Allison W. Good

I’m just going to put this out there: applying for fellowships is incredibly stressful and excruciating.  Extracting recommendations, crafting a stellar and unique project proposal, all for something I probably won’t get because there are only six spots for Fulbright research grants in Israel.  The constellation of the Jewish holidays didn’t help, either, because the deadline was in the middle of High Holiday season.  But I managed to turn everything in, and now all I have left to do is a faculty interview and my language evaluation, which I am scared to death of.  And do you know what, I get to go through the whole process about three more times this year.  Oh, and did I mention I’m also applying to grad school?

It became clear to me that I needed a weekend off campus, i.e. a weekend with my best friends and sister who are all in Washington, D.C., which is where I plan on attending grad school and possibly living my adult life.  Amtrak makes it so easy (unless there are delays), and I couldn’t resist because I hadn’t spent time with my best friend Sarah in four years.  Naturally, the trip almost didn’t happen because the Tuesday before I caught a version of the respiratory virus that’s been going around campus, but lucky for me it only lasted for 24 hours.  Even though I lost my voice on Thursday, I still went to D.C., and it was the best weekend I’ve had since I was in Israel.

Sarah interns for a senator, so on Friday morning I went with her to work and got to go on a tour of the Capitol she gave to some of her fellow statesmen and women.  She was an EXCELLENT tour guide, and it shows that she really knows her stuff.  One of the tour leaders in front of us was using note cards, but Sarah knew even the most obscure factoids by heart.  After lunch in the cafeteria, where I ran into a fellow Rothberg high alum (seriously, this is what happens), I headed to Tenleytown to American University to see my sister Emily and Sam.  Emily has a really nice dorm room that is big and clean.  I’m no fan of cinder block, but it has carpeting and great storage.  Conclusion: I was deprived as a freshman.  I also got to meet her roommate and some of her friends, which was great because it seems like she’s really integrated well into college life and loves it.  When Emily left for physical therapy I saw Sam, who showed me around campus a bit before she had a meeting.  We chatted, I met some of her friends, and I enjoyed seeing what her life at AU is like.

And then, I had a few hours to myself, which meant that I had to go into Europe mode.  How much traveling did I want to do?  Ride the Metro to somewhere or walk around aimlessly?  At first I intended to go all the way to Georgetown, but when that got too complicated I just went to Foggy Bottom and checked our George Washington University, which is where I’ll probably end up going to grad school, given my GRE scores.  I’m not used to urban campuses, but GW is pretty close to the water, so it has potential.  It’s not in a part of town I would want to live in, but it’s easy to access.  I made my way to the Elliott School of International Affairs to inquire about their graduate program, and to take a look at the classrooms.  There’s no question that I can definitely see myself there in the future.  That night Sam, Sarah, Emily, and I went to a cute restaurant in Cleveland Park that had excellent food and cocktails.

Saturday was our big day.  We started out at the Barracks Row fall festival.  Sarah and I got to peek inside the grounds of the marine barracks, and there was a cook-off competition between chefs from the White House, Federal Reserve, Air Force, etc.  But I’ve watched a lot of Top Chef, and the food didn’t look so spectacular.  After that we went to the farmers market at Eastern Market, which had the most amazing produce.  I really love Sarah because she made sure to show me the seafood case.  In addition to browsing the food and the crafts, we also made friends with the guy who sells pickles.

Then it was off to the main event: the National Book Fest:

Fate had obviously interceded in our favor because one of the afternoon’s speakers was none other than Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything is Illuminated and other excellent books.  To put it bluntly, Sarah and I are in love with him.  We got to the tent about fifteen minutes before he was due to speak, only to find that everyone else there was there for him, but had arrived a few speakers early to get good seats.  But never fear, because when Sarah and Allison are on the case, they make things happen.  I was ready to pounce, even if it meant stealing a front-row seat from a senior citizen.  And pounce we did, and we were rewarded.  But of course, the event could not be complete without some sketch-tastic stalkerazzi-ing (he’s on the left):

He gave a great talk that focused on his “new” book Eating Animals, but thank goodness he mentioned that he’s working on another novel.  And he’s supposedly coming to speak at Vassar in November!  And I also really hope that he shows up to teach my seminar.

