 means reader. I'm Mary Fran Coley, I'm one of the associate deans for the Faculty of Public Affairs. Just to give everyone a bit of background, this is an event where faculty members have a chance to discuss a book that they recently published with a group of panelists and with our community. We meet a few times each semester. Normally, we would be meeting in person, but now we're doing it by Zoom, like most things. We will have quite a bit of time for some questions at the end, so if I could ask people to hold your questions for now. I'm going to start by introducing today's author and then the two panelists, and then I'm going to turn it over to Laura, who I'll introduce shortly here. So we're joined by the author of the book that we're going to be discussing today. The author is Mira Sikrov. Mira Sikrov is a professor of political science and the university chair of teaching innovation here at Carleton University. She's the author and editor of many different books and most recently, Borders and Belongings and Memoir, the book that we're here to talk about tonight. She's published many op-eds and she's won a faculty commentary, public commentary award for that work. She's also a five-time teaching award winner. She's the founding co-chair of the Jewish Politics Division at the Association of Jewish Studies and she's a co-editor of the AGS Perspectives and currently sits on the new Israel Fund of Canada Advisory Council. And today, Mira is joined by Laura Levett, who is professor of Religion, Jewish Studies and Gender at Temple University, where she has chaired the Religion Department and directed both the Jewish Studies and Gender Sexuality and Women Studies programs. She's also co-edited multiple collections and authored several books, including her most recent, The Objects that Remain. She edits NYU Press' North American Religion series with Tracy Fezden and David Harrington Watt. And Laura and Mira are joined by Brian Cates. Brian is a film and television editor whose credits include The Laramie Project, The Woodsmen. He's won Emmy awards for both the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Taking Chance. This is really like cutting it short, I have to say. He's an executive producer of the upcoming documentary Israelism and he's currently working on season three of the HB series, Succession. So Brian, I will try to refrain from asking you any questions about season three of Succession during this, as I know it's a topic. So with that introduction, I'm going to turn it over to Laura, who's going to moderate the questions and we'll give you a bit more information about how things will work. Thank you, Dean Frincoli. This is lovely to be with all of you this evening. I feel like I don't go anywhere. So I'm kind of with all of you in Canada, still in my little room where I seem to do my entire life these days. So it's a delight to be here. And so when we were kind of organizing today's event, we thought it would be helpful to have someone kind of do some moderation. So I kind of took on the role. And so I will kind of keep track of kind of where we're going. And what I thought I would do is just kind of give you an idea of kind of the flow of the program so that you kind of know where we're at. And I will say, if you have a question that you'd like to put in the chat, please do so. We're going to try to get to them. And the other thing is we are a diverse crowd. And for some of you, some of the conversation will be more familiar and for others will be less familiar. So we would really delight in your asking questions. If there are terms that are used that you're not sure of, please just put them in the chat. We would love to address them as we go. So those are just some caveats. And so let me tell you a little bit about the format. I'm going to in a brief moment, I'm going to turn the floor over to Mira, who will both introduce her book, offer a brief reading from the text so you get a feel for this wonderful book. And then what we're going to do is she's going to talk a little bit also about how she chose the two of us, Brian and me, to be her interlocutors for tonight's conversation. And then we will move from there into a first round of questions. Brian will get us started. I will follow up. And then what we're hoping to do is move from those questions, those initial questions, into a couple of thematic discussions that kind of bring us all into conversation with each other. The first of those will be really about craft. And we're excited about this because Mira is a prolific writer and scholar. But in this book, she's really writing memoir in a really different mode than the kind of expositional work that she's done previously. And so we're excited for her to talk about the kind of work she does and to put that conversation in, in, in terms of process to the kind of work that Brian does with film and television and the kind of work that I do. And it's slightly different mode as a scholar of religion and Jewish studies. And then we're going to talk a little bit about how we think about the past and the never changing present. And this will also include issues around melancholia and, and, and nostalgia. And so we want to do that. And then we're going to really open it up for general questions. And I'll try to be keeping track in terms of time, because we would like to stay within the hour and a half because we know how zoomed out so many of you are. So it's a pleasure to be with you. And I'm now going to turn this over to Mira. Thank you, Laura. And thank you, Mary and Stephanie for organizing and to Brian and to the Faculty of Public Affairs for providing a forum to discuss my book with two eminent thinkers and professionals. And I'll just explain why I brought, wanted to be in conversation with Laura and Brian. And let me just also explain author meets readers. I think Mary, did Mary explain this where an author meets, it chooses a scholar and someone from the community, any community, depending on the topic of the book. And so for me, when I was thinking about community, I was thinking about one of the people I am frequently in conversation with about pressing issues regarding Israel Palestine, we have a lot, a lot of common background advantage point. And I find that Brian and I will and Laura, but Laura gets to be the scholar category. Brian and I have struggled with a lot of the same things and have sought out a lot of similar visions for new ways of thinking about Israel Palestine. In addition to all that, those ways of thinking about Israel Palestine, thinking about questions of attachment, Hebrew attachment, both Brian and I have studied Arabic Brian more recently than me. In other words, I studied it when I was getting undergraduate course credit for it. Brian is studying it without the need for credit. So Brian gets more credit for studying it for without credit. Brian and his husband, Jonathan will go to Palestine, find themselves on occasion, hanging out with Israeli cousin of mine, completely coincidentally, who's involved in similar activist engagement in Ramallah. And so we have a lot of common contact points. In addition, I'm fascinated and so much respect the work that Brian does in the realm of storytelling as a film and television editor on some of my favorite shows and films. And we're going to talk a bit about that in terms of craft, both the technical aspects in terms of how you make stories and also what drives Brian, what drives me and what drives Laura in terms of the purpose of our work and what really motivates us. So Laura gets to be the scholar who I got to pick. And Laura is a scholar really like no other, partly because she's known second to none as a mentor. And she's a mentor to so many. And she came into, she in fact won a very significant mentoring award last year before the pandemic when we could fit her together at a women's Jewish studies breakfast at the large conference we both attended. Early, early on in this project, really before I had really engaged in this project, when I was between project, Laura is someone I sought out and I paced around the room I'm in right now. Laura was pacing around an airport. We were talking on the phone and Laura was helping me shape my ideas. There are only two scholars whose work I cite directly in this book because the great thing about memoir is a lot of the normal academic conventions are able to be put aside. And one of those is needing to put in footnotes to show that you've tracked the literature. In this case, it's implicit that the ideas that I am putting forth or informed by the literature, but there are only two scholars who I felt the need to cite and one of them is Laura and her work appears in the chapter where I find out that a classmate of ours in Winnipeg has been killed in a bus bombing one night when I am at Hebrew summer camp in 1989. Laura is an expert on trauma and loss and has a wonderful new book out that inspired me as well even though our books came out around the same time. So I'm going to start with an excerpt and then I'm going to turn it over to Laura and Brian for questions and just one more sentence really before I get it to the excerpt. Why I wrote this book is that I love memoir. I love stories and I wanted to see if I could take a lot of the struggles that I am observing in the Israel Palestine domain and the struggles that I experience as an Israel Palestine scholar and share those with my readers in the way of storytelling that is so succinctly and effectively done in creative nonfiction. And one of the many people who helped me along that journey is here tonight and that was my wonderful editor Paulie Rosensweig who's in Michigan and I want to give a shout out to her and she helped me find to the manuscript at the very late stages making sure that I really she was my final reader in other words if there was something I put forward and she was curious about it well tell me a little bit more about this and how did you feel here not to mention all the great language and stylistic corrections that everyone always can use more of. So thank you to Paulie and here I go with the prologue 2015. Sorry Mira the email says I need to pull out of the group my husband doesn't want you in our home I swallow hard the email is from a woman I know from the local Jewish community years ago we had spent the afternoon together in her tidy suburban home surrounded by dress-up clothes and doll houses as our daughters played noisily a few weeks earlier