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www.jpost.com/business-and-innovation/energy-and-infrastructure/article-787092

On Tuesday, April 2 I returned from five intense days in Israel.  During my visit, I met with colleagues from East and West Jerusalem who had been essential partners in the 2022 Jerusalem International Fellows Residency.  I wasn’t there to “do business.”  I wanted to see them. Hug them. See how they are doing. I also spent time with friends living in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, all of whom know someone who has been directly affected by the horrific events of October 7th.  

One dear American-Israeli friend, a staunch progressive, has a 22 year old son who has been serving in Gaza since the war began.  Who has seen unspeakable horrors with no time to “process.”  A young Israeli who is black and lesbian feels excommunicated from her communities because she also identifies as a zionist. Another colleague is close friends with the parents of 23 year old hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin. The one whose arm was blown off at the Nova Festival. How his parents go on as ambassadors of hostages’ families is beyond me.

My Palestinian friends in East Jerusalem were afraid to go out of their homes during the first months after October 7.  Too dangerous to ride the light rail. Walking down the street could result in being beaten by the police, or worse.  One of my colleagues serves hundreds of Palestinian teenagers who are traumatized. He is a Druze who served in the IDF many years ago (he was in intelligence.).  His family’s village in the north is being bombed by Hezbollah.  

One friend believes that Israel must stop fighting and start a peace process at any cost.  Another believes they must destroy Hamas at any cost. 

What was reinforced for me:  Israelis are not the government of Israel. They did NOT all vote for Netanyahu.  Palestinians are not Hamas – they did not all vote for them. In both cases, so-called leaders are failing their people. And there is enormous distrust on both sides.

I continue to feel like an emotional pinball.  I sense the keen distress of my Israeli friends – shock, trauma, and anger at Hamas and at their own government. The people I know are demonstrating against the Israeli government, facing cannons spewing skunk water and arrest. They are especially upset by how the progressive left discounts their experience – from doubting the rape of hostages to the shout of “From the River to the Sea” –  a call to destroy the State of Israel. They wonder how well educated folks do not understand the explicit goal of Hamas to destroy Israel and put their own people at risk to accomplish this task? Or how they ignore the role of Iran in this geopolitical maelstrom.  And there is palpable fear. Some even say that without Israel, the Jews will end up in concentration camps again. Sounds crazy.  Then again, there are a few survivors still alive and more children of survivors for whom that threat is still real. The worldwide rise of anti-semitism stokes their anxiety.

My Palestinian friends are equally shocked, traumatized and fearful. And what they are seeing in Gaza and the West Bank – and even on the streets of East Jerusalem – reinforces that fear.

And yet. 

The people I work with, running cultural non profits that have lost significant funding, somehow press on AND preserve a sense of optimism. Of what the day after must look like.  How person to person, person BY person, repair must be made.  One of my Jerusalem friends is renovating his home, knowing that if a war with Lebanon begins, it may well be destroyed.  But he proceeds.

What was also reinforced for me: Art matters.  The part of my visit that most moved me was along Rothschild Blvd – the “Champs Elysee” of Tel Aviv.  All the trees had been lovingly wrapped with handmade knitted and crocheted yellow “ribbons”. They reminded me of how the Japanese tenderly wrap their trees before they position a support where it is needed.  At Tel Aviv Museum’s plaza – now “Hostage Square” –  searing artworks, made by artists and community members, are everywhere.  One in particular – Roni Levavi’s THE TUNNEL “simulates the terrible reality into which our hostages have been thrown.” It literally concretized their terrifying experience and the fact that Hamas squandered billions of dollars in international aid to the Gazan people to build 100 miles of tunnels out of which they are waging this insane war.  Then I read how Dar Jacir, a wonderful artist residency in Bethlehem, which our Fellows visited in 2022, was damaged by the IDF. WHY? More to add to my emotional rollercoaster.

The day I returned was the night that the IDF killed seven aid workers in the clearly marked truck of World Central Kitchen –  one of the world’s most effective NGO’s – which had communicated with and had clearance from the IDF.  Gut punch. I had just read, at the urging of an Israeli friend, a piece in Newsweek  about how the IDF works harder than any army to protect civilians.  What was the calculus here that allowed such a terrible mistake???? For what it’s worth, the IDF investigated, took responsibility and apologized. This horrific act might well change the course of the war – towards peace. But the damage has been done. 

Rebuilding trust with someone you see as a mortal enemy is an extraordinarily difficult, seemingly impossible task. Yet it has happened in Rwanda, in Ireland. With Japan, Germany and the U.S.  What were the essential steps that made a reasonably tenable peace possible?  No doubt there is rancor.  But there is no war.  

Today marks six months since October 7th and there are still 132 hostages who have not been released from Gaza (dead or alive) and over 30,000 Palestinians killed. Many of whom are women and children. Those alive are facing starvation. I pray for the end of this war.  The return of the hostages. The restoration of health and a way of life for Palestinians.  And leaders with the compassion, vision, will and strategy for Israelis and Palestinians to live on the land they both love and call home.

