On Patriotism and Independence

Three summers ago, when I was first preparing to move to Israel, I frequently wore a pair of flip-flops with American flag designs; stars and stripes, red white and blue, non-running colors, and so on. They were my dad's sandals, though, so I had to buy a new pair and give those back to him. When I did, he made a joke about how Israel, "won't be so crazy to have flip-flops like that."

Wolla! Thanks, Google!!

This is where I could paste in a picture of big old blue and white star of David Israeli flip-flops, but I wasn't sufficiently vigilant in finding them on the streets. You'll have to take my word for it: they exist.

Israel is a pretty patriotic place, I'm saying. In a time where some Americans are reconnecting with their patriotic feelings, while other Americans are repelled by the jingoistic overtones that accompany those patriotic feelings, I find myself in one of the few places in the world more patriotic than America. That's not a scientific finding. Nor do I have a lot of hard evidence about how patriotic countries besides the U.S.A. and Israel are; I know Russians are rather proud of their country, and May 8th, V-E day, is a day I'm to remember every year to congratulate my WWII Red Army veteran grandfather for; I didn't notice any overwhelming pride during my two months in Spain, but then not again, I wasn't there during the summer of 2008 or 2010 when the football team, La Furia Roja, took the world and country by storm. I will grant that most countries are patriotic to some degree or another, and maybe it's not fair to rank them on their respective levels of flag-waving and chest-beating. That said, I am sticking to my premise of the U.S.A. and Israel being very patriotic, and focus on those two countries, especially Israel.

(Note: I don't think Luxembourg, my next home, will score very high on the patriotic scale.)

Today is Independence Day. Yesterday was Memorial Day. The juxtaposition is intended to remind observers of the bittersweet struggle for independence and security that has been waged through several wars, ongoing fears, and 63 years, while also attesting to the country's desire for peace and acceptance. (I am not discussing the contemporary political issues of 2011 here, so feel free to read that last clause at face value or as skeptically as you deem necessary.) The holidays, as with all Jewish and Israeli holidays, go from sunset to sunset. Yom Hazikaron (Memorial Day) starts with a siren at 8pm, where the whole nation is to stand still in silence. There are services that night; the next day at 11am, another siren and set of services. And then that night, on to partying.

This year, there was a unique twist to the combination: Euroleague basketball. Maccabi Tel Aviv, one of the strongest European basketball clubs, something of a Yankees of the Israeli leagues, with all the good and bad that comes with such a connotation, was competing in the Champions League finals against a Greek squad, Panathinaikos. The twist was that once Maccabi made the final, they were slated to play at 5:30, an earlier time than originally planned: the final four organizers in Barcelona agreed to bump up the game to accommodate MTA's wishes to not play during Memorial Day, when all the TV stations go black for the siren and then broadcast services or memorial themed documentaries and programs. The nation hung on both the success or failure of Maccabi's game and the time it took to play, wondering if they could go about their rituals and still see if Maccabi would pull it out.

Though Israelis either love or hate Maccabi in the domestic context, once they play abroad, the team has a full country behind them. The Ha'aretz, the center-left newspaper I read, had an article boasting of Maccabi's fervent fans, outnumbering and outbellowing the other Final Four teams' fanbases while adorned in a sea of yellow, Maccabi's color.  Living on a main street in Herzliya, I could hear air horns and cheers from my window leading up to game time, then the hushed attention of people watching the game, and then the dying wheeze of a fanbase that realized it would only be next year - Panathinaikos was too strong.

The positive feelings for the country did not dissipate along with the dreams of Euroleague glory. The next day at school, after a nice, politically correct service about remembrance and world peace put on by high school students, I had a long talk with a new immigrant to Israel, a mother in her late 40s from an NYC suburb who professed Bronx-accented appreciation for her oldest son deciding to move here first and join the army, who wondered how to persuade her younger son to serve the country, and who talked about how her son's commanding officer gave parents his phone number in case of emergency, filling surrogate teacher and parent roles at once. I don't say that I shared oolll of the same views as this mother from oolllmost the Bronx, but it was thought-provoking in the very least.

Last night was the night of the big celebration, from which all these photos (except the shoe) come. I had no plans to go anywhere unless invited to something, but the constant din of horns, both the ones blown by mouth ala last summer's vuvuelzas and the ones kids could just push a button to sound, the little bastards (both kids and horns), and the proximity of Herzliya's festivities spurred me to get out of the apartment. I grabbed my camera and went for a stroll on Ben Gurion street, the main drag in Herzliya, hosting the Yom Haatzmaut (Independence Day) activities and named after the first prime minister and major founding father of the country, David Ben Gurion (the George Washington of Israel, as it were).

The main part of Herzliya, where I am this time 'round, is a nice-sized suburb of Tel Aviv, not far from the city, the beach, or the hi-tech sector buildings located in Herzliya Pittuach, the beach-side of town. Last night, it was mostly host to families; I saw a few older couples, a bunch of high schoolers, but few people around my age who weren't already pushing baby carriages or toting large bellies. The 20-somethings either don't live in Herzliya or make sure to get into Tel Aviv for the night. (Note: last year, when living in Tel Aviv, Amy and I went to a party hosted by one of my M.A. program buddies at which both of us felt awkward, old, and out of place (well, maybe I didn't quite feel old, but you get the point). Then she met up with other friends and went to a party, and I went to bed, this around 10:30pm.)


In that the patriotic holiday in a patriotic country is a family affair, then, it made me wonder about the nature of Israeli patriotism. Undoubtedly, a small nation affords less escape from patriotism and possibly by its size more of a need for unity. At the same time, the contentious nature of Israel's history makes it more essential to cling to the idea of a country. Not to say everyone agrees with "the situation", that all Israelis have conforming views regarding the nation's challenges. More to say that given the ever-present potential for eruption in a political and military sense, and the intense daily behavior everybody engages in, the citizens who stay here will by their nature be committed to the idea of the state; it's the bias of self-selection. I would think that this applies to Arab citizens of Israel and those living in the territories, though obviously through a much different set of circumstances and logic.

