Hey everyone, welcome to Wondering Jews with Mijal and Noam. As you hear, it’s just me today. Mijal is traveling right now. But we didn’t feel comfortable releasing the regular episode that we recorded just before the massive events in Israel over the last week or so. This week on the other show I host, Unpacking Israeli History, I spoke with the incredible Sarah Tuttle Singer. And we’re bringing you that episode for Wondering Jews as well.
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Noam: So I want you to talk to me about Jerusalem and you’ve been there for 15 years now. want to… You’ve been in Israel for 15 years and you’re in Jerusalem now. And I want to memorialize, I want to capture this moment. This is a history podcast and I want to hear from you, Sarah, how you view daily life in Jerusalem. Jerusalem is a very layered place.
Sarah Tuttle-Singer: been in Israel for 15 years. I’ve only been in Israel since 2021.
Noam: It’s a very charged place. When you’re in cafes, when you’re speaking with people, what are you seeing and hearing right now? Can you paint a picture for me of like, is daily life right now? A little over two years after the 7th of October, what does it look like?
Sarah Tuttle-Singer: Well, depends on the day and it depends on the hour of the day and it depends on the news cycle. I right now, we’re coming off of a period, a very short period of intense euphoria and a real high when we heard the hostages were coming home and when we witnessed it with our own eyes and saw those staggeringly poignant reunion videos. And now it seems that in the streets there is a sense that we’re all trying to reestablish equilibrium, but we don’t know what that looks like anymore because
It’s like we jumped tracks in the multiverse after October 7th and we can’t go back to October 6th. We are still reeling with trauma. We’re finally beginning to sit Shiva for what we’ve all gone through collectively as a nation. And at the same time, figure out ways. How to see our friends go out in the world, connect with people and that’s something I really love about the Jewish people that we are always looking for ways to find joy and simcha even in dark moments. Even tragedy will have some points of light in it for us or some kind of joke that will soften the edges even if it’s a cynical and acerbic joke.
So I’m seeing lots of that. A few days ago, I was in a parking lot running some errands and there was real shouting, like robust screaming, several men yelling at each other in Hebrew. And a crowd of us sort of assembled to watch, you know, one person had popcorn, metaphorically speaking. And then some, some guy wanders over. He’s like, nu, like, what’s your problem? What the war ended? You need to start a new one? Are you bored? Go home.
And so I think all of us on some level are living in this, in a space that’s simultaneously a sigh of relief and a sharp inhale like, what’s next? And so we’re all still on edge, even if the rockets aren’t hurtling towards us, even if Iran is for the meantime being quiet and sort of behaving itself, even if, even though our hostages, the living hostages, thank God, are home, we’re still waiting for the remaining bodies to be returned and we’re also waiting for the other shoe to fall. And I think that’s something that Israelis have been enduring since the inception of the state of Israel because we’ve always been living between periods of war.
May be the strongest army in the Middle East and one of the strongest armies in the entire world and yet we’ve never known a real day of peace since we came being and that does something to the way that we navigate life here. On the one hand it does make us more prone to lean on our horn in traffic and shout at someone but it also I think makes us more prone to reach out and extend a helping hand to someone who seems to be having a hard time and to embrace life in the fullness of it as well. And that’s something that dazzles and amazes me about living here.
Noam: You’re somebody who has spent a lot of time showing the complexity morally, ethically, showing empathy for different groups of people. I don’t know if I, and you’re gonna, if I pigeonhole you in a way that you’re like, no, that’s actually not me. But I view you as someone that’s more maybe part of the progressive political world in many ways. And I, sometimes I wondered from people who identify as in the more progressive space and are Israeli, do you feel like there are things in the United States of America and Australia and South Africa and the UK and Canada, wherever that people just don’t get something about what it is to be Israeli and have a progressive worldview? Is there something that is, I don’t know that you’re like, you just don’t get it, friends. You just don’t get it. Is there something that people don’t get?
