Chana Gable Selmon, Medicine Without Borders

 

Chana (Gable) Selmon

SPEAKERS

Will Bachman, Chana Selmon

 

Will Bachman  00:02

Hello, and welcome to The 92 report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host, Will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Chana Selmon, who we knew in college as Chana Gable. Chana, welcome to the show.

 

Chana Selmon  00:20

Hi, Will. Thank you so much.

 

Will Bachman  00:22

So, Chana, tell us about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

 

Chana Selmon  00:28

I actually joined the class of 1992 as a transfer student from college, and really felt welcome pretty much immediately by the class, I think. What year?

 

Will Bachman  00:44

What year did you join us?

 

Chana Selmon  00:45

I joined in 1990 So I overlapped two years.

 

Will Bachman  00:50

Two years joined as a junior.

 

Chana Selmon  00:52

I joined as a junior, however, I graduated in 1993 So that’s all, but I kind of joined as a sophomore, to be honest,

 

Will Bachman  01:01

all right,

 

Chana Selmon  01:02

although that made me graduate in 93 and I’ll tell you about that in a moment. I was a history concentrator, and I ended up deciding to go to medical school, and that’s why I stayed an extra year until 1993 so that I could frantically complete all the science requirements as fast as possible, because, as you can imagine, being his history concentrator didn’t exactly give you the physics, biology, mathematics angle. So, because I changed my trajectory, I ended up staying at Harvard a year longer in graduating with the class of 93 but because I came in 1990 I felt very much connected with the class of 92 even though unfortunately I didn’t have as many years to spend with them as others did after graduation, because after I took the extra year I did end up going to medical school at Cornell, and after four years there I did an internship in at Bellevue NYU in emergency medicine and surgery, and then I completed my residency at Harvard, went back to Harvard and did my residency in emergency medicine at the joint Harvard program, Brigham and Women’s Mass General, and you know, rotating through all the all the hospitals there, very good experience in my residency, and in my fourth year residency I had my first child. I got married midway through my residency, and then I had my first child in 2000 and I was a fourth year resident. And then I started trying to be both a mom and an ER doctor. I say trying because it’s always a challenge. I to this day, I give a lot of respect to parents, both men and women, who are raising kids and trying to deal with the outside world. But I was pretty fortunate. I have a very supportive spouse, and he took a lot of the childcare, even though he, too, was working, and in 2001 I was working at Brooklyn Hospital Center when the World Trade Center came down. My husband was supposed to be working that day in the World Trade Center, but he had worked very late the night before, so he actually didn’t go to work that morning. He was planning on coming in late, and I treated 68 of the 120 patients who were alive and came out of the towers that day. We expected many more, but unfortunately, with the collapse of the towers, we didn’t get them. And after that experience, my husband and I looked at each other. He said, “Well, maybe we should move to the suburbs. I don’t know expected for the suburbs, but that’s that’s what we did. And I continued to work in New Jersey. I had three more children, so by that time I had four children, and at that point, at some point, I ended up, my husband and I decided to move to Israel, and I don’t know how long that was being planned, but probably not long enough, and I think, as an emergency medicine doctor, I just figured this will be great. I’ll have some international experience. I, I had gone to France, to Paris, to work during medical school, and I really loved that. I loved the experience. It was so eye-opening to just see different ways in which medicine was approached. That really made me feel like I need to go and practice medicine, not just in the United States. So, I was, I was very excited. I don’t think I quite understood what it would be to move with four children and different practice medicine in different languages. I had a little experience in France, but you know, that was as a medical student, and now here I am in Jerusalem, and I’m practicing in Jerusalem, which is not a calm place, because pretty much when we got here, a lot of the what people love to call kinetic energy started, and within a few months of moving we were digging out a bomb shelter to sit in, but I really, really loved working in the emergency department. I really, really did in Jerusalem.