There is also the newness of the state and its ongoing sense of danger that propels citizens to celebrate so furiously each and every year (or at least the three I've been here). History has taught us time and again that democracy, while perhaps a noble and desired outcome for all modern nations, does not come about immediately or suddenly, but almost always in an organic process - see Russia after 1991, Germany after WWI, Yugoslavia after 1991, Africa or the Middle East after colonialism, or even the U.S.A. until at least the civil war. Israel is only 63 years old, younger then the U.S. was when it fought itself over slavery; expecting it to solve all its problems is mildly unfair and at the same time a testament to the fact that Israel has done a pretty good job establishing democracy from scratch. At the same time, Israel's situation is unique, and I am one of many who think the country could do much more in seeking a solution, so I'm not nullifying all criticism as unfair.

A local curmudgeon - a mostly left-wing contrarian journalist whom, I sense, most Israelis ignore at this point - argued on one of the previous two independence days that once Israelis get over the celebration of themselves and their great survival that is wrapped in the Yom Haatzmaut national narrative, they can actually take care of the injustice that is the failure to make peace with the Palestinians.

It's mostly a wet blanket argument, one designed to be ignored on the day itself. But removed from the immediate holiday context, it is another thought provoker - would Israelis care quite as much about independence and their patriotism once those things became granted and confirmed in peace treaties and an affirmed right to exist from their neighbors? Is Israeli pride/exceptionalism the result of the conflict, or part of the cause? With peace, would new problems and bugaboos emerge?

Part of that discussion with the Bronxish mother was about how little Memorial Day meant to us in the States as kids - a parade, the beginning of summer, a day off from school, and a barbecue, but not much more. After 9/11, patriotism and the significance of sacrifice and suffering returned to Americans in a way it may not have since World War II. That sacrifice wasn't terribly well shared, and that significance and patriotism became something of a political football, as during the Vietnam War, but in the very least, we became aware of the issues, we Americans who as a nation were and still are, as a Russian condescendingly termed it to me, "childish" in our view of the world, and who have much more to blush and get angry about in both relative and absolute terms than Israel. Is it a good thing that we now think this way, more patriotically and more attached to rituals? That we only got here through a sense of suffering? I don't know.



Just as I was about to go back up to my apartment for the night, where I would stay awake till after midnight, jamming toilet paper in my ears to blunt the incessant if fading blare of the horns, the first round of fireworks went off. Kids previously messing around with skateboards or spray cans shrieked and ran by me to the intersection from where they could see the fireworks. Adults walked over to similar vantage points. I turned around, pulled to the flash and squeal of the rockets.



Fireworks inevitably serve as exclamation points for outdoor celebrations, especially patriotic ones. They are either ineffable joys or simplistic ones, satisfying the inner child's desire to see sparkles and hear explosions. Whatever happens to Israeli patriotism, American patriotism, both countries' desire for peace, or both countries' propensity for war, the ties between fireworks and patriotic revelry are not going to diminish. Neither will the inner logic beneath those ties.

After the Great Fall

 This is a somewhat rambling post on the political situation in Rwanda. Outside of the usual scope, I guess, but this is my main (only?) writing outlet these days. And it's still about Rwanda.

Driving around Kigali, it is possible to forget the genocide, to forget the civil war of 16 years ago. The city is relatively prosperous and growing. People smile and volunteer friendly conversations more than a shell-shocked or closed populace would. While there are many organizations, governmental or otherwise, who are headquartered in the center of the city and whose focus is on preventing genocide, aiding survivors, or other related issues, there is not a noticeable survivor presence in the city.

In some ways, the government and the people would like the genocide to be put past them. The country is seeking to gain a reputation as a tourist destination, and they are seeking to grow a modern service economy, and they are seeking to do both these things in part by shedding the main word association publics in the west have with Rwanda, genocide. It is not that the country seeks to forget, of course; many argue that the continuing legitimacy for the Kagame regime is tied as much to the fact that he led the forces that ended the genocide as to the fact that he has rebuilt the country thoroughly since that time. Many in Rwanda would like to remind others that there's more to the country than genocide history, is all.

The memorialization of the genocide is in an interesting transitional period. Many of the sites we visited were preserved monuments to brutality as much as anything else; skulls, bones, clothes, and even in one place full skeletons remained intact and on display as a testament to what happened. This on the one hand is an effort to display the very real effect of the 1994 genocide and to ensure its memory endures; on the other hand, there is not a great amount of respect for the bodies of those who died.

So the memorialization is changing, in part. Our guides hinted to us that sites such as Murambi, Ntarama, and Nyamata (I'll go more into them in the next post) may be radically different in 4-5 years, with the bones finally buried and the focus of the exhibit shifted in some way. The Kigali Memorial Center, whose exhibit was furnished by a company that also organized our tour of the country, is a model for what's to come in many ways: a very informative museum-exhibit combined with mass graves, a wall of names, several symbolic gardens or statues, and a heavy dose of witness testimony. It's a very fine exhibit, as far as that goes, and if the genocide sites can be shifted from bare bones evidence of the genocide, literally, to informative and testimonial based sites that still capture some of the experience of the history, that would be a good thing for the memorialization process. Then again, if they do indeed follow through on their plans to do things like transform the former President Juvenal Habyarimana's (his plane was shot down on 6 April, 1994, triggering the genocide which would start the next day; he had long been aligned with genocidal forces, though his signing of a peace accord may have been the final straw in leading him to sacrifical lamb status) house into a national museum and party site - our visit came during preparations for a wedding later that day - perhaps the memory will not be as well preserved.

