Israel and Palestine declared an end to their generations-long conflict this week, agreeing to share control of the holy city of Jerusalem, deploy police forces to quell any unrest in both countries, and have their leaders do a series of photo-ops to model coexistence for their citizens. Israel's prime minister also announced reparations for damage done to Palestinian property and people, especially in the Gaza Strip, with Russia helping foot the bill. The surprise deal came in an International Relations class on Outschool.com, where 13-year-old Alexa Kahn, Israel's head of state, said she had to "change plans real quick" when the United States surprised her by signing Palestine's petition to be admitted into the United Nations. Outschool is an online-learning platform founded in 2015 and having something of a moment in this pandemic. Its Website says it offers 50,000+ classes for kids ages 3 to 18; my daughter, who just finished 7th grade, designed a dream house in an architecture class, took a "trash book" journaling workshop, and has spent the past two weeks playing Finland alongside Alexa's Israel in international relations. The kids meet online for an hour every other day and do research in between to respond to news briefings on issues real and imagined -- Norway invaded my daughter's territory, for example, so she reached out to Russia, a trading partner, thinking it might relish a chance to take on NATO, but was rebuffed; she later managed to join NATO herself, forcing Norway to withdraw its troops, and on Wednesday started a new movement called FLEA -- Female Leadership Equality Association -- with the other women heads of state. Israel, after signing the historic peace agreement, secretly teamed up with Switzerland to colonize Mars. (This is what happens when coronavirus cancels camp!) Alexa, a friend from our synagogue, did not initially want to be Israel, which she visited last summer to celebrate her Bat Mitzvah. "I wanted a bigger country so I could make more ballsy moves," she said to explain why she asked for the U.S., Mexico and Russia. Then she managed to make the boldest move of all. After the U.S. joined every other country in the simulation to sign Palestine's U.N. quest, Alexa pulled its 10-year-old leader into a Zoom breakout room. "I was like, 'O.K., does this mean we're allies still?' He said, 'yeah, we just disagree on this,'" she told me. "I offered to meet with Palestine. I sent a few gifts over." Gifts? "Diamonds," Alexa explained, "because I found out that's one of Israel's exports." Palestine was not actually represented in the class, so the teacher, James Bartlett, stood in. "Regardless of whether I have Israel or Palestine as countries in the simulation I try to involve them in some way because it's something that everyone has heard about," explained Bartlett, 34, who pre-pandemic worked with developmentally disabled toddlers. "It's a topic on which every nation has made their stance clear, and it's one of those things where it's not easy no matter what you want to do." Alexa, though, is the first Israeli leader in Bartlett's run who tried to make peace and approved a two-state solution. "It's the holy land and everyone wants a part of it," she said, "so I thought we should do the adult thing and both step up and share it." In Real Life, Israeli diplomats this week bought more than 600 pounds of tahini to support an Arab-Israeli businesswomen whose product was boycotted after she donated to an LGBT group. Here at the Forward, we had four particularly ambitious pieces of enterprise journalism this week, so I've pulled just those four #longreads for you into a PDF that you can download and print via the blue button below.
There's Louis Keene's deep dive into the demographic history of his own Los Angeles neighborhood: Jewish in the 1950s, Black after school desegregation, Latino after a gang injunction that scared many Blacks away, now increasingly Jewish again. There's Batya Ungar-Sargon's fascinating analysis of a group of Black intellectuals with a different take on our racial reckoning. Talya Zax takes a look at the uncomfortable historic connections between the desegregation of American public schools and the growth of private Jewish ones. And Daniel Lee gives new meaning to the term "armchair historian" with an essay adapted from his book about how he discovered an unknown Nazi. I also wrote this editorial about why I love Shammai for our new On Persuasion series. Your Bintel Brief columnist tackles an intra-family dispute over death and parties. And this week's #tweetyourshabbat column is about French fries. Meanwhile Ann Kirschner, a writer, professor at the City University of New York and consultant, recently shared this picture of her mother, Sala, reading the old Yiddish Forverts. It was in Kirschner's 2007 book, "Sala's Gift: My Mother's Holocaust Story." If you've got an old photo of a relative or friend reading the Forward of yesterday -- or perhaps a new one of someone reading us on their phone! -- I'd love to see it: Send the images and any backstory to [email protected], and maybe we'll publish a collection.
