Four Kinds of Playing: Number One

I'm not going to write about all four right away, and I'm not sure there really are four. In any case, I'll start with straight classical playing, the kind that I was trained in until I gave up the clarinet when I was in college and wasn't good enough to get into the university orchestra. At the time, the only kind of musician I could imagine being was a classical musician.

Recently we hosted a concert in our home. A friend of ours is a classical singer. She had prepared a recital of Lieder with an excellent accompanist and asked if we would be volunteer our living room and grand piano. We agreed. Indeed, we have had quite a few chamber music concerts in our living room, and our piano has been played by some superb musicians. (I always feel that when a master plays an instrument, the instrument absorbs some of the mastery.) I thought, though, that it would be only fair to ask a small favor in return, so I prevailed upon the pianist to accompany me in a short piece, “Danse,” by Darius Milhaud for alto saxophone and piano. You can hear a fine performance (not by me) of that sweet piece on this website: http://www.dcmusicaviva.org/recordings/documents/dance.mp3

Playing a piece like that demands, first of all, precision. You have to play all the notes exactly the way the composer wrote them, in time, in tune, articulated the way it's indicated on the printed page, with the correct dynamics. The challenge for the musician is to play as accurately as possible and, at the same time, to play the piece expressively, not mechanically.

Last year Judith and I attended a Scarlatti and Bach marathon, which was part or the Israel Festival. Six young pianists took turns playing, and we were enthralled not only by the excellence of their performances but also by the palpable differences in their approach – even though they were all playing the notes “as written.” It was a great lesson in interpretation.

My performance went okay. I was nervous and came in wrong a couple of times, but the accompanist never blinked and stuck right with me, and I don't think anyone in the audience noticed. If I had had more time to rehearse with him and develop a musical rapport, it wouldn't have happened. I enjoyed myself, but only so much. My conclusion was: I don't want to spend time and energy in preparing a recital of classical saxophone pieces (and imposing it on my friends), My self-image as a musician has changed.

Private Adventures

I spend quite a few hours every day in my exiguous home office, facing my computer screen, with a Hebrew book open on my left, rewriting the author's words in English. Usually I translate literature, which is stylistically difficult, or academic material, which can be conceptually difficult. Even when a job is fairly simple, I have to concentrate hard on it – if only to avoid skipping a line or a sentence, which has been known to happen. It's tiring. It can be very demanding. I'm constantly making decisions about individual words, about the shape of phrases, about the structure of sentences. And it's lonely: I make those decisions by myself – although later the authors often respond to my work, making corrections and offering suggestions.

Some of my more polite friends occasionally ask me what I'm working on, and sometimes, when I'm enthusiastic about a job, I'll tell them more than they really want to know. However, I'm deeply aware that my work entails intense, private experiences, which, paradoxically, because it's all about communication, is almost impossible to communicate. There's nothing outwardly dramatic about it. I'm not driving a car very fast, thrashing through a jungle, arresting violent criminals, or engineering billion dollar buyouts. There's also very little at stake – even if I get a sentence in a novel completely wrong, no one's going to suffer very much from my error. But I care deeply about getting the right word or expression, about making a sentence read well, about conveying the author's voice and ideas.

In the end, the locus of human experience is in the heart, not out in the world, and the essence of civilization is caring infinitely about things that don't have many practical consequences.

Summer Jazz School

An Intense Week at the Dordogne Jazz School

In the winter of 2004-5, I did a web search for “jazz summer school” and up came the Dordogne Jazz School, run by English musicians in a dilapidated medieval castle in a hamlet called Monteton in the rural countryside near Bergerac. It sounded very attractive, and I had some correspondence with the director, but I didn't manage to get well enough organized to sign up that winter. The following year I resolved to do it, and by December I had reserved a place. I made plane reservations in the early spring and even thought ahead to reserve a hotel room in Bordeaux for the days before and after the jazz school. As I geared up mentally and musically for a week of jazz, the war started here in Israel – making me rather less enthusiastic for the pleasures of life, including making music.

I was a bit apprehensive and imagined the school would be populated by ambitious, young, talented musicians, who would be too stuck up to play with me, or, alternatively, with rank beginners from whom I could not learn very much. However, I assumed that I would be playing a lot, and that would be valuable.

The trip there was not fun. My flight left Ben-Gurion airport after midnight on Sunday, July 30 and, I arrived in Charles De Gaulle airport with an hour or so to get to the Air France window and get a boarding pass for the connecting flight to Bordeaux. The line was so long and slow moving that I almost missed the plane. To top things off, when I got to Bordeaux, I found that Air France had abandoned my suitcase in Paris.

