Opening Session
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Opening Session Introduction What does Israel mean? What does Israel mean to us? This course is aimed to empower participants to work through their own personal well- informed answers to these fundamental questions. Is Israel about religion? About politics? About statecraft? About belonging? About the Jewish People? This opening session is aimed at orienting the individual participants and the group as a whole to what is coming. The group needs to begin to form, memories of Birthright need to be honored and stored, and the learning needs to begin… Goals Participants will begin to get to know each other, and each other’s relationship to Israel. Participants will begin to appreciate the ways in which common language, such as “National Anthem”, often hides fascinating difference, not similarity. Participants will emerge with a sense of the shape of the course to come. Big Question How can we talk about Zionism when we don’t really know what it is? Guiding Questions How does my experience in Israel compare with others’? What does nationalism have to do with it? Why is Israel so different? What did Amos Oz mean, when he said that Zionism was a “family name”? 1 Preparation for Facilitator Read through the entire session and make sure you are comfortable with all the material. Decide how you will implement the session. Note that in Part 3 there is an option of 2 different activities for you to choose from. Read the “Materials Needed” section of this session, and make sure to prepare materials in advance. Make sure to set up the room in a thoughtful way that supports the activities. In order to be prepared to guide the students through the session, we highly recommend doing the activities in this session yourself, prior to teaching it. This will ensure that you are ready to answer their specific questions within each exercise, and will also reveal for yourself your personal biases, which will help you when facilitating. Make It Modular Ideally, the session is done in its entirety. However, if time is limited, you should feel free to be selective about which components of this session you cover. To ensure alignment to the session's goals, we suggest the following: Choose only one of the two options for Part 3 During the Hatikvah activity, don’t play the various videos Bearing in mind this is the opening foundational session, we recommend that if you leave out Part 3a, please email it to everyone afterwards. If you miss out Part 3b, please email it to everyone afterwards. It would be a shame for this material not to be part of everyone’s knowledge bank. Planning Tip: when planning the session it is important to not only think about timing but also about what activities and materials are going to resonate the most with your students. It’s important to have a variety of activities for the variety of learners in the group and we recommend being thoughtful about this as you decide how to set up the session. Materials Needed Computer, connected to computer projector and GOOD speakers Screen Pens and paper for all participants Print outs of the lyrics in the Hatikvah section, and/or print-outs of the Zionism Quotation sheet 2 Session Outline Suggested Segment Description Time Briefly introduce yourself and share names Introduction 5 minutes around the room Part 1: Pre-session 20 minutes Sharing the pre-Session assignment assignment Participants will watch the video of Gadi Taub, Part 2: Gadi Taub 20 minutes and share initial thoughts Participants will explore their connection to Part 3a: Hatikvah 30 minutes their own National Anthem, and gain information about the origins of Hatikvah Participants will learn about different Part 3b: Zionism 101 30 minutes approaches to early Zionism Part 4: Four Hatikvah Here the course structure will be introduced, 20 minutes Questions and a brief exercise about 4HQ Wrap up this session and briefly look to next Conclusion 10 minutes session Pre-Session Assignment Think about your current relationship to Israel. This course is a great opportunity to think more deeply about how you want to relate to Israel and explore many possibilities for expanding that relationship. In preparation for the opening session, please do a free write answering the following questions: 1. (In what way) Did the Birthright trip change the way you feel/think about being Jewish? 2. (In what way) Did the Birthright trip change the way you feel/think about Israel? 3. In what ways do you want to explore/expand/deepen your relationship to Israel? 4. What are you hoping to get out of this course? Note: free write should be no longer than a page in total. 3 Part 1: Pre-session assignment Students should bring their written answers on a piece of paper to this session and be prepared to share with a member of the group. This is a great opportunity for the group to get to know one another. If you have a sense of who already knows each other in the group, pre-assign partners and mix up the group so people have a chance to get to know different people. If you weren’t able to pre-assign partners, ask them to pair up with someone they haven’t had a conversation with yet. This is especially important at this stage in the course as the group dynamic is beginning to form, and the written statements reveal a lot about their thinking and will help participants get to know one another in a meaningful way. Instructions: Before breaking the students up into pairs, remind them that their responsibility during this activity is to listen and give their partner a place to express him or herself. They might hear a perspective that is very different from their own, but the goal here is not to analyze, critique or give feedback. It is simply to give their partner a place to share and listen to their experience. After you have framed the activity, break students up into their (pre-assigned) pairs. Give each person 10 minutes to share what they wrote and then cue the participants to switch to the next person when it is time. Note: We highly recommend collecting and putting their statements in an envelope with their name on it at the end of the session for two reasons: 1) It will be important information for you to read to get a sense of how each participant feels their Jewish identity was impacted by the trip, how they see their relationship with Israel, and what they hope to get out of this course. 2) At the end of the series, they will be writing a statement about their relationship to Israel, and it will be great for them to have this statement as a reference for how their relationship to Israel has shifted or not shifted. Transition: Now that we’ve taken a look at our experiences in Israel, let’s begin to look at why the place came about, and what it has to do with being Jewish and what it has to do with being democratic. Part 2: Gadi Taub on Zionism http://youtu.be/-8sP71BxckY Watch together Gadi Taub lay out his understanding of the roots of Zionism – the roots of the Jewish State. We recommend stopping viewing at 9:10, as Taub then moves on to more contemporary issues of the conflict, that we will address later in the course. 4 Following the screening, go round the group asking them to remark on one exclamation point (i.e. something that they learned for the first time, or surprised them), and one question mark (a question they are left with) – after having watched the film. Encourage an open conversation about Taub’s approach, but in particular it would be worth making sure that participants appreciate his point about the connection between liberation, nationalism, and democracy. In particular, the way in which American assumptions lead us to think that national identity should not play a part in democracy. (Since Taub only refers to the US, and not Canada, it will be worth asking Canadians where US sentiments chime in with, or contradict Canadian assumptions.) In a 2007 article Taub comments: The winds of globalization spread an American form of liberalism and with it America’s tendency to misunderstand itself as a “pure” liberal democracy – i.e. a democracy beyond and apart from identity. This does not mean that identity is not in vogue in the US. Under the paradigm of multiculturalism a plethora of hyphenated self-definitions, are repeatedly de and reconstructed. But the unarticulated premise is that identity is what comes before the hyphen, and that what comes after it – “American” – somehow stands, or should stand, for a democratic procedure or a universal liberal framework. This is, of course, not exactly the case. “American” is a strong national identity and liberalism is part of it, not a pure procedural arrangement beyond it. The confusion of procedure with identity is not a new product of the multicultural vocabulary. It is as old as the republic. Ever since the late eighteenth-century Americans tended to understand their liberal creed as sustained by Madisonian diversity and to ignore the extent to which it was held together by Jeffersonian uniformity. From The Federalist #10 to the current post-structuralist preoccupation with identity, this blindness to their own strong nationalism has led many Americans to believe that imposing the American Way on others is tantamount to liberating them. From Jefferson’s Empire of Liberty, to Woodrow Wilson’s determination to “teach” South-Americans to elect “good men,” and up to the George W.