And I’m going to do a part two of this question. I think that you write with a lot of empathy and you do such a good job making images come alive, making stories come alive. And you do it in a very empathic, compassionate sort of way. Recently, you wrote a piece that was a bit more sarcastic about people like Greta Thunberg and Mark Ruffalo, right? And it was funny, it was funny, but it was sarcastic. And I was wondering, like, I’m combining both of those questions because, like, are you trying to, is there a picture you’re trying to paint for people that you just feel like it’s impossible for anyone outside of Israel to really get? Is there a reason that you decided to be sarcastic and slightly, in a funny way obnoxious, to them as opposed to the standard empathic compassionate Sarah Tuttle-Singer?
Sarah Tuttle-Singer: Well, thank you for this question. So I wrote a breaking news bulletin out of Jerusalem, know, fears and concern mounts for Cynthia Nixon and, or actually, concern mounts for Susan Sarandon, Mark Ruffalo, and Roger Waters, since they’ve gone so quiet. in the wake of the ceasefire as Hamas is trying to regain control of the Strip and murdering Palestinians in the street. I should have put Cynthia Nixon in there too. That’s why her name slipped out now. She was on, she’s on my list.
It’s not that they don’t get it. It’s that they emphatically refuse to even listen when so many people have tried to speak to them about the complexity of life here and the fact that, that yes, unequivocally there’s devastation in Gaza and we should be horrified and we should do what we can to to rebuild now that there is a ceasefire and also Israelis are still reeling with trauma and so my frustration which came through as sarcasm and cynicism in that piece is about that that folks want to view this as a binary conflict and throughout history, Jews have been cast as the villain in whatever moral conflict people want to focus on, with no daylight for, for gray areas or for, and no patience for listening to what we’re going through.
It’s something quite profound really. The Jewish person, or the stereotypical Jew is cast as the villain in every morality play, depending on from where that morality play is written. So for the capitalist, the Jew is the communist. For the communist, the Jew is the money-grubbing capitalist. For, for someone on the right, the Jew is the insane universalist progressive leftist. And for someone on the left, the Jew is reeling towards fascism. We are often cast as the nemesis of whatever particular zeitgeist is playing out. And so I see that and it frustrates me. And I see that friends and people I still consider allies in so many ways on the left. And yet, it hurts me and it enrages me that we are persona non grata.
And even when we speak up on behalf of Palestinians in Gaza, we’re still told to sit down and shut up because we are quote unquote colonizers and all of this is our fault anyway. And people believe somehow that the war just cheerfully started on October 8th and that October 7th never even happened. And that if it happened, it was all some sort of, some sort, part of an Israeli propaganda machine. I know that’s a bit of an extreme example, but I’m seeing comments like that all over the place.
Noam: Right. The comments that I’ve seen on that is that it’s not that it started on October 8th, but it’s also that it’s not that it started on October 7th, meaning. Right.
Sarah Tuttle-Singer: Correct, there’s all the started, know, ago and that we somehow deserved this.
Noam: Exactly.Sarah Tuttle-Singer: And God forbid purchase lands in our historic homeland and how dare we come in to the space and quote unquote colonize it and it’s a rewriting of history and what scares me so much is with the with the advances in AI the history that’s being rewritten right now on social media is going to be history that’s written into into the future, without the facts actually existing to begin with.
Noam: Sarah, why does this all make you sad? You said that it makes you sad when people treat you and Israelis like they’re not even interested in hearing your side of issues. Why does this make you sad?
Someone else might say, listen, Sarah, it doesn’t bother me or hurt me, says this other person that when Candace Owen says something or when the other, what’s it, Tucker Carlson says something, like, it’s okay.Let them say things and there will always be. Are you so naive Sarah? There will always be anti-Semitism. Why does it bother you?
Sarah Tuttle-Singer: Because this was my world and these were the friendships I built. Fight, I mean my father was a deeply involved in the civil rights movement. He was jailed and almost executed by the the Klan for going down south to register African-American voters back in the in 60s. He and my mother met during the Robert Kennedy campaign and my mom was very much involved with the United Farm Workers Union. So was my dad and even in the late stages of my mother’s life as she was dying from cancer she was out marching in the fields with people. These struggles were part of my own family’s struggles. And I feel a connection, kinship, with folks who are having a rough time of it. And so to be cast out of these alliances is deeply painful. That’s one level.