But let's go back to the history itself, and the impact it has on the country to this day. Without giving a footnoted, academically cited, and overly detailed summary of Rwanda's history, I hope to not reduce it too much. I also hope not to mess up too much.

In essence, Rwanda was part of a kingdom with Burundi before the arrival of German and, after World War I, Belgian colonizers. The colonizers solidified the vague racial categories of Tutsi and Hutu by formalizing people's identity via identity cards, backing up the categories with pseudo scientific (eugenic) theories on the differences between the two groups, and placing the smaller Tutsi group in power, leading to newly emphasized tensions between the two groups. Towards the end of their colonial reign, the Belgian leaders decided to give up on the Tutsis and backed Hutus for power. Hutu leaders, sensing the opportunity to take advantage of their people's anger over being subservient to Tutsi interests, built their power on racial grounds, and when the Belgians left, they initiated several cycles of violence against Tutsis.

These cycles continued until 1990, when the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a largely Tutsi-exile army, and the Rwandan national army fought a civil war. The RPF, co-led by current Rwandan President Paul Kagame, was a better organized army and gained ground and leverage. The Rwandan government was also constrained by economic struggles (there was a great drop in coffee prices, an export crop Rwanda relied on) and donor nations eager to see Rwanda make peace, leading to a peace accords. The Arusha Peace Accords didn't include all necessary powers and provided for a shaky power-sharing government, but at least was sensed to be a path forward.

Instead, the President Habyarimana was killed when his plane was shot down on April 6th, 1994. It is still a hot topic of dispute as to who killed the president; Rwanda and its allies, as well as more experts, believe that the Hutu Power movement surrounding the president (who was a Hutu and a hard-liner, at least before conceding to the peace process) killed him as a way to launch a genocidal campaign and consolidate power - they felt that using a scapegoat of the minority Tutsi group (15% of the country's population) would rally the majority behind the government and keep them in control. Many in France (a strong supporter of the genocidal regime) and a few others believe the RPF was behind the assassination. Most circumstantial evidence points to the Hutu Power group being responsible, and I have a hard time seeing why the RPF would have done it, for what it's worth.

Either way, the genocide began the next day, April 7th, 1994. For 100 days, Hutu militias and government military forces killed between 500,000 and 1.2. million (the most common estimate is 800,000) Rwandans, mostly Tutsis, though also moderate Hutu political figures and Hutus who stood in the way. The genocidaires had studied their history well, and used tricks from the Holocaust to Somalia to carry out their genocide and disengage the international community. This was a classic case of the world standing by and watching, at times even doing less than helping - when the UN finally "sent" in a mission, it was a French led army in the Southwest that did nothing more than provide an escape route for the genocidaires fleeing from the RPF forces who had relaunched their fighting in response to the genocide. The genocide only stopped when the RPF won the war and assumed control and power of the country.

The Rwandan genocide was renowned for its brutality. Rwanda is a small country (population between 8 and 11 million over the last fifteen years), and to carry out such a genocide required participation from many people in the country, including ordinary people, neighbors hunting or snitching on their Tutsi neighbors. Families with mixed marriages were torn apart. Major tools for carrying out the genocide included machetes and a local weapon that was basically a wooden stick with a nail on it.

The only other thing I'll say about the genocide before moving to firsthand observations is that it is still unclear how true and how constructed the racial identities are. One popular belief was that Tutsis came from Ethiopia, and so many Hutus "sent them back" to Ethiopia via rivers. Common stereotypes say that Tutsis are taller and more beautiful, while Hutus shorter, stockier, and thinner. Others say that there is, or was, no real distinction between the two groups, and that the term Tutsi was affixed to anybody who had ten or more cattle; as such, Tutsi/Hutu was a class distinction. At this point, or at least at the genocide's point, the distinctions became hardnosed facts, but it should be remembered that there was no primordial, inherent reason for the population in Rwanda to bifurcate into two major groups (there is a third, the Twa, which makes up 1% of the population and is usually considered incidental to the racial politics of the country).

This history also has to be remembered when considering the current political condition of Rwanda. President Kagame has strong control of Rwanda, having recently won re-election with a 93% vote, a number most people consider not to be doctored. But there were a few numerous high-profile disqualifications of opposition politicians from the race, and so 93% isn't a wholly safe number to throw out either; in general, whenever somebody is elected with 93%, there is cause for suspicion.

It is hard to find people who will dispute the notion that Kagame and his team have a strong grasp on the political space in Rwanda. The dispute begins in assessing the implications of that control. On the one hand, Kagame is undoubtedly popular, especially in Kigali - you can't go far without seeing Kagame t-shirts sold or worn, and signs of his campaign hung ubiquitously even a month after the election. Rwanda has grown, Kigali is booming for an African city, and the country appears to be much safer and stabler than most societies would be 16 years after a wrenching social trauma on any scale, never mind one that wipes out an eighth of the population.

At the same time, as my German friend on the trip pointed out, one should get uneasy whenever one man has so much power. Even if the government's intentions are good, it is not healthy in the long term to have such focused control. For example, the government has led a very positive idea of reeducating the people to believe in "banyarwanda", or the people of Rwanda. As in, "we are all Rwandans, not Tutsis or Hutus." A great idea that hopefully will set in to eradicate any racial reasons for Rwandans to discriminate against each other (or for outsiders to encourage dissension and divide and conquer, as was the source of all these problems). But if most people still know who's a member of which group, as we were often told, or if most people perceive the political beneficiaries of the current system, i.e. the people in power currently, to be Tutsis, this system and concept of a new Rwanda hits a blurry border with older systems of privileged people and groups.