We had a few hours to kill before returning to Book Fest and so it was onward to the Newseum, just a few blocks from the National Mall.  I had been dreaming about the day I would go to the Newseum and envelop myself in pride for my esteemed profession that upholds our First Amendment rights.  It was a good thing that the Covering Katrina exhibit was still there, too, because I was afraid I had missed it.  So here it is folks, the coolest museum in D.C.:

The outside front wall of the museum posts the front pages from national and international dailies every day, and as I approached the building the Times-Pic was literally right in front of me, so I couldn’t resist:

One bad thing about the Newseum?  Entry is about $20.  There’s only a $2 discount for journalists, which I find to be quite ridiculous.  But whatever.  It wasn’t like there was a choice to make.  The first thing we did was the Katrina exhibit, which began here:

Beyond that, however, it didn’t feel right to take any more pictures.  For me, it’s the equivalent of photographing Auschwitz.  So the exhibit is pretty much all about the Times-Pic, which of course is wonderful.  A lot of people I have worked with were either quoted and/or in photos.  It was very interesting for me to learn about how the staff survived in the post-Katrina upheaval and what they went through to report the news, whether it was from the newsroom of another newspaper or a reporter’s home.  I’ve never heard anyone at the T-P ever talk about that experience.  One of the objects on display was a small whiteboard filled with story assignments from early September 2005.  For some reason, looking at that made everything more real to me.

The best part was that I was okay emotionally.  Seeing Katrina through a reporter’s lens is so different from seeing it through your individual nightmare.  I found it easy to remove myself from all of that, and most of the video footage they showed was stuff I had already seen.

There’s a lot of other good stuff in the Newseum.  There’s a wall of front pages from the day after 9/11, and a very, very good movie about those reporters.  Now that one made me tear up.  One floor has a history of news/newspaper corporations, another tells the history of printing in general.  Somewhere in there is a station where you can pretend to be a newspaper or television reporter.  And if you’re hungry, they have an overpriced cafeteria with a great salad bar!

On our way out of the Newseum we turned around to discover that the Capital was right behind us:

But our perfect afternoon didn’t end there, because we didn’t want to miss Michele Norris, a host of NPR’s All Things Considered, who is also an award-winning journalist.  She was there to talk about her new book, The Grace of Silence, which is a sort of memoir about how her family dealt with racial dialogue.  From what I could tell, she wasn’t using notes (we were in the front, obviously), and she had a great stage presence.  She also had a posse there to support her, including Gwen Ifill and Washington Post senior editor Milton Coleman, the highest-ranking black journalist in America, who was on stage with her:

After her talk, she took a picture with me and Sarah:

I won’t bore you with the mundane details of the rest of the day, but it involved seafood, Jersey Shore, and a SyFy channel made-for-TV movie called “Sharktopus,” which is indeed about a hybrid shark-octopus that terrorizes all sorts of good-looking people.  But I think it goes without saying that I had a wonderful time, a much-needed vacation from the real world of school and thinking about the future.  I guess it’s a good thing I’m going back in three weeks!

Instead of hiding under a rock and crying in his soup because he couldn’t force a comprehensive peace deal on Israelis and Palestinians at Camp David 2000, our former illustrious President Bill Clinton is really hamming up to the press about the current negotiations.  Sometimes he says the right thing, but sometimes he says the wrong thing.  Like blaming an entire ethnic group for the failure of the peace process.  From today’s Haaretz:

Former United States president Bill Clinton on Tuesday told the media that the Russian immigrant population in Israel is an obstacle to peace with Palestinians, sparking a furious response from Israel’s main immigrant party, Yisrael Beiteinu.

