(NOTE: This Shabbos I will be scholar-in-residence at the Center for Jewish Living at Cornell University. Next week I’ll be giving a presentation in Lawrence at an event for supporters of the Biblical Museum of Natural History; if you are interested in participating, please write to Ellen at advancement@BiblicalNaturalHistory.org. I have some availability for lectures/ meetings in NY/NJ next week.)
One of the many ways in which Israel is unusual compared to most other countries is in its having extremely high artistic standards for postage stamp design rather than sheer mass production. My father-in-law has been collecting Israeli stamps for 68 years, and the other day I was looking through his collection. I was struck at how so many of the stamps are not just visually beautiful, but also tell a story of Israel’s and the Jewish People’s history.
There are several stamps depicting the wildlife of Biblical and modern Israel, but this stamp in particular, from 1963, caught my attention:
A mosquito might seem an odd choice for a postage stamp, but it’s the graph alongside it which reveals its significance. The graph shows the decline of malaria in Israel, as a result of intensive efforts by Zionist immigrants. This was so significant an event that a postage stamp was created to celebrate it.
The battle against malaria by Zionists is one of many facts that punctures the “Jews are imperialist settler-colonials who oppressed the indigenous peoples” in two ways. First is that the Jews who came to Palestine were not European colonialists who exploited resources to enrich an empire. They did not seize the most useful parts of the land. They focused on underdeveloped regions and developed them, draining malaria-infested swamps and making the land far more productive.
Second is that their actions were incredibly beneficial to the Arab population. Before the swamps were drained, in some Arab villages, one in six children succumbed to the illness within their first few months. This along with other health and economic improvements that the Zionists brought was a factor in the enormous increase in the local Arab population in the twentieth century.
Anyway, as I was contemplating this stamp, I called over my youngest son, age 13, to tell him about it. He’s an extremely knowledgeable kid, and he rolled his eyes as only teenagers can. He told me that he already knows all about malaria and how it was eradicated in Israel and how they drained the Hula and everything else.
Then a thought struck me.
I asked him if he knew what a postage stamp was.
He did not!
I live in a country where, at a potentially tragic cost, people fight the idea of immunization. A generation ago my ex-father-in-law had polio, and relied on crutches and wheelchairs to get around. I once heard a young public school science teacher in her 20s asking an older science teacher, who had told that her the brace on her ankle was a result of childhood polio, “What’s polio?”
I live in a Jewish community, where many children are not vaccinated. To no surprise of mine, we had a measles outbreak. Children have been known to die of measles, God forbid. Children have been born with birth defects because their pregnant mothers were exposed to measles, God forbid.
Ignorance of science can be deadly.
A few blocks from my home we recently had a tragic death when a Jewish parent left their one-year-old unattended on a parked car, in August.
I watch in amazement as people “educated” in religious Jewish schools walk down the street at night during and after Shabbat in their black clothing, with their backs to traffic, refusing to wear any kind of reflective gear, even though it is made freely available in the community.
I daily watch women walk “for their health,“ and mothers and fathers pushing strollers down the streets with their backs to traffic. They are not taught safety guidelines, or they are taught these guidelines don’t matter. Children ride bikes and motorized scooters without helmets. Stop signs are viewed as optional. These people go to school in America. They should know better, but they’re not taught to know better.
Years ago, I taught chemistry at a religious girls’ high school. One day a 10th grade girl raised her hand in chemistry class and asked, “Why do we have to learn all this?“ I explained that chemistry is a fundamental science, and it is important in many the other fields of science, biology, pharmacology, etc.
She then responded, “But why do you just MAKE THIS ALL UP and then make us learn it.?”
Postage stamps are much less frequently used today than they were 20 years ago. There are probably many children who are unfamiliar with them.
But the fact that a religiously educated Israeli child knows what malaria is, despite the fact it’s been eradicated in Israel, says they’re getting a content based, practical education.
According to a report I recently read 400,000 children around the world die a year from malaria. I wonder how many religious school students (or teachers) in my community even know what malaria is…
Mosquito borne diseases remain a plague in much of the world. And we do not appreciate them here in the US, even though one shut down the entire US government for months in 1793: Yellow fever. It killed 10% of the population of Philadelphia, then the US capital. The advice from the best medical professionals was useless because nobody imagined that a little insect could carry such a deadly plague. It continued to cause deadly outbreaks into the 20th century. A Cuban-born American-trained physician, Carlos Finlay, proved that yellow fever was transmitted by a mosquito -- but almost nobody took him seriously because what could a Latino know? Fortunately, Americans Walter Reed, Leonard Wood, and William Gorgas did, and the rest is history. Finlay should have received a Nobel Prize for Medicine.
Malaria remained a big problem in the US and much of the southeastern US was plagued for it through the 1930s. The US military initiated malaria control efforts for World War 2 and what would become the Centers for Disease Control was founded shortly after the war in order to carry on the effort. Today most Americans don't realize how bad a problem mosquito-borne diseases used to be.