Prince Harry with Meghan Markle wearing Tuxe’s Boss bodysuit. (photo from Beretta/Sims/REX/Shutterstock via Israel21c)
Since announcing her engagement to Prince Harry last November, all eyes have been on Meghan Markle’s style. Coats, shoes, dresses and other fashion items worn by the bride-to-be have sold out in minutes. It’s no surprise that after she wore a bodysuit by Israeli designer Tuxe for an evening out with her betrothed, the style is now backordered until May.
The couple, set to marry in May, went to London’s Goldsmiths’ Hall for the Endeavour Fund Awards, which recognize injured servicemen and women. Known for her dressed-down-meets-royal style, the former actress layered Tuxe’s silk Boss bodysuit underneath a tailored black Alexander McQueen suit. On her feet, she wore Manolo Blahnik pumps.
“We’ve been royally approved!” the brand posted on Instagram after Markle was photographed wearing the bodysuit. “We absolutely love Meghan for all she has done for women’s rights and are honoured to be worn by someone who encapsulates what we stand for as a brand. She uses her spotlight to be an inspiration and she definitely is to us!”
Tuxe founder Tamar Daniel was born in Jerusalem, raised in London and is a graduate of Shenkar College of Engineering and Design in Ramat Gan. She founded her Philadelphia-based bodywear line in 2015, focusing on transforming the bodysuit, once a 1990s staple, into a chic, modern garment.
Her collection includes a range of bodysuits and has become particularly popular with professionals and religious communities, Daniel told Vogue in an interview. Prices range from about $80 for a simple sleeveless bodysuit to $463 for a cashmere turtleneck version.
Tuxe may not be the first Israeli designer that Markle has had her eye on. In December, news broke that Israeli designer Inbal Dror had been approached by the royal family to provide a sketch of a potential dress for Markle’s upcoming wedding to Prince Harry.
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On Dec. 18, 2017, Israel21c posted the story, “Is Meghan Markle going Israeli for her wedding dress?”:
It’s rumour, it’s conjecture, and it’s probably an awful lot of wishful thinking, too, but that’s not stopping Israelis from getting excited at the thought that Meghan Markle may choose an Israeli wedding designer for her dress on the big day.
All the kerfuffle began when news broke that Israeli designer Inbal Dror had been approached by the Royal family to provide a sketch of a potential dress for Markle’s wedding to Prince Harry in May.
Dror, who began making wedding dresses in 2014, favours sensual red-carpet glamour, with plunging necklines and figure-hugging hand-woven dresses. It’s quite a step away from traditional royal wedding gowns that usually err on the side of caution.
This isn’t the first time that Dror has been approached by celebrities for designer dresses. In 2016, pop diva Beyoncé wore a sheer high-necked white lace Inbal Dror bridal gown to the Grammy Awards.
“Beyoncé casually wore a wedding dress to the Grammys,” read the headline of Elle magazine afterwards, adding as a sub-head: “The queen can do as she pleases.”
“It was an amazing moment to see one of my favourite stars wearing one of my designs,” Dror told Brides after seeing Beyoncé in her dress. “I can’t even begin to explain the feeling. I am so excited for what is yet to come!”
Dror, a graduate of Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, sells her dresses for between £6,000 and £9,000 (about $10,500 to $16,000 Cdn) at the Morgan-Davies Bridal boutique in London – with fittings by appointment only. All of her outfits are individually made, and are based on 30 different measurements.
In an interview with Bridal magazine in 2015, Dror said, “A wedding is such a significant event in a woman’s life, and it’s how she feels wearing the dress that emphasizes her features, [which] can make her feel like the queen of the night.”
Israel21cis a nonprofit educational foundation with a mission to focus media and public attention on the 21st-century Israel that exists beyond the conflict. For more, or to donate, visit israel21c.org.
This year’s Winter Olympics, currently underway in Pyeongchang, South Korea, feature Israel’s largest-ever representation, with 10 athletes competing – in figure skating, skeleton and alpine ski racing. In the alpine skiing events, there is only one Israeli competitor – Itamar Biran – and the Independent spoke with him prior to the Games.
Born in London, England, Biran, 19, lives in Verbier, Switzerland, but grew up in Israel. As Israel’s second-ever Olympic skier, he follows in the footsteps of Mykhaylo Renzhyn, who competed for Israel in the 2006 and 2010 Winter Games. Renzhyn was Israel’s highest-ranked skier in those years, and made his Olympic debut at 27. Virgile Vandeput was 19 when he qualified in 2014, but wasn’t able to compete due to an injury sustained weeks before the Games. Though Biran is not the first Israeli skier, he has posted better results than all of his predecessors.
Biran said the 2018 Games are different than any other past Winter Olympics for Israel.
“The Israeli Olympic Committee is supporting us a lot more, and they are starting to recognize our winter sports are as important as summer,” he said in a phone interview from France, before heading to Pyeongchang. He went on to point out how the increase in support and funding has allowed more Israeli athletes to get the top of their respective sports. For example, Israel now has figure skaters in the world’s top 10 and Biran is in the top 15 for his age.
“In Israel, the only thing people know about skiing is Club Med in Europe,” said Biran, not excluding himself. It wasn’t until age 4 that his father, Doron Biran, took him from Israel to France, where he learned to ski and instantly fell in love with the sport.
After a number of years going to Club Med in France, Biran’s dad bought a house in Verbier in 2006. It was there where Biran really started to excel at the sport. At first, he and his father would travel to Switzerland over school holidays. Soon, the holidays turned into a full season living in Switzerland, and Biran started to race.
European ski racers usually begin racing at 8 years old, but Biran started late, at 12. As a dual citizen of Israel and the United Kingdom, he had the option of racing for Britain. He joined the British Ski Academy at 13, and was with them for a year, splitting his time between London and Verbier. He chose to race for Israel because he wanted to reconnect with where he had spent most of his childhood, and with his family in Tel Aviv.
Not only is Biran the best Israeli ski racer, he would also be one of the highest ranked British technical skiers if he had continued in their program. However, after he chose to represent Israel, at age 14, he dropped out of the British Ski Academy and joined a private training group of athletes from small nations. The group S-Team is based in Gerardmer, France, and includes athletes from Spain, as well as other nations that don’t have large alpine programs.
The 2018 Winter Olympics will not be Biran’s first test against the best. He made his debut in the top level in 2015 at the FIS (Fédération Internationale de Ski) Alpine World Championships in Beaver Creek, Colo., where he was the youngest competitor out of all male events, finishing 62nd in the Giant Slalom (GS). He competed at that level in the GS again in 2017 at St. Moritz, Switzerland.
Biran also represented Israel at the Youth Olympic Games in Lillehammer, Norway, in 2016, where he finished 38th in the Super-G. The Super-G is the second-fastest skiing event, behind the downhill, and is one of the two speed events. It is not an event he will be competing in at Pyeongchang, since he has focused on the more technical disciplines in slalom and GS since the Lillehammer event.
“You have to treat the Olympics as just another race,” said Biran, for whom rubbing shoulders with the best is nothing new. “I have no idols because I want to be their rival,” he explained about the racers on the FIS Alpine World Cup series.
In the weeks leading up to the Games in Pyeongchang, Biran competed in the World Junior Championships in Davos, Switzerland, and made his Europa Cup debut in Chamonix, France.
The young Israeli is among the first generation of athletes to have the opportunity to both go to school as well as continue racing on a European or World Cup level. Germany’s David Ketterer currently attends the University of Colorado and races for their college team, and Biran has similar plans – he has applied to Bocconi University in Milan, Italy, and Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, two schools that will accommodate his high level of sport. He is not in school at the moment, having graduated high school last year, but will begin his post-secondary education in the fall.
In Pyeongchang, Biran is set to compete in the GS on Feb. 17 at 5:15 p.m. Pacific time, as well as the slalom on Feb. 21, with the same start time. For the full Winter Olympics schedule, visit pyeongchang2018.com.
Ben Steiner is a Grade 11 student at St. George’s school. He is a freelance journalist as well as being a teaching assistant at Temple Sholom Religious School. Check out more of Steiner’s coverage at his website, vancitysport.com.
For years, Poles have bristled at terms like “Polish death camps” or “Polish concentration camps.” Rightly so. Places like Auschwitz-Birkenau were Nazi German camps on Polish soil. Calling them Polish camps was misleading and imputed the murder of millions of Polish Jews (and many other Poles) to Poles themselves. This is a linguistic formulation that should be avoided.
But it should not be illegal. There are few, if any, words that should be illegal, in our judgment. But the Polish government thinks otherwise and has passed a law that penalizes any suggestion that Poland was complicit in the Holocaust. So, anyone who uses such terminology as “Polish death camps” could face fines or up to three years’ jail time.
However, while the camps were German, there has never been any question about the willing complicity of plenty of Poles in the extermination of most of their Jewish compatriots. Many Poles were conscripted into the Nazi killing program, but others willingly advanced the mission. Notably, the murder of Jews in Poland did not end with the Nazis’ defeat. There were many instances of Holocaust survivors returning to their homes after the war only to be murdered by their former neighbours, the most notorious example being the Kielce pogrom of July 1946, in which about 40 Jews were killed and as many injured. To utter these facts in Poland now is presumably illegal. On the other hand, it is presumably not illegal to state the fact that many Poles risked their lives to save the lives of Jewish Poles.
The dreadful and confusing new law has been condemned by the American and Israeli governments, among others. Israel’s criticism hit a particular nerve with Andrzej Zybertowicz, an advisor to the Polish president and a sociology professor at Nicolaus Copernicus University. He suggested that Israel’s response to the law resulted from a “feeling of shame at the passivity of the Jews during the Holocaust” and he accused Israel of “clearly fighting to keep the monopoly on the Holocaust.” He went on to say: “Many Jews engaged in denunciation, collaboration during the war. I think Israel has still not worked it through.”
The irony is as stark as it is distressing, that Zybertowicz could accuse Israel of failing to work through its Holocaust history when his own country has just codified its own refusal to do just that.
Conversely, Germany has just announced that it will acknowledge as Holocaust survivors Jews who lived in Algeria under the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy French regime. This means about 25,000 people will be eligible for some compensation under the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. This is a positive development, no matter how late it has come.