I had created a bar about mitzvah project group for Jewish youth around town my daughter's but mitzvah was coming up and I wanted to shore up the Ottawa cohort create a sense of community encourage families to see how this personal milestone could be mobilized to pursue a smattering of social justice we the parents had spent a week over email coordinating the timing and locations and guest lists and program and menu rotating hosts would supply the space and the refreshments and I promised to guide the kids in designing a social justice campaign on a topic of their choice first we learned how to identify wrongs that need writing I figured I'd start with something simple a fictional scenario about a jelly bean factory in crisis maybe I'd ask the kids to consider why the factory had suddenly run out of jelly beans what might the causes and remedies be we would talk about justice we'd think about individuals and structures and systems the workers conditions the children who needed the jelly beans the price of sugar the town's water supply once we identified causes and solutions we'd consider how to leverage social media to help repair the world we would learn about my monadieses ethical ladder of charity and I would try my best I promised myself to keep my own politics out of it mostly anyway I'd encourage the kids to come up to their own conclusions and at the end of the evening we eat ice cream and drink hot cocoa hot chocolate for hot issues I called it I continue reading the woman's email my husband says you support a group calling for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people my mind spins which group is our husband thinking of it can't be the local Jewish community boards I've sat on those are each squarely mainstream although I've admittedly tried to push their boundaries maybe it's the American Jewish organization I'm on the board of and for which I fundraise and travel to New York once a year from meetings for that group I've been working to get a progressive slate elected to the world Zionist organization the group is certainly liberal but it's definitely Zionist so can't be that one and would he even know about it or maybe it's the academic group I'm part of the one that tries to oppose the occupation and oppose attempts at boycotting Israeli academia that one is also liberal but also within the Zionist consensus and it's against BDS boycott divestment and sanctions against Israel after all so with my cheeks burning I ask her which group would that be I wait for half an hour irritated and restless before a reply arrives in my inbox the Palestinian people in general and then she links to an article an op-ed I had recently published my editor at the Globe and Mail had titled it the problem with picking sides in the Israeli Palestinian conflict in that piece I was trying to lay out what I saw as a balanced approach for my Canadian readers a few years later it's true I would come to question even that sort of approach I would come to advance a more justice forward elbows out position clearly not in the direction her husband would want but my stance is measured in this Globe and Mail piece she's sent me measured is clearly not good enough for them as an Israel supporter she writes there is only one side I closed my email program and my teeth clenched I open a Facebook window wow a new personal low for eternal Jewish communal relations I write as I describe what happened with the incident scrubbed of names reactions start to roll in you'd be invited into my house and ask to stay for dinner don't be afraid to keep talking eventually they will hear you I am deeply ashamed of my Jewish community time for this woman to stand up for herself I'm grateful for the solidarity and I click like a few minutes later a friendly acquaintance calls about some other matter I fill her in what I've been going through today but I don't get the reaction I'm hoping for if you're going to put yourself out there you're going to get burned she says and for the rest of the day all I have is my righteous indignation and a splitting headache how did I come to be perceived by those who seemingly liked me enough to chat every day at pickup time outside of the JCC preschool I had to smile across the room with baby music and to invite me to their home for play dates as an enemy of the Jews and some years later how did I come to not often even know what I believed how did my political and ethical rudder once so firm and certain start to warp from the waters of communal pressures coming at me from all directions when it comes to the topic of Israel a subject on which I was suckled and weaned during seven years of Jewish day school a decade at Hebrew summer camp and three years of living in the country soaking up the atmosphere and sometimes dreaming about moving there myself when it comes to Israel a subject on which I've claimed to be a scholar specialist for all of my adult life and about which I have never hesitated in speaking up and speaking out I guess I should have known that anything is possible you're muted Laura thank you Mira I think this gives everyone a little bit of a taste of the interplay between the personal and the political which is so much a part of this memoir and I'm gonna turn this over to Brian to get us started with some questions but I just had to kind of really highlight that piece of the the text because it is just so palpable the sort of embodied ways in which we carry these legacies forward and Mira does this so powerfully and so compellingly over and over again as the chapters unfold thank you Laura Mira it's a wonderful book and I read it again over the weekend and I there were so many touchstones of things in my own life and the lives of the lives of my friends that that I was reminded of in terms of Zionist upbringing summer camp but also living in the diaspora and feeling this need to be a part of something through indoctrination actually but also a kind of genuine love that is fostered from an early age and I personally can't quite let go of and I feel like that's a very strong theme in your book as well what's interesting to me in the book and I want to ask you about is that it's a it's there's a lot of trauma highlighted in the book but but almost all of the personal trauma happens in Canada and is regarding domestic matters and romantic matters and family matters like divorce medical issues there's a skin cancer scare there's there's issues around friendship and around affiliation and but it's but it's it's all within the Canadian realm and yet the the the narrative driver in the book really is Palestinian trauma which is not something that you experience personally but but are forced to reckon with through an engagement with good history and news and journalism and with people teaching you with mentors who you who you meet along the way and so I find it fascinating that this is like this bifurcated book where so much of the trauma is domestic and Canadian but there's the elephant in the room which is the Nakba and Palestine and that's never experienced personally and yet it's the thing that's really changing you through history and I'd love to know if that's I mean that's how I experienced the book is that how you was that intentional when you wrote it did you want did you feel like that was motivating you and also in your life since it's true it's a memoir yeah thank you for that observation what what I try to show particularly in chapter three as you'll recall in the Fallujah chapter is that I was for most of my life operating within a fairly narrow frame wasn't that Palestinian trauma was invisible to me but I own my touchstone points for engagement sort of only extended so far and then at a certain point so in that chapter when I'm spending a lot of time at my beloved kibbutz in the Negev region the desert the southern region of Israel and I noticed that every day the field workers the the the guys on the kibbutz and some women take the their cars out to their daily work branch and it happens to be at some field some distance away from the kibbutz whereas a lot of the other work branches are right right there at the in the in the cowshed and the orchards and they call those fields Fallujah and I know enough of Hebrew and Arabic to know that it's not a Hebrew word but I don't ask why they call it Fallujah almost everywhere else in Israel has if it had where there was Palestinian presence and there is no more has been renamed has been rebraicized yet this area remains Arabic and so much much later actually literally sitting in the JCC where I talk about the preschool years of my my our kids being at preschool and then some of the ruptures with some parents namely that one parent that I wrote about the prologue I'm I'm waiting for my kid at preschool while I'm upstairs in the cafe doing my homework I guess that's what we call it when we're crossed and I decide to research a bit more about Fallujah this is many years before I wrote the memoir and so there is the point there by which things can be your we're aware but we're not always fully aware until we make the decision to become more aware and a great apparel I think that's going on right now for my generation and those older than me is in Canada we were always aware of the indigenous presence but we're we weren't fully aware in the way that we're becoming more aware and I and I expect and hope that 20 years later that awareness will be much more fully realized it's fascinating but did you did you feel like as you I mean anxiety is also a big theme in your book and and there are even panic attacks that you that you document later in life and it's never really spelled out whether those have anything to do with the political situation and yet every other chapter is about the political situation so in my mind I was drawing an invisible connection that wasn't spelled out and to me that's one of the fascinating things about the book is that it has these two registers in these two locations and you don't always come tell us what the connection is but I think the audience imagines it and that or the reader imagines it and to me that was it was fascinating because I filled in some of the blanks with my own associations of those of those conflicts some of the points of anxiety as I portray the book really result quite directly from my parents divorce when I was a young child and the family some degree of family chaos it could have been worse I would say like it's wasn't the most