Sex, Drugs & Gefilte Fish

by Shana Liebman

  I looked around—no water anywhere. This was very un-Gershon.

  “This cave is where Jewish women in hiding gave each other mikvahs,” he said. “I thought you two could give each other mikvahs too.” I looked around again for a sign of water. How on earth could we give each other baths if there was no water? But Gershon wasn’t done. “I want you to do it with this,” he said, and pulled a giant bottle of olive oil out of his backpack.

  How lucky that on the day we went deep underground, into the dry earth, Gershon had thought to pack a four-gallon jug of oil. In a flash, Erin and I were wearing nothing but our miner’s headlamps, and she was drizzling oil over my shoulders and neck. “Don’t forget her back,” Gershon coached from the corner, also naked even though he wasn’t getting a bath. “Get her chest too,” he encouraged as he reached into his bag again, this time pulling out a camera. “Good, good. That’s great. Just like that. Perfect.” And, “just like that,” the whole thing turned into a hot, holy photo shoot.

  Several hours and two greasy mikvahs later, we felt cleansed, happy and oh-so-very Jewish. We drove back to the kibbutz, proud of ourselves, and a few days later Erin and I got on planes destined for Buffalo and Toronto. We promised to keep in touch but we never spoke again. I’ve never told anyone about my summer with Gershon. For a long time, I thought I was keeping it a secret because these memories were so treasured and personal. I now realize that I didn’t tell anyone out of shame.

  But I’m no longer in denial. I know now that what I thought was a beautiful, earthy summer where I discovered my Jewishness and accepted my naked body in the Holy Land was actually nothing but a kinky joyride for a middle-aged man. It wasn’t life-altering, it was just plain weird. And I have the pictures to prove it.

  The Mossad Bought Me Nachos and a Sprite

  By Joey Garfield

  AS A YOUNG KID GROWING UP in Chicago, I spent my summers at Habonim Camp Tavor. The camp was affiliated with an Israeli socialist kind of Zionist movement called Habonim or Habonim Dror, and its philosophy was based on the ideals of Israel’s early kibbutznik pioneers. Everyone at camp was required to do manual labor, and the summers were joyfully spent working and educating one another about Israeli culture and ideology. I loved this camp so much that I was a chanich (camper) for many years and transitioned over to be a madrich (counselor) for many years after that. I participated in every level of the movement well into my 20s, spending a year in Israel on a kibbutz with an affiliated program. Habonim Camp Tavor was the best camp experience ever.

  And then I went to film school in Chicago and wasn’t even thinking about Habonim or Israel or anything Jewish when I received a phone call from this Israeli gentleman whose hummus-thick accent was filled with long, drawn-out “eh”s.

  “Hello… ehhhh may I ehhhhh speak with ehhh Joey Garfield?”

  “Speaking,” I say.

  “Yes, Joey, did you ehhhh participate with ehhhhhhh Habonim Camp Tavor from the years ehhhh 1980 to 1989?”

  “Yeah. Who is this?”

  “My name is ehhh Shlomo and I received your name from your Sheliach [an Israeli Emissary affiliated with the camp]. I would like to meet with you to speak about a very important matter concerning the safety of Israel. Is there a time on ehhhhhh Friday that I could ehhh meet with you and we can talk?”

  And then I start to think that this must be a secret new level to my Jewish youth movement. You start off your mission as a camper, then you become a counselor, then you go on kibbutz and then there is this… call to duty. How exciting!

  I answer Shlomo with an honorable, “Yes, I will meet you.”

  “Good. Where should we ehh meet?”

  “How about the Sears Tower.” He agrees and then asks what I’ll be wearing in order for him to identify me in a crowd. I tell him I will be wearing a blue jean jacket and a red Chicago Bulls baseball cap. Then I flip it on him and ask him what he will be wearing so I can pick him out in a crowd.

  “That is not important right now, Joey. See you Friday at ehhhhhhh noon. Yallah, bye.”

  I have five days until Friday and I realize that perhaps I made a mistake. “Was this for real?” I ask myself. “Am I the stupidest guy ever? Maybe Shlomo is actually a counterterrorist whose mission it is to take out all the hippie socialist Jews one Birkenstock at a time!”

  Friday arrives and in an effort to be all James Bond on Shlomo I arrive at the Sears Tower half an hour early to find him before he can find me. I stand by the food court watching everyone pass by, and you know what? When you are paranoid that this could be your last day on earth, everyone looks like a Mossad agent. The man in the suit reading the paper on my left, the guy cleaning the floor, the lady buying the Sears Tower snow globe, everyone is suspicious. Just as I am beginning to think about quitting this secret socialist Jewish stealth elite squad and returning to civilian life, up walks this burly, short, stocky guy wearing a Russian cap, a long coat and glasses, and carrying a briefcase, which is subtly handcuffed to his wrist.

  “Ehhhhhhh are you Joey?” he asks

  “Are you Shlomo?” I counter.

  “Yes,” he answers. “I am glad to see you. Is there a place we can sit down and talk?”

  I gesture to the very open food court table that I had previously scouted out. We sit down and he looks at the menu.

  “Would you like to eat something, Joey?”

  I tell him I’m fine, but he insists. I refuse again and he insists again. I refuse again and he leans back and with a hushed kind of fatherly sternness he says, “Joey, when the Israeli secret service asks you to eat something you should eat something!” I order nachos and a Sprite.

  “Now Joey, ehhhhhh you may be wondering why I ehhhh asked to meet with you. I am the head of airline security for all flights coming in and out of Israel for El Al. I am ehhhhhh conducting a ‘Nis-a-yon’ test of all security agents internationally. This is a matter of extreme importance. I need you to help Israel by sneaking a suspicious package through security and onto a flight.”

  Honestly, all I could think to say at that moment was “Cool.”

  “Now ehhhhhh the reason you were chosen was because Garfield is not a very Jewish-sounding name, and as we sit here, you don’t even look very Jewish. Are you willing to participate?”

  I agree to do it and he proceeds to get very excited about this next part.

  “OK, this is what you need to do. Go home and make a suspicious package… put some Arabic writing on it. I will get you a ticket on a flight from O’Hare to Israel. When you get to the airport, you will need to have a believable story of why you are going to Israel in case security asks you. That way you will have something to say and not ‘I am here to try and sneak a suspicious package onto the plane’ or something like this. Joey, what do you study in school?”

  “Film.”

  “Ahhh good. OK. You will be a photographer… and you are visiting your girlfriend who lives in Israel and her name is…” He looks at me for the answer.

  “Anna?”

  “Anna,” he repeats satisfactorily. “She is beautiful and you are in love with her and she lives in… Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, pick one it doesn’t matter.”

  “OK,” I say

  “OK,” he says. “Which one?”

  “Oh, now? Ummm… Tel Aviv.”

  “You are bringing this suspicious package to your girlfriend, Anna, in Tel Aviv. I will make you a ticket for next Friday evening leaving from O’Hare International Airport to Israel through El Al. Meet me at my hotel across from the airport and we will go over the details. Work on the story, Joey.”

  I go home. All week I repeat the story in my head: “I am going to Israel to visit my girlfriend, Anna, we are in love. I am a photographer and I am going to take beautiful pictures of my beautiful girlfriend, Anna, in Tel Aviv.” For some reason, even though I already got the job, so to speak, I really want to impress Shlomo. So I buy an Arabic newspaper and use that to wrap my suspicious package. Perfect.

  Friday comes and
I’ve managed to tell no one about my mission to improve the security of Israel. I pack my duffel bag as if I am really going to fly to Israel, because I am confident that my abilities will be so good, so smooth, that I am going to get on that plane without even a blink from security.

  I knock on the door of Shlomo’s hotel room and he answers.

  “Joey, I am so glad to see you! Let’s look at your bag.”