 

So pleased for Dean Moss, whose work “Your Marks and Surface” at Danspace Project, received this fabulous review in the NYT. So well deserved.

Dean was the brilliant Dance and Performance Curator at The Kitchen during my tenure there and became a very dear colleague. In 2013, he was one of four Fellows at the American Academy in Jerusalem and created extraordinary work with an international group of students at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance.
Dean is a master of multiple media – movement, visual arts, performance. His deft and subtle way of working with people and material is always moving. This piece is a masterpiece. Congratulations Dean.

Theaster Gates is one of the most amazing artists I have encountered in my decades of work in the cultural arena. I finally had the privilege of seeing him in person, at the New Museum, on the last day of his exhibition there.  He performed with The Black Monks, a group of musicians he has been working with for years.  Serious chops. 

Theaster is described as an excellent tenor – he grew up singing in Church.  He IS a fabulous singer.  And dancer.  His footwork is almost as interesting as how he takes gospel tunes and turns them into contemporary compositions.  His musical comrades have a sense of where to go with him  – it is clearly all improvised but I could feel the energy between them as Theaster moved through the space – surrounded by audience sitting and standing in the front and sides and the most amazing group of LESLIE speakers (each the size of a small refrigerator) mounted on the wall behind him.  One of the more curious parts of his performance was when he would run past the musicians to the back of a tall “shack” made of corrugated metal.  He would run back, disappear for a few seconds, then come back.  It wasn’t long enough for a costume change.  A swig of water?  

It was only after the performance, while wandering around the space where he had repurposed bathroom tiles and fluorescent lights to make a shrine for his mother and wood from the Park Ave armory to make a variety of Frank Stella- inspired shapes, some of them crosses, that I was able to go to the back of the “shack.”  The house of a GIANT church bell.  Which made sense since the sound of church bells reverberated around the space throughout the 30 minute performance.  Which isn’t really the right word for this event.  A meditation, a dive into sound, a deeply spiritual experience. 

Which brings me to why Theaster Gates is, for me, the quintessential Jerusalem Fellow,   I badly paraphrase Theaster who said in the first moments of this musical offering.  ‘I started in the church, I take my life there and make it into contemporary art…’

He is steeped in spiritual practice. He lives in his Chicago community and finds ways to use his art practice, his understanding of urban planning and his devotion to the people who he grew up with to create a model of artistic social engagement that should be emulated in every city.  One could never superimpose his methods but for any artist wanting to be truly engaged in community, he is an exemplar.  

We ask our Jerusalem Fellows to start a process that is about engagement with community.  Over their ten-week residency, our Fellows, artists and cultural practitioners in a wide variety of disciplines, are hosted by cultural organizations in East and West Jerusalem.  The goals of the residency are the development of understanding of the complexities of the city and building of long-term relationships with the people who live there.  So far it has been an astonishing success. In the current climate, we sense that the members of Jerusalem’s ‘cultural eco-system’ are deeply grateful for such partnership. So we continue to build towards the Fall 2024 residency program.

“To say that we live in complex times is an understatement. Not just because of Covid, but also because of political shifts globally, we are experiencing a kind of turbulence that we have not known since emerging from World War II. We are seeing in some parts of the world a drift toward nationalism and accompanying trends of supremacism and racism, and in other parts of the world a social awakening that underscores the importance of diversity and inclusiveness. Pervasive everywhere is also the phenomenon of global migration that is creating a culture of exile — of exile as home — at a level that is without precedent in modern times.

In this context, while art and politics remain distinct, art has become increasingly engaged with social activism. Art and art history offer examples for this phenomenon, and museums such as MoMA and the Israel Museum are able to tell these stories with clarity. As an example, the political upheaval of the period between World War I and World War II in Europe produced the Dada and Surrealist movements which forged a new definition of artists as creative practitioners. These creative makers expanded their mediums and their ways of working, forging an engagement between art and activism that then spread globally with the migration of artists from Europe to the Americas and to the emerging Soviet Union. This phenomenon remains foundational for art-making today.

Few cultures have ever existed in isolation, and how they live, work, and create is always subject to the influence of those living, working, and creating around them.

The notion that all things connect across time and geography could not be more meaningful than in an era as complex as ours. Universal museums embrace distinct cultures globally and demonstrate how these cultures resonate with others that share their place on the timeline of history. A museum such as the Israel Museum notably demonstrates how the world is always a mosaic of cultures — an example of definitional diversity — and the stories it tells place these distinct cultures in the context of others. Often these stories also demonstrate the cross-cultural engagement among individual cultures that history otherwise might portray as disconnected. An iconic example might be the museum’s 2016 exhibition Pharaoh in Canaan: The Untold Story, telling the story of the time around 1,600 b.c.e. when the Canaanites lived in Egypt and then, a century or so later, when the Egyptians ruled in the land of Canaan. Their practices and aesthetics became merged — and even the seeds of monotheistic belief were formed in this time — and these two cultures became integrated and engaged. In today’s divisive world, examples like this can be enlightening.”