Ethnographic Encounters in Israel: Poetics and Ethics of Fieldwork

By Fran Markowitz

Essays on the challenges of anthropological work in a complicated country: “A compelling anthology.” —Ruth Behar

Israel is a place of paradoxes, a small country with a diverse population and complicated social terrain. Studying its culture and social life means confronting a multitude of ethical dilemmas and methodological challenges.

These first-person accounts by anthropologists engage contradictions of religion, politics, identity, kinship, racialization, and globalization to reveal fascinating and often vexing dimensions of the Israeli experience. Caught up in pressing existential questions of war and peace, social justice, and national boundaries, the contributors explore the contours of Israeli society as insiders and outsiders, natives and strangers, as well as critics and friends.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9780253008893

Book preview

Introduction

Edgy Ethnography in a Little Big Place

Fran Markowitz

THE ESSAYS IN this volume offer an experiential perspective on the variety and vitality of life in Israel by focusing on the always challenging, frequently confusing, and sometimes heart-rending dynamics of carrying out anthropological fieldwork there. Fieldwork demands that anthropologists go where they might not ordinarily tread, or that they approach anew familiar surroundings and examine them with a critical eye. In either case, ethnographic encounters destabilize, making us aware of what is usually taken for granted and upsetting the cognitive binaries and practical dichotomies that divide the world into us and them, here and there, insiders and outsiders, or normal and weird. Even as they strive to present valid, generalizable, and reliable data about those they come to study, anthropologists are often jolted by the experiences they gain. While this condition may characterize the fieldwork process everywhere (Turner and Bruner 1986), it can be particularly acute in Israel, where ethnographers conducting participant observation over the course of a year or two or three invariably confront moral dilemmas, conflicting political stances, and pressing passions.

Discussions about these experiences among anthropologists tend to be relegated to the informal domain of conversation among colleagues, occasionally turning up as presentations in department seminars, or anecdotes that spice up field methods courses. They are rarely the subject of academic publications. For many of us who have contributed to this volume, it has been a difficult choice to conduct fieldwork in Israel: issues of safety, sanity, and pursuit of a viable academic career have haunted that decision (see esp. Dalsheim, and Jackson, in this volume). For all of us, difficulties mounted as we attempted to translate the myriad experiences of fieldwork into written texts that conform to scientific demands for streamlined descriptions, linear plotlines, and well-supported conclusions; or to apply the more humanities-based academic strategy of agonism, the development of a forceful argument through aggressive debate (Tannen 2002). As we crafted our chapters, we found ourselves writing in a different mode, one that might be called anthropological poetics (Prattis 1985). A major concern of such writing is that the story of fieldwork be included as a crucial element in communicating about the people and culture under study (Brady 2000: 964). Narrating the ethnographic process shows the specifics of how anthropologists come to know what they know by developing dynamic relationships, probing and going beyond dominant knowledge schemes, and forging a multifaceted view of things as simple as daily greetings, and as complex as state rituals.

Through first-person narratives of the immediacy of our experiences and the insights we developed in their wake, in this volume we contributors offer a variety of brashly poetic interpretations of the political dilemmas and ethical challenges that each of us confronted during fieldwork in Israel. Despite the differences among our ethnographic encounters, we are united in our refusal to succumb to the lure of those seemingly obvious, primordial, and eternal categories that unremittingly circulate: Palestinians and Israelis; Arabs and Jews; Ashkenazim and Mizrahim; the religious and the secular; black and white; and those who belong and those who do not.¹ Our work and our lives have brought us into direct contact with people who subscribe to these categories, who accept them as the linchpin of their culture and as fundamental to the existence of their nation and their country. Yet it is precisely because these contacts sometimes revealed gaps and insecurities and sometimes elicited didactic pronouncements of their Truth that our field research took place on ethnographically shaky ground. They were reminders that we were working in an upsetting country with unsettling, rarely certain, and always immanent situations in which diverse symbols, nations, languages, ideas, people, politics, and powers are always rubbing up against each other—oftentimes confirming assumptions about essential differences, and at other times merging together in new, unexpected blends.

