The bee-bop of popular Arabic music filled the night, and a clown on stilts wearing a blue balloon hat danced through the crowd. Little kids ran back and forth, some attracted to the clown, others repulsed. Women in colorful red or white hijabs milled through the crowd, shopping for Ramadan deals, but hanging out too.

A normal Ramadan scene, no?

Well, at the top of landing’s steps, Israeli soldiers and policemen looked on. For the hour that I sat on the steps, a young ultra orthodox boy no more than 12-years-old stood at the top of the steps, a few feet away from the soldiers. His fedora was pushed back on his forehead, and he stared with wonder at the action below, transfixed and catching flies. Words couldn’t capture what he was seeing or feeling.

Just a few feet away from the clown on stilts, older Yeshiva boys had emerged from the Old City. They wore black suits and hats and as they walked up the steps, people began to clear away. It wasn’t for them though. A very small boy, wearing a denim jacket and blue jeans was motioning for people to move off of one of the landings. As the crowd, including the teenage Yeshiva boys, looked on expectantly, the denim boy took a running start and somersaulted his way fearlessly across the stone landing, ending in a full body flip to the cheers of the crowd. Another young boy break-danced in his wake and then walked on his hands. The Yeshiva boys, like everyone else watching, smiled in disbelief and admiration.

An hour earlier, 500 yards away, up Jaffa Road, a crowd of a few hundred orthodox Jewish families were watching Sukkoth fireworks in the municipality’s square – home to the Sukkariah, a giant Sukkah made of candy. Ultra orthodox men with curly paot, their wives clad in shapeless dresses, and the many young children with no school in the morning spilled out of the courtyard and into the street. When I walked past them on the way to Damascus Gate, they were rendering the city’s traffic laws meaningless. The road rage of Sukkoth and Ramadan car horns filled the air.

500 yards -- that’s only a thumb or so on Google Earth. In a Jerusalem filled with sukkot fireworks and Ramadan clowns on stilts, however, it is a world away.

The Holiday Season II - Yom Kippur

2007-09-23T16:40:00.000-04:00

The American Colony – Israel shut down yesterday for Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement.

On Yom Kippur, Jews ask God to forgive the sins they committed the year before and the sins they’ll commit in the year to come. As part of our contrition, we fast from sundown the night before Yom Kippur to nightfall the next day.

Aside from the fasting and soul-searching, Yom Kippur is known as the “Bicycle Holiday” in Israel. Since Israel literally puts up the shutters – TV and radio stations, stores, and roads all close – the country’s roads become a playground as children and adults cruise city streets and highways on their bikes. Some even bike the steep road between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

No bicycles for me, though. Instead, I went to the holiest place for Jews in the world, the Western Wall. The Western Wall is the western outer retaining wall of the Second Temple’s compound. The Second Temple was built on the site of the first temple and on the hill that Abraham is believed to have offered his son Isaac to God for a sacrifice (God said, “no thank you). Today the Haram al Sharif, the compound that houses the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosque, sits on the site of the Temple’s ruins.

The Western Wall, also called the Wailing Wall, is an interlocking puzzle of rectangular boulders mixed with tangled greens sprouting from spots in between. Hand written notes, detailing the hopes and pleas of Jewish pilgrims from all over the world, fill the cracks among the giant stones. In the plaza beneath the Western Wall, Jews have gathered to pray since the Second Temple’s destruction in 70 CE.

On Friday night, as the sun set, Jews dressed in white – a sign of purity – began to arrive at the Wall for prayer. Some ultra orthodox with long beards wore kittels, or white religious overshirts. In other cases, it looked like an army of milkmen was invading. Leather is a Yom Kippur no-no, so there were lots of canvas belts and gleaming white sneakers, out and about, enjoying an annual cameo. The big hit in Yom Kippur fashions this year though was white Crocs. Crocs are popular here and the full color wheel was on display, but a local shoe store definitely made a killing on white ones.

With the sound of the Ramadan cannon, which fires each evening to signify that it is time to break the fast, I descended to the men’s section of the Wall for prayer. The plaza had filled considerably, but not into one service. Instead, congregations gathered together in spots around the plaza. The sounds of staggered prayers, each at their own pace, echoed throughout the evening.

The crowd was diverse, not just by dress but by skin color and place of origin too. Besides the men in white, the plaza was filled with Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews wearing fedoras, black suits, and Windsor knotted ties. Some European Jews with shaved heads and long curly pa’ot sported yellow robes, while others wore black silk robes, fur hats the size of flying saucers, and white stockings pulled to their calves. For a while, I joined a Sephardic congregation, where I sat behind a guy who looked to be from India and two others who appeared to be from North Africa. To my left were two Ethiopians, about ten years older than me.

Interestingly, the prayer books were as diverse as the worshippers. As I searched for the right mahsor for Yom Kippur, I found a book of psalms with Arabic-Hebrew translation, a siddur with English commentary, and finally a Hebrew-Russian mahsor.

Fifteen feet from where I finally settled, the leader of a Carlebach-looking group – each member had an untamed beard – thrust his fist into the air repeatedly as he led Friday night prayers. A few feet away, thirty Sephardic men clustered around a rabbi with salt and pepper hair, big brown glasses, and a long grey beard. The rabbi leaned against a reader and delivered a sermon on the need to feed the soul, not just the body. He enunciated each word, competing with the singing of the smaller group to his right.

Directly in front of the wall, an assortment of lone individuals, from a blonde 20 year-old in shorts to a thin black guy wearing a black baseball hat, braced their palms against the smooth hand worn stones that are more than 2000 years old. Their lips, just inches away from pieces of history, mouthed silent and private prayer. Others, with prayer books opened, shucked and swayed in more formal devotion. I wondered how it would be if everyone was on the same page, chanting the same prayers at the same time.

Despite the cacophony of services, though, the night was magical. The wall was sprayed with light from tilted floodlights that cast spelling-binding shadows and induced a moment of spirituality outside of time.

The strangeness of a country collectively paused in reflection returned, however, when I exited the Old City via Dung Gate. The city’s walls were lit against the mostly quiet night. Outside of Zion Gate, a group of Spanish-speaking Christian pilgrims sang hymns. From Silwan, lit by Ramadan lights and crescent moon decorations, came the sounds of Palestinians celebrating the Ramadan break-fast. Other than that, the Jewish side of the Old City was still. The roads leading to the center of town were blocked with barriers.

The next morning, I returned to the Old City. It was a little after 7AM and Ramadan hangover was evident throughout East Jerusalem’s streets and the Damascus Gate area. Two empty falafel cauldrons stood at the top of the Damascus Gate stairs amid the previous night’s litter, and young boys were setting up lines of shoes for sale. In the Muslim Quarter, stores were beginning to open as shopkeepers put out sweets from the day before, hung articles of clothing outside their shops, and put on Koranic tapes.

At the Wall, morning services had begun, each congregation forming in what I realized were their respective spots. The Wall cast a shadow across the plaza and as the sun rose higher, the shadow receded. With the shrinking shadow, each congregation slid forward, pulling plastic white chairs and readers along. By 10AM, we were packed within 20 feet of the monumental stones. Most men were still praying but others sat in circles, listening to a Rabbi’s lesson. Above, in the shadows, birds darted back and forth between the cracks in the upper stones, nesting amid the holy weeds.

After services, I walked to the center of town. Saw-horses blocked the streets and Arab boys rode their bikes down King George and Jaffa Road – downtown Jerusalem’s main thoroughfares. Ben Yehuda Street, the usually crowded pedestrian mall off of Zion Square, was empty. The sounds of singing poured out of a nearby Yeshiva, but the stores were shut and the usual sounds of business were missing.

The only people downtown were Arab kids on bikes and foreign workers. The kids – mostly from the Christian Quarter – did tricks and jumps, and workers from South Asia and Thailand walked the streets casually, laughing. It was the Israeli version of the Saturday Night Live skit, “Christmas Time for the Jews” -- the claymation masterpiece where the Jews of New York celebrate Christmas eve and “control the night” playing professional basketball, driving tractors, and doing all other sorts of things that they never get to do as the city’s Christians celebrate at home.

So Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur have come and gone; Sukkot is next and Ramadan continues. If you’re wondering how any work gets done amid days off, half days, fasting and the rest, you’re asking a good question. I’ll let you know in October, after my Columbus Day vacation.

The Holiday Season

2007-09-17T04:47:00.000-04:00

French Hill, Jerusalem – This last week was full of religious observance, and a little time travel too. Rosh Hashanah started Wednesday night, and Ramadan began Thursday.

Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year and the beginning of the ten days of repentance before Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. On Rosh Hashanah, Jews’ prayers include hearing the blowing of the Shofar, a ram’s horn. The sound of the Shofar is meant to remind Jews to wake up and repent. The holiday isn’t all gloom and preparation for judgment, though. It is a family holiday (lots of food) and dinner is preceded by eating apples and honey, which symbolize the hope for a sweet new year.

Ramadan is a month of heightened religious observance and one of the five pillars of Islam. The month marks the revealing of the Koran to the prophet Mohammed and is a time for self-reflection, increased prayer, and spiritual cleansing. During daylight hours, observant Muslims don’t eat, drink, smoke, or have sex. The evenings though, are full of social events like breaking the fast with family and friends and staying up late playing cards. The month of Ramadan begins with the first crescent of the new moon, so sometimes the holiday starts or ends earlier in Morocco than in Kuwait or Indonesia.

This year, the stars – or actually the moon – aligned and Jews and Muslims in Israel began their holy days together.

To accommodate Ramadan fasting, the Palestinian government decided to “fall back” early. Iftar, or break-fast, begins with the sunset, so to make the sun set sooner, Palestinians turned their clocks back an hour. In Israel, the government decided to wait until yesterday before “falling back.” I’m not sure whether this was because Yom Kippur (a fast day) isn’t until next week or whether sunrise at 5AM is a bit early.

Personally, I’m thrilled with the change. I’m now only six hours ahead of Pittsburgh so when I wake up at 6:15AM, the Post-Gazette sports page has already been loaded on to the PG’s website. I no longer have to wait 46 minutes to read about the Steelers.

Though it only lasted for four days this year, I was fascinated by the hour time difference between Israel and Palestine. Let’s say you were in Jerusalem and had a 1PM meeting in Ramallah. You leave your office at noon, drive 30-45 minutes (assuming you don’t wait at checkpoints) and arrive in Ramallah at 11:45AM! You’re an hour early and you arrived before you left! To a liberal arts major, that’s time travel.

With the joys of time travel, though, comes confusion. To learn how locals deal with time travel logistics, I stopped in at the American Colony, a graceful hotel with an Arabesque style and a wonderful collection of old Jerusalem photographs. The Colony has been a fixture of Jerusalem life for more than a hundred years; today it is where Palestinian elites sip tea and meet with $16-hamburger-eating gringos like myself.

It was the first Friday of Ramadan and I passed hundreds of Palestinians, on foot and in buses, on their way to the Old City for Friday prayer. Local stores and restaurants were shut (for Ramadan and Rosh Hashanah) but the Colony is a secular oasis that bends to no doctrine. So after a coffee, I stopped at the front desk and asked the time. The answer was Israel time so I replied, “what if I had called from Ramallah?”

The time remained the same.

“What if I wanted to make a dinner reservation?” I pestered.

The receptionist smiled and said, “we’d have to ask you whether you’d changed your clock yet.”

Most interesting to me in this time vortex are the Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, like Beit Hanina and Shufat or the Muslim Quarter in the Old City. I live in French Hill, a mixed Palestinian and Israeli neighborhood that Palestinians consider a settlement and occupied land. Prior to the 1967 war, French Hill was under Jordanian control. Israelis, consider French Hill, home to Hebrew University, as no different than any neighborhood in the western part of the city.

My apartment is Palestinian owned and the landlord lives across the way. I was dying to know, however, whether he was an hour behind me. Or in the Muslim Quarter, does the time depend on your religion? Does it change when you enter the Christian or Armenian Quarter?

Besides my fascination with holy land time travel, the best part about the start of the holidays was the feeling of entire communities coming together to do something spiritual and meaningful. Somewhere between 40,000 and 90,000 Palestinians prayed at al-Aqsa mosque in the Old City on Friday. It was a sight to see, the hoards of older men in white khaffiyehs and muhajiba women in traditional dress walking through East Jerusalem to Damascus Gate.

In West Jerusalem, Friday evenings are special. Downtown’s usually crowded streets are empty, as people are already at home preparing for Shabbat. On Rosh Hashanah, it was even better, somehow quieter and more serene. Everyone was at home, at synagogue, or with family, starting the New Year together.

Shana Tova and Ramadan Karim –

The Bad Overseas Haircut

2007-09-10T14:20:00.000-04:00

Jerusalem - If you’ve traveled overseas, then at some point you’ve overpaid at the local market, found yourself inside a dungeonesque bathroom (damp and dirty) at a time of need, and confronted the unfortunate choice of wearing a frontal backpack, neck pouch, or fanny pack. There are experiences that every tourist overseas shares, no matter whether the destination is Delhi or Paris.

Similarly, if you live overseas, there is another range of experiences common to your life, whether it is learning to drive offensively or becoming a regular at Karaoke bars. Somewhere between getting passport photos (a task undertaken at least every other week in third world countries) and complaining about how deodorant is cheaper in America (a current pastime of mine), there is the bad overseas haircut.

The bad overseas haircut is a tradition for American ex-pats akin to Thanksgiving, apple pie, and football. Following the Barry Bonds debacle, I’ve unilaterally decided that baseball is no longer our national pastime.

“Mushroom head,” “the mullet,” “Kojak,” “a tail,” and “the helmet” (aka the “bad fade” or “ill fade”) and the circumstances surrounding such fates come in all shapes and sizes, from the Asian Parlor to the Arab Salon. I’ve suffered all of these except for the tail – a regrettable destiny for its first few hours, but one that is easily remedied.

Americans usually fall within one of two bad overseas haircuts categories, Language Barrier Casualties (LBC) and Fashion Police Victims (FPV). An LBC cannot communicate his needs to the haircutter in question. He uses hand gestures or shouts words like “just a trim,” or “fade,” slowly and clearly. He may even try to actually show the haircutter how to cut his hair. Sadly, the outcome remains socially disastrous for the LBC.

For an FPV, communication is not a problem. He speaks the local language or has found a haircutter who speaks English. After the FPV engages with the barber, he is confident that he is going to get the haircut requested – making his plight more tragic. FPVs have no way of accounting for the local stylist’s Fashion Police sense.

You see, the local stylist knows best. Even though the FPV has clearly stated what he wants (usually a haircut uncommon to local trends), the haircutter cannot risk the potential disgrace of having the local Fashion Police pull over the badly groomed American and pepper him with questions like, “Who did this to you?” or “Why are you out in public looking like this?”

So, the haircutter gives the FPV elements of what he requested, but he localizes it, assured that his client will be happy in the end. If you asked for a fade, you get a helmet. If you have long hair, you get a mullet.

Well, I’m here to tell you that I’m not happy with my “baby Jagr” mullet.

Jaromir Jagr was an 18-year old Czech prodigy supreme who came to the Pittsburgh Penguins in 1990. A goal-scoring dynamo who learned English watching Married with Children, he was a child of the 80s, a small town (Kladno) boy taking that midnight train (flight) to anywhere (Pittsburgh). A puffy afro in the front, flowing curly hair in the back, and closely cropped sides, Jagr set the standard for a generation of hockey mullets. He dominated opponents with his speed and stick handling in the 90s and left a wake of fluttering mall chicks’ hearts in his wake.

Seventeen years later, I have the "baby Jagr," and I’m walking around Jerusalem, trying to stay out of people’s pictures.

Pre-haircut, my Big Hair situation was desperate; the Partridge Family was calling to ask questions about my hair product. So, I went to a barber a few blocks from Damascus Gate. Given my familiarity with Arabic haircut vocab, I thought I had a better chance for a good cut with an Arabic-speaking barber.

I found a guy with long hair himself. He understood English . . . I thought I was so smart. I told him what I wanted, we chatted amiably, and I sat in his chair, confident. When I left the shop, I really thought it looked okay. I’m not sure if it was the lighting or that I hadn’t gotten a haircut in almost two and a half months and forgot what it was supposed to look like. But I thanked the barber and continued on to a work event feeling well-groomed. When I got home, though, I looked in the mirror and saw a baby mullet.

Oh, the humanity.

The next day, several people commented that I had gotten a “nice” haircut. Haircut compliments are a fine thing, for women. Not noticing a woman’s haircut means that the changes are within a range of subtlety undetectable to your average guy, or that the haircut is so bad that a compliment is impossible; the charade of the lie is just too painful for all. When other men notice a man’s haircut, it just isn’t good. Several asked me where I got it. 100 percent they wanted to make sure that they never end up at the same place.

Fortunately, I have impressive hair regeneration powers. Once my sides grow in, I’ll be able to leave the house again. In the meantime, feel free to send in your bad overseas haircut stories. Misery loves company.

Silence from the Rough

2007-09-03T15:05:00.001-04:00

French Hill -- Silence.

I’ve yet to hear from the Ballfinder people. I have heard from several of you, though, as well as from the Landmines Blow people.

The ‘power of one’ might not be enough. Why don’t you send an email to Mr. Lewis and Mr. Garrison asking that they make a contribution to the landmines cause? To make it easier, I’ve written a sample message for you below. Their email addresses are: ebby.lewis@comcast.net and Dennis.garrison@key-golf.com.

Please either leave a comment or send me a message to let me know that you’ve sent the Ballfinders a message. I’d like to keep track of our effort.

Thanks-

-------------------

September XX, 2007  

Dear Ebby Lewis and Dennis Garrison,

I recently read about the Ballfinder Scout on “Live from . . .” at www.benjaminorbach.blogspot.com. The Ballfinder seems like an innovative product and it is a gift that I’m considering purchasing for my ______ (insert appropriate golf playing friend or relative).

I have to say, though, I would be much more inclined to purchase the $169 Ballfinder (and mention the Ballfinder to friends) if I knew that the Ballfinder was supporting the cause of de-mining through www.landmines.org, www.landminesblow.com, or another similarly focused organization. We’re privileged to have the opportunity to spend our leisure time searching for lost golf balls in the rough. We shouldn’t forget others who face a different and desperate situation everyday, especially when we can so easily help them.

I look forward to hearing from you about the Ballfinder’s contribution to this cause – either directly, or through Benjamin Orbach’s Live from . . . blog.

Sincerely,

The Friday Paper

2007-08-26T16:43:00.000-04:00

French Hill, Jerusalem – One of the nice things about Israel is that the Sunday paper comes on Friday.

Lionel Richie's “Easy like Sunday morning,” doesn’t apply here. The Israeli workweek is Sunday through Friday afternoon. For Israelis, Sunday is Monday, Monday is Tuesday, and Tuesday is rough. A six-day workweek, even with a half-day included, is brutal.

If you were wondering, the Palestinian workweek in the West Bank is Sunday through Thursday. Since the Gaza coup, Hamas has changed the workweek in Gaza to Saturday through Wednesday. So, if you are a civil servant in Gaza, you have to decide whether you are going to go to work on Saturday. If you work Saturday, the government in Ramallah won’t pay you your salary. If you don’t work, then the Hamas government fires you.

Since Sunday is Monday in Israel, there is no point in a juicy, thick Sunday paper. By the time Sunday rolls around, the weekend is over. Instead, the Sunday paper, replete with entertainment and opinions, is the Friday paper in Israel.

For someone like me who works an American workweek, this means that even if I skip the news on Friday morning, I still have two full days to spend with the newspaper. This past weekend, I devoted myself to the Friday paper, The Bourne Ultimatum, and Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex. All were satisfying.

Digression: I drove about 50 miles (roundtrip) on Saturday afternoon to see The Bourne Ultimatum because the Jerusalem theater that was showing it doesn’t screen films on Shabbat. The film was edge of your seat good and blended perfectly with the others. Middlesex was good too. I fear that this is a famously well-regarded book (it is on Oprah’s list) that I’ve only just discovered, so let me just say how much I enjoyed the way that the narrator’s tone shifted gender back and forth throughout the story. End Digression.

Haaretz, my English language newspaper of choice, is full of articles and opinions on headlining issues – the peace process, negotiations, political violence, etc. – as well as feature stories on the human aspects of the absence of peace. This past Friday, there were stories of interest from Sederot and Gaza. In Sederot, they are trying to figure out how to start the new school year amid mortar attacks from Gaza. In Gaza, the clothes manufacturing industry is collapsing, strangled by the full closure.

These stories involve human suffering that the public should be aware of, but they are “conflict” stories. You could substitute different proper names for the people or cities, and it could be another part of the world. What I find fascinating are the stories that couldn’t happen anywhere, like the Palestinian workweek conundrum and these gems:

“Pardes Hanna Mayor angered by Indian Jews’ Conversion Course in Town” According to the article, the Bnei Menashe who were lost 2700 years ago and who have returned to Israel from northeast India (where they maintained 40 synagogues) angered the mayor of this smaller town because they arrived in the town “secretly,” and did not coordinate with his office!

“Shas (a religious political party) Seeks To Punish Cremation with Jail Time” This one isn’t about prison terms for the ashes of cremated individuals. Rather, the Minister of Religious Affairs wants a bill that will punish anyone who cremates a body with a year in prison and a fine of $7500. The minister accused those who cremate of “suckl[ing] their heritage from the annihilators of the Jewish people . . . [and] implement[ing] a renewed final solution here.” Outrageous comparisons to the Holocaust combined with grandstanding legislative power, what a combination!

One of my favorite sections of the Friday paper is the “Anglo File.” This week there was an article about the Israel Land Development Corporation, an American company selling pieces of the Holy Land at $118 a square foot. Last’s week’s section contained profiles and pictures of new immigrants from America. I was touched and amused by the smiling picture of seven-year-old Elisha Z. He is looking forward to not having to go to school during Hanukkah, but is also going to miss the treehouse he left behind in New York.