 

Chana Selmon  05:51

It was a fantastic experience, but it was hard, and what I ended up doing for many years is commuting, commuting from Jerusalem to New Jersey, not every day, and not every week, but I would take a few weeks, and I would come and do shifts, and then I’d come back to Israel, where my family was, and that was pretty tough, but, but doable until Covid, and by the time Covid hit, I had started working in a clinic in the West Bank area, which was fascinating, and I was a general practitioner there. I was called a family practice doctor, even though that’s not my field, and that turned into full-time work. So now, now I was basically out of the ER since Corona, but accepting patients as a family practitioner in different areas in Israel and in the West Bank, and it’s been very difficult work, but very rewarding, extremely rewarding. I love that in any day I have to speak some English, but Hebrew, French, Spanish, Arabic. I’m not fluent in all of these languages, but I can get by in most of them, and I can’t get by. I have to call the translator for the Russian Amharic and some other languages, but it’s really fascinating to meet people from all over the world, and it’s a tough, challenging place to live. It’s not, it’s not easy. So, the type of medicine that I practice is very hands on, and I really enjoy it. It’s a little stressful because it’s resource poor, but it gives me an opportunity to really think and really make a difference on a very one to one level. So I was supposed to be in Israel for a few years, or I thought, and now it’s almost 14 years later, and I’m still

 

Will Bachman  08:06

here. The West Bank is obviously a place that’s in the news quite a bit. Tell me a little bit about what you’ve learned about that place, actually working there and treating patients there, and tell us a little bit about, you know, what sort of segment of society you’re, you’re treating, and just about your, how your views have evolved about the West Bank.

 

Chana Selmon  08:44

Well, I have a history with Israel-Palestine that goes back a long way. So, I think it wasn’t an accident that I moved to Israel. My grandfather was born in Palestine. He was an Ottoman citizen. It was one of the reasons I was a history concentrator. I learned a lot about Middle Eastern history at Harvard. That was my focus, even though we didn’t have a dedicated department, but I was very interested in Ottoman history, and probably it was because of my experiences with my grandfather. My grandmother’s family was from Syria, and even my mother, who is Ashkenazi Jewish, her father, her grandfather had moved from Poland to Palestine in the 1800s so from both sides of the family had a lot of deep connections to the region, and I did in large part. I spent a year in Israel when I was 17, before even attending college, and that really shaped a desire to go back to the region. That was always something I wanted, and that’s how I ended up going to work in Israel as a. Supposed to say I don’t know, France, where I really did enjoy my time, and it was wonderful, but I felt a very personal connection, and the connection is in and of itself was not a simple connection, because my grandfather, his father came from Yemen, he identified more as an Arab non-Zionist, so he never took Israeli citizenship. So, my family was a very complex mesh, or is a very complex mesh of identities, and I feel that I’ve grown up with a very interesting exposure to both Arab and Jewish culture, food, music, and it puts me in an odd place, but it also puts me in a really advantageous place, because I’m able to connect with a lot of people from different backgrounds within the region, and it’s a really big advantage to sort of feel that you’re a little part of a lot of different groups, because I don’t, I feel comfortable in a lot of different settings, and I think that I think that it’s really allowed me to connect with people I in the ER, for example, I treated everyone from terror victims to Hamas leaders. Everyone comes to the ER, and for me, when I walk in to a medical setting, I feel very much connected to the medicine part of it, and to the human part of it, and it doesn’t mean that when I walk out of the ER, I don’t have the same frustrations, anger, reactions as everyone else, but I feel very proud and dedicated to really just treating people, and that has been has really opened up some, a lot of opportunities for me. I have a lot of friends who are Palestinian, I have a lot of friends who are right wing Israeli, left wing Israeli, and everything in between, and I feel that I can understand a lot of different perspectives. I generally think that Israel, you know, Israel is a, is a third rail word now, of course, having been here on October 7, having gone through it, having having been shot at, having been rocketed, having lain on the floor with my face in the dust, and thinking, oh, the dust doesn’t taste so bad, you know, and when the rocket lands, my thought is, okay, I’m not dead, you know, I’m alive. I kind of feel that much of the situation here is really not understood, and it’s hard to really capture it, and it’s very easy to show little video clips here and there one way or the other, but it doesn’t capture the real situation, just just really fails to capture what’s going on here for everyone. I think that the majority of people here are under a lot of stress, and when I say people, I mean Palestinians, I mean Israelis, I mean diplomats, I mean everybody who’s here is under an enormous amount of pressure. I have not had the opportunity to go to Gaza or deal with people in Gaza, so I can’t speak to the culture and the attitudes there because I don’t have any experience there, but I do like to speak with and have conversations with people that through social situations with diplomats with with a friend of mine in Soweto, in Syria, whose village got raided recently by the country, and many people were killed, and many women were raped.

