May 9, '04
Are We Israelis?

Oh, how time flies. First, I was busy setting up my US tour. Then it was Passover. Then getting the kids back into school after the (seemingly endless) Passover vacation.

All good reasons not to have time to add to this Israel diary (especially if you figure in raising four kids and keeping my day job).

But today Saul Singer of the Jerusalem Post has a great article about the experience of Jacob's Ladder, Israel's only English-language folk festival, where I played last weekend. Just a few clicks, and I can share the experience with you...through Saul's eyes. Enjoy.

Interesting Times: Are we Israelis?
by Saul Singer

After hearing about it for years, my family and I finally made it to Jacob's Ladder last weekend, also known as the "Anglo Mimouna." Being at the folk music festival, held this year on the banks of the Kinneret at Kibbutz Nof Ginnosar, was to be transported in time and place. But this begs the question of Anglo existence: Are we Israeli, or not?

Some of us have been here a generation, or most of our lives, yet when we say "Israelis" we often mean the sabras we live among, not ourselves. Many of us live in predominantly Anglo neighborhoods, speak English at home and sometimes at work, and still can't quite get used to either the Bolshevik bureaucratic traditions brought from Europe, or the more Middle Eastern ways brought from closer to our new home.

The model for Jacob's Ladder was definitely more Woodstock than other ethnic gatherings in Israel. The music was the centerpiece, but the crowd of thousands let the Irish and bluegrass melodies waft over them as they sampled the crafts, square dancing (called in English), Tchai tea, massage tent, beach, and pool.

A sea of tents spread over the lawns of the kibbutz guest house, which housed the less daring among us. Though people were camped cheek by jowl, there were no boom boxes blaring and even the mangals (barbecues) were kept out of the no-mangal section - itself a somewhat alien concept.

The look was hippie, the sound was English. The organizers do not mind admitting that they were trying to recreate something foreign.

"We came from a group of socialists who sang folk and protest songs and frequented pubs and clubs where socialists met," Menachem Vinegrad told The Jerusalem Post in 2001. "We were Lefties with duffel coats and beards. It took us a while after we came to Israel to realize that it wasn't like that here - there wasn't a folk-and-protest-song scene. At the time, Hebrew folk songs seemed to us to be somewhat contrived."

There is no question that the Vinegrads, who moved here from Leeds in 1967, have succeeded in the folk part - but there is little protest in evidence, except perhaps by example. Their Web site promises an "atmosphere of peace and harmony."

What could be a more succinct rebellion against the status quo?

YET THE festival has become big enough over the past 28 years to ask whether trying to import folk music and keep a Sixties Anglo bubble alive is itself contrived.

Over time, my family has made peace with the extent to which we are integrated - or not - into Israeli life. Living in the heart of heavily-Anglo south Jerusalem, we count few "Israelis" in our social circle, but our kids are sabras and talk back to us in unaccented Hebrew.

Like the generation of our ancestors who came to America, we will always be first-generation immigrants - with all the challenges, frustrations and novelties that implies. I've come to the point that I was proud to see Anglos could muster their own ethnic gathering. If Russians and Moroccans can take pride in their heritage and culture, why not us?

Looking at the crowds, I wondered who had influenced whom more, Anglos or Israel. It is hard to point to any collective impact Anglos have had on Israeli culture, beyond the overwhelming influence of America. But the reverse is also true; we Anglos have stubbornly resisted giving up our cultural fetishes, such as old-fashioned manners and the notion that the customer, or constituent, is sometimes right.

While the highly secular crowd scattered before sundown on Shabbat, a handful of us more observant folk stayed behind waiting to drive home. In that short time, the sea of tents disappeared, leaving the lawns gleaming as if no one had been there. That we were not swimming in garbage was another proud moment for the Anglo persuasion, and a time to wonder why there could not be a few more of us here.

It was hard to escape the fact that the crowd mainly represented only one sector among Anglos; the group that came in the Sixties and Seventies, who are about as far away as possible from the current Anglo stereotype, many of whom were manning the barricades against Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan.

Perhaps we Anglos are not so easily pigeonholed. Both "peaceniks" and "settlers" (and the large group in between) brought with them an admirable dose of idealism and passion. We all shared the somewhat bizarre impulse of the emigrant - not only to leave one's birthplace for a strange and different place, but for a place expected to offer a more difficult and riskier life in numerous ways.

This is not something to be too self-congratulatory about; aliya cannot be successful if it does not supply its compensations. But being part of a community that made such a choice, and that appreciates the usually non-material rewards Israel has to offer, should itself be seen as part of the Anglo immigrant experience.

Maybe it is possible to be different and still be a "real" Israeli.

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