New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft has penned a heartfelt letter of condolence to the family of Max Steinberg, the American-Israeli soldier killed in Gaza on July 20. Steinberg, who was from Los Angeles, made aliyah after visiting Israel on a Birthright trip in 2012, the New York Times reports. He was serving in the IDF’s elite Golani Brigade in Gaza and died when his unit’s armored vehicle was attacked by a roadside bomb. Kraft sent the letter after he spotted a photo of Steinberg wearing a New England Patriots cap in a news broadcast about the tragic events in Gaza.

Here’s the full text of the letter, which was photographed and tweeted by the Jewish Journal‘s Jared Sichel, and appears to have been framed by the family:

It is with a heavy heart that I write to you after having learned about your dear son and distinguished member of the Israel Defense Forces, Max. Although I didn’t have the privilege of knowing your son Max personally, I have taken the liberty of reaching out to you since I noticed him wearing a New England Patriots cap in one of the broadcasted photos. He represents the consummate patriot and I am forever grateful for the sacrifices he made to keep our beloved Israel safe. His dedication and loyalty to Israel have not gone unnoticed and I am sure he has left behind a legacy of which you and your family can be proud.

On behalf of the entire New England Patriots team, please accept our most sincere condolences as we are all profoundly saddened by his untimely passing.

Sincerely,

Robert Kraft

Beneath the printed text, there was a handwritten note: In Hebrew lettering, the words “b’ahava raba”—with great love—followed by the lines “‘We are all Patriots’ / With love of our tradition and the people of Eretz Israel.”

Stuart Steinberg told the Associated Press that his son Max “was completely dedicated and committed to serving the country of Israel. He was focused, he was clear in what the mission was, and he was dedicated to the work he needed to be doing.”

The funeral—attended by 30,000 people—took place on July 23 on Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl, the burial place of Israel’s fallen soldiers and several prime ministers. A memorial service is scheduled to take place in Los Angeles on August 6.

(Image: Jared Sichel / Twitter)

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The world’s stickiest, catchiest viral pop song, Psy’s “Gangnam Style,” might be more powerful than we presumed, as it brought two antagonistic worlds together to dance, dance, dance.

A group of Israeli soldiers from the Givati Brigade heard the song playing in a club in Hebron. It seems the men couldn’t control their dancing feet, which walked them straight into the party, where they partied with dozens of young Palestinians who were reportedly there celebrating a wedding, NPR reports.

As the video shows, dozens of young men cheered and held cameras and phones aloft, trying to capture the unlikely moment. We also note that the soldiers seem to have avoided the misstep of handing their weapons to others so they could dance.

Though the night looks fun, even hopeful, the Israeli government has suspended the soldiers, claiming they put themselves in danger.

Sigh. Oppan Gangnam Style.

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Israeli news site Walla said the women were new recruits stationed on a base in southern Israel. One picture showed the soldiers removing their fatigue uniforms to expose their underwear and back sides. In another, five women posed in what appeared to be a barracks room, dressed only in helmets and a small amount of combat equipment. The faces of the soldiers were blurred in the photos.

In a statement, the military said the young women had acted in a manner that showed “unbecoming behavior” for Israeli soldiers. “The commanding officers disciplined the soldiers as they saw fitting,” it said.

It doesn’t seem to have stopped them, though—Gawker reported that they’ve since uploaded three new images (see above). This means they probably won’t get to join any of the Birthright trips, which may be the greatest punishment of all—at least for American Jewish boys aged 18-26. The best part of the whole story, though, might be this homepage image on British newspaper The Sun’s website.

Female Soldiers Defy IDF, Post More Semi-Nude Facebook Pics [Gawker]

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Last we saw Yossi, he was in mourning. It was the end of Yossi & Jagger, Eytan Fox’s 2002 film about two young IDF soldiers in love—an affair that ended when Lior, called Jagger by Yossi, died in an infantry operation gone wrong. Their love was practically an open secret among their fellow soldiers but less so with Lior’s parents, who, in one of the film’s most bitterly sweet touches, are fooled by a female soldier’s claim that she and Lior were in love. The soldier, Yaeli, admits that she never got a chance to tell Lior her feelings, but she thinks that their affection was mutual all the same. The knowledge is some comfort to Lior’s mother, who admits that she never even knew her son’s favorite song. Yossi (Ohad Knoller), seething with repression and heartbreak, looks up and offers the answer: “Bo” by Rita. The film ends with his melancholic smile.