 

Chana Selmon  14:12

They had an October 7 kind of event, didn’t make the news, of course, but I just speak to people, and I listen, and I think that I suppose I wish that people had a little bit more of an understanding that wasn’t based on social media in general and certain perceptions, and I don’t think I understood what I was getting into when I moved here and moved my children here, but I am very proud of my children. I have a son serving in the IDF, and that’s not a simple thing to say. I think in the modern times my daughter served. I’m also in security services, police. She’s studying law now, and my kids, when I speak to them, I just feel that they very much see other people in the Middle East as people just like them, and I feel like that’s not a simple thing to accomplish, and they’re all dedicated to helping other people and to public service in some way. My son, he’s more in the technical aspects of tanks and takes care of a lot of soldiers and gives his heart and soul to helping people, and his, his roommate is, is Muslim, his, his, you know, another soldier, and my kids are very much into having relationships with people based on who they are and not, and what they do, as opposed to, you know, labeling people, and again, it sounds like a cliche, but I feel like it’s an extremely difficult thing to accomplish on the ground, and having said that, I think that all of my children, myself, my husband, I think that we want what many people want, including however people identify themselves, Arabs, Muslims, Jews, it’s security and peace, and getting up in the morning and going to work without worrying that your child will be shot or you’ll be shot, or, or you know, whatever goes on here, that a lot of it is political. I don’t think that I very much had the heart for politics to begin with. I think that’s why I was a history concentrator instead of government. A lot of my were in the government major, and I thought, no, no, I’m going to stick to, you know, history, and my only, I really still to this day, I really love to study history, and you know, and then on an amateur basis, even though I spend a lot of time in medicine, just by the nature of my job, but a lot of my interests lie outside of medicine, and mainly in history. So, yeah, so that’s me. After Harvard,

 

Will Bachman  17:14

you said that Israel is a tough place to live. What keeps you there? I imagine that you could return to the US if you wanted to, and your kids sounds like we’re born in the US or US citizens. What?

 

Chana Selmon  17:31

Yes,

 

Will Bachman  17:31

what? What holds you there?

 

Chana Selmon  17:35

I asked myself that every day. No, actually, I asked myself that frequently. I think one of the reasons I moved with my children is I did want them to have that learning experience and that connection to an identity I felt in the United States personally that I was not able to convey the religion, the language, the culture that, that well, it felt by the wayside. It was more of a secondary consideration. There were so many other things competing for our attention. We had, you know, our academic concerns, and our community concerns, and our ballet classes, and the soccer team, and I just didn’t feel that I was able to really express and transmit what I really valued as a very rich heritage and culture. So I thought, great, we’re going to move here and they’re going to get that, and they really did. I have to tell you, I think my kids, you know, they’re fluent in English, but they also speak Hebrew, and they also speak a little bit of other other languages, one daughter had a lot of Russian friends and picked up a lot of Russian, and I think that there’s a lot of opportunities. One of the things that impresses me so much about a lot of the podcasts that you’ve been doing is how many of our classmates have lived, studied, worked abroad. I think it’s really remarkable. I don’t, I don’t think that that represents the general college graduate population. I can’t prove it, because I don’t think there’s any statistic that that talks about that. I looked it up, actually, before getting, because I was curious after seeing so many classmates, you know, working in different countries, and apparently the only agency that truly actually knows how many expats there are is the IRS, because I’m probably not going to get any information from them on this, but, but, but it is truly remarkable the number of our classmates who have worked and lived in other countries, and I think that’s great. I sometimes think about going back to the United States, but the practical, the practicality of it is that I have four children, there are still very much I. Are involved in their early years, and they’re none of them have their own homes right now. I have parents who are older, who have moved to Israel, and so leaving them would also be a consideration. Having said that, my husband and I talk about this all the time. I mean, there’s only so many times you can sit in a bomb shelter and feel the ground shake under you and not actually say, what am I doing here? I can go back to the United States, and you know, there’ll be much.. I don’t know if I want to say safer, but certainly less intensely active and anxiety provoking, there’s definitely it takes a lot that the culture is tough, even when you’re not in a war time, which we unfortunately have been, and what is

