It's Getting Hotter

This trip started in a pretty gemutlich (?) kind of way, with a family bar mitzvah and trips to the beach, but it's been heating up since then. Weather-wise, of course -- it's definitely hot. But also in terms of the content -- starting with a trip to the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv, interesting and somewhat moving, but rapidly escalating with a lunch with Teddy Katz from Gush Shalom, who spoke fervently about the wrongs of Israeli government and society for a l o n g time, then moving on to quite amazing meetings with several different groups working on different kinds of Jewish-Arab cooperation and/or dialogue: several women, Arab and Jewish, from an organization called Galilead in Sachnin (an Israeli city with a large Arab population on the way to Haifa), another meting at the Haifa Women's Center with a group of women and one man who worked in various Haifa social service and social change agencies that try to bridge the economic and psychological inequalities between Ashkenazi Jews, recent immigrant Jews (especially from the former Soviet Union) and Israeli Arabs in Haifa, a walking tour of Haifa, and finally a long walk and supper in Akka (an ancient port city that goes back many thousands of years into the long ago BCE's) with an Arab woman and an Israeli man who have been doing Arab-Israeli dialogue work. All of this, of course, needs much more description, but for now -- with a precious few minutes of Internet time and a need to get to sleep so we can set off tomorrow at 7 am for our trip to the West Bank, that will have to do. There were some lighter moments, of course, like when we sang "In Your Easter Bonnet" in the bus, but the story behind that, too, will have to wait. Love to all, Stephanie