harpojaeger.com

It’s been a little while since I posted here, due to the end of school and associated craziness.  I’m going to be taking next year off from school to work and travel, and another one of my goals is to write much more regularly, and to start making money, or at least breaking even, on this site.  I’ve been accepted as a Project Wonderful advertiser, so you should start seeing some interesting ads on this site soon.

I’ve also finally gotten around to ditching GoDaddy.com as the host of my website and the harpojaeger.com domain name.  I’ve never particularly liked their backend and other user tools, and they have some rather sexist and objectifying advertisements that I objected to.  A while back, my dad came across a blog post regarding similar issues, which he passed on to me.  I read it at the time (3/9/09 [and it's been in my Gmail Starred items since then]) and decided to switch, and it’s now done.  I also moved renaissanceboy.org over from directNIC, for simplicity’s sake (it redirects here).  I’ve opted to use BlueHost, which is completely awesome so far.  The backend is way better than GoDaddy’s (none of that ASP-and-glitzy-web-2.0 junk) and as an added benefit they don’t rely on sex to sell their products (there’s much more where that one came from).  It’s also a completely reasonable price – slightly more than what I was paying before, but totally worth it so far.

Another project I’m hoping to take on this summer is a total redesign of this site.  I’m thinking of writing my own WordPress theme from the ground up, which should be a pretty interesting project.

….that I’ll write something here soon.  For the moment, here’s my latest post for New Voices on the connection between organizational funding and policy.

I just can’t seem to stop writing about Israeli Apartheid Week.  Here’s another one.

Too often in conflicts we don’t hear stories.  We don’t know what other people have experienced.  This, I believe, is the root of many social problems.

Political realities are ultimately inseparable from the individual experiences that give rise to them.  We can make generalizations about societal states of understanding, political theories, and large social constructs, but these must ultimately be grounded in a deep understanding of the individual, human nature of the issue.

At its heart, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a failure of understanding.  Yes, we can and do identify policies, tactics, and manners of thought that continue it, but we cannot forget their inalienably human attributes.  Applying the analytical tools of anthropology and other social sciences can tell us much about why the conflict has evolved the way it has.  Why, for instance, does the Israeli government continue to lend tacit, if not explicit, support in most cases, to settlers who are actively violating international law and soiling Israel’s credibility?  Why have Palestinian civilians been so easily represented by the few who decide to blow themselves up?

These are questions of understanding.  I have strong disagreements with many people involved in the conflict, but there comes a time when I have to admit that I just don’t understand their point of view.  I haven’t been to Israel or Palestine, I haven’t sat down across the table with these people and tried to understand what makes them tick.

I don’t think this makes me less capable of making strong and accurate judgments on the issue, but it does impart on me a responsibility to seek out such stories and incorporate them into my thought.  In fact, I would argue that no one is exempt from this responsibility.  Divorced as I am from the on-the-ground realities of the conflict, it’s easy for me to say that my priority is understanding.  For an Israeli in Sderot who’s lived through rocket attacks and seen their children traumatized and suffering from PTSD, or for a Palestinian in Gaza who’s lived through massive Israeli air raids, destruction of vital infrastructure, and a continuing blockade, it must be incredibly hard to understand the other.

But there are those who do.  There are those who put aside their own experiences, and, given the opportunity to do so without sacrificing basic needs, seek out the other’s perspective.  And the fact that those people exist means that we should not just expect others to do the same, but we should strive for circumstances where they can.

Both in his attempts to understand and his attempts to empower others to do the same, Avi Schaefer was one of those people dedicated to understanding.  After graduating high school in Santa Barbara, he joined the IDF and spent several years as a counterterrorism instructor.  To a naive American Jewish boy like me who’s never held a gun, it’s hard to comprehend his motivations.  But it was crystal clear to me from the moment I met him up until the last conversation I had with him that he wanted me to, and he wanted to comprehend mine.  Avi was in many ways extremely oxymoronic; but then, he existed almost for the purpose of defying those same oxymorons.  Before I met him, I would never have guessed that an American Jew who became an Israeli citizen in order to join the IDF would be more dedicated to peace than arguably any other person I have ever met.  But what Avi has taught me was that that doesn’t have to be a contradiction.  That the only thing standing between us and a deeper personal understanding of the other is our assumptions.  If we come to a discussion with an open mind and no assumptions, we inevitably walk away stronger and smarter.

Avi Schaefer was killed in the early morning of February 12th by a drunk driver on the streets of Providence.  Who Avi was doesn’t make his death more tragic than if it had been someone else, but the people he touched, the good he did in his short time with us, and the taste that is left on our tongues, will linger.  In Avi, a man of incredible virtue and dignity walked among us.

“An enemy is someone whose story we have not yet heard.”  Avi attributed this quote to his father, Rabbi Arthur Gross-Schaefer.

