First Impressions
By: Aimee Rubensteen
Posted: 2/11/10
She walks in with a disguised strut. Palestinian. Waiting to hear the “enemy’s” voice, we hold our breaths. Arab. Her hair, inked from our eager pens, borders her sunken eyes that seem to be all knowing. Muslim. She begins with explaining how it may be “harsh to hear” what she is about to say. I laugh it off. Sure, a room full of seminary girls studying at Midreshet Lindenbaum in Jerusalem shouldn’t be ready to bolt as an Arab who supports Hamas begins to tell her story.

Nadia Harhash is like any other mother I know. A smile stretches her wrinkles of happiness when she tells us of her three children, the oldest my age, eighteen. It seems ironic that we’re her audience, nothing like her teenage daughter. She’s a ripe thirty-seven and an activist. Her foreign beauty is surprising with her cut…