Your “what I love about Israel” thoughts keep pouring in. Here are two more, the second one a poem:

I’ve only been to Israel once. I went on a solidarity mission with my Rabbi and a couple of other guys from my shul during the Gulf War. The cabbies wouldn’t take money from us. Half of an IDF platoon ran around the Kotel looking for a band-aid for one of our group after he fell and hurt his knee (once they figured out what we meant by “band-aid”). I planted a tree with my bare hands. We visited an orientation camp for newly arrived Ethiopian Jews. We saw Ethiopian Jews in IDF uniforms. My Rabbi talked us onto a Patriot missile base. I visited cousins in Tel Aviv. We visited the mayor in Tel Aviv. I had to give back my gas mask when we left.

Martin, USA

An unforgettable place.

Sun emblazes wall and dome
brushes hills into gold.

From a bench
in Jerusalem Square,
sipping Turkish coffee,
I watch men, women
walk the cobblestones.
One might be a cousin -
a death camp survivor.

Merging cultures
thicken the air.
Stuffed cabbages, falafel,
honey and pine nuts.

For a moment I forget
stones are being thrown
a kilometre away.

But I breathe a feeling,
is it freedom
out of ashes?

Selma, Walnut Creek, CA

More of the tiny things you love about Israel, beginning with this one about Tel Aviv:

I love the shuk / artists market on Dizengoff Street. My daughter and I could not leave. My youngest daughter who was studying at Tel Aviv University (whom were were visiting), demanded that we go home after 6 hours or she was going to have us committed.
Janet, FL

Actually I love almost everything about Israel starting with the balmy air that enveloped us when we arrived at Tel Aviv in the middle of the night when we visited recently. The taxi ride to our hotel in Jerusalem was with a driver whom we never met before but he acted as a family member, pointing out historic places as we drove by in the night. At the hotel, the Har Zion, Mt.. Zion, we were accompanied to our room by a bellman and noticed a Mezuzah on each hotel room door.. We touched ours and felt we were finally at home. We slept well that night. The next morning we awoke to the panorama of the ancient city of Jerusalem. We were at home.
Agnes, San Francisco

Went to Israel for the first time in the mid-1980’s. After travelling half way around the world, I took a walk in Tel Aviv as soon as we got there and much to my shock all the men on the street looked like my father.
Mort, USA

Here are more of your responses to my question, “What are the little things you love about Israel?” I first asked this question in my article, published on the JTA site, Loving Israel is in the Details.

I love that it’s the only place I travel to where I hear “Welcome home” on both ends of the flight.
Judy K., Suffern, NY

The weekend newspaper- it’s a bigger addition (because on SHABBAT no newspaper) and it’s “an issue” – very very popular.
Marsha, San Francisco, CA

I have to go to the States to join my husband but I’m in tears as I leave because I’ve just heard that my son is in Lebanon in the field and I can’t reach him. It’s the first Lebanon war. My neighbour is a prominent general in the Israeli army. He stops as he passes to go upstairs and I explain why I’m upset. He tells me not to worry. He leaves messages for my son all over the route and the message finally reaches him but he’s frantic thinking something terrible has happened at home. Aftre all, it’s wartime and the General takes the time to contact him !!. Finally, my son gets through to central headquarters from a field telephone. “Could it be that General X wanted to speak to Sargent S. ? The telephonist is thrilled to greet him and transfers him immediately.. “Something is wrong at home?” “No, not at all. I just wanted to know that everything is alright with you.”. Where else but in Israel? An army of beating hearts, of fathers and sons.
Lee S.

Last week, I wrote an Op Ed called “Loving Israel is in the Details” for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. You can read the article here: Chasnoff JTA Op Ed.

At the end of my piece, I asked readers to email me all the tiny things they love about Israel. Your response has been overwhelming. Many of you made me laugh, and some of you made me cry. Please continue to send your reasons, and pictures as well.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll post your responses right here on my blog. Here’s the first batch:

Rabbi J. writes:

Every Israeli no matter the age, will sing as a group in public… The shared cultural heritage is very strong in such a young country.

From Steven W:

What do I love about Israel? Standing on the Tayelet in Talpoit, Jerusalem and realizing that in order to fully appreciate the view of the Old City and its surroundings before me I need to have a pretty good handle on all of modern human history of the last 4000 years.

Here’s a touching note from Carole L:

One of my favorites is how you will never find a locked door or at least in the areas where I lived (Beer Sheva, Yamit – which I miss very much) and Netanya. I can only imagine what most Americans (especially New Yorkers) would think of that. Or stories of bus riders who will get off the bus at your stop so they can help you find your way (that actually happened to me once!), taxi drivers who will invite you to their home for lunch, the way Israelis will always give you advice (whether you ask for it not!) and on and on. Thanks for reminding me!

