Cohort 8 January 18 Workshop- Feducation and Model Knesset Day

By Micah Sallus

This workshop was a particularly eventful one. We stated off by introducing ourselves to our new staff member Hallie Goldstein and our new fellow Justin Greenwald. Then, we learned about what it's like to allocate funds as a nonprofit from a volunteer from the Jewish federation. After that we still managed to have time to do more planning for our upcoming shabbaton, before participating in model Knesset day at the American Jewish university.
            Learning about working in nonprofits was fun. I had similar experiences with a philanthropic youth group that I'm in, but it was still interesting to see how other people dealt with the burdens of allocating money. The shabbaton planning was productive, but uneventful. 

Then came the bulk of our time during the workshop—the Model Knesset Day. For the program we were sorted into some of Israel’s political parties along with a variety of other groups that were attending. We then participated in a warm-up by standing in an area that represented either strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree depending on our opinion on Israeli/American political questions. We then had dinner with our political parties while we were explained our party’s ideology. After learning about our political parties we listened to a panel made up of a representative from some of the political parties, talk about aspects of a bill. We were then given a brief period to vocalize our own opinions of the bill. Lastly we got to vote.

          

  Although the Model Knesset Day was interesting, I think it fell short in a couple of ways. For one there wasn’t a lot of interaction or communication. It was more of a group of speeches than a conversation, so we we’re not able to really explore the bill or our thoughts on the bill. Most of the program was bogged to being told what is believed, instead of exploring our beliefs with Israel’s Knesset as a loose model. Another topic of confusion for me is that, although we were told we can make a change in Israeli politics and government, they failed to mention how we could actually go about doing that.

Even though I didn't find the Model Knesset Day as broadening as I had hoped, I believe that we can utilize the parts that it left out in upcoming workshops. We could explore our own thoughts on Israeli politics and see which political party we agree with the most. We could also explore how we could make changes in both Israeli government, and our own government.