Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2023-11-24
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...
It's Blue Friday, or so I'm told. My family has seen ads for it. I haven't. With my ad blockers, paid subscriptions, and limited watching of TV via YouTube, little advertising reaches me.
I've seen one actual Black Friday ad, from a major shop for appliances, but that's it. Since their branding colors are black and yellow, I guess it works for them.
I try to watch our English-language news channel after breakfast. I can't bring up the stream. I end up watching Al Jazeera. The news coverage, at least on their English channel, is straightforward. When I doze off in my big chair, I dream of riding in an Uber in a city across the border that hasn't been destroyed.
I take my local bus to the mall. It's running again, for the first time on a Friday since the start of the war. It's crowded. I miss voice calls both coming and going, squeezed so tightly between other passengers that I can't get at my phone.
When I get to the mall, I see a lot more of the branding. Many stores have roll-up displays1 for sales, with the "Blue Friday" image either in blue or in white on blue, using the same shade of blue as our flag. The Hebrew on the signs say "Sales in Blue and White."
Traffic around the mall is fierce. Long lines of cars sit in place, waiting to get into or out of parking lots. There's a chaotic symphony of car horns. People here are not known for their patience.
News about the hostages drips in through the day. We find out how many people will be released, then where most are from, then their path as they come back here.
They have to go through several checkpoints and hand-offs, as different groups and countries take responsibility for them. Their families are informed. Some arrive late in the evening at a hospital that I used to pass on the train on the way to rehearsals.
When I get home, I put some of the groceries away, then collapse into my big chair. The English language news channel works again.
While pundits natter on, The TV shows a split screen. To the left, people crowd around the Sabbath table set for the hostages outside the art museum. They sing popular religious songs: "He who makes peace in heaven..."2 and "All the world is a narrow bridge..."3.
To the right, webcams show the checkpoint where the hostages will cross the border back to us. I'm surprised to see that it's a makeshift station on a two-lane road. Dozens or hundreds of trucks with supplies also have to fit through there every day.
Later in the day, we learn who has been released. Most of the hostages from our country were from the same kibbutz. One of them is a particular surprise, since the terrorists had announced a few days ago that she had died.4
Twelve Thai hostages are also returned. The pundits think that that's because Thailand and Iran are on good terms.
A Filipino caregiver, who had been profiled in the news, is also freed.5 When I get word, I send a WhatsApp message to a friend who is a caregiver at the House of a Hundred Grandmothers, so the news can spread among the network of caregivers there and their friends.
I turn off the news and make myself a small Shabbat dinner. I listen to a podcast interview with an American who makes amazing, hilarious and informative TikTok videos about the Talmud.6
More details drip in after dinner, as I write this. More hostages are supposed to be returned tomorrow, and more the day after. And maybe after that, since the truce will extend by one day for every ten hostages that are returned.
So we'll be in a news loop. At least the news should be good. It's a bit of a relief from the Blue Friday Blues.
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.)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
L'hitraot.