Lori B composed her own Top Ten List:

1) Salad for breakfast, chocolate-filled pastries, and ice-kaffeh at every meal and snack!

2) Even the graffiti is spiritual — “Na Nachma Nachman Me’uman” is scrawled everywhere you go!!

3) Floating in the Dead Sea

10) And finally: You don’t have to worry about which direction to face when davening b/c you are STANDING AT THE KOTEL!!

Last week, I taught a workshop entitled “Israel in the Mirror” at the Central Conference of American Rabbis in San Francisco. My goal: to convey how Israelis view themselves, based on the movies they’re watching and the books they enjoy. I chose what I consider three of the most groundbreaking pieces to come out of Israel in recent years – the movie “Bufort”, based on Ron Leshem’s Sapir Prize winning novel Eem Yesh Gan Eden; Eytan Fox’s short film Yossi and Jagger; and the story “Shoes” from Etgar Keret’s collection The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God.
The session was incredible. Jews tend to ask challenging questions, but these rabbis didn’t let up for a minute. In a sense, it was an easy class to teach – I simply introduced the material and let the rabbis do the talking.
Our conclusion – if there was one – is that Israel is a country wrestling with its identity, and that the major challenge to the state is not Iran, or the Palestinians, but ourselves.

One of the biggest challenges I encountered in writing The 188th Crybaby Brigade was the switch from comedy written for the stage to comedy for the page.

I’m a stand-up comic by trade. Onstage, I have tools at my disposal: facial expressions, body language, the ability to speed up and slow down as I create a psychological dialogue with the audience. Best of all, if a particular string of jokes bomb, I can switch topics, or, better yet, pick on a funny looking guy in the guy in the front row.

In writing humorous prose, these tools are, obviously, out the window. Compounding the problem is that I lose my ever-important barometer: instant feedback. I love the instantaneous nature of stand-up comedy. I never have to wonder how the act is going. Instead, it’s simple: if they laugh, I’m great. If the audience is silent, I suck.

To acquaint myself with humor writing, I read books by the three Daves: Sedaris,Eggers, and Barry.

As I read, I looked for patterns. Although their styles of humor differ, I noticed a common trait: they never signaled the joke. Instead, they simply state the absurd truth in as straightforward a manner as possible. This bluntness makes for a double punch: 50% of the humor comes from what the author is saying, and the other half comes from the fact that he’s saying it so bluntly.

For example: one of my favorite passages in Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the one in which Eggers describes his night out with friends in a Berkeley, California bar:

Brent and I, and everyone else, are standing on the bar’s second level, looking down upon the heads of the hundred or so below us, while drinking beer that has been brewed on the premises. We know that the beer has been brewed on the premises because, right there, behind the bar, are three huge copper vats, with tubes coming out of them. This is how beer is made.

Whenever I read this passage, I laugh out loud. What makes it so funny is that, instead of waving his arms and signaling the absurdity of the situation (that seeing beer travel through tubes implies that the beer is brewed on the premises), Eggers instead takes the opposite tack: he takes it seriously. His deadpan approach makes the joke doubly funny—much funnier than had he said, “It’s so crazy. They have beer in vats and tubes, as if we’re supposed to believe that this means it was brewed on the premises.”

In The 188th Crybaby Brigade, I attempt to utilize humor by describing absurd situations as candidly as possible. I start with the opening sentence of the book, in which I chronicle my first medical check-up at the military Induction Center in Tel Aviv:

The Russian is poking my balls.
It’s awkward.

Two chapters later, I describe my first day of basic training:

I am Israeli soldier number 5481287. I’m at the Armored School, in the south, halfway between Jordan and Egypt. I’m dressed like a soldier but I look like a clown. My uniform’s three sizes too big, and it’s stiff, so it looks like I’m wearing a suit of green construction paper; I’d thought I would look sexy in uniform, but I don’t. I’ve also got a new look—I’m buzz-cut and shaved—and a new name: instead of Joel, I’m now my Hebrew name, Yoel, and my last name, according to my dog tags, is Shetznitz.
“You misspelled my name,” I said to the guy working the dog tag machine.
“So don’t die,” he said, and shooed me out the door.