The other level is I’m someone right now who struggles on the cusp between leaning into the particular and feeling this need to fortify our tent as a Jewish people and to strengthen our community internally and to hell with what everyone else thinks, but also realizing that we’re also part of the world and we need to also keep our tent open.
And you know the different Torah portions speak to this as well and holds that complexity. We’re on the one hand, we’re affirming our identity as a tribe, as a Jewish tribe, but on the other hand, we have to welcome the stranger. And there are needs for connections with other communities while still maintaining the particular. So I’m personally and existentially and individually grappling with all of this. And so I think that’s where the pain comes from.
On the one hand, I’m feeling a deeper sense of Jewish identity than I felt my entire life, which is saying something because I did grow up with a strong Jewish identity. I’m feeling a bigger love of all of Israel, even people who are my political opponents, even people I find.
Noam: Who are your political opponents?
Sarah Tuttle-Singer: I’m not going to go on record and say that, but I think anyone can make it through that.
Noam: You don’t you don’t write about it?
Sarah Tuttle-Singer: There’s a few members, I have, and there are a members of Knesset who I find have said abhorrent things. And yet when I referred to, actually, let me back up and I’ll answer it this way. was leading a group around the Old City and I kept talking about Jewish history through the voice of, we’re, in Egypt or we survived the Holocaust or in 1948 when we defeated this army and this faction whatever one of the participants said to me, why are you saying we? I explained because as a Jew, I was there, I was there at Sinai too, and we were all there, we were all gathered there together as we formed our identity as a people.
And then she asked me, it was a very poignant question, does your ‘we’ have limits? Is Ben Gvir part of your we? Are the ‘as a Jew’ folks who qualify every anti-Israel statement with the ‘as a Jew’ part of your we?
And took me a few seconds to think about it, but the answer is yes. They are part of my community and I don’t know if they would consider me part of theirs. Not my problem. They’re part of mine because we are a small tribe and we need each other and more than ever right now, while we reel in the aftermath of this war, continue to bury our dead and comfort the mourners and look over our shoulder at all times and still forge connections with one another.
it’s really the time to unite, not in some kind of oversimplified, overoptimistic, or God forbid, fascistic way, but in a way where we can sit together at the same table, recognizing that we’re all under the same tent, beneath the same starry sky, and have robust discussions with each other. And that’s what we’ve been doing for thousands of years anyway.
Like this is part of our…This is an intrinsic part of our identity. It’s part of our DNA to do this. And so I think it comes naturally. Breaks and shaky fault lines also come sadly naturally to us too. And as we know throughout history, including the history of the present moment. But at the end of the day, we do reconcile and we put our pieces back together and move on until the next catastrophe.
Noam: I don’t know if that last part was sarcastic or not until the next catastrophe, but I hope there isn’t one, though. I guess you don’t you don’t have to be such a crazy gambler to imagine that another catastrophe will happen and certainly happen to the Jewish people.
But is there when you think of your stories, when you think of the different people that you interact with, in Jerusalem, outside of Jerusalem, you interact with a lot of interesting people. Is there a moment of humanity that has surprised you recently? It could be a conversation. It could be some sort of act of kindness that cut through the noise, that cut through the difficulties, that cut through the great divisions in Israeli society that we’re seeing. Is there any like small moment of humanity that you’re like, wow, this was, this was something else?
Sarah Tuttle-Singer All the time. One example that I didn’t personally witness but that a friend of mine saw this guy in East Jerusalem on his bicycle, probably an East Jerusalem, got hit by a car. His body went flying in the air.
Noam: Which means an East Jerusalem, you’re saying means a Palestinian Arab.
Sarah Tuttle-Singer: He would probably identify as a Palestinian.
Noam: Right, okay.
Sarah Tuttle-Singer: I don’t know if he holds citizenship, he’s. But he got he got hit by this car. His body went flying in the air and who came running from all directions, United Hatzalah, all these Haredi men, ultra-Orthodox men, on their bikes from driving out of Ma’sharim, this happened on a Saturday night after Shabbat had just ended, flooding into an area of East Jerusalem that’s not considered particularly safe for Jewish people and they showed up and they tended to him. I don’t know if he lived.