horror story divorce that there is but you know divorce was not easy on me as a young child and I I bring the reader into that and so some of the anxiety comes from that and then what ends up happening for me and then later on more flare-ups of anxiety in my early teen years and what I find what I discover is that Jewish camp Jewish summer camp Hebrew immersion summer camp becomes my refuge and there all my anxiety completely disappears and so that becomes sort of a liminal space between real life anxiety the anxiety triggered by real life and real dynamics and emotions and family rupture and then later on when I go to Israel and then I'm confronting more directly my political experience and my political affiliations and commitments and that Jewish summer camp is that middle space so I guess the question is we're sort of always safe searching for safe spaces to broaden the on its regular usage and then what was going on so then the question is what what was going on for me in that safe space what was going on for me in that seemingly neutral space it wasn't neutral at all it was very identity forming and very powerful in terms of political messaging but it's fascinating because you're you're a good student and that and that makes you fascinated by Jewish history and by modern Hebrew and by learning about Israeli culture but that same like being a good student is what forces you to go deeper into the history and learn the history of Palestine and to learn other points of view and that's eventually what create what is an anxiety provoking situation because you become in conflict with your community you you you become such a good student that you grow you grow out of your community in a sense or some parts parts of your community and then I reach conflict with yet um more narrow or a narrowest slices of my community so later in later chapters as um as you know I I actually this is how we met Ryan remember you you messaged me to use a very 20 um 2021 term back in 2017 you messaged me during the crisis that I talk about in within my community but to the left and that crisis and actually my dad was visiting and he's mentioned in the book and he we told him not to get involved in the facebook debate to try to help me and he got shredded in the debate and um and that was a debate that was happening uh when I was not no longer critiquing to my right but now I was facing my op-ed pen to an incident that happened to the left a campaign that I didn't agree with and you reached out to me in solidarity saying wow I see you're really trying to engage in good faith and these kinds of debates and what's going on with you is really painful what what you're facing is really painful so we bonded on that and so it wasn't so much that you were saying um you weren't you weren't taking a stand on the political debate you were uh observing the emotional dynamics of it all and that to me is really what went on there yeah so thank you well I'm going to just pipe in here for a moment because I think that one of the things that Brian is also pushing you on and it's something that I recognized as I was rereading the book is that you often you know you write about symptoms and you know symptoms are embodiments of something that's out of place right and that's out of whack and I think that there is a way in which the connection that Brian is really asking you to think about between these different traumas and the sort of anxieties around them and of course they're all coupled together because in the ways in which you've so beautifully described this you were looking for home and so you were looking for this you know a safe place a place where you wouldn't feel so uh maybe vulnerable and vulnerability can be a strength and I think that is actually a strength of your book is that you are fiercely vulnerable in this book and it's not out of weakness but out of strength but I think at the same time that those um symptoms the symptoms of the anxiety the you know the the the various embodiments of the discomfort um are bound together and I think the interplay between the sort of geopolitical and the personal that that movement back and forth because you are so invested right um because you took on Israel through camp through Hebrew through your study in such a way that it was you know deeply in a part of you and embodied in you and so I do think that that there is more to the symptomology which is not simply a repetition of the the family trauma but the sort of ongoingness because these things are interrelated in the story you tell and I really like your point about vulnerability which is a key um mode that I really try to engage in this book and actually um one of my proudest moments as a teacher as a prof was when I got a teaching evaluation back a comment in one of my teaching evaluations from one of my first year seminars many years ago and my student wrote she you know wonderful prof so I knew it was meant as a compliment because there was a context there wonderful prof she is so vulnerable she shows us her vulnerability and I was just I just you know clutch that teaching about in my heart I remember showing it to another prof can you remember who now and I said what do you think of this and they said I hope I never get anything like that right so people have different sort of modes and desires and ways of wanting to be um in front of the classroom but I think the key point is and I think this gets to what you what you were saying and really what I feel in the book it's a gentic vulnerability that sounds so jargony being an agency an agent of your own vulnerability versus um having vulnerability thrust on you so um I don't know if you I mean because this is I mean this is I'm really getting into your bread and butter here um but I think that maybe part of the distinction is that vulnerability can be a strength it's an openness it's an openness to complexity it's an openness to um to hearing others um to being present um and that's different than being um that than being fearful right um having fear is not the same as being vulnerable and I think that um this is a strength of yours and it's part of how you bring students into um the this this subject matter that you care so much about and you want them to understand that people care about this material deeply and profoundly and so you model that in the writing and I suspect in your classroom as well and have been since a young age clearly in the book because I mean there's like a there's a kerfuffle with a black an intended blackface performance at camp that Mira tries to disrupt and I mean it seems like you're the only person at the entire camp who sees that this is a potential problem which is I mean it's believable but it's it's upsetting but you're fearless and you're you're like it's like once you figure out what the truth is you don't mind the consequences but they burrow themselves inside you for later possibly and come out in unexpected ways and I feel like maybe we see those ways in in subsequent chapters and it's not necessarily tied to the event narratively but as an as a reader we experience them that way thank you for that observation yeah actually the melanoma diagnosis came three weeks after I called out the blackface um production and tried to get it stopped so there you go yeah so fear okay piled up on fearlessness and so some things come from outside and some things come from outside and we react to them I'm not yet one of those kinds of person people that says oh you can choose you can't choose what happens to you but you can choose how you react to it I'm not yet there like that'll be like my next self-help book like in 20 years I'm not there yet um well I think this is great I think I want to just ask you one other kind of question before we kind of shift our gears and talk some more about the thematics because I I'm seeing we have a lot of questions in the in the chat so I want us to be able to have time for them so the other question that I have for you Mira is that I you know I think that one of the things that this book does and this is something that you and I've discussed before is that in a way your um your experience in some ways marks um kind of a kind of a high point and maybe kind of an end of a certain kind of era of um a kind of self-evidence of a certain way of being a North American Jew who has a connection to Israel and has a kind of you know liberal left politics and that all of these things just made sense together in a particular way that it was you know this kind of affirming place this is part of what camp was about um and I guess I want you to talk a little bit about kind of what's shifted um from that time in which you were going to Hebrew camp um and also kind of um as a as a mother because you began with your children um and the kind of Jewish world in which you are you know kind of shaping with them and for them um can you talk a little bit about the role of Hebrew and how that might be connected and also different maybe for them than it was for you um in in thinking about these questions thank you yeah I mean I think you're right in that there is always a little bit of an end of an era to an extent after you know the a certain door closed behind me after I aged out of undergrad and that was partly was what was going on in Israel-Palestine so Oslo was the high point of I would say of optimism but not everyone was optimistic as I know in my book that Edward Said wasn't optimistic and many Palestinians felt that Oslo was sell out but among liberal Jews it was a high point of optimism to think that there was there were new possibilities that were more just and more peaceful than what had been and that was 1993 and that was right in the beginning of my fourth and final year of undergrad and I had just returned from the first of the three years in which I lived in Israel so we got and I I document this in the book that friends of mine and I gathered in the one apartment where the one friend of ours who owned a tv um it wasn't I talk about it wasn't cool to own a tv uh back in the really 90s at McGill for in my social circle that was sort of considered too bourgeois we only went to the rep repertory theaters but you know what the one person who owned a tv he was nominated for an Oscar a couple years ago so there you go he got the last laugh so Brian likes that because Brian I'm laughing because my parents bought me a tv when I got to NYU film school and I was so angry because he was so uncool to have