Interchapter

Learning Together in the Negev

August 16, 2011 by Alana Sobelman

Published in: SCBWI (Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators)
Issue: July/August 2011

The Negev region of Israel is home to more than half-a-million Israelis, 25 percent of which are Arab or Bedouin Arab. More than 80,000 Bedouin citizens reside in state-unrecognized villages scattered throughout the desert expanse. The considerably long distances between the settlements and the larger cities means that few places exist in which Jews and Arabs have the opportunity to partake in cultural and educational exchanges. Aside from the spatial divide, there are many more – and often detrimental – manifestations of the split between the two populations, including a shared misunderstanding of the other’s lifestyle and traditions, and a large discrepancy in quality education. Be’er Sheva, the largest and most diverse city in the region, is saturated with opportunities for fruitful exchanges between Arabs and Jews, most of which have not been exploited to their full potential. On the short list of Arab-Jewish crossroads in the Negev is Hagar (www.hajar.org.il), the only bi-lingual Arab-Jewish school in the entire region and a thriving, realistic example of peaceful co-existence.

In a national school system clearly dominated by a Jewish-Israeli narrative, Hagar’s Arab parents enjoy the added incentive of sending their children not only to a school that offers a high quality education, but one that allows, encourages even, for the teaching of Hebrew and Arabic, and both Jewish and Muslim traditions and holidays. “We have small classes and two teachers per every class – a Jewish teacher and an Arab teacher, and then an additional teacher’s aid,” explains Lauren Joseph, Hagar’s director of development. “It’s important that the children learn two languages, and they learn not only through direct learning of one another’s language, but through requisition.” The teachers at Hagar speak in their native languages, rarely translating one another and instead teaching different lessons in each language.

Catherine Rottenberg, one of the founding parents of Hagar, explains that alongside more contemporary and popular literature for children, Hagar students “also read the classic texts of children’s literature in Arabic and Hebrew, as well as other world classics in translation.”

In the case where a book’s themes, concepts, or storylines may in any way offend the sentiments of a specific group, says Rottenberg, “teachers prepare and conduct a discussion with the children about these issues. Hagar believes in dialogue and in discussing rather than eliding difficult subjects.”
According to Rottenberg, teaching Arab and Jewish children to read in the other’s language ensures not only that they will become competent readers in their mother tongue and a second language, but also that “each child will become familiar with – and indeed, fluent in – the language and culture of the other.”

For a select reading list from the Tamar Institute and the Hagar School and to read the full article, please see SCBWI Online Bulletin.

Posted in Activism, Conflict/Resolution, Culture, Interviews, Israel, Literature, World | Leave a Comment »

Kafka’s Asking: Reading Rhetorical Questions in ‘Letter to His Father’

April 12, 2011 by Alana Sobelman

(The following paper was presented to a graduate seminar entitled “Reading Kafka and Brod” at Ben-Gurion University, Be’er Sheva, Israel on April 11, 2011. If you wish to use any of this paper for your own purposes, you MUST contact me (alana.sobelman@gmail.com) for permission. You may also contact me for citations of quotes written in the paper.)

Franz Kafka’s Letter to His Father was written by the author in November, 1919. According to Max Brod, Kafka handed the letter to his mother to give to his father, hoping it might help mend the embittered relationship between father and son. Realizing the futility of such a gesture, Kafka’s mother did not deliver the message and instead returned it to its author.

The letter, edited by Brod and published for the first time in 1953, was published in 2008 under the title Dearest Father. The implications of this change in title will not be elaborated here, but certainly should not go unnoticed.

I would like to open this presentation with a few remarks about the nature and use of rhetorical questions in general. According to linguist Gideon Burton, the rhetorical question is a figure of speech presented in question form and posed for its persuasiveness without the expectation of a reply. Theorist JL Austin, the founder of the term “speech act,” in his famous work How to Do Things with Words, argues that what is crucial to constructing meaning from statements is to turn away from what the speaker of this statement may intend or mean, and instead to examine, as Jonathan Culler puts it, “the conventional rules involving features of the context.” That is, if in the suitable situation I say to you, professor Gelber, “I promise to turn in my paper to you by tomorrow,” I have, according to Culler, “made a promise, whatever was running through my mind at the time; and conversely, when earlier in this sentence I wrote the words ‘I promise to turn in my paper to you by tomorrow,’ I did not succeed in making a promise, even if the thoughts in my mind were similar to those that occurred on an occasion when I did make a promise.” Austin’s text is complex; it’s arguments cannot be tweaked out here and now. What I wish to focus on, however, is his notion of what he calls ‘performatives,’ that is, those speech acts that do something in their very deliverance. Culler puts it nicely when he writes that Austin says of performative statements that they “actually perform the action to which they refer,” that is, when I say “Professor Gelber, I promise to turn in the paper to you by tomorrow,” I am accomplishing the act of promising.

When it comes to the issue of the rhetorical question in literary theory, there seems to be little available on the subject, and even less so in relation to the reading of literature. To my mind, however, a rhetorical question may be defined as an utterance which constitutes a speech act all its own, due to its carrying an implicit statement, and not question, as the question mark would normally indicate. What I propose to do here, then, is to point to several rhetorical questions in Kafka’s text and attempt to: 1. Extract meaning from these statements based on Kafka’s description of the context in which the questions were originally posed (according only to the author, of course), and 2. To address the ways in which the text itself performs the act of asking and also answering its own rhetorical questions through: 1. The text’s very existence (including its various parts made up of smaller responses to questions posed within the text), and 2. Kafka’s contextual notes regarding his father’s questions.

Austin further defines the performative speech act as “the utterance of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances.” In the case of Letter to His Father, Kafka’s expression of Hermann’s deplorable behavior and his own equally deplorable response is easily found. The notion of authority grossly overpowers all other subjects in the text, as Kafka recalls dozens of circumstances in which, he claims, he was verbally and emotionally abused, unfairly punished, insulted, and – most importantly for the present subject – silenced by his elder. Through Hermann’s words, Kafka was left speechless, “trampled underfoot,” incapable of response. He writes in the letter, “[Y]ou struck out with your words without much ado, you weren’t sorry for anyone, either during or afterwards, one was utterly defenseless against you.” He notes later, “The impossibility of getting on calmly together had one more result, actually a very natural one: I lost the capacity to talk… [A]t a very early stage you forbade me to speak. Your threat, ‘Not a word of contradiction!’ and the raised hand that accompanied it have been with me ever since.” And further, “You would say: ‘Not a word of contradiction!’ thinking that was a way of silencing the oppositional forces in me that were disagreeable to you, but the effect was too strong for me, I was too docile, I became completely dumb, cringed away from you, hid from you, and only dared to stir when I was so far away from you that your power could no longer reach me—at least not directly.” A final quote reveals the role of Kafka’s mother as the intermediary (which is, interestingly, the role that Kafka’s real mother took on, though not successfully, as the deliverer of the letter). “It was much less dangerous for the child to put questions to mother, sitting there beside you, and to ask Mother, ‘How is Father?’—so guarding oneself against surprises.”

