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Yesterday marked five years since Israel Defence Force soldier Gilad Shalit was abducted. It’s been three years since Gilad’s captors have allowed him to send a letter or release a video statement. Gilad has been continuously held in conditions that violate international law; even the Red Cross can’t visit him. Interesting to note that the […] Today I was about to get water at the machine at work but there was a middle-aged man already there, filling his tea. I waited for a little bit, peaking in to see if he had moved on. He kept standing there, occasionally pressing the button for hot water, but just seeming to watch his […] I am a sucker for interesting vocabulary words. It’s nerdy, but I love finding new ways to express myself and every time I get a little closer to depicting an exact thoughts rather than verbally dancing around a subject in Arabic, I get super excited. When I don’t know how to say sometime, I’ll often […] After waking up (about 3 hours later than I meant to) to the awful realization that this was the last weekend to work on our papers (everyone’s done with those, right?!), I read the news that NY passed same-sex marriage while we were all sleeping. I spent the day occasionally looking at news and pictures […] A couple nights ago, I too went to the Festival of Light in the Old City in Jerusalem. My friend & I stopped to watch one display where the performers were going to be working with fire – juggling with fire, moving with fire, etc. Having spent the past three years training trapeze at several […] This post comes as the result of reading the Haaretz editorial, “A Jew can’t be identified by an ID card stamp” (accessible at http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/a-jew-can-t-be-identified-by-an-id-card-stamp-1.369188); and as a result of thinking about Katy’s statement in a recent post (http://blogs.smith.edu/blog/jerusalem/2011/06/20/the-ethnocentric-desires-of-the-jewish-people-part-2/) that “I know I will never be truly American because my real alliance lies with being Jewish—THAT […] On our way to Zikhron Yaakov yesterday, we passed more than one Palestinian village in which there was not only a mosque, but a gold-domed one at that. These weren’t, as far as I could tell, necessarily prosperous towns or lavish mosques, but I was very interested in the domes. Each time I saw a […] On Tuesday, I was lucky enough to attend the Israeli Presidential Conference (which is where I’m at right now, sneakily typing this blog post in the VIP lounge — more on that in another post). Before the conference began, President Peres and Shakira spoke to the press about the importance of education. Here’s more info […] Today, we were woken up by a very loud male voice shouting from our ceiling that there would be drill sirens today all over the country at 11 AM. We then got text messages from CareerIsrael informing us of the same thing, and telling us what to do depending on where we would be at […] For some reason, I have been especially interested in the kids in Jerusalem for the past week – yes, I have horrible baby fever as much as the next Smithie – but after so much time during our seminar speaking to officials and important people and trying to grapple with the decisions modern-day residents’ ancestors […] |