by Judy Rebick
Then one day, Wheat disappeared. I had never been to his place so I didn’t know where he lived, but I did know where he and his friends hung out so I went looking for him. They told me he was in jail. He had been busted for running heroin to Harlem. I had figured he was probably selling pot or hash, but heroin, that was a different story. I had a crisis of conscience. Running heroin to the ghetto was something I disapproved of politically and morally. But how could I judge him? Even as a woman, the opportunities for me were so much greater than for him as a Black man. How could I judge what he did to make a living?
“We didn’t have the money for bail,” his friend told me.
“How much?” I asked.
“One hundred dollars.”
“Why didn’t you come to me?”
“I didn’t think you’d bail him out,” he replied glumly.
“I’m going out with him. Of course I would bail him out if I could,” I said.
Looking down, he just shook his head. At that moment I realized that they thought I was just seeing him for the sex. And maybe he thought that, too. Or maybe he didn’t want me to find out what he was into. I was more upset by that than the discovery that he was selling heroin. How could my perception of our relationship be so different from his?
Later the friend came to my apartment to pick up the money. The next day Wheat came over to thank me.
He kissed me and hugged me. “I love you, Judy. I think we should get married.”
I was only twenty-two. I wasn’t thinking about getting married; I was just beginning to feel my way in the world.
“I’m really flattered, Wheat, but I’m not ready to get married. I don’t even know if I want to get married at all. I like you a lot and I want to keep going out with you but marriage, no.”
I don’t know if it was because he was offended or ashamed, but we broke up soon after. My experience with Wheat made me understand the impact of racism. From that moment on, fighting bigotry has always been central to my politics.
* * *
After my experience in Toronto, I didn’t want to work in journalism, but I was a good writer so I got a job at the Centre for Handicapped Children at Columbia University translating academic articles into a newsletter. Columbia was also the centre of the student movement. In the spring of 1968, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had organized the largest and most effective student strike in U.S. history. More than a million students walked out of school and shut down campuses from coast to coast. Most of the national media focus was on the shutdown at Columbia University led by the inter-racial alliance of SDS chairperson Mark Rudd and the Student Afro Society activists. So naturally, I gravitated to Columbia SDS.
I attended an SDS meeting in preparation for what became a famous national conference in the spring of 1969. For reasons I didn’t fully understand at the time, the meeting of almost a thousand people was dominated by ferocious arguments that ended in fistfights. It turned out that this meeting was the beginning of the emergence of the radical political group the Weathermen, which soon split from SDS and began a series of bombings and other violent acts. They believed that a revolution was imminent; all they needed to do was spur it on through violent dramatic actions. At the time they called themselves the Weathermen from the Bob Dylan song “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” But I had no interest in joining a group that solved its problems with fists, let alone bombs. Instead I started gravitating toward the more hippie side of sixties radicalization, living life for the experience.
* * *
New York City was violent in those years and sexual harassment was rampant. We didn’t have a name for it then, but if you walked alone at night in New York City, some man was always exposing himself, grabbing you, or at the very least explicitly hitting on you. Most women I knew never walked alone at night but I wasn’t willing to restrict myself that way. I learned quickly that the best way to deal with the harassment was to make a scene: there were always people around and New Yorkers, bless them, rarely mind their own business.
“Put it back in your pants!” I would yell at the flasher. “Take your fucking hands off me!” I would holler if someone touched or grabbed me. Once someone said, “I love your thighs.” I answered, “If I could take them off, I’d lend them to you.” Look tough, act tough, make a scene. Unlike most women, I wasn’t afraid of confrontation. Confrontation was like mother’s milk to me, or rather father’s milk. What I experienced in New York might have been shocking to a born and bred Toronto girl, but I had been subjected to flashers ever since I rode the New York subway alone as a teenager visiting my mother’s family. Usually I would just get up and walk away. I was determined not to let the harassment limit my freedom, but no doubt it affected me more deeply than I realized.
As it turned out, my apartment was much more dangerous than the streets. One night in late August, I woke up to a scream so shattering I can still hear it today. A moment later, there was a shot and then quiet. I called the police.
“You don’t have to give us your name,” the operator said. It was several years after the Kitty Genovese killing in Queens, an infamous case in which many neighbours observed the knife assault but did nothing to help the victim for fear of being murdered themselves. Now New York emergency services provided anonymity for callers to encourage the reporting of crimes. But I was from Toronto. Why wouldn’t I give them my name? Didn’t the police have to get into the building? Better I should buzz them in than have them break down the door.
“There’s been a shooting upstairs, please hurry,” I whispered into the phone.
Suddenly I realized one escape route for the shooter would be down the fire escape and through my window. Quickly making up my bed, I hid in the closet until the police arrived. My mind was racing. What will I do if he does come into my apartment? Will I make a run for it? That doesn’t make sense. He isn’t looking for me; he’ll just go out the door. No, I’ll hold my breath so he won’t know I’m here. And why would he care if he knows I am here? I can’t see him. But he’ll know that I’m hiding and that I know what he did. I could sneak a peak. Staying in the closet, I’m a sitting duck. Maybe I should make a run for it.
