Sixty years ago last month you would have found me sitting in Miss Jones’ 2nd grade class. It doesn’t matter where, my family moved around a lot, but my best guess is that it was Normandie Avenue School in L.A. My teacher’s name was probably not Miss Jones but thru the years she remains an ageless young white woman, who at that time fit the stereotype of an elementary school teacher. Call her Miss Jones for our purpose. She had blond hair, not that that’s important. So, like, she was standing there in front of the class when another teacher entered the room through a side door and went up to Miss Jones and whispered something in her ear.
This is my memory of the day.
Our teacher’s face kind of collapsed. The other white lady who had spoken left the room and Miss Jones turned to us and tried to speak. She started to cry and then covered her face with her hands and she ran from the room. The voice of the school principal came on the public address system overhead.
“President Kennedy has been assassinated,” he said. “Class is over for today. You can go home.”
We—the students in my 2nd grade class—started to jump up and down and shout with joy. Because we didn’t know what “assassinated” meant but we know what you can go home means.
Walking away from school that day with an older student, who knew what assassinated meant, he explained the word to me and that something bad had happened. My point would be that you have to know your audience. You have to know the maturity level, or education, or whatever, of whoever you’re talking to. To communicate effectively it’s super-important. Do people understand what you’re actually saying? Like, literally. When you’re communicating with someone it’s the first question to ask yourself really—no matter the circumstances. Be sure to do a mic check too.
When a storyteller reaches a certain age, fear sets in. About the most important tales that you know but still haven’t gotten around to telling. That worry can also be true about so-called “bar stories,“ my favorite kind of anecdotes actually, of lives widely spent, that you would tell a co-worker after hours. Bellied up to the bar or at a corner table if you were doing serious drinking, after putting the workday behind. Telling others about the kind of happenings in your life that you might not find cause to mention otherwise.
The kind of stories you trade in order to decide who pays for the next round, does that make sense?
So, like, the big concern about aging is not just that you may die before you get the chance to tell somebody something. But also that you may not have the faculties left to say what you want to say. The way you want to say it. Or memory fades. That you may not still have all your marbles, as my mother used to say. She never lost hers, btw.
My own memory has been underperforming recently. That risky age has been reached, it may be the weed but it could be the synapses, you feel me?
My very real concern has been about losing to posterity two particular anecdotes that should be shared with somebody leaning over a bar. This may be last call. The answer to “Where were you when John Kennedy was shot?” is one. That’s the kind of question that people of my age ask each other, in between sips of tequila.
That anecdote was about something that happened in Dallas and the other one is about something that happened in Jerusalem. One was short and the other requires a little set-up. Overall this will be brief. Take another sip or another hit, as the case may be. My second anecdote is completely unrelated to the first and is instead about current—not historical—events.
Those immigrant workers on the kibbutzim attacked by Hamas in southern Israel on October 7? That could’ve been me, in a prior age, back in the proverbial day. Bold and potentially self-serving words, you may say, this guy is a drama queen trying to insert himself into international news. Not exactly. Take a moment and listen. Order another drink if you like—this one’s on me. So, like, years ago during the era of My Young Black Manhood, which lasted into my late 40s, those kibbutz agricultural workers who got snatched would have been a lot of American and European college-aged kids, like me, who went to Israel to work for a few months or a few years, as volunteers—mitnadvim—in Israel’s agricultural fields. To set the scene.
Being a kibbutz volunteer was a job—kind of—six hours of labor six days a week, you got room and board, also a little pocket money and the chance to explore the Holy Land on your days off. You also got two packs of cigarettes a week if you were a smoker, that was the age, there were still smoke breaks at work, and if the kibbutz truck delivering the fruit or whatever was going anywhere interesting you could hitch a ride. You could plan your trip based upon successful hitchhiking because everyone thumbed everywhere. That was the Start Up Nation that Israel calls itself today. People hitched rides to get to appointments.
As a kibbutz volunteer you got the chance to see another culture up close—eating with, working with and sleeping with the locals. My turn came in late ‘76, money running low while backpacking in North Africa after dropping out of UCLA. To set the scene. Someone told me about the kibbutz movement and after that my trek to Eretz Israel was like thousands of others before me. It was like we were First World refugees, laying on the deck of the ferry from Greece to Haifa and catching some rays, chatting up each other in various languages and listening on transistor radios to “Dancing Queen,” which had just come out. We were all going to do seasonal work in the Middle East. Which sounds totally dodgy today but was what you did if you were a twentysomething on the road, backpacking in Europe back in the day.