My hotel in Bordeaux was very easy go get to from the airport, and the people at the reception desk were pleasant. I had arrived before check-in time, but my room was ready, and they had no objection to my going in and resting for a while. Although I was exhausted, after resting for a while, I went out and spent a very pleasant day in Bordeaux, which is an impressive city, full of grand eighteenth century buildings, next to a very wide river, but with a historic center small enough to walk around easily. Since it was Sunday in the holiday season, there were very few people in the streets.

As promised, my suitcase was brought to the hotel in the late afternoon. The people at the hotel said it happened all the time. On Monday morning I packed and then took the long walk from my hotel to the railroad station, because I love wandering around towns, and bought a ticket for the 13:35 train to Bergerac. I slowly made my way back to the hotel and checked out at about eleven. There is a tramway that goes directly from where my hotel was, a big park with the strange name of Quinconces, to the railroad station. I have since discovered that “quinconce” refers to an arrangement like the five on a die or a domino: a square with four dots in the corners and one in the center, which is the way the trees are planted in that park. I had a cup of coffee, got on the tram, and had time to eat a salade niçoise in a decent restaurant across form the station (and to have my first of many glasses of red wine) before my train left.

The train to Bergerac goes through wine country, past places like St. Emilion known for their vintages. Upon arrival in Bergerac, I followed instructions and crossed the street to a café to wait to be picked up by Simon, the summer school's driver and trouble-shooter, an English expat who seems to enjoy life. At the café a tall, balding young man saw that I was carrying a sax case and figured out that I was also headed for the school. His name was Christophe, he's a pianist, and he works half-time in computers and half-time as a volunteer political activist for a small socialist party in Paris. It turned out he was our token Frenchman in the course, though we had a French-speaking Swiss engineer as well.

Christophe and I had a beer together, and he called Simon on his cell phone once he figured out the number from the way it was printed out on the email I had received – my Hebrew oriented computer had reversed the order of the numbers. The drive to Monteton was unexpectedly long, partially because we stopped at the the small local airport to pick up Mike, another pianist, but Simon was entertaining, as was Christophe.

I was still uncertain how things would turn out musically. We pulled into the castle and took out our luggage, but our rooms weren't ready yet, and we didn't know whom we'd be rooming with. In fact, no one in charge seemed to be around to deal with us. We hung around and chatted, about twenty of us, in a pleasant area between a dilapidated stone tower, a terrace with tables set up for dinner, and a low, nondescript building. After a while, some people gathered at the bandstand and started jamming. There was a British bass player named Rick, with a thatch of graying blond hair, and a drummer. Christophe sat down at the keyboard, and I took out my alto. What the hell, I said to myself, why be bashful? After all, I had paid the airfare and tuition to play. I can't remember what tunes we played, but we hit it off fairly well. Other people took out their horns, and we kept going for quite a while. When you think about it, which I have done a lot, it's rather amazing that people who have never met can start making music almost immediately.

Dorian Lockett, a bass player who, with his wife, Andrea Vicari, a pianist, run the school, eventually showed up, and we were gradually settled in our rooms. Andrea's parents have a house nearby, and their two children stayed with their grandparents. Her brother Scott, a drummer, was also around helping out and playing. Dorian more or less takes care of the administrative stuff, and Andrea is in charge of the musical program. I was placed with two other guys in a long, narrow, extremely basic room, with an adjoining bathroom that was even more basic. I'm not complaining. The beds were clean and comfortable, there was hot water for showers, and my roommates were considerate.

I had registered as a vegetarian to avoid problems with kashrut, and at dinner that was no problem – nor was it ever. The restaurant staff was extremely thoughtful and friendly. The food was generally fine, never very ambitious, but always satisfying, with plenty of salad, as much wine as you could drink at lunch and supper, and fresh bread home baked from organic whole wheat flour. They served great cheese after every meal, of course. There was also a bar where you could buy coffee, soft-drinks, beer, wine, or whiskey.