Humor can even be used to describe a situation as dark as death. Here, I talk about the platoon’s field trip to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum:

Inside Yad Vashem, it’s the usual Platoon Two, Company B shenanigans. While our tour guide describes Hitler’s rise to power, Gerber pinches Uri in the ass. “Koos-emok!” Uri whispers, then he stuns Gerber with a quick knee to the nuts that sends him tumbling into a display case of Zyklon B.
“Bitch!” whispers Gerber.
“Your mother,” Uri whispers back.
Doni and Tanenbaum step between them, try to break it up, but only get sucked into the melee. Then Ganz jumps in, then Nir, and suddenly six, seven of them are attacking one another with headlocks and noogies, Three Stooges style, next to a wall-size photo of Jewish corpses.
My first thought is to scold my platoon mates. Show some respect! I want to shout. For the sake of the six million dead!
But as I watch my comrades roughhouse, I suddenly have another thought:
This is awesome.

I go on to describe why my platoon mates’ roughhousing in a Holocaust museum is a good thing for the Jewish people—namely, because it means that after thousands of years of persecution, we’ve reached a point in Jewish history where the notion of our people being annihilated is so foreign that Jews can goof around in Yad Vashem.

Typically, a writer doesn’t get the stand-up comedian’s instant feedback. But since you’re reading this and have the ability to post, I’ll go ahead and ask:

Does it work?

Even before I signed the contract to write The 188th Crybaby Brigade, I turned to other authors for advice.

The first writer I met was Joshua Ferris , author of Then We Came to the End. Joshua had grown up outside Chicago, not far from where I grew up in Evanston. I’d played little league with his best childhood friend, Grant. It was at a birthday party for a mutual friend that Grant introduced us.

Despite the fact that he’d just sold a novel that would go on to become a New York Times bestseller and shortlisted for the National Book Award, Joshua was completely down to earth and, better yet, generous with his time. He read the sample chapter of my book proposal and then, a week later, took me for coffee and gave an extensive critique. He then offered to introduce me to his literary agent, if I needed one. (I did not, as it turned out.) Over the next few years, I’d email him questions about everything from what to expect during the editing process to publicity strategy. He always answered back.

Then, in January 2006, I saw an ad in the Times about an upcoming event at the 92nd Street Y with, among others, Dave Eggers.

Every writer has that one other writer whom he or she emulates almost to the point of obsession. For me, that other writer is Eggers.

I first came across Eggers in the fall of 2003, when I happened to notice his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Shattering Genius, on the front table at a Barnes and Noble in Buffalo.

I picked up the book, examined the amateur-looking cover. I flipped through the first few pages and saw a list of metaphors (and their explanations) contained in the book and an Acknowledgments section that thanked, in turn, the employees of NASA and the U.S. Postal system.

From that moment, I was hooked. I sat in an easy chair and read half the book right there in the store. Then I paid for it, finished it that night, and started to reread it the next morning.

After his reading at the 92nd Street Y, I stood in the signing line for upwards of an hour. When my turn finally came, I handed him a book and a white envelope with a letter in it. “I wrote you a note,” I mumbled, nervous, like a kid meeting his favorite baseball player.

“Cool!” Eggers said.

For two weeks, I checked the mailbox with anticipation.

No note.

Then, somehow, I forgot about it. Until one day, I opened the mailbox and found a letter with a San Francisco postmark, addressed to me in my own handwriting. (I’d enclosed an SASE).

I tore open the envelope. Inside was the letter I’d written to Dave, with his handwritten comments scrawled next to each question.

Eggers offered incredible advice. On my need for an extension from the publisher: “Totally normal. Good to have deadlines, but don’t release it ‘til it’s ready. You can never un-publish.”

On how to know when the book was finished: “Have a group of 5-6 readers outside of your S&S editor. Get these readers committed to reading/helping you make the book as good as it can be. They should be friends/relations who like you, care about what you publish. They can screen for dangerous passages.”

Truth be told, the best part of Eggers’ letter was not any one piece of advice, but simply that he’d written back.

If writing a book is like giving birth, then receiving the PDF of the jacket cover is like seeing the first ultrasound: finally, it hits you that this creature is for real.

When it came time to discuss the cover of my book, The 188th Crybaby Brigade, I made two requests. First, that the jacket art be directed by Chip Kidd, the “rock star” of book jacket design. I’ve always loved Kidd’s ability to produce a single, iconic image that perfectly captures the essence of a book—such as he does in these two covers for Augusten Burroughs and David Sedaris:

My second request—it was more of a demand, actually—was that the cover not be overtly Jewish. The 188th Crybaby Brigade is a humorous and provocative memoir about my year as a combat soldier in the Israeli Army. Throughout the book, I discuss my strong Jewish upbringing and my resultant connection to Israel—a connection that, ultimately, led me to volunteer for a combat unit of theIDF.

