I will tell you more about that now!
Since I was young, I was always interested in the Middle East. I grew up Jewish, so my parents and I talked about this part of the world a lot. It seemed like a very cool region, and I always wanted to visit it. When I was about 13, I visited Israel for the first time. The politics of the place came alive for me. Suddenly, everything I had heard on the news--about the tensions in the Middle East, as well as the region's rich traditions--seemed more real than I ever understood them to be before. I knew then that I wanted to know more about this fascinating part of the world.
A few years after my first trip to the Middle East, I started focusing on this region in high school. I did this by taking language classes in Arabic, which I found to be really difficult at first. Some days, Arabic is still difficult for me! But after a few years, I started recognizing a lot of the parts of Arab and Middle Eastern culture that had not been familiar to me before. The foods and the traditions all started to appear more in my research. So did something else: the idea of migration. As the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, migration has been part of my family identity since before I was born. The idea of returning to the Middle East and seeing my roots were really important to me.
So, I went! It was one of the most important decisions I ever made. I stayed in Israel for a year, and I learned some Hebrew while I was there. That year-long stay inspired me to study the Middle East region in college, where I began to get even more curious about migration. After college, I lived in Morocco for eight months in order to study migration patterns up close as well as to continue learning Arabic.
