Gallatin student Pablo De Castro Gomez recently led a community service project focused on urban farming while studying at NYU Tel Aviv. Working with a group of fellow NYU Tel Aviv students, local students, and a local NGO, Pablo found the experience meaningful. 

When you live in a city like New York where everything exists in abundance, it’s easy to forget that some of the food we take for granted can also be a luxury. For the immigrant and refugee communities in southern Tel Aviv, things like fresh herbs and vegetables are often commodities beyond their reach. Unfortunately, many families rely on cheaper foods that can be detrimental to their health over time. Unwilling to turn a blind eye,  NYU Tel Aviv has partnered up with the Isreali afterschool scout program Eitan Scouts and the Association for Urban Farming NGO, to make a difference. Over the course of a month and a half, delegates from all three organizations rallied to meticulously design a low-cost hydroponic farm at the Scouts headquarters in southern Tel Aviv. Following weeks of planning and gathering the materials, we all once again came together to build a healthier future for the city. After a strenuous day of working the land, programming the hydroponics elements, and making sure everything was pretty enough for Instagram, we had manifest our plans into reality. Not only do these kids now have access to a wide variety of herbs and veggies but by incorporating them into the design process, they learned how to expand their low-cost high-efficiency gardens throughout their community. Seeing how excited and proud the scouts were of what they had built, I’m sure we’ll be seeing more hydroponic gardens popping up really soon.

NYU Tel Aviv journalist student Taylor Bissey recently had an article published in the Jerusalem Report. This was an exciting opportunity for Taylor. Her article and photos are republished below. Please enjoy!

THE WARM sun shines brightly upon the group of men and a few women gathered in front of sheds on the beach. The first boats have already entered the small cove of Jisr a-Zarqa and, with them, nets full of a vari- ety of fish.

The men untangle the fish from the bright green nets and toss them into blue and yel- low buckets. When a new boat comes in, they move away from their nets or come down from their nearby sheds to help an- chor the boat and unload the new catch.

Locals from the exclusively Arab town as well as Jewish Israelis from the neighboring towns huddle around, filling plastic bags with the new catch to bring home. Halil Jarbon, 77, is the grandfather of this com- munity.

“People like to come here. They see the fishermen come out of the water with fish in the nets,” he says. “The people know they are the freshest fish around.”

The community gathers around to grill the new catch on the grassy platforms in front of the stone, wood, and metal sheds. They sit in plastic chairs enjoying tea and coffee with a large spoonful of sugar, a daily ritual for this small group of fishermen and their families.

The day before brown waves had crashed against the light poles in the bay. Under the shelter of the make-shift roof of his restaurant located on the beach front of Jisr az- Zarqa, Mussa Jarbon, 46, had watched as his brother pulled his boat out to cast the nets that evening. “This color, chocolate, the rain changes the water and brings many fish,” he explained.

Only two boats, maybe three, though, braved the weather. Mussa did not. He and the other fisherman buy many of their nets in Haifa, and they are expensive. While winter storms bring nutrients to the sea through rain, attracting fish closer to the shore, the storms also can tangle their nets on the rocks, leaving them useless. Each fisherman weighs the risks, a lost net or lost income from lack of fish.

Fishing has passed from father to son in this community. Unfortunately, each gener- ation has seen less fish. “I remember I would go fishing with my father thirty-five years ago. Daily we would come back to the beach with a hundred kilos, two hundred kilos of fish,” Mussa recalls. “Now I don’t see this.”

These fishermen now need motor boats because of the decrease in the amount of fish in the Mediterranean.

“Once with a small net from the shore, people could get the same amount fish that he gets with eight nets he puts far away,” explains Jarbon.

The small artisanal fishing community sits proudly in front of the densely popu- lated Jisr az-Zarqa. It is the only remaining exclusively Arab town on Israel’s Mediterranean coast. The residents are descendants of swamp-dwelling Bedouin known as Arab Ghawarina. They were joined by Sudanese slaves brought from Egypt in the 19th century and two families, Jarban and Amash, who fled from the Jordan and Hula valleys. A majority of the towns residents hold these names to this day.