Look how far I've gotten, and I've barely begun to describe the musical activities. Dorian sent us a .pdf file before the school began, with the schedule, which I printed out and looked at, but it didn't really mean much to me. On Tuesday morning we started off in earnest, and I began to see how much care had been put into planning things. We were placed in two different groups, which met at different times, of course. One was known as a workshop group – each one had about a quarter of the forty participants, selected by instrument. My group, in memory of the confusion of the first evening, was known as the Bed-Hunters. (Another group was known as the Jazz Worriers – to give you an idea of the humor of the place.) Each workshop group met for two hours or so every morning and prepared a piece for performance that evening. We also had three slightly larger ensembles, a Mingus group, a Soul group, and a Salsa group (which I chose, because I'm pretty weak on Latin rhythms). Those groups prepared performances for the final evening of the school, except for the Salsa group. We played three pieces for dancing at a Salsa evening on Friday. We also had instrumental sessions with the teachers, master-classes, and improvisation lessons.

We had classes from ten to one and then from four to six, and organized jam sessions and performances till eight, when we had supper. After supper sometimes our teachers played for us, once a French group that was sharing the facilities with us gave a concert, and so on. There were disorganized jam sessions until the wee hours of the morning. I stayed up till one-thirty or so one night, but I didn't get much out of that part of the program.

We had four main teachers: two saxophone players, Julian Siegel and Ingrid Laubrock; one trumpeter, Chris Batchelor; and one guitarist, Phil Robson. Andrea worked with the pianists. They are all fine musicians and excellent teachers. Chris was especially articulate, and, since he directed the Salsa band, I was exposed to him a lot.

Julian was the first teacher I was exposed to, in a workshop for the advanced saxophone players (it was up to us to decide what level was right for us). He's a tall man with a soft face and a lot of black hair. He speaks quietly, almost bashfully, and in his class he emphasized sound production in the lower register of the horn: the most basic stuff is also the most advanced. That afternoon he also led my workshop group and taught us the song “Sweet Georgia Bright” by ear, going over it patiently, phrase by phrase, chord by chord, till we'd got it. Like all the other teachers, he was terrifically encouraging, telling us we were doing great all the time.

My biggest obstacle to improvising with assurance is my tendency to get lost in the form (or my fear that I'll get lost). I tend to compensate by gluing myself to the lead-sheet, using my eyes instead of my ears, so it was very useful to me to learn something strictly by ear, without the safety net of written music.

Chris Batchelor, a strong and imaginative trumpet player and a very articulate teacher, addressed a lot of the musical issues that concern me at the moment in a way that I could grasp immediately. He led our workshop group the next day and taught us a simple, amusing New Orleans inspired Bill Frisell piece called “In Deep,” also by ear. He also gave a master class demonstration that day, about breaking out of the patterns of jazz standards by changing phrasing, by playing the chord progressions out of phase, and other fairly technical matters. That mainly drove home for me how firmly you have to have a piece in your mind, in order to improvise against the structure and not confuse yourself.

But I don't want to go on about the specific things I learned, things that I want to work on and use now that I'm back home. The main point is that by the end of the week, a lot of us were sounding pretty good, playing confidently with a full tone, and enjoying ourselves. People who had never met had formed ensembles and were playing together nicely. Andrea and her brother Scott supervised the early evening jam sessions and made certain that no one got up on stage and monopolized the action, and the atmosphere among us was uniformly generous. People always applauded your solos, even if you got lost and sounded like shit.

What may be surprising is that there are enough people like me, mainly middle-aged amateurs, who are serious about our music to populate a school like this. The other thing, of course, is that this was a demonstration that jazz has convincingly become a world music – you don't have to be American or African-American to love it or play it creditably. At our final concert, on Sunday night, August 6, our performance groups played: the Mingus band, the Salsa band, and the Soul band. The Mingus band started off with “Better Get Hit in the Soul,” a lively evocation of black evangelical churches. There they were, about twelve white Europeans playing the blackest of black music with enthusiastic respect. And then another twelve northern Europeans played Cuban music with love and abandon.

I've always looked at my musical activity, at least in one sense, as something that takes me places – and indeed it has.

Review of an Agnon Novel

Once I was a professional book reviewer.
Here's a review that appeared on a good web site:
National Yiddish Book Center - A Simple Story by S.Y. Agnon

All the Things You Are - an Appreciative Analysis

All the Things You Are

in Praise of a Song

This song has been played so many times that people take the elegance of its construction for granted. When you learn to play the melody, you appreciate the logic of it, the way it descends from the first A flat down to a B natural in the fifteenth measure, leaps up to a D natural, again descends to a G sharp, which metamorphoses into an A flat and begins a descent again, a descent which is interrupted with some upward leaps, until it finally settles on an A flat, the basic tonality of the song, at the end. It's deceptively simple, deceptive because the descents move through some surprising notes that don't belong to the key in which the song is written.