For all this, I would like to return to the history and to the bias of Americans and the West. It's easy for us, feeling ourselves to be in an open, democratic society where the political space is far wider (whatever our problems), to criticize a country like Rwanda (similar issues affect westerners' views on Israel, but this is not the space for that). We did not have a tortuous genocide rip asunder our nation within the past two decades; World War II tore apart Europe and led to change, but the main perpetrators were convicted and the general population (i.e. Germans) atoned for their grievous faults, while many of the victims left (Jews, most obviously). America's genocide happened hundreds of years before and was swept under the rug; the country has survived just fine despite the treatment of Native Americans, thanks.

We should consider, then, what would happen had there not been a strong control of the political space. Everything I heard suggested that there are still people in Rwanda who are eager to stir up racial divisiveness. Without getting on the slippery slope too quickly, we can see that racial divisiveness is the foundation for genocidal ideology. This is the government's justification for the disqualifications from the previous election and other political crackdowns that strike us as overmuch. We could be right in thinking this, but can only reach a fair conclusion if we consider the full context.

Two more points about that context, and here I will draw parallels to the situation in Israel. Interestingly enough, there are many parallels between the two countries, if not quite as much as Rwandans especially would like there to be. But the history, the international position, the internal development, the emphasis on security and independence, the controversial issues hovering around, the kindness and defensiveness of the people, and the beauty of the land are just a few of the similarities that these two countries share. What follows could be said about either.

Rwanda has achieved a lot since the genocide of 1994. Undoubtedly aid has helped, and similarly undoubtedly I haven't actually been to any other African countries to compare Rwanda to. But from all I heard and saw, Kigali especially and Rwanda as a whole has grown substantially in the past 15 years and has surpassed its neighbors in many ways. I never really felt in danger in Rwanda (well, not counting the drive through the mountains of west Rwanda in thundering rain at dusk; I felt fairly in danger then), though the presence of armed personnel around the city and the country was a little alarming. All to say that while it is not unambiguously so, Rwanda is a growing country that has done well, and that has ambitions to do better - Kagame has gone on the record in many places about his desire to outgrow the need for aid. This is commendable, and should at least be weighed against the costs of certain political limits, for the time being. In Israel, this growth is at a far more advanced level, but also should be considered when looking at the country as part of the Middle East and as part of its political issues.

The other point is that when external pressures encourage Kagame and Rwanda to open up, or Israel to achieve peace and make sacrifices towards achieving that peace, for example, they are not just doing it to waste their breath or punish the nation in question. In Rwanda's case, true political freedom and a sense of real unity forged under the label of "banyarwanda", where neither former racial group is benefiting more than the other, would be the true sign of recovery from the genocide and emergence as a modern and rising African nation-state. That is not as easy as it sounds in the sentence above, of course, and outsiders need to be cognizant of the challenges facing Rwanda. That doesn't mean they can't help and prod Rwanda to keep moving forward.

We were in Rwanda for the release of the UN Congo report, a report detailing the many abuses that occurred in the Democratic Republic of Congo over a decade of fighting. Rwanda was implicated in this report, and the wording suggested that Rwanda could be accused of genocide against Hutu forces in the east Congo.

This naturally infuriated just about everybody we met in Rwanda. The report has been accused, justifiably, of poor sourcing and lack of context, and generally appears to be a shoddy effort, for the UN or otherwise. Rwanda's Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a sharp 30-page document refuting the UN report (which ran 566 pages), and they had every right and justification to refute it (we actually befriended one of the authors of the report during our time there). It should also be noted that just about every other African nation implicated in this report also refuted the findings, and that only Rwanda's role in the report and their reaction has been covered to a significant degree in the international media.

But even in this clearly flawed report and justified response, there are gray shades to consider. Rwanda's ire emerges most from the term "genocide" - the report accuses them of killing tens of thousands of people, whereas the Rwandan genocide saw, as I said, 500,000-1.2 million die. Any equivalency of this even on the report's terms would be foolish, and Rwandans fear that were the term genocide to be slapped on the Congo, the international community's opinion would slide back to a "cycle of violence, they are all bad" mode, which would tarnish the Rwandan government's legitimacy and more significantly the nature of the trauma Rwanda suffered. Then when you consider the limited validity of the report, or the many missing contextual factors - for example, the Rwandan report (which I would link, but their site is struggling right now) points out how many Hutus the Rwandans repatriated to their country, and their goal of bringing all Rwandans back to Rwanda, which doesn't easily fit in with genocide. Accusing Rwanda of supporting genocide on any grounds is a wholly dangerous and arguably existential threat to the country and its safety, as Rwandans see it. They are wholly right on this.

At the same time, I have a hard time doubting that atrocities were committed in the Congo, and that Rwanda's troops just like so many others had a hand in committing them. Some transparency is needed in dealing with this problem. As with many situations in Israel (the Goldstone report being the most obvious recent one), just because the report itself was wholly flawed and shoddy doesn't mean it didn't reveal serious issues that need to be dealt with. Israel has dealt with it to some degree; Rwanda needs to figure out if they are ready to as well.

Rwanda has done tremendously in recovering from their genocide, growing their country, and dealing with their internal issues over the past 16 years. Our thrilling and successful visit showed me nothing less. That said, the government still needs to open up and solidify its emerging democracy as a truly free and open place. That doesn't happen in a day; it will be very interesting to see how far along the country gets in the next 7 years before Kagame's term ends and, under constitutional law, he has to step down from the presidency. It will be an important test for the country, to say the least. And progress will go a long way towards breaking any last remnants of the cycle of violence that did lead to the genocide.

I'm sorry, New York?

New York is big. New York is the type of place that grows in history, that stands over you and spits out everything that's ever happened before here, and a lot has happened before here, and each neighborhood has its own tenuous grasp on rights and non reason, and the geography of the neighborhoods, the collection and aggregation, the sum of all parts, renders an impossible, predictably looming chasm of America and Western culture, a black hole that exerts its pull on you, stronger as you stand closer, stronger if you're naturally inclined to such a city, stronger if you want to start a new life in America, and so on. And the city is big, never forget that.