Avi Schaefer, 1988-2010.  Z”L.  May his memory be for a blessing.

Tonight marks the launch of the newest entry to the projects section of this site, currently called the text reassembler (if you have a better idea for a name, please let me know).  It’s something I started over a year ago that’s languished undeveloped for much of that time.  I decided to put in a bit of time to get it viewable, and put it up as a work in progress.

The project is based off of something I saw demonstrated at by Prof. Allen Downey at Olin College in the fall of 2008 while I was visiting.  Although I didn’t end up applying there, I really liked the presentation he gave, on various computing methods and some of the ways of using computers to produce humanistic output.  Particularly, he demonstrated a program that accepted inputted text, and broke down that text into an associative array with the following properties:

• the array keys were each word in the array (so the text “hello how are you” would generate an array with keys “hello”, “how”, “are”, and “you”)
• the value of each key was a non-associative array consisting of a list of every word that followed the key somewhere in the text (so the text “I saw you and he saw her” would be (in PHP format): array(“I”=>array(“saw”),”saw”=>array(“you”,”her”),”you”=>array(“and”),”and”=>array(“he”),”her”=>array())

This sounds complicated, but bear with me; the next step will make it make more sense.  Once the program has generated this array, it begins to iterate through it in the following manner:

1. it takes key from the array and outputs it
2. it selects a random item from the list of words following that key (the array stored in that key’s associate value) and outputs it
3. then it jumps to the key entry for that word, and moves back to step 2

It repeats this until it encounters a word that has nothing following it (the last word in the source text if it appears nowhere else) or until it’s output a specified amount of words (much more common).  Thus, if you take any two adjacent words in the resulting text (which sounds uncannily similar in tone to the original and sounds like it should make sense, but is complete nonsense), you’ll be able to locate them, still adjacent, in the source text.  It’s legitimately one of the most fascinating and beautiful things I’ve ever seen a computer do.

I came home determined to write a copy, and made a bit of progress.  It lay around for a while, I did some more work on it some point, but I never completed it.  I rediscovered it this evening and just manned up and made it work well enough to be publicly viewable.  When finished, it will accept input in a text field, or will be able to read input from a specified URL.  At the moment, though, it’s just dealing with block of text I hard-coded in (thus it’s not accepting any user input right now), and a word output limit imposed the same way.  Both the source of the text and the length are displayed on the page.

I’ve written a second post for New Voices.  This one is about the difficulties of providing for all students in a campus Hillel, and what I see as an important step in that direction.  Enjoy!

At the J Street conference, I was approached by Ben Sales, the editor of New Voices, who asked me to blog for them, and I’ve just written my first post for them!  I’m really excited about this, and I’ll continue to post here when I write something new over there.  As with Jewschool, I’m not going to crosspost the content of blog posts, just a link to them.

I encourage everyone to take a look at New Voices.  There’s some really great stuff over there, and I’m really happy to be a part of it.

What makes someone want to become a campus police officer?  I say this in all seriousness.  Not at all to demean them.  I’m really curious.  Being a normal cop is definitely a drag sometimes – you have to do stuff like traffic that I could imagine being pretty boring.  But you also see a lot of things, I imagine you learn a lot about society, and you can genuinely help people.  Not to glorify the dirty work, but I can empathize with that feeling of wanting to actually get out on the street and help someone who’d be getting hurt otherwise.  To be honest, I sometimes think that if I have grand ideas about politics and helping people, I should work as a police officer first.  Then I’d have a real understanding of how the problems I’m claiming to come up with solutions for actually look in real life.

The same motivations of wanting to help people could apply to someone wanting to become a campus police officer.  You’d help people stay safe in a new place, living away from home from the first time, etc.  But there’s another aspect to it that I started thinking about last night.

Last night, I went to a 1920s themed party at a dorm on campus.  I had heard about it from a lot of cool people, and it was billed as having a live jazz band, lots of dancing, and I figured it would be a cool scene.  I expected that there’d be some drinking, but from the way it was described, it sounded like it would be mostly a fun scene.

So I got dressed up, and headed over a bit after ten.  It quickly became clear that the party was not at all what I had expected.  It was extremely crowded, and if there was a live band, I didn’t see it (there was a drum set in one corner of one room, but no one was playing).  There was of course an iPod sound system blaring some typicalish dance music.  And the drinking scene was way beyond what I had been expecting.  It was totally out of control.  About three minutes after I got there, the campus cops showed up and everyone had to leave.  It was a big disappointment given the fact that I was expecting some socializing (I didn’t really care if there was a bit of alcohol – I wasn’t planning to drink either way), good dancing, and a laid back night.  None of those things happened.

