“The art world likes to see itself as avant-guard, the most open-minded enclave of society,” remarks Israeli art critic Ktzia Alon. “But Shula Keshet has put a mirror in front of those who share this view. They have discovered that they are a closed, elitist, hermetic group.” Keshet is a revolutionary, according to Alon, and it is just a matter of time before key museums and art magazines throughout Israel follow her lead.

“I am not the kind of artist who sits in a studio, disconnected from the world, thinking that what I am doing is more important than what is happening in society,” Keshet says of herself. “On the contrary, the core of my artwork is my connection with people and their struggles for justice.”

This sense of connection has led Keshet to launch an ongoing series of exhibitions, where her own installation art fuses with the work of individuals from Mizrahi (Middle Eastern/North African Jewish), Ethiopian, and Arab communities in Israel. “I want to break the standard relationship between artist and subject, where the artist is the one looking and the one producing art. My art bears the imprint of many different people, all speaking for themselves.”

Keshet challenges the Israeli idea of art itself: “There is a separation between ‘high’ art and ‘low’ art,” she asserts. “So-called ‘high’ art is Western-influenced. Mizrahi, Ethiopian, and Arab art is not perceived as ‘high’ or ‘true’ art, but rather as handicraft. It is my goal to elevate people’s conceptualization of these art forms, to bring other narratives into the Israeli art world.”

Shlomo Akale, director of Bahalachin Center for Ethiopian Culture, welcomes such a change. “There is a lot of hierarchy in the Israeli art world,” he concurs. He explains that common measures of artistic worth – such as graduation from a prestigious art academy – are irrelevant in an Ethiopian context. “In Ethiopia, everyone did something connected to art – weaving, pottery, carpentry, embroidery. We didn’t have schools for art. Art was life. In Europe, people had to go to schools, study for a period of several years, and receive certificates. In Ethiopia, however, boys learned art from their fathers, and girls learned art from their mothers.”

Keeping to the mother-daughter artistic tradition, Mira Tezasu and Tasamach Mengestu both displayed their artwork as part of Keshet’s installation on Ethiopian art, Halom Yerushalmi Mehabash, at the Einstein Contemporary Art Gallery in Tel Aviv in 1998. Tezasu displayed poetry and paintings. Her mother, Mengestu, displayed pottery. “Ethiopian art such as baskets, pottery, and embroidery serve people in their everyday lives,” Keshet says. “I was making a statement by including daily art alongside the paintings and drawings, because art should not just be something you look at. It should be something you use. It should not just be something the elite sell, without touching it.”

Tezasu feels Keshet was successful in making her statement. “The exhibition helped show that art like my mother’s is real art. Finally people valued her work and recognized how beautiful it is. Suddenly my mother had exposure and began receiving invitations to display and discuss her art.” Tezasu explains how her mother gained prestige that elders of the Ethiopian Jewish community lost after arriving in Israel. “The exhibition really empowered my mother,” she explains. “Elders in the Ethiopian community are often ignored here. But through this exhibition, my mother got the honor she deserves.”

Tova Mered, director of the Ethiopian Art Center, elaborates on the phenomenon of losing status: “Every Ethiopian child in kindergarten thinks she is wiser and more important than her parents and grandparents, because she knows how to write her name in Hebrew.” Mered works to turn the tables by providing a center where elder women of the community teach Ethiopian art to Israelis of all backgrounds and ages.

Ilana Shamai, program director of Inbal – a center for Mizrahi cultural advancement – looks forward to the day that this expression will be standard. For now, she asserts, “Mizrahi artists who do not completely erase their Mizrahi identity are automatically cast aside on the peripheries of the art world.”

Keshet, however, demands the room to express herself as a Mizrahi while receiving full-blown recognition in the mainstream. Indeed, she seems to be getting her way. Her exhibitions have been well-attended and reviewed in key Israeli periodicals including Ha’aretz, Studio, HaIr, Yediot Ahronot, and Ma’ariv.