At last the buzzer rang and I stepped out to let the cops in. I heard them trooping up the stairs and then silence. Apparently when they arrived, the gunman was standing over the body waiting for them. He was her boyfriend.
The next morning the tiny lobby was full of people asking, “Who called the police?” They had all heard the scream and the shot, and I was the only one who called the police. That day, I decided to leave New York. The city was very heavy, and I had had enough of the violence, the racism, the sexism, and the harassment. I wanted to go somewhere a young, independent woman could be free.
Eight
“Walk Quickly, There Is Danger”
At the end of the sixties and into the seventies a division developed in the youth culture, with some people exploring alternative lifestyles through drugs, travel, music, Eastern religion, and self-help and others moving into more radical politics. For a while I was more into the hippie side.
Lots of young people were backpacking around Europe, hitching rides and staying at cheap hotels. I decided that I would join them. It was part of the hippie youth culture to travel with little money and less luggage, without an agenda or a goal. It would allow me to let go of whatever middle-class values still restricted me. Needless to say, my father was not thrilled with the idea that I was taking off on a trip through Europe by myself, but because I wasn’t asking him for money there was little he could do to stop me.
Starting in London, I grabbed a ride to Morocco with two guys in a Volkswagen van, but got out in Barcelona when their demands for sex became too annoying — a constant hazard for a woman travelling alone. After a wild month in Spain, I headed for Greece. Greece’s haven for hippie travellers was Matala in southern Crete. It may not have been as spectacular as other
parts of Crete, but it had a beautiful white sand beach with a village at one end and caves dating from the Neolithic era at the other. The caves were used as tombs in the first and second centuries. In the twentieth century, they were a perfect place to set up camp.
Travellers in Matala talked about going to Israel, one of the few places around the Mediterranean where you could get work. Israel was a place of great romance for North American Jews. Every year at the end of the Passover Seder we say, “Next year in Jerusalem.” The story is that the Jews, so viciously enslaved by the Egyptians, were led out of Egypt by Moses to wander in the desert and that someday we would return to claim our land. While my father was hostile to religion, he wanted to be part of the Jewish tradition and Israel was an important part of that. He became a top fundraiser for the United Jewish Appeal, which raised money for Israel. He travelled there on a mission in 1956 and loved it. I hadn’t heard much to counter his enthusiasm, and in 1970 there wasn’t a lot of criticism of Israel from the New Left.
On the other hand, Phillip, an American I met in Greece, had spent some time there and was very critical. He was a Jewish American and one of the first really political people I met on that trip.
“It’s a police state,” he warned. “If you’re a Jew and you hang out with Arabs, they’ll follow you everywhere and harass you. The only way to get hash there is from the Arabs, so you’ll have to hang out with them. Plus they’re the coolest people in the place. So watch out.”
“C’mon, you’re exaggerating. I’ve been to Spain and Greece, both run by dictatorships, and there was nothing like that. Israel is a democracy; how bad could it be?”
“You’ll see,” he said, shrugging his shoulders, raising his eyebrows, and nodding his head knowingly.
* * *
I entered Israel through the port of Jaffa. As soon as I got off the boat, the magic of the Holy Land hit me — and, simultaneously, the shocking aggression of the people.
At this point, the North American narrative portrayed Israel as a plucky little country that had successfully stood up to Great Britain and then to its bully Arab neighbours. In 1967, the story went, the Israelis had not only saved themselves from destruction but also taken over some land from their neighbours, presumably to better defend themselves. Of course I also knew the myth of the Exodus, both the biblical liberation from Egypt and the modern story of the ship that brought post-Holocaust Jewish immigrants to Palestine, so brilliantly mythologized in Leon Uris’s blockbuster novel Exodus and the 1960 film of the same name starring Paul Newman. On top of that, Israel had the kibbutz, a collective farm where everyone did the work and everyone got the benefit, where men and women were equal and children were raised by the community — a socialist paradise, or so we were told.
It was true that men and women did many of the same jobs on the kibbutz and that Golda Meir, a rare female political leader, was prime minister, but for a young woman the streets of Israel were worse than the streets of New York. Israeli guys were incredibly aggressive and sexist. I felt more at risk than ever before.
The racism really bothered me. In Jerusalem, there was very little mixing between Arabs and Jews. Arabs would sit at the back of the bus. In 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, a young Black woman named Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of the bus, thus defying the segregation laws and sparking a twelve-month bus boycott by the Black community. The Montgomery bus boycott became a central symbol of the U.S. civil rights movement. There was no law that required Arabs to sit in the back of the bus, but they always did, and no Jewish Israeli ever sat next to them. I went out of my way to sit in the back next to the Arabs.