These two very different present-day actions, 73 years after the liberation of the camps, are but two examples of how we are still navigating the facts of the Holocaust. We are still determining, among much else, who are to be included among the perpetrators and who among the victims. And these are not even the much more difficult, perhaps impenetrable, moral questions and issues raised by the Holocaust. We have not come close to understanding the patterns of antecedents, the human and historical prerequisites that allowed the Holocaust to happen – and which permit genocides to continue happening.
Ezralow Dance’s Open comprises many themes. (photo by Angelo Redaelli)
Los Angeles-based Ezralow Dance kicks off this year’s Chutzpah! Festival at the Rothstein Theatre Feb. 15 with, appropriately enough, a work called Open, for its embodiment of myriad ideas and ways in which to express them.
Chutzpah! also features a range of creative expression every year, with performers from around the world in dance, comedy and theatre. As has become tradition, the Jewish Independent will highlight several of the performances prior to the month-long festival. This week, we focus on dance, speaking with Daniel Ezralow, as well as Israel’s Roy Assaf.
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“Open is a testament to what I believe,” Daniel Ezralow told the Independent in an email interview. “When my wife (who collaborated with me) and I were thinking of a title for the show, we played around with a lot of options, but when we came up with the one word Open, it expressed everything that I wanted to say. Be open, open yourself, open to others, open your eyes, open your mind, open your heart and stay open to the world in many senses.
“It was a way of saying, leave your judgments at the door and try, just try, to be open-minded. I find that we are so full of judgment, many times we fail to see the beauty of what is so simple and directly in front of us. I am constantly attempting to open my mind and receive what comes to me. There is a wonderful concept, ‘to want what you get, not get what you want.’ I think Open has something to do with this.”
In his work, Ezralow is certainly open to new ideas and a wide variety of media. In his 40-some years in dance, he has performed with several companies, co-founded others and choreographed for numerous groups around the world, including Batsheva Dance Company, Paris Opera Ballet, Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the Atlanta Ballet. He choreographed the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics and Cirque du Soleil’s Love. He has created for dance festivals, Broadway shows, gymnastics competitions, television, film, commercials and other corporate projects, awards programs, pop star performances and music videos. The award-winning choreographer, director and multimedia artist has a vast and eclectic resumé, to say the least.
“I remember as a child always asking my father ‘why?’ I asked him why about just about everything. There is no question I am naturally curious,” said Ezralow. “I was once working with Chaim Topol on a project in New York City and we were in a taxi together. I asked him why – why does he work, why does he do the things he does? I’ll never forget the response he gave me. He said, ‘Curiosity.’ At that point, I understood that was the same thing that made me do the things I do. My mother always encouraged me to ask questions and to do what I believed in. I do lose myself in creations, but usually it is not an escape. In my best moments, I also try to live life like a creation and lose myself in it.”
In looking at his body of work, it’s hard to believe that Ezralow didn’t take a formal dance lesson until he was in his late teens, when he was a biology student at University of California, Berkeley.
“Dancing chose me so strong, I had little choice to shy away from it,” he said of his change in career direction.
“At the time, I was deeply disappointed with the American medical system. I felt it had nothing to do with helping people and was mostly about a hierarchy to achieve a status of life. The system was very closed to acupuncture, Eastern ideas and anything alternative. At the time, this made me feel that it was really askew and not for healing and helping people but rather for diagnosing, medicating with pills and cutting in surgery.
“Hopefully, this has changed and we are now entering a period of truer possibilities,” he said. “I just saw a wonderful documentary titled Heal, which delves into the human possibilities to heal ourselves. This is the kind of medicine I would like to get involved with. I also feel that the work I do is healing – dance is healing!”
About his goal as an artist, he said, “As I have grown, I have shed some of my desire to be a performer/exhibitionist and have been humbled with age, which has allowed me to dig deeper to understand that all I ever really wanted was to make people happy. Happy can mean crying, happy can mean laughing, happy can mean many things to me. I really just want to help people to be inspired to live another day of their lives on this planet.”
Ezralow’s father’s family came to Los Angeles via Winnipeg, of all places.
“My grandfather ran from the Russian revolution to Canada and settled in Winnipeg, where my father was born, who was one of a family of five. My grandfather was a carpenter,” he explained. The family moved to Los Angeles, he said, “probably because my grandfather saw there was opportunity. They settled in Boyle Heights, the poor Jewish area of L.A., and he began building houses. One by one, he would build a house, sell the one they lived in and move to the new house. I took a tour of Boyle Heights with my father before he passed away and he pointed out all of the homes my grandfather built and the family had lived in.”
According to the Jewish Journal, Ezralow’s parents met in Los Angeles; his mother was born in Poland, but the family emigrated when she was quite young.
“My mother grew up a Sabra in Palestine, before the declaration of the state of Israel,” he said. “All of my family on her side are still in Israel and I would travel every other summer with my family to Israel, so I am connected by heritage to a people I know intimately from my entire childhood. This has given me a sense of Jewishness as natural and surrounding me.
“In Los Angeles, as well,” he continued, “there is a very strong and permeated Jewish community, which I grew up in and was a bar mitzvah. But, after that, I felt that there was too much dogma in religion. I have worked many times with Batsheva in Israel and still have a deep connection to everyone. I am sometimes sad to see what is happening with the conflict there. But I feel a strong sense of Jewish humanity in my soul. It is something that is universal and not selective to one religion.”
