March 5, 2024

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-03-04

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. You can also read this email online here. Here we go...

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The first headline that I see this morning is from Reuters: "Aussie sheep ship shoots for Israel again after initial shot stopped short." I hope no one on their audio team has to read that quickly.

When I go back to bookmark the article, I see that the headline has changed to something more mundane. A news site from here, however, has picked it up and run with it. Or perhaps swum with it.¹

I type that first paragraph at work, while my authoring software is opening a large number of documents for the manual that I'm writing. The software keeps grabbing the cursor focus for each document. I have to find where the phrase "Aussie sheep ship" or fragments of it have embedded themselves in my documentation.

I find it fairly quickly, and fix the chapter heading that had become "Aussie sheep Person Declarations."

A reader here tells me that she has indeed had to make an appointment with the Post Office to buy stamps to mail something to Europe. Everything is so oriented to digital nowadays that the workers had to dig around in the back for about twenty minutes before they found them.

The government is trying to privatize the Post Office, which will probably bring new costs and enhanced inefficiencies.² It was supposed to be ready by now, which, like everything else that was supposed to be going on, is probably filed under "Man plans, God laughs."

Another reader asks about word she's hearing in the States, that young Jews are at the forefront of many anti-Zionist events. Unfortunately, that's true. The propaganda machine has roped in a lot of young people and fed them steady diets of hate.

One issue is generational: many of them are too young to remember our country as a relatively poor land surrounded by more powerful enemies. Our economy and military are doing relatively well now, though we discovered in October the degree to which we had overestimated our safety.

Since the trendy ways of activism look for trivial images of power imbalances, they figure that since we're relatively strong, especially as compared to areas across our borders whose own governments sit on the spectrum between uselessness and evil, we must be the bad guys. And in the worst hit areas, the terrorists in the supposed government have taken all the money for themselves and spent it building fortifications for themselves, while leaving their populations in maximum danger.

Those Jewish kids who are brought up with values of compassion, defending the powerless, and caring for the world are, unfortunately, roped in by those who skillfully twist things around. So they end up attacking their own people. This even goes pretty far up the chain to some Rabbis and community leaders.

(And I do have to say that those who protest things that our government are doing aren't entirely wrong. Our own country has been wracked by protests in the past year, and many of us have compassion for people across the border who have been oppressed and set up for death by their own supposed governments. But we don't see it as a trivial, black and white issue.)

Today's excellent Anan Sahadei newsletter speaks of some of the sloganeering and looks into the roots of bigotry:³

"When they gathered to create a now-famous disturbance at Goldie, a kosher falafel joint in Philadelphia, the swarming crowd shouted: 'Goldie, Goldie, you can't hide. We charge you with genocide!'⁴ because, of course, Jews create Israeli military policy in kosher falafel restaurants in Philadelphia. In yet another invasion of what should be a Jewish safe space, they infiltrated a synagogue and screamed at elderly Jews gathered to hear Alan Dershowitz.⁵ Does it impact Israeli military decision-making when you raise a ruckus at a discussion meeting convened in a Florida synagogue sanctuary? It's easy to poke fun, but what these people were doing was dead serious!"

A couple of articles today point to the way that people's attitudes have been changing here since the war began. The Times of Israel speaks with people along the southern border who had worked as peace activists.⁶

The New York Times discusses the shifting relations between many secular and Haredi people here. (No paywall).⁷

On a lighter note, the people behind our Eurovision entry have indeed agreed to rewrite the song.⁸ Our president told them that it was more important for our country to be represented in the highly visible contest than to sit it out due to the dispute. So the song that was "October Rain" is now called "Hurricane" and has different lyrics.

I look forward to hearing them. It looks like we will soon. I hadn't been aware of a clock that's been ticking: the video for the song is to be filmed this Thursday, and it will air on TV next week. So lyrics will have to be ready.⁹

As I write this, I'm transferring my data from my old phone to my new one. The old one was inadequate in many ways. I went for a cheap phone, and I got what I paid for.

This new phone should be better. After stressing for weeks over what to get, I asked my relative who knows tech the best what she has, and got the same thing. It says that it's going to take over an hour more for the data to flow over. Fingers are crossed.

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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 at that Las Vegas address, 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.