These dynamics are easily obscured by two seemingly irresistible forces in Israeli life. The first is the effect that security issues and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict exert on everyday practices as well as on academic and media representations of Israel (see, for example, Bornstein 2002, Kanaaneh 2009, Kimmerling 2008, and Ochs 2011). The internationally approved yet still elusive two-state solution reinforces government policy and common sense: Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians are two separate and incompatible peoples who, despite intertwined histories and shared space, are better kept apart (see Romann and Weingrod 1991; Slyomovics 1998; Torstrick 2000; and Habib, and McKee, this volume). The second is that despite these tensions, much of Israel operates according to an everyday normalcy that settles over residential neighborhoods, commercial centers, workplaces, schools, universities, government offices, places of worship, shopping malls, and cinemas. This normal flow of everyday life incorporates religious injunctions, security measures, and global popular media into bundles of practices that seem ordinary and timeless—until they are disrupted by the pomp of ritual, the disturbing voices of social analysts and politicos, or outbursts of violence. And then they begin all over again.

Edginess is part of this Israeli normalcy. Tourists from abroad are often amazed to find themselves caught up in a hard-to-describe nervous energy that pervades Israel’s cities, bus stations, shopping malls, and highways. That nervousness, perhaps, spurs and derives from the contortions that many Israelis go through while attempting balancing acts between Jewish loyalties and the democratic visions that are fused together in Israel’s Declaration of Independence (cf. Rabinowitz 1997). The credos of Jewishness and democracy, so easily compatible at first sight, often split into clashing practices as Israelis of all political stripes, ethnic backgrounds, and religions build homes, eke out livings, raise families, and raise their voices in the demand to live securely under vine and fig tree, in their country, and in the world.

Such is the complicated ethnographic terrain of Israel, where a diverse population is unevenly settled across a small country about the size of the State of New Jersey. Once squarely in the middle of the cradle of civilization, this little strip of semiarid land with contested borders carries a big historical legacy. Hugging the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, Israel has contemporary geopolitics that place it not quite in the Middle East, yet despite inclusion in the Eurovision song contest and European sports leagues, certainly not in Europe. This in-betweenness also sets the parameters of Israel’s social life, a shifting nexus of relations animated by debate and argumentation that keeps its people involved in the dynamics of state- and nation-building, and alert to potential blowups and reconciliations. The Israeli verge is a public space, where it is one’s right, even duty, to assert, juggle, repress, and evaluate one’s own and others’ identities, and the rights that these may or may not confer to living in that space. It is also where Israelis reiterate and revise their history; it is where they maneuver to gain a foothold, settle in, and carry on.

Israel is a little big place of paradoxes that defies simplicity and definition. It is the Biblical kingdom of the ancient Israelites and the birthplace of Jesus, the Christian Christ. It is the legacy of Roman and Ottoman Palestine, and the state voted into existence as the Jewish homeland by the United Nations in 1947. Its centralized state apparatuses extend into the daily lives of residents (e.g., Mazuz, this volume) and affect how they compete for resources and governing power as well as argue—always argue—about security, citizenship, borders, and belongings. For more than six decades Israel has been involved in wars while resettling and absorbing hundreds of thousands of new immigrants. Its population has grown and diversified, and what was once a tiny, vulnerable Jewish country has become a high-tech power and an occupier. All these conditions vex the country’s Jewishness and its democracy, challenge its sovereignty, and bring existential insecurity to its inhabitants.

Israel is perplexing, yet it is inviting ethnographic ground. Fieldworkers’ intrusive inquiries are hardly out of the ordinary in a country that has been subject to global scrutiny for decades, and monitored by the United Nations, human rights organizations, numerous state governments, and various NGOs. Endowed with the right of return, Jews from throughout the world are potential Israeli citizens. Fleeing discrimination or difficulties in their natal countries, some come to Israel in hopes of a more fulfilling life among co-ethnics. Others come as tourists to explore their birthright (Kelner 2010), enjoy the seaside, engage in fact-finding missions, lend philanthropic and moral support, or participate in protests. So too do Christian and Muslim pilgrims enact their connections to the land. They visit ancient holy sites and newer churches, mosques, museums, and memorials; patronize hotels, shops, and restaurants; and gaze at medieval and modern battlefields. They may carry back home the utopian promise of Jerusalem agleam in the midday sun, or apocalyptic visions of a Holy Land gone awry (see Feldman, and Habib, this volume).