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Roy Assaf is both creator of and a performer in the two award-winning pieces he is bringing to the Chutzpah! Festival, starting Feb. 22.
“I dance in both works, the duet Six Years Later and the trio The Hill,” he said in an email. “Back in 2011 and 2012, when these works were created, it felt perfectly natural for me to choreograph and to dance the work at the same time. Nowadays when I create, it is not at all the obvious choice.”
Assaf was born in Israel, and dance has been a part of his life for as long as he can remember. About 15 years ago, he started working with Emanuel Gat, initially as a dancer, then as an assistant choreographer. Assaf’s first choreographed work, in 2005, won two awards at the Shades in Dance competition in Tel Aviv. In 2010, he worked with the Noord Nederlandse Dans company in Groningen, Holland, creating for them a work called Rock.
“I was invited by their artistic director, Stephen Shropshire,” said Assaf about that commission. “The amount of trust that Stephen gave me while working with his company strengthened my belief in myself that I could and should keep making pieces.”
Since then, Assaf has created or co-created works for many other companies, including two full-length pieces supported by the Intima Dance Festival, a work for L.A. Dance Project for the Biennale de Lyon, a collaborative piece for the Royal Swedish Ballet, and a piece for the Gothenburg Ballet. This past fall, he began creating 25 People, working with third-year Juilliard students in New York City, where he was on faculty for a semester, which he is resetting with dancers in Israel.
For Assaf, dance is not simply art for art’s sake.
“I would like to give people room to imagine,” he said. “It’s certainly not about distracting people – I really hope we are in the business of encouraging or facilitating engagement in one’s own life. What a pity it would be if dance principally served to distract or disconnect someone from his or her experience. Please do come to a performance and be fully yourself there – see what you see, recognize what you recognize, run with your fantasies, meet your uncomfortable places.”
The duet Six Years Later explores the relationship between two people who have come together after having been separated for a long time, while The Hill is a commentary on war, based on the Hebrew song “Givat Hatachmoshet,” about a particularly devastating battle that took place during the Six Day War in 1967, a battle that Israel won but with great losses.
Despite the different subject matter, Assaf has described both pieces as having a lot in common.
“They share a spine, in terms of physical material,” he explained. “If you look closely, you may discover that they are both dealing with much of the same movement – but that the same movement has undergone a very different treatment in each work. You might say they share a point of origin, but parted ways in their process. Each work followed a path to its logical conclusion. Both, however, deal with the story of human touch: its effect, its consequence.”
For all of the Chutzpah! dance offerings and the full festival schedule, visit chutzpahfestival.com.
Israel’s Ministry of the Diaspora recently announced what it calls the most advanced system of its kind in the world to track antisemitic content on social media.
The Anti-Semitism Cyber Monitoring System, or ACMS, can find relevant posts that are antisemitic (using the definition devised by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) on Facebook and Twitter in English, French, German, Arabic. It can see who posted and shared the comments. Other languages and social media platforms are expected to be added to the system as it progresses.
In a month-long trial run, the system identified 409,000 antisemitic posts by 30,000 individuals. Whether the system can or cannot catch every instance of antisemitism online is less significant than the fact that it is a tool to identify trends. In the trial, the system identified the world’s “most antisemitic cities” as Santiago, Chile; Dnipro, Ukraine; and Bucharest, Romania. Western cities that topped the online antisemitism list were Paris and London.
This is relevant research. It would be useful to know where Vancouver or Canada falls in such a ranking. That kind of information could help our community work with governments and other agencies to address the topic and devote resources to education and countering hatred.
But information is power. And power can corrupt. There is a difference between accumulating information that is (or can be) anonymized to allow for research into the topic. It is also fair to use such a system to identify individuals who should be reported to authorities for investigation for potential contravention of hate laws or for exhibiting potential for violence. But the words from Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Ministry Naftali Bennett were not reassuring. According to the Times of Israel, Bennett said the system would expose online antisemites “for all to see.”
“The time has come to put a mirror in front of our haters and expose the ugly face of modern antisemitism,” Bennett went on. “From now on, we’ll know who every antisemitic inciter is.”
Anyone who has spent time online and confronted the sorts of nastiness that exists there might find a sort of satisfaction at the idea that some of the people who are purveying the worst Jew-hatred will no longer get off scot-free. But let’s take a step back.
It is one thing for an intelligence agency – or a responsible nongovernmental organization such as the Southern Poverty Law Centre – to accumulate information like this for the purposes of research, monitoring dangers and notifying appropriate authorities. It would be quite another if, as Bennett seems to suggest, a government (or other agency) were to make public an online database of people who express offensive or racist comments online.
There is a website called Canary Mission, which, according to its self-definition, “documents people and groups that promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on North American college campuses.”
The site is a compendium of individuals who have made comments online or been seen at events of various types and includes links to their LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and other social media pages.
Some of the comments Canary Mission has assembled are indeed disturbing. “I swear if [a] Jew gets within 5 feet from me at the protest and says a word, straight murder,” one person wrote. “Ima kill a jew in a month,” wrote another.
