For this post I wanted to talk a little about the paradox that is multiculturalism in Israel, and my experiences with it while I traveled there last summer. Israel as a country was created for a very explicit reason - essentially to create a home for the Jewish people. In theory, the mainly Ashkenazi (European Jewish) founders of Israel wanted to create what would be considered by today's standards an ethnostate - one country, one religion, one people. But this didn't really work, perhaps because after the holocaust there were far too few Ashkenazi Jews left to populate Israel. What actually happened was the creation of an although majority Jewish, extremely pluralistic and multicultural nation that encompasses a massive range of different people and cultural identities. Immigration was the main factor in this, with large swaths of people coming from Ethiopia, America, and the former USSR. Maybe more relevantly to this class, multilingualism is high as well, with a huge amount of Israelis speaking English or Russian as an auxiliary language to Hebrew - there is enough Russian to have prompted Putin to call Israel a Russian speaking country.
My personal experience was even more extreme. In my group, out of 5 soldiers, two spoke Russian as a first language, and one spoke English with no accent having lived in the states for a long time. Walking around in Jerusalem we went into stores that had absolutely no Hebrew spoken - only Russian/English/Amharic/Arabic. It reminded me a lot of America - in San Francisco I spent a lot of time in Japantown (called Nihonmachi I believe by the residents) and it was always a lot of fun to be able to travel in one city and see an area that felt almost like another country. The same things is possible in modern Israel. So even though by it's founders standards Israel could be considered a failed state, something else has grown in it's place - and it is far more fascinating, in my opinion.
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