A story that I’ve been following, but that didn’t appear this Friday, is about the African refugees (some from Darfur) trickling into Israel through the Sinai. These refugees walk here, and Israel doesn’t know what to do with them from either a practical or policy perspective. There are almost daily reports and stories ranging from Africans wandering in the Negev desert looking for help, to Israeli students demonstrating for asylum for Darfur refugees. The issue is intriguing given the importance the Holocaust played in the creation of the state and the moral obligation that many here feel to offer shelter to victims of genocide. At the same time, there is the competing pressure of maintaining Israel’s character as a Jewish state.

This could be a good point of discussion – I’d welcome your thoughts.

------------------------

I’ve gotten a few emails asking about it, but so far no response from the Ballfinder Scout people.

Scouting Landmines

2007-08-19T15:43:00.000-04:00

David Citadel Hotel (downtown Jerusalem) –

900,000,000 golf balls are lost in the United States every year.

Earlier today, I was transfixed by an infomercial for the Ballfinder Scout, a device that finds lost golf balls in the rough through a combination of digital camera and GPS technology. In what looked like the Everglades, a polo shirt-clad Nick Faldo used the Scout to find lost balls. He then demonstrated how to take advantage of that saved stroke by hacking out of the treacherous terrain. The Scout works anywhere, as long as three little white dimples of your lost ball are showing. And for $169, you get the Scout, a handsome carrying case to add to the blackberry or cell phone holder already on your Batman utility belt, and a video of Nick Faldo battling it out in the wilderness.

The Scout, which captured my imagination, is sold in more than 20 countries, including the UAE (watch out for the sand traps)! For some reason, though, as I sat at the David Citadel swimming pool surrounded by Orthodox Jewish swimmers, some in sporty looking bathing skirts, I couldn’t shake my association of the Scout with landmines. Finding golf balls saves money, time, and a stroke on the course, but as I watched golfers find balls through various furry roughs with their Scouts, I couldn’t help but wonder whether this technology could be used for other things too.

When I backpacked in Cambodia a few years ago, I remember reading in Rough Guide about landmines all over the country. There were pervasive stories of children losing limbs in minefields, and landmine victims were a common sight in Phnom Penh. The problem of landmines – especially as they relate to children and agriculture – seem to be a constant in the background of books and movies set in Afghanistan too.

After doing a little internet research, I found out that the problem isn’t so much finding the landmines in these and other countries, it is coming up with the money to de-mine fields. So, the Scout’s technology isn’t needed, but a donation from their profits would certainly be welcome. I felt as if there was a common enough link – digging around in the weeds for golf balls and digging around in fields for land mines, that I sent the Scout people the letter below, inviting them to become unofficial ambassadors.

I’ll let you know if there is a response. In the meantime, the links (below) are worth checking out.

August 19, 2007

Dear Ebby Lewis and Dennis Garrison,

I recently learned about the Ballfinder Scout through an infomercial broadcast in a Jerusalem hotel. Congratulations on your success and remarkable use of technology.

As I watched Nick Faldo and other golf pros poking around in the rough and using the Scout to find their lost balls, I couldn’t help but think about children in Cambodia and Afghanistan poking around in the fields of their respective countries. Tragically, those fields are full of landmines. Did you know that 70 million landmines lie unexploded in more than 80 countries? Or that 15,000 – 20,000 people are killed or maimed by a landmine every year, a third of which are children?

I recognize that landmine victims and potential victims in Afghanistan, Cambodia, and Bosnia are not your target audience for the Scout. Still, I’d like to ask that the Scout consider taking on the issue of de-mining as a philanthropic project. At www.landmines.org, you can see that for $30,000, the Scout can support a full de-mining team in a high priority area in Afghanistan for two-months. At www.landminesblow.com, you can find information about supporting the construction of wells (about $1500 each) and securing clean water for mine-affected communities.

As sporting goods entrepreneurs, perhaps you are wondering why this matters to you. Besides the positive publicity that taking on landmines would generate for the Scout (by the way, I’ve given you a nice plug on my blog), you’d be acting in a way that creates hope and opportunity for others. If there were neither hope nor opportunity in the 20+ countries that the Scout is sold, there wouldn’t be a lot of golfers.

I hope that you'll seriously consider giving to this cause. I look forward to hearing about your success in this and other areas.

Sincerely,

Benjamin Orbach
author of Live from Jordan
www.benjaminorbach.com
www.benjaminorbach.blogspot.com

The Old City

2007-08-12T14:46:00.000-04:00

Borg al Luqluq -

ESPN probably isn’t going to cover it, but I put aside my basketball retirement for a few hours this afternoon to hoop it up with a couple of 14-year-olds named Mohammed in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. A stone’s throw from the Lions’ Gate ramparts, and with the Golden Dome of the Rock as a backdrop, the Mohammeds beat me 15-14. They also bought me a bright yellow popsicle afterwards.

I spent today at the Borg al Luqluq summer camp with some colleagues from work. The day was billed as a chance to interact with local kids as regular Americans. Summer camps are important here, as they are in any crowded city where kids don’t have anything to do during day-time hours. You’ve likely heard about some of the camps here, the places that offer indoctrination in addition to sports, games, and fun. This place wasn’t like that; it seemed very nice. The staff was committed and young and the hundred or so kids rotated from station to station, playing games like dodgeball, practicing for an end of the summer play about a wedding, learning the history of Jerusalem, and competing in different races and activities.

There was some confusion as to why a group of Americans had come to join the fun. Almost every kid I played with wanted to know if I was going to come back tomorrow, the next day, and the rest of the summer - a legitimate question. I’ll add "camp counselors without borders" to my list of needed unofficial ambassadors. Others wanted to know how long I’d be in Jerusalem, whether I liked America or Palestine more, and if I spoke Hebrew. At one point, a group of seven and eight-year-old boys peppered me with Hebrew words, like “girl,” “boy,” and “bread,” and I translated them to Arabic. They learn Hebrew in school.

Mansour, a cute seven or eight year old with a big scratch on his nose asked me if I liked Jews. I told him, “Yes, I am a Jew.” He almost fell over. I gave him my Depeche Mode line about people being people, regardless of their religion or nationality. The other little boys listening nodded, and Mansour didn’t have a problem continuing to play with me.

There was some weird stuff, too, like a game where kids raced to pull clothesline pins off a line using only their teeth – but is bobbing for apples really much different? I shouldn’t cast stones. There was also impressive diversity, with dark haired kids, blonde kids, and Afro-Palestinians playing together.

One of the camp counselors, an Afro-Palestinian named Hathum, explained to me that his great grandfather had come to Jerusalem from Chad after completing the pilgrimage to Mecca. A community from Chad, Nigeria, and a couple of other African countries settled in the Old City. Hathum told me that the Afro-Palestinians have relations with their “brothers” in Dimona, the Black Hebrews. The Black Hebrews hail from Chicago and claim to be one of the lost Jewish tribes. They came to Israel under the leadership of Ben Carter in 1969 after a two-year stopover in Liberia.

Aside from this relationship between “African brothers,” as Hathum termed it, I’m continually stunned by the lack of connections between peoples living in such close proximity. The behind the walls daily life I shared in today, is absolutely separate from the behind the walls daily life that I witnessed the day before, several hundred feet away.

I spent Saturday evening in the Jewish Quarter. Along the way though, I took some pictures at the Damascus Gate market and ate a bag of pistachios in the Christian Quarter.

The Damascus Gate market, in the early evening, is one of the most photogenic places in the city. Muhajiba women peruse bread and fruit, little kids rummage through toys or hawk goods (depending upon their economic status) and their fathers shop for neckties or shoes. Between it all, orthodox Jews, some speaking Hebrew and wearing black coats, Windsor knotted silk ties, and black fedoras, and others speaking Yiddish and wearing fur hats and shiny yellow or black robes, pass between them, through the market and the Muslim quarter, and on to the Western Wall. As Orthodox Jews bustle past Muhajiba women and an occasional Greek Orthodox priest, it’s like a joke where the punch line is that the world threw up religion, right here.

Over in the Christian Quarter – where an Israeli Palestinian attacked an Israeli security guard on Friday and was then shot and killed – tourist groups from Eastern Europe, Spain, and the Far East move in herds along the Via Dolorosa. Wearing matching hats or sometimes yellow stickers that identify them by their group in case they get separated, they crowd around each other and follow umbrella or placard waving tour guide shepherds. Some wear their backpacks in reverse like armor, as they wade into their battle against the shopkeepers and pickpockets of the Holy Land’s narrow allies.

In the Jewish Quarter, on Saturday, there is a different scene altogether. Stores are shut for the Sabbath and there is no commercial traffic. Young couples wander between each other’s homes for visits. Stroller-pushing women wearing limp wigs and shapeless dresses walk with their small children to the central square. Men aged 20 to 60 purposefully bustle to synagogue for prayer or for a lesson. Some have curly pa’ot or sidelocks while others' pa'ot are straight and flowing. Stylishly dressed teenage girls in long skirts and tight fitting long-sleeve shirts wander slowly in packs and settle in the square. Young men, pass through the square, too, sometimes stopping to talk, their black hats pushed back on their heads, the front rim slightly rolled, and their silk ties, with their bulging knots, slightly loosened around their collar.

As a boy no more than fifteen – about the same age as the Mohammeds that I played basketball with today but a world away – ran by my spot, his sports coat fluttering off his shoulders like a cape, I was left with so many questions. Do men curl their pa’ot, or are those tight curls natural? When does a man get his first hat, is it a Bar-Mitzvah gift at the age of 13? Do men curve their hats in a special way, the way we rolled our baseball caps in high school?

Pondering these questions, I wandered the roofs of the Jewish Quarter and stole a view of the Western Wall and its plaza, filling with white shirts and black jackets for prayer. From my roof-top perch, I looked into a hall filled with place settings for dinner, a pomegranate tree growing in someone’s yard, satellite dishes littering almost every roof, and laundry hanging on a line beneath an Arabic mosaic.

I walked out of the Old City Saturday evening through the Christian Quarter, past a salon I’m thinking about going to, an outdoor restaurant filled with Greek tourists drinking coffee, and several young Palestinian Christian men sitting in front of the New Gate, mixing RC and rum.

"Living on the seam" doesn't do justice to Jerusalem's Old City. The Jerusalem seam is between Israelis and Palestinians. The Old City is something different all together. Putting aside the existence of a basketball court that overlooks the Dome of the Rock or a clothes line filled with blue jeans across from the Western Wall, peoples and lives are scrunched together between history and religion. Surrounded by walls, real and figurative, they touch each other, but only in passing. Perhaps, within our communities, we live segregated lives in the United States, but these guys are literally living on top of each other, just on different planets.

The Lowest Point on Earth

2007-08-05T00:23:00.000-04:00

Biankini Beach, the Dead Sea –

Salty, burning, knotted, mineral mud-laden big hair.

That is what I had after two days, three mud sessions, five floats in the Dead Sea, and no shampoo. This week’s post was going to be “Barbers without English.” Instead of confronting my barbershop fears, though, I took my mop-head to the Dead Sea for the weekend and offer observations from the lowest point on earth.