The story I’m going to tell myself is that he made a full recovery. I don’t know if that’s the case. But we see stories like that. see the…
Recently I had a taxi driver who, as we were heading into town, told me he was embarrassed. He said, do you mind if I pull over? I really have to go to the bathroom. I said, no problem. So we turned off the meter, he came back and, I noticed on the back of his seat he also had a United Hatzalah jacket. And his name’s Mohammed. He’s Muslim guy who works for United Hatzalah, also saving lives. And he explained that he just got off of a shift saving lives and now he’s driving a taxi and he supplements his volunteer time with work in a taxi and folks have urged him to give up his volunteering but he doesn’t want to stop volunteering because any opportunity he has to save a life is to save an entire universe which is which is one of our lines in Judaism. I found that profoundly moving. There’s small acts of grace and kindness that you witness in the street all the time.
I’m lucky that I merit to be friends with people from several different communities, from Christian community to Muslim, Armenian, Jewish. The Armenians are Christian as well, but they’re not Palestinian. And so it’s different culture.
You see these small acts of grace all the time. And then you also see like the thing in the parking lot with those two guys for shouting at each other and just blowing off steam. But then this other guy shows up and makes that funny comment like what you need to start another war. And that broke the tension and it broke the argument. I think we are living with that tension and that heaviness and I think we also recognize that everyone else is as well and so there does seem to be some latitude that we’re giving one another which is I think a beautiful thing.
Noam: when you’re telling these stories, right, I always like to situate myself. You’re in Jerusalem, I’m in South Florida, and I hear these stories. And on the one hand, I’m like, wow, this is amazing. Unbelievable intensity, humanity, love for each other. I also know that there’s a lot of challenges and there’s a lot of tension.
I want to add a third element into this though. My life here in South Florida. I love it. It’s lovely. It’s great. I have a pool and like there’s beaches and that’s great. Here’s the thing though. I don’t have the same sort of moments that you’re talking about that you’re seeing of different peoples coming together and working together to the same extent. And it sounds really beautiful.
It also sounds very heavy. It also sounds very, it could lead to a sort of I heard of this term recently called toxic resilience that there’s this resilience amongst Israelis that they they fight for a better tomorrow and they’re not going to get they’re not going to let the challenges of the day get to them and they will fight through it and they they they got this because that’s what it means to be Israeli to push through to be on the other side to sacrifice to to fight maybe to see the other better than anyone else can see the other. Is there a certain point in time that it’s exhausting?
Sarah Tuttle-Singer: Yes! Guess what, boy?
Noam: Lagavulin, sponsored by Lagavulin. Yeah.
Sarah Tuttle-Singer: Absolutely, and a friend of mine once wisely said to me quite recently actually, enough with Jewish survival. How about Jewish flourishing? Why don’t we focus on that?
Noam: What would that look like?
Sarah Tuttle-Singer: would be fun to imagine, wouldn’t it? What do you think it would look like?
Noam: Jewish flourishing?
I you know, I just learned this another term. I learned this term called futurism, Jewish futurism. And basically, what does the future of any sort of people look like that’s not defined by what they’re fighting against, but what they are developing positively. What does that look like? If you weren’t trying to merely survive or oppose antisemitism or oppose terrorism, what does that look like? I actually think it’s a fascinating question. Fascinating because on top of all this, when I go through the history of Israel and I could go through, know, 48, I could talk about Deir Yassin 48, I could talk about the Atalena, I could talk about the writing of the Declaration of Independence, I could talk about German reparations in the early 50s.
I could talk about the Sinai War in 56, the Eichmann 61. I could talk about the Six Day War in 67. I could talk about the war of attrition in 69, 70, Yom Kippur War 73 and Tebbi 76. Oh, before that 75, Zionism equals racism. Oh, let’s fight against that. Late 70s, Camp David Accords, early 80s, Operation Shlomo-Galil in the southern part of Lebanon. I could talk about Osirak, also the early 80s. Then I go to the first Intifada in 87 to 90, then oh, then we’re gonna actually start thinking about peace and we get to Oslo in 93, and then we get to the suicide bombs and we get to Camp David number two failed, then we get to 2001, 2005, Second Intifada, and then we get to Gaza taken over by Hamas and it’s like, oh my gosh, this entire history that I just ran through is a history of conflict, of challenges.
