|




Barbara Sofer
e-mail: bsofer@netvision.net.il
|
Award-winning writer and lecturer Barbara Sofer grew up in a small town
in Connecticut, and moved to Israel in 1971. She is a graduate of the
University of Pennsylvania and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Her
articles -taking on a wide range of subjects from ethnic cooking to terrorism--have
appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Parents, Readers'
Digest, Woman's Day, Hadassah Magazine and Inside Magazine
among many others. She writes a bi-weekly column for the Friday Jerusalem
Post.
Barbara has written five books and contributed to several others
EXCERPT FROM CURRENT ARTICLE
Jerusalem Post
June 26, 2009
|
The Human Spirit: Fear vs. Hope
By Barbara Sofer
''I know that the Arabs working
here are all good Arabs," says my grandson Oze. We're sitting
together at a dinner in a hotel in Tiberias. I'm surprised and saddened
that he's somehow become conscious that the waiters are Arabs. We've
vacationed at this hotel many times before. The waiters haven't
changed. They've known Oze's father as a boy, and have happily greeted
the arrival of the newest generation of guests. No one has mentioned
the waiters' ethnicity, but somehow Oze knows and cares. Because
he's heard so many times in his short childhood that "there
are good people and bad people, good Jews and bad Jews, good Arabs
and bad Arabs," he's worked out that these must be the "good
Arabs."
Amid the sunshine in this city
on the Sea of Galilee, the cold memories of winter return. Last
December, the radius of rocket fire expanded to include the farming
community where Oze's family lives. He turned pale and slept poorly,
attending nursery school underground. The living room window was
boarded up for lack of a safe room, and in the playground he would
race for shelter at the sound of the sirens. It was his first experience
of war. But then, he only now just reached five years old.
OZE'S NEW nervousness around
the waiters is germane to the thought-provoking questions asked
recently by the Washington-based, peace-seeking organization Search
for Common Ground, which has called for papers from laypeople and
professionals about fear and its impact on the conflict (to be published
on the organization's multilanguage Web site). Asks Search for Common
Ground: "What are the underlying fears that drive our conflict
and how much of an impact does the day-to-day reality have on people's
fear levels? Does fear override hope? If so, how can one use hope
to override fear?" ...
|
Click To Read Whole Article...
|

| The Washington-based Search for Common Ground
organization has announced that Barbara Sofer is the winner of
the 2008 Eliav-Sartawi Award for journalism creating greater understanding
in the Middle East. The award ceremony will take place in Jerusalem
in November. |
|