The Dead Sea is like no place on earth, and not just because it is lower than everywhere else. Lonely Planet says that the Dead Sea contains 20 percent more bromine (that’s the stuff of pickle jars, I think), 15 percent more magnesium, and 10 percent more iodine than your typical seawater.

Practically, this adds up to three things. First, all of these chemicals are supposed to soothe you. Second, the Dead Sea is in effect 33 percent solid substance, so it is almost impossible not to bob or float on top of the silty salty water. Third, Dead Sea water burns something awful if it gets into your eyes. Think about iodine in an open wound and multiply by 24. There is no better feeling in the world than the warm splash of the beach side shower’s fresh water flowing into your stinging eyes and washing out the Dead Sea after you’ve lurched from the water like a blinded sea creature, clenching your eyelids in pain. The purpose of the eye-washing station in Mr. Blough’s chemistry lab makes perfect sense to me now. We used to use it as a drinking fountain in 10th grade.

Besides people covering themselves in green mud and doing their best to look like the Hulk or Kermit depending upon their body type, the thing that makes the Dead Sea special is the collection of people that it attracts. On Friday evening, I sat on the dock and watched dusk settle with a group of older Sephardic, Hebrew-speaking women; an Arab family that included a muhajiba wife; several Nordic tourists; a Black Palestinian life guard; and several Russian speaking Israeli families – one with a very whiny adolescent named Alex who wouldn’t get out of the water and was determined to take Dead Sea mud home with him in the abused pockets of his red bathing suit. The next afternoon, the dock was crowded as well; mostly with Russian speaking Israelis but with other representatives of the Dead Sea mosaic too. Most of them were getting wasted in the sun. The number of empty Vodka, Bacardi, and Carlsberg bottles strewn about early Sunday morning rivaled the scene at a frat house.

On Friday evening, though, I looked across the Dead Sea and saw the lights of Jordan’s resorts. When I lived in Jordan and visited the Dead Sea, I looked across the way and wondered what people were doing on the other side. There seemed to be so many lights compared to where I was standing. It was close geographically, but far away in almost every other way, at least for me, at that time. So it was strange to sit on the Israeli side and to feel the reverse, trying to picture what was going on in Jordan. To think of my Jordanian friends, but also to wonder whether anyone there could imagine the details of here. I was again struck by how close very different things are here, but how separate they remain at the same time.

Which brings me to the best part of the weekend, the four Palestinian-Israelis, all in their mid-20s, who I befriended. Palestinian-Israelis, also known in Arabic as Palestinians from 1948, are about a 20 percent minority in Israel. They are Palestinians (Christians and Muslims) who are Israeli citizens and whose families lived in parts of mandatory Palestine, like the Galilee or Haifa, that had Arab populations but that became parts of Israel in 1948.

Alaa, Jarious, Wisam, and Hadi grew up in neighboring villages in the Galilee and are friends from college. A pharmacist, two law students, and a medical student home from Italy for the summer, they came to the Dead Sea for the weekend. Their cabin was next door to mine and they insisted that I join them for food and drinks each night, as they grilled out on a little hibachi, drank beer and vodka, and sang classical Arab music. It turned out that Alaa studied at a university in Jordan at the same time as I was there.

On Friday night, as we sat on their front porch and they sang Um Kalthoum songs, Shadi, a 22-year old from nearby Jericho who works at Biankini stopped by to drop off towels. The group urged him to sit, drink, and join the fun. They made introductions over the lamb and pork that they were grilling, and offered Shadi dinner, warning him off the pork that three of them were eating. Shadi asked them their religion and Jarious explained that three of them were Christian and one was Muslim. Shadi nodded, took a drag on his cigarette, and said, “Kol al nes, h’yar baraka,” or for all the people a good blessing.

Jericho sounds great in the bible, but it is a poor place. I was briefly there for the first time a few weeks ago and was struck by how much it felt like an Egyptian desert village. On the outskirts of town sits the towering Intercontinental Hotel, with its shiny wooden lobby fixtures, lingering staff, and its adjacent Oasis Casino. But Jericho itself seemed full of mostly dirt streets and squat buildings, few taller than three or four stories. The summer heat and dustiness recalled a pre-air conditioned time and the few people who I met mentioned a lack of opportunities beyond the dormant service industry.

Sitting there with Shadi from Jericho and the four upwardly mobile guys a couple of years older than him from the Galilee, I was again struck by closeness and farness of it all. All five are young Palestinian men living within a few hours of each other, but in such a different state and considered in such a different way. Jarious, Alaa, and the others sang the words of their favorite Um Kalthoum, Fairuz, and Abdel Halim songs – the icons of classical Arabic music – with such passion, joy, and ownership, but in Arab countries they would be considered sellouts by many on the basis of their Israeli citizenship. In Israel, on the other hand, the allegiances of Israeli-Palestinians are generally questioned, and some undetermined number of Israeli Jews regard them to be Palestinians, no different than Shadi.

Shadi, meanwhile, is considered a Palestinian by everyone. From the conversation both nights, though, it seemed as if his main concern was trying to figure out from Wisam (a future lawyer) how he could get an Israeli ID for his mother, who was married to a Palestinian with an Israeli ID. Wisam told him it would cost $4,000, an incredible sum for Shadi, but something that any of the other four sitting there would be able to afford with some saving.

There is a lot of stove piping here. Very different lives – whether it is Palestinians and Israeli Palestinians, the Russian Israelis and Sephardic Israelis at the beach, or Israelis and Jordanians even – occur in close proximity to each other, but do not necessarily intersect. In my case, this past weekend, there was a nice intersection. All five of these guys welcomed me for who I am, without bias against my religion and nationality. And there were more jokes about how good pork tastes (directed at me, Shadi, and Wisam) than I’ve heard in my life.

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PS, I want to plug Biankini Beach, a nice, relaxing, and clean place with great breakfast and a nice staff. If you go, tell them I sent you.

Su BAr Ru

2007-07-27T12:36:00.000-04:00

The outskirts of Beer Sheva – She was in her early 50s, with short big-hair and large rimmed plastic glasses. “What kind of car is it?” she asked skeptically, in Hebrew, from the other side of the counter.

“Subaru,” I answered. Two weeks of walking and taking cabs has been tiring and expensive. Whether to work, a nearby restaurant, or home from the Old City, every trip costs 25 shekels ($6). The distance just doesn’t seem to matter. It makes me nuts, and I’m wearing the soles of my shoes thin walking the hour home from work. The upside is that I like cutting through the Old City, buying some pistachios, and meandering through East Jerusalem. The downside is that it is almost all uphill (both ways) and trekking in a sports coat, in the summer, in the Middle East, isn’t pretty.

“What? We don’t have this,” she replied with a tone that implied that I was making up the names of cars.

“Subaru,” I repeated. “Forester.” I’ve been shopping for used cars. Well, not really shopping since I’ve only responded to one ad in the Embassy’s newsletter. The Sunday before, I’d driven to Gadera, south of Tel Aviv, in a rental car, on my way back from Haifa, to meet the owner, a tall guy from Michigan named Dave who works with the corps of engineers in Beer Sheva, and to test drive the car.

Driving here is like a race. You’re trying to escape the cars next to you as much as you are trying to actually reach your destination. Adding to the experience, Israeli roads have a special feature I call “the disappearing lane.” Two lanes merge to one with little notice. You have to anticipate the disappearing lane and speed ahead to beat the merge.

The Subaru performed fine in our test drive, but what do I know? I’m a city person – walking, riding buses and subways, and taking taxis when I need some social commentary.

So, I had to have the Subaru inspected before buying it. This meant renting a car and driving to Beer Sheva to take the Subaru to an “official garage” for a pre-sale inspection. When I called the garage for directions, I realized that no one there spoke English and that I was going to get lost. The place was on the outskirts of town in an area that didn’t have street names, several turns away from the junction that would take me to Dimona. The lack of street names wasn’t a big deal since I hadn’t been able to find a city map of Beer Sheva, Israeli’s fourth largest city. I found maps in atlases that showed the roads coming and going, but nothing for inside the city, perhaps a statement of some sort.

Getting lost isn’t so bad if you know in advance that it is going to happen and have a chance to caffeinate and snack. So, at a rest stop on a desert road outside of Beer Sheva, I stopped for a coffee and some grill flavored bisli, an Israeli chip that is a cross between dog food and Fritos. The ride, thus far, in my little white rental car with poor acceleration, had been nice. The rocky open valleys surrounding Jerusalem are gorgeous and I cruised down the hilly road in my soapbox racer listening to Galgalatz, a radio station that alternates between Israeli and English songs.

Before settling on Galgalatz, I skipped around between a range of Arabic, Hebrew, and Russian stations. Galgalatz’s variety was equally impressive – in a half hour they played Smokey Robinson, Stone Temple Pilots, and my new favorite hit, Ani Holech (I go/walk/leave). The only lyrics of Ani Holech that I understood were the chorus (Ani Holech), repeated again and again in grouchy vocals. I’m left assuming that the song is about an old man wearing a plaid hat and a white ‘members only’ jacket who is trying to return cold soup at a diner.

After racing through Jerusalem’s surrounding valleys, I passed some very green vineyards. I’d brought my camera and was going to take some pictures, but I knew that I didn’t have time to stop because I had to account for getting lost later. I figured I’d photograph the vineyards in the late afternoon light on the way home. I zipped past small packs of orthodox Jews in white shirts and black pants and young soldiers in olive colored uniforms looking to hitch a ride. The scenery changed again, tall fir trees became dusty rocky ridges. I slowed at a scene of a young boy herding a herd of goats around a water tanker with a Joshua tree placed teasingly in the background. On the way home, I told myself.

Percolating and full of bisli, it actually wasn’t that hard to find the garage. All of the signs were in Hebrew – usually signs are printed in Hebrew, English, and Arabic – but I stumbled upon the general area and only had to ask a couple of people for directions. It was more difficult directing Dave there, since he can’t read the signs and I could only use landmarks.

“What? Subru? This doesn’t exist,” the woman at the counter said, annoyed.

“Su-bar-ru, Su-bar-ru,” Dave said, losing patience with the communication problem.

“Su BAr Ru?? Ah, Su BAr Ru . . . why didn’t you say so?” she responded, shaking her head.

“Su BAr Ru, Su BAr Ru,” Dave and I said, nodding our heads and smiling.

Once we’d confirmed the existence of Su BAr Rus, the inspection was painless. We were sent to a group of cashiers, passed between them, and then on to a garage along the side of the complex where a man named Rafi inspected the car. No one spoke a word of English, and actually, until Rafi went through the inspection report relatively slowly, so that I could translate for Dave, no one made any special effort to be understood.

Jerusalem is swimming in English. At lunchtime, I walk through the Ben Yehdua pedestrian mall and I hear more English than Hebrew. At restaurants, stores, and even kiosks, in East or West Jerusalem, you can fall back on English, someone will understand. The garage outside Beer Sheva was the first Hebrew only environment that I’ve been in here, so far.