These historically salient social imaginaries are also intertwined into complex Israeli worldviews. Fears of annihilation and dreams of messianic harmony are often pushed into the shadowy background of the everyday (cf. Erez, and Jackson, this volume). But every now and again these concerns leak into awareness in the mundane activities of families, workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods in which Israelis of different circumstances and persuasions spend the bulk of their lives. Even if they wish to shield these zones of intimate sociability from difficult existential questions, world politics, and the gaze of outside eyes, Israelis themselves are globally self-conscious (Shryock 2004: 10). As they go about the most ordinary tasks of everyday life, they possess and often enact an objectified awareness of self as (Jewish or Palestinian or Druze or Circassian or …) Israeli in contrast to that wide range of other kinds of selves who inhabit the world. So they are frequently eager to take the proffered microphone and express their opinions, talk back to pundits, and criticize authoritative voices. To prove their points, Israelis might take tourists, journalists, philanthropists, clergy, students, and teachers into their homes; show them their neighborhoods and workplaces, their orchards and shopping centers, their children’s schools, and the cemeteries in which loved ones are buried. They will bring you to memorials and into museums, and introduce you to others like themselves who are also living witnesses of atrocities, of victories, of sadness, and of joy. They might urge you to take pictures and to write it all down. The difference between ethnographers and these other types of visitors, though, is that the probing anthropologist isn’t usually satisfied with a one-time call and will come back for more. Sometimes this is welcome, sometimes it is not; sometimes ethnographers are successful in establishing long-term relationships, but sometimes there are impassable barriers (see Nehushtan, this volume).

For many of the contributors to this volume, Israel is where we live our lives, write our papers, earn our daily bread, and struggle to balance a citizen’s concerns with research imperatives (Weingrod 2004). Yet not one of us is a complete insider or outsider to the ongoing issues that percolate in Israeli society, whether we retire at the end of the day behind the closed doors of a little house in the Negev (as do I), or board a plane after fieldwork to fly half a world away to a place called home. Most of us live in between; caught up in the shared context of globalized power relations, we carry the field into our homes and blend those homes in some way with the field (D’Amico-Samuels 1997; Dalsheim, this volume).

At its fullest, this book is a collective engagement with that range of dilemmas, obstacles, and challenges that permeate fieldwork in Israel. Some chapters are more action-oriented than others and some are more poetic. Others strive for theoretical resolutions, or are more grounded in ongoing social issues. All of them combine personal commitments—anguish, passion, feminism, strivings for social justice—with local poetics and world politics, and struggle with the ethics that undergird twenty-first-century anthropology. Some of the chapters highlight concerns that are endemic to the humanistic project of participant-observation; others narrow the focus to the specifics of Israel and our own particular place(ments) in it. In one way or another, all the contributors discuss the edginess of their experiences as fieldworkers in Israel. The constantly fluctuating awareness of being simultaneously in a little and big place is what unites ethnographers with our hosts in the field as we struggle to make sense of, convey, interpret, and translate what it means to live in the in-between and everyday of Israel.

The Changing Challenges of Fieldwork

Ever since Paul Rabinow published Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (1977), anthropologists have been challenged to place their methods in perspective, and to understand that these are neither objective nor obvious ways of documenting the social life of other peoples and their cultures (Asad 1973). Although I am quite certain that Bronislaw Malinowski’s (1922) sequence of fieldwork stages is still taught and practiced today—it makes ample sense to envision the social body as composed of a foundational skeleton, made live through the flesh and blood of institutions, and spiritually animated by the natives’ point of view and the imponderabilia of everyday life—most ethnographers have learned through experience that what sounds so logical, so compelling, and indeed infallible, is flawed. Why? Because ethnographies are not objective readings of social facts, but complex products of interactions between embodied persons (Wiener 1999: 95; see also Markowitz 2006). Ethnographers and their interlocutors are particular, and often peculiar, men and women of varied sexualities, sensibilities, genders, races, ethnicities, ages, religions, and nations. All have their reasons for doing, or aiding and colluding in, fieldwork. The relationships which result may take unanticipated turns for fieldwork is surprising. It is rarely a linear process; it slips and slides, begins, proceeds, and ends in fits and starts.

More than thirty years ago, Robert N. Bellah wrote in the preface to Rabinow’s Reflections that because fieldwork is so immediate, human, and relational, it involves constant valuation and reevaluation (1977: xi). It is hardly ever morally neutral or value-free. No matter where or with whom they work, ethnographers operate as one-person research teams charged with making objectivistic observations, listening sympathetically, and forging intersubjective dialogue. Bias and partiality, underwritten by academic commitments, philosophical leanings, and political agendas, are part and parcel of such an enterprise. Rather than squelch these in the names of scientific objectivity and cultural relativism, recently anthropologists have been owning up to the humanistic, feminist, postcolonial, human-rights, or social-justice perspectives that drive them to study anthropology and engage in ethnographic research.

Why take this route? Because fieldwork does something. It responds to malaise; it energizes; it creates opportunities for novel perspectives by bringing together people who would otherwise not meet. It disrupts and it can disturb. It can also forge meetings of hearts and minds. These issues are no less important for ethnographers’ interlocutors, who harbor similar reasons for spending time with and telling their stories to curious researchers. Informants-hosts-consultants often use persuasive rhetoric to make researchers theirs, to convince them of their truths, and entice them to join in their passions. If Rabinow’s Reflections challenged the hitherto little secret of the inevitable presence of moral judgment in fieldwork and opened up space for legitimizing it as a process whereby that judgment is itself educated and deepened (Bellah 1977: xii), then twenty-first-century ethnographers must make explicit the dialogical techniques they put to use, and the stances they take in every new and ongoing project.

The boundaries of culture have also cracked under the changing conditions of the twenty-first century, and the dynamics of diaspora, globalization, Internet communications, and cyberspace have all affected the conduct of fieldwork (see Marcus 1995; cf. Hage 2005, also Boellstorff 2008, Boellstorff et al. 2012). Be that as it may, most fieldwork remains "rooted in a place, where the anthropologist can be a participant observer and witness a wide range of activities in his [sic] informants’ lives (Silver-man 1984: 14, emphasis in the original). Despite the influence of postmodernist views of traveling cultures (Clifford 1997), the need to rethink spurious connections between culture and place (Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Malkki 1992), and harsh postcolonial critiques of area studies (see, e.g., Guyer 2004), a reinvigorating spate of place and space studies has redirected ethnographers to the meanings, usages, and constraints of the places where specific people manifest, manipulate, and produce particular cultures (see esp. Low and Lawrence-Zuñiga 2003). Thanks, in part, to both critical and poetic interrogations of the links between people, culture, and place, new instructive tomes have been published that probe and illuminate how to construct the field and do fieldwork in Japan (Bestor et al. 2003), China (Heimer and Thøgersen 2006), and throughout the contemporary world as a whole (Amit 2000). Years earlier, Altorki and El-Solh offered a collection of essays that revealed and mulled over the long and painful process of many Arab intellectuals as they examined their own societies, their values and institutions (1988: 2). I will return later to the problematic dichotomization of native/foreign anthropologists and its felicitous solution in the halfie (Abu-Lughod 1991; Narayan 1993); right now my wish is to assert that while local knowledge may no longer be what it once was (Geertz 1983), nevertheless, even as they use cell phones, TV, and the Internet, people live embodied lives in one place at a time. Geographic and cultural placements—in Israel, in Arab societies, in Japan, in China, and throughout the contemporary world"—do make a difference, and it is up to anthropologists to delineate what these may be.

