the status quo

I realized I haven’t really written much here in a while. I guess life and my absorption into Israeli society has reached a standstill in the last half year and I haven’t had much of a desire to write about news events, as I find that I have nothing insightful or unique to say about the news here. As Alan wrote on my birthday card, “I’m getting used to not having our first anything in Israel anymore.” It’s not a bad thing. In fact, in many ways it’s a really good thing - it means life is becoming more comfortable and routine here. 

 

Right now, life is just continuing on as it has - sprinting after the 19 bus, cursing and simultaneously lavishing my silly cat with love, taking care of my cells, shul, lab meetings, my daily trip to Ne’eman, etc. I’ve collected some pretty good stories in between and occasionally even during the aforementioned activities. But I tend to not write them here, for fear of violating people’s anonymity. Maybe in a few years?

 

Like older people worry about Alzheimer’s and dementia, I worry about the loss of my English language abilities. I phrase thinks strangely. I notice useful and simple words slipping from my grasp. I still spend a lot of time on the confocal (or rather, in the confocal room…in addition to imaging, it is a quiet and private place for phone calls, napping, illicit snacking, etc).

 

I also lock myself in the bathroom a lot. At work it seems to be my new thing. I’ve done it three or four times in two weeks alone. I’ve developed this problem where I sort of over-shoot the lock, and the door gets jammed. I then struggle in earnest for a few minutes, which of course feels like nine hours when you’re locked in a bathroom with no obvious way out. If I am really lucky, there will be someone laughing hysterically outside when I finally extricate myself from the stronghold.  You can see how boring my life is because this is, like, the only eventful thing I have to write about. 

 

Hopefully something interesting will happen to me soon. In the meantime, I’ll just be falling asleep while imaging and locking myself in the bathroom for increasingly long periods of time:-)

In Memoriam: Judah Folkman (1933-2008)

 On Monday evening, renowned cancer researcher Judah Folkman, Harvard professor and director of the vascular biology program at Children’s Hospital Boston, died unexpectedly of a heart attack at the age of 74.

 

When I was in my junior year of high school, I saw “Cancer Warrior”, a Nova documentary on public television narrated by Alan Alda. The documentary was about Judah Folkman and his theory of angiogenesis, the process through which a tumor is able to generate its own blood vessel network. In order to grow beyond a certain size, tumors rely on their surrounding vasculature in order to obtain nutrients and excrete wastes. Folkman reasoned that if it is possible to cut off a tumor’s blood supply, a tumor could essentially be starved and maintained in a dormant state.

 

There was something magical about the way Folkman spoke. His electric energy, his grandiose ideas, and his enthusiasm for the way in which basic research can change the world was completely contagious.Listening to him tell his story about angiogenesis, I felt a passion and excitement for ideas that I had never known before. I remember at one point actually getting up from the couch and moving closer to the television in anticipation of the next turn of the unfolding story, as if I were watching an adventure thriller. Two aspects of the angiogenesis story captured my imagination: Folkman wasn’t ashamed to dream big and to share those big dreams - sometimes prematurely. Also, Folkman had a great, romantic story.

 

The major focus of cancer research in the 1970s was harnessing the new tools of molecular biology to study cancer cells themselves. No one was thinking about the tumor’s seemingly irrelevant normal environment. For decades Folkman’s ideas about the importance of a tumor’s environment were scorned and ridiculed. After all, he was a surgeon dappling in research in his free time. And he had the whole problem of his big ideas that he talked so freely about before he had any proof to substantiate them.

 

The work to prove angiogenesis was painstaking and slow because Folkman and groupies had to invent most of the tools and systems used to study angiogenesis themselves. Eventually, vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), a major stimulator of new blood vessel growth, was identified and in the years that followed a host of other stimulators and inhibitors of angiogenesis were isolated. With proof of such stimulators and inhibitors, tumor angiogenesis became a credible, accepted phenomenon. Overnight Folkman went from the quack with irrelevant, unprovable ideas to super science celebrity. The list of other diseases in which pathological angiogenesis is implicated keeps growing.

 

In 1998, two endogenous angiogenesis inhibitors, angiostatin and endostatin, were shown to cure cancer in mice, a study that made the front page of the New York Times and prompted co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, James Watson, to prophesize that “Judah will cure cancer in two years.” By the time I sat in my father’s downstairs study watching “Cancer Warrior” at the beginning of 2001, a whole new field of cancer research had exploded and a biography of Folkman, Dr. Folkman’s War by Robert Cooke, had just been published.

 

The next day I went to my high school biology teacher and I asked her if I could do an independent study reading about angiogenesis under her supervision in lieu of a regular course. She thought it was a great idea. I didn’t have Powerpoint, so for my end of semester presentation, I drew pictures of tumors in magic marker and color-copied them onto overhead transparencies. I loved every second of my independent study and by the end of my junior year, I decided that I definitely wanted to be like my hero Judah Folkman and become a scientist.

 

During my first year at Wellesley, I met a Harvard scientist who trained in Folkman’s lab and now had her own angiogenesis lab. I ended up working in her lab every summer during my time at Wellesley and also did independent studies in her lab during the school year. It was very lucky and special to actually become part of the research I first learned about in high school, especially since it was what inspired me to want to do science in the first place.

 

Every summer, Folkman would lead the annual surgical research department (later renamed vascular biology department) meeting at the Academy of Sciences in Cambridge. The meeting would consist of his own lab and the other collaborating labs in the department. Folkman was a pretty quirky guy (for instance, he drove a silver VW bug right into his 70s) and had very particular ideas about how this meeting should be run. For one thing, jacket and tie were required. The other rather interesting twist was that no Powerpoint or slides of any sort were allowed - “chalk talks” only. So you had everyone dressed in his or her finest garb in the middle of the day giving these very informal short talks with magic marker and chalk.

 

Every year Folkman would give a talk at the meeting that would more or less dictate the major themes of angiogenesis research for the next year. He’d get up there and be teeming with his electric energy and excitement and you’d know there was something special going on. It was just like watching the Nova documentary in high school all over again except it would be so much cooler, because I’d actually be in the room. It would set the standard for me of how I think all scientists should love their science and talk about their science.