In part, these quotations make up the “certain circumstances” or a “context” that deem all statements within these circumstances relevant, reasonable, and open to interpretation, according to Austin. The situation presented by Kafka in the letter sets the literary stage for the author’s free use of rhetorical questioning (both through recollections of his father’s questions and his own asking). Perhaps the most crucial situation set up by Kafka (crucial at least in terms of his desire to provide proof of his father’s punishment techniques) is one in which Kafka, as a young boy, is silenced and literally shut out for asking his father for a glass of water. “One night I kept on whimpering for water, not I am certain, because I was thirsty, but probably partly to be annoying, partly to amuse myself. After several vigorous threats had failed to have any effect, you took me out of bed, carried me out onto the pavlatche, and left me there alone for a while in my nightshirt, outside the shut door… I dare say I was quite obedient afterwards at that period, but it did me inner harm. What was for me a matter of course, that senseless asking for water, and the extraordinary terror of being carried outside were two things that I, my nature being what it was, could never properly connect with each other.” Kafka’s pavlatche memory reveals his father’s zipping up and shutting out of his young son who had merely asked, admittedly senselessly (and thus, as an aside, perhaps rhetorically), for a glass of water.

And since the stage as been set—the circumstances assembled—we can now look more carefully at the quoted rhetorical questions presented throughout the text, their various intended meanings (per situation), and further take a look at the text in its entirety as a response to a larger—perhaps the largest—rhetorical question of this text, if not—dare I say it—much of his writing.

According to Kafka’s examples in the letter, Hermann Kafka’s strength often came in the form of a rhetorical question. For instance, Kafka writes, “It was only necessary to be happy about something or other, to be filled with the thought of it, to come home and speak of it, and the answer was an ironical sigh, a shaking of the head, a tapping on the table with a finger. [And his father would ask]: ‘Is that all you’re so worked up about?… or ‘Where is that going to get you?’” And later, “An admonition from you generally took this form: ‘Can’t you do it in such-and-such a way?… You haven’t the time, of course?’ and so on. And each such question would be accompanied by malicious laughter and a malicious face.” Kafka later states, “I think of remarks that must positively have worn grooves in my brain, such as: ‘When I was only seven I had to push a barrow from village to village.’ ‘We all had to sleep in one room.’ ‘We were glad when we got potatoes.’… ‘I got nothing from home, not even when I was in the army, even then I was sending money home.’ ‘But for all that, for all that—Father was always Father to me. Ah, nobody knows what it means these days! What do these children know?… Does any child understand such things today?’” And Kafka not only provides the quotations, but also his responses. To Hermann’s admonishing question “Is that all you’re so worked up about?”, Kafka responds “Of course, you couldn’t be expected to be enthusiastic about every childish triviality… But that was not the point. Rather, by virtue of your antagonistic nature, you could not help but always and inevitably cause the child such disappointments…” To “can’t you do it in such and such a way?” Kafka replies, “One was, so to speak, already punished before one even knew that one had done something bad.” And to Hermann’s long list of childhood hardships and the follow-up questions, “What do these children know? And “Does any child understand such things today?” Kafka strikes out with “[T]here was no opportunity to distinguish oneself as you had done. Such an opportunity would first of all have had to be created by violence and revolution, it would have meant breaking away from home… But that was not what you wanted at all, that you termed ingratitude, extravagance, disobedience, treachery, madness. And so, while on the one hand you tempted me to it by means of example, story, and humiliation, on the other hand you forbade it with the utmost severity.” Kafka, however unsuccessfully or effectively, evades that fatherly shutting up of his child so typical of their relations.

And Hermann is not the only one asking questions in the text. Kafka too does so. He writes, “You were such a giant in every respect. What could you care for our pity or even our help?” And “You have a particularly beautiful, very rare way of quietly, contentedly, approvingly smiling, a way of smiling that can make the person for whom it is meant entirely happy. I can’t recall its ever having expressly been my lot in my childhood, but I dare say it may have happened, for why should you have refused it to me at a time when I still seemed blameless to you and was your great hope?” and regarding Kafka’s two failed attempts at marriage: “Marrying, founding a family, accepting all the children that come, supporting them in this insecure world and perhaps even guiding them a little, is, I am convinced, the utmost a human being can succeed in doing at all… it is not a matter of this Utmost at all, anyway, but only of some distant but decent approximation; it is, after all, not necessary to fly right into the middle of the sun, but it is necessary to crawl to a clean little spot on earth where the sun sometimes shines and one can warm oneself a little. (par)… How was I prepared for this?” To the last question Kafka himself replies, “As badly as possible. This is apparent from what has been said up to now.” Several such questions appear throughout Letter to His Father, some of which carry direct replies by the author, others which are left standing on their own. But whether Kafka replies to his own rhetorical questions in the text is of less importance than the fact of his asking them, for in doing so – and particularly in writing – he forces silence on his father, not unlike the silencing he describes to have received as a child and through to adulthood.

With some examples in mind, we can now address the nature of rhetorical questions and the Kafka-Hermann power dynamic. As discussed, rhetorical questions are open-ended, either not intended or unavailable for response. In Letter to His Father, however, Kafka attempts to turn the rhetorical into the “real” by answering questions that are generally understood as unanswerable. And in fact, Hermann cannot answer these questions, not only because they are rhetorical in nature, but also because they are written and not spoken, thus eliminating the possibility of direct response. Kafka prematurely incarcerates his father’s response, arrests his abilities of speech through a bizarre cat and mouse game in which the cat is poisoned by its prey.

It can be argued, then, that Kafka wishes to accomplish a transfer of power from his father – the authoritative speaker who generally owns and performs the right to ask the questions – unto himself, the addressee who has been paralyzed by his father’s brute force of speech and now wishes to perform the speech acts through response and, further, rhetorical questions of his own.

I would like to conclude with the argument that, including all of the rhetorical questions written within the text, the text itself may be read as a response to one major rhetorical question. “Dearest Father,” the letter opens, “You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you, and partly because an explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more details than I could even approximately keep in mind while talking. And if I now try to give you an answer in writing, it will still be very incomplete, because, even in writing, this fear and its consequences hamper me in relation to you and because the magnitude of the subject goes far beyond the scope of my memory and power of reasoning.” And though Kafka may claim that even a written response to this obviously rhetorical question still carries some of the weight of having to answer verbally in his father’s presence, the letter is, I believe, nonetheless no small effort of response on Kafka’s part.

And in one final act of defiance, perhaps revenge, Kafka takes the furthest possible step and responds to his own letter as he believes it may be received by Hermann. In other words, Kafka puts words into his father’s mouth, literarily responding to the larger text’s opening rhetorical question. He opens the paragraph: “If you look at the reasons I offer for the fear I have of you, you might answer..” For his own self-protection, Kafka both answers the rhetorical question his father “recently” posed, further responds to it in the form of questions, and in a final blow, takes control of his father’s potential retort by writing hypothetically, in quotations marks. After a final paragraph in which Kafka “answers” with “after all, this whole rejoinder—which can partly also be turned against you—does not come from you, but from me.” In these final words, but most strikingly in the hypothetical response of the father, Kafka succeeds in closing all gaps of response, leaving nothing unanswered, eliminating the possibility of opposition.

