I can’t keep track of all the birthday parties, weddings, engagement parties, and sukkot holidays. I buy a present, go home, remember another present, or a card, and go back, get another one, go out again… Today I got so cramped for time I thought I’d try the shop next to my office, at the Diaspora Museum. I don’t know how long it has been open but I’ve never been so desperate before to think of it. But it turned out beautifully. It may be tiny but it’s got everything a museum shop should have, including cards and books and gifts. The book store at the university has a lot of stuff, and I was there yesterday buying gifts, but the Diaspora Museum Store is ‘classy,’ if conservative.

A lot of shopping in general is going on around here lately – negotiations, promises, threats, exchanges. As long as we’re not fighting I’m happy – it’s just keeping busy and sharing attention. And there’s a lot of risk involved, like if one or two terrorists that have been free come back for a second try. A pretty young woman with a bomb strapped around her stomach and a little experience at a checkpoint.

 

>”How is it you haven’t commented on the Goldstone Report?” a friend wrote me today.”You seem far more absorbed in yourself than your city, your country.” In a sense it is true. I haven’t said that I believe with all my heart that we should be investigating all the aspects of “Cast Lead” on this site. I haven’t even said much about Gilad Shalit lately. But every element of my private life is interspersed with the politics and the sociology of this country. And this is true for every person living here.

© 2012 Tel Aviv Diary: Karen Alkalay-Gut Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha