Americans and Israelis have different cultural norms.

Americans and Israelis have different cultural norms. In America we tend to think bigger is better. Portion sizes are large and big cars are encouraged through the media. We wear name brands on everything. We have big buildings that we climb up everyday and thrive off of living in excess. In Israel things aren’t focused on quantity and more on quality. Portions are tinier but the food is more filling. Architecture is built with bomb shelters and meant to withstand earthquakes. Israelis focus on having fun. Tel Aviv is more alive than New York even. In Israel people aren’t so much focused on how big something is, but rather the quality. Except ice cream, which is always the largest serving.

In three years I am going to be in college, planning my career, and setting myself up for a life in the workplace; it does not matter whether that might be a cubicle in the Comcast building or a farm in Taiwan, we spend our entire high school career planning for the next step: work. We are manufactured to work, to have a purpose to ensure our survival. There is no sense of leniency, the first thing that students think when they join a club is, will my college application stand out? When I told someone I was studying abroad, so many people immediately told me that my college application will look amazing. It’s almost not American to think, what if I didn’t want to go to college?

In three years kids in Israel will be serving their two or three years. They could be in an elite unit or surveilling armories. They won’t be thinking about what Harvard or Arizona or Temple will think when they see “Served in a medical unit”. The immediate thought is to travel. People the same age as my 21 year old brother have been to almost every continent, lived in different cultures, and experienced life as an adventure; they have lived for more than a job. It’s considered not Israeli to go straight to college. It’s a mindset unimaginable to almost an entire country of 321.3 million people, yet in Europe it is considered the social norm.

In America we seem to focus in on little things that in the end don’t seem to matter. People can get offended over the littlest things, and many times it can be blown out of proportion. Yet we also don’t acknowledge the real important things that are offensive. If there was a picture of a forest in front of us, most would end up focusing in on a single tree instead of seeing the entire picture. In Israel people tend to see a different picture all together. Not the entire forest, yet not a single tree, more of a clearing within the forest. They have a different mindset where people have a thicker skin. School isn’t the epicenter of a child’s life and people live when they are young. People have an idea that they don’t need to base their lives off of the same stressful ideas that we do.