There is also no doubt that, among these people, most of whom are university students, are some who have been drawn into anti-Israel movements and have made, as many of us do, occasional untoward comments on social media. It may be fine to call these comments out, but it is not acceptable to assemble in one place a group of people who vary widely – from those who should be reported to authorities for posing a danger to society to some who are probably legitimately attempting to make a peaceful political statement, however misguided we may think that message is.
This approach encourages vigilantism. It is the sort of tactic that has been used in the past by anti-abortion terrorists who have murdered or attempted to murder healthcare providers, including one right here in Vancouver who was shot through a window in his home.
Consider – and there is absolutely no reason to view this as far-fetched – that a website was set up to aggregate information about you, your parents, your children and anyone else you know who has traveled to Israel, donated to Zionist causes or attended pro-Israel events. There are a lot of irrational people in the world and a project like this could help them act out in potentially catastrophic ways.
Again, there is value and importance in accumulating this information. It should be shared with relevant authorities, including the universities, police, FBI, CSIS and so forth. But we should not be encouraging the public dissemination of this material. It is an extremely hazardous game.
U.S. President Donald Trump with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas at the Presidential Palace, Bethlehem, May 2017. (photo by the White House)
Mahmoud Abbas has had enough. Thirteen years into his four-year term as elected leader of the Palestinian people, he has nothing of substance to show for his efforts and his friends are abandoning him.
On Sunday, his frustration was on full display during a two-and-a-half-hour speech.
Things have been building up lately for Abbas and his Fatah faction and, at a meeting of the Palestinian Central Council, he finally let loose.
Naturally, he focused on Israel, which he declared a European colonialist enterprise and denied Jewish connection to the land.
“Israel is a colonialist project that has nothing to do with Jews,” Abbas said. “The Jews were used as a tool under the concept of the Promised Land – call it whatever you want. Everything has been made up.”
Abbas, who has a doctorate in history, has taken a creative approach the discipline from the start, when his dissertation discounted the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis and contended that European Jews were collaborators in their own genocide in order to advance the cause of Zionism.
Of course, Abbas also railed against the U.S. president for his announced intention to move the American embassy to Jerusalem. Abbas accused Donald Trump of destroying the prospects for peace.
“Yekhreb Beitak,” Abbas said in the general direction of Trump. According to the Associated Press, the curse literally translates as “may your house be demolished.”
“In colloquial Palestinian Arabic,” AP explained, “the phrase can have different connotations, from a harsh to a casual insult, but its use in a widely watched speech seemed jarring – and could exacerbate his already fragile relationship with an American president who is particularly averse to criticism.”
If the U.S. president is a notorious hothead, that’s exactly how Abbas appeared Sunday, but certainly not without reason.
What must hurt more than anything is that Abbas now sees those who have been the Palestinians’ historic allies softening their resolve. As a New York Times investigation earlier this month indicated, while Arab leaders from Egypt to Saudi Arabia were making appropriate noises in public about Trump’s Jerusalem gambit, behind the scenes they are giving every indication that they won’t expend political energy on the matter.
The irony is clear – and for Abbas and his allies it must be especially painful.
The welfare of Palestinians has never been a genuine priority for the Arab world, even as they have propelled the Palestinian cause to the top of the global agenda, paralyzing the United Nations in the process. For Arab leaders, Palestinians have always been little more than a battering ram with which to land blow after blow against the Zionist entity. Palestinian life under Israeli occupation and autocratic leaders is filled with small and large indignities.
Now that geopolitics suggests Israel is not so much the regional threat that Iran poses, the Palestinians, once a useful weapon for the Arabs in their 70-year confrontation with Israel, are being cast aside.
Abbas’s obvious frustration Sunday suggests there may finally be a change afoot to the status quo that has been unsatisfactory for Israelis and even more so for Palestinians. What the future looks like for the Palestinians – and for their relations with Israel – remains unclear.
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Note: The headline of this editorial has been changed. In the Jan. 19 newspaper, the piece ran as “Abbas rightly irked,” which misled some readers to think that we agreed with Mahmoud Abbas’s remarks. We in no way condone his abandonment of historical fact, his inhumane accusation that Jews were complicit in the Holocaust or the many other false and immoral statements in his two-and-a-half-hour diatribe.
Hospitality is culture itself and not simply one ethic amongst others. (Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism)
One of the late French-Jewish philosopher Jacques Derrida’s most famous short works is his On Cosmopolitanism, in which he discusses the problem of refugees. Cosmopolitanism is a word first coined in ancient Greece by wandering, homeless philosophers and popularized by the Stoics. It refers to the idea that the whole world (cosmos) is my city, or community (polis). It is the idea of an international or, better, transnational humanity and citizenship. Cosmopolitanism became popular again during the European enlightenment and slowly had a growing influence on international law and modern ethical sensibilities, including the sense that countries have a duty of hospitality, of offering refuge even to peoples of other nationalities.
This same ethical idea occurs in Derrida’s own Jewish tradition, where “love the stranger” is a commandment uttered many more times than “love your neighbour” and where Isaiah the prophet urged Israeli kings to give shelter to refugees of war.
In On Cosmopolitanism, which was based on a speech Derrida gave to the International Parliament of Writers on the subject of refugees, Derrida discusses the nature of hospitality and the contradiction at its heart. Hospitality involves welcoming guests into your home, in sharing resources and shelter, yet, to do so, it must remain “a home.” Should all boundaries of the home dissolve in unconditional welcome then the possibility of hospitality itself will also be obliterated. Derrida’s insight mitigates against a naive or utopian call for the obliteration of borders or the indiscriminate welcome of refugees.