(I repeat: This paper was presented to a graduate seminar entitled “Reading Kafka and Brod” at Ben-Gurion University, Be’er Sheva, Israel on April 11, 2011. If you wish to use any of this paper for your own purposes, you MUST contact me (alana.sobelman@gmail.com) for permission. You may also contact me for citations of quotes written in the paper.)

Posted in Literature | Leave a Comment »

A Young Adult Novel that Truly Goes Against the Grain: Anna Levine’s ‘Free Fall’ (Greenwillow, 2008)

December 13, 2010 by Alana Sobelman

Teenage girls have their dramas. Hormones, crushes, clashes with friends, wrangles with parents, and, of course, self-doubt, are all included in the trials of the typical post-adolescent. But what happens when the average 18-year-old – influenced by MTV, fashion magazines, and potato chips – is stripped of her Levi’s, her concert tickets, and her mirror – and is (quite literally) dropped into real-life combat training?

Aggie, fresh out of high school and preparing for mandatory service, wants to join the most dangerous army unit in the Israeli Defense Forces. Driven by a heartfelt sense of nationalism combined with a basic love for her friends and family, she is swayed by no one. Her parents squawk at the notion of her carrying a weapon, and her sister and her best friend tease her; but her very traditional Moroccan grandmother and her humble love interest, Noah, give her a great deal of confidence.

Underweight for the combat unit’s requirements, Aggie proves to everyone that her physical size doesn’t hold a candle to her burning determination to stand on the front lines in defense of her country. Though dehydrated and exhausted from her first day of training, Aggie manages the strength to take on extra duties, including relieving a fellow soldier from night watch patrol.

In the midst of such tough situations, Levine manages to incorporate the small dramas that concern young women everywhere. Having rejected her boyfriend, Ben, Aggie finds herself drawn to her best friend’s brother, Noah, who is himself a combat soldier. It is not difficult to fall as hard into love with Noah as Aggie does – his hazel eyes are only second to his peaceful demeanor and sharp sense of humor.

All signs point in the direction of Aggie heading off to two years of combat training. She seems more than ready to go – to get into the dirt and to do something few women have done before. But fate has other plans. A barrage of rockets and escalading violence on the Northern border with Lebanon sends Aggie – to the utter disproval of her mother – to help rescue animals abandoned by frightful owners seeking shelter from rocket fire. Levine’s descriptions of the empty streets and abandoned homes in which Aggie finds herself are eerily accurate. And one wouldn’t ordinarily believe that weddings take place in bomb shelters, but Levine writes with an honesty that is hard to deny. Weddings do, in fact, take place in bomb shelters.

Though she may be young and a bit naïve at times, our young warrior Aggie, who indeed comes to feel like a kind of universal “daughter,” has an enthusiasm that is highly contagious. A difficult book to put down and a library must-have for anyone interested in Israeli life through the eyes of a young soldier, one only hopes for a sequel to ‘Free Fall’ – perhaps even a film.

Posted in Israel, Literature, Reviews | Leave a Comment »

Child’s Play, by the Golden Rule: How a bilingual Arab-Jewish School Stands the Southern Heat

July 10, 2010 by Alana Sobelman

Published in: The Jerusalem Post

Debbie Troen-Mathias’s youngest daughter, Shakked, was in kindergarten when the Gaza war began at the end of 2008. “When the rockets were coming in,” she recalls, “Shakked really wanted to be at kindergarten because she feels safe there.”

Troen-Mathias seems well-prepared when it comes to explaining the political situation to her children, all three of whom attend Hagar, the only bilingual Arab-Jewish school in the Negev region. During the war, Shakked, impressively inquisitive for her young age, says Troen-Mathias, “did know that the war was with the Palestinians, and we openly explained it to her to make sure she understood that it’s not black and white, and that war is painful on both sides.”

Shakked clearly understood the message when she said to her mother, “You know, when there’s a siren, I say ‘Shema Yisrael,’ and for the Muslims, Muhammad calls them and they take off their shoes and they bow.”

Troen-Mathias believes in the type of education that allows for knowledge of, and respect for, the other’s practices, even – and perhaps especially – during times of war. She says of Hagar’s teaching practices, “I don’t think it threatens her individuality and beliefs; she knows who she is.

“We are a traditional family, when I put them to sleep, we say Shema Yisrael. We come from a pluralistic home, and we keep kosher in the house.”

Above all, Troen-Mathias says, she wants her children to “feel comfortable with the people who believe differently than them and who look different than them, and not to believe everything that’s said to them.”

THE FOUNDING of Hagar was set in motion by a group of Jewish and Arab parents, academics, teachers, community organizers and others who decided that the status quo of public education in the Negev was insufficient in a large number of ways.

Catherine Rottenberg, a lecturer of literature and gender studies at Ben-Gurion University, is one of the founding parents of Hagar and sits on the pedagogic committee. She says Hagar fulfills a need for a platform where not only children, but also parents come together in an effort to pacify many of the fears associated with quality education through bilingualism and mutual acceptance of one another’s cultures, religions and historical narratives.

Another prime motivating factor for Rottenberg’s involvement is the existing inequality of education offered to Jewish versus Arab schools.

“In comparison to their Jewish counterparts,” she says, “Arab schools receive half the per-capita budget. It is therefore not very surprising that Arab students have the highest dropout rates and lowest achievement levels in the country.”

Sarab Abu-Rabia-Queder, a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University, has two children at Hagar, Mohammad in first grade and Yazan in pre-kindergarten. She also sits on the pedagogic committee. Sending her children to Hagar was a decision motivated less by the ideology of coexistence and multiculturalism, and more by the level of education and the opportunity for her children to learn about where they’re from and the traditions of their background.

“There are more than 8,000 Arab families in Beersheba,” she says, “and there is not one quality education system in the Negev that serves the Arab population.”

Abu-Rabia-Queder believes that Arab language and identity are crucial aspects of her children’s education.

“At home,” she says, “I want to emphasize our own narrative, our own culture. What is theirs is theirs and ours is ours, and my children have to know the difference. The language at home is Arabic. Some Arab families speak Hebrew at home.”

AS WITH Abu-Rabia-Queder, the fact that Arabic is taught alongside Hebrew at Hagar is one of the central reasons why many Arab parents send their children there. Such exposure to their native language, they believe, will help them to create an identity separate from – yet equal to – the one according to the widely-maintained Jewish narrative.

Hagar Student. Courtesy of Natalia Zourabova

Sending an Arab child to a Jewish school is a move that has some obvious drawbacks, says Abu-Rabia- Queder. Such a situation, she explains, “means that Arab children study in a different language, culture and religion than their own. They are not exposed to their own culture.”

Having studied in a Jewish high school, she speaks from her own difficult experience. “Arab students in Jewish schools suffer not only from marginalization but from discrimination and the feeling of being a stranger.” Refusing to take the risk of putting her children in an environment “saturated with alienation and prejudice,” she chose Hagar.

The biblical story of Hagar exposes the deep historical relationship between the different populations in Israel, and uncovers the different ways that land and memory can be simultaneously contested as well as shared.

Hagar, the biblical figure who appears both in the Bible and in Islamic texts (as Hajar), is an Egyptian maid who initially served Sarah and later became Abraham’s wife and mother of his first child. Subsequently, she was expelled with her young son Ishmael to Beersheba.