Keshet’s next installation will focus on the theme of common identity between Jews, Muslims, and Christians throughout the Middle East and North Africa. “This installation will emphasize the connection between Mizrahim and Arabs, Mizrahim and Palestinians,” she says. The theme of a Mizrahi-Arab connection is nothing new for Keshet, who created a series of self-portraits fusing images of herself and Islamic art.

Keshet’s self-identification and forthcoming exhibition may be shocking to some. Then again, Shula Keshet does not pull punches. She is an artist on a mission.

Loolwa Khazzoom has published widely in such periodicals as The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Marie Claire, Yoga Journal, and Elle Girl. She is the editor ofThe Flying Camel: Essays on Identity by Women of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Heritage (Seal Press), and she is an Israel correspondent for Jewish Telegraphic Agency. More about the author at: (http://www.loolwa.com/ articles.html)

TEL AVIV, Sep. 29 (JTA) –

“When I shower, it usually takes me seven minutes,” says Hayim Foxman, a volunteer with Zaka, the fervently Orthodox rescue and cleanup organization that collects victims’ body parts after terrorist attacks. “But after I return home from a terrorist attack, it takes me an hour and 20 minutes.”

Foxman pauses. “And I don’t know if I am soaked from the water or my tears,” he says.

Married and a father of four, Foxman says his work can be emotionally draining for his entire family.

“When I return home after a terrorist attack, one of my children comes and says, ‘Daddy, look what I did in kindergarten today!’ And I respond, ‘Say thank God you are living. What do I care what you did in kindergarten? Say you are happy you’re alive.’ My kids look at me like, ‘What happened to you?’ ”

Today, three years after the Palestinians launched their intifada against Israel, Foxman — like most Israelis has acclimated somewhat to life under the strain of terrorism.

Foxman and his wife have a system for dealing with the intense emotions that follow terrorist attacks.

“I have come to understand that when I come back from an attack, I am extremely agitated for a few days,” Foxman explains. “My wife knows that when I come back from an attack, it’s better to speak with me about what happened, so that I will free myself. It’s very hard for her to hear these things, but she knows that listening makes it much easier for me.”

The Foxmans’ experience is typical of that of Zaka volunteer families.

According to Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, who founded the organization in 1989, volunteers — there are currently 900 — and their families commonly suffer from post-traumatic stress.

“You’re talking about humans, not angels,” Meshi-Zahav says. “There are people who saw one awful image and became traumatized for the rest of their lives.”

In addition to doing rescue and cleanup after terrorist attacks, Zaka volunteers work at the scene of car crashes and building collapses around the country.

The organization’s Hesed Shel Emet division — which translates as “true righteousness” — deals with the fatalities from these incidents. Volunteers gather the remains of bodies, identify as many parts as they can and bury as much of a victim’s body as possible — including blood — in one grave.

The Hatzalah Mehira — or “rapid response” — division is an emergency response squad of volunteers on motorcycles who arrive at the scene of incidents to administer first aid until ambulances can arrive. Usually, they’re at the scene within four minutes of the incident.

The Itur Vehilutz — or “search and rescue” — division specializes in the rescue of people trapped in cars and buildings.

All volunteers in the Hesed Shel Emet division are fervently Orthodox men. The other divisions include women and non-Orthodox Jews.

Zaka volunteers say their faith in Judaism gives them the strength to keep going — and is their reason for volunteering in the first place.

The commandment to bury the dead is one of the most central in Jewish law, explains Meshi-Zahav. Even a kohen, a member of the priestly cast forbidden to touch dead flesh, is allowed to bury a body if it is otherwise left unattended.

“When the Jews left Egypt and crossed the Red Sea, the Jews began to sing because Egyptians were drowning,” Meshi-Zahav explains. For decades, Egyptians “killed Jews, made them suffer. But God said, ‘Don’t sing, even though they caused you grief. You can’t sing, you must give respect.’ ”

A dignified end to life is a universal right, Meshi-Zahav says.