If fieldwork was pursued naively in the first part of the twentieth century, a century later that stance has proven untenable. The naïf-abroad is no longer salubrious or credible, and neither graduate students nor veteran anthropologists will gain funding to go into the field unless and until they demonstrate mastery of a research topic and the literature treating the geopolitical area in which they intend to work. Just as important, ethnographers are expected to be mindful of the physical and psychological hazards of fieldwork (e.g., Howell 1990; Kovats-Bernat 2002; Nordstrom and Robben 1995; Wengle 1988); the implications of sex, race, age, and gender for their research (Conaway and Whitehead 1986; Kulick and Willson 1995; Markowitz and Ashkenazi 1999; Rubin 2007); and potential ethical dilemmas. Once accepted as a universal and transparent methodology, participant-observation is now better understood as various kinds of intersubjective experiences between different and similar people on both sides of the I/thou divide. Nonetheless, many academic anthropologists, aware that it still seems too personal, too idiosyncratic [and] too subjective for the solemnities of theory, avoid discussion of the relationship skills demanded by fieldwork (Wiener 1999: 99).

Such were the conditions I faced when, upon my return to Ben-Gurion University in 2006 from a sabbatical year at my alma mater, the University of Michigan, I was assigned to give the required Field Methods in Anthropology course to first-year graduate students. I fashioned a syllabus that blended readings on the techniques of asking research questions and gaining answers through the methods of participant-observation (Bernard 2006; Davies 1999), with those that offer a critique of these methods by underscoring their shortcomings and proposing alternatives. Each year students most heatedly discussed and challenged two interrelated issues: (1) the linear progression of fieldwork from Entry to the Establishment of Rapport, to the Everyday Work of Fieldwork, to the Final Frenzy and Exit, and (2) the defining and conduct of oneself as an anthropologist while doing fieldwork at home.

The idea for this book began to germinate in those Field Methods courses as Israeli students carrying out fieldwork projects in Israel expressed frustration with the standard plotline of participant-observation. Most of the students required little work establishing rapport; sometimes the greatest problem they faced was creating distance. Many expressed dismay that they were unable to settle into a fieldwork routine as they tried to balance participant-observation with their studies, their families, and their lives, which produced anxiety about whether or not they were doing real fieldwork. Perhaps the biggest problem of all was that they felt precluded from the pleasures of exit, how to end frequent and intense relationships with people who generously let you into their lives, who live a short distance away, and who have your cell phone number.

Together we wondered if these issues were idiosyncratic to Israel, or if they demonstrated the line of divide between native at-home fieldworkers, and foreigners who come on time-limited projects from abroad. I myself was involved in long-term, on-again/off-again fieldwork in Sarajevo and was experiencing some of the same dilemmas as my students (Markowitz 2011). In addition, I asked two Ben-Gurion University colleagues with field projects abroad to join our discussions. Shmuel Ben-Dor (of blessed memory) did doctoral fieldwork in the Canadian Arctic and over the course of forty years returned several times to his fieldsite. Likewise, following two years of doctoral research in Hoi-An, Nir Avieli has been returning to that city in central Vietnam almost every year for more than a decade. Ben-Dor and Avieli spoke in vivid detail about the joys and sorrows of ongoing contacts and return visits, the new findings these produced, and the moral and financial obligations incurred along the way.

Just as important were the guest presentations by Cédric Parizot, Gabriella Djerrahian, and Emily McKee, all doctoral students when they initially came to Israel from their homes in France, Canada, and the United States. They talked about the research proposals they had written to gain permission from their professors, as well as funding, to conduct and conclude time-limited projects. All of them, as it turned out, made more than the one originally anticipated research trip to Israel and spent much more time in the field than they had planned. Even more critical to our discussions was the revelation that as these foreign researchers developed strong affective ties with their hosts, lines of divide were recast, which called into question the naturally dichotomous categories of insiders and outsiders (Parizot 2012; and Djerrahian, and McKee, this volume).

