"There are no houses available in Tuscany"

Last year, I asked an Israeli academic whether it was theoretically possible that I could, assuming completion of my program (i.e. 6-7 years from that day), have any chance of finding a job as a professor in Israel. She said no. Everything I've read about strikes in Israeli academia seemed to confirm that something in the field in that country was amiss. Plus Israelis are overrepresented in American academia, suggesting a worse-than-average case of brain drain. All of this looked like it would keep me torn between Herzl-inspired existence and... the sort of work that led me to read and read about Herzl in the first place. I kept picturing a choice between a job filing stuff in Israel versus researching French Jews and Jewish nationalism from America, and if lucky, France. Further attempts at boring Israeli and Israel-knowledgeable classmates have led me to believe my understanding of the situation might have been unfounded. It sounds like what I will need to do is figure out what research that I want to do needs to be done there, spend some time doing that along with (re)learning Hebrew, and not see everything as a choice between dropping it all and staying for the rest of my life within a certain set number of miles of Manhattan.

So that was the Zionist fantasy, in honor of Israel's 60th, which is as we all know a moment to stop and discuss the challenges facing Israel's Arabs while not worrying too much about those facing Jews in that region looking to live anywhere other than Israel. Middle East, big mess, post comments below with your original takes on the matter, by all means. But first, have a look at my apolitical fantasy, which is to live in a house built out of a railroad station. I can't quite imagine how putting up shelves would work, practically speaking, so I can't even begin to picture putting a kitchen and bathrooms into what was once a train station. But once finished, it looks fantastic.