In memory of my dear friend, Ohad Baruch

Ohad Baruch, a dear friend of mine since high school, died of cancer.   He was only 28 years old.   He was a wonderful young man.  He was intelligent, had a wonderful sense of humor, and was great fun to be around.   He will be missed dearly.  

What is the Problem With Women Singing?

I have been doing some thinking lately.   A lot of very religious Jewish people claim that it is not modest for a man to listen to a woman singing who is not a relative.  According to the Chabad website, "The singing voice of a woman is considered sensual and possibly stimulating to males."  The Chabad website claims that Jewish law forbids women's singing because it is not good for a husband to get sexually aroused via a woman's singing voice who is not a relative.   This whole concept is taken from Song of Songs 2:14, which states, "Let me hear your voice, for your voice is sweet and your face is beautiful."  The Talmud evidently explains this verse by claiming that the sweetness or ervah refers to nakedness and should be interpreted to bar women's singing.

Yet, although I consider myself modern Orthodox, I don't agree at all with this way of looking at the world.   While maybe such arguments made sense if one woman was singing alone in front of a man who is not her husband, what could possibly be wrong with having a group of women and men singing together in the synagogue?   What is wrong with a family of men and women singing together at a dinner table alongside some guests who aren't relatives?   What is wrong with listening to a CD of songs sung by a woman, where you can't see the woman at all?   What is wrong with going to a concert full of thousands of people, with one woman singing in front of a mixed audience?    To me, none of these seem sexually arousing.  To suggest that it is sexually arousing is not to have confidence in the strength of our men that they can control themselves.   

It is moments like this where I question whether I will ever be more religious than I presently am.   I have no problem with my husband listening to a woman singing, either on a DVD player, at a family gathering or in a concert.   I view such things to be great fun, not things that should be shunned.   I have full confidence that my husband will continue to remain loyal to me, even if he listens to other women sing.   While I do keep Shabbat and wear a hair covering when I go out of the house, and have a strong belief in G-d and have great respect for the Tanakh, I don't understand at all why so many orthodox Jews have a problem with women singing, even though G-d created the woman's voice just as he created the man's voice.   While I will continue to respect people who have a different life-style than me, I nevertheless fail to understand the reasoning for why they chose to live like this.      

My Speech at the Israel Academia Monitor Conference

When I was growing up in America, it was not uncommon to hear negative comments about Israel!   However, until I made Aliyah to Israel, I could not imagine that even here I would be exposed to anti-Israel propaganda and even face intimidation from fellow Jews.  All this happened when I joined the MA program in the Middle East Studies Department at Ben Gurion University in the academic year 2009-2010. 

 For starters, the social coordinator for the international MA students Noah Slor was a very big pro-Palestinian activist on campus.   Indeed, during our very first meeting, Slor was encouraging international students to support the radical left wing party Hadash.   While it was Slor’s responsibility to expose international students to Israel by showing them natural beauty, sharing Israeli culture and history, and in general enriching their experience in Israel, she instead decided to focus almost exclusively on taking them to parties and trips to Palestinian areas.   As a result, it should come as no surprise that the international students from the US, Canada, and Germany become more pro-Palestinian.

For the first major trip, which was held on January 20, 2010, Slor decided to take our group on a tour of East Jerusalem.   The e-mail claimed that the tour would be given from “two different perspectives: that of a Palestinian who lives in one of the neighborhoods that we will visit in, and that of a Jewish settler.”    In reality, the tour guide was Daniel Seideiman from Ir Amim,  a left wing activist who only demonstrated that perspective during the tour, while Arieh King of the Israel Land Fund was given only a couple of hours to share his perspective inside of a café in the Jewish Quarter and was not given the opportunity to show us different sites in East Jerusalem from his perspective.   By the time that he was given the chance to speak, Seideiman basically had already convinced the audience of the merits of the left wing perspective.  