Here is what it means to fight and be Sparta and survive and that’s what it is. And it becomes intoxicating, not just from the Lagavulin, but it becomes intoxicating to get to the point that you actually are thinking about, no, no, no, what does the future of Zionism and Jewish flourishing look like that’s not defined by that? And I think that we need to actually map it out because I don’t even know what it can and should look like. I could imagine together with you, I could talk about, you know, building the land. I could talk about making sure that there’s a flourishing of Hebrew poetry and music and dancing. And I could talk about what it looks like to have a society of sports and all different types of athletics that are built on, you know, Jewish people coming together, Muslim people coming together, Jews people coming together, playing on these sports together, being normal, like everyone else around the world and having the challenges that they all have and then being going beyond that and being exceptional and being a light unto nations and helping not with the conflict that’s local, but helping with the conflicts that are problematic in other regions to do what Golda Meir spoke about, which is to go to Africa and to build up African society and say, take the plight of the Jewish people and solve that plight and now go to Africa and involve themselves in that plight. Like all of that to me sounds like Jewish futurism.
Which I should have mentioned also for people like me, I think a big part of Judaism is God as well and developing like an incredibly meaningful relationship with spirituality that is at the center of the spoke is in Israel where culture has developed and thrived over the years. Like that to me would be like, wow, futurism. How was that? How was that monologue? How’s a monologue?
Sarah Tuttle-Singer: I love that. And you know what, some of it’s already happening. IsraAid, for example, does remarkable work all over the world in areas of extreme conflict or devastation, showing up and doing whatever it takes to help rebuild and heal and stay the course and continue to offer assistance even after the cameras have left. So we do see some of that and we see that also throughout the innovation sphere in Israel. I think part of why I am so sad that Jews are in this current moment being marginalized is because I know we have to be part of the world in order to lean into that kind of futurism that you’ve described. We can’t only circle the wagons.
I don’t want to be Sparta. I mean, forget the bad haircuts. Like that’s the travesty in and of itself. But we also have to continue to be players in the world while at the same time caring for our own. And this is that dance we’re constantly doing between the particulars and the universalism of what it means to be the Jewish tribe.
I love what you said. And as you were going through the history that we have gone through and are currently going through, I started getting heart palpitations because generational trauma is a real thing and genetic memory is a real thing. And that’s something I wish people understood about us.
And maybe I wish they understood that about themselves too, because genetic memory and Jewish trauma and intergenerational trauma is not uniquely Jewish. Every culture, every people has their their narishkeit, right? The things that they’re contending with and ways that it plays out. And I hope we get to a point where we can have more robust discussions about this without folks getting triggered again, air quotes around that. Or telling Jews to just sit down and shut up because they don’t have any space for what we’re going through. And now you’ve really gotten me thinking about Jewish futurism and what that could look like, how we can continue to flourish.
Noam: By the way, shout out to Becca Levis who taught me that term. I just want to make sure that she gets that appropriate shout out.
Sarah Tuttle-Singer: Great term. And this is something that I’m wrestling with right now, especially in the wake of the fragile ceasefire. We can’t pretend that what’s happened in Gaza is separate from us. We have to come to a reckoning with that and figure out a way somehow to help fix it, whether directly or indirectly, because the future of our success also is determined on the future of Palestinian success too. You can’t have one without the other. Our safety is based on their safety and their safety is based on ours and if we’re going to flourish they have to flourish too. Not at our expense but in a way and I don’t have the answer to how to do this if I did I might be able to sleep at night but Jewish flourishing cannot be mutually exclusive, and so I’m thinking that through as well, especially now that the hostages are home and I can try to live between that exhale and that in the new inhale, which I’m sure will happen at any moment.
Noam: The Israelis and Palestinians futures are dependent on one another. They’re interdependent so Sarah, what would you say to somebody who’s like Sarah you sound naive right now, like when when hostages are coming out saying things like, the Palestinians that were that I was hostage in their homes and they were not Hamas. That’s not who they were. They were just a standard Palestinian who thought I shouldn’t live. I shouldn’t exist. And they are not going to stop until we’re all dead that the Jewish people are all dead. Tell me tell me if you view it as naive to think that there are Palestinians who want a future, want a piece now.