In this thought of Derrida we see a tragic conflict at the heart of modern Zionism. Do we want a hospitable Zionism? Is the house the Jews built in Israel for Jews alone? Yet if the doors are flung wide, what will happen to “our Jewish home”?
There is much anxiety to protect our “home,” of that we can be sure. An extensive security wall, checkpoints, and airport border guards who are masters of interrogation. When we press Israel to become more hospitable – to African asylum seekers, to displaced Palestinians – we hear a chorus of voices arise: if we let them in, if we include them, the demographics will dissolve our home!
And we so badly want a home. Wandering for 2,000 years, we were homeless, exiled, a tolerated or cursed minority. Finally, we returned to our ancient home and, amid controversy with others who had come to live there and also claim it as home, built walls to protect it. We now again had a home, and we have chanted this word to ourselves over and over again, “home, home,” for the last 70 years.
Yet what good is a home that does not extend hospitality? Sure, we airlifted Ethiopians, we opened our arms to Russians, and so on and so forth. Yet they were us, our family. True hospitality, though, as it says in our own foundational text, is given to the stranger. The other.
Unconditional welcome is not the only way to destroy a home. What good is a home that offers no hospitality? Is a home that offers no hospitality even a home at all?
Israel is in the process of deporting the 60,000 African refugees who arrived before the building of a barrier wall with the Sinai to prevent more entering. As Russel Neiss wrote in the Forward, “For years, in actions held to be illegal multiple times by Israel’s Supreme Court, the Israeli government has arrested and placed these refugees in a detention centre in the Negev and forcefully deported them to other African nations in exchange for money or favourable terms for weapons contracts and military training.”
Twenty thousand refugees, most from Sudan and Eritrea, have already been deported or left of their own accord, and the government has ordered the rest to leave, with a small financial gift and plane tickets paid, or be jailed.
According to Derrida, hospitality is both a duty and a defining feature of a real home. The feeling that an inhospitable Israel is not really a home, I fear, is growing and will continue to grow among Israelis and Jews. Maintaining the feeling that Israel is a Jewish home only will require an unremitting focus on perceived and real threats to Jews in Israel and abroad. It will reinforce the unhealthy sense of home as a shelter from others, rather than fostering the healthy sense of home, one that is open to sheltering others.
The result may be that we have a very well guarded home. But, for those of us who perceive the lack of hospitality on offer, it begins to feel like no home at all. The opposite of Derrida’s formula – “in order for there to be hospitality, there must be a home” (a formula that is surely true and needs due respect) – is “in order for their to be a home, there must be hospitality.”
Jews, being a transnational people for so many years, became, in two senses, a “cosmopolitan people.” One was that fact of transnationality; the other stemmed from the involvement of Jews in socialist political movements, which problematized nationalism, as well as our involvement in activism aimed at the liberalization of immigration laws. It was all of this, seemingly, which coalesced to give birth to the use of “cosmopolitan” as an antisemitic code word for “Jew.”
I don’t think “cosmopolitan” is an insult, but rather a very high compliment. When an antisemite calls Jews “cosmopolitan,” I hear it as a calling, not a calling out. Israel will not truly be our Jewish home until it embodies the highest cosmopolitanism of the Jewish spirit, which can be read in the Torah’s call – millennia ago – to love the stranger and refugee.
Matthew Gindinis a freelance journalist, writer and lecturer. He writes regularly for the Forward and All That Is Interesting, and has been published in Religion Dispatches, Situate Magazine, Tikkun and elsewhere. He can be found on Medium and Twitter.
(photo from teenlife.com/summer-program/urj-camp-kalsman)
Going to camp was a rite of passage when I was growing up. Everybody went to camp. In my day, it was the B’nai B’rith camp that all Jewish kids went to, in Sandy Hook, past Winnipeg Beach.
I don’t recall much detail of my really young days as a camper, but we never missed a summer. As small kids, we went with our mothers. It all had to do with getting away from the oppressive summer heat and time at the beach, wading and swimming, sunning on a blanket, playing the games on the boardwalk. I would have an ice cream cone every day, even though, back then, all you could get were vanilla and strawberry flavours. There may have been chocolate, too.
I enrolled in Young Judaea in my early teens. In the heady days leading up to and after Israel declared its independence, movements of every political stripe in Israel had a youth group and camps in Canada and in the United States.
At camp, we built our Jewish consciousness and reinforced our Jewish identity. We were part of larger society, of course, but the one that was becoming central to our lives was the Jewish one, and the camp experience strengthened all that. Everything around our activities focused on our life as Jews, intellectually and emotionally, in our developing teen years. It was easy to pick out the future leaders – assertive, confident, basing their arguments on material accepted as fact. That was the stuff we brought forward into our adult years, colouring what we would become and the messages we would transmit to our children.
Aliyah to Israel was an enormous focus of the Zionist camps I associated with. This possibility, went the argument, was why we had to study our history, our customs, our holidays. We were building a new kind of Jew, unapologetic for his striving nature, determined to never again be a victim. History’s lessons were clear and we had to take heed and take our future into our own hands. The camps I attended were the educational vehicle.