 

Will Bachman  20:54

tough about the culture?

 

Chana Selmon  20:55

Oh, extremely tough. The Middle East is, you really have to advocate for yourself. It’s not a very mannerly place. It’s not. It’s given to chaos and not order. People push online and try to, they’ll jump over you to get on the train. It’s a very densely populated area, and it is loud. It is pushy. It is there. Are a lot of cultural elements that are difficult, I think, to swallow as an American. My kids, my kids sometimes don’t understand, because I think, although they’re American, they’ve grown up here, and I don’t think they take this too hard. But my husband and I look at each other and say, could you? That, of course, they did. It, you know, it’s.. it’s the Middle East, and wherever you go in the Middle East, it’s really much, very much like that. On the other hand, there are positive aspects of it. People are very warm, they take an interest in you, they will help you out. Nobody will walk over you on the street. If you fall down, you’ll have 10 people trying to help you up, give you a glass of water, ask you where you live, try to find out if they know your family. And this goes for the Arabs and the Jews in the region. You know, I can get into long conversation with taxi drivers, and we then figure out that they have a relative in Damascus, and I had relatives in Aleppo, and now we feel like we’re, you know, literally brother and sister. So, there’s, there’s, there’s a very strong personal connection, but familiarity breeds non manners, I guess, if you compare it with the American system, at least,

 

Will Bachman  22:44

did I hear correctly that you have one grandparent who was originally Yemeni and considered himself an Arab, who I’m interpreting was was not Jewish, and another grandparent who was an Ashkenazi Jew, and could you just tell us a little bit more about your background, and how, how your family came together? That’s,

 