It was a two-day trip from Greece across the Med, all of Israel’s land borders were closed and the only way in or out was by ferry or by plane, at a time when airplane tickets were still extraordinarily expensive. Followed by a short train trip to Tel Aviv—it’s a small country. This is my memory of the logistics. A bus to the Jewish Agency where an old man pointed at a map on the wall and told me that my new job was as an agricultural worker in the Jordan Valley. To set the scene finally. This was almost exactly half a century ago. The Jewish State then was still getting good press as an underdog in an area of the world where peril lurked and always has. Israel’s rep as a bully with a big uncle hadn’t yet been earned.
Would you like another round?
My worklife on kibbutz included picking bananas and avocados in the Galilee and weeding row crops near Jerusalem. Worked for a while with chickens, which are mean, hateful animals, and turkeys which are, like, so dumb it’s hard to describe. Working in the turkey shed, hundreds of birds around my feet, it was possible to believe the reports of these guys looking up in a rain storm and drowning, not that that’s important here. It was a wonderful time, actually, the Israelis were completely cool, never saw any racial prejudice on kibbutz or in the outside community, unlike at home. Except one time. Which is the subject of my second anecdote, my second best bar story left to tell.
So, like, where the Israelis did draw a distinction though, in my experience, was between who was Jewish and who was not. That was the racial line, like color in the U.S., you might say. The Izzies really seemed to believe “the chosen people” thing too, which is not a big conversation starter with those of us from other cultures. You feel me? And which is anathema to black people in general who believe in the equality of all peeps and that no group is better than any other. But it was the Izzies' home and my upbringing was that you don’t criticize your host in his/her own crib. And there’s just not enough time til closing to get into all that here.
My first kibbutz—there would be four, through the years. The other three were all in the Galilee near the border of Lebanon and were populated by sabras, Israel-born Jews who knew the Arabs better than the new arrivals, it seemed, and called them “the cousins.” Most of the time. That’s a stereotype but it was kind of true of my experience.
My first kibbutz, on the other hand, was full of young American Jews who had come to the Middle East on a mission. This is where my second anecdote really begins.
So, like, it’s a bad idea to try to generalize so long after the fact but stereotyping can still be a useful exercise. A shortcut to understanding, you might say. The Jewish kids at my first kibbutz were earnest and armed to the teeth—a fire in their eyes and all that—not that there’s anything wrong with that. Not to exaggerate, either. This assessment comes from what we know now, much more than any sudden recognition on my part at the time. But they were basically the kind of people, in hindsight, who are settlers in the West Bank today. It was that mindset, is that fair? Probably yeah.
Although you didn’t know that at the time because you were a kid mostly looking to get laid and Gaza as we know it today hadn’t happened yet. Or was in its early stages of happening? The guys and girls on my first kibbutz were zealots—Zionists, although that noun wasn’t part of my vocabulary at the time. They were Southern California-born white kids who had probably been in some of my classes back in Westwood and who were now building a country. On somebody else's land? Seeing through the lens of a Hollywood screenplay is also possible—that’s popular both in Israel and in the U.S. today. The hero of that plot is the quintessential Israeli cowboy. These guys and girls see themselves as settlers on a frontier populated not by Native Americans but by Muslims. Who are the hostiles, would that be an oversimplification? It's not Winchesters anymore, it's M-4s. Not much has really changed thru the years in terms of the narrative. Flawed though it may be.
My arrival in the Holy Land was purely based upon needing a place to crash for winter. But all in all, my stays on kibbutzim would total more than two years. Being a volunteer on a kibbutz full of young people turned out to be fun. You could be riding to work on a tractor in the morning and sitting next to you was a member of the Swedish Bikini Team. Or an ex-Japanese paratrooper just out of the army and also seeing the world. One winter the granddaughter of a former British prime minister worked with me in the communal kitchen of a leftist-led kibbutz in the Galilee. She was smoking hot, btw, the product of being fine thru generations of wealthy well-bred white women. There were radical intellectual Jewish chicks filling out IDF uniforms and carrying matching accessory assault rifle. There's just something about a Palestinian woman who looks like she knows her way around an AK-47, wouldn't you agree? Israel exposed me to a world that was beyond my imagination in terms of the variety of chicks alone. Not to sound totally superficial but in Israel the chicks were always hot.