In those days, we pretended we were chalutzim (pioneers), so we went out into the bush and made like we were going to live off the land. We built lean-tos to sleep under, chopped down trees, built things, learned how to make a campfire even without matches, and engaged in marches, canoeing, the whole megillah.
The years I spent as a camper – learning to be a scout, learning to create things with my hands, to develop myself physically, to compete for excellence – we were modeling the new Jew. We were not content with just being students, we knew we could do that – we were going to be doers. We were building pride in ourselves and in our accomplishments.
In turn, I became one of the leaders trying to transmit the messages I had absorbed to others. The young people I grew up with at camp worked in their own communities in the same way. All across the country and across the United States, we were a network fighting assimilation, building loyalty to Israel and a consciousness of being Jewish and the values it represented.
One of the best experiences I had was when I was invited to be a Camp Shalom program director in Gravenhurst, Ont. I spent six months preparing programs and then threw them all out on my second day on the job. I spent the next two months preparing different programs on the fly, built around Jewish holidays or events in Jewish history. We organized camper teams, choosing names, uniforms and cheers, and had athletic competitions, colour wars, talent competition skits, swimming competitions or just fun at the beach. I don’t know about the campers, but I had a great time exploring my creative capacities. We set up a pattern that was followed for years at that camp.
Some of us became community leaders. A few of us even got to Israel, at least for a time. Many of the associations we made have withstood the test of time. Some of the best friendships I have today are ones I made in those years. A good number of marriages came out of those experiences, including one of my own.
What a wonderful institution camps are, whatever their nature! Bringing kids into a healthful environment with responsible supervision, living lives completely different from what they are accustomed to, meeting people they would not normally meet, exposing them to alternative behavioural norms, has to be good. And getting away from the city into a natural environment, who has to be convinced that that is a good thing? Let’s hear it for camp days. Rah, rah, rah!
Max Roytenberg is a Vancouver-based poet, writer and blogger. His book Hero in My Own Eyes: Tripping a Life Fantastic is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.
When boys are hurting, are at-risk or are vulnerable and abused, they act out. They join gangs, skip school and get into fights,” Danielle Burenstein, executive director of Beit Ruth, told the Independent. “But, when girls are hurt or abused, they disappear and become transparent; they hurt themselves. When the system identifies a girl who is at risk, it’s normally because she has disappeared from the school system, is living on the streets or tries to commit suicide.”
Beit Ruth, in the northern part of Israel, was founded by Susan and Michael Ashner, a philanthropic couple from New York who, in 2003, were in Israel to visit a project they were supporting – a program that was educating vulnerable boys. During this visit, Burenstein said, “Susan asked something that would change both of their lives forever: ‘What happens to their [the boys’] sisters? Where are the programs for the sisters?’ The answer, pretty much, was there is really no need for those programs for the girls, because we don’t have those issues with the girls.”
Nevertheless, said Burenstein, Susan Ashner researched more about the status of at-risk and vulnerable girls in Israel, and determined “that there was a need for programs and services in Israel for those girls.” Beit Ruth began as a hostel in Rishon LeZion in 2006, which housed 13 at-risk girls between the ages of 13 and 18. By 2014, a new location had started operating on the outskirts of Afula, in a gated village setting. Today, Beit Ruth Village in Afula houses 45 girls in three houses.
Recently, a new school building was completed. Next on the list of capital projects are two more homes that will allow the village to take in 30 more girls. Following this, the plan is to add five more homes, giving the village and school the capacity to help 150 girls.
“Beit Ruth is a long-term residential village for at-risk and vulnerable girls,” said Burenstein. “It is a learning, healing and caring community that embraces the whole child, emotionally, socially and academically. It gives girls who have been removed from their homes by the Ministry of Welfare – due to incidents of severe neglect or abuse … and, when I say abuse, I mean emotional, physical or sexual; in many cases, it is incest – it gives these girls a chance…. Most, for the first time in their lives, have the chance to receive therapy for this abuse.”
Beit Ruth also “gives them the chance to get a high school education and life skills, so they can be prepared for life outside the village.”
Walking into the village, she said, is “like walking into a gated community in Vancouver. There are homes, with between 12 to 15 girls living in each home. They are not dormitories. They are decorated like homes.”
Each house has a kitchen with a dining room, where the girls cook together, eat together, and have chores and responsibilities, and a living room. They have a bedroom they share with three other girls, and they can decorate it however they wish.
“We’re recreating that security and foundation that any child needs to have in order to be a successful human being,” said Burenstein. “I mean, to be able to have trust and respect, communication skills and a desire to learn, like most kids have.
“When our girls come to us in the village, I can tell you that, if you were to visit as an outsider, you’d probably be able to point out which girls have just come to us … because they are a shell of what a child should look like at that age – withdrawn, many sitting in a corner. You can tell that they are scared. They won’t make eye contact with you. They speak in a low voice.
“In a matter of weeks or few short months, you’ll see them start to smile, hang out with the other girls, talk with staff, engage, listen … some will laugh out loud.”
The girls who come to Beit Ruth have to choose to do so themselves, and they can choose to leave at any time. The purpose of the village gate is to keep out unwanted visitors, not to lock the girls in.