But I’ve always felt that, despite the Jewish themes, Crybaby Brigade is a human story with mass appeal. It’s a story about a father and son. It’s about myth and the inevitable disappointment that occurs when we come face-to-face with our heroes. Most of all, it’s a book about identity: as I progress from hapless basic trainee to tank soldier in Lebanon, I ask myself just who I really am.

So when it came time to discuss the cover, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted, but I certainly knew what I didn’t want: anything that might drive away the general audience because the cover was too blatantly Jewish. My editor agreed.

So I was shocked when the following PDF showed up in my inbox:

I stared at the image, speechless.

A minute later, my agent called. “Well?” he asked.

I shook my head. “It’s so…Jewish,” I said.

“It’s a tad Jewy,” he agreed.

Actually, it was tremendously Jewy—way too Jewy for my taste.

I was crushed. Here, I’d just spent three years crafting my masterpiece, and now it was about to be ruined by this screamingly Semitic cover.

My agent (and here I’ll give a shout out, because he was so incredibly wonderful throughout the book cover process—the entire book process, for that matter), the talented Dan Lazar, promised he’d relay my feelings to the publisher. “But don’t be surprised if they ignore you,” he said. “They decide the cover. Not you.”

Not wanting to leave matters to chance, I racked my brain for a way to finagle a new cover. I glared at the image on my screen. That star—so big and vulgar—like one of those yellow stars Jews were forced to wear in Germany. And the soldiers, hanging on the star, as if they were caught on barbed wire…

Then it hit me!

I Googled the terms “holocaust museum jerusalem statue barbed wire,” clipped out the below image, and sent it to Dan with the note, “Tell the publisher that their cover will remind Jews of this sculpture at Yad Va Shem”:

Ten minutes later, Dan emailed back. “They’re doing a new cover.”

In the end, Chip Kidd dropped the project. (Or the project dropped Chip Kidd; I never did hear the final version of the story.) Instead, my cover was designed by a young art school grad in Boston, Holly Gordon. I stumbled upon Holly by chance (a friend introduced us). After a few phone conversations, Holly and I came up with the iconic image that, in my opinion, perfectly captured the theme of my book—the absurdity of life in the Israeli Army:

Miraculously—and I want to stress that it was an absolute miracle—the publisher went for it. “This NEVER happens!” Dan emailed me. “I have never, in all my years of publishing, seen a house accept a cover design from an author!”

Maybe I was lucky. Or, more likely, the house got sick of my complaining and wanted to shut me up.

I immediately sent the cover to friends and asked for feedback. The one note we consistently received was that the image reminded them of Douglas Adams’Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

I took the criticism to heart. After a few tweaks, Holly and I came up with this:

And then, finally, the image that would become the cover to my baby, The 188th Crybaby Brigade:

It was a harrowing process, but worth the effort. I certainly didn’t want to give birth to an ugly baby. And anytime the process got especially rough, I reminded myself of the following quote by none other than the rock star himself, Chip Kidd:

“Whoever said you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover never worked in publishing.”

One of my biggest pet peeves is poor grammar in public.

A Jew in Maryland emailed me this joke:

Three Chassidim are talking about their rebbes.

The first Chassid says, “One Shabbos morning on the hottest day of the summer, we were walking with our rebbe to shul and it was so hot and so humid, none of us could take another step. But the Rebbe started to daven, and what do you think? In front of the Rebbe it was hot, and in back of the Rebbe it was hot! To the left of the Rebbe it was hot, and to the right of the Rebbe it was hot! But right where our holy Rebbe was davening, it was cool and pleasant and we all stood close to the Rebbe and walked to shul!”

The second Chassid says, “That’s NOTHING. One Shabbos morning on the coldest day of winter, we were walking with our Rebbe to shul and it was so cold and snowy and icy, none of us could take another step. But the Rebbe started to daven, and what do you think? In front of the Rebbe it was freezing, and in back of the Rebbe it was freezing! To the left of the Rebbe it was freezing, and to the right of the Rebbe it was freezing! But right where our holy Rebbe was davening, it was warm and dry and pleasant and we all stood close to the Rebbe and walked to shul!”

The third Chassid says, “Holy? I’ll tell you HOLY!! One Shabbos morning on a lovely day in springtime we were walking with our Rebbe to shul and it was just delightful. Suddenly, we came across this huge satchel full of cash. We asked the Rebbe, what can we do? This money, it would provide so much tzedakah, it would feed so many poor people and we could use it for all sorts of good. But we can’t carry it! So the Rebbe started to daven, and what do you think? In front of the Rebbe it was Shabbos, and in back of the Rebbe it was Shabbos….”