On this podcast, we’ve often shared voices like Lana Aikalan, like Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, like Samar Sinijlawi and others. Sometimes I get the feedback that from some segments of my listeners that they say, Noam, you’re cherry picking people who you want to put out there to platform that, you know, that believe this, but they’re so they’re so fringe, Noam. They’re so fringe. They’re not really. Come on. Look at what every hostage is coming out saying about what life was like with Palestinians and Gaza who are not part of Hamas. So what do you mean by that, Sarah?
Sarah Tuttle-Singer: Also to add to that, we also know that many of the participants in the October 7th massacre were not affiliated with Hamas. They were Gazan civilians who took advantage of an open fence and did some of the most indescribable, heinous acts of inhumanity that we have seen in generations. I’m not naive. I do see that.
I vacillate between hope and rage any given moment because I know that is also true. And I also know that you have to hold multiple truths. Our safety is dependent on their well-being too. I don’t know how we manage that because my trust in an average person in Gaza is at a pretty low point. I would imagine they’d say the same for us too.
A friend of mine, Vivian Silver, was a remarkable woman, peace activist, and literally hours before she was burnt to death on October 7th. She was on the radio from her kibbutz defending the need for a two-stage solution and a just and equitable peace for both Israelis and Palestinians. But she died, but she still died defending that principle. And we also know that so many of the people who were murdered that day on October 7th were peace activists and had close relationships with Gazans who were coming in to to work on the in the various kibbutzim in that area.
And so the anger I felt after that, especially in the wake of her murder and all the others as well was just almost all consuming, almost. But, why I force myself out of it is to remember that that is exactly what Hamas wants and what extremists on all sides of all conflicts want. They want us to continue to demonize each other. And Hamas has done a spectacularly good job demonizing the Jewish people in Palestinian circles and telling them the most hideous untruths about us that have turned potential allies into bitter enemies.
Do I think it can change? I don’t know. I really don’t know. But I am going to insist on holding onto that shard of hope that it can and that folks who are dedicated to trying to make that change either through practical work on the ground or through dialogue can be part of that process. And if there’s some small way that I can be part of that, I want to be part of it. I want to, I insist on imagining a better future.
I don’t know if I’ll ever see it. I don’t know if it’s ever possible. And yet I’m going to do something which is emphatically Jewish and that is cling to hope. I hope has sustained us throughout exile, right? mean, that hope is the basis of our national anthem. And it’s something that, along with resilience, toxic or otherwise, also fuels us. The other side of possible toxic resilience is hope, that we continue to insist on choosing life. And so I have to do that. Again, I don’t have practical solution to this, but this is how I’m choosing to move about in the world. And this is maybe why folks from different walks of life, from different cultural and religious backgrounds and different levels of observance within different religious backgrounds are willing to talk to me because I’m open to listening to them and I’m happy to hear what they have to say even when I find it challenging. I’m also happy to push back. Over the last few months I’ve been doing more of that as well, mostly online but also in person too.
Noam: When you talk about hope, hope is so thematic in Judaism. I would call it the throughline of Judaism in many ways. And I want to know what you see when you talk about hope. What does it look like? Is it a face? Is it a ritual? Is it a place? Is it a conversation? Paint a picture for me. What does hope look like?
Sarah Tuttle-Singer: Mm-hmm, beautiful. God, guess. But that doesn’t work for everyone, that doesn’t track for a lot of people because not everyone believes, I happen to believe. Hope is… Hope is love, creation, we just finished reading about creation as we’re navigating the new Torah cycle and the possibility of new beginnings. Hope is an open window or an open door into another universe that we can imagine together, create and build imperfectly but with good intention. Hope is putting faith in our children to be better versions of us somehow and continuing to plant seeds in a garden knowing that we’ll never see that tree grow to fruition. I think there’s a beautiful story about that, right? mm-hmm. I like that. I that’s hope. That, and that story is, it’s one of my favorites.