 

The last time I saw Judah Folkman, he joked about his own death. Avastin (the first angiogenesis inhibitor to make it big which interestingly works more by normalizing the tumor’s convoluted vasculature to enhance deliverability of chemotherapy than by choking off the tumor’s blood supply) had just finished the last stages of clinical trials and had been put on the market. He said he was at a big press conference marking its release and one of the speakers commented, “If only Judah Folkman were still alive to see the results of his research.” Folkman then went up to the microphone during the question and answer session to say “This is the ghost of Judah Folkman!” (I think he really liked to tell this story).

 

I know that Dr. Folkman’s life and work affected thousands of other people very much like me and also very different from me and changed their lives forever - young people who were inspired to study science because of his story, scientists and physicians at all stages of their careers whose career paths and choices were impacted, patients in the death throes of cancer, some who lived and some who died, but all healed in some way whether by words or by drugs.

 

Now the patriarch of a whole new field, the man holding the light out front, is no longer with us. I am very, very sad. But I am pretty sure his boundless enthusiasm for ideas, his imagination, his creativity, and his unshakeable and stubborn pursuit of truth in the face of skepticism and adversity could reach from here to infinity. The stubborn rabbi’s son from the midwest turned surgeon “quack” scientist turned science superstar - you changed the world, Dr. Folkman.

Judah Folkman, cancer’s innovative enemy, dies at 74 Boston Globe

Monkeys on a Bus

This morning I was sitting on the 19 bus on my way to work reading a section on evolution in a biology book. Having suffered from motion sickness when I was younger (and by younger I mean until about three weeks ago), I have been relishing the opportunity to read on the bus lately, and I feel as if I am making up for years of lost time.

I noticed that the woman sitting diagonally across from me had stopped davening (praying), and was now scribbling furiously on notebook paper. I didn’t think much of it, and looked back down at my book. A couple minutes later, she tapped me on the shoulder and presented me with the following note:

The idea that man came from monkeys was after the horrors of the 1st World War when the Europeans wanted an excuse for sexual freedom.

Look on internet. Tel Aviv University Prof. Raz made a theory that there are apes and there are men. Men didn’t come from monkeys.

ShXXXXXX, 054-XXXXXXX

(Below this was a convoluted postscript about a religious text that, according to her, implicates one who believes in evolution will become a monkey.)

I thanked her for her reading suggestions and she asked me to call her so that she could present me with more material on the topic. I was neither angered nor threatened by our interaction, only a little stunned. I could have been offended that she was suggesting I was ignorant about the subject and that she was there to enlighten me and inform me of the truth, but I knew that she meant no malice.

I suspect that Professor Raz is probably a credible scientist and also that his work does not attempt to disprove evolution, but rather that she took his work regarding evolutionary relationships between man and primate out of context and misinterpreted it. I am interested to find his work but a few cursory Google searches turned up nothing promising - perhaps she got the name slightly wrong?

I think that some of the onlookers on the bus probably thought I was an impressionable young girl being indoctrinated by this woman’s ideas because I was so receptive to what she had to say. But it was clear to me that refuting what this woman believes or arguing with her served no purpose; unlike her perception of me I did not believe for a moment I had any chance of changing her mind, especially if she is convinced that she has credible scientific “proof.”

Another added irony and level of complexity to the interaction is that I am actually religious but she would have no way of knowing of this. The whole interaction made me reflect on what it means to be a religious Jew in science (certainly not an inherent contradiction in my opinion), but I am going to chicken out on expounding upon this one for now!

Once I shared my note in lab we got to wondering - what is this sexual freedom that the monkeys supposedly have that the Europeans wanted so badly? We secretly wish we didn’t have to wear underwear? I will leave you this question to ponder, but in the meantime, it’s really not half bad to be a monkey on the bus.

The Great Sufganiyot Search: 2007 - 5768

Every year around Chanukah, the Jerusalem Post puts out a sufganiyot guide. The authors of the guide sample sufganiyot at a bunch of bakeries around town and then write a compiled review of their findings. I had a few concerns about this process last year: Did the authors have an appreciation for the scientific method? What was their methodology? For instance, if they sampled a bunch of sufganiyot in one trip, they would clearly be biased against their samplings by the end of the day, by which time they would surely be ready to vomit.

I felt it was important that each sufganiyot be allowed its own day; its own moment of glory; its own sacred time for contemplation, enlightenment, and introspection. Also, what if the testers just sampled a piece of a sufganiya? You can’t compare the center of one sufganiya with the edge piece of another.

I wanted to level the playing field for all the sufganiyot out there and I wanted to introduce a little objectivity into the study. Most of all, I wanted to sample every sufganiya in Jerusalem. And, okay, as anyone who ever attended the Scooperbowl with me will attest, I am a very competitive eater. I feel strong loyalties towards my favorite foods.

Despite a few well-intentioned concerns about my cholesterol fielded during last year’s study, I am up for the challenge once again. My yearly sufganiyot experiment may still not be a double-blind controlled study, but I have goals in place and I’m working towards them. Ultimately, I aim for my study to be worthy of Nature publication by Chanukah 2009 or at least an Ig Nobel Prize. I still have two more sufganiyot seasons to perfect things. How can you help, dear reader?

There are a couple things you can do. You can recommend locations around Jerusalem for me to try - good and bad, but mostly good, please:-) You can add to the comments section of this post your own reviews of sufganiyot you have consumed in the Jerusalem area. And finally, dear reader, you can work on your own major scientific breakthroughs. I am sure the sufganiyot connection won’t be very difficult to establish. Not a very sophisticated system for now, I know, but as time allows maybe I will start a sufganiyot blog that will take on a life of its own.

Ready…set…go!!!

And Happy Sufganiyot Season 2007 - 5768.

P.S. Definitely last week’s news, but for those following the saga, Harriet was successfully spayed.