Harmonically, it is very sophisticated. It starts off by establishing the key of A flat major in the first four measures, with an absolutely ordinary sequence of chords, VI⁷-II⁷-V⁷-I, which one typically finds at the end of a classical piece. In the next four measures, it takes us to a surprising place harmonically with a daring transposition that sheds four flats in three measures, by moving from D flat major (a chord appearing in the key of A flat with no accidentals) to G⁷ (a chord that sheds two of the flats of A flat, the B flat and the D flat), which resolves to C major.

Then it jumps back to a key much closer to the original key of A flat major, when the C major chord turns into a C minor chord, and we have a repetition of the initial chord series (VI⁷-II⁷-V⁷-I) but in the key of E flat, the dominant of A flat – so after the digression to the unrelated key of C major, we have returned to a harmonic movement typical of classical movement: modulation to the dominant. However, instead of staying in that key, in a sequence of chords identical to that of measures five to eight, but transposed up a fifth, we modulate to the entirely unrelated key of G major, exactly one half tone below the initial key of A flat major, which means that in the space of sixteen measures, the song has moved almost as far as possible from the originally key. (If you lay out the twelve possible keys in the diatonic scale in the order of the cycle of fifths, you get:

Ab – Db – Gb (F#) - B – E – A – D – G – C – F – Bb – Eb- Ab

So the keys of either A or D would actually be farther away from A flat than the key of G, but it's still a very bold modulation.)

The third eight measures of the piece, the bridge, begins by establishing the key of G major with chord progression typical of classical harmony: II – V⁷ – I. Then, however, the second half of the bridge jumps to an unexpected key: E major. The chord progression that Jerome Kern (assuming that the chords that appear above are the ones he wrote) put in is A minor, B seven, E major. The A minor seems to be repeating the chord progression of the first four measures of the bridge, but instead of being II in the key of G major, it becomes IV in the key of E major, since the following chord is a B seven. In fake books that reflect the way jazz musicians have reharmonized the song, an F sharp half diminished chord is substituted for the A minor (the chords have almost the same notes, F#, A, C, E and A, C, E, G respectively), so you have what jazz musicians call a two-five to E – except ordinarily the half diminished chord ordinarily indicates a minor key, and this progression leads to a E major. The last chord of the bridge, on the twenty-fourth measure, is A flat augmented (Ab, C, E) – a chord that can be also be thought of as C augmented and E augmented, because it's made of three equal intervals, major thirds. Harmonically, augmented chords don't fit into any ordinary diatonic scale (except the melodic and harmonic minor scales, which are not, strictly speaking, ordinary), and composers use them to shift keys almost any way they want to. Here, if you think of the chord as a C augmented chord, it can be used to move the harmony back to F minor, which is where the piece began.

The last part of the song repeats some of the material from the first part but expands on it, and, unlike the first part, it finally lands squarely in its home tonality: A flat major. The chords in the first five measures of this section are the same as those of the first five measures of the piece, but instead of jumping to an unexpected G⁷ chord after the Db⁷, the way Kern wrote it, it stays in the tonal territory of Db, the sub-dominant of Ab major and ends with a classical cadence: Bb min⁷ - Eb⁷ – Ab. Those measures are reharmonized in various ways in different fake books that I have seen, to make the final cadence stronger.

Another way of thinking about the harmonies here would be to say that the song can't decide, at first, whether it's in Ab or C. The first eight bars end on C, the second eight bars end on the dominant of C, G, and the bridge starts off in G. The bridge ends in the key of E major, which is exactly halfway between C and Ab, and the final chord of the bridge is that augmented chord which fits both into the key of C (C,E) and of Ab (Ab,C). In the last twelve bars (in the printed version I appended at the beginning, the final bar of the piece is missing), the song makes up its mind. If the last part of the song were a simple reprise of the first eight bars, which is very common in the type of song known as “standards,” to which “All the Things You Are” definitely belongs, it would in fact end in the key of C. However, the second to last four bars, which correspond to bars five through eight, and on a d diminished chord, as Kern as harmonized it. (In some fake books this appears as a B diminished chord, which is made up of exactly the same notes, with a different bass.) From there Kern puts us squarely in the key of Ab major, although the second to last melody notes, F, G, could actually be heard as the seventh and root of G⁷, resolving into C major rather than Ab!

Here's another essay of mine that's on the web:
Konch Magazine

But it's archived in an obscure way there, so I'm copying it in here.