“During her life,” explains Rottenberg, “Hagar crossed several cultural and geographical boundaries. Hagar’s story calls upon us to adopt a critical point of view toward conflicting relations and practices in our society. The same desert region which she passed through thousands of years ago currently accommodates Jews and Arabs, who often find themselves in similar positions of marginality and strife.”

The kinship relations between Hagar, Abraham, Sarah, Ishmael and Isaac, Rottenberg remarks, “all invoke the inevitably close if often fraught relations between Muslims and Jews, Palestinians and Israelis, Arabs and Hebrews. Hagar’s story thus continues to be timely.”

End-of-the-year party at Hagar

What the majority of Israel’s population on both sides may call blind ideology in the face of past and present conflicts, the parents and teachers at Hagar call rational thinking. Indeed, for members of the school’s community, it is not only important to “create a community of co-existence through multicultural education,” as Hagar’s director of development Lauren Joseph puts it, but, in fact, “you can’t have one without the other.”

For these reasons, and the conclusion that, according to Rottenberg,“such inequality in education does not bode well for the future of the Jewish-Arab relationship,” several individuals in Beersheba took matters into their own hands when, in 2006, they opened Hagar, a bilingual kindergarten school whose focus is, as Joseph explains, “not only the creation of equality in the quality of education between Jews and Arabs, but also the creation of equality for Jews and Arabs living specifically in the Negev.”

Hagar's first grade class at the end-of-the-year party, themed 'World Day'

And what began three years ago as two classrooms – one kindergarten and one pre-kindergarten with approximately 25 children in each grade – has turned into a fully recognized institution, supported by the Ministry of Education, the Beersheba Municipality, the Hand-in-Hand Association and outside donors who help fund additional attributes of Hagar unseen at any other Israeli school.

NOW HOUSED in two separate buildings in Beersheba, Hagar currently has an enrollment of 72 students and 11 teachers. Next year, with the opening of a second- and third-grade class, as well as two nursery school groups, the total number of children enrolled will reach about 150. The class sizes and teacher-to-student ratio are motivating factors for many parents.

“We have small classes,” says Joseph, “and two teachers per class – a Jewish teacher and an Arab teacher, and then an additional teacher’s aide. It’s important that the children learn two languages, and that they learn not only through direct learning of one another’s language, but through acquisition.”

The teachers speak in their native languages, rarely translating one another and instead teaching different lessons in each language.

Unlike in the regular school system, where classrooms hold up to 35 or 40 children and one teacher, Hagar limits its classes to no more than 30.

The walls of the classrooms are adorned with the typical alphabet letters and pictures of people in different professions, such as doctors, police officers, athletes and so on. But because one of Hagar’s missions is to challenge the norms of gender taught in regular schools and the larger society, many of the pictures feature women in these roles. All of the words on the bulletin boards around the room are written in both Arabic and Hebrew, side by side.

First-graders sit in clusters of tables facing one another and kindergarteners generally learn in a circle formation, as opposed to the frontal-style teaching found in most other public schools.

Insaf Shart, whose four- and five-year-old children attend Hagar, was motivated by such a progressive structure of education.

“There are no other educational frameworks in Beersheba that are like this. And it was very important for me that the kids will also study in their native language and that they will get an education in Arabic.”

Shart, who grew up in an unrecognized Beduin settlement, points also to the Hagar community, where “every child is a child for himself. So they have Jewish friends who come to visit, and I have very good relationships with the Jewish parents. Through Hagar, the parents get to meet, not only inside the institution but outside as well.”

All of this is certainly not to say that there aren’t challenges to overcome when teaching two languages, nationalities, cultures and often contradicting versions of history to children who will grow up in the larger society outside Hagar – in an education system where cross-cultural learning between Arabs and Jews is not generally the status quo and national narratives clash, sometimes violently.

Olga Kuminova, whose two sons, Israel and Alexander, are in kindergarten and first grade, also knows that “Jewish parents are very hesitant [about sending their children to Hagar]. Most of them are determined that this is not an option for them.”

As in so many other areas of Israeli society, fear of the other dominates the feasibility of cross-cultural relations.

What undoubtedly concerns both Jewish and Arab parents who are considering sending their children to Hagar is the potential for religiously and politically biased teaching, especially when it comes to national days, holy days and history lessons.

Aware that this is a prime issue for many parents, Joseph explains that through Hagar’s model, “history is taught mostly via the holy days of the Jewish, Muslim and Christian religions.

“Teachers explain and tell stories, but it’s more to learn about identity, and also to learn who the other is and how to respect the other’s identity.”

A special program has been created to deal with national days – Holocaust Remembrance Day, Remembrance Day for Fallen Soldiers, Independence Day, Land Day – during which, says Joseph, “the kids learn the basics, things like ‘This is what happened on this day, someone’s feelings were hurt at this time.’ On a very basic level, there is the explaining of the story. This is also done to emphasize what it means to be free – personal freedom. And about what it means to be able to think what you want to think.

“Questions like ‘What does Independence Day mean? Does it mean to have a house and a home and a place to live?’ or ‘How would you feel if that was taken away?’ are looked at. The real emphasis is not on what happened in the past, but on moving into the future.”

Parents seem to agree.

WHEN IT comes to learning in what many parents may fear is a religiously biased or left-wing environment, Kuminova says, “I don’t feel that [leftist ideology] is very dominant, or that it shapes the curriculum, or that our kids are indoctrinated in some way that would bother me.

“I mean, I’m not really a left-wing person, though I guess it depends who’s looking.” Confirming the sentiment expressed by Joseph and Kuminova, Rottenberg explains, “Hagar’s community also includes families that are not necessarily leftist or have a different world view, but that still believe in quality education and in equality of education.”

As for the kind of religious education children receive at Hagar, parents such as Liat Nesher, whose two daughters are in the pre-kindergarten and kindergarten classes, are not concerned that Jewish education will be outweighed by what is taught about Islam or Christianity.

Of her older daughter, Yael, Nesher explained in a recent interview with the Jerusalem Post: “Maybe if she was in a different kind of kindergarten, there would be a larger influence religiously. But I think what is being exposed to her at Hagar is enough.”

Jewish, Muslim and Christian holy days, she points out, “are taught everywhere else in the world the same way. That’s the way the world goes.” She sees no need for something other than what most other democratically run public schools teach about religion.

Yet another difficult challenge Hagar faces is the need for outside funding. The school receives approximately 50 percent of its funds from within Israel, but this amount does not cover the costs of added benefits of Hagar’s program, including three extra hours of schooling per day, a fresh, hot lunch prepared daily, and extra activities that help bring the larger community of Arabs and Jews in the Negev together, including outings and picnics.

THE MINISTRY of Education and the Beersheba Municipality are among the school’s major supporters. Support also comes from Hand-in-Hand, a network of bilingual schools, of which Hagar is the youngest. Unlike the other three Hand-in-Hand schools, however, Hagar is administered by its own board of directors and raises its own funds. Support from within Israel is generally allotted toward teacher training programs and books.

The remaining funds come from outside sources, including the Jewish Foundation of San Francisco, the United States Embassy, the Sobell Foundation and other organizations from the US, Europe and Japan.

The teachers at Hagar, all certified public educators, have been re-trained according to the principles set forth by the association.