From Jerusalem to Sderot

This past Monday I took a vacation day and had the opportunity to ride my bike from Jerusalem to Sderot as part of a solidarity ride with the residents of Sderot organized by OneFamily Fund. As you may already know from my blog, the plight of the residents of Sderot is a cause that is close to my heart and something I care quite deeply about.The ride itself included a hodgepodge group of approximately 90 participants ranging from competitive cyclists to families to some folks who looked as if they hadn’t been pedaling anything with wheels for quite some time.

We were joined on the ride by victims of terror in Israel, including three young people who lost both parents in terrorist attacks. While not everyone was able to complete the ride on his or her bike, vehicles stayed at the end of our entourage and picked up stragglers so everyone was reunited in Sderot.

I was certainly among those moaning and groaning about the late start and also the frequent and lengthy breaks at the beginning of the ride, but the timing ended up being such that we arrived in Sderot against a dramatic foreground of orange, red, and gold as the sun set and I was grateful for the colorful sky along with cool early evening air that ushered in our arrival to Sderot.In addition, by the last 40km of the ride, when we really got going without frequent stops, we spread out, and I enjoyed the freedom and solitude of the open stretch of road, which provided some nice alone time to enjoy the beauty of the land and get lost inside my head.

It was interesting to see the change in the topography of the land as the ride passed on, from the slow, long, curving hills of Jerusalem to the quick, steep up and down and long areas of flat terrain through Kiryat Gat, Be’er Sheva, and Sderot. The first part of the ride afforded dramatic, panoramic views of hills and yishuvim while the second half of the ride consisted mostly of open fields turned golden and brown by the dry summer heat and undeveloped land.When we arrived in Sderot we had a festive meal of Middle Eastern fare at a local restaurant and then proceeded to the yeshiva, where we were greeted by over a hundred Sderot residents for a Simchat Bet Hashoeva.

The residents of Sderot have been living in constant terror among a barrage of daily Kassam rocket attacks that receive little attention from both the government and the international media.The reason for this is two-fold: the rockets are rudimentary and highly inaccurate so they rarely kill, but instead maim with shrapnel, which is not considered very newsworthy. In addition, the residents of Sderot are mainly poor Russian and Ethiopian immigrants with little political clout. In other words, more often than not, the forgotten ones.The festivities included music, singing, dancing, and in my opinion, a really bad comedian who kept making stupid jokes about Americans. It was funny (and also a little awkward) to be singing and dancing in the yeshiva still in my cycling clothes with my Camelbak.

Overall, it was a very uplifting day but I look forward to the day when we don’t need to ride to Sderot for solidarity and we can just do it for fun. As one of my fellow cyclists commented while being interviewed when asked why he was doing the ride (incidentally a physician from Hadasssah who gave me a lot of great shortcuts to evade traffic on my bike commute to work), “Because we are Sderot and Sderot is us.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. Now if only our government and the international community could appreciate this.

In the moments that the sun set directly upon our cycling envoy and cast a glow over the land, before night fell, I pedaled alone on the shoulder of highway leading to Sderot through the thick silence of dusk. No sirens, no Kassams, just the rhythmic sound of the turn of my pedals and the rotation of my chain. I could see a few cyclists ascending the hill in front of me and if I turned my head I could see a few colorful dots behind. I was in a complete state of peace in what some consider a war zone, but how could I not be? I knew that even in Sderot, as my fellow cyclist implied, we are still home.

My Aliyah-versary

Today I celebrated the one year anniversary of my aliyah. Here are some pictures from my aliyah flight one year ago.Shabbat shalom.

Volunteers Wanted

Everyone has heard the familiar Israeli adage:

“Maybe means yes.
No means maybe.”

I am giving an hour-long department seminar next week. I am mildly terrified to put it lightly after watching many of my co-workers descend into a panic the month before. And I’ve observed one or two of them sitting in front of Powerpoint weeks before crafting elaborate animations illustrating their experimental schemes. Animations so fancy that they can dance, play basketball, and oh you know, pipette and analyze data for you. In other words, robots.

Today I was sitting at my desk with my eyes staring into space, most likely drooling or foaming at the mouth (while mechanically consuming about 600 grams of peanut M&Ms - thanks Dad) when S.K. stopped by my desk. “You know, it’s so great that you’re so cool about this.” “Cool about what?” “Your seminar next week. I mean you seem really calm.” And I guess it’s true, being in a self-induced coma was a pretty calm thing to do. “I wouldn’t say that I am so cool, I am just … thinking,” I replied.

About an hour later R.A. breezed by with one of his three major pieces of advice about life: “Ohhhh bayyyy-beeee you don’t know what you’re missing!” (Sex). Next it’s S.T. at my desk. “So I hear you volunteered to give the seminar next week. You go girl!!! When I heard I thought ‘Alissa is so awesome! She’s only been here six months and she volunteered!’” “Volunteered??? Who said I volunteered!?!?” “Oh, L.O. told me, she told everyone that - that you volunteered. I mean didn’t you?”

“She told me about six weeks ago that I had to present and I said, ‘Really?’ and she said ‘Yes’ so I said okay.” “Oh honey, you totally volunteered, then. You just need to become more Israeli. But don’t feel bad, you’re changing already, you really are. Now let’s practice you saying ‘no’ without laughing a few more times.”

“No. I can’t practice right now. I need to work on my seminar,” I say as I turn back to the computer screen keeping a straight face just long enough for her to slip out the door before erupting into a fit of giggles and returning to my usual self: a goofy American-Israeli consuming an inordinate number of colorful candies in front of a computer screen in a Jerusalem lab on a hot August afternoon. After all, I volunteered for this.

Through Israel’s Looking Glass

Dear Gilad,

What I remember most about the day you were kidnapped, 25 June 2006, were your thick glasses. In later pictures, pictures your family got to choose and send to the press, you would be wearing more stylish frames or no glasses at all. But what I remember on that first day, the day when the summer began to unravel so quickly, the summer of my own aliyah, were your thick glasses and your shy, childish grin beaming onto the newspaper page.

I thought you looked very young and also, no offense, like a dork. The newspapers said you had a low military profile so you chose to serve in a tank unit. But you still chose a combat unit when it would have been totally acceptable for you to serve as a jobnik. I would have done that, too.