As I was leaving with the same friends I had come with, I was thinking about what the cops must think.  It must feel so hopeless.  So futile.  I mean, maybe some of them had bad experiences with drinking, or knew someone who was badly hurt in a drinking-related incident, and decided to take it into their own hands.  But it must be so hard to carry on, busting up one alcohol-soaked party after another.  It must feel like there’s nothing you can do.  No matter how many drunk kids you kick out, no matter how many times you make someone leave who potentially could have hurt themselves or gotten hurt later, there will always be another.  I suppose there’s a satisfaction in knowing that you helped even one person, but it’s not like that’ll make it stop.  For every person who is reformed like that and doesn’t do it again after such a close call, there are a hundred who just carry on.

It must take a lot of perseverance to keep going with that job, feeling as though you can never really have an effect.  I have an enormous amount of respect for someone who makes that decision.  I don’t know if I’d be able to.  But I almost feel like I should, like if I’m not going to engage in the kind of behavior they’re up against every night, that I should be out there helping them.  Maybe there’s no place for taking a back seat here.  Maybe I need to get off my high horse of moral superiority and just try to help someone out.

I don’t know if that’s what the cops actually think about it.  This is all purely speculation.  But I do know that this is a societal problem.  Can the cops fix it?  I don’t know that either.  But they’ve got an incredibly important job to do.  No matter what the politicians are doing, no matter how society is changing or staying the same, they’re there to make sure it happen safely.  To me, the institution of the police is one of the most important there is.  It’s a government agency that exists for no reason other than us.  No politics, no values, just priorities.  Safety and respect.  Those are elements of a civil society that don’t exist in a lot of places.  During the Bush years, when our civil liberties were being assaulted left and right, and our country was making a mockery out of its core values domestically and internationally, I would hear people say that we were living in a dictatorship, that our government was no better than a military junta, and I would say, no, that’s not true.  Because we could wake up in the morning and know that there wouldn’t be a mob running through the street.  This country’s ability to maintain peace and domestic tranquility through changes of power and huge catastrophic events is incredibly important.  It’s something that we should treasure, and not write off thoughtlessly.  Without that support from the bottom up, none of the institutions we prize would function.

It’s not always perfect.  There are corrupt or inefficient police forces all over the place.  But in the big picture, they’re the exception, not the rule.  I look at police as a body of people who, as a general rule, genuinely want to help people.  And as such, I maintain a great deal of respect for them, and a great deal of sympathy for the things they deal with every day so that we don’t have to.

The question is, should we?

This high holiday season was new for me in many ways. It was my first away from my family, it was the first time I fasted without drinking water, and it was also the first time I didn’t go to services during the day on Yom Kippur. This last one, and a related concept I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, are what I want to talk about here. As anyone who’s done it knows, praying is not a simple concept. It’s a big category within the religion (as in it encompasses a lot of practices and ideas), and there are a myriad of opinions about every single aspect of it. When, how, where, and why you should do it, and so on. Like many Jews, I’ve always had a complicated relationship to prayer. I was raised religious, but without much connection to a synagogue. Although very nice, the shul in our town never excited us that much (I think I’ve talked about my struggles with this a bit in a previous post), and I’ve looked for other options for a long time. (more…)

It’s pretty different, to say the least.  Living on my own poses some definite challenges.  I have a nasty cold, and there is no one to bring me soup or tea.  And I realized that I didn’t know where the Health Services building was.  That’s no good.  I had to go out and buy myself a thermometer and cough syrup.  I mean, in normal life, these are just things that I expect to be there.  But I guess someone had to buy them at some point.  Which is an interesting thing to think about.  At what point in your life, living on your own or with someone else, do you buy household things?  Plates, Advil, soap, etc.?  I guess I’m more self-sufficient now.

I’m swamped with work.  And that’s even after I switched out of the basic freshmen Chem class down to an introductory one that is more appropriate to my level.  I’m in a math class that’s intended more for math majors, so it’s very theoretical and proof-based.  I like it, but it’s definitely my most difficult class.

I also don’t really like having huge lecture classes.  There are so many people in them who have so many interesting things to say, but I don’t get to here most of them.  It’s a bummer.  It’s also demoralizing, and a hard thing to pay attention to first thing in the morning because of how impersonal it is.

I’m adjusting to the whole experience in some ways, but in others I think my Western-MA, small-homey-school mentality that I’ve been operating within my whole life is pretty deeply embedded in me.  And I’m okay with that.  I find myself feeling lost in such a huge place as this.  Not to say that I don’t have friends or feel comfortable around people.  I just don’t like not knowing everyone.  It’s weird that I see people I don’t recognize every day.  In my dorm, even.  I feel like if you live in the same building as people, you should know them.  It’s weird.

I’m definitely learning a lot.  I do have one class that’s a small seminar, on Talmud, which is great.  I mean, all of my classes are, but this one’s just very personal, and the other people in it are really smart and talkative.  We’re going to cover various aspects of the Talmud, including historical background and context, legality, morality, ethics, and others.

Also, I am swing dancing weekly.

It’s going to be a good four years.  Tiring, but good.