Bringing this dignity to victims often triggers intense feelings of grief among those collecting body parts, but it also has had a positive impact on volunteers’ lives.

“I value life more,” Foxman says. “I know that when a person comes home from work, we need to thank God that we returned.”

Another Zaka volunteer agreed: “You have to make use of every moment that you get.”

When Zaka first started, volunteers’ wives had a difficult time coping, and many of those married to Hesed Shel Emet volunteers asked their husbands to give up the work.

“They complained their husbands were becoming apathetic or agitated,” Meshi-Zahav says.

Zaka developed a psychology program for volunteers. But nobody sought counseling in the program — apparently for fear of seeming weak-kneed — and the problems persisted.

Zaka then adapted its psychological counseling program to 20-person workshops. In groups, the volunteers “can see that everyone has the same problems, and they can open up,” Meshi-Zahav says.

In addition to psychological counseling for Zaka volunteers, there also is a support group for volunteers’ wives.

The women’s support group holds a national conference every Chanukah, as well as smaller regional gatherings throughout the year, according to its founder, Yehudit Weingarten.

Zaka also holds two annual family days, where volunteers and their families come to relax and have fun. Zaka volunteers say they find the programs helpful.

“In the beginning, it was extremely difficult,” says Shimmy Grossman, who describes one particularly gruesome experience.

“I was at my sister’s house and we heard an explosion on the street right under her house. I went downstairs and began taking care of matters. Suddenly, I saw the head of a baby. It made me crazy. For a full week, I was delirious and hallucinating.”

After psychological counseling, Grossman got past his symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

To deal with what they’ve seen, one husband-and-wife team of Zaka volunteers uses gallows humor.

“We try not to repeat it outside the house,” laughs the wife, who asked not to be named. She says her teenage children also have developed this bizarre sense of humor.

“It’s a family thing,” she says.

TEL AVIV, Oct. 1 (JTA) –

When Amiad Horowitz, 18, first came to Israel for Young Judaea’s Hamagshimim program, he was shocked to discover unorthodox views on Judaism and Israel among his non-Orthodox peers.

Raised in an Orthodox home in Philadelphia and New Jersey, Horowitz was spending his first significant chunk of time away from home and — for the first time — was finding some of his core beliefs challenged.

“My first response was to be very angry,” Horowitz recalls of one of an early incident when he locked ideological horns with his peers. “But in the end, nobody was changing his mind, so we just agreed not to talk about it anymore.”

Hamagshimim offers post-high school students the opportunity to study, work on a kibbutz and volunteer in programs throughout Israel before beginning college in the United States. Bringing together Conservative, Orthodox, Reform and secular Jewish youngsters, the program is based in Jerusalem, where participants live together for three months before beginning projects elsewhere in Israel.

Eventually he realized the program was an opportunity to become more worldly, Horowitz says.

“The year course unshelters you, makes you more prepared for diversity, for what you see out there, for how things really work,” he says.

More than anything else, perhaps, the Hamagshimim program is an opportunity for different kinds of young Jews to learn how to get along.

Keith Berman, director of the year course and founder of Hamagshimim, which is sponsored by Hadassah, says uncomfortable encounters between youths is a key part of the program.

“There are definitely tensions,” he says. “It’s not like everyone gets here and it’s a lovefest.”

Learning how to live together is one of the program’s biggest challenges — and one of its points of pride.

Young Judaea’s mission, Berman says, is to transform enmity between religious and secular Jews by encouraging program participants “to contribute their vision to Israel, instead of hating what is here.”

Hamagshimim can drain the ideological swamps of secular-religious enmity in Israel the way Zionist pioneers drained the physical swamps of pre-state Palestine, he says.

And Israelis are feeling Hamagshimim’s impact.

“We are teaching Israelis what non-Orthodox Judaism is,” Berman says.