Yes, Yisrael Beiteinu  is headed by Avigdor Lieberman, who immigrated from Russia with his family at the age of 20, and he has said some pretty bombastic things about Palestinians, but he is not all Russian immigrants.  According to Clinton, said Russians are a nasty infestation that has invaded Israel:

“An increasing number of the young people in the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] are the children of Russians and settlers, the hardest-core people against a division of the land. This presents a staggering problem,” Clinton told a roundtable with press in New York. “It’s a different Israel. Sixteen percent of Israelis speak Russian.”

Oh yes, Israel was definitely transformed for the worse in the early 1990s when it absorbed thousands of Russian Jews who were finally able to get out of Russia.  I’m not going to lie, the Russians certainly have interesting ways of dressing and might be the pushiest of the pushy, but they are trying to integrate into Israeli culture and society.  Cultural and societal absorption is still a sensitive issue in Israel, especially in terms of Ethiopians, and Clinton is exacerbating that problem by pointing to the likes of Lieberman and extreme right-winger Natan Sharansky:

“I said, ‘Natan, what is the deal [about not supporting the peace deal],’” Clinton was quoted as saying. “He said, ‘I can’t vote for this, I’m Russian… I come from one of the biggest countries in the world to one of the smallest. You want me to cut it in half. No, thank you.’”

That’s Sharansky’s stance, at least according to Clinton (Sharansky, of course, denies having ever said that).

Unfortunately for Clinton, Russian Israeli opposition to peace has not manifested itself in such a visible manner as the settlers’ opposition has.  West Bank settlers, for the most part, are of Western European descent.  The Russian immigrants are generally much less observant than the settlers.  When Ariel Sharon pulled out of Gaza in 2005, it was these settlers who resisted Israeli soldiers.  We regularly see footage of settlers throwing rocks at soldiers trying to dismantle illegal settlements.  The settlers create the most effective propaganda since most of them speak English, whereas the Russian immigrants do not.  I’ve never heard of a bunch of Russian immigrants staging a protest or engaging in violent behavior against the state military or local law enforcement.

My personal opinion is that this was just a snub against Russians in general.  I’m pretty sure that every American president, deep in the recesses of his heart, secretly abhors the Russians and their government.  Perhaps I’ve watched too much “Alias” and “24,” but I’d rather go for this explanation.

On my daily “news cruise” I found an interesting story from the Jerusalem Post.  Here’s the breaking news: Netanyahu just had his annual physical, and his doctors say he’s doing quite well, but that he’s a bit on the heavy side.  Too much falafel and schwarma lunch takeout, I presume?  Maybe it’s the stress of the negotiations?  But I kid, because the state of Netanyahu’s health isn’t terribly interesting.  I mean, it’s not like he’s in a coma or something.  Oops.  Is it still too soon for that?  Never mind.  Here’s what’s actually interesting today:

Senior Israeli officials are considering a deal in which the moratorium on building starts in West Bank settlements would be extended for three months in exchange for the release of convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard from the United States Army Radio reported  Monday.

Naturally, Netanyahu’s office responded to this report with a resounding unawareness of “the US being approached with the deal and reaffirming that the building moratorium will end on September 26 as scheduled.”  Ok, so it’s not a flat-out denial of such a potential deal, but they’re obviously trying to keep it hush-hush.  I can understand why, and I agree with settlement leader Danny Dayan’s classification of the exchange as blackmail, akin to “giving up the Golan [Heights] in exchange for Gilad Schalit.”

Jonathan Pollard, for those of you who don’t know, is an American naval officer who has been serving a life sentence since 1985 for giving classified information to Israel.  Even more importantly, though, bringing Pollard into peace negotiations has only backfired in past attempts.  The Wye River Memorandum almost fell through in 1998 because of the issue.  Not that the agreement actually achieved anything in the end, but it was already on the brink of failure when Netanyahu added one last condition: that President Clinton release Pollard.  Disagreement was imminent, with Netanyahu claiming that Clinton had promised to release Pollard, and Clinton saying that he had only promised to review the case.  CIA director George Tenet, who was brought into the negotiations, threatened to resign if Clinton released Pollard.  Obviously, he wasn’t released, but Wye was still signed.  I’m sure Pollard has been brought up several times as a bargaining chip since the Clinton days, but the idea of actually releasing him is blasphemous.  The US would never put on such a show of public self-defacement.