Chana Selmon  23:09

yeah, so my grandfather, who was born in, in Palestine, in Jerusalem, in 1905 or six, we’re not sure, he, he was Jewish, but he was Yemenite, and there is a very complicated history of Yemenite Jewry in, in Israel, in the state of Israel. The state of Israel, there’s a very complex history there. My grandfather’s family came before the state was established, and they did not have a Zionist perspective, meaning that they did not – we’re not looking to establish a state, a Jewish state at all, and in fact they had some religious objections to it that was founded in their religious beliefs. Subsequently, when the state was established, more Yemenite Jews were brought from Yemen, but there was a somewhat racist and sordid history there, in that there were accusations that some Yemenite children were taken from their family families and placed with Ashkenazi Jewish families in an attempt to de-arabicize them and to give them a culture that the state felt was more appropriate for developing a Jewish state, and that was not – that’s only coming to light, I think, you know, in the more recent years, and it was not appreciated by the Yemenite Jews, to be certain, who identified as both Arab and Jew, so it’s a little complicated, and it wasn’t that they, they, it would be, it would be very, it would be actually incorrect to say that they were in the modern sense pro-Palestinian, because they were also. Very much oppressed in Yemen by the local population, so there wasn’t a history of a coexistence in Yemen that they could rely on. Having said that, they very much dressed like the local Arab population, they spoke Arabic as a first language, and a lot of their customs and culture were very Arab, and that came into conflict a bit with the Jewish state as it perceived itself, and so my grandfather was not a fan of the state of Israel, and he used to say, ah, you know, the elements, the British, the Zionists, they’re all the same, you know, so that’s kind of how I grew up with him, and my mother’s family, my mother’s family was from England originally, but her grandfather had come to Palestine because he was very devoutly religious, and he was a scribe or a writer, and he actually was – he actually died of starvation here, and is buried on the Mount of Olives after his family tried to send him supplies, but the Ottoman soldiers stole it. It was very common in those days; they would confiscate shipments, and then he didn’t get food. That’s the story, at least we’re told. So, I think that there was just a lot of different narratives coming through in my family, but by and large, I grew up in a family that was not an advocate for taking Israeli citizenship, and in fact, my sister, sister, who was the first one in our family to come to Israel and take Israeli citizenship, and at that time it was very controversial in my family. Can you do that? You know, should there be a state of Israel again, it’s not a matter of they weren’t answering Israel, but they weren’t, they didn’t espouse a Zionist ideology, so it’s very, very interesting background that I grew up in, and I think that when I came here, one of the difficulties I had was to have to put my children in schools where I had to give them an identity where they are being raised in the state of Israel, and I want them to be productive members of the society that they live in, and so I had to sort of enroll them in a sort of a more Zionist school, which I am grateful for, and at the same time they would hear from me some interesting messages, not anti-Zionism, but just, just other perspectives in which sort of brought in the Jewish experience in the land of Israel, as we call it, and just about other people in the land and other Arabs who were there, and the connection that we have to Arab culture, and the history that we have with our culture, which is not a completely benign experience.

 

Chana Selmon  27:48

It’s a mix, it’s like a lot of good things that we got from many 1000s of years living in Arab lands, and a lot of less good things, and persecution, and my grandfather coming from a Shiite Islam land, and my grandmother being from Syria, from a Sunni Islam land, and the differences that that entails in terms of how it manifests in terms of treatment of Jews and the experience of Jews in those lands, because I mean, now there aren’t any Jews in those lands. There are no Jews in Yemen. Jews have been chased out of Syria, and we too were refugees from those lands, and we’ve lost our lands. We’ve lost our houses in Syria. We’ve lost our houses in Yemen, and you know, are not expecting to reclaim those, although recently there’s been more of an interest in reviving some Syrian Jewish communities, so it’s complicated, and I think that I have a very complex relationship with with Israel, but I don’t know that that’s different from a lot of Americans who may have a complex relationship with the United States for different reasons, be they political, be they historical, I don’t know, I think it’s not uncommon, and but it’s just a little bit more intense

 

Will Bachman  29:23

here, yeah. You mentioned that you wish fewer people would get their information about the West Bank from social media, and you wish people would understand it better. What is one or two things that you wish people understood better about the West Bank? Maybe you share a story to illustrate.

 

