Israel Discussion in a Kosher Restaurant

Those of you who follow what's going on in the middle east know that things between Israel and Gaza are not looking pretty right now. There's a conflict going on that involves rockets, the death of innocent civilians, and the possibility of a ground war. All in all, not so much fun. Also, not all that new. This type of thing has been happening on and off, pretty much since Israel first became a state. But that's not the point. The News isn't telling you that. The News is telling you about the escalating conflict and stuff. Because it doesn't make a good story to say, "Israel and Gaza are going at it. Again." This is not meant to undermine the violence going on there. This is terrible stuff, and the fact that it isn't new doesn't make it any less terrible.

Anyway. My uncle and his family live in Israel on the kibbutz Ma'agan Michael, a small socialist community based on the idea of farming the land (they also have a plastic factory that makes toilets). The kibbutz is to the north of Israel, near Haifa for those of you who know where that is. To give some perspective, Gaza is much further south. But with close family living in Israel, this type of conflict makes my family worry.

The issue is, my mom is extremely liberal and seriously faults Israel for its occupation of Gaza. My Zaydie (her father), is an Orthodox Jew, who is liberal in most social and economic things, but orthodox in those things Jewish. He doesn't think Israel is completely perfect, but if you criticize Israel too much around him, he'll snap. As you can see, in a family with a large stake in what happens in Israel and largely conflicting view points, there might be a bit of conflict. Just a bit.

This came to fruition today after lunch, while sitting in a kosher restaurant (where my Zaydie's views are generally more popular). My mom was talking with her parents about my uncle and Israel and what was going on there. It somehow came up that my uncle had been kind of pushing my grandparents to move to Israel. As you might expect, considering that most people who's parents live nearby don't want their parents to move out of the state, much less to a war ridden country across the globe, my mom was vehemently opposed to the idea of them moving.

At one point, she mentioned that she would never want to live in a country in which the government actively oppress their population. My Zaydie clearly took a bit of offence, but at that point, things were still relatively civil. From there, they got to how the Jews who moved to Israel originally got their land, whether they had bought it from the Palestinian's or stole it from them (sounds a bit like conflict surrounding the US and the Native American's, huh). My mom talked about how the government forced Palestinians off their land to give the land to people who immigrated to Israel. My Zaydie compared it to how the US, "stole one-third of our land from Mexico, but we're friends with Mexico now and the US isn't a bad place." And things kind of spiraled downhill from there. Very quickly.      

Personally, I'm not sure what to think about all this. I've grown up listening to both my mother's perspective and my Grandfather's. At my parent taught, cooperative Hebrew school, I've had classes that do their very best to give both sides of the conflict. I go to a Jewish sleep-away camp that stresses labor Zionism  the idea that there should be a Jewish state and that Jews should move to Israel and farm the land. But even at this camp, the counselors do their best to teach us that Israel isn't perfect.

Honestly, I don't think that this is an issue with one right answer, if any right answer. At this point, both the Israelis and the Palestinians are at fault. Neither side is even close to perfect. You can't really play one side as the victim and one side as the persecutor. It doesn't work that way.

Unfortunately, that is what people have the tendency to do. Many people see this as either the Israelis oppressing the Palestinians or the Palestinians are bombing the Israelis, unprovoked. People tend to pick the extremes in a conflict that is no where close to black and white. Both my mom and my Zaydie understand that actually. But a lot of people don't

The thing about my mom and Zaydie's argument is that it isn't all that rare. This is the type of things that really has the potential to divide families. And in arguments about this, no one will win. No one will persuade the others that they're right and the others are wrong.

 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrdevlar/4921828661/

Capture the Fall

This week I made my Capture the Fall video for media class. I used a flip camera to film it.

Here's a list of my shots:
1. colorful trees
2. my brother riding his bike
3. my mom walking our dog
4. a lawn display
5. a leaf pile along the street
6. fallen leaves
7. a spring with leaves in it at a park
8. my brother swinging
9. a tiny stream at the park
10. my brother walking
11. my brother throwing pine needles
12. a pretty sidewalk chalk drawing
13. more fallen leaves

Unlike some of the videos that I've seen for this project, my video doesn't tell a story or have any overarching theme besides fall. The clips that I used were things that I associate with fall in general. My favorite clip is the one of my brother throwing pine needles into the air. It looks staged, but it's actually not. It's just the type of thing that my brother does. I brought the camera to the park with me to film and  looked over at my brother and that's what he was doing.

