Education in Four Parts

School's Out

I spent the last day of English class at Jaffa’s Lev school discussing food with Aya and Sineen. As they chose pictures of peaches, tomatoes, cucumbers and watermelon to put in their make believe fruit and vegetable salads, we talked about what they liked to eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The girls, along with their classmates, had become increasingly rambunctious and distracted over the course of the last few months.  On this day Aya and Sineen literally danced in their seats---their hands and torsos swayed to a disco beat while their bottoms remained planted in their seats. Pointing to each other they learned the English words for “she’s crazy.” It was a wild ride to the end of the session.

After class the headmaster, a personable young Arab man, invited us into his office for a goodbye celebration.  We had contact with him during the year, especially towards the end, when he was called on to intervene with students who needed some encouragement to behave in class. One day, for example, Mahmood refused to work with me until the headmaster had a talk with him. Later, the headmaster explained that Mahmood’s parents, who were divorcing, had come to school and yelled at each other.  Speaking in Hebrew, the headmaster thanked us for taking the time to work with the children. He explained that many of the kids experienced disadvantaged or difficult circumstances--- single parent and divorced families, poverty and so on. With 30 kids in a classroom, the teachers have little time to give them the individual attention they desperately need. He said that they had benefited from the one on one attention we provided. As for the challenging behavior, he said we shouldn’t take it personally as they treat all the teachers that way. This was obvious to me when I saw the kids bursting into the teachers’ lounge and heard the teachers yelling at them. The headmaster explained that they were testing us---Would we come back? Do we care? What expectations do we have of them to learn and succeed? “You have done something important,” he concluded, rewarding us with a booklet about Jaffa (in Hebrew and Arabic) and an ergonomic ballpoint pen and offering us cookies and juice to show his appreciation for our efforts. 

The cookies, from the nearby bakery Piece of Cake, were unbelievable.  Since I needed a birthday cake to bring my ulpan party the following day, I got directions and headed directly over there (the chocolate and halva cakes were a big hit). We stopped in again while touring Jaffa with Rachel to stock up on cookies, rugelah and granola. I am going to miss my weekly trips to Jaffa, typically including stops at the fruit and vegetable market and Café Yafo for shakshuka (traditional North African dish of eggs poached in a tomato, onion and pepper sauce) or, more often, fabulous gelato/sorbet. Luckily I didn’t discover Piece of Cake until the end of the term otherwise that would have also been a weekly temptation. And of course I should also mention the famous Abulafia family’s Arab bakery and hummos/shwarma restaurants.

To Teach or Not to Teach Nakba

One of the worksheets we used for our lesson on "daily activities" features simple stories about “Tom” from America and “Gila” from Israel in which the children introduce themselves and tell how they spend the day: “My name is Gila, I am from Israel, I live in Tel Aviv, I get up at 7 a.m.” and so on.  When I asked Aya to write a similar story about herself she began: “My name is Aya. I am from Felastin. I live in Yafo.”  When I gently suggested that she lives in Israel, she insisted on writing  “Felastin”, using a spelling based on the Arabic pronounciation. I should point out that Aya was the only girl in the class who wore a white head scarf covering her hair but Sineen, minus headscarf, also agreed that she lives in Felastin. With my limited Hebrew and their limited English (and young age) we weren’t going to have a political discussion about this. However from observation, reading the newspapers and talking with community activists, I can see that as the Palestinian/Israeli conflict fails to resolve, and conditions for Arab-Israeli citizens remain problematic, Arab residents find themselves in limbo and many have become more militantly identified with the Palestinian struggle. Religion also plays a role with differences among Christians and Muslims and varying degrees of fundamentalism within the Muslim community. On the street one now sees a few women wearing the most extreme head to toe black garb (with only a small slit for the eyes) standing out from those wearing less drastic head scarves and coverings. 

Arab and Jewish families have lived side by side in Jaffa for centuries through periods of interdependence and prosperity, suspicion and conflict. The fierce struggle that led to the 1948 creation of the State of Israel marked an important turning point in Arab-Jewish relations in this traditionally mixed town. At that time many Arab families left and were unable to return due to political circumstances. Those that stayed became citizens of Israel but experienced marginalization and discrimination. A fascinating account of Jaffa’s history, told through the stories of several key families, can be found in Adam LeBor’s City of Oranges: Arabs and Jews in Jaffa.

This month controversy erupted over observation of and teaching about Nakba  (Palestinian commemoration of the ‘catastrophe’ that befell them after the establishment of Israel).  A knesset member from the right wing nationalist party Yisrael Beitenu proposed a bill prohibiting any event marking Nakba while at the same time HaAretz reported that a curriculum about the experiences of Palestinian Arabs before and after the creation of Israel has been developed for use in Israeli high schools. 

Multiculturalism in Israel? (Oy!)

Curriculum issues make for huge battles here, not only between Jews and non-Jews but also between secular and religious Israelis. As I explained in an earlier post, Lev school split from the neighboring school across the courtyard, Weizman, over language and curriculum issues between Arab and Jewish parents. Now Weizman school is having difficulty attracting Jewish families to maintain the diverse population in the school.  Consequently, Beit Daniel, the Reform (Progressive) synagogue in our neighborhood that operates a guest house and educational progams in Jaffa, has been invited to run the kindergarten in the school next year. The hope is that this will encourage Jewish parents in the community to enroll there children here rather than choosing an alternative or private school.  

Reforming Education---the L.A. Connection

Amazingly, I recently met a woman here, Sara Gefen, who was instrumental in  developing a relationship between the very well-respected high school in Tel Aviv (near our apartment) where she teaches photography and optics and Miliken High in Los Angeles (connected to the reform congregation Stephen S. Wise---my parents were among the founders!).  Sara spent a lot of time in Los Angeles working with Metuka who runs all the educational programs at Stephen S. Wise. Metuka was one of my Hebrew school teachers many years earlier. As a high school student I was her assistant in the third or fourth grade Hebrew school class.  Another unbelievable coincidence among many we've had here