THE JERUSALEM REPORT JULY 13, 201538

Not either or, but both

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Student chefs watch and learn as Master Chef Nof Atamna-Ismaeel shows how it’s

done at a master class at Bishulim – t he Institute of Culinary Arts in Tel Aviv , June 15

Not either or, but both

Microbiologist and ‘Master Chef’ Dr. Nof Atamna-Ismaeel dreams of establishing

a bilingual cookery school for Jews and ArabsBy Paul Alster Photos by Tomer Neuberg / Flash 90

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I’m sitting in the comfortable kitchen of a welcoming home in the Arab- Israeli town of Baka al-Gharbiya. A

carafe of chilled water with fresh lemon and mint sits alongside a bowl of sweet red cherries.

An American photographer is photo-graphing a gorgeous looking dish, ‘Sum-mer Tabouleh,’ which will feature in his forthcoming book on Israeli cuisine – finely sliced char-grilled zucchini, fresh parsley and mint, spring onions, okra, young almond centers, a smattering of burghul (also known as bulgur wheat), lumps of mouth-watering labane cheese, all with a generous squeeze of lemon juice and a pinch or two of salt.

In a bid to uphold the honor of true investigative journalism (feigning reluc-tance but immediately allowing my arm to be twisted), I agreed to taste the dish. It looked fantastic and tasted even better; a perfect fusion of tastes and textures, ev-ery bite a little different and full of fresh

summery flavors. Delightful. A feast for both the eye and the palate. A masterful dish from the 2014 Israeli “Master Chef.”

It’s not been easy grabbing an inter-view with Dr. Nof Atamna-Ismaeel. She remains in huge demand for personal ap-pearances, cooking demonstrations and television programs. The phone is never silent for very long as text messages buzz in on a regular basis. From total anonym-ity, the research scientist and doctor of microbiology became a household name within a matter of weeks of the start of the cooking contest and long before its conclusion.

The subject of dual identities and the pressure to jump from one side or the other soon arose. She is an Israeli Arab whose much-deserved success at the end of a hugely popular television series that presented the widest spectrum of Israeli society was endorsed by a public tele-phone vote. The Israeli public voted the 34-year-old mother of three as the clear

winner of the coveted award.Her meteoric rise to fame has made

many people examine their preconceived ideas of what an Arab woman can be in modern Israeli society. Even at the Mas-ter Chef auditions, there was confusion among production staff as to which pi-geonhole this lady should occupy on their demographic spectrum.

“People keep trying to put me in a box,” she calmly explains to The Jerusa-lem Report. “I am different people in one person. I am a scientist, I am a mother, I am a woman, I am a Muslim, I’m Arab, I’m modern, I love to cook. I‘m many things and I don’t fit in any box and I’m happy with that. I’m also Israeli and I’m Palestinian. They can coexist together.

“The thing is they want you to decide that you’re either an Israeli or a Palestin-ian. OK, I’m Israeli because I live in Is-rael and I’m enjoying my life as an Israe-li, enjoying my rights as an Israeli, and doing everything that Israeli law entitles

Smiles all around as the students taste the finished delicacy

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me to do. But I can’t just eliminate my origins and where I came from. I can’t just conceal it. It’s something that will al-ways be there. I’m originally Palestinian. I live with that and I’m proud of that.”

Has such instant fame proven a double-edged sword? Is she still happy with the unexpected direction her life has taken?

“EVERY DAY, more and more,” she smiles. “I’m really happy about it. It’s had a huge impact on my life and on the life of my family. The biggest change was leaving academia after 15 years ‒ I was at Tel Aviv University for my first and second degrees. Then I went to the US for the second half of my masters. I came back and did a PhD at the Technion Institute of Technology in Haifa. After my PhD, I did a post-doc at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and was back at Haifa University when I started filming Master Chef.”

I mentioned that I had found an abstract of her PhD thesis on the Internet and, be-ing a complete ignoramus where matters of science are concerned, asked her to give me an overview of the “Ecological Diversity of Microbial Rhodopsins in Freshwater Ecosystems, Sea Ice and in the Phyllosphere of Terrestrial Plants.” Her eyes lit up. This engaging woman is genuinely in love with her research sub-ject. Here’s a little of what she told me.

“I was researching proteins that are found in bacteria and were supposed to only be in a marine environment. They collect sunlight – this is really, really ba-sic – they just turn sunlight into energy that they can use to grow, to multiply, like plants do with photosynthesis.” I’m with her, so far.

