Her classmate Priscilla Mercedes concurs. “The food is real weird there,” she says. “But the people are so sweet. When you’re in Finland, you get hungry at twelve o’clock at night because of the time change. But it’s okay. The people there will get you food.”

Finland is a land of democracy and saunas, fine crystal and cellular phones, weird pizza and generous people. It is also a land of paradoxes, especially in terms of its recent history. During World War II, Axis Finland fought alongside Germany to fend off a Soviet invasion. But although Finland and Germany were allies, the country categorically refused to hand over its 2000 Jews to the Nazis and their death camps.

“Jews in Finland were citizens in a democracy,” explained Finnish-Jewish U.N. Ambassador emeritus Max Jacobsen, speaking via video last week to an assembly at the Sol Goldman YMHA in the East Village. “They had equal rights and equal freedoms.”

The Ambassador was speaking on the invitation of Thanks to Scandinavia, an organization dedicated to expressing gratitude to a part of the world which showed rare and precious decency during the Holocaust. Every year, Thanks to Scandinavia gives out a Spirit of Scandinavia award, bringing together an unlikely crowd of Jews, Nordic types, Y-goers, and hangers-on. This year’s ceremony was the first to focus solely on Finland; it was sponsored in part by (the surprisingly kosher) Finlandia Cheese.

The Spirit of Scandinavia award is meant to honor a Scandinavian who shows commitment to pluralism, tolerance, and peace. It seemed almost too perfect, then, to give the 2002 award to Johanna Grussner, a teacher from Helsinki who taught music to Keshauna Sanders, Priscilla Mercedes, and the other inner-city schoolchildren of P.S. 86. Ms. Grussner, twenty-nine years old and as blond and gorgeous as you’d hope, arrived at the Bronx elementary school in the late nineties. Music education in the New York City public school system was famously languishing, and the young Finnish woman was expected to do little more than baby-sit. Instead, Ms. Grussner created the award-winning P.S. 86 Select Choir, an outfit dedicated to singing old-fashioned gospel and the occasional Scandinavian folk tune. Last year, Ms. Grussner’s choir performed in her hometown in Finland. This year, the choir sang together at the Sol Goldman Y.

And so last week’s joyfully surreal evening: picture fifteen inner-city kids in a darkened auditorium, singing songs about their “Father Almighty, who has saved (them) by His loving grace” to a crowd of relatively older Jews and slightly baffled Finns. Some spectators winced as the kids sang about the ends of their earthly journeys; on the other hand, nobody in the crowd could help but smile when a shirt-and-tied fifth-grader reached wildly pre-pubescent notes in praise of his Lord. A Swedish folk tune, featuring solos by twelve year-old Jheanamen Hernandez, elicited murmured awe. And the extended final number, during which Ms. Grussner herself took the microphone, had the crowd enthusiastically (albeit arhythmically) clapping along. The ceremony was a shining display of pluralism at its giddiest.

Which was the point.

“We’re here to thank the institutions of the countries of Scandinavia,” explained Beth Mann, the director of the Y, at the evening’s end. “In a time when violence, hatred, and xenophobia seem rampant, sometimes we feel hopeless to affect any change. But tonight we celebrate the example of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”

It was a moving speech. Nevertheless, the kids from P.S. 86 weren’t listening. Dressed up in their black-and-white outfits, out late already on a Wednesday night, they squirmed in their chairs or poked at each other and tried to hug their beloved music teacher. One of them, a slight girl who seemed a little like she’d been transported back to Finland, got out of her seat and danced toward the back of the room. Her classmate, another world traveler from the Bronx, followed a few steps behind, and continued to sing in the aisles.

In Petra, the famed Jordanian archaeological site which was used as the hiding place for the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, a group of American and Canadian tourists wandered around the old rocks and marveled at the Bedouins standing in the shadows, dressed in wool. “They are used to it,” the Arab tour-guide said. “The heat.” The tour-guide urged his visitors to buy bottled water from the Bedouins as selling water was the Bedouins’ livelihood. The tourists hid from the sun in the ruins of temples and homes, and wished that they could see the site more clearly, but the glare was leaching out color from Petra’s famously crimson stones, and anyway, it was hard to stand outside without squinting.

Most of the tourists, after finishing their day in Jordan, were all too happy to board the bus back to Israel. Israel is, after all, a supernova of luxury compared to most of its Arab neighbors; even “modern” Arab states such as Jordan seem like little more than backwaters when compared to their relatively lush and wealthy neighbor. Israel has, in abundance, powerful air conditioners, public swimming pools, Italian restaurants, cold beers, and flush toilets. It has electricity and the Internet. Its women wear bikinis, carry guns, go to war. Ideologically (and unsurprisingly) it is as close as the Middle East gets to America.

However, one tourist was eager to see more of Jordan. A 24 year old Jewish-American graduate student, the tourist had never been to the Arab world before and was eager to explore as much of it as possible before returning to the relative safety and familiarity of Israel. She asked the tour-guide to let her off the bus. “You are not dressed for this,” he said to her, gently. She was wearing a t-shirt and shorts and had a bandanna in her hair. She insisted. She gave the tour-guide some money.

He sighed, and asked the driver to pull the bus over.