We heard that you are good at physics and math, that you are quiet and gentle, and also that you can make anyone laugh. We don’t know much more about you than that. It’s been over a year since you were kidnapped, but still, you are in the headlines here almost every day. I think that means we haven’t given up yet on your return. We may be a generally impatient people, but we are equally as stubborn.

I hope that you haven’t given up either; I hope your life is not a cruel, taunting game and that you haven’t lost your imagination and the gift of blocking out reality by getting lost inside your head. I hope that when you are sleeping, you can still dream of beautiful things. If I am lonely sometimes, I cannot imagine your loneliness. If I miss my family, I cannot imagine how much you must miss yours.

And I wonder what it is like, to have been Israel’s looking glass for the past 14 months. When we look in the mirror, we see you smiling back - your thick glasses and shy grin - and then we see our own reflection. You did not choose this and yet here you are; our country’s reaction to your plight a recording of our own blunderings, our own wavering and indecision.

First we reasoned that we would not give into extortion, that there would be no prisoner exchange. If we give in, we will pay the consequences with even more similarly heart-wrenching abductions by setting the precedent that kidnapping Israeli soldiers is an effective bargaining chip, we thought. So we said that we would exercise tough love; we would not give in. There would be no prisoner exchange.

We thought about sending in a rescue mission but we were haunted by the botched rescue attempt of Nachson Waxman and then we got distracted with the Lebanon War. Many of us thought you may have been dead all along, but then in mid-September of last year, a letter in your handwriting came.

Finally we were ready to consider the prisoner exchange and then there was the constant back-and-forth, newspaper headlines assuring of your release any day, any hour, any minute, really. The negotiations stopped and started undulating with the back-and-forth of quiet and trouble in the region and again we saw our country’s own reflection in your plight.

Then on the one year anniversary of your capture, the audio tape was delivered. In it you read a message in Hebrew, its content probably dictated to you by your abductors. You implored us to accept a prisoner exchange and you said that your health was deteriorating; that you needed to be hospitalized. But soon after, the talks all but ended with the Hamas coup in Gaza. Now we hear of renewed talks, but are we more cautious this time? Or are we still convinced that it could be any day, any hour, any minute?

Where did we go wrong in this whole mess - what should we have done differently? I am not sure, but I am humbled by my inability to answer these questions. As we enter a new Jewish year, I hope the government will pick up its pace. I hope that we stay stubborn and defiant and continue to pray for and believe in your safe return. And I hope this year will be the one that marks the end of your nightmare.

I am haunted by knowing that you exist and think and breathe only a few kilometers away from where I type and yet you live in a parallel universe that may as well be on a different planet. But mostly I am haunted by your thick, dorky glasses and your wide, shy grin staring back through our nation’s looking glass, recording our rise and fall, our triumphs and failures, like a seismograph.

List of Israel’s Missing Soldiers
Prayer for Missing Israeli Soldiers

Harriet the Spy (Sabra Secret Agent) Edition

The last month has been a little hectic between work, being sick, and searching for a new apartment but it’s a poor excuse for having not yet devoted a posting to my new family member, trust-worthy confidante, and absorption counselor extraordinaire: Harriet the Spy, licensed sabra kitty secret agent. Harriet and I share many common passions and interests including but not limited to chopped liver, spying, raw salmon, jumping all over the place,  and a general curiosity about people.

Here are some pictures of The Spy in action:

Here is Harriet in an illicit mid-nap pose on my bed. Illicit since she really isn’t supposed to be all over my bedding because according to allergy tests, I’m allergic. Unfortunately, she’s often at her cutest when she is on my bed. This was only a few days after I got Harriet. Harriet has almost doubled in size since then!

Here’s Meera with Harriet. The Spy loved Meera and especially loved snuggling with her. The Spy requests that Meera come back to Israel soon to see how much she’s grown.

I am lucky that Harriet loves to clean herself. Here she is in licking action. She also likes to lick me as well, especially my face. A sweet gesture Harriet, but I prefer washing it with soap and water to your spit - sorry, pal.

Thanks to Meera who took the pictures below of Harriet when she came to visit:

Okay, that is all for now from The Spy and from me! We will keep you posted on all of our adventures.

Love,
Harriet the Spy and Alissa the Wannabe

Science JAPs and the kit bag problem

Just as I am always interested in learning more about Israeli culture, my co-workers are very curious about American culture, specifically American Jewish culture. One day in lab, O. and R. asked “Alissa, can you tell us what it means if someone says a woman is a JAP?” So I did my best to explain.

The next day we got an order of some new stuff from Alex Red, a distributor of labware and science supplies in Israel. Included in our order, which was placed by S., were two mini-coolers that hold microcentrifuge tubes so we can keep our growth factors chilled in the tissue culture hood, those weight rings you can place around bottles so they don’t float away in the waterbath, and two new ice buckets specifically designated for our group’s room.

R. enters and says “What IS all this new stuff?” “Oh, S. ordered it,” I tell him. “S. really loves to spend money, look at all this stuff! She loves to buy. You know, Alissa, I think she’s a real science JAP.” I did not know that there could be science JAPs, but the sabras are teaching me new things every day.

Another resurfacing issue at work is what everyone refers to as my “kit bag problem.” There’s this story of a unit of soldiers. The officer announces that they are going on an extremely long and grueling hike. Then one of the soldiers speaks up and says “Officer, with our kit bags?” The officer then pauses and nods his head and says “Oh yeah, good idea, with your kit bags.”

I suffer from a severe case of the kit bag problem. This manifests itself in several ways. For instance, whenever I need something, I follow my very American instinct and ask for it, you know, before taking. Apparently this is very un-Israeli. Want a new chair? Another set of drawers? Need a USB stick? Another set of pipetman or a new aliquot of laminin? Want to leave work four hours early and lie on the beach in Tel Aviv? No problem, squander whatever resources exist all for yourself, be your own boss, but whatever you do, do NOT under any circumstances ASK PERMISSION.