In 1920, because of their surprising immunity to malaria, the residents of Jisr az- Zarqa relocated to their current location after helping Jewish settlers drain the nearby Hula swamp. This collaboration led to good relations that later preserved the community during the 1948 war. Halil Jarbon reports his father was told by the people of Zikhron Ya’akov, a nearby Jewish community, that the Arab residents of Jisr az-Zarqa did not have to move. In contrast, other Arab towns, like Fureidis, were moved further from the Mediterranean because the Israelis feared that the townspeople would aid an attack against Israel if other Arab countries approached from the sea.

Their status as “swamp people” and their relationship with the nearby Jewish commu- nities isolated Jisr az-Zarqa Arabs from the other Arab communities. It wasn’t until the 1980’s that they began to marry Arabs from other towns.

The town’s growing population is squeezed against the sea by the Nahal Taninim Nature Reserve and Kibbutz Ma’agan Michael to the north, Highway 2 to the east, and upscale Caesarea to the south. An attempt by Cae- sarea, home to Prime Minister Netanyahu, to build a “sound barrier” to block the call to prayer between the two cities was start- ed but never completed. The partial wall is now covered with vegetation, but is a clear boundary between the two communities.

Despite residing adjacent to the highway, only recently has there been talk about put- ting in an exit to serve the town. There are only two entrances and the main entrance is only one lane wide. Currently, Israelis can simply drive past this town. Halil Jarbon has watched the relationships that existed previously change. “It’s not only in Israel, but all the world,” Halil recognizes.“But here we don’t really have relationships between ourselves, the Arabs and the Jewish.”

Jisr az-Zarqa is one of the poorest towns within Israel. The population of 15,000 has more than doubled within the last two decades. About sixty percent of the community’s population is under the age of 25. The town has a high unemployment rate, and low matriculation rates.

Over the past decade, there have been several initiatives to foster change within the community. One example of these is the “social business”, Juha’s Guest House, established by an Israeli Jew along with a local Israeli Arab from the community. In collaboration with this guest house, the Middle East

Partnership Initiative has begun to establish programs such as vocational training for local women instructing them in traditional weaving and other skills that have been lost. The fishing village has also been targeted for economic development within the city through tourism.

Israel’s Park and Nature Authority (PNA) began a clean-up on the beach front of Jisr az-Zarqa and the Nahal Taninim Nature Reserve. Its stated goals were to attract more tourists to the area as well as to decrease the ecological impact of the pollution. The Parks and Nature Authority employs three local fishermen to pick up trash.

Hamama, the only woman fishing in the community, however, sees problems with the PNA getting involved.

“People are afraid that in a few years they will take this place from them because they know how things work in Israel and with this department. Just like every place that is beautiful and has the potential to become touristic and have money, they take it over,” she said. There is uncertainty about the future of the sheds, too, whether they will be allowed to stay or if they will be torn down. Hamama wants to preserve the beach and fishing community.

During the day, the sheds serve as gather- ing places for local families. In the warmer months, the sheds and the beach are hum- ming with activity. Fishing, biking, swim- ming and surfing can all be found within this small cove. Hamama, who broke away from the conservative standards of the village and the community by establishing herself as a strong girl when she was young, believes the development efforts should be focused instead on empowering youth and women. She has established youth groups and sports clubs for women to help them become em- powered.

At the same time, it is becoming more difficult to make a living from fishing. Halil Jarbon recognizes the tie between the growing amount of litter in the sea, and the de- creasing amount of fish. “There is no more fish in the sea nowadays because the waters are polluted,” Jarbon said. “Either there is the power plant, all the garbage, and all the rivers going to the sea are polluted with sewage.”

He recalls that when he was a child that there used to be so many fish that collecting them was like agriculture. “Like a farmer used to go to his field and take as much as he wants and he had plenty. This was the same as going to the sea.”

It is only recently that Israel began taking steps to help reestablish the marine ecosystem. Israel attributed much of the decline in the fishing yields to the large commercial boats that moved down the Israeli coast.

“They just take everything in their way and they don’t care where it’s a big fish or a young fish that could grow equal to the size of the others,” Halil said. “Once they catch the fish, and they don’t use them, they are throwing them back into the sea. But they are already dead, so they are destroying the population of the sea.”

In 2014, Israel began to place restrictions on trawling activity after they saw a severe decline in fishing yields. The Ministry and Agriculture established far-reaching amendments of the fishing regulations to help with the overfishing. The amendments would be overseen by the Parks and Nature Authority beginning in 2016.

In addition to restricting commercial trawlers, another amendment stops fishing during the spawning period. Halil Jarbon agrees that if this was implemented, in a few years the situation would improve.

“It’s actually a good idea, but the problem is that if we are not fishing for two months, we don’t have income” he said. “If the Park and Nature Authority would pay us for the two months, it would be fine. But, it is not working, because this is the first year we are trying that, and we didn’t fish for two months, and we haven’t seen the money yet.” For the fisherman, fishing is their main income. But, even with fishing, according to a survey done in 2017, many of them still rely on economic aid from the state.

In addition, there are other restrictions that have been implemented whose rationale is not clear to the fishermen of Jisr az- Zarqa. It makes sense to not fish near the military base to the north or the power plant to the south, but Halil says doesn’t understand the restriction on fishing near Tantura, which used to be an Arab fishing village prior to 1948.

The fishing community not only struggles with challenges from the Israeli government but also the local council. The fishing community lacks a paved road all the way to the sheds. There is no electricity running to the beach. Everything there is run by generators. Many fishermen still feel the local government is not meeting the needs of this part of the community.

For these and other reasons, there is still a lot of division and distrust when it comes to the government and the local council. “Israel’s eyes are on us because we are situated in the best location,” Hamama says. “There are a few families in the village doing fish- ing and it moves from father to son. The sea is a source for earning money. Not only for families but for the entire village, it is part of our tradition and legacy.”

Unless something changes soon, Jisr a-Zarqa’s tradition and legacy of living by and from the Mediterranean are threatened. The decrease in fishing yields threatens the future of the profession here. Thirty years ago, Mussa Jarbon recounts there being forty men and, sometimes, up to a hundred men fishing. Now there are only six families engaged in fishing. “Now we have 15 boats [that can] work daily”, Mussa, says. “If the weather is good, you will see. Sometimes only two boats go out depending on weather and the fish.”

Halil admits now that he is older, he doesn’t go out to sea anymore, but the sea is still his passion. Every day the first thing he does in the morning is look at the sea. “I give my wife an insulin shot and her breakfast, and then I come straight to the sea” Halil says. “Thirty years ago, you couldn’t have sat here with me, because I would have been in the sea all the time.”

Mussa, who has eight children, six girls and two boys, is encouraging them to pursue their education. He is able to sustain his family through fishing and opening his restaurant on Fridays and Saturdays, but he says life is still difficult. As one of his sons tells him he would like to be a fisherman, a wave of concern washes over his face.

“I would like my children to go to university,” he says. “The sea isn’t going anywhere.”

NYU Tel Aviv students at EMIS

The Times of Israel recently published an essay about NYU Tel Aviv students visiting the Eastern Mediterranean International School (EMIS). The essay was written by NYU Abu Dhabi student Rodrigo Ferreira who is currently studying in Tel Aviv and an alum of EMIS. NYU Tel Aviv students from New York, Shanghai, and Abu Dhabi participated in the outing. The exchange was meaningful for the EMIS and NYU students. Read Rodrigo’s essay here.

To conclude this series, we hear from an NYU Shanghai student who studied at NYU Tel Aviv, Michael Lukiman.

What is your school affiliation and what year are you? What is your major?

My main campus is NYU Shanghai, though I originally come from Southern California. I am a senior in the first graduating class of this campus, with commencement in May 2017. My official major is neural science, the study and research of the brain.

What inspired you to study in Tel Aviv?

I had heard that Tel Aviv was a business-oriented city, indeed in a place labeled as the world’s “Startup Nation”. Additionally, I felt I had a lot of perspective to learn from such a unique country and region. Similar to the reason I decided to study in South America in the previous semester, I feel that the various segments of the world can have unimaginably different modes of thinking; to fully put the puzzle together, sampling each place by living there can give those different modes of thinking due respect or at least understanding (which can help negotiate conflicts). But ultimately, it sounded like an adventure.