Sharon Schoenfeld, director of Hamagshimim-Hadassah in Israel, agrees with Berman.

“We are showing the Israeli community that something like this is possible,” she says.

Schoenfeld is responsible for Hamagshimim’s aliyah support branch, which runs a private absorption center for English-speaking immigrants aged 20-35. Its Jerusalem headquarters is a mix of a Jewish community center and a home, providing living quarters for 30 residents and community activities for 2,000 members.

While participants in the year program must abide by public Orthodox strictures — such as refraining from TV viewing in the public room on Shabbat — residents of the aliyah center have more latitude.

“If a woman chooses to wear a bikini on our front lawn,” Schoenfeld offers as an example of something Orthodox rules of modesty might prohibit, “people need to accept it.”

Yet both Hamagshimim projects share the same goals.

Both provide the opportunity for people to learn about others and figure out how to live with different types of Jews — something that Israelis often have a difficult time doing in a country that increasingly seems fragmented into religious and secular enclaves.

The only significant differences in approach between the two programs are that the aliyah center is geared toward adults and the year course is for teenagers.

“I like learning about different Jewish expression,” says Becky Korman, 18, a Reconstructionist Jew from Montreal. “The part that has affected me the most has been my discussions with other students in the program who are modern Orthodox, and comparing the ways we have grown up.”

Korman says she doesn’t mind adhering to certain Orthodox practices in the year course in order to make others feel comfortable.

“I respect the fact that people have their traditions and need to practice Judaism as they see fit, so I’m not going to butt heads with someone who practices differently,” she says.

Instead, she sees those differences as learning opportunities.

For example, Korman says, “It’s so foreign to me that a woman couldn’t read from the Torah or lead a service,” in Orthodox practice. “I want to understand why modern Orthodox women practice this way.”

The point, organizers say, is to foster a new kind of community, one marked by tolerance.

Hamagshimim’s year course is “not liberal,” Berman says. It “is not ‘everyone does whatever they want,’ because we’re a community. If I’m keeping Shabbat, I don’t want to hear music or see a TV on Shabbat.”

Before Rosh Hashanah this year, participants studied the meaning of the holiday and learned about diverse holiday traditions, including Sephardi ones.

For Yom Kippur, program participants will be encouraged to “shul crawl,” visiting different area synagogues to get a broad view of how Judaism is practiced in Israel.

“This is a great learning experience,” says Andrew Fretwell, 18, a secular Jew from New Jersey. “You get to see things from more than one perspective.”

TEL AVIV, Jan. 14 (JTA) –

Sabra, an asthmatic from Tel Aviv, was at a nightclub enjoying live music when the man seated next to her lit up a cigarette.

Unable to breathe and unable to speak over the loud music, Sabra gestured to the man to let him know that the smoke was bothering her. The man responded by turning toward Sabra and blowing smoke directly in her face.

That’s when Sabra punched him.

Sabra, who asked that her last name not be used, is one of countless Israelis convinced that Israel is a staunchly pro-smoking society and that asking law-enforcement authorities to enforce anti-smoking laws is an exercise in futility.

In shopping malls, banks and airports, many complain, even law-enforcement officials flaunt clearly posted no- smoking rules.

Jerusalemite Charlotte Herman recalls talking to a guard at the Interior Ministry who was smoking directly beneath a no-smoking sign.

“When I showed him the sign, he claimed it referred to the 1-inch space beneath it,” Herman says. “He said that where he was standing, 2 inches away, smoking was allowed.”

The battle between smokers and non-smokers has become so heated in Israel that fisticuffs sometimes occur.

Dov Rabinowitz, director of the national committee against public smoking, Ma’avak B’Tabak — “Struggle Against Tobacco” — recalls an incident where a doctor was attacked after asking a hospital visitor not to smoke.

According to Israel’s Health Ministry, almost 30 percent of Israelis are smokers; in development towns, which typically are poorer, the number is closer to 50 percent. Between 8,000 and 11,000 Israelis die each year from causes directly related to smoking, and about 1,000 to 1,500 are killed by second-hand smoke.