a tv and I gave it back so yeah I related to that detail too that's hilarious yeah so it's Andrew Rosen who's a film producer and he was nominated for an Oscar and and um that was great so high point and but then we realized well the Palestinian and Arab students who we were in dialogue with and so this is the point of this high point of liberal progressive Zionism we thought we were we thought we had all the answers we were the Jews who were reaching out to the Arab and Muslim students and having dialogue groups we were the ones who were who were who were totally evolved holistic Zionist Jews and yet what happened when also was signed as I document in the book and this is excerpted in tablet magazine if anyone wants to read the excerpt from the the book the memoir the the students the Palestinian Arab and Muslim students um closed off dialogue and they said we can no longer continue our dialogue group with your progressive Zionist group because now that also has been signed it would in their view be tantamount to endorsing an agreement they didn't believe in so this was sort of our first political cold shower awareness that this was you know cold water being splashed on our on our liberal Zionist progressive Zionist party and you know since then progressive Zionists have been squeezed more and more from both sides and again what I do try to make clear especially my teaching and public engagement is that just because you're criticized from both sides doesn't mean you're right the center is not necessarily the golden mean um in politics it may be important aesthetically at different times but politics is not aesthetics and so I'm always still trying to question um my positions and sometimes they shift and so now and I don't try to give too many labels to my positions in the book because I don't want the book to be read as a political treatise but those who followed my work have seen that I've shifted somewhat away from um uh progressive Zionism more into a more critical vein that questions some of those assumptions let's just put it that way um and can you just can you just tell us a little bit more about the Hebrew because I think the Hebrew piece is also distinct in your story and I think for folks who may be less um um clued into some of this this this material and some of these stories um you know most North American Jews I shouldn't maybe say that but many North American Jews lots of North American Jews don't speak Hebrew they might be able to read Hebrew letters so that they can do this in a synagogue setting but Mira you really are talking about a kind of commitment to um to a language and a culture which certainly I grew up in the United States I'm a bit older than you um in a small town and I had that bad Hebrew and it took me a really long time to learn um the Hebrew that I have which isn't the most wonderful Hebrew um but you have this rich Hebrew legacy that is both a part of your relationship to your father um to your grandmother to your children um which in increasingly sounds to me like it's not completely bound to the state of Israel and if you could sort of talk about that I think that would be really great so I went to the only remaining Hebrew immersion camp in North America uh the camp is not named on purpose in the book so that it gave me more flexibility more latitude to either be sometimes critical of some things that went on there and other times and I would say the majority of times to be very effusive because it was overwhelmingly a positive experience and I didn't want it to read like an advertorial um and so I just leave the name out but it's well known what it's easily defined out what camp it was it's in uh Hebrew camp in Manitoba and Laura you're actually you're exactly right that I'm uh rare among North American Jews in my level of Hebrew knowledge but in Winnipeg a vibrant Jewish community at the time that had 20,000 Jews at the time out of 600,000 total people in the city so a large footprint of Jews and a very prominent cultural uh footprint the Jewish community made uh it was normal to have fluid Hebrew the there were three Jewish day schools and almost everyone um I can think of like hundreds of kids um attended Jewish day school where half the day was immersive Hebrew or actually there was one Jewish day school where half the day was immersive Yiddish so how's that for uh arcane and interesting and our camp was Hebrew immersion we spoke Hebrew all the time maybe it wasn't so good Hebrew it was simple Hebrew but it gave us the feeling for the language such that we could be fluid in a simple way and um and I made the decision when my kids were born to speak only Hebrew to them and I still do they're now 16 and 14 and part of my motivation was that I wanted them to be able to get good parts in the place if they went to Hebrew camp and so there was a bit of a selfish motivation and I wanted them to feel a little bit like they have something um that not everyone has I guess it was a little and and I you know feel a little bit like it does connect us to Israel and Israelis and I want them and I want myself to be able to feel engaged because if I want to make change over there um engagement and cult sensitive cultural engagement is the first most important way in and I think it's really important to be able to know I mean I would I would I wish my Arabic was stronger I wish I mean I did take two years of Arabic to university um problem with learning Arabic because it's bifurcated between written and writing and spoken so it's hard to find a course that does both so therefore my spoken Arabic is not good um I could used to be able to read newspapers and translate things about foreign ministers and peace summits um but that didn't get me very far with everyday conversations but um to have a cultural sensitivity um to a place enables one to enter into the mindset of a place and the people and really make advances great I think this is just really important for people to know and I do love that you want that the that the that the motivation and your initial motivation was performative because you loved performing at camp and you wanted your kids to be able to have a leg up on performing in Hebrew at camp and then later you talk about the political part of it too and the cultural part of it but I think that's really important and there is just something about this camp experience those of you who may have read the novel um the Yiddish policemen's um union uh which imagines a counter historical vision of there isn't a state of Israel but instead Jews go to this place in the north sort of Canada slash uh Alaska um and somehow see when I read those chapters and I said this to you and to Brian when I read those those chapters about camp you know that that here you were speaking Hebrew you know um in Canada you know and I just it just was so it it it it charmed me in some profound way that like that again that in some ways these cultural pieces are also mobile and that they they can be incredibly fruitful in different contexts so I'll kind of leave it at that and I think what I'd like to do is I'd like us to kind of shift gears a little bit um and um I'm gonna ask Mira to take a peek in the in the chat and just see if you if there's any here should I um answer a few questions in the chat and then move to theme and craft yes I think that would be great because we've got some going on and I think that would be terrific awesome um okay Yavuz is was one of my uh was a summer student who worked on a course with me that I'm teaching right now Netflix and politics so trying to help students um find politics under every stone and today we did stand up comedy it was powerful technique this morning thank you so much for taking the time um for a first time reader of my book are there any particular suggestions what lenses should we analyze the information you provide what questions should we ask ourselves when reading your book thank you so much well Yavuz the great thing about memoir is I've done all that work for you and so all I ask is that you get comfortable maybe make a cup of tea and just let yourself enter the story and really what memoir does that's so wonderful um and that's why I love reading memoir I mean I can't read enough of them I can't get enough good memoir so if anyone has more suggestions of new ones have that have come out that I may have missed um the great thing I talked about this last night at the Vancouver Jewish Book Festival those some of you may have been there too last night and my dad my father Max Sukharov was here tonight he was in conversation with me one thing I said to him that I would also say to you Yavuz is the great thing about memoir is um the author is very present and at the same time has gotten out of the way in other words the reader is inside um my head and looking out at the world with my eyes rather than looking at me showing them the world of course what I'm really doing is showing them the world but I'm trying to um simulate the idea of being inside myself and that's really what creative nonfiction does so please do I look forward to spearing your reactions when you read the book um but if you do want some things to think about for themes belonging search for home um diaspora Jewish engagement with Israel uh and Israel Palestine um emotional life and the making of an Israel Palestine scholar those would be the keywords if you were doing a library search uh Max Sukharov that's my dad to everyone um so when Brian was asking about invisible connection between Canadian personal trauma and the theme of my book can I read the very end of the panic chapter on page 145 sure um thank you for suggesting that just the last paragraph on the okay so when Laura was talking about the difference distinction between vulnerability and fear um the panic chapter is a very um tight little nugget of fear and it really brings the reader into fear and then you can see the difference between fear and vulnerability as you go through the book by contrasting the different modes the different emotional valences that are in that chapter versus the others I think that's useful um panic it is a wizard of threat it is a okay so so several years ago I got diagnosed with a shellfish allergy and I took it in stride and I made all the kosher jokes because those of you who aren't familiar with the Jewish dietary laws it's not kosher to eat shellfish anyway so it's like oh kush root is now my friend haha but as the months progressed