The car passed inspection and I made arrangements with Dave to make the exchange. Hungry, I drove down the thoroughfare looking for a place to eat. On my way to Gadera the Sunday before, I’d found a Burger Ranch – an Israeli fastfood joint – in a shopping center outside of Ramle. For 36 Shekels ($9) I got a spicy schnitzel sandwich (fried chicken in picante sauce that dripped on to my tray in a steady flow), fries, and a Sprite. Rip off! And it wasn’t just because I’m a foreigner – locals were eating there too! Some people think Jerusalem is nicknamed “Jerusalem of Gold” because of its beauty. I’m convinced the nickname comes from the cost of living. I’ll analyze my receipts for you in a different post, though. The important thing is that I was determined to do better than Burger Ranch.

Down the street from the garage, I found a warehouse-sized grocery store with a cafeteria. I got a freshly grilled, spiced ground meat kabob sandwich with all the fixings and a bottle of water for 18 Shekels ($4.5)! It is the best deal that I’ve gotten in Israel, and I happily scarfed it down in the meat section of the cafeteria. To my right, a row of potted plants separated me from a handful of guys eating dairy meals. Behind me, sat four industrial workers eating and chatting. Three of them sat at a table in the dairy section and the fourth next to them, but at a table on my side of the plants, eating a meat- stuffed pepper.

Since I had the rental car, I figured I’d do some shopping. As I fumbled my way through ordering sliced cheese in Hebrew, the woman at the deli counter asked me (in Hebrew) if I was from Russia. She assumed I was a new immigrant. I got similar questions at the checkout counter, as I struggled to fill out my “Super Card” form and then bag my own groceries as the cashier looked on. There was a Bedouin woman wearing a niqab (the Islamic face covering) in the aisle next to me. Hearing her buy groceries in Hebrew was alone worth the trip from Jerusalem.

Driving home, I pulled over to check out an ancient stone house in the middle of the desert, a few hundred feet from the road. I circled the roofless house, built of stacked flat stones, and went inside. In one of the back rooms, there was a cannon ball sized hole ripped into one of the external walls. It was a window into a desert whose brownness was only interrupted by a couple of dark green Joshua trees. With the afternoon light and the billowing desert dust, it was a trophy picture, justice for missing the watering goats earlier. I pulled my camera from its bag and turned the switch to no effect. The battery was dead.

So, no pictures from the road to Beer Sheva, sorry. I did buy the Su BAr Ru though. So maybe, I’ll go back. In the meantime, I need to name the car. Suggestions welcome.

Samer and Zion

2007-07-20T17:15:00.000-04:00

French Hill, Jerusalem – “Erev Tov,” I said hesitantly, my hand on the open windowsill of the white cab. “I’m going to the Germany Colony.”
“Ok,” replied the cab driver in Hebrew, as he waved me into the car. He was in his late 20s with receding black hair. Parenthesis-like smile lines framed his face.
“How are you?” I asked, searching the rearview mirror, dashboard, and ashtray for ornaments that would signal his religion or language preference.
“Good,” he smiled, bobbing his head to the side, and shifted gears.
“Good, I’m going to Rahel Emeynu Street.”
“Ok,” he smiled and nodded his head again, tilting it toward his right shoulder. We lapsed into silence, cruising through the Jerusalem evening, past the Old City’s walls, a view of the Dome of the Rock jutting out over the Muslim Quarter, past the New Gate and to a stop at the Jaffa Road streetlight. The cabbie pulled a tin of candies from his front pocket, ate one, made to return the tin to his pocket, but then asked (in Hebrew), “Would you like one?”
I smiled. I usually don’t accept candy from strangers unless they ask three times, but took one and replied, “thank you.”
I looked at the driver again, trying to find some confirmation beyond the stereotypical generosity, but there wasn’t anything there to help me. So I just asked him Arabic, “Do you speak Arabic?”
“Yes,” he replied in Arabic, smiling, skeptically.
“Can I ask you a question?” I continued. He seemed like an affable guy, and I thought it might be my big chance to crack the code.
“Please” he said in Arabic.
“I’m having a problem. When I enter a cab, I don’t know whether to say “Boker Tov’ or ‘Sabah al HHear.’ Is there a way I can know whether to speak in Arabic or Hebrew?”
He laughed and pointed to a little white sticker with blue Hebrew writing above his safety belt. “Look for the driver’s name, it is written here.”
“Ahh, usually I look for a David’s star or a hamza,” pointing to the mirror. “Or I’ll listen to what music is playing, but it is hard to know.”
“Listen, 80 percent of the cab drivers are Arab. Unless you’re in Rehavia or the German Colony or a place where there are only Jews, most of the time he’s an Arab. Sometimes, drivers wear a kipah,” he explained as he patted his head. “They’re scared and they don’t want people to know; maybe they won’t want to get in.”
He shrugged and I smiled and shook my head. “What a strange place.” A moment later I called out “Allah ya’tik al afya,” and he pulled over.
We shook hands, “What’s your name?”
“Samer.”
“My name is Ben.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“Nicer to meet you. See you, in’sha’allah.”
“Ma Salaama.”

So, this morning, running late, I hopped into a cab and blindly launched into Arabic with the driver, a middle-aged, tan guy with black and silver hair. As I said, “Good morning, I’m going to Agron Street,” I noticed that he had a black kipah resting on top of his head.
“Ok, come on,” he replied in Arabic, not missing a beat.
“Let’s use the meter,” I continued.
“Ah, why don’t we say 20 Shekel?”
That is five shekels less than what the meter would cost (four Shekels is a dollar); I enthusiastically agreed. Something was strange, though. We were speaking Arabic, but he was wearing a kipah and wearing shorts.
“Where on Agron Street?” he asked in Hebrew, enunciating each syllable.
Tired and ambivalent about taking a principled Arabic language stand, I told him where, in Hebrew. We chitchatted a little more; he asked me where I was from and what I was doing here, and I explained, all in Hebrew.
“But you speak some Arabic, no?” He continued. “You spoke to me in Arabic.”
“Yeah, I speak Arabic. Where are you from?” I asked, trying to determine if this was a well-disguised cabbie or what.
“I’m from Iraq, we’re Iraqi Jews.”
“And where were you born?
“Here, in Jerusalem,” he stated emphatically. “I was born here, we all lived here, all the Jews from Iraq. I live in Pisgat Zeev now. I grew up here on that street” as he pointed out my window.
“And you speak Arabic?”
“Of course!” He exclaimed. “We grew up speaking Arabic, with our family. Look, we used to be friends,” his voice rising. “We would go to each other’s houses and weddings and we would visit one another,” he lamented. “All the time, we would go to Nablus and Ramallah. We would just drive there. We would shop there.”
“What about now?”
“No, we don’t see each other anymore,” he shrugged. “Sometimes we ask or hear about this one or that one, but everything changed. It is a mess.”
“What changed?”
“From 1988, the generations – not just them, but us too – they’re filled with hatred. Hatred. We were friends, but not this generation,” he said as he shook his head.
“Have you visited Iraq?”
“No, my parents lived there, a long time ago. The Americans, you don’t like the Iraqis.”
“How do you mean? Because we went to war or because we want to leave?”
“You don’t deal with them well. You kill them.”
I’m much better speaking about Iraq in Arabic than Hebrew. As I considered a response, he asked, “Where are you from in America?”
“Pittsburgh, it is in Pennsyl – ”
“Pittsburgh! I know Pittsburgh, I was there.”
“Really? When were you there?”
“I took a Greyhound trip from Washington D.C. to Los Angeles in 1990. Three days we were on the bus! We stopped in Pittsburgh, for an hour. We had a rest. I went outside of the station and walked around and looked around.”
“It’s pretty, no? The rivers downtown and the hills.”
“Yes, I took pictures. I remember there was a [cable car], like at Masada, that goes up the hill. I just showed the pictures to my son a couple of weeks ago,” he said with a big, nostalgic smile.
“That’s great! Wow, three days on a bus. That’s a long trip.”
Laughing, “Yeah, it was long. We started at 2AM on one day and didn’t finish until 6AM three days later. And then we had to come home early because of the war. They told us all to come home because of the war.”
We pulled up to work, “this is good, here, thank you. What’s your name?”
“Zion.”
“My name is Ben. Nice to meet you, Shabbat Shalom,” and we shook hands.
Smiling, thinking about the incline in Pittsburgh, perhaps, Zion said, “Yes, Yes, Shabbat Shalom, see you.”

-------------------------------------
A few more pictures from the Old City:

Living on A Seam

2007-07-13T15:19:00.000-04:00

East Jerusalem – A week ago, on my first evening here, I walked to a nearby coffee shop at the Hebrew University. It was 6:30 PM, and I wanted to drink tea outside and stay awake a couple more hours. With Shabbat fast approaching, the campus was almost entirely deserted. A dark haired student in a tight black shirt waited for a ride in front of the (closed) Aroma Café. It seemed like she’d been forgotten, sadly waiting to be picked up for Shabbat dinner with her family. A shorter dark haired student came around the corner and called out in Arabic, “What are you doing? How long are you going to sit there waiting?” They laughed and began a rapid conversation.

The next day, I went to the Old City’s Muslim Quarter. Descending into the Old City through Damascus Gate, I passed toy, vegetable, and shoe vendors who had lined the staircases with goods; child touts hollered prices.

At the Central Café, a spot along the way to the Al Aqsa Mosque, I drank a Turkish coffee. Like at any café in Egypt, men sat inside smoking hookahs and playing cards. Outside, however, Hasidic Jews with curled sidelocks and black hats passed Muslim fundamentalists coming from the al-Aqsa compound. The Fundys wore flaming beards, similar to their Jewish counterparts, but instead of black coats, they wore gray thobes that just brushed their ankles. Short thobes are a sign of modesty before God; men would have to stoop for their thobes’ edges to touch the ground, not show their ankles, and avoid looking silly. These men walked with regal posture, though, seemingly showing off their black socks and lace tied shoes. Between the Hasidim and the Fundys, tourists streamed by my perch. They wore shorts, fanny packs and sunglasses, and spoke Hebrew, Arabic, Italian, Greek, Spanish, Russian, or English.

At the café and throughout the Old City, I tried to speak with locals in Arabic. To my frustration, they mostly replied in Hebrew, mistaking me for an Israeli. I’ve practiced my poker face in return, pretending not to understand. The language issue is interesting. With the same assuredness that Americans approach the world in English, Israelis walk around the Old City speaking Hebrew. On Saturday, I listened to an Israeli tourist ask a shopkeeper how much a ceramic bowl cost, and the shopkeeper responded in Hebrew. The tourist moved on and the shopkeeper sat down on a stool and continued his conversation, in Arabic, with his friend in the stall next door. The other night, I took a taxi home from work (downtown and in West Jerusalem) and negotiated the price, in advance, in Hebrew with the driver. On the ride home, the young, dark driver spoke on his phone, in Arabic, to a friend. Like the girls outside of the University, I had no idea that his native language wasn’t Hebrew until he started speaking Arabic.

Despite the overlay of Hebrew and other things Jewish (like the Hasidim), East Jerusalem and the Muslim Quarter feel like an Arab place. Just a few blocks away from Jaffa Gate, though, in West Jerusalem, there is a different world. Last night, walking home from work, I jaywalked across Jaffa Road. Immediately, a policeman, who looked like Moshe Dayan but without the eyepatch, approached me and demanded, in Hebrew, to see my ID. I showed him my passport, and he said, in English, “You crossed the street when the light was red.”