Officially, Israeli law mandates that all places of employment — including stores, movie theaters and cafes — must post signs informing customers that smoking is not allowed. Business owners may create designated smoking areas that take up no more than one-quarter of the business area. Businesses and customers flaunting the rules may be fined.

Smokers insist that anti-smoking laws are enforced every day all around them.

“This law has turned smokers into a persecuted minority,” cries Angela Ben Tsvi, waving her cigarette as she speaks. “It violates my personal rights. It violates my right to free expression. I feel like a criminal when I smoke in a cafe. I always have to look around me to see if I can light up. It’s very unpleasant.”

Ruth Ben David agrees.

“I enjoy holding a cigarette in my hand,” she says, smoking outdoors at Tel Aviv’s Espresso Bar. “I enjoy the nicotine and I enjoy the inhalation. If I pay $20 for lunch, I want to enjoy it. I want to be able to smoke my cigarette and finish it. I shouldn’t be denied that right.”

Ben David complains that she is forced outside during hot summers and cold winters if she wants to light up.

Rinat Laufmann, another smoker at Espresso Bar, says businesses should choose whether to allow smoking or whether to be entirely smoke-free, allowing smokers to choose which establishments to patronize.

Mati Gudiner, one of many smokers enjoying a cigarette at a cafe at Dizengoff Center, a popular Tel Aviv mall, asked the waitress if smoking was permitted before she lit up at a table in the mall’s walkway.

“I guess they just don’t really care” about irritating nonsmokers, Gudiner says, gesturing around her. “Case in point: ashtrays on all the tables.”

Though she is a smoker, Gudiner says the government needs to insist on enforcing the anti-smoking law.

“I think it’s just an issue of getting used to it, as with every new thing,” she says. “It’s difficult to introduce this law after people were allowed to smoke for so long. It was the same in New York and in Sydney. It was hard; people were used to smoking. But as soon as they made it a law, there was nothing to do about it.”

In Israel, however, where authorities are lax about enforcing the law, no-smoking rules have taken longer to catch on. The lack of social pressure in Israel against smoking has helped keep alive a culture of tolerance toward smokers.

Cafe, restaurant and bar owners say it’s impossible to get Israelis to stop smoking, regardless of the law.

Anti-smoking crusader Rabinowitz disagrees: Citing the effective campaign that banned smoking on buses, he says it’s a matter of resources.

“Many bus drivers were under the impression that they would be fined if they allowed smoking on buses. Whether or not that was the case, that was what they believed. Within two months, there was no more smoking on buses,” he says.

Urban legend has it that when one bus driver encountered a rider who refused to put out a cigarette, the driver drove the bus straight to the nearest police station.

The problem is that business owners, by contrast, have no incentive to risk customers’ ire and demand that they refrain from smoking, since the government does little to enforce smoking penalties in places of business, Rabinowitz says.

In Israel’s capital city, city inspectors are responsible for issuing tickets for no-smoking violations, Rabinowitz says he was informed by a spokesman for the Jerusalem municipality, Ayal Chaimovsky.

Chaimovsky told Rabinowitz that, due to budget cuts, inspectors don’t go out on patrols but act only when complaints are registered.

After meeting with Chaimovsky, Rabinowitz decided to test the system. He went to a nearby shopping mall, called the municipality to report that numerous people were smoking next to no-smoking signs and was met with befuddlement.

“The person who answered didn’t even know what law I was talking about,” Rabinowitz says. “She said, ‘We don’t respond to call-in complaints, only written complaints.’ I said, ‘I just came from a meeting with your boss, who said you only respond to call-in complaints.’ ”

Gidi Shmerling, a spokesman for the municipality, said, “The Jerusalem municipality does enforce the no-smoking laws. For example, smoking is prohibited in the municipality building, there are specially designated smoking areas and tickets are issued to smokers who are not in permitted areas, or are in public areas where it is prohibited.”

