Brave New World : Students Use Cultural-Exchange Trip to Israel to Help Shatter Stereotypes

Hollywood High School student Paul McDonald learned a lot on his cultural-exchange trip to Israel--starting with an eye-opening exchange of stereotypes.

“We were standing on a corner in Jerusalem, and this Israeli girl asked us if we were from New York,” said Paul, one of nine Latino and African American high school students from Los Angeles to take part in the trip, which ended last week. “Then she asked if we were gangsters. I guess she got that from what she sees on television.”

For his part, he says, he was surprised to see that Jews “came in all shapes and colors. There were Asian, Pacific Islander, African and Mexican Jews in Israel . . . I thought all Jews were just rich white people.”

The roster for the eight-day trip consisted of one student from Hollywood High, Crenshaw High and seven other Los Angeles schools. Organized and sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League, the excursion included visits to schools, a kibbutz and cultural centers.

Students were selected for the trip by Anti-Defamation officials after being nominated by teachers at their schools and submitting essays on why they wanted to take part.

Anti-Defamation League member Bill Lambert, who organized fund-raisers to finance the trip, came up with the idea a few years ago as he was watching news reports on the exodus of Ethiopian Jews to Israel.

“My wife and I were interested in seeing if we could bring about better relations between African Americans and Jews,” said Lambert, who works as a lobbyist for United Teachers Los Angeles.

In 1992, he went to Marjorie Green, an education official with the Anti-Defamation League, and helped organize a visit to Los Angeles that year by a group of Ethiopian Jews whose families had emigrated to Israel. A second group of Ethiopian Jews spent a week in Los Angeles last November, attending classes at Los Angeles high schools and living with American families.

On this month’s trip to Israel, the Los Angeles students attended classes with Israeli teen-agers, spent a night in Bedouin tents, got a taste of communal life on a kibbutz and visited the Ethiopian Jews who journeyed to Los Angeles last November.

“These kids from Los Angeles and the Ethiopian kids have both experienced discrimination,” said Aviva Kadosh of the Anti-Defamation League.

The purpose of the program, said Kadosh, was to show American students of color that the Jewish experience is similar to their own.

Lyndasha Dukes, 16, said she was struck by the pride Israelis take in their religion, their country and their work.

“I was impressed by how they wanted to go to the Army,” said the Crenshaw High School student. All Israeli youth, before attending college, must serve in the Army for a year. “For them, it’s a sign of maturity.”

The students stayed with a group of nomadic Bedouins in a desert region north of Tel Aviv. “The tent was OK, but I’m not used to being close to nature and all those bugs,” said Lyndasha.

The sexism of the Bedouin culture, said the girls, was shocking. “The men marry four women, “ said Lillian Miranda, a junior at the Downtown Business Magnet in Los Angeles.

“The Bedouin leader said a woman is ‘like a car. If one gets sick, you get a new one,’ ” she said. “I was so disappointed. And when I asked if a woman can marry more than one husband, he said he was insulted by that question.”

Lillian said that for her, the highlights of the trip included a camel ride, a visit to the Jordan River and spotting a Ben and Jerry’s ice cream parlor near the Zion Hotel in Jerusalem. But by far the most moving experience, she said, was a tour of the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem.

“It was really big, five floors. In the memorial for the children who died in the Holocaust, there were only six lit candles in a dark room, but they were reflected in a lot of mirrors, so it looked like thousands and thousands of candles,” she said.

“And as we walked around, a man read the names of the children, and how old they were when they died,” she said. “I wanted to cry when I heard their names.”

The students said they noticed some similarities between Tel Aviv and Los Angeles.

“Even in the Jewish homeland, I saw that the Russian Jews didn’t accept the Ethiopian Jews, and vice versa,” said Paul, after visiting a center that houses recently immigrated Ethiopian and Russian Jews.

“Just talking to people on the street, immigrants, I got the uncensored viewpoint that Israel isn’t this perfect utopia,” he said.

At Israeli schools, the American students discussed everything from course work to Arab-Israeli tensions. In the process, they encountered some of the subtleties in a country that, for some of them, seemed a distant war-torn land.

“We talked about the problems of the Arabs and Israelis at one school,” said Paul. He recalled that one of the students, a Jewish girl, pointed to another, an Arab boy, and said: “This is my friend. I don’t see him as an Arab. He’s my friend.”