“Yes, I did. I’m sorry.” I couldn’t believe that this was an issue and was wondering why I was being hassled.

“Why did you do that?” he replied, his “th” sounding like a “z.”

“Well I looked both ways and didn’t see anything coming, so I crossed.” I said with a smile, amazed that this was really about jaywalking and not a “random” security check.

“You crossed and the light was red,” he said again, with a frown, not amused. He thumbed through my passport, stopping on the page with a UAE stamp.

“I didn’t look at the light, I’m sorry,” I said, wanting the interview to end.

“Don’t do that again.” He ordered me, handing back my passport and searing me with his pale blue eyes.

Except for the speeding between green traffic lights, West Jerusalem is orderly. They have the rule of law here, meaning there are laws and people follow them, whether it is out of a sense conviction or a fear of consequences. There are cameras at intersections, and they send you a ticket, I understand, if you speed through a red light. So, ironically, in a city known for its tension and pressure, people come to a stop in their cars when they see a flashing green or yellow light. Or if they are walking, they wait patiently for the little green man to appear before crossing the street. A few blocks away, in front of Damascus Gate, you can cross the street whenever you want - it is just at your own risk.

A block away from my interview with the traffic police, security guards and metal fences surrounded a big square. Inside the fences, nine or ten 3-3 basketball courts with portable backboards had been set up. It was “Streetball, 2007,” and roughly a hundred kids, ages 8-18, in different colored jerseys battled it out, Hoop-It-Up style.

I joined fans and family after passing through security and answering the guard in Hebrew that I didn’t have a weapon. With tip-off, the speakers blared “Eye of the Tiger” and Israeli streetballers of all shapes and sizes -- wearing kipot and tzi-tzit, sporting dreadlocks, and wearing Michael Jordan armbands and baggy shorts – pounded on each other, in Hebrew, under the watchful eyes of referees who seemed to be playing hard to get. It was hockey meets basketball, and the phrase “no blood, no foul” was never more appropriate. It looked like fun, though, and I missed playing ball for the first time in two years.

After watching a couple of games, I continued home, past a crafts store filled with orthodox Jewish women and through an arched gateway that framed Jerusalem’s walls and Mt. Zion. I walked down the hill and a black man in a habit, perhaps a Coptic priest, stepped out of the New Gate on my right. I proceeded through the gate and then made a left into the heart of the Christian quarter. Above me, an old couple sat on a balcony drinking tea. I wondered for how many years, or perhaps how many generations their family had lived in the Old City. Winding my way through the Christian Quarter, I passed ceramics and wood sculpture shops that were still open, but not expecting business. There was still another hour of light, and maybe there would be one last sale for the day, but it seemed more like a time for an evening sit with neighbors.

I’m going to my cousin’s up north for Shabbat tomorrow and I wanted to bring him some pastries. As I wrote about in Live from Jordan, I faced a similar task four years earlier – searching for Kosher pastries in the Muslim Quarter. Having crossed into the Muslim section of the Old City, I first stopped at a bakery where a middle-aged man with a warm face asked if he could help. I said to him in Arabic, “With all respect, I’m looking for Kosher sweets, I’m going to a Kosher home tomorrow. Do you have any?”

He gently shook his head, and welcomed me to come back another time. I stopped at a second place several stalls down and asked the same question to another baker. Surrounded by homemade baklava, he told me in Arabic that everything he made was hand made, and that his boxes did not say “Kosher.”

As I wondered whether I should buy some nuts instead, I felt a measure of satisfaction with my failure. Not only was I being answered in Arabic, but strangers were respecting my cousin’s religious redlines and not trying to sell me a false bill of goods. I came upon a third store, and it might have been the same store where I bought the pastries four years earlier. A young friendly man in glasses proudly showed me a box of chocolate ruggelach that had come from Tel Aviv and that was marked Kosher. I bought a kilo of Kosher pastries from him, and we traded small talk in Arabic about our favorite spots in Amman.

This roughly stitched seam that I cross everyday, which is filled with tourists, pilgrims, believers, and everyday people doing their thing, is fascinating. You can literally see and hear where two worlds separate, or perhaps come together. As I hail a cab in my neighborhood, study the car’s dangling windshield ornaments, and try to guess whether I should say “Merhaba” or “Shalom,” I’ll keep you posted.

Frankfurt . . . sigh

2007-07-06T12:06:00.000-04:00

The Kuffler & Bucher in the Frankfurt Airport – Kuffler & Bucher is the place where I paid $12 for a banana, a bottle of water, and cheese toast on white bread. It is 7AM here, my internal clock reads 1:43AM, and I’m tired. The cheese was gooey and the tomato in the middle was cold. A 50-year-old Indian man with a soft face made it for me.

My bill came to 7.50 Euros or $11.17. The cashier, a young Indian woman with long black hair rounded it up to $12; she didn’t feel obliged to make change in dollars. I found her authority to round up ironic.

Moments earlier, Frankfurt airport’s finest wouldn’t let me into the Red Carpet Lounge. I have a United Premier card, but I’m not a “Premier Executive.” If I was a Premier Executive, then I could have drank free coffee while lounging in a snug two-seater sofa, snacking on a free croissant, and reading a free Financial Times. The hospitality team informed me that I had 46,000 United miles prior to boarding my flight. You need 50,000 miles to enter the Red Carpet Lounge. I argued that I surpassed the 50,000 mile marker somewhere over France. The head hostess--a young South Asian woman--looked at me like I smelled of bad bratwurst and in a preachy tone explained that they would have a “very crowded lounge” if they let everyone in with such an exception.

Clearly, the bold and the beautiful of the Frankfurt airport would be very displeased if joined by the likes of me. Behind her, her flamboyantly gay French North African colleague who had discovered my 4000-mile shortfall on his computer shrugged his shoulders sympathetically, indicating that his hands were tied on this issue of maintaining the airport’s social order.

Extreme frustration; I’d already been turned away by the First Class and Business Class lounges. A dark haired German woman at the Business Class lounge had directed me to walk to the other end of this Mall of America sized airport and the Red Carpet Lounge. Along the way, I passed through security where a pale German in his late forties with a buzz cut and an earring patted me down exhaustively. At least he didn’t give me the usual Frankfurt squeeze – searching for a grenade, I’m sure.

So, it turns out a United Premier card gets you a table in the non-smoking section of the Kuffler & Bucher. Cigarette smoke fills this cavernous airport, except here, in the K&B non-smoking section, where a big sign with a picture of a crossed out cigarette reads “Nichtraucher” and “Non-Smoking-Area.” An Arab man and his wife just sat down two tables away from me and lit up.

Behind me sits a Lebanese or maybe Palestinian family; the children are running around and having fun, their shrieks adding to the background airport noise of cell phone conversations and announcements in German. There is a non-parent female adult with the family. She is telling the husband, in detail, about the alternative dispute resolution and mediation programs she is running in Jordan and their percentages of success. Yes, it is 7AM.

Two U.S. soldiers in camouflage walk in to the K&B. One is Asian and the other Latino. A cafeteria worker from somewhere in West Africa wipes down a table for them. A flock of six muhajiba young women stroll by, carrying red duty free bags and giggling. Here comes a well endowed, toothpick thin, bleach blond Russian, pushing a stroller. The two blonde backpackers, who had been listening to I-pods and reading at a table across from me, stand up. I wonder how I-pods have changed the dynamics of long backpacking trips.

A group of twenty older Germans wearing erect backpacks slung over both shoulders descend upon the K&B. Wait, after a quick pow-wow, they are moving on to the smoking section instead, the official one. A women’s youth sports team, wearing red warm up suits with white “Venezuela” decals stitched on the back just took the tables the Germans were going to occupy.

I’m not sure that I’ve ever been in a place so diverse. Should I be thankful that all of the airport’s lounges turned me away? I would never have gotten a chance to see this melting pot that must have the Third Reich’s leadership spinning in their graves.

No. I’m going with my instincts on this one. I hate the Frankfurt airport/ashtray. The bathrooms are disgusting, there is nowhere comfortable to sit, and people use German as if it is an international language akin to English, expressing surprise that you can’t understand them.

Ixnay on the sauerkraut. I vote for more non-stop flights to the Middle East.

Huevos Rancheros, the Peacemaker

2007-07-04T13:30:00.000-04:00

Dupont Circle - My brother and I ate Mexican food last night in Northern Virginia. Neither of us ate huevos rancheros, but we polished off two baskets of chips and a couple troughs of salsa. Is there any ethnic food with a better free appetizer than Mexican food? You can count on fresh bread and olive oil at an Italian restaurant, but I find it impossible to contain my excitement when those fried tortilla chips are placed before me on that red tablecloth (they’re red to hide the salsa dribble).

My obsession with huevos rancheros started in a roadside diner in Northern Arizona in 1997. My buddy Brian and I were half way through a seven-week camping trip that would have made Clark Griswald envious. We started in Indy and did a lap around the western part of the country, hitting 12 national parks, Vegas, and several friends’ couches in the 9000 miles in between.

Up to that morning in Arizona, we had some great times, camping with a few buffalo in South Dakota, playing Frisbee on the sides of some Colorado roads, and hiking the Narrows. The only thing missing from our trip were the free love campfires and drum circles that we’d expected to find in America’s parks. The only people we’d met, so far, were German seniors in rented Tiogas campers, intent on burning their fair skin a lighter shade of red.

Brian is my “most fun friend,” but three weeks of driving, hiking, cooking, eating, and then sleeping in a tent with the same person is intense. At a certain point, you cover all the road trip games, brainteasers, and greatest little league moments. Around day 19 of such a trip, your traveling pal’s idiosyncrasies cease to be endearing. They leave their dirty socks on your side of the tent, they can’t throw the Frisbee straight, they keep playing Phish on the car stereo . . . Basically, you’re ready to explode.

This happened to me the summer before, too, when I backpacked through Europe with another pal, Tony. We split up for a couple of days, vacationing separately in Barcelona. It’s tougher to separate when you’re traveling together in a car, unless you make invisible walls with duct tape like Les Lessman on WKRP in Cincinnati.

Anyway, Brian made a wrong turn on the way to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, we drove fifty miles out of the way before we realized it, and we both combusted. He yelled at me for being a worthless navigator and I screamed at him for being a moron. We’d yet to eat breakfast and things deteriorated further when Brian tried to retrace the fifty miles in 15 minutes. Somewhere between Page and Kaibab, we pulled over at hole in the wall diner, famished and furious.

We were on the verge of sitting at separate booths, but out of a fear of losing the trip we squeezed into a booth across from each other. In that formal clipped tone that people use when they really just want to tell you how much they loathe you, Brian said, “The special sounds good.”

“Yes, that does look good.” I replied as I pictured pulling the hockey move on him. He was wearing the same stinking San Francisco t-shirt that he hadn’t changed in two days.

We both got the special. Huevos rancheros.