Rada el-Ubra, an Arab teacher of one of Hagar’s kindergarten classes, gladly reports that “the children do not distinguish between Jewish and Arab when it comes to friendship. They live together.

They know that there are Jewish, Muslim and Christian religions, and everyone maintains his or her own identity and nationality. But, again, they get along well – they play together and they learn together.”

At Hagar, says Abu-Rabia-Queder, “the children grow up together as human beings, but without giving up each child’s personal narrative. They get to know each other’s side.

Growing up together helps them know each other, and not [see each other] through prejudice masks.”

She believes that Jewish and Arab parents, “if they try to look at Hagar from the inside, they will see it is a better system.

“It’s education for peace and love, not education for hate between nations. And because of the bad situation in which we live today, this is the best way toward coexistence. And coexistence is the only real existence.”

Posted in Activism, Conflict/Resolution, Culture, Interviews, Israel | 1 Comment »

Listening to the Past: Esther Dischereit reflects on her Holocaust installation in Germany and latest exhibition in Jerusalem

July 8, 2010 by Alana Sobelman

Published in The Jerusalem Post

‘I’m interested in giving a voice to the voiceless,” says author Esther Dischereit. “My work is influenced by voices. I want to pick up the voices of those who lived and those who died, to intermingle the dead with the living. I want to know what voices do they all have?” Her poetry, novels, stories, essays and plays for stage and radio have earned her numerous grants, fellowships and awards, including the Moses Mendelssohn Fellowship and the Erich Fried Prize, the most prestigious literary prize awarded by Austria. Her work, including Joëmi’s Table, A Jewish Story, Exercises in Being Jewish, With Eichmann at the Stock Exchange, When My Golem Came to the Door, A Slice of Bread in the Toaster and a recently published short story collection, The Morning the Paperboy, has been acclaimed in literary reviews and is set high on the reading lists of university courses throughout Europe, the US and Canada. She has been published in magazines and newspapers in Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Argentina and Colombia.

According to Prof. Mark Gelber, head of the Center for German Studies at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, “Esther Dischereit is considered by many observers to be the most important Jewish writer today who was born and grew up in Germany and continues to write in German in Germany, something that was until only recently considered to be taboo or indecent or inappropriate by many Jews throughout the world.”

Born in 1952 in Heppenheim, to a mother who had survived the Holocaust in hiding with her daughter from an earlier marriage, Dischereit was deeply affected by her silence regarding the experience. “I was in this typical relationship with my mother where she didn’t talk much. And in a way I knew, but I in fact did not know much. I didn’t want to know much. This is the silence I work with. The silence was there, but in a way it was full of words.

Like speaking—I had to pick it up somehow.

There was no story which was told to me. And I’m still picking.”

DISCHEREIT’S ROUTE TOWARDS writing was paved with odd jobs. Although she studied in Frankfurt am Main and was trained as a teacher, she also worked in the metal industry and later as a typesetter and worker for the German trade unions.

One of Dischereit’s many domains of interest is sound. Considered a “rhythmic poet,” she has produced moving radio plays broadcast by major German radio stations and is celebrated for her collaboration with jazz musicians and composers for the project “WordMusic- Space/Sound-Concepts.”

Two years ago, Dischereit succeeded in winning a competition in Dülmen—a small city in the German state of North-Rhine Westphalia—for the most original German-Jewish project honoring the city’s former Jewish inhabitants.

With a solid concept in mind, Dischereit began the construction of a sound installation in one of its central parks, now named Eichengrün Square after an affluent Jewish department store owner who once lived there. The Dülmen installation, which was adapted into book form in 2009, is now the focus of an exhibition at the Goethe Institute in Jerusalem entitled “Vor den Hohen Feiertagen gab es ein Flüstern und Rascheln im Haus” – Before the High Holy Days the House Was Full of Whisperings and Rustlings.

Collaborating with typographer Veruschka Götz and musician Dieter Kaufmann, Dischereit planned the exhibition, which runs until October 2, to feature a visual representation of her sound installation in Dülmen.

The installation consists of two audio speakers situated in different locations in the park, where, she explains, “pedestrians walk, eat lunch or sit at tables around the square and talk while their children play.” The concept behind the installation comes from Dischereit’s interest in “accidental listening.”

The voice heard from a small speaker placed in a hedge behind a park bench is that of a woman reciting one of 55 “sound-marks,” several of which are first and last names, in no particular order. Read in a deliberate but peaceful tone, the names are ordinary ones.

“You sit here or you sit there,” Dischereit says. “And you don’t know necessarily why. And you sit and talk with people and then you sit back like you always would, and if you lean far enough, you hear a recording for one, two or three minutes. If you like what you hear, you stay.”

Because the recording is manually triggered, she explains, “if you don’t activate it on purpose, it stops. So you hear it for the first time by accident, and only later by choice.”

While preparing the project, Dischereit spent many hours in Dülmen’s historical archives, logging the names of the Jews who lived there in the last few centuries.

Considering that the majority of the city’s Jews were killed in the Holocaust, she contemplated collecting the names of those who survived beyond 1942. “I had to decide,” she explains, “would I mention only the people who were murdered? And I decided not to. If I would have divided them, I would have split families. When you think of a family, you think of them all.”

A central challenge Dischereit faced was how to make it known that the names recited were those of the Jews who formerly lived in Dülmen. “The Nazis wanted to make the invisible Jewishness visible by creating the race issue,” she says. “I had to ask myself, ‘How can I myself make these people visible, and not others?’” Her solution was to scramble the first and last names for the recording as a way to reiterate the former Jewish presence in the city without forcefully prompting listeners to recognize them.

“When I decided to include the names of the people,” she recalls, “the actress [whose voice is on the recording] couldn’t differentiate the families from one another. She said I had made a mistake, but in fact I didn’t at all. I wanted it like this, because the way people today think of the Jews of the past has led to the creation of an indefinable mass of people. I wanted to both represent this fact while still including the names.”

The second sound installation in the market square is attached to a lantern and plays a minute-long recording once a day between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m.; the time changes daily and cannot be predicted.

Resonating from the lantern are cooking recipes that were once prepared by Jews all over Germany.

“It’s only one minute and is something of an intervention in the day,” explains Dischereit. “It jumps over your day, and you won’t know when.

It’s a reference to when Jewish people were eating here; but of course, it’s also a reference to their absence… It’s very clear that many Germans honor these recipes themselves; they are not so different from what the Germans ate in the past.”

The sound-marks from the lantern speaker, unlike the activated recording behind the park bench –which leaves the listener to choose whether or not it sounds – says Dischereit, “never really end. You are never ‘done’ with it; its random activation at any point in the day cannot be turned off by choice.”

The voice of the speaker – a man with a “terrible American accent” – was carefully chosen by Dischereit, who reveals that “the everyday life in Jewish terms comes back through the voice of the stranger, the outsider, the other. It also refers to the liberation of German Jews by the Allies. Making an American voice present in everyday life in this little market square shows one of the realities of the past as well, and one that should also be honored.”

THE DÜLMEN INSTALLATION, she says, is an effort “to create a new discourse about the past, to illustrate how the past intermingles with the present, especially if it’s not asked for. It’s really placed in the middle of everywhere and anywhere, where people do ordinary things – they eat and meet there; the installation itself is not very beautiful or prestigious at all.”

Many had been afraid that Dischereit’s installation might be intrusive – an irksome reminder of the Nazi persecution to pedestrians expecting only to go about their everyday comings and goings. Dischereit disagrees, however, and explains, “I respect that this is a public space for everyone to sit and eat if they want to. And I don’t want to force anyone to feel ugly or bad if they want to come here. I simply say that all these absent people are there, even if you go to there to eat. You can pass, you can go on eating, but you can also stop for a minute, even longer if you’d like.

Still, I know that this is a public space and I do not want to dominate it with ghosts who have not chosen to be there.”

She also strays from any direct reference to the Holocaust and focuses her attention on recalling the past in a way that respects the dead, without placing blame on the Germans of today. “I always had in mind while working,” she says, “that if someone would come over, an immigrant or a dead person, and could listen, would they ask if this is the right voice? Would this be respectful to them? Doing this work, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to be both respectful toward the dead on the one hand, and also toward the everyday life of the pedestrians there.”

Her role is neither to educate nor to present numbers and dates, she explains. “I can do what others do,” she says, “like teachers and historians who try to pull out the biographies of people.

But I just show what happened, that the identities and biographies have all become intermingled – they have all become the same.”

Dischereit’s decision to record the names in no particular order drives this point home – the Holocaust has indeed become an event that is often perceived to have happened to a nameless mass.

Her work simultaneously depicts and rejects this idea by delivering fragments of names and the recipes that those behind the names once followed.

She adds that coping as a second-generation Holocaust survivor played a crucial role in the project. “I think that I would not have been able to do this if I would not have been the child of a Jewish mother who survived in hiding with my older sister,” she explains. “I myself had to look for splinters.”

Dischereit’s complete installation in Eichengrün Square is lastly a response to the countless Holocaust memorials and museums throughout the world that serve to “victimize the Jews, rather than to encourage the existence they once had and the places they populated.”

“I wanted this intermingling between the dead and the living,” she explains, “because it’s not interesting to build one monument after the other for deadness…

For me, such displays seem like the Germans’ attempt to fulfill the ritual of burial. The Germans did not bury their brothers and sisters, and there’s no way to do it now. So in a way I’m saying that whatever side you were on– and most families were on the side of Hitler – you didn’t manage to get rid of the Jews. And if you feel sorrow about it, that’s fine. But even if you don’t, they were there.”

The visual depiction of Dischereit’s work at the Goethe Institute, created by Veruschka Götz, is an intriguing reflection on Before the High Holy Days the House Was Full of Whisperings and Rustlings. Several placards line the walls of the exhibition, each riddled with text, much of which is incomprehensible at first glance. The words are often split in half; full sentences are truncated, leaving only words that, unless combined with words from later sentence fragments, cannot be deciphered on their own.

Götz, a professor of design and typography in Mannheim and the author of several internationally-recognized books, is pleased to have been chosen to create a textual adaptation of Dischereit’s work. “I’ve known Esther for a very long time,” she says, “and one day she came to me and asked me if it was possible to find a typographer interested in the subject of her installation.”

As Götz is not Jewish, the two women questioned the possibility of a shared understanding of Dischereit’s concept, but came to a point of agreement; Dischereit left the rest up to Götz.

The fragments on the walls of the exhibition are a solid representation of the complexities of memory in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Dischereit could not help but hear the voices of the lost lingering in Dülmen to this very day. Her attempt is not to scare or ostracize, but rather to remind not only the population living there now, but somehow the city itself that though the Jewish people are absent, they can nonetheless be heard through the recipes they once prepared and the families of which they were part.

Her desire to “know how the absent are present, even if they are not looked for,” has led her to create an exceptional installation that summons not only the Jewish ghosts in Dülmen, but of those throughout Europe.

The original Before the High Holy Days the House Was Full of Whisperings and Rustlings installation can be viewed on-line at www.eichengruen-platz.de.

The Jerusalem exhibition runs until October 2 at the Goethe Institute, Rehov Sokolov 15. Go to www.goethe.de/ins/il/jer/ for more information.

Posted in Arts, Culture, Interviews, Literature, Reviews, Shoah | 1 Comment »

Odd Commonalities: Jaeun Chung, from South Korea to Kibbutz Or-Haner

June 18, 2010 by Alana Sobelman

Published in The Jerusalem Post

As many Israelis likely know, the greatest volume of new immigrants to Eretz Yisrael are of North American, European, South American, North and South African, or Ethiopian descent. It is rare to find immigrants from Asia, however, and it is even rarer to find immigrants from East Asia.

Jaeun Chung, however, defies all stereotypes and assumptions. South Korean-born and raised, Chung has made a life for herself here. What started as a small curiosity led Chung from kibbutz volunteering, to Jewish conversion, and finally to full Israeli citizenship.

Life in Israel before aliya

In South Korea, Chung explains, “there are many books about Talmud and many Torah stories for kids.” This no doubt seems odd to many, but, as she explains, “Koreans think that Jewish education is the best. The Korean people always try to learn from others.” Aside from what she was taught in school, she began at a young age to read some books on her own, and became more and more interested in Judaism.

Her childhood inquiries into Judaism and Israel reemerged somewhat surprisingly while she was in her third year of undergraduate studies in computer science engineering at Chang Ju University. Mid-studies, she recalls, “I realized that this is not really what I wanted. You know, you try to find yourself at that age.”

At 21 and “kind of lost,” Chung read about the ‘Working Holiday’ program, which provides young people with visas to travel to a number of countries to do volunteer work. As she read on, she says, “I looked at the list [of countries] and I said, you know what, ‘I want to be a volunteer in Israel because the culture there is really different from what I know.’ I also believe that Torah is one of the foundations of religion in the world, except for Buddhism.” She soon found a branch of the program at Kibbutz Or-Haner.

Compounded by the South Korean-taught belief that Israel is one of the pinnacles of Western culture and education, her eagerness to learn more about the country strengthened and she decided once and for all: “I have to go to Israel and I have to meet these people.” She signed up, bought herself a ticket and made the move that would change her life in drastic and remarkable ways.

First Visit

Chung had traveled by plane only a few other times before her trip, and never alone. She realized when she landed that as much as she was interested in discovering one of the smallest countries in the Middle East, she wasn’t so prepared for the minor details. “When I first came,” she said, emphasizing her nervousness, “The [Working Holiday] people told to go to some office in Tel Aviv. Then I found out that most volunteers that come for Working Holiday take two days to travel in Tel Aviv before they begin working. But me? I went straight to the office. And they told me, ‘You’re going to Kibbutz Or-Haner.’ Most volunteers want to go to Ein Gedi, but I said, ‘fine, you want me to go there? Then I’m going there.’”

When Chung arrived at the primarily South American-populated kibbutz, despite the obvious differences in culture, religion and certainly appearance, she says, “I felt, ‘I’m at home.’ Obviously, I’ve been here 11 years now!” In fact, she explains, “I never felt any racism on the kibbutz or that they treated me differently than the other volunteers. Actually, they treated me as a really good worker. There were others. Swedish, English—all white, blond girls,” she jokes. “But they asked me to be the manager of the dining hall. They treated me as an individual.”