and I started to realize sort of the gravity of this allergy and that I my life was in danger I got very panicky and I started to get panic attacks around eating and then as my dad explained who is a psychotherapist psychiatrist once panic attacks start they just start happening all sorts of times even if you're not eating and so this chapter is about coming to terms with the shellfish allergy and starting to cope with panic attacks okay panic it is a wizard of threat it is a sorcerer of terror and discomfort using the same tools sparkly stimulation and sensory showering that could bask a person in pleasure and delight if it only wanted to panic it's like being a child of divorce all over again as I try to pull the pieces together safety and danger reality and fear swimming between houses with different carpets between marriages and separations between my real home and my dad's home and the home away from home that is summer camp between the reality of the present and my nostalgia for the past between Israel as a lived reality and my image of the place between political polls between parts of my community and between my community and that of others as I try to locate a single coherent authentic narrative that is safe and secure and true and then my dad adds later a tough question has the book given me a single coherent authentic narrative that is safe and secure and true so I would like to chew on that question and come back to it at the end because that's a good question and a tough question so thank you dad for that and then Peter I think we've talked a bit about the difference Peter Larson between being vulnerable and being afraid and for me the difference is a gent is feeling agency and vulnerability as a mode of engagement and openness mindfulness to use one of the new vote terms and fear is none of those things fear is monkey mind and fear is feeling like one has no agency and I mean Laura has written a very very powerful book right now on trauma and post trauma coping and I wonder if Laura has any more thoughts on that well I just wanted to say that that passage that you read from panic was beautiful because in some ways it brings together the question that that Brian first asked you in that very passage in some ways you've always been shuttling between these places longing for home but never kind of finding it right it's you're always looking for the ideal one and it keeps saluting you and it's both the it's the parents houses it's camp and when you're not at camp it's Israel and it's Canada in that passage they're all there right and we see again the sort of intertwining of the sort of tensions that bring together the traumas the early traumas and then the later ones because the disappointment of the home that breaks right that that can sustain that you can't live at camp and you and and in some ways you can't live in Israel right this becomes like a site where that kind of tension is being played out over and over and I think that that passage does a beautiful job of kind of knitting together some of the dynamics and then in terms of trauma I just think that you know traumas don't go away they they're they're ever they're absorbed in and ever shifting present right and so you know sometimes again we can have very different kind of reactions to them so some of them can be more symptomatic and and problematic because there can be dangerous and and uncomfortable and frightening and in others they can be some of what we learn that makes it possible to imagine a different future and I think that one of the things that I love about what you've done is that in in describing your own experiences of of panic and and fear but also vulnerability that you are able to think about other people right and other people suffering and and and it opens up a space of of empathy right and this is something that I know really motivates Brian's work and so I think maybe what we could do now is kind of shift into this discussion about craft and so maybe Brian could get us started then I'll go to Mira and then I can kind of chime in but um I'm just thinking about what motivates your work and and this is kind of a perfect point from our discussions earlier Brian sure and yeah I like the empathy segue we while we had had a pre-discussion and we were talking about documentary versus narrative versus fiction and talking about historical historical fiction versus current present day film and and and to me I mean all all film is essentially the the same storytelling storytelling um in in terms of what I'm looking for in terms of editing though it's it's really an engagement with with characters and that's really empathy so if I try to boil it down to what am I what in my craft what I'm looking for it's really I mean I look at tons of footage during the day and a lot of it's very very similar to the footage that came before it but there'll be a spark of hopefully a spark of something in a character's eyes that will say this is this is engaging me with their emotional life and um I mean I don't know how many of you know intimately what the what film editing entails but you know you build scenes up for many many different shots many angles many um shot sizes and many different nuances of performance sometimes following the script sometimes not following the script and in documentaries it's a lot more it's a lot faster and more fluid um but I but often you don't build a scene from the beginning of the scene in the script to the end you find a piece of footage that um that that that grips you because of that empathy because you feel like this character is speaking to you in a very powerful way and sometimes it means starting starting knowing that you have to build towards something in the middle of a scene and then finding ways to to to segue from that to the end of the scene and build up from it from the beginning of the scene it's all about what what's the most um driving emotional moment when you look at that footage the footage the first time and try to try to organize it into hierarchy saying well this is this has this kind of engagement but this has this kind of shot designer size and you know it's really about the puzzle of of of making a hierarchy of those of those feelings and uh and then try to put it together but really empathy is what it boils down to and um that's what makes it like many other art forms and yet it's different in the sense that it's so um the the mosaic aspect of it is is is probably a little bit different Mira I think that's a really good place for you to talk a little bit about again I'm thinking about Brian talking about the interplay of your narrative that you move back and forth from the intimate to the political and it does right lend itself to a kind of cutting mm-hmm so two ways that I do that one is in how I ordered the chapters and so what I did was because the chapters are sometimes quite distinct and they and and because I cover so much of my life like from when I was three and a half till when I was 45 and a half um I um wanted to make it keep it interesting for the reader I keep it meaningful and keep the narrative front and center and narratives are often not chronological and nor are they always chronological in film is there I wonder if there's a rough estimate if we need the data on how many films run chronologically versus not but we can think about that and so I or tv shows so I oh I'm watching this is us right now ah there is a great example this is us there is your one this emotional manipulation show for the week and it's very deliberate in its flashbacks and present but I wanted to um take the reader alternate them between um adulthood and childhood until the points converge so that's how I ordered the chapters and within the chapters I do a lot of layering um I don't do as much of that well I don't okay so when I'm a young child I don't do any layering because there's not much behind me but as I'm older I start layering backwards and sometimes even forwards and then I'll literally switch to the future tense and I actually got that technique from the last page of Cheryl Strait's wild where she goes into the future tense and as my writing I have a couple of wonderful writing mentors one of them is Shulam Dean one of them is Alison Pick and Shulam Dean recommended Wilde to me and noted that it is one of the most under appreciated memoirs and I think he was right because it's a very strong it's a very strong book despite the Hollywood um what's the word uh fame that it got or in addition to the Hollywood fame that it got so I try to layer them and then dad you asked me a question about this last night and here's the answer I wish I'd given because I had a day to think about it about that layering and so the layering is about bringing uh being in the current moment and anchoring the scene in the current moment for the reader but then um bringing up a memory from the past to the present the present it isn't necessarily 2021 right the present is whenever I'm writing I might the present might be a scene in 1993 that's the present but I want to remind I'm thinking in 1993 as a 21 year old about something that happened when I was 14 so the point is it's not in my dad dad you asked me last night did I was I remembering that as I was writing that chapter so the point is I don't know I don't remember but the point is you don't write you don't actually write stream of consciousness you just get the reader to think that's what you were doing right so it's all very deliberate so that the reader is feeling like you are now remembering that but you're you're doing it on purpose because if you just wrote um stream of consciousness and everything was put together the way you actually thought about it at the time you would get the reaction that I got when my writing mentor read my first draft and I won't give you that reaction now quote it because um author meets reader at faculty public affairs never has swear words in it I love that you just did that because I think that one of the things about um about writing and um you know is is really craft and you know that you have to write and rewrite and rewrite and um it seems effortless especially when a book is kind of you know small and concise and has these lovely little chapters and you just think oh isn't that just great but usually the shorter books are the ones that are um more crafted and take longer to write than just writing a big fat book um uh so I I I wanted to just talk a little bit more