Rabinowitz says a male inspector arrived at the mall about 20 minutes after his phone call, flirted with a group of female smokers and then asked them to put out their cigarettes. The inspector didn’t dispense any tickets.

Rabinowitz repeated the test several times at other locations, and when he did not invoke his professional capacity in phone calls, no inspectors showed up.

For the past few months, Ma’avak B’Tabak has tried a new tactic to encourage Jerusalem to enforce the smoking laws.

“We have a private donor ready to fund these inspectors that the municipality supposedly has no budget for,” Rabinowitz says. “We also have volunteers ready to send in reports, to be the eyes and ears.”

Government officials tell him that there are legal complications involved in taking a private donation, he says.

Shmerling said there are legal restrictions involved with accepting donations to enforce specific laws.

However, he said, “If a donation comes in at a specific amount, and the goals the donor seeks are set down, the municipality’s legal counsel is prepared to examine the opportunities to use this donation proactively regarding the subject of enforcing the smoking laws in the city.”

Until the issue is resolved, it seems the only clear thing is that the City of Gold will remain the city of smoke.

TEL AVIV, Jul. 5 (JTA) –

For months, Palestinians have blasted Israel’s West Bank security barrier as an “apartheid wall” that will extinguish Palestinian national goals. But an Israeli ecologist says the fence’s potential impact on plant and animal life has been completely overlooked.

Noa Olchovsky, campaign coordinator on the fence for Green Action, an Israeli environmental group that advocates “socio-ecological change,” said the proposed border zone threatens Israel’s ecological system.

“What will tear the ecological system is the separation fence itself,” she said. “Animals won’t be able to get from the places they sleep to the places they drink water. Trees and plants won’t be able to reproduce themselves properly, because their seeds won’t be carried by the wind more than 8 meters in one direction. In a few years, certain species of animals and plants in the region will be extinct.”

The environmental claims come as the fence has been heavily cri! ticized by pro-Palestinian activists around the world, who see land the Palestinians desire for a future state being lost on the Israeli side of the fence. Palestinians also fret that the barrier will close off their most effective weapon against Israel — suicide terrorism.

Now some Israelis are raising the specter of environmental damage as well.

Already, Olchovsky says, Israel has uprooted hundreds of trees and bulldozed Palestinian farmland to build the fence and a patrol road alongside it.

Yehoshua Shkedi, landscape ecologist for Israel’s Nature Reserve Authority, the governmental body in charge of natural conservation, says the problem with the fence is two-fold: “It will destroy everything within its range,” he says, and will impact ecological corridors.

“It blocks movement of animals and impedes the growth of plants that are dispersed on the fur of animals,” he says.

An Israeli army spokesman, Capt. Ya’acov Dallal, rejected the criticism.

“If an an! imal were to walk by, the animal wouldn’t be harmed by the fence,” he said. “It’s a fence.”

And supporters note that the fence protects the most important species — human beings. With the number of Palestinian terrorist attacks down precipitously in areas where the barrier already is in place, supporters say potential damage to animal and plant life really is beside the point.

“While they listed the complaints of the birds and the animals, they neglected to mention that the reason the fence is being built is to save people,” Dallal said. “The fence is saving lives. We have to start from that premise.”

In addition, he said, the fence “can also be moved if the security situation changes, if there’s an agreement with the Palestinians. It’s not a final border, so it’s not something that necessarily is permanent.”

But ecologist Ron Frumkin says that even if the fence comes down in a few years, “the scar on the land will stay for up to thousands of years.”

Dallal disagrees.

“The fence is not an obtrusive obstacle to such a degr! ee that it causes irreparable damage,” he said.

For most of its planned 450-mile route, the barrier is a sophisticated network of wire-mesh fences built with electronic sensors, patrol roads, ditches, cameras and watchtowers. In some short spans, the barrier is a concrete wall.