  I proudly unzip my duffel on the bed. Shlomo looks at the package and then at me. “This is it?” he asks. “Joey, it’s too suspicious. It is very obviously a suspicious package. Here take this one. I made one for you.” I take a look at the difference between his package and mine and he has a good point. His package was a lot less suspicious-looking than my suspicious-looking package. So I take his.

  “OK, Joey do you have your passport?”

  Check.

  “Your story?”

  Check.

  “Tov. Here is your ticket. I am leaving for El Al now and you should come in ten, fifteen minutes, OK? Yallah, bye.”

  Honestly, you would think that sitting in that hotel room having a moment alone to myself I would have come to the conclusion that I may possibly be the dumbest guy in the world doing the stupidest thing ever. But I don’t think that. I am so into this idea of sneaking through security and impressing the Israeli secret service that I spend those 15 minutes singing the theme song to S.W.A.T. and not once questioning what Shlomo may have put in his suspicious package.

  I walk to the airport and hand the woman at the counter my ticket and passport.

  “Have you packed your bag yourself?”

  “Yep.”

  “While at the airport, has anyone given you anything to blah blah blah?”

  “Nope.”

  Off I go. I put my bag through the security machine and walk out clean. “Anna, I am coming for you!” As I turn down the hallway I can see way up ahead another security checkpoint. This one is improvised with long folding tables. It’s right at my gate with a bunch of tough-looking Israeli soldiers going through everyone’s stuff. “Oh, no,” I say to myself as a sweat ring forms from my armpit to my ankles. You know that scene in Midnight Express where the guy duct-tapes all that hashish to his body and tries to sneak through Turkish customs and all you hear is his heartbeat? That’s the sound track to this part of the story.

  As I reach the table in slow motion, I am asked for my passport and ticket. “Why are you traveling to Israel?” asks this one superhot Israeli soldier security woman. Instantly, I lose my cool and my story.

  “Ah na… my girlfriend is a Anna, she is a girl and ummmm I am Anna and Anna… and Tel Aviv.” While I continue to make words come out of my mouth, I realize that some other Israeli security guy has taken my bag and is opening it. A feeling comes over me that in a matter of seconds someone is going to snap my neck and I’m kind of hoping that if it’s this hot Israeli woman it may not be so bad. “Where is Shlomo!?” my mind says to my gut. “You’ve been set up,” my gut says to my mind. The hot Israeli security woman gives me my passport and ticket back, and I take this moment to nonchalantly distance myself from my duffel bag.

  “Sir, your bag! Sir, your bag!” the guard kind of panic-shouts in my direction.

  “Oh, of course… my bag. How silly of me… my bag…”

  And as I reach for my duffel I can see Shlomo walk out from behind a rubber tree plant area. “Stop… stop ze test… nisayon, nisayon,” he says and pats my back. He quickly takes the security guards to the side and has a little conversation huddle with them. I stand there thinking to myself, “Technically I’ve made it through with a suspicious package and they are probably talking about how to rearrange the tables to make a ceremony for me. Perhaps some champagne in plastic cups. A cookie assortment would be nice. Will I have to make a speech? It will have to be in English.…”

  The conversation breaks up and the Israelis go back to the line of people not yet checked. Shlomo comes up to me and shakes my hand.

  “Joey, I want to thank you for participating in this important security test and want you to know that the State of Israel is a safer place because of you.” I am a little teary-eyed at this moment, but I gain enough composure to accept his thanks and ask if it’s possible to get an actual ticket to Israel.

  “Right now,” he says, “I have to get on this flight. We are conducting tests all over the world so I will have to call to talk about this later next week. Yallah, bye.”

  This happened in 1990. I’m still waiting for that ticket.

  Exodus

  By Elliott Kalan

  SUMMER CAMP AND I HAD ALWAYS had a checkered history. For everything that camp offered that I enjoyed (nature, running around yelling for no discernible reason), it also provided me something I loathed (competition, situations where I might be nude in public). And no matter which summer camp I attended, none of them ever addressed my greatest interest as a boy: sitting quietly and reading. One time, an aspiring bully caught me eyes-deep in Don Quixote, one of the few classics of world literature that gets most of its laughs from scenes of uncontrollable vomiting and pooping.