“The girls need to commit to the hard work it takes to overcome their trauma, to face their trauma through therapy, to listen to the values we instil in the village, which are all about teamwork, respect and trust,” said Burenstein.
Something that makes Beit Ruth unique are its guiding principles, one of which is creating the atmosphere of a home life – the kind of support a family should give a young child. Another guiding principle is therapy, which helps each girl face her own personal trauma, with the goal of overcoming it.
There are also enrichment programs, such as therapeutic art or music, sports and physical activities, all of which are mindfully selected and designed to help a young girl find her voice, passions and skills, to forge communication skills, trust and respect.
Many girls come to Beit Ruth with big gaps in their education. Some don’t know how to read or write at 13 or 15 years of age.
“When you’re hungry, when you’re scared, or when you’re in an abusive situation, school is not what you’re focusing on,” said Burenstein. “So, our girls are given the opportunity to have a high school education and we help instil a love of learning and curiosity that most kids have.”
Once at the village, each girl gets the support she uniquely needs. Beit Ruth does not go with one-size-fits-all programs, as each child comes with her own trauma, past and capabilities.
Beit Ruth’s educational programs, which were developed for the village, are trickling down into use by Israel’s Ministry of Education, to other schools around the country, and into hospitals.
“Each girl has her own journey to take,” said Burenstein. “It’s really hands-on for each one of the girls. They know it’s a place they can call home. They know this is a place where they are safe. They know this is a place that, no matter what … and, trust me, they try to test us … they know that we’re here for them and that we’re not giving up on them. That comes across loud and clear.”
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu takes off for Kenya on a trip last year. (photo by Haim Zach/GPO via Ashernet)
Recent years have seen a mass migration of people from Africa and the Middle East, primarily to Europe. Images of rickety boats filled with migrants and bodies washing up on European shores jolted the world’s conscience.
To be more accurate, these images jolted some people’s consciences. Others, like far-right political parties in Europe, have been more concerned with preventing migrants from entering their countries than they have been with the dangers the migrants face at home or in transit.
Israel’s experience has been somewhat different. Beginning even before the peak of the migration, thousands of east African migrants traveled to Israel, crossing the Sinai border with Egypt and entering Israel illegally. In some cases, migrants, many of them asylum-seekers, paid Bedouins to transport them across the border into Israel. The once-porous border has been secured and Israel’s attention has now turned to how to deal with those who entered the country illegally.
Some have been held in a facility called Holot, in the Negev, which the government describes as an “open-stay centre.” It is run by the prison authority and, while “residents” are free to leave during the day, they cannot work and if they miss an evening curfew they can be jailed.
There are an estimated 27,500 Eritreans and 7,800 Sudanese in Israel. The Israeli government department responsible says that 1,420 of these people are being held in detention facilities.
Migrants say they came to Israel to escape conflict or persecution, but the Israeli government characterizes them as economic migrants and refers to them as “infiltrators.” Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has also suggested that African migrants threaten the Jewish nature of the country.
Thousands of migrants have already voluntarily left Israel, apparently not seeing a future there, despite arriving filled with the promise that life there might be free and prosperous.
Now, Netanyahu has announced a crackdown that puts the fate of the remaining tens of thousands in doubt. The government had already announced plans to deport migrants, a plan that Israel’s high court approved last summer, on the condition that safeguards were in place in third countries that would accept the expelled people. Rwanda has accepted several thousand African people from Israel.
Some who have returned to their home countries have been tortured or placed in solitary confinement. And reports say that others who have left continue their journeys through successive countries, many of them with an eye to eventually making it to Europe. Libya has been the departure point for many Africans setting off for Europe. For around 2,000, it has also been the last sign of land before drowning. In Libya, also, migrants are being sold in contemporary slave markets. Others are sexually assaulted or coerced into forced labour.
Irrespective of all of this, Netanyahu announced last week that the remaining migrants would be given the equivalent of about $3,500 US and sent packing. Those who do not leave will be imprisoned, the prime minister promises.
The choice is not necessarily obvious for everyone. One migrant told the New York Times recently: “If it’s between going back to Africa or to jail in Israel, I’ll go to jail.”
The government’s plan is inhumane.
We have plenty of sympathy for the need to maintain Israel’s Jewish character, but the assessment that 40,000 Africans present a serious threat to that demographic necessity – even generations down the line – is not credible.
A country that absorbed one million migrants from Russia in the course of a few years (albeit imperfectly) and whose entire history has been one of absorbing migrants, can do better than this for 40,000 Africans.
It is also startling to see the Jewish state behaving in such a callous way to migrants. Eve if some – or all – of these migrants were “economic” migrants rather than fleeing persecution and conflict, this would still not be an acceptable strategy. Jewish history should imbue Israel with more sensitivity to the humanity of migrants of any colour or origin. Even if the sensitivity to the migrants’ humanity were not genuine, Israel should at least be sensitive to the appearance created by their inhumanity toward the migrants.
In this space, we have always maintained that Israel has the right to determine its policies and directions first based on their self-determined needs, not on whether it makes it easier or more difficult for overseas Zionists to make our case. But does the Netanyahu government absolutely need to behave in ways so blatantly and unnecessarily nasty?