Noam: yeah, in the Talmud. Beautiful story in the Talmud. It’s one of the great stories. It’s a story of someone planting a tree that they know won’t exist when they’re alive. the point is, I’m not building this for me. I’m not building this for my children. This is for a couple generations from now. And if all of us, like in a John Mills sort of on liberty perspective and said to ourselves, well, if this ethic applies to everyone, it applies to me. If it applies to me, it applies to everyone, then that is the the ethic of hope there is that it’s not just about me. It doesn’t end with me. It actually I have a responsibility for the future.
So that’s what hope looks like for you. And when you imagine Israel five years from now, whose lives do you hope will look different and how?
Sarah Tuttle-Singer: I hope that children in all different communities here, both within Israel, also within Gaza, can sleep through the night with roofs over their heads and enough food on their tables. I hope that we have a framework in place to learn more about each other and to be open, going back to our earlier conversation, to hearing the narratives of the other. And that’s something that’s also missing in Israeli society because we’re so fearful and we’re so angry and for good reason, by the way, I’m not going to deny that. have every reason to be angry and afraid, but we also need to hear what Palestinians have to say, in a way that we can understand and they need to hear what we have to say.
Noam: So how does that happen, Sarah?
Sarah Tuttle-Singer: I know that it needs curriculum and when I’m a minister of education, please.
Noam: Yeah. But I mean, that’s such a like that to me when we were talking earlier, maybe is before we started recording. I don’t remember about what my dissertation was about Israel education. And I spoke about how in the United States of America, the there was a revolution in the Jewish education world that said and beyond that we have to talk about Israel in a much more multifaceted way, diverse way viewpoint diversity showing different perspectives being open to Palestinian narratives and I think that that is so important to be teaching in the Jewish educational system. I can’t stress that point enough. I also wonder in Israeli society my first piece I ever published was in 2006 I believe don’t fact check me on this anyone but I believe is what I was at Hebrew University and I was, I was interning for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs as a junior in college and I co-authored a piece with Justice Reed Weiner, I might say his name incorrectly. And it was about the problem of education in the Palestinian, the PA system. Since then, that basically said that Jews don’t have a connection to the land of Israel, that Jews are evil, that Jews are horrible, that Jews are pigs, that Jews… And went through the entire curriculum. I think you can still find it on JCPA’s website.
And to see that still being spoken about now, 20 years later, being a problem, I was like, oh, OK, well, it didn’t do much by talking about that then. Would you also argue, Sarah, maybe this is provocative of me, that Israeli society needs to do more, not saying it’s equivocal, not saying it’s the exact same thing, but that Israeli society needs to do a bit more to explain the history of Islam and the history of Palestinian Arabs living in the land of Israel. There’s always a line growing up that there is a land without a people for a people without a land. Well, you actually studied the history, there are many, many, many Arabs living in the land of Israel then called Palestine. And I don’t want to say that they are equivalent, but I’m wondering if you think that within Israeli society,
Sarah Tuttle-Singer: That’s true.
Noam: Again, am I being naive? I’m pushing you on this point, but do you think that there should be? is that, will a listener, I don’t mind being accused of things, but like, a listener say, you’re just saying some left-wing, know, gobbledygook about, you know, salaam alaynu ve al-kholal al-alam. Like, come on, you’ve seen what happens when you sing that song, Noam. You see what happens when you sing that song, Sarah. are you guys so childish and naive?
Noam: Should it be included in the education system in Israel?
Sarah Tuttle-Singer: Yes, and I’ll tell you why. And it’s not naive to think that I experienced on a micro level how transformative it is when we as Jews are aware of Palestinian perspective on that and can, excuse me for sounding Californian, forgive me, when we can hold space for the narrative, I’ve experienced this firsthand while living inside the old city and getting into arguments with Palestinians in the Muslim quarter where one man in particular wears a key around his neck and that key belongs to his grandfather’s house, that his grandfather built in Baka, actually. And his family left in 1948. They fled to Jordan, assuming that the war would be over within a matter of days, and they’d come back to their homes. And by the time they got back home, it was too late. Israel had, thank God, won the war, and we were celebrating our independence. But they lost their homes and had to start over in a different part of Jerusalem, and he still carries the key to his grandfather’s home and still feels that connection.