Chana Selmon  29:54

I think the biggest thing that I wish people would understand is how small the space we’re talking about. Is how this is literally smaller than the size of New Jersey. This whole region, when you talk about the West Bank, when you talk about Israel, you’re talking about a very small, complex space, and how the challenges that presents for the situation, and coming here and seeing that the whole way in which things are set up currently is really untenable for everybody, and when I say everybody, I mean Jews, I mean Arabs, I mean everybody. You can’t really successfully put up walls, you know, down a street and say, okay, you’re going to be on this side and I’m going to be on this side. It’s just. it’s. it doesn’t work, and when you come here and you see the proximity of everything, you stand on a hill and you look over and you see that there’s just this is supposed to be Palestinian, this is supposed to be Jewish. You want to burst out laughing because it doesn’t make any sense. It makes absolutely no sense on the ground, and I think that intuitively people know that when they come here, and it’s led to quite a lot of behavior from a lot of different groups, be it Israel, be it the Palestinians, that has been very detrimental to everybody living here, because I think the situation is not sustainable, I think most people would would want to say that, and the challenges, you know, if you’re standing in the middle of it, the challenges seem much more intractable and difficult. I’m very biased, because to me, I think everybody should live in one place. I think you should live wherever you want, I think. If you want to live here, live here. If you want to live there, and I don’t believe in separating populations based on religion, so that’s just my take. And it doesn’t make me sort of what you would perceive as, you know, a peace lover and kumbaya, because I’m a very strong believer in security. I’m not very tolerant of violent attacks from anybody, and so I’m not. I would be very harsh on violence, but very more open to people who want to live anywhere they want. It doesn’t bother me that somebody goes to mosque, and doesn’t bother me that somebody goes to synagogue. I just don’t, I don’t really care. So, coming here and seeing the health small the land is, is, I think, very important. And then also, the other thing that I wish people would see, because this is another bias of mine, because I work in health and population health, is the impact on the environment, and just how much destruction has happened here, and amount of pollution, the amount of garbage on the beach, the amount of just the amount of destruction, I think is very sad, and it’s a general problem in the Middle East, because environmental concerns often take a backseat to war. When you have war, you can’t actually be too worried about the impact on the environment, but this is really the air that we are all breathing and the environment that we’re all living in, so it’s a real, real Solomonic dilemma, you know, there were Solomon has two mothers come and suggest that you split, take a live baby and split it into two, and that’s how it feels. This is a really feels very Solomonic, very much trying to split a live baby into two, and I think that if people came here, they would see these things, and it would be less of a matter of, you know, who has what to say about it, and more of a sort of a distressing reality that needs a lot of creativity to solve, and none, and in no way is it helpful to throw around accusations, slogans. It’s just, it’s, it’s, it’s not only unhelpful, it’s harmful, because as soon as you label one side or the other, this one’s a genocidal, and that’s when that one is, you know, homicidal, and all these things, you just, you’ve just stopped conversation, and you’re not going to make any progress.

 

Chana Selmon  34:23

So, I just wish that people would stand in some ways that people need to talk about foreign policy and what they want to put money into in general, and they can earn title to have their beliefs as to what the government should do as their representative, and I do understand and appreciate that, and at the same time, I feel like most people just really don’t know what’s going on here. That’s my impression. So, let’s change

 

Will Bachman  34:50

gears. I want to make sure we have time to ask you about any courses or professors you had at Harvard that continue to resonate with you in. Same way,

 

Chana Selmon  35:01

yes. So I was in history department, and James Henkin was one of the professors I really enjoyed having class with. Also, he is kind of a funny story. I, when I first got to Harvard, I had just gotten out of community college. I had no idea that professors were treated as, you know, these royal special people who you could only approach under certain circumstances. So I saw Professor Henkin in the yard, I think probably my first or second day there, and I ran up to him and I introduced myself and started talking to him, and he was delightful. And then he invited me to come sit on the curriculum committee, which I did through graduation. It was really spectacular experience for me. And what’s the

 

Will Bachman  35:51

correct.. what’s the curriculum committee? You never heard of that. The

 

Chana Selmon  35:53

curriculum committee was excellent. It was a committee that both looked at how to incorporate the curriculum into the core. I think at the time they were trying to construct History 10 A, or some other, some other requirement, and also was actually the committee responsible for hiring professors, so I got to hear and see a lot of people coming from different universities who wanted to teach at Harvard, and hear about their fields of interest, and I was the student representative on the committee. He said, “Do you want to be the student on the committee that hires professors? “Sure, why not? Wow, I didn’t even.. yeah, I didn’t

 

Will Bachman  36:41

know that was a thing, even. Yeah, there

 