How was your experience? What was most inspiring, surprising, or moving about your time there? What did you find challenging?

My experience was life-changing. I would often walk along the Hayarkon River in Tel Aviv’s North side. What surprised me was just how much it was like California in terms of geography and climate – golden beaches, chaparral, and hiking to boot. There’s a point where you realize that these places were more alike than alien. What moved me was feeling the sun on my skin and looking toward the Mediterranean ocean. What inspired me is the sense of unfaltering unity in the community of Tel Aviv, including that of the NYU staff. It was challenging being a clear foreigner, but even then it was easy to get by with curiosities and the effort to speak the language. It was a pretty safe atmosphere, getting to the statistics of it. More universally, it could be seen as challenging to approach political or cultural elephants in the room, but NYU provided an exceptionally safe space for doing so. Additionally interesting, my technology internship’s locale had me walking by goats, cows, chickens, and pastures – a peculiar and outstanding way to stay connected to nature in the “tech” sphere.

I understand that you interned with Israel Brain Technologies while at NYU Tel Aviv. Can you tell us about how you came to intern there? Is this an academic internship or non-credit internship?

I like the feeling of creating something unique and emotional – and curious about how things work (and how we can make them work), notably the brain. When mixing this startup spirit with my academic major of neuroscience, finding Israel Brain Technologies allowed me to handle practical, real, and serious implementations of neuroscience-oriented ideas on a daily basis. I’d like to thank Ms. Ilana Goldberg, the internship coordinator, for being a very effective and important liaison in finding this perfect fit. I interviewed with her over Skype a couple months prior to starting, and everything was connected for this non-credit internship (it provided much more value than a couple credits). In this startup accelerator supported by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and former prime minister Shimon Peres, I worked closely with Miri Polachek and Yael Fuchs to get involved in all levels of an industry where business, science, and entrepreneurship lock eyes.

What did your work involve? How did you find the experience?

In an accelerator, there are multiple stages: first, you need to select which companies are promising and worthy of your resources, then spend months polishing their efficiency, marketing, and product through training and meetings (because nothing is perfect off the bat), and finally, connect and demonstrate their value to the investors. I had privilege of helping to organize the judging rounds to decide which final dozen or so of the upwards of fifty companies would come under IBT’s wing, thereby earning me the key opportunity to sit in on the board meetings and serious decision-making discussions behind the table. How does an idea go from paper to effectively profiting and providing value in the community? I played a part in learning the financing infrastructure of such an institution, as well as being able to connect one-on-one with entrepreneurs of these companies, in Israel of all places, the country with the most startups per capita. More importantly, I could learn what life was like day-to-day in an industry like this – the meetings, the organization, the challenges, the jargon, hierarchy, and not to mention how long their workdays were.

As I understand it, Israel Brain Technologies is a non-profit that seeks to accelerate the commercialization of Israel’s brain-related innovation and establish Israel as a leading international brain technology hub. Did being there feel as though you were at the crossroads of the non-profit, tech and start-up worlds? How would you best describe the organization, its mission, and how it influences the development of brain technologies?

Yeah, it was definitely a sweet mix of all things entrepreneurial and scientific! Moreover, it was grounded. There were no obsessive metrics, although there was an emphasis on overall social impact and how much money would be needed. You could emphasize simple rules like: Who would use this? Why is this important? Why is it better? How do we get there? What’s the market like? Is it possible? Is it efficient? When you mix the detailed pace of truth-finding science with the expedience of business, it kinda becomes like engineering. The mission of Israel Brain Technologies to me was to address a silo of business that we once saw as impossible or overly complicated – empowering companies with exciting ideas, some of which sought to allow you to control machines just with your thoughts (not physically impossible), or companies that were out to cure and assist those with Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other disabilities. These are companies that, if successful, could add thousands of years of quality of life around the world – and some of these breakthroughs are already in practice today. That’s invaluable. To make these groups successful, we need to think about money, resources, and how to get themselves to the people that want to hear about them. I knew this internship was genuine because the type of the people working there – many of whom are mothers who are wonderfully leading the mission while managing to care for their kids. Those concurrent activities vest you into anything you do.   

Do you feel as though the work you did as an intern has been valuable? Has working for Israel Brain Technologies changed your understanding of innovation is promoted? Or the various manners in which we are seeking to use technology for the brain? If so, can you describe how?

In every internship, my main objective is to learn insights and work my way up a knowledge, wisdom, and community ladder. I like the simple heuristic to provide a new conceptual continent, or at least district on the map, so to speak. There, one could either mentally rest or return to when needed. Israel Brain Technologies has given me the most in terms of this, where I can think about science in relation to business and money, and hence what I’m studying in relation to what other people are experiencing. I learned that starting a company is both overwhelmingly complex and simple. I learned that pressure is just reflective of how much you can offer – if you aren’t thinking in the right mode, no matter how hard you try, you can’t get into the right arena. Most of all, it assured me that neuroscience is still the promising new frontier that I first saw when choosing it for my initial college career – generally, anything that most people can entertain as science-fiction and then be surprised about when someone tells you it’s a real product is society’s current sweet spot of discovery. On the honest flipside, I learned that lots of people don’t have what it takes to really think in a risk-welcoming, conflict-welcoming endeavor while still focusing on the big picture. Something gets in the way and creates tunnel vision with the companies that we didn’t accept, either pride, doubt, or lack of enthusiasm. You’ve really got to objectively focus on what you’re doing, at least if you want to make it exceptional. Either have a good track record or a good spirit – anything less, you can imagine people will not demand as much. That’s just a lose-lose for both you and the people. For startups, this means accepting when something is just a plain bad idea, or maybe realizing that something is a good idea when everyone else says it is bad. For neuroscience, there’s a realization that anything a brain can do, a computer may eventually do, given some bureaucracies. This fact in turn humbles anyone. A brain just just another component which we can funnel technology through; it can decay or be sharpened. So I think it’s logical use it wisely by getting an internship that keeps it on its toes.

How do you feel your internship experience has complemented your academic experience at NYU Tel Aviv?

It’s hard to think of a way which my classes related to my internship. That’s probably a good thing, since sticking to one main behavior in a new country can easily put a cone around your head to experiences. I mostly took politics courses, as well as a linguistics course about Hebrew, Arabic, and other languages of the region. It’s a cop-out, but I can say that language and socially/tribally-driven politics has a reserved space for neuroscience because knowing the brain can help us anticipate and navigate these once irreducible landscapes. It’s what I’ve always said to myself. But one could say that about any field. In my classes, we talked about dictatorship, religion, and all sorts of controversial things. I do have to say that it’s a good exercise to think how our brain is lighting up when discussing these topics that are close to home, where so much identity is on the line for a lot of people. There may be a latent element there that can help us prevent conflict and ease tensions, just like how we discovered more empathy and personal stories can increase donations to charity. Another link is that running successful companies and running successful governments have their parallels, although on different scales. One similarity is that you’ve got to care for your people or else you’re not going to have a good time.

Has your time studying at NYU Tel Aviv or your experience in either internship informed your thinking about your future plans? If so, how?

Because of these experiences in Tel Aviv, I realize there’s a lot of work to be done not only in creating new things but fixing old ones. So it’s Silicon Valley with a more evocative twist. It put me on the other side of the table – after judging other companies, now I judge myself: I have my work ethic, and that provides a certain amount of value to people. How much does brain research mean to a government or economy whose main metric is still profit or gross output? How much will working 100 hours a week and dotting every “i” marginally increase what we can do opposed to what I can experience or share with other people outside of work? And how much are my genetics and environment really going to allow me/us to accomplish? These are questions that being on the other side of the table taught me. There’s a generic match in every institution, and being in Tel Aviv thinking of different governing styles and judging different companies begged the question to find what unique features groups really need to break ceilings. Ultimately, this experience in Tel Aviv showed me the real world of business as well as the real, firsthand world of political strife, as far as I know of course. In other places, we may take big corporations and an established government for granted, whereas they are only as solid as allowed, not to say that they’re not strong. That is, although there’s a lot to learn, life has become a bit more transparent, at least to a 21-year-old me, through this experience.

Is there anything else you’d like to share about your time in Tel Aviv or while at NYU?

I recommend an experience like this, especially if you think you don’t quite fit the bill, because the abrasion may just provide pearls of insight.