Dallal said a variety of factors determined the route of the fence, which runs roughly along the Green Line, the boundary between Israel and the Jordanian-controlled West Bank prior to the 1967 Six-Day War.

“We’re using the Green Line as some sort of a contour,” he said. “We want to have as many Israelis on the one side, as many Palestinians on the other, so that Israelis can go on with their lives and Palestinians can go on with theirs. Wherever you draw a line, it’s difficult.”

Frumkin said ecologists want to talk not about whether Israel needs the fence, but “where to put it, how to put it, so that the damage will be minimal, both to ecology and people.”

Frumkin says he and his! wife, Tamar Ahiron-Frumkin, sat down recently with geologists and sec urity consultants from the Council for Peace and Security, a left-leaning think tank, to prepare a report on an alternative fence route.

“It’s possible to do the fence in a different way,” Frumkin said, “so that it’s good for security, for ecology, and for the aesthetic view.”

For example, Frumkin said, building on flat land instead of slopes, and building on the northern side of hills, where there is more rain and less direct sun, would help the land recover faster if the fence one day comes down.

He also said that setting the fence along a straight route rather than a circuitous one would cut its length by half and thus affect less land.

In Jerusalem, where there is a fence winding around the city, Shkedi said, “it’s a pocket closed from three sides. The effect of the fence there is very bad.”

So far, Frumkin said, Israel has not given serious consideration to ecologically preferable alternatives for the route.

“If it was done, it wasn’t done properly, ! with professional people to look at the possible alternatives,” he said. The government “only looked at security.”

Dallal rejected that assertion.

“There is a whole host of considerations that must be taken into account,” he said, including security, operational, environmental and social concerns.

“It’s also a question of priorities,” Dallal said. “Foremost among them is saving Israeli lives.”

If the white face of Israeli media was an anomaly, I would let it slide. But it is typical. Like a heat-seeking missile, Israeli media seeks out the most Aryan looking Jews in the country, all, oh, 5% of them, then shoves them front-and-center —  explicitly or implicitly commanding the Israeli public to worship them.

Disheartening. Infuriating. Boring. Same old same old. Here o’Israel: The Nazis won. They may not have annihilated our people, but they have annihilated our collective mindset and our self-respect. So that we now impose the racist chokehold on our own damn children.

Six years ago, when I was living in Israel, I was writing for the biggest, baddest periodicals in the world. Through tireless efforts, I consistently got stories about the un- or under-represented Israelis into periodicals like Rolling Stone, Marie Claire, BBC News, The Boston Globe, you name it.

Given my track record, you might think it was easy. It was not. I had to fight tooth-and-nail for every damn story. All the media wanted to hear about was how Arabs and Jews were killing each other. If you wanted to sell a story about a man who raised tomatoes, you’d have to link it to Arabs and Jews killing each other. Which is a whole other issue, about how international media feeds or, dare I say, even creates the bloodshed in the region. But I digress.

One night in 2004, my editor at Seventeen – which already had published my story on a Sephardic girl in Israel — called and asked me if I could round up an awesome teenager to profile in the magazine. They were doing a feature on girls in war-torn regions. Immediately I got on the horn with my friend Alamu, a leader in the Ethiopian community, and asked him to get me the most badass Ethiopian community activist he could find. Within a couple of hours, I’d secured the perfect person for the story.

This girl not only was an activist but also a uniquely heart-centered, thoughtful individual who was, as they say, wise beyond her years. When a blatant case of racism rocked the Ethiopian community to its core, for example, a throng of Ethiopian youth wanted to vandalize the school where the incident had taken place. This girl single-handedly stopped the mob, asserting that if they were to indulge in violence, they would sink to the level of the racists; and that instead, they needed to lead constructive change through positive example.