See, my problem is that in my very American way, I only want to do things with the blessing and approval of everyone I know. In my new environment, I tend to do this with my co-workers pacing around in the background doing a nervous dance muttering “Kit bag problem, kit bag problem.”

So, apparently, I am still walking around with “olah hadasha” taped to my forehead. In the mean time, I am still trying to figure out how to model my every day work behavior after my relationship with my younger sister, which is probably the most Israeli relationship I will ever have. I’ll leave it up to your imagination what that might be like.

“You should be ashamed of yourself, you have forgotten us in war. Signed, the children of Sderot.” (graffiti in Sderot)

A direct hit to a classroom in Sderot a few days ago.

“Because not all of our classrooms are protected, we have to study in shifts. We have no gym class because there is no safe place to practice… During the night we can’t fall asleep because of the drones and helicopters flying overhead, and during the day we can’t concentrate because we are too tired.” -Gon

“We have no normal life. We never know what will happen the next hour when Qassams fall; we are not only afraid for ourselves, but also for our families. It’s traumatic to think that someone close to us will get hurt. It’s just terrible.” -Bar

“I have a hard time concentrating in school, and the Qassams affect my entire life…Every time I want to do something, I give up because I think that the alarm will go off at any moment. I can’t study and I can’t even play soccer.” -Niv

quotes from Ynet News Sderot kids: Can’t Remember Life Without Kassams by Miri Chason

Dear World,

I am very sad about some of the awful things that are happening to my country right now. I am sad about the events themselves and I am sad that my country refuses to protect its citizens because of the shame and ridicule she feels from the international community.

Our country was designed to be a place where Jews could finally be safe and escape persecution. Instead, we have become sitting ducks for those who hate us most. Yesterday, 35 rockets landed in Israel proper and 35 people were injured (ironically one for every rocket fired). Today 16 rockets landed in Israel proper. More were wounded. Actually, Kassam rockets fired from Gaza have been landing in Israel, primarily in southern towns such as Sderot, almost every day for several years now.

You might be surprised to learn this. After all, it hardly ever makes international headlines anymore. It doesn’t make headlines because Israel has done little to make it stop. Without Israeli retaliation, dead and wounded Jews don’t make much of a news story. Nobody cares. Our government is too scared to do anything because it doesn’t want you to hate us more than you already do. Our leaders seem to be the only people in this entire country unwilling to accept that no matter how much restraint we use, you still hate us.

So, let’s take the example of last night again. In the first round of rockets, an apartment building was directly hit. A mother was critically wounded. She was found lying on the living room floor, her children also injured from fragments crying hysterically at her side. While the MDA (Magen David Adom) paramedics were treating her, another “Red Code” alert was sounded. The paramedics continued to treat victims of the first round of missiles while additional missiles were falling all around, meters away. Sometimes they protected the wounded with their own bodies. They admit that they are frightened but they say matter-of-factly that this is just part of their job.

The rockets fired into our borders hit nursery schools and community centers, gas stations and homes, soccer fields and restaurants. All of this largely in part because we got out of Gaza two summers ago. Some of us thought it would make you like us more and that it would make the Palestinians like us more. Instead, the Palestinians have turned the land we gave them into a killing ground with which to reach Israel proper with rockets.

We forced our own people kicking and screaming out of their homes, homes that the government encouraged them to build on once barren desert land that the government asked them to settle in the first place. They transformed this land into a lush paradise with exotic greenhouses and exported more produce than anywhere in the country.

The dignity of the residents of Gush Katif was uprooted along with their homes and their livelihoods. Today most of them live in tent cities, like refugees. No permanent housing solution has been found. Many are unemployed and none have been adequately compensated by the government for the loss of their homes and livelihoods. A significant number of the youth are no longer religious. They can’t believe in G-d anymore. Many of the former residents of Gush Katif have lost their faith - faith in the State of Israel, faith in the Zionist idea, faith in the government, faith in G-d, and for what?

For this. So the elderly woman minding her own business in her apartment could wake up this morning and be critically wounded by a rocket. And for this I am sad, sad for my country, sad for the Zionist idea, and sad for the cowardice of our own leaders.

When you don’t explicitly hate us, you look at us with pity and disdain and think “Let both sides kill each other” and then you look away. We leave a sour taste in your mouth. World, please give us a chance this time. We need you. We need the permission to defend ourselves. We are mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, wives, husbands, daughters, and sons just like you. We are overall a good people. We treasure and love life. More than anything, we just want to live normal lives like ordinary people. Stop cajoling and threatening and judging us. Let us defend ourselves. And to our leaders - please show the world that Jewish blood isn’t so cheap. And let us defend ourselves. Always remember, that’s a big part of why we created this land in the first place.

World, I leave you with this message: Today children in the south of Israel couldn’t go to school because of the rocket fire. Photographs in the newspapers show them standing outside, their eyes wide with terror, looking skywards. I pray for the day when the children of Sderot will only look up into the sky to see fireworks or the stars at night instead of rockets raining down.

The Price of a Passion for Life

I enjoy writing observations about the things in Israel that I find to be somewhat novel or unique - the type of endearing and ‘ethnic’ things that I think might interest those back in the Old Country. The relationship between Israeli culture and Jewish culture is often a blurry one, given that we do live in a Jewish state. Sometimes the problem is that these lovely cultural practices are a bit TOO familiar. In my opinion, many aspects of Israeli culture are just extreme manifestations of obnoxious, stereotypically Jewish behaviors.

For an example of what I am talking about: the Israeli workplace and the whole meeting phenomenon. Israelis LOVE their meetings in a way that borders on unhealthy fixation. In my opinion, this meeting fixation/fetish has a distinctly Jewish origin.

In college, I was very involved in Hillel. I enjoyed Hillel very much and we did a lot of really great things. However, the one thing I could just not stand were the endless meetings. There were always meetings because no one could ever keep quiet for longer than three seconds or agree on anything and thus nothing could ever be entirely resolved, therefore warranting another meeting.

A three item agenda could easily take over two hours as everyone weighed in at great length as to whether straws were really necessary for the bagel brunch on Sunday and if so, whether they should be bendy straws or whether straight straws would do the trick. You get the point.