A decade later, the grieving young man has returned in Yossi, Fox’s minor-key sequel now premiering in the United States. By nearly all measures, we are a long ways away from the first film. Yossi & Jagger took place almost entirely on a snow-covered mountain in Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon. It appears to have been shot with a handheld, and the effect is less documentary than home movie—prone to jitters and unexpected close-ups, the colors washed out by sunlight bouncing off the snowscape. None of this is to the film’s detriment—although some viewers might find the aesthetic dated, even anachronistic for its time—as it creates a familial, informal atmosphere around the soldiers’ remote outpost. (The location, forbidding and snowbound, is not dissimilar from that of Beaufort, a glossier and more politically minded film that also starrs Knoller.)

Yossi, on the other hand, finds itself a world apart. Whereas our title character was once a confident, strong-willed, even dour commanding officer in the IDF, capable both in his duties and in his romantic life, Yossi has deteriorated in the years since. Now 33, he’s successful—a cardiologist at a Tel Aviv hospital—but he’s depressed, lonely, and without friends, save the garrulous Moti (Lior Ashkenazi), who is ecstatic about his impending divorce. Even more markedly, Yossi has added about 30 pounds, much of it to his belly and face, the latter now colonized by an ivy-like growth of scrub that, along with the premature crow’s feet and purple bags around his eyes, signals a man at his nadir.

Fox’s style has changed, too. Gone is the handheld camera, replaced by a smooth, shadowed approach that, particularly in the hospital’s antiseptic halls, highlights Yossi’s veritable lifelessness. When Yossi goes to the chic apartment of a man he’s met online—an Adonis living in the kind of brushed steel-and-glass enclosure that seems less like a living space than a habitable status symbol—he becomes nigh catatonic. Were you to encounter him on a beach, you’d have to poke him with a stick to find out if he were in fact animate. Or, as Moti tells him, “You look like an operating table.”

All this changes when Lior’s mother is admitted to the hospital and gets treated by Yossi. A reckoning with her and her husband follows. Yossi leaves town on an impromptu vacation (he’s never taken one) and, at a Negev rest stop, picks up some young soldiers on leave. He drives them the rest of the way to Eilat and falls in with them—or rather, falls for Tom (Oz Zehavi), a tanned, blue-eyed sylph. It seems improbable that Tom would be attracted to Yossi in return, but such unlikely unions, and the tangled emotional pathways that lead to them, are the basis of films like this one.

It’s easy to say that Yossi is about grief, depression, and repressed sexuality (there’s a pointed contrast with the far more liberated Tom). But in retrospect, I’m struck by how little the title character actually talks about these things, when he speaks at all. So much is communicated with a squelched remark or by the looks he gives Tom at a distance: pathetic and longing, but with some hope, secreted within like contraband. Such is the skill of Ohad Knoller, who adroitly inhabits both incarnations of Yossi. In fact, between this diptych, there are many Yossis: a clandestine but joyous lover, a brusque but respected soldier, an urban professional utterly adrift, and a man feebly searching for a way out of his own mind.

Both films show signs of the maudlin and the mannered, but they redeem themselves on the strength of Knoller’s acting. With Yossi, Eytan Fox has produced an unexpectedly moving sequel, one that doubles as a welcome entry to his filmography on gay life in Israel.

The post Culture Kvetch: The Many Sides of ‘Yossi,’ Eytan Fox’s New Film appeared first on Jewcy.

Join us and the Jewish Book Council at 1:30 p.m. EST today for what should be a fascinating Twitter Book Club with Shani Boianjiu, the author of The People of Forever Are Not Afraid. In the novel, the 25-year-old Israeli writer weaves together the compelling tale of Lea, Avishag, and Yael, three friends from a small village near the Lebanese border as they begin their service in the Israel Defense Forces.

Use the hashtag #JLit to follow along with the discussion, and don’t hesitate to jump in with questions of your own—just make sure you include Boianjiu’s Twitter handle (@ShaniBoianjiu) and #JLit.

Before our chat, don’t miss:

• Jacob Silverman’s Culture Kvetch column about Boianjiu’s novel and the unique challenges of being a successful young writer.

• The Jewish Book Council’s review of The People of Forever Are Not Afraid.

• Boianjiu’s three blog posts for the Jewish Book Council’s Visiting Scribe series.

• Boianjiu’s New Yorker fiction, published this summer.

• The Jewish Book Council’s contemporary Israeli literature book list.

Previously: Like Jews and Books? You’ll Love Our New Twitter Book Club Partnership

The post Join Israeli Novelist Shani Boianjiu for Today’s Twitter Book Club appeared first on Jewcy.