Well, editors are notoriously fickle, and Seventeen eventually decided to go in a different direction with the story. When I was in New York a few months later, however, visiting my editor at ELLEgirl, I convinced her – get this – to create an entirely new page in the magazine, just to feature this girl. For those of you not hip to the behind-the-scenes world of media, editors (and therefore writers) are constricted by very rigid guidelines about exactly what kinds of stories go into exactly which sections. Everything is laid out formulaically. A story idea must fit that exact mold, or the story does not, under any circumstances, get published.

But I was hell-bent on getting this girl into a mainstream glossy magazine. It was high time for a black face – a young woman’s, at that – to represent the entire state of Israel. Not a “special interest group,” not a “poor little” minority group, but the entire damn country. To, oh, tens of millions of readers worldwide. (My articles regularly were published in multiple languages, through global reprints.)

“I know you don’t have a section for a story like this,” I started off the conversation, “BUT listen to how awesome this girl is.” Bam. Bam. Bam. I launched into bullet points of all the cool stuff this girl had done by such a young age. “Wow, you’re right!” my editor replied. “She is amazing!” My editor then stuck her own neck out, to pitch the editor-in-chief with the idea of creating a special page just to profile this girl. The editor-in-chief said yes. For those of you in media, you know how insanely rare that is.

So I wrote up the story, which was approved and slotted for a certain issue. The only thing that remained was for me to provide a photo of this girl.

Being that the girl was in the army at the time, and being that she clearly had not yet lived in Israel long enough to know that you cannot under any circumstances follow the rules of Israeli bureaucracy, lest you get your entire life screwed out of you, the girl advised me that I had to get permission from the army leadership before she could provide a photo.

The army leadership was infuriatingly slow in getting back to me. I left multiple urgent messages. I pleaded that the deadline was fast approaching and that the story would die if I did not get a “yes” from them pronto. I am sad to share they stalled and stalled and stalled, until the editor in chief said (understandably so) that she could not wait anymore – that they had to kill the story and replace it with another one, because the issue was about to go to press.

I was livid. Furious. I called the army representative and gave her an earful. Her response? Get this: “We have another girl you can profile, blonde, very beautiful, the magazines will love her…” “Are you fucking kidding me with this bullshit?!” I screeched. “I am not going to lift a pinky to profile a blonde girl. You are missing the entire point!”

Even from a completely utilitarian point of view (“Use us!” the Egyptian Jewish father of a friend used to say), the army representative was a moron. The axis of anti-Israel hatred on the Left, as I explained to the representative (she still didn’t get it) is that Israel is a white, European colonizing nation and therefore a racist, apartheid state. A picture, as they say, is worth 1,000 words. An image of a black woman in Israeli combat gear would have done, could have done, wonders for Israel’s public relations campaign, never mind the social justice coup.

But the army leadership blew it. Because Israelis are blinded by the very white supremacist bullshit that annihilated 6,000,000 of its own people. Israel now continues to erase its own Jewish self – not physically, but spiritually, through effectively putting on a pedestal that which is Aryan and spitting on that which is not.

In 2002, when I lived in Be’er Sheva, in Southern Israel, a man I was dating, Amir, took me to the remote outskirts of the city, to show me a cool view from the hills. As we came back down the hill, a car started honking – as it stalled right near where we were parked. I sped up and called out to the passengers, to see what they needed, thinking maybe they wanted directions or maybe our car was blocking theirs.

Suddenly two young men came flying out of the car and charging uphill at Amir and me, each man blocking one of us, both violently screaming at us in Arabic. As I confronted the assailant in my face, I heard Amir, further up the hill from me, calmly speaking to his own personal assailant in Arabic. Amir, you see, was also an Arab.

I’m far from fluent in Arabic. I do, however, know enough Arabic to understand that the assailant up the hill shouted this out to the guy still in my face: “It’s OK, it’s OK, he’s an Arab. He’s an Arab.” With that, the assault was called off. As in, oops, my bad, sorry bro. As Amir and I neared our car and were close enough to that of our assailants, I discovered that there was a young German woman driving the getaway vehicle.

What. The fuck. I could not stop shaking all night long.