The second major trip, which was held on April 23, 2010, was even less balanced than the East Jerusalem tour.   During this particular trip, Noah Slor arranged for the international students to visit Hebron to meet with Breaking the Silence, which is an organization monitoring the IDF. According to the original e-mail, the goals of the tour was to “witness the harsh situation in the region and to learn more about the power relations between Palestinians and Jews in Hebron in the context of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.”  After this e-mail, I sent out a string of e-mails criticizing this tour for not even trying to create balance.   Only after a long exchange of e-mails amongst me and other classmates did Noah Slor decide to make the trip more balanced by including a Jewish resident of Hebron, Noam Amon, for one hour, and even still, the balance was still tipped in favor of Breaking the Silence, which resulted in most of the international students becoming more pro-Palestinian after the Hebron tour. 

To add insult to injury, Slor justified her initial position in an e-mail sent to the entire class where she explained her reluctance to include members of the Hebron Jewish community.  She claimed that Hebron’s Jews are an “extremely violent group that have routinely abused the city’s Palestinian residents” and that given this, she has a “hard time to give legitimacy to such a violent group, by enabling them to speak up and to express their opinions.”   She went on to claim that “Breaking the Silence” is a “legitimate NGO that does have an agenda, but that has never endorsed violence or racism as part of its discourse or strategy.”   In conclusion, Slor compared giving Hebron’s Jewish residents the right to speak alongside “Breaking the Silence” to giving rapists the right to speak alongside rape victims. 

Unfortunately, Noah Slor was not the only radical left-wing activist who held a prominent position in my program.  For my “Selected Topics in the Geography of the Middle East Class,” I studied under Prof. Oren Yiftachel, who taught international students that “Israel is in a colonial situation with the Palestinians,” “the whole Israeli state is what you call an ethnocracy,” “Ashkenazis colonize the Mizrahim,” “Israeli Arabs have ghetto citizenship,” “Israel is like Sudan in ethnocratic structure,” and that “Israel imposes Judaism on her Palestinian citizens.”  He also compared Israel to apartheid in South Africa and claimed that those who opposed MK Haneen Zoabi’s participation in the Gaza Flotilla were “fascists” and that Israeli society was “racist” for being upset about what she did.  It was due to statements like these by Prof. Yiftachel that I decided to get involved with Israel Academia Monitor.   

After sitting through about a month’s worth of classes, I felt that the way that Prof. Yiftachel was teaching this class was very one-sided and thus unprofessional.   So, after doing an Internet search, I discovered Israel Academia Monitor and decided to give Dana Barnett a phone call.   She asked me to write about my experience studying in his class, in the hopes that public exposure would encourage Yiftachel to teach in a more objective manner.   However, even though I published my first two exposes anonymously, Prof. Yiftachel figured out that the person who was writing the exposes was me and arranged to have me intimidated by the head of the Middle Eastern Studies department at the time, Dr. Avi Rubin. 

Upon the publication of my second expose, Dr. Rubin sent me an e-mail stating, “Your defamatory web postings re Professor Yiftachel and Dr. Cohen’s class have been brought to my attention. I wish to meet with you and discuss the possible ramifications of this.”   Both Israel Academia Monitor and I interpreted this e-mail as an attempt to silence my freedom of speech.    As a result, I was advised not to respond to this e-mail and was put in touch with the well-known attorney, Dr. Haim Misgav.  I also followed Misgav’s advice not to respond to Dr. Rubin’s second e-mail.

Then, on April 25, 2010, I received a phone call from Dr. Rubin, where he demanded an explanation for why I did not answer him.   On the phone, he pretended that he just wanted to mediate between Prof. Yiftachel and myself, and didn’t mean me any harm.   However, after I received Dr. Rubin’s response to my attorney’s letter, it became clear that Dr. Rubin did not have my best intentions at heart.   He accused me of lying, refused requests to remain impartial on this issue until hearing my side of the story, and decided to side with Prof. Yiftachel before even hearing what I had to say.   It was decided that there would be a meeting between Prof. Yiftachel, the university’s legal department, and Dr. Cohen, who was Yiftachel’s assistant.   My attorney, a pro-Israel professor, and a sympathetic member of the Board of Governors would also be present.  