There are a couple things that I didn't put into my Capture the Fall project that I wish that I could have. For me, fall is strongly associated with waking up and coming homes from school when it's dark. Unfortunately I kept forgetting to take my camera with  my to school, so I never got that footage.

One of the biggest challenges I faced when making this video was using the editing software, WeVideo. This is only the second video that I've ever edited so I still don't really know what I'm doing. I don't own any editing software so I had to use a free online software, WeVideo. WeVideo proved to be very glitchy. Some  of the clips would freeze as I tried to edit them so that when I tried to watch it in the editor, it would go through a couple clips and then freeze. In addition, the editor wouldn't play the transitions that I inserted between clips. Although the transitions wound up working when the video was exported to YouTube, I could only hope that they worked right because WeVideo would just skip over them.  

Leftover Soup

I spent the weekend in New York city with my family, going to see the Broadway show Newsies. We had a great time at the show, but I also had an experience this weekend that really moved me.

We rode the bus in to New York and walked to our hotel, stopping at a restaurant for dinner. My brother ordered soup that he decided he didn't like and didn't eat. Although nobody wanted the leftover soup, my dad took it to go. As we walked from the restaurant to the hotel, we passed a young woman, sitting under a store awning with a sign saying something along the lines of "Hungry and Broke, Please Help". She was sitting hunched against the wall in a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt, her blond hair whipping around her thin face in the wind. My dad offered her the leftover soup. Often in these situations, the homeless person will respond with thank you, god bless you, god bless your family, have a nice evening, and on, but she simply said, "yes, thank you."

First of all, she must have been freezing. It was dark, cold, and windy, and I was shivering in my winter coat, so I can barely imagine how cold she must have been in just a flannel shirt. But what really struck me in the encounter was a tone in her voice. As she accepted the soup, there was a something that crossed from thankfulness into desperation. The "yes" was an exclamation, the "thank you", tagged on to the end in an attempt to save face, to cut that desperation a bit.

My mom was also moved by the encounter. To her, it was less about the woman's tone of voice and more about her age. Often, the people you see on the streets at night are middle aged men, but this girl looked like she was only a few years older than me. After we walked another block, my mom decided to go back and give her twenty dollars.

Interactions like the one described above always leave me feeling guilty. As a privileged teen, I never have to worry about where my next meal is coming from. At the same time, in these situations, I think that people have the propensity to look down on the homeless people they meet. They feel bad for them, but they also feel better than them. At my summer camp, we have spent days discussing this; whether it is better to give money to a person on the street, or to donate money to an organization that helps homeless people. The subject also came up of how it's difficult, but important to remember that you aren't any better than the people to whom you're giving your money, just in a different situation.

I don't know what this woman's story was, why she was on the street, or even how she felt about being there. That's something that I'll never know. But as we walked around New York city for the next two days, I saw an amazing amount of homeless people on the streets, many more than you see walking around DC.

According to the Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy and service group, homelessness in in New York City is currently at its highest level since the Great Depression. In June 2012, there were 46,600 homeless people sleeping in municipal shelters each night, including 11,200 homeless families with 19,200 homeless children. This is not including the number of unsheltered homeless people, as there is no accurate count of unsheltered homeless people in New York City. Studies show that the primary cause of homelessness, especially among families is a lack of affordable housing in New York City. In addition according to a report published by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 92.9% of chronically homeless people in New York City are African American and 82.3% are male. They found that people experiencing transitional homelessness (one short term stay at a homeless shelter) are also predominately African American and Male.

I don't think that my experience that night has really changed how I'm going to behave in the future. It hasn't left me any more inclined to run out and volunteer at a homeless shelter or to hold a canned food drive. I think that really this experience has simply helped me relate more to the situation of homeless people. We all tend to relate the most with people with whom we feel we have something in common. I think that I saw something of myself in that cold, desperate young woman. I have no idea what it was, but it was there. And that something made her, and through her, the issue of homelessness, seem more real to me.




Homeless Girl