about that with you um because I know that for me in a somewhat different way um I and I wasn't trying to write memoir in the same way that you are obviously using the genre here quite effectively but um I also found that there were ways in which I think kind of um in I have a kind of associative way of thinking about the world and so I make connections that are kind of odd and so um I I had to figure out a way to bring the reader in so I talk a lot about process and I kind of make the book a kind of companionship where I I try to in my in the objects that remain the book that I just wrote um that I just published I I kind of brings right I bring readers into the process of writing and some of my my efforts to do that but one of the things that um that that I had to really struggle with is I I remember there was one chapter in my editor said to me you need to change the order of this and of course the order was the the way that I had to synchronically put things together and it made perfect sense to me and he just said no a reader is not going to understand this so I had to change the order around and in the process of doing that you know then things that don't make any sense because they were they they came later in or earlier in the earlier rendition um this is like the cutting and pasting work that I think Brian is talking about where it's like oh and then you need somebody else to look at it because you just mush them all together in your heads you need someone else to be able to say oh no they're not in the right order like I why are you talking about this here and I had to literally give it to a friend and say will you just read this chapter and tell me why this doesn't work but you know when film is great you can make association you can cut between things that don't make narrative that are not narratively coherent but if the craft if something about the shot design or the color or the color palette or the shot size or the camera movement or the music is is is emotionally coherent then the the incoherence of the story will suture itself and you'll go with it and that's the magic of film editing is that you I mean that's my favorite kind of filmmaking impressionistic but where the craft is pulling you through you don't even know necessarily where and it's good because you don't really want to know where the story is going because you want to be surprised so if you can make associations that are that are outside of the box but pull the audience forward with the other elements of cinema then I think that's the better you know that's the greatest way to build film if you can't it's hard incoherence can be great and I think that does also happen in writing it we don't have the we don't have all of the the different dimensions so we don't have the sound and we don't have the color and we don't have those elements but we have you know ways of structuring narrative that can that can do some of that work but but it is a kind of a labored activity and I think that that's part of what we wanted to talk about and crap and I guess I want to just come back to Mira to just talk a little bit about the difference between the writing that you've done so successfully as a scholar and a public intellectual and you know where you're really doing it you're really making arguments and and and this kind of writing because I think this is just a shift from your in your voice right we we're getting a whole different dimension of you and if you could just talk about that that tension and kind of where you are going to take it from here too so really important part of the learning process for me was shifting from expository voice where I'm making arguments very explicitly particularly in my op-ed writing and my prescriptive mode of writing prescriptive mode meaning so started out like most academics in explanatory mode why did event happen why did event X happen the way it did here's some possible reasons here's my explanation later on as a scholar more recently I shifted into prescriptive mode how should the world be and that came out that comes out most explicitly in my op-eds and in op-eds what you really have to do is you have to you have to hit the reader over the head with your arguments because the whole point is to anticipate your critics and articulate the argument that your critic has or might make and the strongest version of it not the strawman version of it and then rebut it so it's it's like classic debating style and it's very explicitly expository and argumentative a memoir can't do that at all and that helps explain the swearing that my mentor did initially because he really explained it to me this way you have to trust your reader and you can't trust your reader when you're writing op-eds because you have to always be anticipating your critics and you're trying to persuade people of taking action on a certain political act that they may not have wanted to do so you don't trust anyone right it's like in making a case in a law court you don't just say well I trust the jury that they'll just feel me and they'll relate to you right in a memoir I'm not trying to persuade anyone to take action I'm trying to get them to examine their own political and social life and model that vulnerability for them now in the end I hope there are lessons they will learn but they have to be done much more subtly and I'll just give you a literal example of something that had to go when I was talking about sort of racist racist songs that we sang at Hebrew summer camp in the 80s I had a line in there we never asked we never thought about those racist songs no we didn't I'm kind of parodying myself or something but it was so over the top you can take all that out in the memoir let the story tell itself okay so that's one thing you really you really have to do and of course also in filmmaking um and your oh yeah so I really had to learn a new genre and I've really appreciated learning the genre and shifting it and I'll go back and forth to other types of writing too so I just published an op-ed with my co-author Bernie Farber we write a lot together on the plight of Hassan Diab and that's a case going on right now in Canada about potential extradition to France and that's very expository and we're you know making our case in a very obvious way that said um one thing I will continue to do in my op-ed writing that is inspired by my memoir but didn't just begin with my memoir is sometimes bring my own vulnerability amount of subjectivity to bear so in other words I will import some of the creative non-fiction elements back into my expository writing and I encourage my students to do that and an example of when I did that was after the Pittsburgh massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue and I wrote a piece for the Globe and Mail and there I wrote not only as a scholar who was analyzing the dynamics of antisemitism in the US and by extension Canada but as a Jew and I was very clear that I was writing it as a Jew and I made my emotional context very obvious in that piece and they sort of toggled between expository and subjective and one can do that once one has learned all the styles then you can sort of start to make your own pastiche as we know. It's interesting though because you could be more persuasive it writing a memoir more politically persuasive writing a memoir than you might be writing an op-ed. I mean for instance like your character Mira is modeling that a love of modern Hebrew does not have to be a colonial endeavor or a nationalistic endeavor it could be just love of language. Now that's complicated but I feel that way but that's actually very it's a difficult thing to tease out in this current climate and you do it not by saying well you know languages or languages and they're neutral because they're not neutral there's tons of implicit biases in modern Hebrew about conquering Palestine but you're showing the love through memory through nostalgia through culture and that that's an emotional connection that you feel as an audience member when you're not being told it in an essay form or an op-ed form and I find that really fascinating that you could that it could it could be more powerful that way you know. And that I'm glad you brought that up because I wanted to ask you about it because my dad had written a question on Hebrew how can we separate the love of Hebrew from its nationalistic connotations and that is something Brian you and I talk a lot about and we also talk a lot about cultural honoring in possible new scenarios of Israel Palestine new political possibilities where culture would be dual cultures would be elevated rather than erased and Arabic would be elevated alongside Hebrew which would be elevated and I mean you worked on an Israeli film which I love and I want to plug for everyone it is a wonderful you know what Richard Geer gets the Mench of the Year award for this film he went nerd nebish. This is a film called Norman by the way. The film was called Norman and he went opposite the Israeli my favorite Israeli heartthrob like is that took a lot of guts right to to not be the heartthrob to take on a role where he's the nerd to be the nebish yeah you know he wants to he wants he wants great parts so not so much it's not that great okay he was very good at it but very good at it he's played plenty of heartthrobes okay yeah exactly that he knows that he needs more of that so that's a wonderful character that Brian edited and it also has an allergy scene that I had to I had to message Brian for the movies on pause I don't know if I can watch the rest of the scene can you let me know like trigger warning and you let me know what I could or couldn't watch so no spoilers remember that was oh god that was okay so Hebrew yes I don't view I view Hebrew as an important cultural touchstone and that there is a possibility of elevated cultures and new reimagined Israel Palestine Christine wants to know how my own children were involved in the writing process yeah I definitely cleared this one or two scenes where my daughter is involved I cleared it with her and it was very important for me that nothing about my children would be in any way humiliating or mocking and she was reassured and I wouldn't do that really any way to other characters because I don't think that that really does much artistic or political work so really I'm the one being critiqued mostly in the book except for a few a few other instances and in this case she didn't mind because I