I've had different views at different times on New York City, mostly nonplussed over thrilled. Partly, my contrary nature, flawed and lame as it is, dictates that if everybody loves New York, I'll approach with caution, if all my friends move there after college, I'll visit only occasionally, if my best friend desires to visit at every chance, I'll join in dimly, with hesitation. So that's part of it.

But the city is different, and there are legitimate reasons to dislike it. That bigness is overwhelming, American in its hint of the unneeded, most visible now in the incessant I-phones and blackberries that suck the soul out of their users, one at a time (and yes, Moscow and other cities are bigger, Moscow the only one I've been to, and I probably would have wearied of Moscow if I stayed much longer, and the veil of a different culture and different language hide a lot of the problems anyway). There's the noise and the wide streets with cars always jetting by so you can't get away, the feeling that everyone has bought into the rat race here and then, what's the point? That all this bigness is somehow phony, a sham, meant for tourist billboards and movies and J.D. Salinger books and ripoffs.

All those critiques aside, New York promises a memorable trip every time you visit it. In my short career of satellite New York living (for we all seem to be in its orbit at times, especially living near Boston), 8 years or so since my first visit that involved walking in New York and not driving through, I've had the following memories stand out:

June 2002: Visit to Yankee stadium that featured Boston-based friend exhorting me to cheer on the other team against the Yankees, wistfully hoping to "stir shit up".

July 2005: Into town to visit for a friend's surprise birthday party, I remember talking with a girl from Duke who was my year and who I had spotted in the Directory sent to incoming freshmen of our class, of whom I had thought, "hey, she seems small, cute, sporty, and since she's at Duke, probably smart, put her on the 'to watch list!", only to never talk or cross paths with her at school, since she was a Tri-Delt, fit perfectly into the upper stratosphere of Duke, while I was an athlete but mostly a loner with weirdo tendencies, those supported by the friends I did have. No regrets in that statement, just barebone facts.

I also remember seeing a high school friend at the door before we entered and asking if my clothes were decent enough for the dinner, earning a laugh. I earned a lot of laughs in high school.
And we drove back to where I stayed in a cab, through the village, and I thought about Bob Dylan.


To be fair, I think about him a lot.

August 2005: In two trips sandwiching a three-week tour of Eastern Europe, a teammate and I visited Battery Park for a half an hour and saw post-grads in skimpy bird suits prancing about to an instrumental repeat of Love's "Good Humor Man", and then found a nice little Cuban sandwich shop in the Bowery and met a Duke alum a couple years older than us. He advised us that the path was open but unclear, and inspired me to write in my journal that, "it is about PEOPLE, and I feel fortunate to get this chance to meet people, and to have met these incredible ones already." So I guess that was cool.

February 2006: Wrestling match at Columbia against two schools I didn't get into, featuring a win against the one I didn't get into (Harvard, where of course I got to train and was treated really well, but still, it's nice to win that) and a loss against the one I got wait-listed to (Columbia). I was so light I could eat steak at the hotel with my family the night before. Also, we went to Brighton Beach, my first visit there, and I got a cold that may or may not have sent my unstoppable wrestling momentum off the tracks, screwing my season. Ah well, I screwed it too.

May 2007: A visit to my cousin, notable mostly because it followed my brother's visit to her by a few weeks. Wisdom is learning from other people's mistakes, and so I didn't get my car towed the next morning.

June 2007: On the eve to a trip to St. Petersburg, I visit with Ben for one night, immediately post 5th High School Reunion. The night goes from good (sushi dinner in the west village) to artsy (Feist show) to bad (vague wanderings as we wait to meet Ben's sister and her friends) to really bad (thumping Asian dance club and me in full pout mode) to surprisingly pleasant (sangria and hookah bar that they let just in to, with nubile Barnard co-eds and a slight stumble in my step) to redemptive (sunrise breakfast at Ukranian diner Veselka somewhere in Manhattan).

December 2007/January 2008: New Year's in New York consisting of:
1. party in ridiculously ornate penthouse somewhere in/near Columbus Circle, wherein:
- the artwork was very expensive but not very good
- a hockey game table was a highlight
- the library was an impressive room but had a collection dwarfed by my dad's, though I did find a book on the erotic works of D.H. Lawrence (my dad has this too, by the way) that I amused myself with after mailing in 15 minutes of faux-socializing
- also while in the library, I saw a stranger who was at the party seat himself at the desk of the apartment's owner, an Austrian apparently who had residences in Austria and Colorado as well as this one (we were there because we knew the house-sitter), and who according to that stranger had not only a bunch of passports in his desk but a bunch of money, a grand or two - "What do you think would happen if I took it?" he asked; "I don't know," I answered, and his morals held up, the money stayed as is
- a view of the Apple falling in Times Square and many of the fireworks;

2. a ride on the Subway down to the East Village or the Lower East Side (LES as the kids call it, apparently), I forget which, wherein I found a friend (the one who urged me to cheer against the Yankees, then a NYC resident) who had either just instigated or broken up a fight, and who now stood on the street, Delaney or Bleeker, with a shit-eating grin, unable to speak coherently to me or recognize that I was there really, or that a high school friend of ours wanted to say hello to him on the phone;

3. A walk to nearby restaurant where another friend worked as a bartender, simultaneously hating the job and investing all his energy into entertaining (I'm told he's become one of the best bartenders (1st and 10th photo) in the city since then), screaming himself hoarse as he tried to usher all the co-workers and guests, drunk and hopeless, out the door. More nobly, he gave me the key to his Brooklyn apartment so I could go home a couple hours earlier than the rest of our party.