“Bacteria have only one protein that does this. It’s less efficient, but it is some-thing that when you live in a poor envi-ronment you can use and survive. I loved this project. I told my professor that ev-

eryone is investigating [different seas]. I wanted to do it somewhere else.”

Her professor allowed her to look in freshwater and she chose Lake Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) as a model and collab-orated with scientists from around the world, who sent DNA samples from dif-ferent lakes in Canada and Europe. She checked the bacterial genes and found them there before moving on to establish the presence of such genes in sea ice and, later on, plants.

Despite such research success and hav-ing an apparently outstanding résumé, finding a job in her chosen field proved impossible.

“My [Jewish] friends went to work in different companies so I thought that would be nice and I sent my résumé to many companies in Israel. Sadly, I didn’t get any replies. No company was even willing to interview me, not even to meet me or see who I am. At first I thought it was just by chance, but after trying very

Atamna-Ismaeel revels in her new role as celebrity chef

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hard for three years and all the people around me getting jobs, I had to think that it might have something to do with the fact that my family name is Arabic, and I’m Muslim. They didn’t know me as a person and they didn’t want to take any risks.

“It was tough, but then I thought to myself, “I like my freedom as a re-searcher,” so I continued doing these post doctorates, researching what I wanted. Academia wasn’t placing any barriers in my path as a woman, as a Muslim, as an Arab, so I should stay there. It’s a safe place.”

When she was 14 years old, Atamna-Ismaeel’s parents decided she had to experience life outside of their Arab town and enrolled her in a Jew-ish school in Hadera. She was the only Arab pupil there during a period of Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel, including in Hadera itself. It was a very tough time in her life.

“CHILDREN ARE not really known for being tactful, so they used to blame me for [the terrorism]. They didn’t want to be friends with me, they didn’t want to talk to me, they didn’t want to sit and eat with me during recess, so I was alone.” She was verbally abused by many of the children, she says.

“It broke my heart. I came home and said I’m not going back. I had been really popular at school in Baka. Now I was alone, which is hard enough, but being abused with horrible words when you’re a teenager is very hard.”

Her father persuaded her to stay at school in Hadera, telling her that “con-fronting racism at this age will make you stronger and you will know how to live with this because it is something that is out there all the time.”

“Being Jewish,” Atamna-Ismaeel says to me, “I think you will relate to what I’m saying because there is racism against Jews all over the world.”

The moment that changed her life came by chance when her eldest son moved to the nearby Bridge Over the Wadi school at Kfar Kara, where both Hebrew and Arabic are taught. It’s a school where 50 percent of the children are Jewish and 50 percent are Arab and has the motto, “learning together, living together.” She and her husband

wanted a bilingual school where their child can “understand that he is not in one type of a country. He is in a very complex country. He needs to learn about the other side, about holidays, culture, language, everything.”

“The first time the parents of the new

pupils met, the teachers asked every-one to bring some food. The children didn’t know each other but they soon found a toy or a game to connect quick-ly, but since grown-ups don’t like to play games any more it was weird at the beginning. We had the table there with all the food, though, and people started asking, ‘What is this? How do you make that?’ We started exchanging recipes, and suddenly I had this mo-ment when I saw that [Jews and Arabs] are connecting through the simplest of things ‒ through food.”

Driving back from the meeting, Atamna-Ismaeel told her husband she would love to create a school for Jewish and Arab adults, teaching about food, using something that everyone has in common to make a connection.

“Food is essential and is something that everybody wants and needs for life,” she recalls. “I realized it would be nice to have these grown-ups who had never talked before or interact-ed, to bring them to cooking classes and through food achieve something much more important which is… talking.”

Her home town of Baka is surround-ed by Jewish people living on kib-butzim and in villages, but Atamna- Ismaeel believes that there is little or no genuine interaction.

“When you ask a Jewish guy from a

moshav [farming community] nearby, “Do you know anyone from Baka?” he will say, “Sure, I fix my car in Baka and I buy pita bread in Baka,” but it’s not really knowing these people. It’s just a very surface interaction that doesn’t go any deeper than that.” However, “food is a very intimate thing,” she reasons. “Whatever I created and gave you now goes into your body, into your blood. It’s a very personal and intimate thing.”

After hitting on the idea of food bringing Jews and Arabs together, she sent a letter to all the parents and peo-ple involved, but most didn’t answer and those who did said they weren’t in-terested. Undaunted, the lifelong food-ie decided she would have to become a chef and that, if she could become famous, people might finally start lis-tening to her.

