The fragility of fear
Reflecting on the micro-moments that shattered my prejudices and yes, Daddy Yankee makes an appearance
1. Germany: shed hate, gain weight
Roughly three months before 9/11 and days before my 16th birthday (obviously equally important historical events), I took my first trip abroad. When my plane touched down in Brussels, Belgium, I was convinced the entire trip was a sham: My peabrain couldn’t process that I was on the other side of the globe.
We must be in Montana, I reasoned.
Once I touched grass and accepted that I was, in fact, on another continent, I spent the next three weeks touring with a youth symphony orchestra across France and Germany, staying with host families along the way.
I also gained 15 pounds during that time—thanks to a healthy diet of Nutella, meat, cheese, and bread (I didn’t drink yet, so I can’t blame beer)—but that’s beside the point.
I was a well-meaning 15-year-old Midwestern American kid clunkily blossoming into my dial-up-laden teenage years when “~*~” was the herpes of the AOL profile world; nu-metal bands like Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, and Korn dominated the radio; and dELiA*s was the slightly too-expensive catalog turned storefront where I aspired to spend most of my PacSun paychecks.
In other words, it was simpler times but music was definitely at the beginning of its multi-decade downhill trajectory.
A few days into the trip, my double-decker tour bus crossed from Alsace, France into Germany on an overnight trip. As I watched the shadowy outlines of dark, hilly forests whiz by, all I could think was, “A lot of Jews hid and died in those woods.”
(Lovely!)
When I finally arrived at my first German host family’s home in the northwest part of the country, I was quietly concerned to find they were an older couple in their 80s.
(Former Nazis, probably.)
They didn’t speak any English, but the woman handed me a letter from her son, who I never ended up meeting. In it, he wrote that if I needed any accommodations as a Jewish person—such as kosher food, which I’ve never kept, minus a natural disdain for shellfish and a love for cheeseburgers—to let his parents know so that I could have a comfortable stay.
This one letter shattered my absurdly naive idea that the country was still rampant with Nazis, despite it having been over 50 years since the Holocaust.
A few days later, while staying at their home, I woke up on my 16th birthday to the sound of music outside. It was my ‘host dad’ outside in the backyard playing ‘Happy Birthday’ on a trumpet, proudly yelling, “Amanda!” when he was done. Both host parents threw a cute birthday party that morning with a traditional breakfast, and they gifted me with a German jewelry dish as a gift, which I still keep on my work desk at home.
To say I left Germany three weeks later humbled, full of appreciation and a smidge larger in physical size is an understatement.
2. Bored border guards & Daddy Yankee enthusiasts in Jordan
Years later, I found myself in Israel (don’t you love how passive that sounds?) on an extended week of travel after my Birthright trip ended. It was January 2006 and I had been bopping around the New Jersey-sized country with a few friends from the trip. At one point, after spending time in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Be’er Sheva, we made our way to Eilat: a resort city on the Red Sea smushed between Jordan and the Sinai peninsula.
It was in Eilat where I’d check off a destination on my bucket list, a place I never thought I’d get the chance to go in a thousand years: Petra. This ancient city of rock had been a dream of mine since I was a kid watching Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (the best of the trilogy, IMO.) At the time, I had even been keeping an Indiana Jones-inspired journal of brown leather and yellowed paper where I was practicing the Arabic alphabet before Arabic was officially offered at my college.
Yes, this is embarrassing to admit.
When we arrived at the Jordanian border to get into Aqaba, I was apprehensive and just kind of scared. I had never been to an Arab country before, and I couldn’t help but think of the future headlines, “Four Jewish American college students disappear on ambitious trip to Petra, citing debatable best Indiana Jones film as inspiration.”
The guards looked at us with flat, unsmiling faces and asked for our passports. The “interrogation” went something like this:
Them: You’re American?
Me: Yes.
Them: Jewish?
Me: [Oh, fuck me.] Yes.
Them: Did you pray at the Western Wall?
Me: [Well, at least I was Bat Mitzvah’d before I spend the rest of my adult life in Jordanian prison!] ……Yes.
Them: [Cracking up, clearly enjoying watching me spiral] Come on in!
Me: WTF.
After proverbially shitting myself, we randomly picked our cab out of many waiting in the nearby parking lot, most likely the majority of whom would be shuttling tourists to Petra or Wadi Rum. The cabbie spoke no English and none of us spoke Arabic, so it was a relatively quiet car ride through the southern Jordanian desert, save for the soothing sounds of 50 Cent and Daddy Yankee: Gasolina and In Da Club were playing on repeat on his cassette deck.
Can Daddy bring world peace?!
Suddenly, Gasolina-fest came to an abrupt pause when the cabbie pulled over to a nondescript shack in the middle of nowhere. We exchanged nervous glances, having no idea what he was doing or where he had disappeared to.
OK, we got into Jordan but THIS is where it ends, I decided.
A few minutes later, he returned with “the goods” aka drinks and snacks for us, and had probably taken the liberty to go to the bathroom or something, you know, normal. I can’t speak for my friends, but I caught myself both letting out a sigh of relief while also feeling a pang of Jewish guilt for having such asinine assumptions about everyone I had encountered after leaving Israel.
While I didn’t necessarily believe that all Muslims or Arabs were terrorists (I wasn’t that far gone) I still had the idea that, at least as a Jewish American, I was going to receive poor treatment, especially having just been in Israel.
The rest of our desert excursion was smooth, minus my tripping over a grain of sand and face-planting in front of a group of tourists at the entrance to Petra.
There’s one in every group, isn’t there?
I documented as much of the Rose City as I could on my disposable camera, and while the physical photos I have are poor shitty quality, my memories are golden, and I went back to Israel feeling appreciative of the hospitality, humor, and warmth I encountered in Jordan.
3. This all sounds lovely, but what’s your point?
Humans can have ugly thoughts and hold shameful views, myself included. The best way to shatter biases and prejudices (because I believe we all are capable of having them) is to put yourself into situations where you’re going to have to interact with the people you are, well, afraid of. These experiences I had in Germany and Jordan brought me down to Earth, and in quite short, fleeting moments, too.
I think the fact that my prejudices in these specific circumstances were shattered so easily says something: They were based on nothing but things I had read in history books or seen in movies. And particularly in the case of my fear of being a Jew amongst Arabs, it was based on coming of age in a post-9/11 world.
Unfortunately, today we live in an age that makes it easier to be a gnarly troll on TikTok than to be a kind, empathetic listener in real life. We always have time to shed our nasty if we recognize it’s there and choose to do something about it and “doing something about it” might just mean getting out of your comfort zone—literally and figuratively—and meeting with and listening to other people.
I’m not saying that I’ve never had a bias since then—I’m sure I’ve had many, but to be aware of them and to challenge them is important. This happens when we come face to face with people who are different from us and shatter our fragile, fear-based views, whether it’s through a respectful debate; with humor (a la the Jordanian border guards); or a simple written card from a stranger in Germany.
This is one of my favorite works that you have done yet!
Knowing we disagree on key things I bet we agree on 90% of most issues that come in front of us. It’s really easy to take a side in today’s world and label someone an extreme to either side but we need way more of this!