From the Schizophrenia of American Racism (the Frying Pan) to the Paranoia of the Middle East (the Fire)

by Jeffrey M. Green

On the photographic paper under the enlarger my white face was black and their black faces were white. If we exposed the print so that the features of their faces were clear and distinct, my face would be so underexposed that I would look like a featureless ghost, and if we exposed it properly for my face, theirs would come out like bottomless shadows. So I explained the technique of dodging to them. After we exposed the print long enough for their faces, I waved my fingers over them to shield them from the light while I continued the exposure long enough to expose my face properly. My students thought this was a riot. Not only had photography reversed black and white for them, but it had made my white face into a problem that had to be solved. They joked with me about it, and for that moment I had gained their trust, in the darkroom, where we were all invisible.

This incident took place in the summer of 1968. I was a twenty-three year old graduate student in Comparative Literature at Harvard, and I had come to Charleston, South Carolina to teach in an Upward Bound program. I had no illusions about the enormous gap of privilege that separated me from my students, but in the safe and nurturing atmosphere of that program, which was run by some self-assured and impressive southern black educators, I was accepted by my students, who probably had never had a white teacher before. We learned a lot from each other. During that summer it often happened that I would be the only white person in a crowd of African-Americans, and I sometimes forgot how conspicuous I was. Once we took our students to the University of South Carolina at Columbia for a meeting of all the Upward Bound programs, and while I was standing with my students, I happened to catch the suspicious gazes of students from another group. Suddenly I sensed the hostility toward white people that black high school students in the south felt but rarely could express openly. You might recall, though, that there was extensive rioting in Charleston a year afterward. Hostility can't be bottled up forever.

Here's the schizophrenia. During the week I lived in a boarding house in a black neighborhood of Charleston. My landlords, the Brevards, were an elderly, proper couple. Mr. Brevard was a retired railroad chef, and occasionally he would cook gourmet meals for me and my roommate, a student from Bombay who was studying at Carnegie Tech. But I spent the weekends with my fellow Jews. A relative of mine had married a doctor from Beaufort, South Carolina, and I visited them several times. Also, before going down to Charleston, I had received the names of several members of the local Jewish community, who were extremely hospitable to me and approved of what I was doing. So I sometimes found myself switching from the Brevards, clean and comfortable but somewhat rundown home to air-conditioned ranch houses in Charleston's affluent suburbs. One of the Jewish families that I came to know in Charleston had a forty-foot racing sloop, and they often took me out for sails. So there I was, with one foot in the poverty program and another foot on a yacht. I went to the African Methodist Episcopal church with the Brevards to see what that was like, and I went to the elegant Reform synagogue in Charleston with my Zoroastrian roommate.

My schizophrenic experience in Charleston was, in essence, no different from what I had known for most of my life. I grew up in Greenwich Village in the 1950s and went to a progressive private school, the Little Red School House, where we were taught not to be prejudiced. In elementary school we studied about Mexico, India, and China, and also what was then called Negro History. How many other fifth graders in the US at that time were taught about Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Haitian rebellion against France? We sang spirituals in music class, and, in fact, our music teacher was a charismatic black woman, Charity Bailey. Looking back on it now, I realize that it was very unusual for a class consisting mainly of middle-class white pupils to have a black school- teacher, but at the time I thought it was entirely natural. Charity (we called our teachers by their first names) was an amazingly gifted teacher and handled her blackness with admirable poise.

I went on from the Little Red School House to its upper school, the Elisabeth Irwin high school (where Angela Davis was a year ahead of me). The political commitment to integration and civil rights was even stronger there. We sang "Lift Every Voice and Sing"along with the "Star Spangled Banner," and we regularly spent Saturday mornings picketing the Woolworths on Fifth Avenue near Fortieth Street, because the lunch counters in southern Woolworths were segregated. But at the same time, Elisabeth Irwin found it hard to recruit African-American students. The tuition was kept as low as possible, and scholarships were made available, but not that many black people could afford to send their children to private schools, and those that could were not interested in a leftist, progressive school like ours. So the integration in my school was more token integration than the real thing, despite our ideals.

Outside of school, my life was just as segregated as any other middle class white American,s. My parents had no African-American friends. I never played with black children or went out with black girls. And I was under tremendous pressure to get into a "good college. Only one of my classmates had the courage of his political convictions and attended City College, where there was some likelihood of studying with a significant number of people of color. Looking back on it, I see how abnormal it was to be in favor of civil rights, against segregation, and so on, and also to protect my white middle class privilege with vigorous tenacity.

