{"id":819,"date":"2010-04-21T16:41:25","date_gmt":"2010-04-21T21:41:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.levinger.net\/josh\/?p=819"},"modified":"2010-04-21T16:41:25","modified_gmt":"2010-04-21T21:41:25","slug":"tourists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.levinger.net\/josh\/2010\/04\/21\/tourists","title":{"rendered":"Tourists"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I saw this poem mentioned in a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/04\/21\/opinion\/21iht-edlet.html\">letter to the IHT<\/a> in response to Elie Wiesel&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.politico.com\/static\/PPM41_elie_wiesel_ad.html\">full page ad<\/a>.<br \/>\nCan I forget thee, o Jerusalem?<\/p>\n<p><em>Tourists by Yehuda Amichai<\/em><\/p>\n<p><code>Visits of condolence is all we get from them.<br \/>\nThey squat at the Holocaust Memorial,<br \/>\nThey put on grave faces at the Wailing Wall<br \/>\nAnd they laugh behind heavy curtains<br \/>\nIn their hotels.<br \/>\nThey have their pictures taken<br \/>\nTogether with our famous dead<br \/>\nAt Rachel's Tomb and Herzl's Tomb<br \/>\nAnd on Ammunition Hill.<br \/>\nThey weep over our sweet boys<br \/>\nAnd lust after our tough girls<br \/>\nAnd hang up their underwear<br \/>\nTo dry quickly<br \/>\nIn cool, blue bathrooms.<\/p>\n<p>Once I sat on the steps by agate at David's Tower, I placed my two heavy baskets at my side. A group of tourists was standing around their guide and I became their target marker. \"You see that man with the baskets? Just right of his head there's an arch from the Roman period. Just right of his head.\" \"But he's moving, he's moving!\" I said to myself: redemption will come only if their guide tells them, \"You see that arch from the Roman period? It's not important: but next to it, left and down a bit, there sits a man who's bought fruit and vegetables for his family.\"<\/code><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I saw this poem mentioned in a letter to the IHT in response to Elie Wiesel&#8217;s full page ad. Can I forget thee, o Jerusalem? Tourists by Yehuda Amichai Visits of condolence is all we get from them. They squat at the Holocaust Memorial, They put on grave faces at the Wailing Wall And they [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[35,51],"class_list":["post-819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel","tag-israel","tag-politics"],"geo":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levinger.net\/josh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levinger.net\/josh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levinger.net\/josh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levinger.net\/josh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levinger.net\/josh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=819"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.levinger.net\/josh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levinger.net\/josh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levinger.net\/josh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levinger.net\/josh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}