A couple of weeks into my trip, I met a very nice elderly Arab man who spoke fluent English. Farooq was in his early seventies and he loved meeting young travellers so he could practise his English. He told us stories of the land before the state of Israel was established, but he never showed any hostility to Israelis and certainly not to Jews. We were both friends with Jeremy and Laura, a young American couple who were staying in one of the ancient hotels in the old city. It was March and Jerusalem was cool that time of year. The cheap hotels had portable gas heaters for the comfort of their guests. One night the heater in Jeremy and Laura’s room blew up. The explosion killed Laura and put Jeremy in the hospital. Farooq and I went to visit him with heavy hearts.
When we arrived at the hospital, two security guards walked up to us, said something in Hebrew to Farooq, and took his arm.
“They want me to go through a back door to be searched,” Farooq said in a quiet voice.
“He’s with me,” I said to the guard. “We’re visiting a friend together.”
“Sorry, miss,” the guard said politely in English. “It is policy. All Arabs must be searched before entering the hospital. I hope you understand; we have to be careful.” They were still at war with their neighbour states and therefore suspicious of any Arab, even those who were living in Israel.
“I do not understand,” I said. “I’ll go with him then.”
“No, you won’t,” he said more firmly, as one of the guards escorted Farooq while the other one stood in my way.
“Do not worry, Judy,” Farooq said, indicating that I should stop protesting. “We will meet in Jeremy’s room.”
I, who had been in the country for only a couple of weeks, was allowed to walk right into the hospital. Farooq, who had lived in Jerusalem his entire life and whose parents and grandparents had also lived there, was forced to go into a back room where he would be searched and humiliated. I was horrified. He was an old man and one of the most pacific people I had ever met. He had come to the hospital with food to comfort and help a young friend get through what was probably the worst moment in his short life.
We didn’t tell Jeremy about what had happened, but after we left I expressed my outrage to Farooq.
He just shook his head sadly. “It’s just the way it is, Judy. There is nothing we can do.”
It was the exact same response I had gotten from Wheat about racism in New York. Thereafter, I spent a lot more time talking to Arabs and learning about their perspective on what had happened to what they called Palestine. I was confused about the conflicting stories, but it became clear to me that it was the Arabs who were facing discrimination and the Jewish Israelis who were inflicting it. My anger at the political situation made me forget the warning about what happens to Jews who hang out with Arabs.
* * *
The reason I went to Israel was to find work; by this time, I was running low on funds. I decided my best bet was a kibbutz. Ein Gev was in Galilee in northern Israel. It had been founded by Americans so the kibbutzniks [members of the kibbutz] spoke English. I was also told that hash was easy to come by at Ein Gev, which wasn’t the case at other kibbutzim.
There were a lot of young American Jews who had come to Israel in order to volunteer on a kibbutz. The Six-Day War in 1967 had had a big impact on youth in North America and to a lesser extent in Europe. Little Israel had defeated what looked to us like an Arab Goliath. Moreover, the kibbutz seemed like one of the only real collectivist experiments in the world. We all slept together in co-ed dorms, which was pretty remarkable in those days. Most of the kibbutz members were white American Jews, except for the kitchen staff who were Sephardic Jews mainly from North Africa. The only Arabs I met on the kibbutz were dealing hash.
The land was beautiful, surrounded by mountains. Ein Gev was located on the incredibly lush plateau of the Golan Heights, one of the most beautiful parts of Israel. We stayed in cabins, woke up at 6 a.m. to work the fields picking oranges, and in the afternoon we worked in the kitchens. The kibbutz was far from the socialist paradise it claimed to be. It’s true that men and women worked together in the fields and in the kitchen, but the worst jobs were given to Sephardic Jews from North Africa and the Middle East. The racism went beyond Arabs to dark-skinned Jews. They got the more menial jobs and were not even members o
f the kibbutz, but hired help.
I stayed on the kibbutz for about a month, then decided to go back to Greece. I was anxious to get out of Israel, which I found militarist, sexist, and racist. Everything I valued about being Jewish didn’t seem to be there. Some part of me liked the fact that everyone — the cops, the farmers, the firefighters — was Jewish, but I didn’t feel at home there.
The kibbutz volunteers threw me a party the evening before I was leaving. Needless to say, there was a lot of hash. I also got some from a local Arab dealer because you couldn’t buy it in Greece. I was confident that the Israelis wouldn’t care if I smuggled it out of the country and that the Greeks would never search a woman. Nevertheless I needed a place to hide it. Like most hippie girls, I didn’t wear a bra but I packed one, in case I needed it for just such a purpose or if I had to look straight. I couldn’t find my bra so I put the seven grams of hash in a Kotex pad, inserted it in my underwear, and headed off.
As soon as I arrived at the port, I knew I was in trouble. The guy at the entrance took my passport and said my name out loud. A man in a suit came over and asked me to follow him. I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone in Israel wear a suit. I had only a few minutes to plan my strategy.
He took me into a small room, where two men searched my backpack. They were customs officials, not in uniform. They looked everywhere I could have hidden the drugs, even turning the oranges and bread around to see if there were any holes in them. My hair was long and frizzy, and I was wearing Indian clothes that were fashionable among travellers. Even though I looked like a stoned-out hippie, I decided to play it straight.
“What are you looking for?” I asked, smiling. “Bombs, microfiche?” I laughed.
