वेयर? वहत?

After driving for 11 hours from Chapel Hill North Carolina , hopped up on stale gas station coffee, NPR podcasts, and the concrete of highway moving 85mph below my feet, I opened the door to the sanctuary of Beth Israel of Jackson Mississippi to see a room full of elderly Southern Jews watching an Israeli youth group performing a high energy Grease medley loaded with Hebrew harmonizing, snapping, clapping, hip swiveling, white polka-dotted overalls and neckerchiefs. And I thought: Holy God, what have I gotten myself into?

Only days before I was sitting comfortably in my parents living room in Massachusetts watching HBO documentaries on demand and munching homemade biscotti. It’s been a strange couple of days. Monday was Massachusetts to Washington D.C. Besides taking a wrong turn somewhere around Cheesequake, New Jersey and the monsoon that hit the D.C. area as soon as I got off the highway, it was a pretty smooth day. Met with my friend Jenni in Cleveland Park (Though, when I stepped through the door her family was in the midst of a bit of crisis involving pyschotic break or two) But we had a very nice dinner at a Mexican restaurant regardless. I then made my way over to Bethesda, Maryland to meet my friend Mike whose summer program put him up in a altogether sterile, ritzy, and corporate high rise suite. (The kind of place you might take a congressional intern to booze up and off) Woke up in a white anonymous room and headed to Arlington to meet my friend James for lunch, then I hit the room stuffed with coffee and some pretzerellas (think mozarella stick lined with pretzel).

Driving through Virginia listening to a New Yorker fiction podcast about a woman having an emotional crisis in the Museum of Metropolitan Art and staring into the vast expanse of blank highway stretching out in front of me, I thought: Where am I? I’m nowhere. I’m anywhere. I’m in my car. I felt an urge to experience some local culture, to see some stuff. I saw a sign for the Peterson Historic Battlefield National Park. Americana, here I come! After driving around slightly lost in an economically depressed little rural town, with the GPS system chastising me all the while for getting off course, I finally found the park entrance and drove through the access road to view the various forts captured by the Union. At Battery Number 5, I came across a large group of people being given a tour by a park ranger. Naturally, I hopped on. In his thick Virginia accent, he told us about the banal details of the life of a Confederate or Union soldier. I looked around at the group and saw a preponderance of guys with buzz cuts. Then I saw many in the group were wearing military fatigues. I soon learned that I had joined a tour group of National Guardsmen on break learning about our nation’s history.... Rusty Watkins (the park ranger) took us to the spot in the old Peterson battlefield where coal miners from the Union ranks tunneled underneath the Confederate camp and dynamited the hell out of Johnny Reb. As he described the carnage of the Peterson siege I looked around at my beefy peers, actual soldiers listening about the atrocities of wars of yore. Uncomfortable and sweaty in the hot sun, I was relieved to get back into the air conditioned car and blast my New Yorker shit all the way to Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

When I arrived in Chapel Hill I went to go stay with Ari, a UNC graduate student who I met on couchsurfing.com, a social networking website where people offer to put up travels on their couches. Surprisingly enough he did not try to steal my stuff nor make homoerotic advances. Instead, we went out to eat dinner at a local, organic market, walk around UNC campus, and play pub-trivia with his graduate student friends. I guess Blanche Dubois was right about the kindness of strangers and whatnot. I once again believe in the internet and that decent people exist. Chapel Hill felt weirdly like Amherst, Mass with its small, preppy, college town vibe. I told this to Ari, who himself is a Jew from Orange County, California, and he explained: “There is the South, and then there is the South.”

The next day, I woke up and had some coffee with Ari and got on the highway at around 9am EST. In one day, I drove over 700 miles, and through 5 states (and we’re not talking chintzy New England states), saw a giant peach in South Carolina, ate 18 inches of Subway sandwiches, listened to hours upon hours of podcast, crossed a time zone, ate two Slims Jims in Alabama, and pulled into the Beth Israel of Jackson to meet with the crew from the Institute of Southern Jewish Life, Mississippi at 8:30 pm CST only to find Isreali teens wailing into cordless mics in front of a room full of dazed and slightly bemused American members of the Tribe.

These were the Tozim Isreali Friends Scouts. A youth group started sometime in the 1970s. They tour the United States every summer to share their songs and dancing and remind us how horrible Palestinians are. Kind of like a Zionist Mickey Mouse club. Except replace cute/irritating skits between musical numbers with fear mongering promotional videos that advocate the furtherance of the Israeli state and take away the Mousketeers signoff song with the Israeli national anthem and flag waving and you’ve pretty much got a good picture of what we’re dealing with. Loads of costume changes, jazz hands, and Star Search note belting... plus a little Hebrew and prayer. Welcome to the Southern Jewish experience, I thought.

After the show, I met some of my co-workers and headed off to the house of the person I’ll be staying with until my apartment opens up, dazed and confused, and already over-dosing on Jewish and thinking on repeat: What have I gotten myself into?

I’ve been here for a couple of days now, and the thoughts of “Where am I?” “Why am here?” don’t seem to quit. I’m in Mississippi. I’m in Mississippi. I’m in Mississippi. I’m working for Jews. Jews. Jews.

Stay tuned, and you might just hear about Goldring Woldenberg Institute’s Southern Jewish Educators Conference that I had to work at this past weekend.

Shalom Y’all, until next time,
Turistamen Supremawitz en el Sur