Name: Jeff Greenwald
Age: 60
City: Oakland
Position: Travel author, monologist, executive director of Ethical Traveler
J.: Where did you grow up and what was your Jewish upbringing like?
Jeff Greenwald: I grew up in the Bronx and on Long Island, in a Conservative Jewish family. One of my grandfathers was a kosher butcher, and my mother still keeps a kosher home. She had a bat mitzvah at 66.
J.: How did you first get the travel bug?
JG: One thing was seeing the film “Lawrence of Arabia.” The vistas in that film, and the sense of solitude and of going to an exotic place like that completely infected me.
J.:
You’re an accomplished travel writer who’s visited five continents. Where was your first significant trip abroad?
JG: In 1979 I left the U.S. on an open-ended journey. At the time I was a visual artist working in sculpture, and my plan was to create art in Paris and Amsterdam, and then sculpt in Greece. While in Greece, I met a woman who inspired me to follow her to Kathmandu, Nepal, and that’s when my infatuation with Buddhism began, as well as a love for Asia in general. Kathmandu became a second home to me. I came down with what I called the “Golden Calf Syndrome,” which is a tendency of Jews in Asia to start worshipping images of Ganesh and the Buddha.
J.: You lived in a shared house in Berkeley from 1986 to 1988, and since then you’ve lived in Oakland. Why did you settle there?
JG: I really fell in love with the place. As much as I love to travel, I’m a person who likes to have a home base, as well.
J.: You went to Israel for the first time around your 50th birthday. What took you so long?
JG: I spent my actual 50th birthday at Wadi Rum (also known as the Valley of the Moon) in Jordan, listening to the soundtrack of “Lawrence of Arabia” on my iPod. It’s an incredible place, and evokes that whole movie and era, and it was a dream of a lifetime to be there.
I had always wanted to go to Israel, but somehow Asia exerted its hold on me first. Israel is a place where everyone has opinions and no one has solutions. It’s also one of those places like Cuba or India or Burning Man that you can’t really speak of until you’ve been there. It defies categorization and shatters your expectations. It was both more wonderful and terrible than anything I had imagined. I met Israelis whom I admired greatly and Palestinians whom I admired greatly, and found my heart broken on both sides of the fence. And as unpopular as it might be to say this in your newspaper, I have never seen people as mean-spirited as some of the settlers I encountered in Hebron. It was an awful experience to be spat at and have things thrown at me by Jewish people while walking through bombed-out Palestinian neighborhoods.
J.: In the 1990s you decided to circumnavigate the globe entirely by land, and your book “The Size of the World” was the result. What made you decide to travel this way?
JG: When I turned 40, I decided to make a devotional circuit around the world, known in Buddhism as a kora. I left Oakland and set off on foot using whatever means I could find to make my way around the world. The trip took nine months, and I visited more than 30 countries. I didn’t plan my route, and as a result I got stuck in Turkey, Senegal and Hong Kong for almost a month each, unable to find my way out. In 1994 there were 17 shipping companies in Hong Kong that went to North America, and I was turned down by 16 of them before one took me home to Oakland. Very few people travel that way, and in order to get on a ship, you need the permission of the corporation and the captain. You are actually a liability, so it’s astonishing I was able to do it.
J.:
You visited Iran in the late ’90s. What were the circumstances of that trip?
JG: In 1999, I was part of a small group of Americans allowed to enter to watch the total eclipse of the sun there. Like most Americans, I had a lot of preconceptions, and found it was nothing like what I expected. One of the most startling things was how open and free the women were in talking to me on the streets, and how educated everyone was and how proud they were of their heritage. There is a tremendous value placed on hospitality toward strangers, and many times I was asked whether I was Jewish. People were especially friendly when I said I was. The people I met wanted me to know that the policies of their government don’t echo their own sentiments.
J.:
Do you have any stories about being Jewish while traveling, either positive or negative?
JG: I’ve led a trip to Cuba for the past four years with Ethical Traveler, and had a wonderful Passover in Havana last year. I have run into Jewish communities by accident in Singapore, Hong Kong, India and Guatemala. The only time I had a negative experience was the first trip I ever took, at 17 in 1971. It was only 25 years after the end of World War II, and in Munich I ran into some middle-aged Germans who had fought alongside Nazis. Some of them, in a drunken stupor, started saying how much they had loved Hitler, and I was shocked. But I don’t see Germans that way anymore. Germans are some of the kindest and most enlightened people in the world, and I’ve enjoyed all my subsequent trips there.
J.:
You founded an organization called Ethical Traveler. What is that?
JG: It’s a nonprofit that I co-created in 2003, and the idea is to turn an international community of travelers into a global political action group. Travelers have tremendous economic power and can use it by voting with their wings and traveling to places that support human rights and have good environmental practices. On Dec. 8, we’ll have a big event at the Commonwealth Club, where we’ll announce the 10 best ethical destinations in the developing world for this year, and these won’t include places like Cambodia or Thailand or other places on everyone’s bucket list; they will be more unusual places where people are doing things right in terms of their environmental practices, human rights record, freedom of the press and how they treat animals, to name a few.
For more, visit www.jeffgreenwald.com or www.ethicaltraveler.org. A 25th anniversary edition of Greenwald’s “Shopping for Buddhas: An Adventure in Nepal” was recently published.
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