Mea Culpa
When I commenced this “Carolina Israelite” journey, I didn’t quite know what I was setting out to achieve. Primarily, I wanted to do what I enjoy most in life, which is to tell stories. I also wanted to follow in the footsteps of the Israelite’s patron saint, Harry Golden, and bring into the mix my Jewish heritage, Zionist ideology, Progressive politics, and some North Carolina cred, all in a slightly sentimentalist style. That part was easy.
Where I started to fail was in crossing the line into political punditry. The newsletter was becoming more and more political and preachy. To make matters worse, the political analysis and prognostication was, more often than not, entirely wrong. Somewhere during the 2016 Presidential Primaries I realized that I no longer cared for my written voice, especially those election year comments; hence the long hiatus.
I now approach the newsletter differently, trying to avoid a running commentary on the current political situation in the US. I don’t have Harry’s political activism to draw upon, and certainly not his astonishing personal network, so I am resolved to stay within the bounds of what the Israelite is all about, and avoid it becoming a political blog. This does not mean that you should expect my passion and voice for justice, peace, equality, solidarity and freedom to be in any way diminished. In the words of the great Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, “While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free”. Let’s see if I can get this back on track; apologies for the delay.
“A Splendid Time is Guaranteed for All”
Well, no one really know if it was seventy years ago when Sgt. Pepper taught the Lonely Hearts Club band to play. What is undisputable is that fifty years ago the Beatles shocked an unsuspecting world with what is universally acclaimed as the most important pop music album of all time. But why is that?
From the opening sounds of an orchestra tuning-up, to the most famous single chord played in music history (E Major, played on three pianos), the Beatles, paired with an inventive studio staff led by their producer George Martin, take us on a rollicking, kaleidoscopic romp through England. While the themes are universal (and Sgt. Pepper is, indeed, considered the first themed album) this is certainly England: From the music hall sounds of “With a little Help From My Friends”, on to “Meeting a man from the motor trade” from “She’s Leaving Home”, continuing with “The celebrated Mr. K.
Performs his feat on Saturday at Bishopsgate” from the utterly droll “Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite” (in which John Lennon basically set an antique circus poster text to music), we encounter the “Lovely Rita” meter maid, and all the way to the somber, sinister, utterly desolate “Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire” in what has to be their most important song, “A Day in the Life”, these are the landscapes of industrial, urban, and suburban post-war England, viewed through the eyes of its most famous ambassadors of our time, and done with no cynicism, and much love.
Numerous tomes have been written about Sgt. Pepper: The first album cover to include lyrics on it, the single most iconic album cover ever (one could, and did, spend decades looking at that renown Peter Blake photo of all the famous people adorning it), the engineering ingenuity required to squeeze so much sound into eight recording tracks (a modern studio is considered deficient if it doesn’t support at least 256 tracks) which resulted in Ringo Starr’s complaint about how the drums were continually “pushed” into the background with each necessary overdub, George Harrison’s decades-ahead-of-its-time Indian “Within You, Without You”, which he was the only Beatle to play on, and Paul McCartney’s brilliant concept of a band (The Beatles) actually watching a different band (the Lonely Hearts Club band) perform, essentially as their alter egos, until “A Day in the Life” brings it all crashing back to reality. The list of “firsts” never ends, and the superlative lyricism, top-of-their-game musicianship, seven hundred studio hours, epic production quality, and attentiveness to packaging detail (the album shipped with an insert of paper cutaways with which fans could fashion their own Sgt. Pepper badges and mustaches) all made for a timeless masterpiece.
The album has been near and dear to my heart since my early teens, and while I was only four years old when it was released, it was my first compact disk I had purchased, and later, when it was digitally remastered (finally fixing the percussion issues) I just had to repurchase it… There are possibly tens of millions of fans out there who know every single note in it, and I count myself among them. I have a personal rule of never listening to part of the album, only to it in totality, from the lovely horn quartet in the title song, to the 18 KHz “noise” they inserted in that dead space where the non-automatic turntable’s needle just keeps spinning, in order to drive dogs crazy. It remains for me the most complete musical performance of my time. As John Lennon prophetically promised (and even had printed on the back of the cover, as the album’s motto), “A Splendid Time is Guaranteed For All”. Indeed, they delivered.