I was in love from the moment that my fork broke the seal on those eggs and the highlighter yellow yolks spurted out over the red sauce and on to my crispy tortillas and cheesy yet crispy fried potatoes. It was the perfect food.

Brian felt the same way. We got back into the car, drove to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and continued to look for a drum circle. It turns out that huevos rancheros are not just the perfect food, but a peacemaker, too -- and not just between me and Brian.

There are accounts that Jimmy Carter served huevos rancheros to Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin at Camp David. It was over a mouthful of corn tortilla that Begin called Ariel Sharon and asked for his support in dismantling the settlements in Sinai. In fact, the story is told that Zbig Brzezinski split Cyrus Vance’s portion of huevos evenly between Sadat and Begin, demonstrating that the U.S. was a true honest broker. Vance was outside locking up his bicycle after a morning ride.

Insiders have not denied that at Camp David II, Bill Clinton served Ehud Barak and Yasir Arafat homemade grits. Poking around in his grits with a spoon, Barak mumbled, “Ma ze?” or “What’s this?”

Inadvertently, we believe, the motion from Barak’s spoon flicked some grits onto the stubble of Arafat’s beard. Clinton himself intervened, preventing a food fight escalation between the two men. Talks eventually broke down and analysts have asked the question, what if they would have broken bread over huevos rancheros instead?

We’ll never know.

My next post will be “Live from . . . Jerusalem.” I leave Thursday, hopefully.

"What if you were a woman?"

2007-06-30T12:11:00.000-04:00

A train, somewhere in Delaware – “What if you were a woman, would you have been able to have the same experiences?”

I’ve been asked that question at book talks, repeatedly. Sometimes the questioner is a concerned mother. Other times it is a woman my age who read Live from Jordan and asked herself at the anti-American protest in Aleppo or in the moonlight of the Western Desert in Egypt, “what if that was me?”

Reading Lolita in Tehranis a bestseller and I can’t go anywhere without seeing Khalid Husseini’s new book. The lives of women and the treatment of foreign women in the Middle East are subjects of popular interest. On both of these issues, I’ve found that American women have negative impressions. In a Miami bookstore, a reader told me that we had to liberate the women of the Middle East; their status was the equivalent of slavery in the United States. At a book club in Washington, we discussed whether certain rights are universal and whether Betty Friedan and the women’s movement in America should have an impact beyond our borders, particularly in Saudi Arabia.

If Saudi women had the right to drive, though, how many would want to get into their cars by themselves and zip over to Starbucks for a latte?

I don’t know.

There is a “women’s only world” in the Middle East that I know little about.

My life in the Middle East was spent mostly in the company of men. As a man, I was able to do certain things like camp in the desert by myself or stay in dodgy hotels without worrying about the underlying sexual connotation or the personal safety that a female traveler has to consider.

I was also able to be a fly on the wall in a way that I don’t think is possible for a female foreigner. I’d talk with other men late into the night in coffee shops. If a foreign woman was there, she was the center of attention and the topic of conversation, for everyone there. In a male only setting, though, conversations ranged from politics and work to sex. Frequently, after the usual topics were covered, my otherworldliness would recede and other conversations that didn’t include me would sprout up. It gave me the chance to listen.

If I were a woman, I don’t think men would have spoken about sex with me. More importantly, I don’t think they would have spoken to a female in such an unguarded way, in such a public venue. People would take care with their words and topics of conversation. There would be a question of personal boundaries and whether something more – in either a sexual or fairy tale kind of way – was on tap.

Along these lines, I got to know young men and their problems. In one-on-one conversations, I gained an understanding for the issues my peers faced, whether it was affording marriage or getting a decent job. It is possible that these same young men would have been as open about their vulnerabilities with women, but more likely that they would have hid them out of insecurity, or not felt comfortable talking with a foreign woman at all. As a man, while I had access to a segment of society and enjoyed a kind of carelessness, I also missed out on an entire world that remains a mystery to me.

In my first week in Amman, I was walking up a set of uneven steps in a poor neighborhood downtown. I was lost and sweating through my shirt when a couple of young women in their early 20s popped out of an alley and passed me. They were wearing hijabs and jilbabs (overshirts that reach the ground), chatting, and were oblivious to my clumsy presence. As they descended, I turned and snuck a peak, catching a glimpse at a jean-clad leg and stylish black boot emerging from the bottom slit of one of the ladies’ jilbabs.

“Gadzouks!” I yelled to myself. “They’re wearing jeans under there!”

In the time that I lived in Jordan, I learned that there was much more than meets the eye, on all subjects, but the story of that peek at a jean-clad leg is a symbolic for how I felt about the world of women. I had female friends and I asked questions and had conversations with women about their lives and what they wanted, but the “women’s only world” remained a secret world to me, a foreign man. My Mom entered it when she visited and told me--to my dismay and envy--that the couple of hours she spent in the University library speaking with female students were the most comfortable and safest she felt in Jordan. Rggh.

So, I’ve asked several women I know, Americans who have traveled throughout the Middle East, and women from Arab countries to offer comments on their experiences as either foreigners or residents in that secret world. We should have comments rolling in this week. I’d welcome other, unsolicited comments, too. Thanks-

Bill and Me

2007-06-26T20:17:00.000-04:00

Dupont Circle (still haunting D.C.’s coffee shops) – I received a letter from President Clinton today. I’ve been waiting for this day since I was a 10th grader plotting with John Scott and Rodrigo Pinchera how to get a then campaigning Clinton to join us for a hearts game. So, today was a big day, even if the missive seemed awfully close to a form letter requesting a campaign donation.

Okay.

Sigh.

It was a form letter.

Bill started out with a reference to the Soprano’s spoof (I thought he wanted to discuss the theme music situation), but he just wanted money:

“Hillary can be a great president, but she needs your support to win. And she needs it now as we come down to the wire in the last critical days of this quarter. Come June 30, all the campaigns will be measured on what they raised in the last three months. We have to raise more online before then to show her strength and keep her campaign going.”

I considered the request, and replied with the following:

Dear President Clinton,

Thanks for your note. I have extraordinary respect for you and am actually a child of your legacy. Your time in office was a period of optimism and hope. As a college student in the 90s, I felt it was my duty and honor as an American to try and make my community and our world a better place.

I served in AmeriCorps after college, studied the Middle East and Arabic in graduate school, worked at the State Department for three years developing democratic reform programs, and I wrote a book about the process of listening to, living with, and understanding "the other" -- it is called Live from Jordan" Letters Home from My Journey Through the Middle East. (I would be honored to send you a copy).

I've decided that I will not be making any campaign contributions this election -- to Hillary or to any other candidate. I'm disgusted by the process and am saddened by what could be accomplished with such funds if they were spent in the Middle East, Darfur, sub-Saharan Africa, and in the United States for that matter. Our problems are too great and too widespread for Americans to be giving money to candidates to talk about themselves or to attack each other. I'll be giving my money to charity instead. If Hillary would like to set up a separate fund for charity -- perhaps devoted to stopping genocide in Darfur -- I would happily make a contribution. Maybe she can be the candidate that raises the most private funds to stop genocide? I like the sound of that.

Please let me know if I can send you a copy of my book.

Best Regards,

Benjamin Orbach

PS, I did like the spoof, but I devoted my blog last week to criticizing Hillary's choice in theme music. Celine Dion? Terrible.

I’ll bet I scared him with the “child of your legacy” comment. Rereading the letter, it also strikes me that I’ve become quite an apple polisher. Oh well.

To the point: Americans are making donations to presidential campaigns at a rate that is making credit card debt feel inadequate. In the first quarter of this year, the leading six candidates raised $115 Million! On June 30, we’ll have numbers on the second quarter. Pundits tell us that $1 Billion could be spent on the 2008 presidential election. That makes me want to puke.

Imagine what a percentage of that money could do if devoted to stopping genocide in Darfur? The Save Darfur Coalition is engaged in advocacy efforts to persuade companies like Fidelity to stop investing in international companies that operate in Sudan. Without such investments, the government of Sudan will be pressured to stop arming and supporting genocide within Sudan’s borders.

Habitat for Humanity is an organization that builds homes for disadvantaged, poor, and homeless people. A $100 contribution would pay for a kitchen sink in the new house of a Katrina victim.

The International Volunteer Program Association is a coalition of non-governmental organizations involved in international volunteer and internship exchanges. Their website offers links to programs around the world, from the Art Corps to World Teach. Your contribution could support the work of unofficial ambassadors.

The 2008 campaign is pivotal for both domestic and foreign policy reasons, and I’ll volunteer for a candidate and register people to vote. However, as I wrote to Bill, why don’t we judge the candidates for their actions, including the funds they raise for the issues they believe in? Governor Huckabee can raise money for creationism textbooks.

When you get those automated emails and evening phone calls, ask what the candidate is doing now about the issues you care about. And consider contributing to one of the causes I mentioned, or something else you care deeply about, instead of enabling a 30 second sound byte about why candidate X will be the best.

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Readers tell me that they want more Big Hair posts. One is in the works. In the meantime, my research on Hillary’s theme song has left me obsessed with Journey. If you want to see some Big Hair, check out this video. And if you have any idea how they got into those jeans, please let me know.

Ben

Book Clubs and "the Other"

2007-06-23T13:26:00.000-04:00

Adams Morgan (still waiting to leave) – It was the first book club that I’ve visited, a group of six women with thoughtful questions. Before that evening, I’d only appeared on radio shows and at bookstores where people were interested in Live from Jordan’s substance but they wanted a taste of the milk -- i.e. some anecdotes and analyses -- before buying the cow.

Some people aren’t milk buyers, though. They sip in the supermarket (Borders) aisles and stop off at their neighbor’s or friend’s for a glug glug. Well-meaning people have told me that they thought my experience sounded “so interesting,” and that they were going to “borrow” Live from Jordan from the library or a friend. Don’t get me wrong, I have a message, and I’d like to spread it like cream cheese on a Sunday morning garlic bagel. But come on -- I’m 31, this is my first book, and I need to sell some copies. If you like the arts, support the artists. And yes, I’m using the term “artist” loosely.

I’m fascinated by the concept of book clubs, though. They are women’s answer to poker night. Groups of women choose a book to read, actually read the book, and then discuss it in detail over drinks and finger foods. I suspected something else might be going on (secret NASCAR watching, perhaps) but at both of the book clubs I’ve visited, there was thought provoking conversation and no mention of Jeff Gordon.

The best thing about the book club conversations is that everyone has read the book and there are challenging questions about the Middle East and my experience. You can really get in depth on some of the nuances.

At this book club visit, Jeanette, an African-American lawyer, asked me whether my experience living as “the other” in Jordan had given me insight into the experience of blacks in America. I’ve thought about this subject a lot, but had yet to speak about it in public.

When I was living in the Arab World in 2002 and 2003, I hid my Jewish identity for both security and for professional reasons. In Jordan especially, because of the absence of Jewish history (compared to Egypt or Syria), there is little distinction made between Jews as members of a faith and the Israeli army, a reviled institution. On the professional front, I went to Jordan to learn about daily life and people’s viewpoints on political issues, not to be the center of a traveling Talmudic road show, debating details of doctrine – that isn’t my bag. So, out there on my own without official protection, I had to choose how to identify myself to the people I didn’t know and trust. The assassination of Laurence Foley deeply disturbed me; before he was killed, and certainly after, I lied.