  “If you like reading so much,” he said to me, “why didn’t your parents send you to book camp?”

  If only they could have, I thought.

  This was typical of most of my interactions with fellow campers, and as a result, I was always looking for a way to get out of camp and back to my home, where I controlled what I did and when I could eat.

  I had attempted early exits from numerous summer camps before—so many in fact that my name had become legend in the tristate area. I can’t help but think that an alert had been posted to all New Jersey residents living within a 10-mile radius of any summer camp, which is what tripped me up on my final attempt. Of course, like any high-profile alleged criminal, I’d already been convicted in the court of public opinion (i.e., camp directors and my parents) before I could tell my side of the story. The fact is that every incident was a direct reaction to some sort of physical or emotional duress brought on by that great scourge of humanity, bullying.

  I was a popular target for bullies from birth roughly until my sophomore year of college. Bullies were attracted to me like hormonally confused metal filings to an extremely bookish magnet. Let’s assume, however, that your average bully is merely a misguided Samaritan. I assume what happened in a bully’s mind was that, upon noticing me not interacting with another person at the moment but instead reading a book, he assumed I was lonely and decided to ease me from my isolation in the most abusive way possible. Either that, or he thought books were basically poisonous and that he was saving my life.

  This is assuming the best about bullies. In the case of the last time I went to summer camp, however, no assumptions should be made. The bully that year, whose name has escaped me the way I always wanted to escape from summer camp—without a trace—decided that for whatever reason he didn’t like me. This may have simply been his nature. I don’t like to judge a book by its cover, but in this case the cover was a pretty accurate summary of its contents. He was a pale, bald, sharp-nosed, sharp-eared devil of a 16-year-old with a look that screamed “I’m an asshole.” He was the spitting image of the vampire Nosferatu, if Nosferatu wore a lot of NBA jerseys and gold chains, and had impaired learning comprehension.

  Nosferatu had one main hobby at camp that he indulged often: pushing me off things. Chairs, stairs, benches, tree branches, logs, bunk beds—if it could support the weight of my body, then he enjoyed pushing me off it. This was apparently hilarious to him, especially if he could attack me verbally at the same time, perhaps with some extra back-up from his strange posse of skanky-yet-somehow-mannish teen girls. I have to assume these were his underage vampire brides, because they followed him everywhere but didn’t actually seem to like him all that much.

  This particular exodus was sparked by an incident during the after-lunch rest period which some 1920s camp jokester had waggishly dubbed siesta, completely unaware that decades later t
he United States would undergo an influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants who wouldn’t find calling a rest period siesta all that humorous. I had decided to read a book (most likely something Star Wars–related) by the side of the camp’s picturesque lake, which for some unknown reason didn’t meet with Nosferatu’s approval.

  With the air of confidence that only someone who’s already broken more rules than you ever will, he marched up to me and announced that I wasn’t allowed to be there, and had to leave. The permission given to me by my cabin counselor was effectively and officially overruled by this self-appointed one-asshole police force. When I explained patiently that I wasn’t leaving and he couldn’t make me, he replied by pushing me off the bench I was sitting on. Looking back, I should have seen that part coming.

  Temporarily retreating before he could somehow discover a way to push me off the earth itself and into deep space, I located the nearest actual camp counselor, a pretty girl whose posture told me she was a mature and hardened veteran of the world. I explained to her what had happened, assuming my assailant would be punished, or at the very least I’d be assured it was OK for me to go back to where I had been sitting. Possibly realizing that approach was absurdly rational, however, she instead told me not to be a tattletale and turned away.

  Now, at my wizened age, I realize that the counselor, being an 18-year-old girl, probably had more important things on her mind, like finding a bar with a blind bouncer so that she could use the really badly made fake ID she’d paid her older brother’s best friend altogether too much for. But seriously? I was at fault for being a tattletale? I’d expect that kind of childish devotion to playground law from a gym teacher, but from a camp counselor?!