No other meetings were as lengthy, ineffectual, frustrating, and inefficiently run as our special Jew meetings - whether it was Hillel student board, Hillel alum board, Hillel personnel committee, the Hillel director search committee, or even our short-lived Hillel book club - whether it was young Jews, medium-aged Jews, or senile Jews the overall governing theme was my insatiable desire for a fire alarm, real fire, or medical emergency. Anything to make the torture, I mean meeting end.

I realize all of this information might come as a shock to those who know me in real life as pretty good-natured, like the whole part about wishing personal harm upon myself or even possibly others in order to make a meeting end.

My favorite meetings in college involved organizations with high concentrations of non-Jews and science majors, two populations known for being people of considerably fewer words.

So, yes, getting back to Israel. I naively imagined that the end of my Wellesley College Hillel days would mark the end of the Jewish torture meeting phenomenon. This was before I settled into my first Israeli job. If it’s even possible, these lab meetings are worse than the Hillel meetings. For one thing, since the meetings are in Hebrew, I have totally exhausted one month’s worth of concentration in comprehending approximately four sentences. According to this calculation, it takes no longer than 2 minutes for my ADD drooling glazed eye vegetable coma to kick in.

In addition, here in Israel, the mastery of the “let’s sit in silence for 30 seconds and gather our final thoughts…oh wait someone has one last thing to add now let’s repeat this routine 395 more times” ritual is beyond proportions I ever thought possible. Inevitably during these meetings I am either shivering cold or melting and either my bladder is about to explode or I feel parched dry and in addition I have inevitably lost feeling in one or two or four of my extremities due to my sitting position. This element of physical torture serves to mirror the depth of my psychological torture.

The reason for the excessive length and inefficiency of these meetings is that we Jews love to talk. Everyone has a passionate opinion on everything and in addition, the conviction that his/her thoughts on every topic, no matter how mundane or ultimately inconsequential or how completely unrelated to one’s area of expertise are a)correct and b)deserve to be heard and c) absolutely need to be heard or his/her universe will cease to exist.

However, even though these meetings are often a form of extreme torture and even though everyone is really self righteous (in the most endearing way possible) in his/her unshakeable belief that his/her opinion on every conceivable issue is so important, isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t it wonderful to be part of a culture that so values an individual’s opinion? Isn’t it wonderful to be raised in a culture that says to a kid that your opinion is important and deserves to be heard?

Well, we certainly aren’t an apathetic people, that’s for sure. If this is the price I have to pay for the free exchange of ideas, I’ll happily pay it because isn’t it wonderful to live in a place where there is such an abiding passion for life that everyone wants to squeeze life to its fullest and argue and discuss and overanalyze everything to death until there is truly nothing more to say? In the mean time, I should probably be working on how to fake a nosebleed without red marker.

“Healthy” Coke comes to Israel

According to Ynet, Israel will be the first country to sell preservative-free artificial color-free Coke, a formula developed right here (right here in Israel, that is - not right here in my bedroom though it would be pretty cool if my bedroom was a Cola-Cola development lab).

I take this as another sign that my parents should make aliyah, given that my dad is such a big Coke consumer and also paranoid about preservatives. I will also be glad to further justify my current level of Coke consumption with this new and wonderful improvement to an already great product.

The Lucky Ones

I wanted to share this article that Alan sent me:
Israel - love it or leave it

And he’s right, I’m one of the lucky ones. Lucky to no longer be dreaming grand romanticized aliyah dreams. Lucky to no longer be longing to the east like the generations that came before me. Israel is where I work and food shop and pay my bills. I have a pretty normal life here. Jerusalem is my playground and the places of the Tanach are my backyard. That’s all very lucky.

Regardless of the impression the news might give you, I’m lucky to call Israel home. I consider myself extremely lucky to be an Israeli living in Israel in 2007.

Thank you, Bradley Burston, for reminding me of my good fortune and the many miracles that brought us here.

Happy Birthday, Israel!

A beautiful Yom Ha’atzmaut (Independence Day):

So, yes, I too have noticed that I am the worst blogger ever and in addition, I am incapable of responding to an email with more than two sentences. I am not sure I can promise that any of that will change. I definitely go through phases where I really enjoy writing but lately, I have just been too busy (and after I am done being busy, too tired!) to have any desire to write for fun.

The last couple weeks have marked my first set of spring holidays in Israel on aliyah. The juxtaposition of feeling very much on the inside (Yom HaShoah) and very much on the outside (Yom HaZikaron) caught me by surprise. I pray that I will never feel like an ‘insider’ on Yom HaZikaron but I also appreciate that the longer you live in this country, the greater the chance you will lose a loved one fighting for the country.

Yom HaShoah took on a different and more meaningful dimension for me in Israel - the ultimate response to anyone who has wished for our destruction. The Nazis hoped to build a museum about Judaism once they exterminated us from the earth. We built the State of Israel instead. I cannot think of a better way to honor the memory of all those we lost.

Last week I attended my first scientific conference in Israel, the Israeli Society of Gene Therapy Conference at the Technion in Haifa. Lucky for me, the talks were in English. It was also my first time riding the train in Israel! It was all the more fun because it gave me an opportunity to chat with more of the people in the gene therapy department who I don’t see every day in lab. I am still surprised by how friendly and inclusive everyone is given that I am significantly younger than most everyone else, a newcomer, and have yet to master the language.

Lab is going well in general and I am starting a few projects of my own. I am pretty excited about that. I love to talk about my work but I will spare everyone the details on my blog so if you want to hear more about stem cell stuff you’ll have to get in touch with me personally:-)

Last Thursday I went to Tel Aviv and saw a really weird movie about the Yom Kippur War with Alan, Shiri, and Shaul. Afterwards we went out for sushi. I think I was the person who was happiest with the dinner arrangement. We woke up bright and early on Friday and went hiking up north, near Tiberias. We finished at the Kinneret and then took the ’scenic’ route back to Jerusalem along Rte. 90 and Rte. 1.