Fortunately, the pressure wore off after this exchange, thanks to the fact that I met with Prof. Yiftachel, where he refused to help me with my final paper before lecturing me about how I hurt his feelings.  Nevertheless, he backed off after this meeting when I said that I would try to understand where he was coming from.  But the pressure started up again after the publication of the Im Tirtzu Report to the Knesset Education Committee, where my story was featured prominently.  During our next meeting to discuss my final paper, he more or less refused to help me at all and instead lectured me on how what I was doing was unethical.   He claimed that I had violated university policies, that this had the potential to be a war between the two of us, that what Israel Academia Monitor was doing was like McCarthyism, that I was guilty of slandering him and that I had no right to criticize him unless I had a PHD.    I was so scared and intimidated during that meeting.  I found that only through lying to him would I be able to complete the class in peace, so that is what I did.  I honestly believe that the only reason why I was not significantly down-graded was the fact that a sympathetic member of the Board of Governors arranged with BGU President Prof. Rivka Carmi to have a neutral professor check my paper and override Prof. Yiftachel’s grade if I felt at all that I was downgraded.

Unfortunately, Prof. Yiftachel’s class was not the only instance where I faced intimidation because of my views at Ben-Gurion University.  At BGU, I also attended a human rights conference that was organized especially for BGU students.    At this BGU human rights conference, Prof. Neve Gordon tried to intimidate me into leaving by interrupting one of the speakers by blurting out in front of every one that I work for some monitor and that I was recording the event.   Later on, between sessions, he emphasized that I could not publish any thing about the BGU human rights conference without the permission of the conference organizers.   Prof. Gordon did this despite the fact that I am an MA student at BGU and thus just had as much right to be there as any other student at BGU, as well as to write about what happened on university property.

But as if this was not bad enough, while I was a student, other anti-Israel professors were recruited to teach international students Middle Eastern Studies.   Dr. Maya Rosenfeld was recruited to teach a course for international students at BGU titled “Palestinian Society in the Diaspora and in the Occupied Territories: Trends of Social and Political Change.”   In this class, Dr. Rosenfeld taught international students that Palestinians have a right of return, called upon the international community to impose a solution, asserted that Israel is violating international law, that Gaza and Judea and Samaria are “occupied territories,” that Israel is the main impediment for peace, has promoted certain terrorists, such as Ghassan Kanafani and Abu Iyyad, and referred to Fatah and its affiliates as “resistance organizations.”  She also has discussed her anti-Israel activism with the class and intimidated the one outspoken pro-Israel student in the class, even though he is a left-winger.  

This past year, BGU’s international masters program in Middle Eastern Studies was canceled.  I very much support the idea of international students coming to Israel to learn about the Middle East.   However, it is important that less knowledgeable young people are not exploited and brainwashed into becoming anti-Israel activists.   International students should be exposed to many opinions and professors should leave it to the students to decide what they believe, and not to teach their own political positions as facts.   

Thank you.

Israel's 65th Independence Day

In celebration of Israel's 65th birthday, I ate tons and tons of food.   On the eve of Israel's Independence day, I went to a BBQ with my husband and our group of friends in Netanya.   We had originally wanted to pitch tents on the beach and spend the night in them, yet the weather had other plans for us, so we merely had a BBQ.    I ate so much steaks, pargiyot, chicken wings, and salads that it was not even funny.   My husbands grilled eggplant with tehina and spicy grilled pepper salad was out of this world.  It was also really nice that my husbands friends all brought along their girlfriends and wives, so that I would have other women to talk to.

The day after, we had another BBQ.   This time, however, it was at the home of my brother-in-law Golan and his wife Tami.   There, I had kebabs, steaks, pargiyot, chicken wings, lots of salad, and homemade pita bread with grilled eggplants and homemade matboucha which was really tasty.   Now, unfortunately, we are back to the regular routine of working.   Unfortunately, Lag B'Omer won't be so fun this year, because I need to cover a special event for Lag B'Omer for my job and my thesis.   This means that there won't be so many vacations until Shavuot.   I simply cannot wait until I submit this damn thesis, so that I can take a day off to visit the camel ranch south of Be'ersheva.  