was the I end up being quite self critical in that scene which takes place at Jewish summer camp at her Jewish summer camp so it was important for me to put it in there were some other things I could have put in that were interesting moments where I met some of her other Jewish youth group colleagues and perhaps overstepped with my political utterances and that didn't go over so well but I I was able to leave those out and just use some other things and I but and they've read little bits of it they started coming to my book talks and I have a spin-off piece in Haaretz the Israeli newspaper about what happened after chapter two when I learned I have a a brother who's been given up for adoption I'm seven and he had been given up eight years earlier what happened 20 years later when I met him and that's a spin-off piece in Haaretz so my daughter's read that my son promises he'll read it and but she can feel you know they can feel the emotional tension in the book even if it's not a chapter that's particularly traumatic and I don't know if they necessarily want to go there yet but they'll find it in their own way um and actually the person who warned me the most oh am I allowed to name drop and Brian and Laura will like this there is one person I talked to who was um right when the memoir was going to be submitted um before it was going to press and she said be very careful about your children like really protect them and that was Dr Ruth Westheimer and I trust her with um those kinds of instincts about love and protection so I was quite careful um expository forms cannot be separated from our subjectivity there can be a view where we always speak from things like yeah of course we subjectivity and objectivity are always melded and merged and I encourage my students to draw on that I guess I just want I want people to be aware of their subjectivity and that's also why I don't use the word bias you'll really never hear me use the word bias ever because I find it it sets up um a dichotomy between our own subjective experience and the way we experience the world and I so for that reason yeah good were there um go okay Laura okay no I think this is great and um I'm so glad that people are um are in the chat and that we're able to kind of move back and forth because we wanted this to be more of a conversation so I'm I think um uh I want to go back to Brian because Brian we talked about you know this question about the past and the past and the present and you talked a little bit about nostalgia and I and I wanted you to come back to that and um and talk about some of that and um yeah let's let's go there well it was generated by I was listening to a podcast about Annie Hall Woody Allen's in the news a lot again Emmy Affair lately because of the HBO movie um and it was about Annie I mean that's beside the point but it was about the idea of of of you know the past is living a representation of the past is not is not neutral it's it's it's it's it's an impression based on where you are in the present and um I what they were saying was that um by by at least in Annie Hall the way that nostalgia functions is that is that it makes that relationship in the in that film um meaningful in the present to him thinking back on it even though in the moment the actual moments were not charged with the same kind of um sensitivity and explosiveness that they are in retrospect and packaging it as nostalgia makes makes makes that character I mean for better or worse say that was an important part of my life and I'm honoring it by by thinking of it nostalgically and I thought about that a lot reading your book mirror because I feel like um you're valid you're validating in a way that summer camp experience by thinking of it nostalgically you're saying that Hebrew means something to you now in the present lots of people go to Hebrew or maybe not immersion camp but a lot of people go to Jewish summer camp or go to Hebrew school and don't have nostalgia they have trauma or or hatred of of of those experiences but you have nostalgia and I wonder how does that what what is it about mirror in the present that needs to see those experiences with nostalgia it to me it's it's validating and it's saying that that Hebrew is part of my life now it's as much as it was then because um you're you're charting a a path where it where it's meaningful and actually generative for your future as well so I just think that nostalgia gets a really bad rap and I think it's unfairly maligned often and it gets a bad rap because it's often considered with politically retrograde or reactionary policies and outlook xenophobic outlooks and I have really been really deeply interested in nostalgia so interested that on the call when Laura was mentoring me by the way this thing about mentoring most of Laura's mentees are young scholars just starting out I'm no longer a young scholar but I said to Laura can I get in there too and when I say mentor like this completely informal friend relationship of mentoring there's nothing formal here um there was nothing for but can I get in there too I see all these young scholars just bursting with possibility potential I want to still burst with possibility potential and one of the things I told Laura on that phone call was that I had had a book manuscript under contract with the university press on the topic of nostalgia and political change and it never got published and it was sort of the low point and I really think it's really important for academics to talk about and failure isn't the right word because it was a low point wasn't a failure failure implies binary they gave me the opportunity to revise it but it would have involved heavy revisions I didn't feel I had it in me and I lost my confidence so was it was a low point but not necessarily failure just it didn't get published I did get an article out of it which is in a journal um on nostalgia and Canadian immigration policy and so the kernel of the idea was there and what I was really trying to do in that book was harness the idea of what I called ironic nostalgia it's a little bit following spetlana's blooms um uh what does she call it reflex uh reflective nostalgia yeah and yeah and I was trying to say that if nostalgia is done carefully it can help us engage with our collective past and I was looking at collective groups of Jewish communities or Canadian settler communities in it done carefully it can help us say goodbye to what we perceived was a simpler past quote unquote of course that's no such thing objectively but that's how we experienced the past and then open ourselves to a to a new future open ourselves to political change so it was really grounded in political psychology and collective psychology and social dynamics and I'm I'm for me nostalgia nostalgia can be painful obviously that's me it's a bitter sweet longing for the past and it can be hard for me personally to live in such a nostalgic frame but I do try to say what can I do with that what can I do without love for Jewish summer cap in Hebrew what can I do with that love of singing the song about longing for the Sinai we were 10 years old singing a song written when Israel has won the Sinai Peninsula that's called a Shalom Shev and it's longing for that but that I mean it didn't really make sense I mean by that time Israel had signed a peace agreement with Egypt it was about to give the Sinai back to Egypt and there we are singing almost this hypernationalist territorially expansionist song about Shalom Shev but it was so beautiful and the harmonies were so good I mean I write about this in the book and there was a dirty version in Hebrew of course and so what can I do with this well what what I can do is go travel to Shalom Shev which I have and learn Arabic which I do and think about new possibilities and fortunately the Israel-Egypt piece is holding but so now I can think about new possibilities with the Israelis and Palestinians. I think that that's really helpful and and hard because again the the the ideas around nostalgia I keep I keep thinking about the I love that Boehm talks about the future of nostalgia and it's not so universal I have a student who's working on Iraqi Jewish memory and the ways in which nostalgia doesn't work because you know it's not about diasporic existence they were there for all you know for centuries on end right and so and the break was you know when they had to leave in the 50s to go to Israel and then her grandmother lived in a tent and so it was this loss of not you know it wasn't longing for home they were at home so we've been I spent a lot of time with the student thinking about that question this last couple of months as she's thinking about going to graduate school actually just gone into graduate program and and this has been a real a real question but I think in in my own work you know I I pick up on something else in Boehm in this book called the future of nostalgia and so she she talks about diasporic intimacy and she talks about what happens when you've lost everything and I mean really traumatic loss so that can be you know exile which was a part of her story she was a Russian Jew and and but it can also be trauma and violence and and when you've lost everything there's this possibility that you can make a connection to someone else who's also lost something and that there can be moments of tenderness that and that's the surprise the surprise of tenderness when you've lost everything and I I feel like that's that's a piece of it's not as overt in your narrative but I do think that that is some of the ways in which you connect to the Palestinian question I you know and it's most poignant and it does mean losing you've it has to do with losing you know the the that song and its pleasures right it has to do with both understanding how much you love that and then you don't have it anymore so I just wanted to kind of put that out there as a part of the the conversation as well so there's layers of loss and in terms of reaching out to Palestinians and the feeling of shared loss shared connection shared trauma it also has to be done properly and there's a scene in the book where I think it isn't necessarily done properly on my part but I don't necessarily reflect on that as much in the book but it came out last night in my conversation with my dad where I'm with my friend Odette Levinheim who's a wonderful scholar prof of international relations at Hebrew University he's Israeli Israeli Jew and he wrote a