My son is not Malcolm Gladwell
“Dad, it’s going to take me at least ten thousand hours to figure out what field I should specialize in, and then spend ten thousand hours mastering.”
JFK
One of my most powerful early childhood memories is that of night at John F. Kennedy International Airport. I still have images of swirling colorful lights, sounds of planes taking-off and landing, the scent of jet fuel and the overarching sense of excitement that comes with travel. Perhaps due to that memory, throughout my life JFK has been my gateway of choice whenever departing the US.
The size of a medium city, JFK had long replaced Ellis Island as the place millions of immigrants first set foot as they arrive in America. Built in the Forties, it was officially named “New York International Airport, Anderson Field”, but everybody called it “Idlewild”, after the golf course that it was built over (in fact, old-timers will still fondly recall its original airport code “IDL”). In 1963, about a month after the assassination, it was renamed for the late President and, other than Washington DC, is probably the best-known physical location named for a US president.
It’s one busy place: over 230,000 people make their living in and around it, with close to 60 million passengers each year. More than 20 percent of the nation’s international airfreight transits through JFK ($30 Billion), with close to a hundred airlines operating foreign flights. Single most travelled route? JFK-Heathrow, a Special Relationship indeed.
It’s also very disjointed, and quite chaotic. It seems to be under perpetual construction (and a new $10 billion renovation was recently announced, and it looks quite like no other airport around. Much of this is due to the interesting fact that the original planners left it to the airlines to construct their own buildings and terminals, so although it’s officially in Queens, it looks less like that borough’s old tract, cookie-cutter homes (think “All in the Family”) and more like Midtown Manhattan’s parade of architectural diversity. Naturally, many of the original buildings are long-gone, among which was the wonderfully futuristic Terminal 3, the old Pan-Am Worldport with the iconic flying saucer shape, giving way to larger, more efficient terminals (JFK had ten of those; it’s now down to six), but I never fail to be thrilled by the fact that the old Terminal 5, the historic TWA Flight Center with its one-of-a-kind spacecraft shape designed by architectural legend Eero Saarinen (he of the St. Louis Arch fame) is still with us, with its red TWA sign intact, and will be reborn next year as a hotel. Not so lucky were the famous airlines of my childhood, who I viewed as America’s “Official” airlines: Eastern, Pan Am, TWA. Once you boarded one of them in an airport overseas you instantly felt as you were in America already.
Many, many justifiably complain about JFK: It is the poster child for our country’s crumbling infrastructure, the terminals are not designed to handle modern security requirements, the jetways are ancient, one has to walk miles for a decent cup of coffee, and how about a decent slice of pizza? Fuggedaboutit. I know many people who will not use the airport when traveling to New York City, as road traffic has become impossible.
And yet, as night falls, and the leviathans of the sky, the Jumbo Jets and the A380’s start lining-up on the 14,551 foot-long runway 13R/31L, lights in all colors of the spectrum are swirling, the turbofans roar, and the unmistakable scent of jet fuel permeates the evening air, the pulse still quickens with the promise of exotic travel, exciting homecomings, and the indescribable bittersweet emotion of making port in one’s new home. Welcome to John Fitzgerald Kennedy Airport, America’s Front Door.
Fifty Years and Six Days Later
One of the most astonishing military victories of the Modern Era occurred in early June, 1967. In a time-span of six days Israel defeated the combined armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq, conquered the Sinai desert and the Gaza Strip, liberated the old city of Jerusalem, scaled the Golan Heights, and rolled through the West Bank of the Jordanian kingdom, effectively quadrupling its size. This unprecedented victory was the result of both unimaginable bravery and acts of heroism by the Israeli soldiers, and meticulous preparation by Israel’s military and political leadership, particularly the multi-year task of getting the Israeli Air Force ready for “Operation Focus”, the first stage of the war, in which Israel (in three hours!) was able to destroy approximately 450 Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian planes, effectively establishing complete air superiority facilitating the mission of the ground forces.
