About

Amos Oz once said while talking about his book Let Her: “I wrote a novel about Israelis who live their own lives on the slope of a volcano. Near a volcano one still falls in love, one still gets jealous, one still wants a promotion, one still gossips.”

We have never lived near a volcano before. Our lives in suburban New Jersey, small town Iowa, and Oberlin College are far from the lives of Israelis. The Mahane Yehuda market is not the farmer’s market in Grinnell, Iowa; the religiosity of this city is in stark contrast to our secular lives at home; the politics of Israel-Palestine don’t much resemble the Barack vs. Hillary battles of the United States.This is not to say that we won’t encounter similarities. As Oz points out, people are people everywhere

This blog will document–in words, photography, sound, and other media–the those differences and similarities that Max Strasser and Helen Stuhr-Rommereim observe while in the Middle East. We want to share what we see, hear, and think about Jerusalem, Israel and Israelis, Palestine and Palestinians, the desert, the Golan, the history, and maybe even the beaches and the discos.