wonderful book about his daily mountain bike commute to Hebrew U campus from his home in Mavisera see on a summer book Jerusalem and what he finds along the way every day what he finds inside himself what he finds about the history etched into the place and he took me on the root and we did it together and we talked about it and while we were at one of the sites that he chronicles Lyft is a Palestinian village that is now part of Jerusalem we bumped into we encountered two kind of big words we encountered two young Palestinians maybe they were in their early 20s and we started engaging in conversation with them in Hebrew which was our common language that we had with them what are you doing what are you up to hi you know how are you and they said we're visiting our town we're from here of course we did some mental calculations I think it would have been his grandmother or great grandmother that would have been from there I tried to figure out the age group how does it feel to be back we said well they said what's what's done is done the past is the past we didn't buy it right we didn't think they really necessarily believed that but that's fine and then I started thinking even last night when my dad was asking about it I started thinking you know that wasn't necessarily totally cool like they don't owe us a big political exposition it's like we didn't we hadn't established any trust with them and it wasn't something that I was necessarily aware of because at the time it took me many years this was 10 oh 10 years ago because I was hungry for knowledge I was curious and I'm a nice open person but these are things we have to sort of think through a little more carefully if we're going to do the work it's sort of the mirror image of the scene where you talk to the swimming instructor the camp where it's a scene where you it's your daughter your daughter's swimming instructor and he's Israeli please please sailing of course um and you want to he's Israeli so you want to speak to him in Hebrew and engage him in culture or politics and he's you know he's a teenager he doesn't he's you're the parent like he's not super engaged and I'm wondering like what like I mean I so relate to the obsequiousness of North American Jews and talking to Israelis as if they have the upper hand and you're the less powerful player because we're in the diaspora and it's so embarrassing and I I mean it made me cringe when I read that but I related to it and I thought why do we need to prove that we're stakeholders in in no in having knowledge about Israel in in in understanding this conflict or the culture it's um it's a problem and I think that you don't um I don't know if you addressed that specifically but you you engage with the issues by illustrating scenes yeah I know I do I'm mentioning that a little bit but but the one difference between what I do mention that sort of a mea kalpa and he doesn't really care and why should he care and why should he care that I'm a columnist and how are at some why should he care that I just got back from a breaking the silence tour and I do I'm or even know what it is yeah exactly I am a bit obviously self-deprecatory in that scene as I'm relaying it to the to the reader but one difference is you said we feel I don't disagree with disagree with you but I I do have a little bit of a different positionality you said we have to prove that we're stakeholders I feel I am a stakeholder but maybe I'm not right and maybe that's really the we don't live there I mean this is I mean we're really we're really not I mean well we can argue about it but yeah well that's the question why do we need why do we want to why are we first brainwashed to feel that we should be or are and then how do we engage with that education and deal with it as adults it's hard that will be the subject of my next book yeah how to talk about Zionism and trying to really get at the emotional attachment that we do many of us do feel but then what does that mean for really thinking about governance structures over there but yeah I mean these are wow we're in questions yeah and I just want to come back around because this is kind of where we began and I think that there is this other question like are the two of you who are somewhat younger than I am um quite a bit younger than I am uh are you kind of the last of a generation of um dare I call them liberal Jews left-leaning Jews who have had this love with love of Israel right um I think some one of the people in the chat you know pointed out that passage about your love affair right um you're broken heart the whole the whole the whole sense of that love because I've often thought well you know in order to in order to be critical you have to have you know you have to own the love that you had because I think some of the anger that some folks have is about the betrayal of that and so then they get very very um self-righteous and arrogant in in in expressing their anger but the anger is really motivated by this sort of loss of the love um but then you know I think about so many of my students now um younger generation of certainly American and maybe Canadians slightly different but um who have not grown up loving this place or for whom it has not been a central piece of their experience and I think that this is another piece of the sort of audience I think for the book maybe that you're going to write next but I think this book is a window into um a moment which might be really quite foreign for for many of the students we teach now who didn't grow up with that kind of self-evidence certainly like I could say at Temple University where I teach most of my students if you know many of them will go on birthright because they've never been out of the country and it's a free trip and you know and certainly you know who am I to stop them from I mean I think it's it's an important thing for them to go but um even if I'm critical of that of that format of many of those trips but um but they don't have the kind of camp experience um they're they're not a camp remau or even at like the nifty camps I just you know there are these Jewish youth movements in North America that that that do have all these Israeli you know uh folks who are on the camp staff etc it's becomes a part of that experience and this is just different so I think I'm going to ask you to answer that question and we'll kind of have to wrap it up I'm just noticing we have three minutes yes well I think the big question so exactly a year after me no so birthright used to be only open to age 26 for a long time they've extended it a bit so let's say ages 18 to 26 for most of the time I was 27 when birthright was created and I was living in Israel if my husband was stringing doing some freelance journalism work and he even wrote a piece about the first birthright trip remember so that was a important moment um so after my generation is the birthright generation and that is yes these quick hit trips a free 10-day trip to Israel free 10-day trip to Israel with the hope of the aim of creating love for Israel creating Jewish philanthropists and creating Jews marrying Jews and having Jewish babies right that's so there's a there's a lot of scholarly literature on this and the goals of it and identity creation and identity maintenance so I guess the question is what will the birthright generation look like when they're when they're or what are they looking like and I think this is what we need to to look at yeah and also the ones who who aren't going to go who have decided for political for their own political reasons that they're not going to go and they define themselves as Jewish because they um you know they they go and they do chuvah in the front of an ice um detention place you know about services there this is the kind of thing that I'm seeing now many of my students are engaged in and they're really not engaged in Israel in Israel they're really you know finding other ways of imagining so I really I'm I'm cognizant of the time and I wanted to just ask Mira if you would just maybe um let us give us a few words to conclude and thank you all so much for this very rich conversation there are just I can't I won't really conclude with a statement I'll just conclude with reminding us of a few of the unanswered questions that just sort of emerged and one of them was whether and to what degree Canadian Jews feel themselves as stakeholders and whether they morally or ethically are and if there would even be a way to adjudicate that question and um and then well to ask for Palestinians form a little bit of a different um community because I'm talking about Jews who are not Israelis versus Palestinians who did come from Palestine although Jews who aren't Israelis may have hailed from ancient Israel many many many years ago so there's some complexities there the other question is whether um by the end of a memoir by the end of the craft of writing a memoir one lands at some more emotional and political certainty and whether after one reads a memoir and does the implicit work of examining oneself whether that helps someone come to more certainty and even if there is such a thing as as as having that sort of political certainty whether that's even a desirable thing so I guess I'll end with questions because what profs love more than answers is questions because we want to think of questions and send other people off to do the work to answer them and I really appreciate everyone's questions and I so appreciate Laura and Brian's um discussion and insights and observations that we have so much more to talk about and one thing that Brian and I um need to do when the pandemic ends is the one of the last things on my calendar before the pandemic or at the beginning of pandemic one of the last things on my calendar that was canceled was tickets for Brian and his husband Jonathan a fellow Canadian and me to go see my favorite musical as a child because the Jewish high school put it on when I was 10 and for then on I was absolutely smitten we had tickets right down the street from Jonathan and Brian's home in New York to see so we're going to see West Side Story next time aren't we and company and Caroline are changed yes good thank you everyone I really happy forum to those who celebrate yes happy for a drink holiday tonight and thank you Stephanie and Mary for hosting in the faculty public affairs and my colleagues at Carleton thank you so much Mira thanks Laura Brian have a good night everybody good night