Parts of what he shared with me were frustrating to hear and I wanted to counter with some kind of, yeah, well, what about this or what about that? But instead I looked him in the eyes, and I said, I’m really sorry that that happened. That must have been very hard for your family. And if you want to tell me more, I’m here to listen. And I know that we, that Israel played a part in your misfortune and displacement. And I hope one day we can make things right for both of us.
And then he calmed down. Like I literally watched the color return to normal in his face. He had been quite passionate before, and took a breath and he says, yes, we need to think about the future and not hold on to the past. But because I was able to acknowledge what his family had gone through and what he felt they were still going through with trauma, with their own intergenerational trauma, because again, we’re not the only ones who carry that, he was then able to make some kind of, I wouldn’t call it a concession exactly, but some kind of lovely statement to me that we need to move on from the past and focus together on building a better future. And that is exactly the point. And I think it would do us so well within Israeli curriculum to understand that side so we can not only know about it for our own sense of being able to counter some of the ridiculous arguments we’re bound to face out in the world, and in the news cycle, but also to speak from a place of empathy or at least concern for those who are still reeling with the trauma of what they’ve been through. And on the other side of that, the Arab schools within Israel have to teach about the Holocaust and have to teach about the pogroms of 1929 and what happened in Hebron to the Jewish community. It has to work both ways. We can’t be the only one carrying that burden, although I believe we should be the first ones to take up that burden, because we do have more power in this conflict right now, or and, Palestinians have to do the same and we have to understand both of our stories without necessarily agreeing on every point.
We have to find a way to hear each other in order for things to move forward, only in order for us to move forward, because whatever agreement leaders might sign will be, it’s garnished, what’s worth nothing unless people living in the aftermath of these agreements on the streets can actually get behind that. And the only way to do that is to know one another, and to appreciate the perspective of the other even if we don’t agree. You don’t have to change your opinion. You don’t have to give up Zionism just because Palestinian families are still reeling with what they perceive to be the Nakba and a Palestinian family doesn’t have to suddenly wrap themselves in the Israeli flag and start watching Eretz Nehederit and sleep with a picture of the prime minister under their pillow. But we have to see the other side.
And that’s part of why I’m constantly talking to strangers from all facets of society here in Jerusalem. you mentioned that Jerusalem has, some people perceive it to have this heaviness. And yes, it does. It has the weight of history and the weight of religion and so much emotion. The city is laden with that. It’s literally built on stone that was forged from seabed with fish bones and fossils in it. And yet at the same time, I view that heaviness the same way I enjoy a good weighted blanket once in a while. The gravitas of the city is something remarkable and it focuses me and I know others who love living in Jerusalem probably can relate to that on some level as well.
Noam: Last question for you. After two years of this horrible war, what’s something, what’s a message you want to share with Jewish people who don’t live in Israel, young Jewish people who don’t live in Israel across the world?
Sarah Tuttle-Singer: Come visit. Yalla, come. Come on. The Shuk is a thriving place. The people here are warm and wonderful and sometimes pain in the ass, but basically fabulous. This is your family. Come even if you don’t agree with the Prime Minister and newsflash, lot of Israelis don’t either. This place is here for you. We’re home to you with open arms. Come experience it and be part of it and continue to lean into the history of the Jewish people and shape it.
Noam: And what would you say to non-Jewish people?
Sarah Tuttle-Singer: Come visit. Come see the complexity and nuance of life here. Talk to everybody. Talk to Palestinians stuck at the checkpoint. Talk to the soldiers at the checkpoint. Talk to families who are still reeling from grief and loss from a terror attack. Talk to the families of the hostages who came home. to the hostages themselves. Talk to the families of the hostages who didn’t come home and will never come home alive.
Talk to the soldiers in Gaza. Talk to people in Gaza. Talk to the folks who are living down south during the murder and mayhem and terror of October 7th. Talk to the random barista with a great smile in Tel Aviv, speak to the rabbi at the Kotel, come by for shabbat, like experience life here and get to understand this land, this spectacularly beautiful and aching and insistently hopeful land in all of its glory.
Noam: Sarah, thank you so much for joining me on Unpacking Israeli History.
Sarah Tuttle-Singer: Thank you, and I appreciate it.