July 2008: A visit with my Moscow cousin and my sister. My cousin was mad on the hunt for I-phones, to no avail (no service in Moscow at the time), and as such sated by shopping on 5th avenue, visiting the Statue of Liberty (my first time too!), and strolling on Brighton Beach. I also got in trouble with Russian friends of my grandparents who lived beyond the end of the 6 in the Bronx, because I had "abandoned" the two girls to the wolves of Brighton Beach and NYC, and at night no less, while I went and met up with a friend in Brooklyn, who through her ineffable charm managed to get me to not only drink my first shot of vodka but subsequently my first (and only) full beer. Not surprisingly, the night saw my first instance of drunkenly (vs. merely clumsily) knocking over a glass full of liquid. However, not my first hangover, thanks to oodles of Smart Water.

Me with my cousin in Central Park. I can't explain the look on my face, as the shaky events were to come later that night.

Which brings us to the present, and by the present I mean last weekend, when I visited New York again. Again, it was on Ben's impetus, again there were friends to be seen (both of those Brooklyn people, the friend whose birthday it was in 2005, my cousin who lived there), and unexpected things to happen.

I'll remember this trip for the nearly two-hour walk from the West Village to Central Park after a big pizza dinner, before we threw in the towel and took a $5 cab the last 15-20 blocks home.

Also for the cartoonish friend of my friend's brother, who I vaguely remembered as a skinny tall kid in high school, and who now looked like he was bursting out of his shirt, and who acted like a cartoon character to boot.

And the Honduras teen I sat next to on the bus, who struck up a conversation with me about how I was reading too much, and who I ended up counseling on the insignificance of age in relationships and the need to not take things too seriously when you're 19.

There was the getting woken up by text messages at 5 in the morning when a Brooklyn friend happened to be going to bed and had to delay plans for the next day, which was this day, if you catch my drift.

Realizing that Ben going for a run at 2:15 guaranteed that we'd be late for a 3:15/3:30 meeting with the other Brooklyn friend, and being ok with it, because at this point it'd be my fault if I wasn't ok with it.

Walking by the Gay Pride Parade for about 5 minutes, and being impressed that it's not just the obvious people you might expect at a Gay Pride Parade, but people from all over the city. Which gives me the sense that this is not just a celebration of Gay Pride but just a plain old celebration, beginning of summer and we're all in it together and what not. Which is cool.

Also, Michael Jackson came up too often in conversation, but I guess that's not really just a New York thing.

All of this is to say that New York, whatever its foibles or irritances, its limits or pretensions, always delivers excitement and interest (the same can be said of Israel, in a different respect, but I digress). Something will be happening, and one has to try to have a dull visit. I'm not going so far as to claim that it's especially unique, because the only cities I've spent anywhere close to comparable time in the states are Chicago and Boston, special in their own ways, and Madrid and Moscow both have their own large city dynamism. And I'm still negligent on the West Coast of this fine country.

But New York City is different, somehow, a place that goes up and up and up, to the point of toppling on itself, except it also stretches up to the tips of the Bronx and into the semi-suburban sprawl of Brooklyn. New York is full of itself, convinced it is its own singular force, and at times that that force is a messianic one, a life-changing power that makes everywhere else unimportant and hopelessly outdated. It might not be completely right, but New York asserts its significance, its rights apart from all others, perennially and loudly. I'm kind of a big deal, New York says, with the only sentiment dripping off its words sneering confidence.

The thing of it is, as annoying as it might be to admit it, New York kind of has a point.

We saw it in the Museums, Written in Big Pictures

While it's hard for me to believe each time I'm stuck at a poorly-designed traffic light or a bottleneck intersection, wondering where all those bright young Jewish engineers have gone, Israel stands at the technological frontier. The high-tech industry is a jewel in the country's economic crown (now tarnished a bit by some crisis going on, have you heard?), researchers developed voice mail for cell phones and ICQ (sort of like AIM outside of A) here, and everyday citizens have perfected the technology of transmitting a vulgar gesture while driving crappy boxy cars and talking on a cell phone ear piece here.

So perhaps it's not surprising that technology would transform tourism in Israel as well, and specifically their museum. This country possesses a chain of experiential museums; museums where, instead of walking around and reading information while taking in visual evidence through artifacts or artistic items, the visitor learns about the museum material by watching and listening to a video presentation, a film wrapped around the museum's thesis or message. It's like one of those classes where instead of lecturing about the New Deal, the teacher opts to show a film of FDR and his time.

The first time for me was, as first times often are, unexpected. I had no idea I was in for a whole new brand of museum. Unlike most first times, perhaps, my first time was with my brother, and it was in a small city along the Mediterranean coast, just north of Haifa, a city called Akko.

Akko, a.k.a. Acre, is known for its Fringe Theater Festival, its Crusader history, its mostly Arabic old city, and the mixed population of Arabs and Jews (these elements flared up in riots around Yom Kippur last year). When we went on a damp, cloudy Friday in early January, tempers and temperatures were low, and the port city felt raw and unwelcoming.

Our principal stop was the Turkish Bathhouse, reported by my guidebook to be one of the highlights of a visit to Akko. The book said something about a light show, and between that and my love of saunas, I thought it would be worthwhile. We had a hard time following the confusing signs in the old city were confusing, and we stumbled across the place more than we found it, but at some point a security guard standing beneath an arch pointed out the brown brick hallway we were to walk down and we found the front desk to the museum.

As it was the Friday after New Year's, a crappy day weather-wise, still relatively early, and soon to be Shabbat, it was perhaps not surprising that Mark and I were the only ones there. The man behind the desk offered us admission and handheld audio guides that were required for the exhibit. He then sent us through the open courtyard and to a door with a digital clock counting down in red numbers above it, and when that door automatically swung open, we entered.




In front of us was a gray, waterless fountain in the center, with gray columns on the outside of the room. The color of the walls was a brownish yellow, and pale transparent sheets hung before the walls, depicting typical scenes of a bathhouse. To our right was a big projector screen, and towards that the guard suggested our eyes should be trained. We each took seat in one of the many white plastic lawn chairs scattered about the room, held our audio guides to our ears, and did as suggested.

