Everybody knows from bagels and lox and Groucho Marx, Woodie Alan and Fiddler on the Roof. There's so much more to us than that - especially important to Israel, the Mizrachi and Sephardic culture. These are the people of the Middle East and the Mediterranean, who suffered terribly during WWII and were expelled from their homes after 1948. Hundreds of thousands came to the new world but the majority settled in Israel, often in tent cities on the open plain.
But more, the resurrection of the Hebrew language, asleep for nearly 2000 years, alive now in Israel.
I give you two poems, by the great Yehuda Amichai - born Germany
1924, emigrated to Mandate Palestine, fought in 4 wars, died in 2000.
Jerusalem, 1967 (poem 5)
Yehuda Amichai
On Yom Kippur 5728, I donned
Dark holiday clothing and walked to Jerusalem's Old City.
I stood for quite a while in front of the kiosk shop of an Arab,
Not far from Shchem (Nablus) Gate, a shop
full of buttons, zippers and spools of thread
Of every color; and snaps and buckles.
Brightly lit and many colored like the open Holy Ark.
I said to him in my heart that my father too
Owned a shop just like this of buttons and thread.
I explained to him in my heart about all the decades
And the reasons and the events leading me to be here now
While my father's shop burned there and he is buried here.
When I concluded it was the hour of N'eilah ("locking the gates").
He too drew down the shutters and locked the gate
As I returned homeward with all the other worshippers.
--from Achshav B' Ra'ash ("Now, Noisily") (Schocken, 1975), page 11-12
translation by Richard Silverstein
http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2004/05/jerusalem_1967_.htmlWildpeace
Not the peace of a cease-fire
not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,
but rather
as in the heart when the excitement is over
and you can talk only about a great weariness.
I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult.
And my son plays with a toy gun that knows
how to open and close its eyes and say Mama.
A peace
without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,
without words, without
the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be
light, floating, like lazy white foam.
A little rest for the wounds - who speaks of healing?
(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation
to the next, as in a relay race:
the baton never falls.)
Let it come
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace.
Amichai read this poem at the 1994 awards ceremony in Oslo when Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres received the Nobel Peace Prize together with Yasser Arafat.
http://www.jrf.org/edu/israel2002-study-poetry-amichai.html