But here’s why the Pollard option will always be attractive.  It appears that the settlers are the only constituency who actually care about what happens to him.  They’re the only ones regularly campaigning for his immediate release and rehabilitation.  Any guarantee of his release might be enough to get them to stop building.  But to stop them from building forever?  Probably not.  If you notice as per the excerpt above, this is only about extending the moratorium for a few months.  It’s an interim deal to extend the window for peacemaking, and we all know interim deals never work and that nothing can be accomplished in three months.  I guess this is just to say that reports coming from either official or unofficial sources about backdoor deals like these are farcical and insulting to our intelligence.  All the same, they are undoubtedly amusing and entertaining.  My thoughts on Jonathan Pollard?  You got caught, and now you pay the price.  That’s how the world works.

What will I read next?  I’m not sure, but it’s always an adventure.  Stay tuned!

But first, some personal news.  I received an email this morning informing me of my acceptance into a seminar conducted by Samuel Freedman, a professor at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.  The Writers’ Seminar on the Jewish People is limited to writers between the ages of 22 and 35, and meets once a month in New York City.  What coincidences!  It was definitely the opportunity for me.  Out of sheer luck I saw a link to the website on Twitter, and it was a no-brainer that I had to apply.  I wrote a few essays, sent in some clips, and began to play the waiting game.  I heard back this morning, which I thought was interesting considering that all of us Jewish folk are busy preparing for the big YK, which begins tonight at sundown.  And so, a well-deserved pat on the back to me.  The seminar focuses on journalism, and my work might get into some mainstream publications.  Being a real, live journalist is fun.

The fun stuff is coming, I promise, but I have to say a few words about Yom Kippur in Jerusalem.  This time two years ago I was dreaming about experiencing the High Holidays in Israel, and last year it became a reality.  Everyone was dressed in white, the streets were filled, and there was an atmosphere of calm and relaxation even though Yom Kippur is a solemn occasion.  Sam and I stayed at a hotel in Bakka, a neighborhood next to the German Colony, and walked to services from there.  My favorite memory is going to HUC for Neelah and watching the sun go down as the shofar was sounded one last time.  I’ll never forget that.  I’m pretty sure I said all of this in a previous blog post, but you can’t recreate that experience outside of Jerusalem.  There’s only one Jerusalem.  This morning, I submitted to Vassar my application for a Fulbright grant to conduct a research project in Jerusalem next year.  Hopefully that will turn out how I want it to, and a year from now I’ll be back.

Okay, down to business.  Mahmoud Abbas and Benjamin Netanyahu spent Wednesday and Thursday conducting some “difficult peace negotiations…over the issue of Jewish settlements.”  The freeze ends in less than 10 days.  They are down to the wire.  Everyone should be in crisis mode, but surprisingly there has been no chaotic fracas over the issue.  According to the New York Times and most other reputable news services, however, Abbas said yesterday at the Palestinian Authority’s headquarters in Ramallah that “‘We all know there is no alternative to peace other than negotiating peace, so we have no alternative but to continue peace efforts.’”  It’s good that Abbas appears firm in his convictions, but that doesn’t cancel out the fact that the Palestinians “have threatened to walk out of the talks if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not extend a partial moratorium on the construction of settlements, something he has refused to do.”

The U.S. has certainly vocalized its support for extending the moratorium for a few more months, giving the two sides time to solve border issues, but the question of pressuring Netanyahu remains.  I don’t care what anyone says, this man is not ready to make peace on Abbas’ terms, or on the terms that the U.S. envisions.   I’ve been doing a lot of reading for my Transitions in Europe class about what made Stalin and Gorbachev so special and able to make sweeping political and economic changes with support from the people.  It all comes down to the cult of the personality, and both were event-making men.  There are certain characteristics that leaders need in order to make blind leaps of faith like, say, making peace with an adversary.  Begin had “It,” Netanyahu doesn’t.  He’s shown too much ambiguity and flip-flopping on settlements and freezes to all of a sudden make concessions with courage and conviction.  This is just all a show.  And, on the other side of things, Abbas isn’t great, either.  He can’t rally people around his causes.  Arafat was the Palestinian equivalent of Stalin, or the closest any Palestinian leader has ever come.

Unfortunately, something happened at the end of August that highlighted internal Palestinian divisions within the West Bank population.  We tend to see it as West Bank and Gaza, but there is more than one West Banks, if you catch my drift.  Here’s what Foreign Policy Magazine reported:

On Aug. 25, one week prior to the opening of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, a group of Palestinians held a conference in Ramallah to discuss – and protest — President Mahmoud Abbas’s decision to travel to Washington to attend the talks. The Ramallah gathering, to be held at Ramallah’s Protestant Club meeting house, had been meticulously planned by a prominent coalition of political activists that included Palestinian businessmen, acknowledged leaders in Palestinian civil society and respected leaders of Palestinian political parties. “This was to be an open forum, an assembly to debate and discuss,” Munib al-Masri, the founder of the Palestine Forum and one of the meeting’s organizers said in an interview from his home in Nablus. “Our intention was to exercise our right to assemble and debate. Tragically, that’s not what happened.”

A crowd of about 250-300 people gathered as a group of “about 100 non-uniformed officers from the Palestinian General Intelligence Service entered the hall carrying placards featuring Abbas’s picture and shouting pro-Abbas slogans.”  A group of young men “shouted down” a speaker from the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights, and even “began to push and shove the attendees out of the building.”  While Mustafa Barghouti of the Palestinian National Initiative tried to maintain order,

“People were pushed into the street,” he remembers, “and that’s when the beatings began. It was very violent. The General Intelligence people were pushing people to the ground.”

Bassam al-Salhi of the Palestine Peoples’ party described the incident as “mob violence,” and said that while the Ramallah police did not participate in the violence, they didn’t try to stop it either, and people just ran away.  The incident as a whole prompted “broad-based outrafe with Mahmoud Abbas and the security and intelligence services.”  Al-Masri said Abbas is targeting all opposition, and that even if he did not plan the crackdown, that would show that he has lost control over his government.  And Barghouti says things can only get worse.

The bottom line is that these opposition groups pose a threat to Abbas, and his government is clearly aware of this fact.  This show of brutality indicates that the government feels threatened.  The article also notes that support for Abbas within his own party is “eroding.”  Both factors threaten any chance for Israeli-Palestinian peace because the official Palestinian position does not reflect the Palestinian street.  There can be no support among a majority of West Bank Palestinians for any peace agreement that Abbas would sign with Israel.  What happened in Ramallah was not reported in the U.S. at all.  In addition, the West Bank government has become increasingly militaristic, because as former Fatah member Salah Ta’amri said, Palestine is not in the process of becoming a police state because it already is one.  A police state not supported by the people?  That’s always been a recipe for political suicide.  I’m curious to see if similar incidents happen in the near future.  Until then, I’ll keep monitoring this sham of a negotiation process.

Ok, first and foremost, HOW BOUT DEM SAINTS!!! What a victory, but not an epic victory.  However, that first touchdown brought tears to my eyes.  And I love it when they pan Drew Brees sitting on the sidelines when the Saints are playing defense.  And also when they showed that footage of Favre getting beat up during the 2009 postseason Saints-Vikings game, even though the shots of his ankle and thigh were pretty gruesome and, in my opinion, not suitable for national television.  In conclusion, a few words of wisdom for the NFL:

1. Do not invite Colbie Callait to sing the national anthem.  She couldn’t hit those high notes.

2. When New Orleans musicians actually come out to join Dave Matthews Band onstage, introduce them.  For those of you who didn’t quite catch it, it was Kermit Ruffins and Trombone Shorty with some token Mardi Gras Indians.

3. Learn how to pronounce “New Orleans.”

Bottom line: We’re undefeated.  1-eaux.  And next week is going to be an even bloodier bloodbath.

Now let me backtrack to Tuesday.  Every Tuesday from 4-6 p.m. I sit in Rockefeller Hall 308 for a my seminar in political theory, which is based on a special topic chosen by the instructor, who in this case is the chair of the department.  He’s a phenomenal professor, and his intro course solidified my desire to major in political science.  At the end of our first class, he asked us all to write down on a piece of paper what we thought of it so far, and what our expectations were.  While going over the syllabus, I had noticed that the first readings were penned by Edward Said, a professor at Columbia University who was a founding figure in postcolonialism and a staunch critic of Orientalism.  An advocate for Palestinian rights, he died in 2003.

Said always claimed that he was of Palestinian heritage, and wrote that from his birth in 1935 until Israeli independence in 1947/48, he lived with his family in Jerusalem, after which they fled to Egypt  That’s the story he stuck by.  Unfortunately for Said, however, a fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, international lawyer Justus Weiner, exposed the truth about Said’s formative years, which he actually spent in Cairo.  Based on my knowledge of Weiner’s paper, “The False Prophet of Palestine: In the Wake of the Edward Said Revelations,” published in 2000, I could not help but mention these findings in my “letter” to my professor.  I said that even though I did have a bias against Said because he lied about his origins, I would discern his work with a scholarly eye.

Honestly, I didn’t think the subject would come up in the discussion, but my professor asked the class at some point what Said’s background was.  Everyone said he was Palestinian, because that is what he said in his writing, but I was very quick to say that he wasn’t, and then I tried to keep quiet.  Everyone seemed confused that I had denied a very obvious fact, but the professor jumped in and asked me to explain, saying that I had brought up the issue with him earlier.  And so I did explain, and the professor did acknowledge that extensive research had been done on Said’s background.  But everyone seemed miffed, skeptical of what I was saying.  I felt very uncomfortable, even though I knew what I was talking about and had met Weiner at the JCPA in addition to running into him frequently at the gym.  If this had been a class at Rothberg, I would not have felt so uneasy in my own skin.

And thus it was that I realized this is going to be a tough year.  There are very few people here that I can talk to about these issues who can see them from my point of view.  Everyone is either too liberal or conservative, or sticks to a certain ideology too much for my liking.  Even if I didn’t ascribe to the political leanings of the JCPA, at least we could still converse semi-objectively about current events.  And even during and outside of class, Israel was a frequent topic of discussion.  I also feel like living in the Diaspora necessitates more talk.  In Israel, I felt like I was “living it,” and so I didn’t need to talk about it as much because everyone knew everything I knew, and there was no eight-hour time difference that effected the news cycle.

I’m not going to start a chapter of American Students for Israel at Vassar, and I’m not going to invite speakers from AIPAC.  I will continue as I always have, as a one-woman machine.  And I will always try to voice my opinions without raising my voice and interrupting others.  But I just did the assigned reading for next Tuesday’s class, and the author, a Muslim of Arab descent, equates fundamental Shi’ism with Zionism because both are the Other when it comes to their respective religions, at least that’s how I interpreted it (Dabashi is REALLY hard to read).  There are so many problems with this statement, and I’m going to have to say something.  I just hope my classmates can respect me.

Thursday is a very special day with a lot of religious and spiritual significance.  First, it’s my 22nd birthday, so I guess you can all worship the Cult of Alli G and bring me offerings of Elite chocolate if you so please.  But honestly, my birthday’s only the side dish.  It’s not the shrimp etouffee.

This year, my birthday also happens to be on Rosh Hashana, which in my memory has never happened before.  I’ve always loved the Jewish new year because I love the fall and I have positive memories associated with feeding the ducks at tashlich at Audubon Park.  It’s a wonder that I have any good memories of my classical Reform ‘Temple” at all, but that’s an entirely different story.  It’s weird not to be in Jerusalem, but I enjoy celebrating the High Holidays at Vassar.  We’re very low-key and pluralistic.  Even though I still go to most of my classes, it still means something to me.  However, I do need to find a fish head to eat so that I can be a leader and not a follower in 5771.

But even Rosh Hashana is not the most important thing that happens on Thursday.  Can you guess why? I’ll give you a clue: TWO DAT!  That’s right, folks, at 8:30 p.m. EST the Saints will begin their quest for a second Superbowl win with a game against the Vikings in the Superdome.  Home in the Dome, baby.  Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the rabbis of New Orleans offer special prayers for our boys at services.  Personally, I’m going to pray to Breesus.  I’m a Jew for Breesus, you see.  Yes, there is a service that night followed by dinner, but the home team calls.  It’s my other religion, and sometimes it must take precedence.  Because we have not yet entered the Days of Awe, which means I don’t have to start apologizing to people for all sorts of misdeeds and “bad speech,” I just want to say this: BRETT FAVRE, YOU ARE GOING DOWN IN THE MOST PHYSICALLY AND EMOTIONALLY PAINFUL WAY I CAN IMAGINE.  I mean come on, that’s no worse than the Vikings alum who said the team should pound the Saints like Katrina did.

I’m taking stock: I’ve got my inflatable helmet, my stuffed Saint, my Superbowl mug, a variety of t-shirts, my flag, and my pendant.  I think I’m ready to go.  All I truly want for my birthday is a Saints win, and the NFL power rankings reassure me that I’m going to get it.  And when hell freezes over in February and the Saints return to that Superbowl gridiron, I’m going to be in New Orleans.

So have a blessed Thursday.  WHO DAT!

It’s been a whirlwind few weeks, but I’m finally settled into Terrace Apartment 58.  My room is still a bit of a mess, but I promise that photographs are forthcoming, though it might take me a month since the High Holidays are coming up.  I finished my first week of classes, and all of them are pretty good.  I was dismayed to find that you cannot opt for the non-recorded option for Art History 105, but hopefully I won’t end up missing so many classes that my grade drops too much.

I also have an internship with the PoliSci department, which I was not notified of until about a week before I got here.  This week I start having office hours and dispensing my wisdom to the young’uns.  And taking naps on the couches.  Hopefully I can also use my position to get involved in planning events like panels and film screenings that relate somehow to Katrina and New Orleans.  I’m kind of into advocacy now, in case you couldn’t tell.

Hmmm let’s see, what else…

On Thursday I went into New York City to see some of my Rothberg ladies for a day of walking around SoHo and Greenwich Village and just chilling like old times.  We had a great time reminiscing about last year’s greatest moments, and now all I have to do is book a flight to Winnipeg.  Seeing them also made me realize how tough of a time I’m having transitioning back into Vassar’s social life.  I didn’t stay in touch with that many people, and now I only have one year left.  Thank goodness for planes and trains.

In terms of easier transitions, I’m really happy that now I can walk to the gym in shorts and not get jeered at by Palestinian men for showing my legs.  I knew I missed this place for a reason.

Last week I also had my first thesis meeting with my advisor.  I am sososososo infinitely happy that I decided to do a lot of research and reading last semester when I didn’t have to.  Reading all 700 pages of Dennis Ross’ memoir definitely paid off because that’s about ten less hours I’ll have to spend in the library.  For the win.  And my proposal and tentative reading list are done.

Friday night was my first time leading Shabbat services in ages, and now I’m Shabbat chair.  It went really well, and we even had a visit from the lovely Rachel Glicksman.  But I must admit that I am so happy to not be in charge of High Holiday stuff here.  I have too much to do and I’ve been there, done that.

So it’s full speed ahead here at Vassar, and I promise I’ll update the blog as often as I can, but I won’t have as much time as last year and my life won’t be nearly as interesting.  To all of my fellow Jews out there:

!לשנה טובה ומתוקה וגמר חתימה טובה