A little background on this story: when I was in Samoa, I posted a message on Facebook about my travels that sparked interest from my family in Israel. We started messaging back and forth about my trip. My father’s cousin Leah asked me about how my family tree research was going and how there was another second cousin who I had not met yet who was also trying to create the Graf family tree. After all of these years of reconnecting my family, there was still another cousin I had yet to meet?! Who was he!? What was his name!?

Dad’s cousin Leah e-introduced me to Yariv Graf. We determined that we were definitely related. We had the same great-grandfather. We chatted over a period of days about our lives. We are around the same age and he has a family with two children. I told him I’d be making my way to Israel in October and he insisted that I stay with him and meet his family. So, from April onwards, I had been looking forward to meeting Yariv. In a serendipitous moment, Yariv’s sister Aviva happened to be in Warsaw for business at the same time as me in August! Aviva and I met for a drink and caught up. Apparently she sent a good word back to Israel about me.

After spending time in urban Tel Aviv, I was really eager to make my way towards nature. Yariv invited me to meet the family in Modiin for Simchat Torah. Modiin is towards the mountains of the Judean Desert, so this seemed to work out in my plans. Yariv’s brothers and sisters would be in Modiin to celebrate. They are all married and have kids. The party took over the whole apartment. The meal was festive. We also celebrated one of the kid’s birthdays. The plan was to go to the Dead Sea with Yariv’s family the next day and they would drop me off at the hostel in Ein Gedi on the way back.

I’ve been to the Dead Sea before on Birthright trips. The temperature was 100 degrees that day. I was not excited to be doing this. I just wanted to cool off in a pool somewhere. After the long drive to the desert, we arrived at the parking lot of the resort. This was the first sign of a common theme throughout my next 5 weeks in the country: the incredible amount of ethnic diversity. Of course I noticed this before on my other trips. This time, it was on another level. Maybe after being in homogenous Europe for 3 months, the mixing of people stood out more?

The first thing I noticed were West Bank Palestinian license plates on the cars in the parking lot. I knew about how West Bank Palestinians had different license plates. I just had not seen them before. According to my friend Hadar, you used to see them a lot more in Israel but after the Second Intifada, that all changed. Once we entered the resort, we passed by a big swimming pool area with signage at the bar for beer. I thought: “Good news! You have a Plan B if the Dead Sea itself ends up driving you nuts”. The resort is on the top of a cliff and there are winding paths that take you down to the Dead Sea.

Once you reach the start of the path to the Sea, you can see everything: Jordan on the other side of the Sea, the incredibly hazy sky and the brackish water of the Sea. It did not look appealing. When we got down to the bottom, there were people speaking all sorts of languages: Hebrew, English, Arabic, and Russian. In addition, there was a large group of tourists from Africa collecting the water from the Sea and putting into buckets and they were speaking their language. I thought this was maybe the the biggest mix of people I’d ever seen. Maybe the NYC subway would be a notch down to #2!

The heat was awful though. Yariv and family were having fun in the water but the salt somehow got in my eyes and it was stinging terribly. I couldn’t open my eyes. There are fresh water showers on the beach to wash the salt off but there was a single file line of multinationals waiting to do just that. I made my way to showers, somewhat blinded, appreciated the international flair for a hot minute and then cut the line to get this salt out of my eyes! “That’s enough for me! Yariv, I’m going up to the pool area. You guys can join me or we can meet later.” His wife offered me a hummus sandwich… the mere thought of eating that in the heat: I’m really not Israeli. Yariv’s response to my path to the pool: “You’re such an Ashkenazi.” I had to really parse that one: here’s a little Israeli cultural hint about the judgements between Mizrachim and Ashkenazim (coming up again like it did in Spain) and a new stereotype? Ashkenazis are uptight and prefer swimming pools, apparently.

At the pool, which was very crowded, I found my own little nook in the back. I cooled off in the pool, got my ice cold beer and chilled on the lounge chair. I have to share with you what I saw in the pool area though: it was the same multiethnic crowd from the Sea. Let me describe it differently this time: Jews, Muslims, women in hijabs, blacks, whites and everything in between were in the same pool. I’m not sure how common it is for these groups to mix in the same locations, safe from swimming pools. Given the political drama and the way the story is told in the US media, you’d think there was no mixing of people at all. (In the US, we still had officially segregated swimming pools through the 1960s and unofficial segregated swimming pools through the 1980s. In my neighborhood on Staten Island, there was a “swim club” in the adjacent neighborhood that was known to bar membership to Jews. In response, a swim club opened up directly in our neighborhood that ended up being Jewish-only. That places has been torn down and it’s all cookie cutter houses now). This experience in the Dead Sea was important because while Israeli is imperfect, and I think every country is imperfect, it is important to see how many different “kinds” of people live here and visit here and share space.

I would end up seeing this over and over again as I toured throughout the country, particularly in: in Jerusalem, Haifa, Acco, the Jezerel Valley and the Golan Heights.