Within days, Israel became a mini-empire, ranging from the snowy peak of Mt. Hermon in the north, to the pristine coral reefs of the Sinai desert. From the Suez Canal abutting Africa, to the ancient biblical lands of Judea and Samaria. And did I mention Jerusalem? A city that was divided from 1948 to 1967 between Israel and Jordan, with barbed wires, minefields, active snipers and a crossing (“Mandelbaum Gate”) that offered just as much human drama and political intrigue as Berlin’s “Checkpoint Charlie”.
I arrived into this brash, chauvinistic, hubris-laden environment when I was five years old, about a year after the war. Israelis, including us, went everywhere. I have no idea if it was due to a sense of relief by Palestinians who were no longer under the authoritarian Egyptian and Jordanian regimes, who maintained (for political purposes) the then twenty-year old refugee crisis, or that they were just glad for some normalcy in their lives, but I remember being welcomed everywhere. We would regularly travel in the West Bank, visiting Arab cities and towns, eating the wonderful food, touring biblical and historic sites. It was safe, pleasant, and cheap. Israelis discovered the low cost of shopping in the West Bank markets, and getting dental care from well-educated Palestinian dentists, for a fraction of what it would cost “back home”. We had trips down to the Sinai, all the way south to Sharm El Sheikh, the Red Sea resort town, spent time in Gaza and, already as a child, fell in love with the most beautiful part of the expanded country, the Golan Heights, where fifteen years later I spent a significant time as part of my military service. I even recall driving past the squalid refugee camps outside of Jericho, a reminder of a people abandoned by their fellow Muslim brethren.
All this euphoria and bombast came to a sudden end in October of 1973, when Israel was attacked by Syria and Egypt in what is known as the Yom Kippur war, where it defended itself at a horrific human cost. Things were still a bit stable for a few years, but in 1977 the right-wing Likud party won the elections, and the settlement process in Eastern Jerusalem and the West Bank reached warp speed, with currently over 800,000 Israelis residing “over” the June 4, 1967 border, which used to be fondly known as the “Green Line” (that was its color on the maps). Over the years, step by step, Israel has created a massive settlement presence which, due to the fact that it drove many Palestinians from their homes and land, and, citing security concerns, and carved-up the West Bank with 20-foot-tall barrier walls separating Jews from Arabs, has empowered a brutal, oppressive, cynical occupation of the Palestinian people. This occupation has become the root of all that is bad in Israel: Continual war crimes committed by security forces, an unchecked armed settler population that considers itself to be above the law, massive government investments in the settler’s universe which come at the expense of vital Israeli social services such as Healthcare and Education, a justification for continual terrorism by a desperate populace targeting Israelis and Jews, both home and abroad, and, worse of all, the destruction of the Zionist ethos and dream by creating a de-facto Apartheid state within “Greater Israel”.
In the first cabinet meeting following the war, the government decided that it will maintain the acquired territories in its custody, to barter for peace with its neighbors at the opportune time. In fact, legendary defense minister General Moshe Dayan (the one with the eyepatch) spoke with disdain about administering the Old City of Jerusalem, with its myriad religions, sects, churches, mosques, monasteries and holy places: “Who needs that Vatican?”. Over the years, interesting things have happened with the various Occupied Territories: The Sinai, in its entirety, was returned to Egypt as part of the 1978 Peace Accords, the Jordanians disavowed ownership of the West Bank and no longer consider it to be part of their country, both Egypt and Israel have disengaged from the Gaza Strip, leaving it to its own devices and creating, as a result, a horrific humanitarian catastrophe and enabling the rise of the radical Islamist movement known as “Hamas”. As a residual of the virtually defunct Oslo accords, fatally crippled as a direct result of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, the Palestinian Authority has some autonomy in the large cities such as Hebron, Ramallah, and Jenin, but Israel (and the settlers) directly and indirectly effectively control most aspects of life there. The Palestinians have no airport, no seaport, limited infrastructure, poor population health, no natural resources, crushing unemployment and, worst of all, no self-determination.