Soon a well-dressed middle-aged Arabic man stepped into the screen to greet us. While the screen character spoke in Hebrew (or maybe Arabic, I can't remember now), our guide started chirping in Arab-accented English. This was supposed to be the last bath attendant, or a descendant of that attendant, and he was to tell us the story of the bathhouses in Akko.

So far, things were more or less in order. Yes, the English sounded funny, and the speech was a little corny, full of knowing pauses and verbal winks, but there wasn't anything to make one feel strange. If anything, it was an interesting idea, to center a museum around a random epoch in Israel's history (as a location, not a country), and even more so around the main "other" in the country, i.e. the Arabs during the Ottoman Empire.

But then they went into a flashback scene. From the modern, well-dressed descendant we went to four Arabs from times past, gathered around a table in the bathhouse of the clouds, floating above us. They were all wider, older men, and as the voices switched to cover each of them in a different Arab-inflected English, they smoked the nargila and shot the proverbial breeze. Each told the other a tall tale about El Jazzar, the Pasha who built the baths at the end of the 18th century. They also busted on each other and muttered about the "sneaky Jews", in the way of all locker room conversations.

Fortunately for all involved, Mark and I were alone in the room, as I mentioned. This was fortunate because while even at the beginning we were giggling a little bit about the conceit of the museum (Mark is a notorious giggler after all, and it can be infectious), by the time we got to the "bathhouse" itself, the two of us lost it. Giggles turned continuous, laughter turned uproarious, chairs turned over as we fell to the floor, and the whole thing seemed ridiculous.


This was the general gist of the museum. There was one other room, where the actual sauna was supposed to be. Amidst statues of bathers and another video screen, we felt no more serious than before. The big change was that the voice did not only come from the screen, but also from a statue sitting on a beheaded column, his lips moving by holographic projection. This, needless to say, sent us further atwitter.




I didn't realize then that we were experiencing the cusp of a trend. The whole museum exhibit took just over a half hour, and when we finished, we chalked it up to a pleasantly silly diversion that we probably wouldn't spend money on again. Then we walked along the coast and Mark talked me out of buying something and that was that.

A month later my Hebrew teacher, a colleague at the school, asked me to help chaperone the school Hebrew trip to Jerusalem. At first the plan was to go to the Knesset, which would have potentially been fascinating, considering it would have been two days after the elections. And so it also wasn't surprising that the authorities didn't let us go there.

Option #2 centered on the Jerusalem Time Elevator. Located in the Beit Agron building near the center, the Time Elevator takes the interaction a step further, putting it into a ride jam-packed with excitement. Or something.

Our wise-mouthed British locals bragged about how they had been on the ride three or four times already as we filed into the room, 60 of us in all. I sat with my colleagues, grizzled Israeli natives who nevertheless looked forward to the ride. On the walls there were fake old-fashioned hearths and Roman numerals, and on one side of the screen a timeline went up from 1000 BCE to the present-day. A lady in modern tour-guide uniform came on screen, welcoming us to the elevator and preparing us for the journey, as the room shook ominously. The time elevator was doomed to fall out of its groove, and we to plunge into history. And then the main guy from Fiddler on the Roof came on the screen.

He was dressed in rags and quite old, meant to represent a Jerusalem native cursed to live forever in Jerusalem and to tell people about it in this little film. So he took us through David's founding of the city, the Babylonian exile, the return, the Roman exile, the arrival of the Ottomans, and then the reemergence of a Jewish state. All this came with our seat shaking and at one point, a spray of water from the ceiling upon us. The information presented was analogous to what I saw at the Tower of David museum in the Old City of Jerusalem, if a little abridged, but the entertainment and goofy factors were off the charts.

And yet I didn't realize the common thread tying all these museums together until later that day. We drove up to Mt. Herzl on one of the outer neighborhoods of Jerusalem (and Jerusalem, like few cities I've seen, is a city of neighborhoods, confusing to drive through and weirdly disjointed as you go from north to south or from the Old City up to the hills). The mountain featured a park and the graves of a few famous figures, including Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism himself (and here I was thinking Herzliya was just a funny name for the town I lived in). But we were not to go walking around the mountain, visiting the graves: we had another museum in store, and another historical experience to live.

The schtick at the Herzl museum was as follows: we entered a room meant to model fin de siecle Vienna. On the screen, a young, attractive-looking Israeli actor (very European though) prepares to audition for the role of Herzl in some play. He expresses ignorance about the man, and the full-bearded wide-bodied director suggests that the actor do some brushing up on the founder. They bring in a Herzl expert - a woman whose age falls right in between the 50-something director and the young 30's actor - to advise the actor on the role. Sexual tension and light humor introduced into the plot, the museum takes us through Herzl's Zionist career (1897, sparked by the Dreyfuss Affair, to 1904, when he died) and puts the state of Israel in its historical background, while the rooms we go through are modeled after Herzl's room, a speaking hall, and a Zionist congress. By the time they get to the big clip show about the history of Israel, and whether or not it lived up to Herzl's vision, the whole thing iskind of hopeful and balanced at the same time. In fact, they concede that Herzl saw this as a more egalitarian society, a place where Arabs and Jews would be equal and safe. Utopianistic, surely, but pleasant to keep in mind.

In fact, that's what makes these experiential museums so interesting beyond the gimmickry. For example, I generally prefer reading to watching, whether it's books to movies or the Tower of David museum to the Timeline elevator. But when well done, these types of museums provoke emotions and a greater connection to the material at hand, along with providing a historical education.

