Arrived in Israel!

Arrived in Israel on Tuesday afternoon. My flight – New York to London to Tel Aviv -- was uneventful. I spent most of my time reading Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad, watching Doctor Who (I'm a fan of the new series), or sleeping. I expected to be interrogated like when I flew El Al, but I wasn't. I had to go through security again in London, and then in Tel Aviv the woman at passport control asked me where I was planning to stay in Israel, but that was it. Perhaps I look especially trustworthy (but lost) these days. The only other thing about the flight worth mentioning is that I was a little surprised the passengers didn't clap when the plane touched down in Tel Aviv. I've seen that happen on past flights to Israel, but maybe they only do it on El Al flights and not British Airways. Actually, one person started clapping but quickly and sheepishly stopped when no one else joined in. (No, it wasn't me.) That's what sociologists call a collective action problem.

My friend U. very kindly met me at the airport in Tel Aviv and dropped me off at my new apartment. He and his wife A.K. are Israeli sociologists. U. would ordinarily be teaching in Haifa on Tuesday, but all university lecturers are currently on strike in Israel -- more about that in a later post -- so he was free to pick me up. On the drive to my new apartment, we talked about the strike and U.'s recent journal article about the Ethiopian Jews airlifted to Israel in the mid-1980s and in 1991 and the cultural racism they now experience in Israel.

After taking me to my apartment on Rupin Street, U. accompanied me to the supermarket around the corner. I learned that most Israeli supermarkets carry only kosher meat, even in secular Tel Aviv. If you want non-kosher meat, you apparently have to go to some specialty non-kosher supermarkets. Anyway, as luck would have it, one of the cashiers was a young Ethiopian girl. (As U. pointed out later, all the cashiers in the store were Ethiopian, Arab, or Russian, an indication of the ethnic stratification in the Israeli labor market, just as in New York the cashiers would typically be black or Latina.) U., remembering my interest in his article and in Israel's Ethiopian Jews, steered us to the Ethiopian girl's lane and launched into a conversation with her (in Hebrew, but translating for me) about the situation of Ethiopians in Israel and whether she thought there was racism in Israeli society. (Her very sensible answer: Yes, but there's racism everywhere.) U. reassured me that it's not unusual or strange to engage strangers like this in Israel; there seems to be less of what the sociologist Erving Goffman called "civil inattention" here. (In fact, we'd had an earlier exchange with another stranger in the supermarket about coffee.) Judging from the girl's reaction, U. is right. She was friendly and chatty and smiled a lot. I asked the girl in Hebrew whether she understood English and learned that she could understand pretty well but was reluctant to try to speak it. Too bad; I would have enjoyed talking to her more.

After shopping for groceries, I went with U. to pick up his wife A.K. at Tel Aviv University. The three of us drove to a shopping mall to get some coffee for me from Arcafe (the Israeli equivalent of Starbucks, but better) and a coffee percolator. I was reminded of the line in Douglas Coupland's novel Generation X that it doesn't matter where you come from anymore because everyplace has the same stores now. This mall didn't look very different from the ones I remember from my adolescence in the Florida suburbs. I'm fairly certain it's not what Israel's socialist founders had in mind.

With coffee and percolator secured, U. and A.K. took me to their stylish Tel Aviv apartment to join them and their two daughters (the younger one had to be picked up en route from her Girl Scout meeting) for dinner, wine, coffee, and good conversation, including some very interesting shop-talk about guest workers (official and de facto) in Israel and the sociology of citizenship (a topic about which A.K. has written a book). By the time U. drove me home to my new apartment, I was (as they say in Russia) tired but contented.