Election Day

My brother and I have different political views, but despite that (or maybe because of that) we like to talk about politics anyway. In an e-mail message my brother sent me two weeks ago, he asked if there was much news or speculation in Israel about the U.S. Presidential primaries. In the media, there is quite a bit. I hear references to it on the radio when I'm riding the bus to ulpan in the morning, I see Israeli journalists and pundits discussing the primaries on TV here, and it's covered in the newspapers too. (You can read the Israeli coverage in English by going to Haaretz.) That's what I expected. After all, the U.S. Presidential election will have important consequences not just for Americans, but for the rest of the world as well, including Israel.

Being (I hope) a good sociologist, I decided to supplement these observations with another tried and true sociological method: asking people. In my conversations with ordinary people, I encountered more indifference than I expected. This was especially true among the Israeli students I asked at Tel Aviv University. There could be many reasons for this indifference. It might reflect their age (in the U.S. I know that younger people are less likely to vote), where they are in terms of their life course (students), the broad bipartisan support for Israel in the U.S. (which means they are not overly concerned about which party takes the White House in 2008), or the fact that Israelis have plenty of political problems of their own to worry about (the Winograd Commission, the continuing rocket attacks from Gaza, etc.). Among the Israelis who did express an opinion to me, most supported Clinton. This may partly reflect her name recognition and the popularity of her husband here, though a taxi driver told me he disliked Bill Clinton because he blamed the Oslo peace process for strengthening Palestinian terrorists and in some way contributing to the current violence against Israelis. (Clearly, this was a right-wing view, but it means that the Clintons are not universally popular here.) One of my ulpan teachers expressed some support for Giuliani before he dropped out of the Republican primaries. Again this may have reflected name recognition (she heard of him but perhaps not many of the other Republican candidates) and also awareness that Giuliani is staunchly pro-Israel. I had an interesting conversation with her about Giuliani; I told her that I lived in New York when he was mayor, and I tried to explain why I could not support him for President. Unsurprisingly in these conversations, Israelis based their opinions entirely on the candidates' foreign policies with no regard for their domestic policies. And of course why should they care about the candidates' domestic policies? They don't live in America.

Wednesday of this week was election day for me. My absentee ballot for the Wisconsin primary arrived last week, and after spending a few days agonizing over whether to vote for Clinton or Obama I had finally made up my mind. (My vote went to Senator Clinton, though I'd be happy to vote for Obama if he gets the nomination.) According to the sternly worded instructions that accompanied the ballot, my signature had to be witnessed by an adult United States citizen. Dutifully, I took the ballot with me to the ulpan on Wednesday morning and asked my former UW sociology student and now fellow ulpan student G. to do the honors. She was pleased to learn afterwards that I "voted for her girl."

With Wisconsin's primary election only six days away, there was no time to waste; I was determined to mail my ballot that very day. The ballot came with a note informing me that I could mail it from the American Embassy or Consulate Office free of charge. As soon as the ulpan finished for the day, I took the bus to the city center and marched resolutely down HaYarkon Street to the American Embassy to perform this quintessential ritual of democratic citizenship. I felt elated to see Old Glory flapping in the Mediterranean breeze as I approached. The sight made me feel reassured and invigorated, not unlike the aborigines that the French sociologist Emile Durkheim described in the presence of their totem. My more cynical friends will scoff at this shameless upwelling of emotion – patriotism is unfashionable among academics – but as Mark Twain observes in The Innocents Abroad, the sight of one's flag at home is tame compared to what it is in a foreign land. To see it abroad is "to see a vision of home itself and all its idols, and feel a thrill that would stir a very river of sluggish blood!"

Getting into the American Embassy was not nearly so sublime an experience. What I found when I arrived was a little knot of Israelis trying to push their way inside to get travel visas. In my experience, I have found that Israelis are congenitally incapable of forming a line for anything. They couldn't form a line if their lives depended on it. They have no conception of a line. One of my fellow ulpan students told me that she once asked her Israeli boyfriend why he and his friends didn’t form a line, and the answer was: "What's a line?" Like Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court, I tried to introduce American customs here. But I soon learned that if you try to form a line in Israel by standing in an orderly fashion behind the person in front of you, it will be in vain because the next person to arrive will simply push his or her way to the front. I could see this lesson replicated at the American Embassy. The guard standing outside the embassy entrance would periodically corral the unruly Israelis into some semblance of a line, but it was like the work of Sisyphus. As soon as he had succeeded, the next person to arrive would cut in front of everyone else and go straight to the door, forcing him to begin his thankless efforts all over again.

The pushing did not stop once we got inside. As I approached the metal detector and reached into my pockets to empty their contents for the security guard, the young woman behind me threw her things into the bin before I could. By now, I had about reached the limits of my patience. Being a visitor, I have been more deferential here than I would be at home. But heartened by the Stars and Stripes and emboldened by the fact that I was now on my own turf, I was not about to let this woman get away with an act of such brazen and audacious chutzpah. Without hesitation, I grabbed the bin and dumped my own things into it. "Atem b'yachad?" (Are you together?) the perplexed guard asked. Testily and in unison we both answered "Lo!" The guard resolved this Solomonic conundrum by waving the woman through and making me take my mobile phone outside to the "storage office." There I was charged ten shekels for the privilege of having my phone temporarily taken away and being made to go to the back of the line (such as it was) to re-enter the embassy. Though chastened by this defeat, I was consoled by the discovery that there was a separate office for "American citizen services," which enabled me to bypass the unruly crowd still pushing each other out of the way to get travel visas next door. At the risk of reinforcing ethnic stereotypes, I have to say that I thought seven years of living in New York had taught me to be pushy – just ask all the polite Midwesterners I have inadvertently offended in Wisconsin – but Israelis put New Yorkers to shame in this department.

And my ballot? After all this consternation and exasperation, it was safely delivered into the hands of the appropriate official and sent on its way home. I guess sometimes you have to push to make your voice heard.

P.S. I attended the plenary session of the Israel Sociology Society conference at Tel Aviv University on Wednesday evening, the only part of the conference that was conducted in English. There was less pushiness here – apparently sociologists are a better-behaved lot – except the usual stampede at the end of the session to buttonhole the distinguished speakers. The speakers talked mainly about various aspects of globalization. This was in keeping with the theme of the conference, "A Place for Sociology," which cleverly lent itself to a variety of meanings. Of course, conferences are only partly about research; they are also an occasion for socializing with colleagues and friends (renewing social solidarity in Durkheimian terms), and this was no exception. I kibitzed briefly with my friends A.K. and U., whom I hadn't seen for a while; H.H. (B.H.'s mother – it's a sociology dynasty); and a few of the sociologists that I met in Haifa when I went with U. and A.K. to Y.'s birthday party a few weeks ago. (Y. is the author of The Struggle over the Soul of Economics, a book about the demise of the once influential institutionalist school of economics pioneered by John R. Commons at the University of Wisconsin, which coincidentally I happened to read last summer.) I would have liked to have joined A.K. and the plenary session speakers for dinner afterwards, but I bowed out to return home and study for the final exam of my ulpan. As the wise King Solomon might have said, to everything there is a season, a time to push and a time to go home.