Which is also what makes these museums a little bit dangerous. In Israel, a place where everything is political, it's easy to look twice at just about any statement or historical point. So when a "museum" talks about the history of Jerusalem, or the development of Zionism, there's a lot of room to be subjective. If a museum has a certain thesis that isn't wholly declared, it becomes much easier for that message to sink into the visitors' mindsets, as the connection drives the point further home.

The Herzl museum was fairly balanced, I thought. They tried to point out that the Jewish State hasn't been a perfect creation, and that Herzl would not be completely pleased with what Israel has become in 2009 (and mind you, this was pre-right wing government). At the same time, they pointed out the incredible positive changes that this land has undergone in the past 60-100 years, and suggested that Jews and Israelis (and Herzl behind them) have much to feel proud about.

This is mostly a neutral message, a sort of benevolent nationalism, and while those dialectically opposed to the Jewish state or those critical about how the country has conducted themselves in their history might find a lot at fault with that, a neutral clear-headed observer might find a mostly even-handed presentation that raised questions and interesting points. This is the sort of museum that would suit peace-loving Zionists in Israel, which suits Herzl's legacy as I understand it.

It's important to consider, however, that among those groups attending the museum before or after us were groups of soldiers. Israelis a few years younger than me (and even closer in age to our high schoolers) stood in regimented lines and prepared to learn about their history through this experiential fashion. Certainly, this is a more effective way to teach and to push a message across than sending them to a standard, cut-and-dried museum. It's that question about whether it's right to push across a message in a museum, and how hard messages are to keep historical, that I'm asking.

The question becomes even more pertinent at the Palmach museum in Tel Aviv. The Palmach was one of the main Israeli fighting forces before Israel existed. The British established the Jewish units during WWII to fight the Germans if they invaded the British-held territory, but once that threat was subsumed in 1942, the Palmach evolved into an underground force obsessed with paving the way for a Jewish state. If the Herzl Museum tells the story of the ideological underpinnings to the Jewish state and how they came to be, the Palmach talks about the dirty work that made Israel a country.

I attended the museum a week ago amongst a pack of Australian kids my age or perhaps a little younger. They were in a big group from Masa, an organization that offers programs in Israel to young Jews around the world, to offer them opportunity but also presumably to indocrinate a sense of Jewish pride and an identification with Israel. The kids were loud and rambunctious, and it seemed that a museum could hardly hold them.

An Israeli soldier managed to grab their attention while giving the introduction to the museum. She called out one of the kids, saying, "Purple sweater, you're really annoying," to a girl in the group. Still, in the first room in the museum, somebody from the group was making animals with their hands against the light, so they had an irreverent attitude at the outset, to say the least.

The museum also took a different approach to the translation issues posed by an English-speaking group. Whereas the Herzl museum overdubbed every part in English and played the sound through the stereo system, and the Akko museum did the same overdubbing but played them through headsets, the Palmach museum played through headsets and didn't overdub everything. The screen introduced about ten characters that made up a Palmach unit, yet instead of offering a voice for each of them in English, the display only gave us a narrator who indirectly covered everything they said, either through quotation or through summary. Only when it was completely unavoidable, as when a character was reading a letter, did they allow for a "character's" voice to speak.

Maybe the Palmach was the first experiential museum and so those behind it hadn't mastered the formula, but this weak translation limited the effectiveness of the presentation. All the humor, cheesy as it probably was, bled out of the process, and it was harder to connect with characters when they were largely indistinguishable. (They did have the moving lipped statue trick though, which drew laughs).

And yet, by the time they got to the final fighting that marked the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the founding of the state, where the wise-cracking nerdy lieutenant to the main commander begs to go into battle in the Negev and then dies, the presentation hit its mark. Emotions were stirred, connection was made, and all those Aussies were silent as they watched.

But then there's that nagging question. You find out in the museum that the Palmach bombed every bridge connecting Israel to another country in 1946. You hear about the fighting between Jews and Arabs who lived together. You learn about the struggle and the cost and the lives lost. But you hear about this all from the Israeli side.

There is no balance at the Palmach the way there is at the Herzl Museum. And the Palmach's topic is much more controversial on its own. The exhibit then leads a visitor to two likely sets of responses (assuming that they would be the type of visitor that would actually go to the Palmach museum - Hamas members are unlikely to have either of these reactions): the first would be a conscious empathy with the story and the characters they've seen, leading the visitor to a stronger understanding of the history behind the state and hence, subconsciously, a stronger connection with Israel. I may be patronizing in suggesting that the Aussies fell into this category, but I will suggest it ne'ertheless.

The other reaction would be to wonder where the distinctions are drawn in these identities and these namings. Is the bombing of every bridge connecting pre-state Palestine to the countries around it an act of war, an act of liberation, a guerilla tactic, or even a terrorist move? Is the victory over fleeing refugees and hated rivals something to be proud of or something to consider deeply? I'm not trying to jump on Israel and, if I fell on the Israeli political spectrum, it would probably be as a Herzl nationalist type, but watching that history unfold on the screen from room to room leads to either subconscious agreement (since after all, the Palmach soldiers were presented as good guys, and did "win") or substantial questioning.

None of this is meant to imply that somehow the technology or idea of experiential museums was developed in Israel as a way to propogate propaganda. Or that other museums don't exist in Israel, more straightforward exhibits indoors (Tel Aviv Art Museum, Tower of David Museum, Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv, Massua near our school, for examples) or set in Israel's natural beauty (Masada is the most obvious example).

It's just that as we propel forward into a bolder, more technological world, the new opportunities that the technology offers are also new opportunities to be misused in some way. Some are more obvious, like mind-reading or students screwing around on facebook on their laptops in class, and others are not quite so obvious, like these museums. This has always been true, of course, but as the technological advances come faster and faster, the questions, challenges, and temptations follow with them at an equally rapid pace. It's just something to watch out for, and it's another place where Israel is at the cutting edge. For better or for worse.