“A short time after, we were watch-ing ‘Master Chef’ and my husband turned to me and said, ‘You can totally do it.’”

The idea struck her that she could use prime time TV to expose the world to her idea and maybe somebody would be interested in helping her establish a school. The next morning, she signed up for the competition. As they say, the rest is history.

It wasn’t easy, though. By nature a shy person, who admits she even tried avoiding the cameras at her own wed-ding because she felt she didn’t look good in photos, Atamna-Ismaeel ad-mits that, at first, she didn’t like being famous, “having people looking at me all the time, because I really was a very, very private person.”

The reaction, however, from the peo-ple of Baka, from Israeli Arabs and from many Jewish Israelis, has brought her out of her shell and, while it might not always come naturally, she has be-come a major media personality.

“In Baka, everybody was really proud and excited,” she smiles. “Peo-ple told me they were so proud that this time the person representing them on prime time is very well educated ‒ by both Arab and Jewish standards in Isra-el ‒ and that this will shed light on the different society that exists here and is being ignored.

“When I came to the audition they said, ‘Well, you are on the very extreme

HER METEORIC RISE TO FAME HAS MADE MANY PEOPLE EXAMINE THEIR PRECONCEIVED IDEAS OF WHAT AN ARAB WOMAN CAN BE IN MODERN ISRAELI SOCIETY

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of the Arab population. You are well ed-ucated, your Hebrew is fluent, you don’t have an accent, you’re a woman, and you have a strong personality. You don’t rep-resent Arabs.’ So I said to them, “OK, let’s say that you’re right. [She holds her arms out wide apart.] I’m on the extreme and here is the population that you know about. So this means that there is a whole spectrum of people between me and the population that you know that exists. And this is what people need to be aware of. You don’t have to be here or there. There is a whole population, widely diverse and with personality.”

One of the highlights of her time at Master Chef was her friendship with another contestant, Josh Steele, a young British ultra-Orthodox yeshiva student who had only recently emigrated from London. Have they kept in touch since the series ended a year ago?

“Oh, I love him. I really love him’” she coos. “First, he’s English and I can’t re-sist the English culture. I really like it. We’re still in touch all the time. Josh is an amazing person. I never thought that I would have a rabbi as a friend ‒ you know, being in a university you don’t run into too many rabbis in your life in ac-ademia ‒and he never thought in a mil-lion years that he would run into an Arab woman who would talk with him about steak and kidney pudding!

“We found we could talk about molec-ular cooking (which he’s really into), and I’m a scientist, so talking with him about that was so natural. We actually fit into my theory that food and talking about food can bring together people from two very, very different backgrounds, but who share a love of food.”

HOW HARD, I wondered then, is it be-ing an Israeli Arab? What are the biggest challenges she faces?

“It’s a very complicated question. Pal-estinians in the West Bank don’t like us very much because they see us as hav-ing lost our ‘Palestinianity’ because we are a little bit different from them. We have an Israeli ID, we live here and we study in Jewish universities. We are not the same. And Jewish people consider us Palestinians. You are stuck in the middle between these two societies, but I think we are really lucky because you can en-joy both worlds.

“My world is much wider than the Is-raeli Jews and the Palestinians, because I get to experience everything. I get to eat in Tulkarm and Nablus, and travel around Ramallah, all in the West Bank, then go straight from there to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. So I know they call it dual identity and it’s always talked about as something bad, but actually it’s like hav-ing two passports.”

Atamna-Ismaeel’s main goal, her driving ambition, remains in establish-ing a bilingual cookery school for Jews and Arabs. She has found the “perfect location,” the plans are ready, they’ve crunched the numbers, and are now look-ing for somebody who will understand the importance of the idea and invest in such a project.

The experience of seeing her young son, already fluent in both Arabic and Hebrew, spurs her on to help roll out the idea of bilingual communication for all Israelis. She passionately believes Arabic should be taught in Jewish schools in Is-rael and used as a bridge to build a better understanding between Jewish and Arab Israelis, as well as Israel and its Arab neighbors.

“You should see this seven-year-old boy going to a playground in a shared area, playing with whichever children are there and communicating. He has a very wide world and so many options to choose from. I’m really proud that I gave him this so he can choose and not feel that there is a whole society that he can’t play with and can’t talk with. It will make his life much better, much more interest-ing and much richer.” ■

Paul Alster is an Israel-based journalist. Follow him on Twitter @paul_alster and visit his website: www.paulalster.com

Applying the finishing touches to Atamna-Ismaeel’s favorite dish, the Armenian delicacy Manti