Chana Selmon  36:43

is a thing. I don’t know how many departments have it, but the history department, actually, when I was at Harvard, was very small, and I think they lost a lot of students afterward. The people gravitated towards other majors, and history department had suffered from a reputation of being too specialized and not generalized enough, and I understood that, but I felt that my experience was great, and from that I learned I feel I wanted to really pursue a career in history. Originally was my plan, but I then I kind of chickened out. I came from a poor family, I needed to feel like I could have a profession that would sustain me financially, and, and I thought, what should I do with my life that I really could put food on the table, and medicine was also interested in medicine, and I decided to go in that direction, but I feel like I think Harvard, in general, allowed for this, but giving me an idea that I just have to continue. I can continue to pursue lifelong learning, you know, be a lifelong learner. And one of my small principles is that I have to do a little bit of foreign language every single day, and it doesn’t matter if it’s the alphabet or if it’s, you know, some kids video, I have to do a little bit every day, and it, I’m slow these days, because I’ve slowed down a lot in terms of acquiring information, but even still, I feel like it’s just great to push foreign languages, because that’s, that’s really how I communicate with people, and that, and people get so excited when they come into my office, and they can express themselves in their language. I obviously can’t do that for every language, but it makes such a big difference, and I enjoy that. So, I feel like I feel like the history department was a good place for me, and I appreciated it a lot. I also really enjoyed. I was, I was involved with CityStep with Tricia Perez Kenely, and that was

 

Will Bachman  38:45

okay,

 

Chana Selmon  38:45

and experience with dance. I loved it. It was one of the highlights, I think, of, you know, terms of extracurricular activities, and so those are things that I just really remember very fondly at Harvard, and

 

Speaker 1  39:06

yeah,

 

Will Bachman  39:06

now tell us the story. It’s pretty unusual. Tell us the story about being a transfer student from community college,

 

Chana Selmon  39:15

right?

 

Will Bachman  39:16

Might come across someone who transfers from, I don’t know, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, or you know, a four year college or something. I don’t know if I’ve ever spoken with a classmate who transferred from community college. How did you end up going to community college? Not the

 

Chana Selmon  39:31

usual thing. Yeah, actually, so I grew up in an ultra-orthodox Jewish family, and I did not go to a college preparatory school, and I didn’t know what a credit was, didn’t understand the concept, and my, and I was forbidden from going to college originally, because my parents did not believe that it was an appropriate place for a Jewish girl, so I kind of stepped off and went to community college, because it was literally one. Walking distance from my house, I remember sneaking out of the house, and in those days you didn’t have Find My iPhone, so my parents didn’t know where I was, and I went, and I met this wonderful guy named Professor Samuel Draper, who I owe a huge amount to, and he had started an honors program at Rockland Community College, and I met him, I sat with him. I didn’t. He said, “Don’t worry about anything, you’ll enroll in the honors program, and I’ll take care of everything. He actually told me which courses to take. I said, “This sounds interesting. Great, I’ll take it. I had to almost pause one semester because I was $300 short for tuition, and I was working. Your

 

Will Bachman  40:38

parents didn’t know you’re going to college;

 

Chana Selmon  40:40

they didn’t know I had applied, and then ultimately they did know I was going.

 

Will Bachman  40:45

Oh, but

 

Chana Selmon  40:45

they were not happy. They actually called the rabbi, and he said I was going straight to hell, and I cried. Remember this? I cried, and my mother, who never stood up to him ever, said to get out of my house, you’re making my daughter cry. What’s one time she stood up? But they were very unhappy, very unhappy. In fact, when I ultimately got into Harvard after filling out the application in blue pen, I had no idea my father was embarrassed, and he resigned his permit, his position from the synagogue. He, what? Yes, he resigned. He resigned as the he was the organizer of the synagogue, I think you call it a sexton, and he could not face the congregation. His own daughter was going to go to non-Jewish higher education, and this was absolutely shameful. It was bad, he didn’t come to my Rocklin Community College graduation, he was, he was really, was really difficult for him to, you know, he’d raised me to go and have an arranged marriage, and you know, just become a very ultra-orthodox Jew the way he was, and for me to go and look for an education was not, not something that he and I’m the oldest of 10 kids, so there are also setting a poor example for the rest of the family. So, Professor Draper really helped me along, and a lot of people had a hand in helping me and supporting me, because it wasn’t that easy. My parents were really against it, and they had a lot of people in the community that said, ‘This is terrible, but what are your.. what are you allowing your daughter to do it’s shameful, it’s not modest. How could she go and do this? And and then I applied to Harvard, and I didn’t. I’m not sure I knew exactly where Harvard was, to be honest. I did not grow up, met people from Phillips Andover Academy, had no idea what that was, had no idea that there were even people in the world who had spent all of their lives wanting to attend a really good institution, or that their parents had no idea. I just thought I was going to go and learn something really exciting, and that that made me very happy. So I came to college as naive as you can imagine.