As a volunteer Chung found enjoyment in the work. “I was committed to meeting young people on the kibbutz,” she says. Interestingly, however, she found her strongest ties to the kibbutz’s elders – “The Zionists.” “I got really attached to them,” she explains. “I traveled to Jerusalem with them and leaned about Torah and Talmud from them.” The idea of Zionism and a trip to Jerusalem with the old-timers strongly contributed to her growing attachment to Israel and awakened in her the possibility of staying.

Conversion

In 1999 Chung studied Hebrew for the first time. As her language skills improved, she began searching around for ‘Ulpan Giur,’ a Hebrew language learning program that caters to potential Jewish converts. After several months and some difficulty convincing others of her seriousness about conversion, she found Kuvtzt Yavne, a religious kibbutz in the country’s center district. A couple of months after opening a file at a Ramat Gan rabbinate office, she began studying.

“People on the kibbutz, they were kind, I was adopted by a family; until today I have family there. We keep in touch.” After studying for six months and subsequently undergoing the bureaucratic annoyances experienced by most new immigrants, she says with relief, “I finally converted.”

About conversion, Chung explains, “I chose to be in Israel even though I am not Jewish originally. I choose to become Jewish. It was not easy—nothing was easy to become who am I today—but I did not look for an easy way out. This is one thing that I may have in common with the Jewish-born people. I mean in the history of the Jewish people, there was never an easy way to face problems.”

The aliya process

In 2002, with conversion certificate in hand, Chung went to a misrad hapnim (ministry of interior office), where, she laughs, “they gave me my conversion ID that moment and they told me that I had to make Aliya. So I went to the misrad haklita (immigration office) and they gave me a teudat oleh (new immigrant ID) and explained to me what benefits I had… And I didn’t get much.” But what was the most meaningful benefit to Chung was the opportunity to study for a Bachelors degree, tuition-free.

Language

Although succeeding in a Hebrew course and feeling quite confident, she says, “The madrich (guide) for a psychometric exam told me, ‘I don’t understand what you’re doing here. I don’t get it.’ I told him, ‘You know, I’m here and I’m trying my best.’” Today, having completed her BA entirely in Hebrew, Chung is fluent—working, studying, and even writing in Hebrew.

Studies

As is the case for many students, Chung faced difficulties understanding the complicated inner workings of college administration. Before starting her BA, she says, she went to an admission secretary, hoping to get help with her course schedule. “So, I thought,” she says, “’[the secretary] is supposed to speak to me in Hebrew.’ And she told me over and over ‘marechet’ (system).’ And I asked, ‘What’s marechet?’ And she told me a room number and I went. I was standing in line, waiting. And I had no idea what I was doing there.” Eventually Chung obtained her first-year schedule.

Studies for the new immigrant were not so easy. “I didn’t understand anything,” she says laughingly. “And only at the end of the year did I remember one word that is the most basic word of the whole subject. So imagine my grade. It was bad.”

Despite the discouragement, she managed to pull off passing grades and after some time working has now moved into an MA in anthropology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Work

Chung has proven herself to be quite marketable in several fields. During BA studies she worked in an export factory where she single-handedly opened up a Korean market for the business. At the same time she worked in the Human Resources Department on the kibbutz, calculating numbers and salaries. “More than Hebrew,” she jokes, “I’m good at numbers.”

In 2007, when she finished her first degree, she was hired by the Korean Commercial Embassy (KOTRA) and Berlitz to teach Korean to the Israeli ambassador to Korea. Although the ambassador is, understandably, now in South Korea, Chung continues to teach his wife in Jerusalem. She has also recently taken a job at a small hi-tech company.

Cultural Changes

Surprising as it may sound, Chung believes that there are far more similarities between Israeli social and behavioral norms and those of South Korea. For instance, in South Korea, she says, “army is also a duty. Just like here, army stories are always shared between friends there. When they sit they often talk about the army.” And as the population of her hometown of Seoul is over 10 million people, she compares the often perceived pushiness of people in the bigger cities of Israel to the hustle and bustle of Seoul.

A major difference, however, according to Chung has much to do with family life. “Most of my friends in South Korea are not married. They also have only one or no children.” In Israel, however, she feels “more of a family unit” mentality. Since Chung is married but without children, she sometimes feels alienated on the family-oriented kibbutz where she lives. Nonetheless, it is clear that her values are in line with the Israeli version of “la familia.”

As Chung describes her experiences, the notion of “opportunity” pops up now and then; she believes that Israel “gave me many opportunities I couldn’t have in the United States or Europe. I feel free. I feel like there are no limits. And many people have helped, and with my luck, there were always people there at the right time and the right place. There was always someone around the corner to help, always someone pushing me a little. If not for this help, I couldn’t make it here.”

Looking Ahead

Included in the many accomplishments that Chung has made since her initial visit in 1999 to her Aliya in 2002 to now, is her involvement in an important project that will create never-before seen ties between Israel and South Korea. At Ben-Gurion University, Chung has teamed up with Professor Aviad Raz and the Israeli ambassador to South Korea to build relations between the two countries through a university exchange program. Chung points out that “South Koreans don’t know anything about Israel and Israelis don’t know anything about South Korea. So this will allow each to learn from the other and to know each other. I really think it can be helpful for each country.”

The similarities between the two countries also play a role in her desire to create a bridge between them: “In 1948, South Korea was also recognized as a country, and the economic situations are quite similar.” For Chung, “it would be really interesting to see the connection between the two countries. So if I can give a little push in the middle, why not?”

But as with most future plans, there are always challenges. Chung also has hopes to become an anthropologist, which means that her studies continue without the benefits of free tuition she was awarded at Sapir College. And now, her studies and job, along with her efforts to become a native-level Hebrew and English-speaker has proven to be somewhat difficult.

Home

Some are inclined to come to Israel for religious reasons, others for familial reasons, and others still for ideological reasons. But Jaeun Chung may be one of the very few who has made a successful aliya for the most basic wish, as she puts it simply, “to feel at home.”

Posted in Interviews, Israel | 4 Comments »

Who is your B-G? An exhibition asks artists to share their visions of the nation’s first prime minister

May 14, 2010 by Alana Sobelman

Published in The Jerusalem Post

On Yom Ha’atzmaut in 1958, as the story goes, a man of small stature with unmistakable puffs of stark white hair planted on each side of his otherwise bald head ordered the establishment of the very first national exhibition. The occasion was the 10th anniversary of Israel’s independence and the pieces exhibited were meant to display the most notable accomplishments in the country’s short history.

The man with the order was Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and he insisted that he see all of the works before the exhibition opened to the public.

Yosef Zaritsky, the most important artist of that time, created a piece just for the exhibit entitled Otzma (Power). Despite the artist’s talent and fame, however, Ben-Gurion wasn’t pleased with the work. He looked at his assistant and asked, “What is it?” The assistant responded, “It deals with power.” The little man then raised his hand and flapped it in the air, shoving off the work as if swatting an irritating insect. “It was the biggest war between the king of art and the leader of the country,” said painter, professor and curator Haim Maor, “and Zaritsky backed down.”

One thing Ben-Gurion was not, stressed Maor, was an artist. In fact, “He didn’t understand art at all.”