Sex—not drugs or alcohol—was the social lubricant. On the kibbutzim where money was not the means of exchange, often pussy and dick were. In the Jordan Valley with the American kids for example there was a squad of soldiers assigned for security, who walked around in work clothes and looked like ordinary kibbutzniks but were there to protect a settlement in Indian Country, so to speak, if the California cowboys couldn't handle it. To set the scene.
So, like, one day a couple of totally hot little Jewish girls from New Jersey arrived as “volunteers” and instead of having to work in the fields like the rest of us, they stayed in their rooms, with a line of soldiers going in one at a time. Pulling an IDF train was their way of supporting the State of Israel. How cool is that? These chicks weren't pros either, they were nice American college girls just doing their part for Israel by staring at the ceiling for an extended period of time.
That is not the second of my last two important bar stories, btw. We’re getting closer. The girls from New Jersey would not actually even be in my top ten list of best bar stories from a life widely not necessarily well-lived. The Jersey girls are mentioned only to set the scene. The kibbutz was close to Jerusalem. You know who the Bedouins are, right?
So, like, they are an Arab peep—not being an expert myself and basically pulling this from my ass or from Wikipedia.
And having gotten it wrong before. But the relationship of the Bedouins with their neighbors has been fraught. To say the least. Because everyone’s relationship with everyone else in the Middle East is fraught? Is that fair? “A widely quoted Bedouin [saying],” according to Wikipedia: “‘I am against my brother, my brother and I are against my cousin, my cousin and I are against the stranger,’" sometimes quoted as, "I and my brother are against my cousin, I and my cousin are against the stranger." That’s all the background you need to know. Take another sip, we’re almost there. This will be a whole lot better than Miss Jones of Normandie Avenue School.
So, like, my contact with the Bedouins was limited to their service in the Border Police. You’d see the border cops in the kibbutz fields because the kibbutz was near Jordan and was on land that had been a “depopulated” Palestinian settlement, whatever that means. And because Israel is a small country. You’re always near a border. Or, later, at my next kibbutz, near Lebanon—you’d see B.P. for the same reason—you were next to a dodgy international frontier. Walking through the second kibbutz’s banana plantation, in the Western Galilee, you came around a tree at 6 o’clock in the morning and a Bedouin in a Border Police uniform was just standing there, staring at you. Silent and stealthy—not shifty, that’s not my intent. The Bedouins are known as great trackers actually, and that is what the Israelis employ them to do in the Border Police. In the Western movie narrative that the Izzies like so much—to describe their struggle with the Palis—the Bedouins are the “Indian scouts” who work for the cavalry that is led by Ariel Sharon or Bibi Netanyahu but previously John Wayne or Henry Fonda? That’s not a completely accurate analogy but it works. The Border Police also patrol Jerusalem.
So, like, my first kibbutz was close to the aforementioned J’town. We worked until noon or early afternoon and were free for the rest of the day and some afternoons were spent in the city, after hitchhiking in or taking a sherut, the big Mercedes touring cars that served as taxis, that the Germans sent to Israel as reparations for the Holocaust? Not that that’s important here. So, like, me walking down the street in Jerusalem one day, minding my own black business the way the Constitution says a man has a right to do? Guess what happened. This is worth the price of a damn drink.
The Border Police stopped me! No lie. They jacked me up just like pigs back home in the U.S. do.
And you know what they said when they realized their mistake?
“Sorry. We thought you were Palestinian.”
That is my last best bar story and you have to admit it’s pretty damn good. It’s totally superior to the New Jersey girls who came to the Holy Land to pull a train. And is only told now because weed has replaced alcohol in my diet and in case fate makes today my last on earth—that kind of thinking, you know? Not to get all gloomy as an oldster. Like, if God asked me, “Do you have anything else to say before I pull the celestial plug?” my reply would be, “Can I tell you first about what happened to me in Jerusalem?”
It had to be told.
And if people notice a certain similarity between Black Lives Matter and the struggle of the Palis against the Izzies, that’s because there is a certain similarity. It’s also why African Americans want nothing to do with attempts to seek our support for the wrong side in the quarrel. Black people know oppression when we see it. This refusal on our part seems to upset American Jews inordinately, who say that black people owe the Jewish community for support during the civil rights struggle.
That’s an incomplete narrative, actually. Over seven hundred black GIs died in combat during the Second World War, fighting to liberate Jews from the Nazis. We’ve already paid a lot. We owe American Jews money but they owe us blood. We’re in each other’s debt in other words and black people won’t be silenced. The Bombing of Gaza needs to stop.
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