Rachel Kadish shares her experience teaching a creative writing course at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv, where her classroom doubled as a bomb shelter. Noting that her 11 students “spanned six nationalities, as well as a range of points along the religious spectrum (some were wholly secular Jews, some Orthodox, some Christian …)”, she announced to the class, “We’re going to offend each other — let’s consider that a given”:
Religious difference, it turned out, was only the beginning of what surfaced in the classroom.
Any writing exercise I assigned — no matter how technical and craft-based — tugged at larger issues. In the weeks that followed, a woman in a head covering wrote a moving piece about childhood memories of terrorist bombings. Another woman — a dancer — wrote a powerful scene about sneaking into a West Bank bathhouse and dancing with Palestinian women there. A Christian woman wrote about her teenage immersion in mosh pit culture in the U.S., and offered the first pages of a harrowing piece about friends who joined neo-Nazi skinhead hate groups. Challenged to rewrite a single paragraph in three different voices, a Swedish student began a nostalgic passage extolling his mother’s baking. By the third iteration of the same paragraph, he ended up revealing that his mother was an Auschwitz survivor, and that this bounty of pies and cakes stood in sharp contrast to her own childhood of starvation. …
I’ve never before written about a workshop. What happens in class stays in class. So when I asked my students whether they’d be comfortable if I wrote about the work we’d done together, their quick assent took me by surprise. “The conversation in this room is different than the conversation on the bus,” one said, to nods. In daring each other to explore literary craft, they’d given each other permission to explore stories many of them had feared to tell. And of course, our weeks together had expanded my point of view as well. When I walked out of that bomb shelter for the final time, it seemed less a metaphor for the threat of war, and more a reminder of how difficult and how essential it is to create shelters like this: safe places where heartfelt argument, human gestures, and the occasional interpretive dance keep the lights on.
The Dish 