Passover Vacation 2013

My Passover holiday was amazing.   It started out with an Iraqi style Seder in Netanya with my husbands family.   There was tons of excellent food.   Then, it was followed by a Mizrahi BBQ the following day.   Immediately after the first holiday of Passover, I was forced unfortunately to visit my thesis adviser in Be'ersheva, where I unfortunately learned that I will need an extra semester to finish my MA thesis because he wants me to make many revisions.   I am taking this in stride, even though it is frustrating.   After I met with my thesis adviser, I went to Tel Aviv, where I met my friend Anna for coffee and a walk by the Mediterranean Sea.   It was still too cold for swimming, yet it was fun to gaze at the sea.   We also did some shopping at Dizengoff Center.

The day after however was the highlight of my Passover Vacation.  I went to Jerusalem, where I went on an English speaking tour with my friend Ben at the Tower of David Museum, which documents the history of Jerusalem.    After seeing how layer after layer of history was built in Jerusalem, with Ottoman structures being built on top of Roman buildings and bricks dating back to the times of the Prophets of Israel, we then proceeded to the Israel Museum, where we saw the King Herod exhibit which is only going to be in Israel through the following October.   For all who haven't seen it, I highly recommend the experience.   In the evening, we went back to the Tower of David Museum to see their wonderful light show.

Immediately after the trip to Jerusalem, I went to Nahariyya for the rest of the holiday.   It was nice in Nahariyya.   I met with my husbands family and we went out to restaurants.   I bought some new Jewish head coverings with my husband, which were very pretty.    Yet, it wasn't as exciting as my Jerusalem trip with Ben.   We went to celebrate Mimouna, the Moroccan pastry holiday, however with Shachar's great aunt on some moshav that I never heard of.   That was my holiday.   It was a great vacation, yet not long enough.   I am counting the days till the next holiday and would vote to extend Passover by another week, so that I can have a longer vacation.    Only my Ashkenazi religious friends object, since they can't even eat rice on Pesach.  

My husband's mothers side of the family

Purim Belly Dance 2013!

Purim is supposed to be a time when Jews are merry and dance!   In the above video, one can witness me belly dancing in honor of the Adar month!  I believe that Purim is the ideal time to repost this video!  In high school, I actually took belly dancing lessons for two years, underneath a belly dancer named Yasmina who used to dance at the Kuwaiti Embassy in Washington, DC.   In addition, I spent about a year participating in a belly dancing troop in college.   On top of that, I have been doing Israeli folk dancing for years and also performed in an Israeli folk dancing troop in high school.   I am a bit out of practice, since I spend most of my days now writing articles and working on my MA thesis, instead of dancing and doing sport.   Yet, I don't think that this video is bad for someone who is a bit out of practice!    Enjoy!    

Purim Parade 2013

Today, I went to the Purim Parade in Netanya with my husband, my mother-in-law and my husbands' little cousin, Ben.   Every year in the city of Netanya, there is a different theme for the Purim Parade.   This years theme was the world.   Thus, as a result, people dressed up to be from various countries across the globe.   For example, in the picture above, you see that the Arabs were represented with a belly dancer, who danced with a donkey.   Behind the wheel of the donkey cart, a man dressed up as a woman with a hair covering was driving the donkey cart.

Yet, there were many other costumes as well.   One person dressed up like the Queen of England.   Eritreans dressed up in traditional African dress, as did Ethiopians, and they played the drums.   A group of children dressed up as Mexicans.   There was also a Statue of Liberty, a Kibbutz cow, Israeli folk dancers, karate specialists, an Asian dragon, Japanese tourists, and many other interesting sorts of costumes.   The whole parade was guided by a huge globe, to represent the international theme.   Once again, I came dressed up in my Uzbek dress, although this time I left the Moroccan slippers and crown at home.   I wanted to be comfortable, since unlike in the synagogue, I needed to walk quite a distance.   Another picture of girls dressed up in Moroccan henna outfits can be viewed below!

 After the parade, we all went out to eat lunch in the mall.   It was very crowded since most Israelis were off work and all of the children were out of school.   We had to wait in a very long line just to eat lunch out inside a cafe.   However, in the end, it was worth it.   I had a very fun day today.