Maor is curator of the first art exhibition featuring works solely representing Ben-Gurion entitled “The Old Man.” The exhibition, which runs through June 8 at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, contains 140 works that reflect the artists’ links to the leader, whether through his iconicity or from childhood stories or through personal relationships with him.

“Each and every one of the artists here has his or her own biographical details that influence the way they see Ben-Gurion,” Maor said as he traversed the exhibition, offering historical anecdotes about the artists and their works. Some pieces flatter and others criticize Ben-Gurion, but all reveal, said Maor, “his human parts.”

Hanging in the exhibition is an intriguing work painted by Eliahu Eric Boucobza, Cultural Icon as Self-Portrait, which presents three side-by-side portraits – the first depicting Ben-Gurion holding a sheep, the second of Groucho Marx with a cat and the third of Albert Einstein cradling a rocket. What the three figures have most in common are their almost identical hairstyles.

As Boucobza explained, “David Ben-Gurion is an icon. He’s like Marilyn Monroe… And no one can say that he didn’t have the humor of Marx or the genius of Einstein.” Boucobza revealed the reason for the likeness in hairdo: “You take a round shape and put two bunches of hair on each side and everyone recognizes that that’s Ben-Gurion.” The three men, said Boucobza, “are all hair-challenged, which allowed me to bring in some of the more fun part of my perception of Ben-Gurion.”

Eliyahu Eric Boucobza "Self-Portrait as Cultural Icon"

Most, it seems, are wary of poking fun at the notoriously tough Ben-Gurion, but as Maor said, “no man is holy… every human being is going to the bathroom and doing things that human beings just do. It’s the biggest honor to give a man, to see him at eye level and not to represent him as a superior being.”

It may be true that Ben-Gurion would not be flattered by several of the pieces that depict him in less-than-complimentary shades, such as Noam Nadav’s Depletion of the Spirit in the Holy Land, a cartoon showing him as a pharaoh chasing several haredim through a desert landscape. But what the exhibit reaffirms is the power of Ben-Gurion as a man who changed Israel’s history in major ways. So whether he is praised or harshly criticized, as Boucobza remarked, he is always “deeply encrusted in memory.”

MANY OF the pieces portray Ben-Gurion as a larger-than-life figure, chin raised, eyes determined, back stiff and upright. And though the first prime minister may not have understood anything about art, he definitely knew how to use his small stature in ways that would maximize the power of his national image. According to Sigal Drori-Pazy, one of Maor’s art students, Ben-Gurion “had an awareness of how he was being portrayed. He knew how to market himself.” Maor added, “He studied rhetoric and trained himself in body language. He knew he was short, so he used a lot of techniques to make himself look taller.”

He also employed the media very consciously, according to Maor; in fact, Ben-Gurion’s photographers “would always shoot from below, which made him look bigger. Like Mussolini – who of course has nothing to do with Ben-Gurion – you won’t see any photo of Mussolini where he looks short. He’s always pictured from the bottom up.”

The exhibition’s photographs for the most part seem to fall into the B-G-as-hero category, but there are several images that depict an individual completely unlike the powerful Zionist superstar of our collective memory. Well-known photographer David Rubinger, for instance, who spent much time with Ben-Gurion, caught major moments that went unpublished in newspapers. One exposes a head-wounded Ben-Gurion on a hospital gurney following a terror attack. Beside the picture hangs a photograph of the man in his hospital bed, sleeping like a child. These snapshots instantly transform a superhero into an injured everyman, a person whose power of body language has been disrupted.

Litvinovsky, Pinchas "David Ben-Gurion"

Other works can be examined as reflective of the ways in which older generations have glorified Ben-Gurion, regardless of the historical setbacks that resulted from his actions. These works, such as photographer Paul Goldman’s famous A Leader Standing on His Head or painter Pinchas Litvinovsky’s stunning Matisse-reminiscent portrait, David Ben-Gurion, may represent a yearning for the days of inspirational leaders. The exhibition is also saturated with works that almost deify the leader, some quite literally, such as Neta Elkayam’s Baba Gurion, which depicts Ben-Gurion pensively studying Kabbala like the famous Rabbi Yisrael Abuhatzeira, the Baba Sali, who is said to have performed miracles.

Maor stressed the reflective quality of the exhibition, remarking that it can be viewed affectionately as “a portrait of Israeli society. It’s how we see him – with yearning and nostalgia – because we have the feeling that with all of the things that weren’t so good, still he was a man who was a leader and a man of the people… Ben-Gurion, no matter what he did, he took responsibility, and today there’s the feeling that our leaders – in every field – they don’t take responsibility. We expect them to make decisions and they don’t. And so we use him as a general example of someone who can assert himself… Today you see that this is missing, someone with these horizons.”

And Shlomo Suriano, one of the country’s first filmmakers and a harsh critic of the downward path of politics since Ben-Gurion’s era, expressed a similar outlook. He spent a week with Ben-Gurion on his kibbutz in 1966 to film him in his most “natural” environment. Suriano’s memories are vivid, even at 93. During the kibbutz visit, he said, “I tried to bring him to the flock of sheep to shoot the film. The idea was to show the film to the public to bring some money to the kibbutzim. So I asked him to go to the sheep. And Ben-Gurion asked me naively, but very sincerely, ‘So you think that sheep will bring money to the kibbutz?’ And this was his humor.”

Suriano with Ben-Gurion, 1966 (from Suriano's collection)

Suriano shared another tale in which he went into Ben-Gurion’s room in the small shack where he lived during filming. “I was in his room,” he said, “and [Ben-Gurion] said there was a problem with the rubber band around the faucet. So he said, ‘You know the problem in the world is that there’s not enough water in the desert.’ So I said okay, and he gave me some plans for resolving the desert’s water problems. Then I repeated, ‘So what about the rubber band?’ And Ben-Gurion looked at me and said, ‘This is a complicated problem. I have had enough.’”

The admiration Suriano feels for Ben-Gurion is unshakable. He illustrates through his work these stories as well as the vestiges of his intimate relationship with the country’s first prime minister. The work is highly valuable to the collection as it strengthens the viewer’s ties to Ben-Gurion in a personal – and likely for many, nostalgic – way.

AS MAOR wandered in and out of the puzzle-like spaces of the collection during the interview, sharing small anecdotes about the artists and their work, he explained the exhibition’s conception. “We received a request to make an exhibition about Ben-Gurion from Ben-Gurion University president Rivka Carmi for the 40th anniversary of the university’s existence.” Maor was at first surprised to find that “there was a huge amount of material” to exhibit. Artists began to say things like, “You have no idea what Ben-Gurion was to me when I was a kid.” This is when he realized that “everyone has a personal story that’s connected to [Ben-Gurion] or to his family.”

Drori-Pazy added, “Everyone can find himself here and ask himself, ‘Who is my David Ben-Gurion?’”

In the end, “The Old Man” looks something like an elaborately detailed diary full of pages written by artists who knew him, who knew about him, and those, like Boucobza, who knew only that he represented something huge. Through the exhibition Ben-Gurion can now be fully recognized as a reflective staple of past events, both major and minor, a mirror image of the country’s present political underbelly in the broad public sphere, and an illustration of the stuff of childhood stories, in the private sphere.

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