As Operation Pillar of Defense continues, the Israeli Defense Forces are simultaneously making waves in the social media realm. In addition to their much-discussed Twitter activity, Facebook updates, Instagram account, and surprisingly high production value Tumblr, it appears that the IDF is in fact on Pinterest, that last bastion of online time-suck.

Boasting 161 followers, the IDF follows only two Pinterest accounts: United With Israel (“World’s largest grassroots pro-Israel Community!”), and the U.S. Army. Their five pin boards, which showcase soldiers, events, humanitarian aid, IDF technology, and women in the IDF, have a combined 16 images ‘pinned’ to them.

Compared to their aggressive Tweeting and Tumbling, the IDF’s Pinterest page seems a little directionless. (The U.S. Army has a board titled ‘Army Style and Fashion,’ showcasing uniforms throughout the years. Now that’s creative.) It just doesn’t feel like Pinterest, beloved mindless portal of shiny things, is the right medium for them. While Tumblr and Instagram pack a visual punch that the IDF has zealously embraced, the glossy, saccharine expectations of Pinterest don’t seem to work as well with their no-holds-barred social media strategy.

Israel Defense Forces [Pinterest]

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The People of Forever Are Not Afraid, the first novel by Shani Boianjiu, a 25-year-old Israeli who writes in English, has much to tell us about life in the Israeli military. The Israel Defense Forces is perhaps Israel’s most mythologized institution and, to outsiders, its most opaque. For young diaspora Jews, the IDF is often encountered through the sweatshirts purchased in a tourist shop—a popular method of vicarious identification—and by discussions with the occasional veteran, every one of whom, it can seem, has served in an elite unit. (The process of mythologizing, after all, also depends on non-Israeli Jews looking admiringly at a symbol of Jewish power.)

Boianjiu’s novel (some critics have referred to it as a collection of stories) digs beneath the hasbarista image of IDF service and offers a somber look at the depression and alienation that can arrive when one transitions from being an 18-year-old high school student to a soldier charged with securing your country’s periphery or enforcing its occupation of the West Bank.

The book is largely the story of three young women—Lea, Avishag, and Yael—friends from a small village near the Lebanese border. We get some impression of their life at home, where Avishag’s brother, Dan, committed suicide not long before she was drafted, but much of the novel is about their refracted, vastly different experiences. Lena joins the military police (she lobbied for a higher-status assignment, but her request was denied) and works at checkpoints in the West Bank. Avishag is sent to the Egyptian border, where she monitors surveillance feeds and does guard duty in an observation tower. Yael is a weapons instructor at a base near an Arab village, whose boys frequently sneak in to steal equipment.

It is a novel of contrasts, where the trivial and the tragic, gossip and gunplay, messily intermingle. One of the characters falls for a fellow soldier and they engage in furtive sex at their base; the next day, he’s sent to Lebanon and dies. Weeks of unending banality at the Egyptian border are interrupted by the sudden appearance of a car trafficking women, or of an African migrant shot while trying to cross into Israel.

Boredom, in fact, is the dominant theme—the book has this in common with the Gulf War memoir Jarhead—along with the ways in which it colonizes the mind, destabilizing these characters’ sense of self, making them long for some extreme sensation (love, terror, violence) to slice through the ennui. It’s that destabilization of the self, combined with the traditional insecurities of youth, which makes Yael, Avishag, and Lena blend together. They do have some individuating qualities—Lena is beautiful and cold; Avishag is scarred by the death of her brother, though Yael, who loved him, is as well—but in many ways are indistinguishable. It’s one of the novels deficits: the storylines may vary, but the characters peopling them do not.

All three women are suspended somewhere between adolescence and adulthood. IDF service is an interregnum in which they are supposed to find themselves, but for them the uniform promises a sense of purpose that it can’t deliver. This is reflected in the prose, a mashup between the lyrical and the chatty, blog-speak meeting finely tuned confessionalism. Consider the opening to a chapter narrated by Yael: “One day, thirteen days before the war, I turned beautiful. It was the best. Don’t let anyone tell you there is anything better that can happen to a woman.”

One day but also thirteen days—vague and then exact. Beautiful—an adult’s word. But “it was the best:” that’s how a teenager talks. Yet in the next sentence she reminds us she is a woman.

This miscegenated style is ultimately very effective for Boianjiu, as it reflects the kind of story we are being told. Boianjiu’s hybrid English—informed as much by American pop culture (Dawson’s Creek and Mean Girls get referenced) as by any formal instruction—produces some small, pleasurable dissonances, the kind that can only come from a non-native speaker. Avishag at one point remarks that “it is time to start caring about someone who is not myself,” which is a challenge for all three of these characters. An American would probably use the more conventional “other than myself,” a phrasing that would be digested without notice, like the chips at the bottom of the bag.

So why did Boianjiu write this novel in English, rather than her native Hebrew? In interviews, she’s explained that, following her IDF service, she studied English and social anthropology as an undergraduate at Harvard. The People of Forever Are Not Afraid, which began as her senior thesis, came together practically by accident. She was writing stories for class and a professor put her in touch with Andrew Wylie, one of publishing’s biggest agents.

Boianjiu’s career soon took off, well before this book was released. In 2011, she was selected for the National Book Award’s 5 under 35 prize, reportedly on the recommendation of Nicole Krauss, who has been a champion of Boianjiu’s work. It’s understandable why Krauss is a fan. Like her American admirer, Boianjiu leans towards direct, emotionally raw prose, she makes use of repetition, and the novel, even in its overall bleakness, is shot through with whimsy (like the sandwich shop in which customers can request any ingredients they can think of). There’s also an element of, if not outright surrealism, then a blurred vision, one that derives from the characters’ brokenness, their inability to fully engage with the world.

Early success has a tendency to attract both irrational criticism and unearned praise. It also makes for odd bedfellows. Some journalists have compared Boianjiu to Lena Dunham, a pairing that seems to have little merit except that both are female creatives in their mid-twenties. Perhaps Dunham is just too easily invoked—and too SEO-friendly—to resist. Recently, a rather cynical article in Haaretz called Boianjiu the “Cinderella of Kfar Vradim,” and deemed her the product of marketing hype (there really hasn’t been much).

Some of the venom seems to stem from the fact that Boianjiu writes in English, thereby bypassing the smaller Israeli market, but like Aleksandar Hemon, her decision to write in a second language has proven an artistically sound one. Debating the commercial or ethical merits of that choice is a rather dull side pursuit. Instead, better to conclude that Boianjiu has produced an impressive first novel, flaws and all. That she has done it at a comparatively young age only means, I hope, that she will have more time to perform the same feat again.

Boianjiu will be participating in a Twitter Book Club with Jewcy and the Jewish Book Council November 20 from 1:30 to 2:10 p.m.

Recent Kvetches: Stop Calling Porn Star James Deen a ‘Nice Jewish Boy’
Watching the Anti-War Documentary ‘Tears of Gaza’
The Jews of HBO’s ‘Boardwalk Empire’

The post Culture Kvetch: Shani Boianjiu and the Problems of Youth appeared first on Jewcy.

When Homeland returns for a second season this Sunday night, it will be able to boast a bevy of Emmy’s and claim Barack Obama as a fanboy. But perhaps its most noted distinction is indirectly leading to the creation of America’s new catchphrase—“Mandy Patinkin, holla.” As I’m sure you know, Homeland is an adaptation of the Israeli TV series Hatufim, Prisoners of War, and is only one in a flood of programming coming out of the Israeli-Hollywood pipeline. Just last week Universal Television bought rights to The Gordin Cell, a series following former Russian intelligence agents reintegrating themselves in Israel.

There have been various hypotheses offered for the recent obsession with Israeli television: Israelis, they’re just like us! 9/11! And inevitably—Jews run Hollywood. Showtime and HBO as well as all the major networks have at least one Israeli television adaptation in the works.

But the Israeli TV shopping spree hasn’t been particularly discriminatory and results vary: The sitcom The Ex-List was canceled after only four episodes, and the reality show 3 got the axe after two. And while the success and failure of a show can be a crapshoot, there does seem to be a pattern in whether or not a series has crossover success.

America has a long history of adapting TV shows from other countries. Iconic American classics such as All in the Family and Three’s Company were modeled on British shows. More recently, the U.K. has given us the soon-to-be-put-out-of-its-misery series, The Office, as well as NBC’s Prime Suspect and MTV’s Skins—both failures. In the hunt for new ideas, producers have turned to other countries; AMC’s The Killing, for example, was based on a popular Danish program.

Sharon Shaif, who co-edited the book Global Television Formats: Understanding Television Across Borders and is currently writing a book on Israeli reality television, told me that traditionally, the rule of thumb when scouring for potential crossover hits is to find programs that are “culturally neutral” and adhere to established formulas. For Israel, though, the lesson has been almost the opposite. The Israeli shows that have succeeded in the United States have been steeped in Israeli cultural concerns, from war and terrorism to the specter of the Holocaust.

