![ella shalom hanoch ella shalom hanoch](https://img.haarets.co.il/img/1.5550859/1018316866.jpg)
Having made sure I had properly digested the information, Ms. Damari had returned with a plaque in hand from the mayor of NYC – I believe Lindsay – thanking her for the contribution she’d made not only to the arts but also to her representation of the State of Israel, its culture, its people, etc. In essence, I had just asked Frank Sinatra if he’d ever sang in the shower or Barbra Streisand if she was Rockette.īy the time Jackie was half-way through his polite British explanation of the magnitude of my cultural idiocy, Ms.
![ella shalom hanoch ella shalom hanoch](https://res.cloudinary.com/soundbetter/image/upload/c_fill,f_auto,g_face:auto,h_288,q_90,w_540/v1542448026/assets/photos/38333/_X3A9543.jpg)
Picking up the flat-line in my expression Jackie essentially informed me that she was a Zionist icon. Shoshana Da…?” a vague inkling stirred somewhere in my scotch-dappled brain. With her dramatic exit, Jackie, the British fellow next to me asked with a bemused smile, “You have no idea who that is, do you?” Shoshana stood up with the stage presence of a diva, left the table, and walked across the hall to her apartment. “No, I’m just saying… uh…” I looked around the table pleading for a social lifesaver. “Why danced?” the voice at the other end of the table continued. That’s what I heard from…” I pointed weakly in Zahava’s general direction. That’s all it really took for me to sense the faux pas deep in my soul. Then the powerful voice came like a fugue from the table’s other end. His eyebrows were hiked so high they threatened to tear a hole in his forehead. The look on my cousin’s face was somewhere between shocked, agitated, surprised, embarrassed, and homicidal. Can you guess who?”Ī vicious silence fell over the crowd. So trying to make some feeble fraternity brother attempt at ice-breaking, nicey-nice, I shouted across the table to my daughters, “Somebody here danced at Rockefeller Center.
![ella shalom hanoch ella shalom hanoch](https://img.haarets.co.il/img/1.5515876/1018316866.jpg)
I remembered Zahava once telling me that Shoshana was some kind of entertainer, and during her career had performed at New York’s Rockefeller Center. This past Rosh Hashanah, seated around the table were the usual cast of characters-family members, assorted wacko friends and Shoshana, this time dressed more elegantly, seated on the opposite end of the food laden table. We never really exchanged many word other than the “hi-hello-how are you” variety. We started taking it as a given that, as the visits continued, Shoshana, the neighbor, would be in attendance. In fact, every time I went over to my cousin’s house, Shoshana, the neighbor in the ever-present housecoat, was a constant, somber presence. After eyeing me up and down she handed over the key. A striking woman with intense dark eyes opened the door a crack. Sure enough, when we got there they weren’t around so we knocked on door of the neighbor directly across the way. One summer day when we came to visit them, they told us if they weren’t home to just knock on the neighbor’s door, get the key, and wait till they arrived. My cousin Ilan and his wife Zahava, live in an average apartment in an average building in an average neighborhood of Tel Aviv. Or as my colleague Danny Gordis recently put it, “the most exciting conversations in Israel today are not happening on army bases but rather in cafes and on the bookshelves where religious thinkers like Moshe Halbertal are duking it out with post-Zionists and feminists about the future of the Jewish people.” Being privy to that conversation is the crux of cultural intimacy. Jewish Cultural Intimacy is the term I came up with as a way of describing this difference between knowing facts and figures about Israel (and Jewish life) and a deeper way of understanding and feeling its importance to one’s present and future. I wanted to bring to light an Israel not of bombs, walls and fanaticism but of deep and varied culture – dance, art, food, music, poetry, films, photography, theater, rap – you name it. Shoshana Damari personified the lack of separation between stars and the audience.I came to Israel on a two year fellowship with the mission of helping close the gap between what most Americans (Jews and non-Jews) think they know about Israel and the actual vibrant life of the place, its people, and its culture.