[as if in dream] A newsletter from Joseph Zitt - 09 November 2023
Hi. I'm Joseph Zitt. I moved from the US to Israel in 2017. This is my newsletter about more-or-less daily life in my city in the shadow of war. You can select these links to subscribe or unsubscribe. There are more links at the bottom. Here we go...
The victory slogans and flags on the paper towels are sharp marketing. Half of the packages on the display in front of the supermarket are gone. The other brands have barely been touched.
Buying locally has always been important here. The country, being quite small, is heavily dependent on importing. Fortunately, shipping by sea seems still to be happening. Some companies have redirected routes from a port close to the fighting to one further away. That port is actually owned by a company from India. Nobody wants to mess with them.
There's a national event every year for shopping locally online. It is theoretically happening yesterday and today. I have gone to the site but, even running it through Google Translate, I can't figure out how it works or even if it's happening at all. It never has worked for me. I must need some sort of secret handshake that locals don't realize that other people don't know.
The supermarket is less crowded than on most Thursdays. People are shopping less, and many stocked up on food at the start of the war. More information keeps coming in about the effect of the war on the economy, due to work absences and hesitancy to buy things.
I splurge slightly on lunch. Rather than my usual hummus or cheese, I get salmon salad. And the cherry tomatoes that I get add up to more than the usual cucumbers. I also get a container of walnuts, which I keep in my desk drawer for snacking.
I check out at the self-service registers as usual, without a problem. I catch the eye of the worker there as I scan my receipt to leave. He nods. "You have succeeded beautifully."
My favorite cashier is at one of the regular lanes. I greet her by name. I hadn't known it until yesterday. Even though we had been talking for five years, I had never asked. Now I know it. She had known mine, from reading my debit card as I checked out, but had forgotten it.
I tell her that I'm glad that it's Thursday already. "Yes, it is Thursday," she says solemnly. We speak English to each other. I could probably handle most of our conversations in Hebrew by now, but we stick to what we're used to. "I will not be working at the store tomorrow. Do not be afraid."
As I eat lunch, I see a nicely-designed announcement online for a concert to benefit soldiers -- or, as the English text on the announcement and the text below it repeatedly say, "soliders." It also says that the musical meditation before it (meditatzia musikalit) will be a "music mediation."
I send them a note about the misspellings. I'm kind of compulsive about these things, but I try to be gentle. I make enough mistakes myself, as hard as I try not to. As a saying might go, anyone who proofreads himself has a fool for an editor. (I hasten to add, though, that I have had an excellent editor for all of my books.)
I get messages from my family and WhatsApp groups about two parallel projects. Each is collecting testimony about the October 7th massacres. One group, working with the USC Shoah Foundation, has created a site for a collection of first-person accounts, as well as maps of what happened where. The National Library is spearheading the other project, focused on digital preservation of video, social media posts, and ephemera that might otherwise be lost.
Our government has been showing video of the atrocities, much of it filmed by the bodycams of terrorists that had been captured or killed, to carefully-selected groups of journalists, ambassadors, and the like. An article on a local news site warns that an edit of some of it is floating around WhatsApp. Experts say that people should avoid watching the video for the sake of their own mental health.
There have been reports that our Prime Minister has been thinking of releasing the whole thing to shock people into awareness, but mental health professionals are strongly against it. The members of a Facebook group, "No Mental Health without Democracy," organized as part of the protests earlier in the year, has shifted to dealing with trauma from the attacks.
The Institute for Counter-Terrorism at our city's largest university has been training local volunteers as first-responders, focusing on the type of events that might happen due to the war. It's looking at what to do in case of missile strikes, buildings collapsing, and the like, but also events due to the effects of climate change.
Back in the States, a poll last week showed that some 70% of Jews feel less safe than they did before the war. There are also reports that harassment of Palestinians in schools and other Islamophobia is spreading. I have gotten email from the White House Office of Public Engagement about their efforts to combat antisemitism and Islamophobia. (I'm having a heck of a time trying to find the announcements on the web. Not great public engagement.)
With all this swirling in my head, I still get some things done by the end of the day at work. In documenting a series of screens, I figure out that I don't have to describe a set of complicated fields in detail. With only about four exceptions per screen, it all boils down to looking at a specific other screen elsewhere and copying the information from there.
Another worker asks me to make some quick changes to another manual. I look at what he emails me. I don't remember anything about it. I very vaguely recall having written something or other on the topic a few months ago. I'll address it after the weekend.
Walking home from work, I think I spot the full moon. I quickly realize that I'm wrong: it's too low in the sky, we're at the wrong end of the month, and it's square.
I look more intently. A single window is shining out against bricks and trees, near the top of an otherwise dark apartment building. Someone has put a sign in it. I can tell that it's carefully lettered. But from this distance, at this hour, with my tired eyes, I can't tell what it says.
Today's links:
- Some of these articles may be in Hebrew. Google Translate tends to handle them pretty well.
- The call "Together we will win" should also have meaning in the shopping basket - the Devar news website
- War is costing economy some $600m a week due to work absence -- Bank of Israel | The Times of Israel
- Testimony of Hamas massacre survivors compiled from social media posts on new website | The Times of Israel
- National Library of Israel to preserve 200,000 recordings of Hamas massacres for posterity - The Jewish Chronicle
- Report: Summary of the video of the horrors running on WhatsApp • Sharon Online
- Mental health professionals implore Netanyahu not to show atrocities film to public | The Times of Israel
- Yahum Hasar: about 300 residents will respond in an emergency • Sharon Online
- Poll: 70% of Jews feel less safe since the war | The Jewish Federations of North America
- Harassment of Palestinian Students and Staff Is Spreading in US Grade Schools | Truthout
Feel free to forward the newsletter to other people who might be interested.
Here’s an archive of past newsletters.
You can find me via email, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, and, just out of inertia, X/Twitter. There's more about me and my books, music, and films at josephzitt.com.
The newsletter’s official mailing address is 304 S. Jones Blvd #3567, Las Vegas NV 89107. (I’m in Israel, but if physical mail comes to me there, it’ll get scanned and emailed. I don’t expect that to happen much. If you want to send me physical mail, ask me for a real address.)
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L'hitraot.