HBO’s In Treatment, the most successful Israeli crossover before Homeland, is a case in point. Adapted from the Israeli hit B’tipul, the show centers on a psychologist, with each episode depicting a therapy session. The patients in the Israeli version included a pilot, whose father is a Holocaust survivor, grappling with having bombed an Arab school; a couple deciding whether or not to have an abortion; and a childless woman in her 30s from a traditionally conservative Mizrachi family. The U.S. script follows the Israeli version almost word-for-word, only changing Israel-specific details, such as turning the pilot into an Iraqi war veteran.

Hatufim, which aired on Arutz 2 in 2010, is even more predicated on the Israeli context. The show revolves around the return of two Israel Defense Forces soldiers who were held in captivity in Lebanon for 17 years, and thus hits on one of Israel’s most sensitive nerves: the culture of the abducted soldier. While the series was successful, it had many detractors, who accused writer and director Gideon Raff of exploiting the issue at a time when Gilad Shalit was still in captivity.

Though Raff consulted on the U.S. version and serves as its executive producer, the series diverges sharply from its Israeli model, and with good reason: returning soldiers don’t have the same hold on the national mindset in America. So while Homeland takes as its premise a U.S. Marine returning home after being held captive by Al-Qaida since 2003, it adds an element of suspense to the mix with Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), a CIA operations officer who suspects he may have been turned.

While Hatufim and B’Tipul didn’t offer culturally neutral source material (far from it), they gave Hollywood something even more valuable: fresh ideas. The shows are unlike anything on American television, not only in theme, but in genre. For viewers used to network cop shows or cable series focused on tormented male anti-heroes, a show set entirely in a therapist’s office is nothing if not different. And Israeli television is a fertile ground for dramas that don’t conform to American models. “Israel is not wedded to the usual procedural formats—lawyer, cop, etc.,” says Shaif.

Not so with comedy. Israelis grew up on a steady diet of imported American sitcoms—the first Israeli sitcom, Krovim, Krovim, only premiered in 1983. Today many of Israel’s comedies mimic the classic sitcoms of the ’80s and ’90s. The familiar tropes are there—the plots are driven by misunderstandings; men are constantly screwing up and spend an episode working to hide it from their wives who will inevitably find out; children are a bit too precocious.

With contemporary popular American comedies trending toward meta-references and fast-paced jokes, it is not much of a surprise that American audiences would shy away from shows imitating Israeli shows that imitate American shows from 20 years ago. Take last year’s Traffic Light. The Fox show was based on Ramzor, a hit show in Israel. Now in its fourth season, the Israeli show follows three men at different stages in life: Itzko is married with a kid, Amir lives with his girlfriend, and Hefer is the perennial bachelor of the bunch. The show won an Israeli TV Academy Award for best comedy and became the first Israeli TV series to win an International Emmy Award for best comedy series.

Fox heavily promoted the show, which premiered in February 2011, but with dismal ratings it only lasted through May. Looking at the source material, one could guess why the show failed. In one episode, Itzko’s wife gives him two bags—one filled with old clothes to donate to African refuges and one with a Prada dress she needs dry cleaned. If you have ever watched an episode of Home Improvement you can easily guess that he gives away the wrong bag, his wife finds out, and hijinks ensue as he is forced to go down to the refugee shelter to get it back.

This doesn’t mean that all Israeli dramas are good, and Israeli comedies bad. Arab Labor, for example, the first Israeli sitcom to center around an Arab-Israeli family is both radical in its subject matter and riotously funny. But it may be a sign that the American audience is on the hunt for television that seems non-prepackaged, something that Israeli dramas are able to offer. And once Israeli sitcoms find their own voice, they may succeed here as well. And if anyone from Keshet is out there, I’m pretty sure a comedy centered on a multigenerational family that runs a Sabich stand in Tel Aviv is pure gold—remember to thank me at the Emmys.

The post Is That a Falafel in My Situation Comedy? appeared first on Jewcy.

• Things got a little weird yesterday on Twitter when the woman operating the @Sweden handle—as part of the country’s nobly intentioned experiment to let a different citizen tweet/represent the country each week—started asking why some people hate Jews. We’d refer her to Henry Blodget, but she seems nice, if terribly naive.

