Culture

To Liberal American Zionists: A Call to Intervene

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Due to a breakdown in budget negotiations within the governing Likud-led coalition, Israel is now scheduled to hold elections on January 22, 2013. What a perfect opportunity for liberal Zionists in America who support U.S. President Barack Obama to pull a “Bibi,” that is to say, to be actively engaged — dare I say meddlesome — in the upcoming Israeli elections in order to help oust current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu from power. For those unfamiliar, during a critical period of the U.S. presidential campaign, Bibi went public with his disagreements with Obama over the Iranian nuclear issue, leaked a story about being snubbed by Obama after requesting a meeting, and lavishly courted republican presidential candidate and former colleague Mitt Romney during his trip to Israel earlier this year. These tactics were intended to bind Obama to Israeli red lines for military action against Iran by exploiting his vulnerability to attacks from the right during the campaign season. But they were also a not-so-subtle endorsement of Romney.

Culture

Thoughts on Hospitals and Healing

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For many hours every day for more than two of the last three weeks, I was in a hospital setting, supporting my beloved sister’s recovery from a major surgery. I have a lot of very personal experiences – of sorrow, helplessness, and moments of grace – that are now part of who I will forever be. This piece is about what I learned from all of this about why so many of us hate being in hospitals and what it would take to create hospitals that are truly designed to support healing. Despite everything that I am about to say, I am confident that all of us who were with my sister during this time would rate the care we received as excellent. We were in a hospital ranked in the top 5% in the US.

Education

Doing the Right Thing: From Tolstoy to Minimum Wage

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Recently two seemingly unrelated events came together: I volunteered for Measure D to raise the minimum wage in San Jose to ten dollars an hour, and I watched another episode of the BBC’s excellent production of War and Peace. In the episode I watched, a wealthy family, the Rostovs, is crating up their numerous possessions, china, furniture, dresses, vases, and clocks, to flee Moscow in the face of Napoleon’s oncoming troops. They look out the window: a long line of wounded Russian soldiers is wending its exhausted way through the city – now abandoned by most of the rich. At first, the family watches, curious, as the soldiers drag and are dragged past their front door. Then the daughter, Natasha, a person of great spirit and integrity, asks what it could hurt to let the wounded be brought inside and laid on the floor; the family is leaving the city anyway for their country estate.

Culture

Empathy Hurdles

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A few months ago, my sister Arnina, who lives and teaches Nonviolent Communication in Israel (meitarim.co.il), was telling me about someone who had just taken an action that was very painful for her. Part of the pain, as is almost always the case in such situations, was caused by the familiar enigma: how could anyone do this? Then she said something that has stayed with me ever since: “I can explain his behavior, but I don’t understand it.” I have quoted her often, because this simple sentence captures, for me, the profound and slippery distinction between empathy and analysis. However compassionate our analysis might be, it remains external.

Culture

Visiting Europe

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Germany
It’s never easy to visit Germany, not as an Israeli Jew, no matter how many years I’ve lived in the USA. The question is never far enough away to forget it: What did your parents do during the war? (or now it’s grandparents for some of those I meet). When I know that 90% of people supported Hitler, how can the question not be asked? At a workshop on the power of requests, it takes me the entire day before I can bring myself to tell the usual story about the power of requests based on the Oliners’ study of rescuers of Jews (for more details, see Tests of Courage, Part 2).

art

The Millionaire Tax Virgin: Spread the Love for Prop 30

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Taxes are sexy. Yeah, I said it. I know that most times you hear about taxes – from Obama to the latest Tea Party wingnut to your local city council bureaucrat – that conversation is boring, it’s policy-wonkish, and it’s usually pretty conservative. Well, it’s time to change the debate. Meet the Millionaire Tax Virgin.

Culture

Punishment and Rewards

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I have been carrying a vivid memory with me for over 50 years. In it, my father is chasing me around the little circle of dining area, kitchen, corridor, and living room that existed in our apartment. In my memory, this has happened already, to me and to my older sister. I don’t know, in actuality, if it was a one-time event or recurring. As I am running away from him, I suddenly realize there is just no way I can manage to escape.

Culture

The Unique Privilege of Meaningful Work

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Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? — Mary Oliver

After I wrote my previous post about privilege, I was more attuned to the presence of privilege in my life and around me. It is in the nature of privilege to remain invisible to those who have it, and I wanted to make use of my heightened awareness to expose and explore other forms of privilege. This brought me back to a topic I alluded to in a very early post about despair and never fully explored: the privilege of having work that emerges from passion, from a calling, from a sense of meaning. This is a form of privilege that cuts through social class, though also tends to align with class privilege.

Culture

Israeli Filmmaker On Grandparents' Friendship with Nazi

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“The Flat” (Hadira) is so compelling that I couldn’t refuse when invited to meet this award-winning documentary film’s creator, Arnon Goldfinger, even as I prepare for my departure for Israel at the end of this week. It is clever and engaging, with light moments that flow naturally into what turns out to be a heavy and mysterious theme. The story begins almost exactly like another recent but very different Israeli Holocaust-related documentary, “Six Million and One,” with unexpected discoveries as family members clean out the Tel Aviv apartments of a recently deceased parent (in “Six Million…”) and of a 98 year-old grandmother (in “The Flat”). Filmmaker Arnon Goldfinger discovers clippings of a series of articles published in a Nazi newspaper in 1934 Germany, which provides a glowing account of a high-ranking Nazi official visiting Palestine, accompanied by none other than his own grandparents, Kurt and Gerda Tuchler. His grandfather was a Zionist representative who guided Leopold Itz von Mildenstein, an S.S. and S.D. (Nazi intelligence agency) bureaucrat on what resembled a typical tourist excursion to Palestine, along with their respective wives, seeming from the photographs to be thoroughly enjoying each other’s company.