On Monday we had a ceremony for Yom HaZikaron at work around the time of the air raid siren, like on Yom HaShoah. On Monday night I went to a Yom Ha’atzmaut ceremony and fireworks in Efrat with Naomi, Elka, and Becs. It was freezing! After that, we headed to Tel Aviv for Alan’s roof party, where it was significantly warmer. Yesterday Alan and I had a late brunch at Coffee Bean and then headed to Ramat Aviv where we spent the rest of the afternoon jumping the waves and walking on the beach.

Okay, that is my major life update!

I want to post two things that are special to me:
1)audio of the Declaration of the State of Israel, 1945 (click on the speaker icon)
2) One of my favorite poems in honor of Yom HaZikaron and Yom Ha’atzmaut:

The Silver Platter
by Natan Alterman

The land grows still
Crimson skies dimming, misting
Slowly paling again
Over smoking frontiers

As the nation stands up
Torn at heart but existing
To receive its first wonder
In two thousand years

As the moment draws near
It will rise, darkness facing
Stand straight in the moonlight
In terror and joy

When across from it step out
Towards it slowly pacing
In plain sight of all
A young girl and a boy

Dressed in battle gear, dirty
Shoes heavy with grime
On the path they will climb up
While their lips remain sealed

To change garb, to wipe brow
They have not yet found time
Still bone weary from days
And from nights in the field

Full of endless fatigue
And all drained of emotion
Yet the dew of their youth
Is still seen on their head

Thus like statues they stand
Stiff and still with no motion
And no sign that will show
If they live or are dead

Then a nation in tears
And amazed at this matter
Will ask: who are you?
And the two will then say

With soft voice: We–
Are the silver platter
Upon which the Jewish State
Was served to you.

Then they fall back in darkness
As the dazed nation looks
And the rest can be found
In the history books.

Pesach in Pictures

My brain is currently on Pesach vacation, so no writing from me right now, but I thought I would post a few pics of Pesach so far.

We stopped at a random makolet in the middle of nowhere up north to get ice cream. Who came running out of the makolet? Becs!!

When we were at Decks in Tiberias, we noticed former Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu a few tables away. When his wife got up shortly after their arrival, I had an unobstructed view that I honed in on with some stalkerish zoom lense action. Here’s Bibi just chillin’.

A view of the Kinneret from my bike.

Elka and I right before the start of Pesach.

Traffic is everywhere on Pesach, even in remote parts of the country.

Zahava and I at a Jordan River crossing.

Time for a nap…

Shabbat shalom!

A 6.75 month progress report

I just realized that I don’t live in America. I was on the website of one of my favorite NPR shows, This American Life with Ira Glass. Just last week, a TV version of This American Life debuted on television. I was excited to see a link for a free download of the first episode on the website, especially since I don’t have a TV here in Israel. But then when I clicked on it, it said “Sorry! We at Showtime Online express our apologies; however, these pages are intended for access only from within the United States.”

I sat there for a moment in silence, sort of stunned. Um, slicha? What do they mean I can’t view this content? The longer I spend in Israel, the more “normal” my life here starts to feel. Instead of thinking about how I live so far away from my family and friends I wonder why they don’t live near me. I don’t live far away from them, they’ve chosen to live far away from me. I realize that this backwards-logic (or maybe it’s actually really forward-thinking logic) is sort of strange, but I’ve finally reached the point in my aliyah where Israel feels like the natural place to be. It’s not some far-away foreign place because, well, it’s my home. So to sum up the past 6.75 months in review…

I knew for a long time that I wanted to make aliyah as soon as I graduated college but it always seemed so far off in time and so ridiculous and far-fetched, part of me never believed that I would actually do it. When I was sitting on the plane during my aliyah flight looking out the window and saw Israel below me, I was not happy. In fact, I was in a complete state of shock that I was staring down at my new home. I don’t think I have ever been more genuinely terrified in my life than when I gazed out the window of that plane and saw land down below. Don’t tell Nefesh B’Nefesh that.

Now it all seems so normal. Of course I’m here, but where the heck is everyone else? I have been living in Israel as an Israeli for almost seven months now. It doesn’t sound like a very long time but in the context of what has happened to me between the time I stepped onto the tarmac at Ben Gurion and now, a lot has gone down, I think. I survived ulpan and the French roommates and the 2006 Vomiting Olympics - Jerusalem. I learned how to cut in line and have no conscience. I searched high and low for a job doing something research-related before scoring what I wanted.

I’ve worked two jobs (and still do - one full-time and one part-time). I’ve made some great new friends and have really missed my friends in America. I experienced homesickness for the first time in my life. I’ve almost gotten killed on my bike by Israeli drivers more than once. I am surrounded by Hebrew all day - at lunch, lab meetings, you name it. I can frequently be found perched with my little notebook making a fool out of myself saying things like “Ech omrim to thaw?”

After over half a year as an Israeli (not a very long time at all), I still miss Red Sox games (at Fenway Park with my dad, not on TV) and I barely function without Sundays. I now think in shekels and kilograms and kilometers and I keep my watch on 24 hours. When I went to America to visit, I had to convert shekels to dollars in my head. I have a really tacky faceplate for my cell phone and I wear Crocs everywhere and a gray fleece Fox sweatshirt. On some level, I probably secretly think these things make me cool. I can eat cucumbers for breakfast without flinching and I covet my hofshi hodshi (unlimited monthly bus pass). I push and shove in line when it becomes necessity but always offer my seat on the bus to older people.

I can SMS as fast as I can type and I have developed less patience for most things than most New Yorkers. I still hate hummus and tomatoes. I can sing along to most songs on Galgalatz. I solve every aliment with ice caffe and if that doesn’t work, with Acmol or Kal-Beten. I think Cafe Hillel is overrated and ridiculously overpriced. When people ask for directions I sometimes just tell them, “yishar yishar” even if I really have no idea how to get there. I have absolutely no idea what I did with papers before I started putting everything in those clear plastic sleeves (oh wait in America we had filing cabinets). At least I don’t alternate between “Ehhhhh” and exclaiming “Why!Why!Why!” every five seconds. Oh and I’m not a pack-a-day smoker. Yet.