• In honor of Pride Month, the IDF posted a photo on Facebook of two male soldiers holding hands, claiming they were a gay couple. The photo attracted a great deal of attention (of all types) but has since been revealed as staged. Only one of the soldiers is gay, and both serve in the office of the military spokesman who posted the photo.

• Andy Samberg hopes that his new British TV show Cuckoo will “cement the special relationship between our two great countries.” We just want more digital shorts.

• In her new music video for “Don’t Leave Me (Ne Me Quitte Pas),” Regina Spektor puts toast on her face, sings to animatronic caterpillars, and sets things on fire. We think she’s wonderful.

The post Daily Jewce: James Deen, a Swedish Twitter Snafu, IDF Gay Pride, and More appeared first on Jewcy.

Recent statistics show that these efforts to sex-up Israel’s image are working. Tourism to Israel, which virtually ceased for a few years during the height of the Second Intifada, has returned to normal.

But many of these new tourists want their itinerary to include a glimpse of Israel’s decidedly unsexy side, too. Two colleagues of mine recently made a trip to Hebron, the city in the West Bank in which Palestinians and Israeli settlers live with their hair standing on end, baring teeth at one another ready for attack. The trip was organized by Breaking the Silence, a group of former Israeli soldiers, who show tourists what the Israeli army is being asked to do to protect the settlers and cow the local Palestinian residents into submission. One person described it as a twisted Disneyland, another as a zoo, watching people live their lives sealed off behind barbed wire.

By far the most popular stop on the socially responsible travel itinerary is the Separation Barrier dividing Israelis from Palestinians. In the past three years I have been invited dozens of times to
participate in these trips.

The separation barrier, or “wall” as it is often referred to, runs much of the length of the West Bank, weaving in and out of the Green Line that serves as the internationally recognized border of Israel. Building of the wall began with Ariel Sharon’s government as a response to the Second Intifada, ostensibly to protect Israelis from violent Palestinian incursions. For most Israelis and Palestinians, the barrier has become its own de facto border, despite insistent denials from the Israeli government that the barrier is intended to mark a border.

In Jerusalem, the wall is at its most notorious as it scars the landscape with huge twenty foot slabs of concrete. One can see the wall from many parts of the city, and several different political groups have created tours of the wall for visitors.

The number of organizations getting involved in “socially responsible tourism” grows each time I return. Almost all the tours are led by left-of-center social change organizations who try to shake the complacency of travelers who only experience Israel as a normal tourist destination with its ancient ruins, museums, good restaurants, hotels and beaches.

The feminist group Machsom Watch, which monitors the checkpoints for Israeli human rights’ violations, takes visitors to see the checkpoints that regulate Palestinian movement. Breaking the Silence takes visitors to the Wall and to Hebron. Ir Amim (City of Nations), Women in Black, Rabbis for Human Rights, Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, and others all offer their own tours of the effects of the Israeli occupation.

Israelis, on both the right and the left ends of the political spectrum, take the tours to better understand what is happening within their own country. Most of the international tourists who participate are like me, people who spend much time in Israel, who engage the country deeply, and are troubled by some of its politics and
policies.

There are also one-time tourists, of all religious and ethnic backgrounds, sometimes Europeans, sometimes American Jews, who have seen the standard tourist sites like the Old City and historic ruins, but who now want to see in person the places which they read about on a regular basis in their local newspapers.

And for American Jews who usually see travel to Israel as a form of identity travel, the tours are a way of showing them the implications of racialized occupation, as well as the harsh reality of what Israel as a state does in the name of the Jews.

The best, most sophisticated tours show not just the hardships that the wall imposes on Palestinian residents—who are now on occasion separated from their jobs, schools, and family by concrete—but also what motivated the Israeli government to put up the wall in the first place: very real fears about violence carried out by Palestinians living just miles away.

Socially responsible travel recognizes that tourism is too often about not engaging the place to which one travels. It’s instead about searching out fantasies like those in the photo spreads of Maxim. But tourists have power: they can support or destroy local economies, and support or resist political and social situations that a traveler might find reprehensible at home. When tourists spend their dollars in countries like China visiting the Great Wall and the Forbidden City, should they also be invested in encouraging political change by meeting dissident journalists and Falun Gong members?

Separation barrier tourists, both Jewish and not, are choosing to engage, to see political realities that are usually masked by the tour guides on their overly air conditioned buses that zoom from place to place. In the future, as people become more sensitive to the political implications of their travel choices, perhaps a visit to the separation wall will become a standard stop on the average tourist’s visit to Israel.

The post “Socially Responsible Tourism” Comes to Israel appeared first on Jewcy.