In 1969, while I was partway through my graduate program, I had the opportunity of teaching English in a southern Negro college. I was offered a job at Tuskegee and also at a college in Houston, Texas, but I chickened out. I opted to remain in the safe environment of Harvard and

finish my doctorate (which has proven to be a virtually worthless credential, since I did not become an academic). I can,t complain. If I,d gone off to teach at Tuskegee, I would never have met the woman I married, and our marriage has been very rewarding. But my life would certainly have had a very different shape.

For one, I probably would not have moved to Israel in 1973.

To some degree, the decision to move here was an effort to escape American racism, to escape the burden of being white in a society that oppresses people who aren,t white. I heeded the cry of Huey Newton (I think it was he who said it): "If you,re not part of the solution, then you,re part of the problem. I was unable or unwilling to make my whole life over to become part of the solution, so I decided to evade the problem by moving away from it. How naive I was! Instead of being privileged by my skin color, in Israel I am privileged both by being Jewish (with respect to Palestinian Arabs) and by being of Ashkenazic (European) origin (with respect to Jews from North Africa and the Middle East). Also, as if to compound the irony, during the past ten years or so I have become increasingly interested in jazz, and that interest has led me to read extensively about issues of race and African-American culture. So not only have I not escaped American race issues, I have found myself in a violent stew of ethnic conflict in which I am no less compromised by the unearned, accidental privilege of my Ashkenazic Jewish birth than I was as a white-skinned citizen of the United States.

For someone who grew up in the racial society of America, it is difficult not to see the social problems of Israel in the same light. That is my point of reference, but it is not necessarily a useful one. The crimes committed against Africans during the slave trade and under colonialism, and to African Americans under slavery and since then, are not at all the same as the suffering undergone by the Palestinians as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Which is not to deny that very deep scars have been left on Palestinian souls. Conversely, being here in the Middle East has changed my view of the issue of race in the United States. Despite my white skin and European features, I don,t look all that different from many Arabs and Oriental Jews. Although they tend to be darker than I am, some of them are just as light, even blond. The main difference between me and them is cultural. Seeing this, now, has shown me what I had been blind to as a liberal, white American in the fifties and sixties. I tended to discount the cultural difference between me and African-Americans. I failed to realize that African-American culture was really a culture, and I didn,t understand why there had to be Black Studies departments at universities. I wanted desperately to regard American Negroes as white people who happened to have dark skins. That,s how I viewed civil rights. Since "they are the same as "we are, "they deserve the same rights. I hadn,t fully grasped the notion that "they deserved full civil rights even if "they weren,t the same as "we were. Moreover, now that I think of it, it was odd that I, as a Jew, thought of myself as part of the white American collective, while at the same time I insisted that Jews should both enjoy full American citizenship and also preserve certain distinctive religious and cultural traits. We Jews are often accused of being clannish, and I felt

we had every right to be that way if we wanted to.

As an American who grew up committed to civil rights, I am sensitive to the prejudice and discrimination practiced in Israel against Oriental Jews and Palestinians, and as a person who has lived in the cultural stew of the Middle East for nearly thirty years, I have become sensitive to the cultural aspects of discrimination against African-Americans in the United States. As an American troubled by the unearned privilege of having white skin, I suffered from a kind of schizophrenia. As an Israeli, surrounded by real enemies, many of whom have every intention of killing me and my family, I run the risk of suffering from paranoia. I can,t assume that Palestinians will stop hating Israeli Jews if we start treating them fairly. I still have to deal with the cognitive dissonance of being a privileged person who doesn,t believe in that kind of privilege, but I also have to protect myself. And it,s never clear how real the threat can be. I have joined groups of Israeli peace activists on visits to Palestinian villages in the West Bank, and I have felt safe and welcome. But I also was within sight of one of the suicide bus bombings that took place in Jerusalem in 1996. If my car had been stopped a couple of hundred feet closer to the traffic light, I could have been injured. If I had sent my son to the Central Bus Station by bus that morning instead of driving him, he might have been killed in that explosion.

I have used the words "schizophrenia and "paranoia loosely here. I,m not a clinical psychologist, and I don,t really claim that these situations have made me mentally ill. But sometimes I feel as if what stands between me and the mental illnesses that go by those names is insensitivity. Not only is my skin white, it is thick. If all of us were fully sensitive to the contradictions between the values we profess and the values we actually live by, we might all go mad. Or else we might change the world.

Links to my writing in "Zeek"

Zeek | In Vincoli | Jeffrey M. Green
Zeek | Shiatsu | Jeffrey Green