Sometimes it’s hard to just be me in a society that forces us into categories but ultimately, I know I must keep true to myself and try not to worry about people judging me too much.

I have begun to reconcile real, actual Israel with the romanticized, idealized Israel that used to exist in my head. I am trying to figure out how to still be a Zionist with my knowledge of the real, current day Israel. This is an on-going project. It is one I will never give up on because I believe in it with all my heart. I am glad things are starting to come together for me in my new home.

I need a candy store

I need to file a complaint. I have been eating too much protein and too many fruits and veggies. My body is crying for carbs and junk food, in particular chocolate. I am becoming junk food-malnourished. I think this is a real problem. Since starting work this is my typical day:

I usually get through the morning on two granola bars, a piece of fruit, and either a string cheese or yogurt. Sometimes if I am smart, I remember a piece of chocolate.

A little after 13:00 is lunch, main meal of the day. For 10 shekels deducted from my salary I can get a hot lunch in the Hadassah cafeteria. Lunch consists of a heaping pile of chicken, vegetarian schnitzel, or tofu (I will not eat institutional fish or red meat), rice, and a big bowl of cucumbers and shredded carrot, sometimes with a piece of fruit.

The problem is I can eat to my heart’s content but there is no proper dessert!!! And no vending machines!!! The chutzpah, I know. What happened to the makolet next door when I was in ulpan? What happened to the Pesek Zman and Bamba and Mike & Ike and ice-cold Coke?

Then I come home exhausted. All that is left now is the reject Purim candy. It is reject Purim candy because it doesn’t have chocolate. That’s even worse than vegetables and I am so lazy I just microwave Teevol (soy fake meat) and have a sweet potato and more fruit sometimes even.

Unfortunately, my peanut butter M&Ms are no longer. This is my mom’s fault. When I came to America to visit, my mom wouldn’t let me buy more than two bags because she said that was gross. And I am a mature, independent 23-year-old. I could have bought as many bags as I pleased behind her back but apparently still in need of constant parental approval, I did no such thing. Now they are all gone and I am severely malnourished.

My body has never dealt with so few carbs and junk since toddlerhood when my parents rewarded me with carrot sticks or once in a while an oatmeal cookie if I was particularly well-behaved. So on that note, before I go away for Shabbat, I am going to be pro-active. I am going to stop complaining and I am heading for a candy store. Shabbat shalom and enjoy something SWEET. Your body will be thanking you.

P.S. it snowed in Jerusalem yesterday

If you just told me, at least I could Google it

I never thought I would say this, and in a few hours I may regret having said it, but I am thrilled to be back in lab! On Thursday I started my new job at Hadassah. Right now I am still becoming familiar with the lab and taking copious notes on everything, from how to prepare and add mitromycin-C to inactivate cell proliferation to the location of the nearest bathroom to where the keys to the random storage container in the fifth room on the left are located.

My love of Israel and my science have always been two totally different parts of my life so for now, the union of those two things - doing science in Israel - is the coolest thing ever. I am sure the novelty will wear off soon but for now I am pretty thrilled.

The most difficult part of the job so far has been completing the medical portion of the hiring process. I ran into my first big hurdle the day after I got back from my trip to America. There seem to be some cultural differences between how medicine is practiced here compared to in America. My general experience with the doctors here is that they are good but they don’t tell you anything. And I don’t think it’s a language barrier issue, either.

In America if you go to the doctor and he/she finds something wrong, in my general experience, he/she tells you right away and then informs you of the options of how to proceed and possible diagnoses. There’s sort of a team player approach, if you will.

In Israel, apparently, your own medical history is confidential from you. I guess it’s a pretty clever approach. It definitely gives the doctor all the magical powers and if he/she is wrong about something, well you’ll never know the difference because it’s not like you had any idea what might be wrong in the first place.

I was a little miffed after being sent for two EKGs without being told why I needed a second one, especially since I was under the pretty strong impression that the first one was normal. Sitting in the cardiology waiting area thronged by really old people is not so comforting when you have no idea why you are there in the first place. However, that was sort of the tip of the iceberg.

The day after my appointment at the personnel clinic I was informed by Hadassah that my neurological exam was “problematic” and that I needed to be evaluated by a neurologist. (Did the doctor notice I can’t tie my shoelaces the ‘real’ way? Does she perhaps know I only know how to make bunny ears? Is not being able to snap my fingers or blow a bubble actually a ‘neurological’ problem? If so, does that mean it can be fixed?).

Having never had a neurological problem, I was a bit bewildered but I took comfort in the fact that I myself had not noticed any neurological problems so it must be a mistake because I have an encyclopedic knowledge of House MD and Trauma: Life in the ER and also I own and have colored in a human anatomy coloring book. When I was in eighth grade, I had some pictures from said coloring book hanging on my wall.

In addition, I have access to the Internet and can competently navigate and extract/synthesize information from WebMD and Wikipedia and I have performed CPR successfully on a real person. Throughout my college education, I completed repeated extensive and lengthy literature search training sessions offered/imposed by The Overly Helpful Librarian (The OHL). All these things combined, I clearly pretty much have an (yeah right).

When I thought back to my appointment, I realized that the doctor did a very thorough neurological exam, which in hindsight, was obviously because she thought something was wrong. But I was upset she never informed me of her concerns such that I found myself faced with a neurologist appointment with no idea why except I am sure I have no neurological problems.

Fast-forward a few days and happily, the neurologist feels the problem I was experiencing last week was likely due to exhaustion and just advised me to come back if the problem returns. Fat chance I’d notice given that it was the doctor and not me who noticed the first time! (I am being intentionally evasive not because there is something really wrong but rather because the very sad truth is that I still don’t completely understand the problem in sound medical terms and I don’t want to make a fool of myself because of my lack of knowledge - a sad testament to how little information I am able to successfully extract from doctors in this country).

Anyhow, I have found the doctors I have seen in Israel to be very competent but PLEASE, if you suspect something is wrong with my body, tell me about it! Besides, I’m pretty sure whatever it is, I’ve seen it on House before and if not, it’s definitely on Wikipedia.