Second semester

My second semester in Haifa began this Monday. My main focus this week has been to finish a pre-final draft of the review article I am writing about the neurobiological and psychological relationship between injury and posttraumatic stress disorder. I have read hundreds of journal articles by this point in my research, and fortunately I have found the subject to be very interesting. Checking all the references and ironing out the ambiguities, however, is not so exciting.

I keep expecting to run into friends from last semester, but most of my overseas friends have gone home; now there’s a whole new group of overseas students. The Israeli students are busy studying for exams since their first semester extends into February, so campus is pretty quiet at the moment.

My Hebrew class this semester is way harder than last semester. But the teacher is great and I don’t mind doing the work since I want to improve my Hebrew skills as fast as possible. I feel so frustrated when I can’t express myself to other people because of the language barrier! And when someone speaks to me in Hebrew, I am never entirely sure I understand what they are saying since I don’t recognize every word. Usually people are nice about it, but not always.

As much as I like living in Israel, at times I think that I would always feel like a foreigner here. No matter how hard I try, I will never be nearly as comfortable in Hebrew as I am in English. And there are many aspects of Israeli culture that I still don’t understand or know how to respond to effectively. It strikes me as rather ironic that in America I am identified as a “Jew”, and in Israel, in turn, I am identified as an “American”.