Undoubtedly, us Jews have suffered enormously over the past 2,000 years. This is all well-researched and documented. Out of sheer grit, determination, ingenuity and bravery my ancestors created a proverbial miracle in the desert, surviving against all odds and, not only founding, but sustaining, a well-deserved Jewish homeland which, in its first 19 years, was hailed by many as (in the words of the prophet Isaiah) a “light unto the nations”. I refuse to believe that this success must come at the expense of the Palestinian people, who deserve their own spot under the searing Middle East sun. The fifty-year long occupation must end, if Israel is ever to regain the moral footing that has been the bedrock of my people for thousands of years. Contrary to those who perpetually beat the war drums for their own political gain, the country no longer faces any existential threats. Return the Palestinians their land. It’s time.
Food, Glorious Food
Our own lovely Town of Cary has become a national battleground for competing supermarkets, with a current count of twenty-eight, and more scheduled to open. This is obviously a result of both a high amount of disposable income, and residents’ strong, healthy appetites. My concern is that future archeologists will be unable to properly explain why a population that was so concerned about a possible siege that it incurred the expense of creating and stocking numerous massive food repositories, yet didn’t bother surrounding the town with any fortifications such as moats, walls, and watchtowers.
Pink Daddy
My immediate family knows that I am a sucker for apple-flavored drinks. On a recent trip to Israel I stopped at a local convenience store and went to the beverage cooler to pick out a soft drink, when I noticed a pastel-colored Schweppes bottle bearing the name “ICE Pink Lady”. Intrigued, I picked it up and read the front of the label where it proclaimed to be a “Naturally-flavored, lightly-sweetened Sparkling Water” presumably tasting like a Pink Lady apple, that wonderful Australian cross between Golden Delicious and Lady Williams apple cultivars. Sold. I paid at the register, stepped outside, twisted the top off, and took a long sip. I immediately fell in love with the slight tangy flavor, low sweetness and amazing apple aroma. I took another sip, and turned the bottle around, to read the list of ingredients, when my blood froze.
There it was, on the label, in both Hebrew and English, the one thing that I had least expected to see on the back of a soda bottle: my late father’s name.
Apparently, the Schweppes factory in Israel is now situated on the site of an old fruit juice factory in my ancestral hometown of Rehovoth, home of the world-renowned Weizmann Institute for Scientific Research. My father, a scion of the city’s founding families (who merit their own story), passed away at the young age of 49. The city decided to honor his memory by naming a local street after him, back in 1987. I remember the ceremony well: chairs were set out on a small, previously-unnamed dead-end street which extended a couple of hundred yards from a busy thoroughfare, past the local swimming pool and juice factory, terminating at our family’s citrus groves (Rehovoth’s oranges, sold under the “Jaffa” brand, used to be shipped and coveted all over the world, until the low cost of Spanish and Moroccan citrus, combined with the ever-increasing value of central-Israel real estate, brought about the demise of a once-proud industry. In fact, the city’s official crest still includes oranges, an open book, and a microscope.) The mayor made a speech, a family friend spoke. I thought it a nice gesture by the municipality honoring a beloved son who died long before his time, something for the family to remember him by.
Over the years, as the citrus trees were uprooted and made way for residences, a public school, a high-tech industrial park, an events facility, the Shimon Peres Academic Center, tennis courts, you name it, the road kept being extended (and widened) into a major artery in western Rehovoth, all of which now proudly carry the street address “Gad Feinstein Road”. And, in accordance with Israeli product labeling laws, the beverage manufacturer’s address is printed on every bottle of Schweppes made in Israel – all fifteen flavors!
Yes, I know that sodas are bad for you, and sugared ones even more so, but this one comes with a very special stamp of approval on it. So, I implore all readers: whenever you’re in Israel, enjoy a Schweppes (and say hi to my Dad).