 

Will Bachman  43:06

What do you think happened to you? I mean, how did it.. how did it happen that growing up in the culture that your parents raised you in, where it was shameful and disrespectful and stuff? What, what, what do you think was the circuit that somehow you know connected that got you motivated to, you know, pursue education and to sneak out and go to college, which is not the norm, not the normal, not

 

Chana Selmon  43:36

the normal. I think other kids probably snuck out and went to a club. Love, you can, you know, sneak out and drink alcohol or have a joint, you know, that everyone understands. I, to some degree, it was a little bit of rebellion. There’s no question about that. But I really did want an education, and I think it goes right back to the circle of my interesting family heritage. I was very much different from my classmates. I went to an all-girls ultra-orthodox school, but they were all Eastern European Jews. I was the one who had this weird Arab heritage, and they never let me forget it. And I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but that was the best thing that could ever happen to me. They said, ‘Your family is weird, I didn’t understand why you speak this weird language. One told me I couldn’t possibly be an Arab Jew, and I said to her, ‘Where does your family come from? She said, ‘Well, they’re German Jews. I said, ‘Well, if you could be a German Jew, I could be an Arab Jew. I don’t, I don’t understand why, and she thought about it. She said, ‘Hi, I never thought of it that way. So people were very.. they were there, was a little bit of a difficulty with that, and I always felt like, you know, what? I just have to think differently about things. I just naturally felt a lot. Little bit different, and I think that allowed me to explore other things that I.. it was scary, though. It was scary, I mean, you, when you grow up that insulated, and that I hadn’t.. I really, I really had no idea what it was. I had a little bit of exposure, of course, but my community was kind of closed, and I didn’t have that much information, and again, this is before our TikToks, and our internet, and you couldn’t just Google things, you know, you really, if you didn’t meet people, then you just didn’t know. So I feel very fortunate, I’ve always been able to go to places where I really had the privilege of being, and people will share with me things, and I think it’s partially because I do have – I’ve been in just, just a lot of different places that, and when I say places, I don’t mean physical places, I mean more, more intangible kind of experiences that have really let me see a lot of things and do a lot of things that I don’t think I ever would have done if I had just stayed in my community clearly, but yeah, so I’m very, very fortunate. Wasn’t with it, wasn’t easy. It still isn’t easy, but I’m very fortunate.

 

Will Bachman  46:28

Wow. Okay. Chana, thank you so much for joining. Where can listeners who want to keep track or follow you, where can they find you online?

 

Chana Selmon  46:43

Okay. Well, I do. I do have Facebook. I’m not, I’m not frequently on social media, is the truth. I do have Facebook. I do. It’s under Chana Gable Selman. I do have LinkedIn. Again, I’m not that. I will, we’ll check in every every once in a while, but probably the best way to reach me is through email as Sue Selmon at Gmail, and I really say this unequivocally, and just I really welcome visitors, anyone who wants to come and stay with me. Meet with me. I would love it. I mean, whatever your feelings are. I don’t have a litmus test. If you’re curious about Jerusalem, I’m very into the history of Jerusalem. I like to show people around. I like to be an informal tour guide with my, you know, my history obsession, and I people are really welcome, and people are welcome to reach out to me by email or for any other kind of conversation. I really welcome it, because I very much value our class, and I would love to hear from anyone, even if you didn’t know me at college. I really would love to hear from

 

Will Bachman  48:00

you, Chana. Thank you. you so much for joining.

 

Chana Selmon  48:04

Thank you for having me. Much appreciated.