These conversations between native and foreign student-researchers showed that the intimately embodied and poetic acts of participant-observation charge ethnographers to examine the extent of their involvement at every turn. Insiders may be reevaluated as outsiders (Dalsheim, this volume), whereas outsiders, as they adopt their hosts’ concerns, manners, and mannerisms, can come to attain insider status (Dominguez, this volume). Because of the continual give and take between attribution and the refusal of identities that shift the lines of inclusion and exclusion, I came to believe that it is analytically fruitless to posit a priori a methodological distinction between anthropology-at-home and what is often posited as the more objective and more highly valued ethnographic gaze of those who come from abroad. These categorical placements are never static, and neither the subject position of native nor that of stranger inherently holds the magic of unlocking cultural enigmas.

All this got me to think further about Israel as a little and big place that includes and excludes, while sharpening and blurring its always (to some extent) porous lines of distinction. For the ethnographer—native, halfie, outsider, or what have you—once you are seduced into believing that you know the scheme of things, where you do and do not belong, and how variously self- and other-defined Israelis are categorically placed, the ground may suddenly fall out from under your feet. Surprising events and new field findings can disrupt the knowledge you’ve painstakingly gained. Instead of throwing up your hands in dismay or surrender, you will begin again by rearranging and reevaluating what it is that you think you know, and where you think you belong. In the process, you might go back to square one and mull over your life trajectories and the ethnographic paths that your project has taken (see Dalsheim, Djerrahian, Dominguez, Erez, Feldman, Habib, and Nehushtan in this volume). But the story will not end there. Certainly mine hasn’t.

If I Should Forget You, o Jerusalem!

I cannot remember not knowing about Israel. In fact, I should probably credit the State of Israel for my birth. My parents, two people whose paths would not otherwise have crossed, met in the spring of 1948 at a Zionist convention in Washington, DC. They were married by the end of that year. I came along four years later.

When I was a child, my mom, my brother, and I (and sometimes my dad) joined my grandparents and their guests in Baltimore for the Passover holiday. Toward the end of the interminably long Seder, I shook myself out of a near-doze to sing the lively concluding songs and to join in chanting, Next Year In Jerusalem! On the highly polished dark wood buffet across from me, the blue and white pushkes, or charity boxes, caught my eye. Standing out from the treasured European crystal and silver, these were tawdry receptacles for spare change and dollar bills that went to planting trees and building towns in the Land of Israel. In addition, my grandpa wrote monthly checks to Israel. That Israel was shrouded in mystery, but now I know that it was the surviving people and things of his alma mater—the Slobodka Yeshiva of Kovno that the Nazis had desecrated and destroyed—transplanted to Jerusalem.

Israel remained more mythical than real as I went through grade school and Hebrew School. If anyone had asked me then what I thought of Israelis I would have answered I don’t know, because I had never met any; that is, until my Hebrew School principal decided to enrich the curriculum by bringing in an Israeli music teacher. Today as I think back, I am sure that the young woman who came bearing the gift of Israeli culture was a university student trying as hard as she could to get by in New York City. But to us kids, she was mean and aggressive—and she shrieked. Her eyes were jet black but they did not sparkle.

One Sunday morning during recess, my brother ran over to me and said with a laugh that the music teacher had tried to hit him. He was quick and had escaped her blows. But she didn’t escape mine. As she attempted to begin the lesson, I told her with all the haughtiness an eleven-year-old could muster that here in the United States of America it was illegal to hit children. There were lawyers in my family and I would contact them and have her deported. She kicked me out of the class, but the next week, the principal called me and my mother into her office and said that the Israeli music teacher would finish up the year and not be rehired.

By June 1967 the negative image of Israelis that I carried was completely replaced by those young, sinewy, brave, and handsome khaki-clad soldiers who did the impossible by repelling the much stronger armies of the surrounding Arab countries that had declared war on Israel. Even more miraculously, they crossed into Jordanian-held east Jerusalem. After nearly two millennia, there they were, young Jewish men walking unimpeded in the ruins of the City of David and praying at the one remaining wall of King Solomon’s Temple. In 1967 I was a disaffected fifteen-year-old, no longer attending Hebrew School or spending Passover with my grandparents. But during those heady days in June I joined in the Jewish joy that pervaded New York City by collecting money to support Israel and celebrating its tremendous victory. The little besieged Jewish country had become a very big place.

At around the same time, my grandparents announced the discovery of a hero in the family, my grandpa’s nephew, Moshe, one of only two family members who had survived Hitler. We didn’t call it the Holocaust in those days. We didn’t talk about it at all. Later one of my uncles explained to me what had happened in Slobodka, that once thriving Jewish suburb of Kaunus in Lithuania. When the Nazi stormtroopers entered the town, they rounded up its most prominent Jews and publicly humiliated them. My great-grandfather, a rabbi, was kicked and pummeled as they plucked out his beard and sidelocks. After tiring from such sport, the stormtroopers called in the killer dogs, who tore his body apart.

Cousin Moshe was 10 or 11 at that time. He survived the Aktion, the ghetto, transport to Auschwitz, and a horrendous time as a concentration camp prisoner. But Moshe bore no resemblance to those spooky pictures of walking skeletons clad in striped rags. He was an IDF officer, and his photo showed a smiling, apple-cheeked man with the same broad shoulders, solid torso, and twinkling blue eyes as my grandpa. When he came to visit, Cousin Moshe in the flesh was a warm, hearty guy who switched languages (Yiddish, Hebrew, English) and laughed easily. We all loved Moshe; he was our family’s quintessential Israeli.

My grandma and grandpa and some of my uncles, aunts, and cousins boarded El-Al jets to visit the Holy Land/State of Israel in the 1970s. They returned with stories of white cities and orange groves, of bravery and determination. My brother and I occasionally used our pennies to plant trees while our dad cajoled colleagues in the garment district and our Brooklyn neighborhood to invest in Israeli bonds.

The first time I set foot in Israel was at the tail end of the summer of 1987. I had completed my PhD in anthropology at the University of Michigan with a dissertation on Knowledge, Sentiment and Sociability among Soviet Jewish immigrants, based on fieldwork in New York. I was eager to compare my findings with those about the Russian community of Israel, and just as keen to test my mettle as a real anthropologist by going abroad. I applied for and was awarded a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Truth be told, as I packed up my apartment in Ann Arbor and headed east, I was more scared than excited. I would be on my own for an anthropological adventure in Israel, armed only with a few slips of paper holding names and phone numbers of Russian-speaking friends of friends. Lots of water had flowed under my family’s bridge; my grandpa had died; my grandma had grown feeble; my parents had divorced, and so had I. It hadn’t occurred to anyone to give me Cousin Moshe’s address or phone number, and it didn’t occur to me to ask.

Someone from the hospitality staff of the Hebrew University greeted me and a few other young scholars at the airport and piled us and our luggage into a car. It was the middle of the night, or the wee hours of the morning, as we drove up the winding road. Our host excitedly pointed out Jerusalem up on the hills. It didn’t gleam, shine, or beckon, or maybe I was just too tired to notice. But then I started living there. I still couldn’t see Jerusalem as the golden city on the hill. It was dusty, choked with traffic, and swarming with all kinds of inconsiderate people.

At the same time that I found myself in alien surroundings, I was an oddity to the Hebrew University hospitality staff and to the administrators of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. They did not understand why I was so desperate for them to help me find a place to live. Didn’t I have relatives? When I said, No, not really, they told me that I was the first North American Jewish researcher who was not taken care of by family members. I felt like an orphan; the workings of Diaspora had failed me. Despite belonging to the Jewish people, I was out of place in the Jewish homeland.

That feeling accompanied me just about everywhere I went. On my first Saturday/Shabbat, when I realized with a start that everything was closed and there was no public transportation, I wandered down from Mount Scopus to join a walking tour of the Old City. As the group approached the Western Wall of King Solomon’s temple, some of my fellow walkers burst into tears. They ran down the steps and across the plaza to embrace its stones. I stood on the walkway looking down and across at That Place, but I felt nothing. How could I feel nothing? I squinted, rubbed my eyelids, and popped my eyes back open. Still nothing. I pinched my right arm just to make sure that it hadn’t fallen off.

By the time my postdoctoral year—known more widely as