When you’re hiding something, as I was, you avoid certain situations. When coffee shop discussions came around to the tenets of Christianity, I redirected questions back to the questioner and Islam. I had many of the same conversations and became adept at the two-step. With the arrival of holidays, I traveled or stayed home, sick.

If you’re black, you can’t hide your skin color, however. So while I thought about being the “other” a lot and transposed it to different contexts, I told Jeanette that I didn’t understand racial discrimination much better. Instead, I think I gained more of an insight into what it is like to be secretly gay in America.

I haven’t read any literature on life in the closet, so this is a complete (and hopefully respectful) stab. I think there are similarities, however, of avoiding certain conversation topics (like relationships), feeling alone when you aren’t participating in events that are the norm for the community, and resenting “forced” participation in these events in order to fit in and not raise suspicions (the prom, college date parties, work events).

There are more difficult situations, too. What happens when people you’ve become friends with say hateful things about gays or Jews? These are your friends, you know that they are generous or kind, but it turns out that they are also ignorant and perhaps hateful.

Worse, what happens when you become good friends with someone and haven’t been honest about who you are? Is there a full disclosure obligation? Such a forced clarification is insulting to everyone. It’s like, “I know we’re friends, but you’re entitled to know that I’m really _____ and you now have the opportunity to excuse yourself from this friendship because being _____ is so terrible that I’m obligated to explain it to everyone I meet and make sure that they have full information before continuing our friendship.” That’s awful, for the friend, too. You’re projecting on to them a desire for a prejudicial escape hatch.

So, I think I gained some insight into living a secret world, but I’m not sure. What are others’ thoughts about the “secret Jew in Jordan” vs. “gay in an American closet” comparison? Also interesting, how does being “the other” openly compare to being “the other” in secret?

Comments welcome, thanks-

Hillary Blew It

2007-06-20T15:01:00.000-04:00

Washington D.C. - Hillary chose Celine Dion’s You and I as her theme music over Journey’s Don’t Stop Believen’. A few thoughts on why this choice was a disaster:

Origin of the Artist. Celine Dion is from Canada! Her website has options for English and French. Worse, when you click buttons on the website, Celine Dion’s music starts playing. Do you know how embarrassing that is when you’re at work? I had to get up and close the door to my office.
It is not that I’m anti-Canada. Anyone who has read my book knows that I like Canada and even posed as a Canuck under different periods of duress. Despite my distaste for those Canada patches that our northern neighbors sew to their backpacks (to make sure they aren’t mistaken for Americans), I think Canada is a nice, clean place and I wish we had their health care system. Even better, every twenty years, Canada sends Pittsburgh the greatest hockey player to walk the planet. I like that.
Journey, on the other hand, is from San Francisco. They are a quintessential American rock band – hits in the 70s and 80s, long hair, and mullets! That’s an image Hillary should want to identify with. The more pictures she rolls out, like the one of her in that paisley shirt (which may be velour), the better. The Midwest wants to see a human Hilary, not someone in glitter.

Sound and Lyrics. I can’t listen to You and I without worrying that someone is going to catch me and I’ll have to explain that I’m doing research for a blog post. I listened to Don’t Stop Believen' once last night and I’m humming the chorus at my desk, bobbing my head, and dreaming about big hair coming back.
As for the lyrics, Don’t Stop Believen’ blows You and I out of the water. It is about tough times, people on the margins, and hope for the future. You and I is about flying, together. As far as love songs go, that could be nice. This is theme music, though, and I don’t like the image of America and Hillary engaged in a love affair, flying together above the clouds.
Let’s go to the telestrator and examine the lyrics up close.

Don’t Stop Believen’ opens with:

“Just a small town girl, livin in a lonely world
She took the midnight train goin anywhere”

Who can’t identify with this? We’re all chasing dreams here. The song’s chorus is great:

“Dont stop believen'
Hold on to the feelin . . .”

Bill had “Don’t Stop” (thinking about tomorrow),” and Hillary could have had “Don’t Stop Believin.” Part of Hillary’s appeal is the return of Bill and the optimism of the 90s. The Hilary people missed.

Let’s take a closer look at the lyrics of “You and I.” The song opens with:

“High above the mountains, far across the sea
I can hear your voice calling out to me
Brighter than the sun and darker than the night
I can see your love shining like a light”

Huh? We’re talking about our next choice for President, not the love of my life. The chorus:

“You and I
Were meant to fly
Higher than the clouds
We'll sail across the sky”

I don’t get it. The flying thing seems overly ambitious. If we were meant to fly, can someone please make our airlines start serving food on the plane again? It isn’t so much that I mind eating at Potbelly’s before take off. Rather, I can’t stand the assorted smells of a mall food court emanating from the row behind me. McDonald’s and Kung Pow mixed at 30,000 feet is a recipe for nausea. Someone should do a study of the increase in the number of incidents of vomiting since airlines dropped food service. And another thing, don’t bring that big cookie around and try to sell it to me for $4. That’s just insulting.

The Titanic Factor. You say Celine Dion, I think Titanic. Maybe that’s because I lived in the Middle East for a year and had an ungodly number of conversations about Celine Dion, Canada, and Titanic, but I can’t be alone in this. I have to ask the question, “What campaign wants to be associated with the Titanic?”

So, Hillary made a mistake. She used a democratic process on her website to determine her theme music. I’m sure more people out there like Celine Dion than Journey these days, but democracy isn’t good for all situations. Democracy is good for decisions that impact the common good or the majority of the people. Choosing theme music is something entirely personal, like the clothes you wear. Is Hillary going to post potential outfits for the convention on her website and let her voters choose her wardrobe too? I hope they don’t choose an oversized Clyde Frazier throwback jersey or a Zoot suit.

It is going to be disappointing to have to hear Celine Dion over and over again for the next year and a half. The only thing that will make it tolerable is if Hillary’s team can rig it so that she swoops in from the rafters, on Batman-like wires, at future campaign appearances as they play the music. If they can do that, then I take it all back and You and I was the right choice.

Unofficial Ambassadors

2007-06-16T22:00:00.000-04:00

Pittsburgh -- About a week and a half ago, Metro published an interview on one of my favorite Live from Jordan topics – the role of Unofficial Ambassadors. “Unofficial Ambassadors” is my own term for American citizens who improve America’s relations with the rest of the world, and the Middle East specifically, by traveling, working, volunteering, and studying abroad.

It was a nice piece; Jason Notte, the Metro writer, wrote a summary of my book and pulled a few questions and answers from our lunch in a Cuban restaurant near Broadway and 51st in Manhattan. The restaurant had terrific espresso, and the food wasn’t bad either, except that Jason ordered a mini-hamburger and it was the size of a carmex lip balm container. He put some ketchup on the burger, and it disappeared. I felt bad for him; he must have eaten an early dinner that night.

For those of you who don’t live in New York, Boston, or Philadelphia, Metro is the free newspaper that is handed out at subway stations in the morning. We have one in Washington D.C. too, called the Express – it is like Headline News meets the Washington Post, Sudoku, and a classified section on steroids. It is especially nice for the people who don’t have cell phone reception on the train or who forgot their ipods at home.

Back to the unofficial ambassador interview though, my contention is that we do much better as a country if everyday Americans are the face of America to the Middle East rather than someone official, like Donald Rumsfeld. Not to take away from the efforts put forward by our military and diplomatic corps, but they represent and implement U.S. foreign policy first. Only afterwards are they able to represent the “American people.”

Whoa, how can I make a distinction between the U.S. government and Americans you might be asking? Well, it is true – Americans elect the President and Congress. But, in the Middle East, people separate the American people from the U.S. government. The American people gave the world Martin Luther King, the Matrix, and the minimum wage (I think – we at least get a lot of credit for it). The U.S. government brought you Iraq. In sum, people love Mariah Carey but hate George Bush. If we want to decrease anti-American sentiment in the Middle East, we should play to our strengths – the American people – rather than making everything a discussion of our (perceived) weaknesses, U.S. policy.

So, playing to our strengths, unofficial American ambassadors make us safer in the world for two reasons. First, they demonstrate our humanity. Despite the carnage you see on the nightly news, the killing of innocents is abhorred in the Middle East. When the issue of whether it is okay for al-Qaida to target American civilians is debated in salons and coffee shops across the Middle East, we want people to think of the Americans they know, like, and who have made the world better a better place. We don’t want them to think of our leaders who smirk at them and say in so many words, “we’re strong, you’re weak, and we’ll do what we think is best.”

Second, unofficial ambassadors can play a positive role in helping people in the developing world address the unmet human needs of their communities. Doctors without Borders, Peace Corps Volunteers, scholars, practitioners, and study-abroad students have a lot to offer in their fields of expertise or through their attributes of openness and curiosity. They’re able to travel around, unhampered, and people are willing and eager to accept advice and assistance, especially if there aren’t strings attached. While there isn’t much that American citizens can expect to accomplish on major policy questions in the Middle East, they should get involved in “people’s issues” like education, health, and IT training. One well meaning and knowledgeable person can have a multiplying impact. Just don’t wear shorts, behave like a jerk, or hit on someone’s wife or daughter.

The nice thing about having a platform, even if it is a small one like mine, is that you can say and write things and interested people of all stripes contact you and want to know more. I’ve recently met (in person or over email) high school students, college professors, and other potential unofficial ambassadors of varying interests and proficiencies who want to make connections with their Middle Eastern counterparts but who aren’t sure of where to begin.

Figuring out how to form those linkages in the most productive way seems like a good next step. I’ve been facilitating different connections over the last week and a half, and would be happy to continue. Send emails about what you can offer or what you’re looking for, and I’ll try to point you in a reasonable direction.

Welcome

2007-06-16T15:31:00.000-04:00

Pittsburgh – Live from Jordan: Letters Home from My Journey Through the Middle East has been out since the start of May. I’ve been receiving a lot of interest and feedback at the “grassroots level” by way of emails, bookstore talks, book clubs, and talk radio/local NPR call-in questions. In a way, it is like the response to the original letters that I sent home from Jordan and Egypt. The New York Times editors may not care less about what I have to say (I still can’t place an oped with them), but people in Wisconsin, South Florida, Utah, and Ohio seem genuinely intrigued.

One of the surprises of this grassroots response is the number of people who have contacted me with questions about traveling or living in Jordan or other parts of the Middle East. Most are in college or just out of college. That’s great news, for everyone involved. There have been a lot of emails, though, and I haven’t been able to keep up as well as I would have liked. So, true to my book, I thought this blog would be a place where I could:

- Answer questions and continue discussions that have arisen from my book
- Continue to write about the intersection of our interests with everyday people and colorful places (in the Middle East, but also in other venues too)
- Respond to travel and living abroad questions and share others' stories too
- Daydream about the upcoming Steelers season, huevos rancheros, and other issues of paramount importance to me

Thanks for stopping by-

Ben

www.benjaminorbach.com
www.myspace.com/benjaminorbach