The town of Aqaba, in Jordan, is located on the Red Sea; Eilat shimmers Vegas-like across the water, and, if one looks far into the distance on a clear day, one can almost see the shores of the Sinai, in Egypt. The Jordanian government, which boasts friendly ties with the U.S. and a sincere desire to join the first world hopes to turn Aqaba into a genuine tourist destination. One can already find a few western-style hotels there, and even a couple shops selling alcohol. In an Arab Islamic country, these are no small things.

The tourist got off the bus in Aqaba and found herself standing alone in the shimmery afternoon heat. There was a pension across the road that the tour-guide had pointed out to her; he would be staying there that evening and would be glad to show her around town, if she wanted. The pension seemed run down, though, and the tourist thought it might be nice to check out one of the fancy hotels by the water. She began walking in that direction, but soon found herself scared to keep going. Men had stepped out of the surrounding buildings. They were staring. Some were hissing.

The woman tied her bandanna over her long brown hair. “You are not dressed for this,” she said to herself. The men continued to stare, some in amazement, some in glee, but most with disgust. She turned and hurried to the pension that her tour-guide had pointed out. Once she locked herself into a small, neat room, it occurred to her how little she knew. Around midnight, the tour-guide arrived as promised and took the tourist out through the windy streets of Aqaba. With him, she felt more like a curiosity than an affront – men still stared but the tour-guide brushed them off with a few words of Arabic. “What are you saying?” she asked him.

“That you are American,” he said. “That it’s not your fault.”

He brought her to a rug merchant’s and a magazine store, he bought her pita bread with lamb and showed her where to buy a long scarf she could wrap around her legs. The stores stayed open deep into the night, because the temperatures fell into the 80′s and 90′s and both shoppers and merchants could breathe. The tourist saw a few women, too, dressed in long black robes, heads fully covered. Some of them wore lipstick. A few of them were dressed in more modern fashion, and did not seem afraid.

At three in the morning, the tour-guide brought the tourist to the beach, where they sat at a table and ordered a hookah pipe and, as a special treat, bottles of Sprite. They sat quietly together at a plastic table and smoked from the hookah; they were surrounded by screaming babies, playing children, and even some men and women sitting together. There was a carnival feel in the air, as the hookahs burned sporadically, like fireflies. Soon the tourist heard splashing in the water, and then more, and then laughter heading in with the wind. Dark shapes like dolphins rose into the night and pitched themselves back into the sea.

“What is that?” the tourist asked.

“The women,” the tour-guide said. “They are swimming.”

Dressed entirely in their chadors, heads still wrapped in scarves, the women laughed and swam together in the warm Red Sea. The tourist thought back to a few days previous, when she had suffered in a bikini in Eilat, surrounded by other women in bikinis, everyone being watched, free in some respects and shackled in others. The tourist knew that Jordan was a modern country, and she suspected that many of these women’s peers in Saudi Arabia, say, or Iran, would be physically brutalized for swimming in public. But she also knew that there were possibilities for joy even in the strictest traditions, and that some women, at least in Jordan, could find freedom in the very rules that seemed to harness them.

As dawn neared, a strange man sat down with the tour-guide and the tourist. In English, he said to the tourist, “I heard that you were here, and I am glad that you’ve come to see Jordan, but next time I must ask you to dress modestly and respect our traditions.”

The tourist, sweaty and tired, wondered how the man knew she was there. She promised him that she had already learned her mistake, and that she would make a respectful return.

The tourist was no longer a tourist on September 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center was attacked. She was standing on the Brooklyn Promenade, a boardwalk which juts out over the East River, providing perhaps the best of all possible views of lower Manhattan. The tourist lived a few miles from the Promenade and had gone there that morning to drink coffee and watch the boats in the harbor. By the time she arrived, the second plane was pirouetting around the second tower. She heard the sound, saw the smoke, dropped her coffee. As both of the towers collapsed over the next hour, friends of the tourist died.

At no time have Westerners with even the best of intentions known how to respectfully engage with the Middle East. Westerners with the worst of intentions have never even tried. We have visited in our shorts, and sat tanks in their holy places. We have introduced products and values that they consider corrupt. We have supported tyrannical regimes, and we have funded guerillas. We have done of some of these things because we think they are morally right, and some of these things because they suit our strategic needs. In the past, perhaps, we have been willing to engage in some debate about our course. But, as George W. Bush recently reminded us, there will be no more debate. Whatever hope there might have been for some brokered understanding between East and West crumbled with the towers. The foolish and fiery terrorists killed 6000 people and any hope for American compassion. After September 11, there will be no respectful returns.

These days, the scene at Olympic Pita is fairly placid. Women in wigs and men in shirtsleeves commandeer a few back tables near the wall-size Bob Ross-ish landscape; closer to the front of the room, bare-headed young men in tight shirts flirt with the waitresses in Hebrew. Food is delivered, smiles are exchanged, and customers leave drowsy and full. “Kosher tapas!” sang a Manhattanite named Jeffrey, dining out the other night with his wife Alyssa, as he gestured toward the array of small dishes which covered their table. There was hummous and tabbouleh, salty hot mushrooms, bright purple beets, and a mayonnaise-y blend of canned corn and potato which looked like English nursery food but was actually, Jeffrey promised, delicious. “It’s the best kosher restaurant in the city. I come here all the way from midtown whenever I can. Midtown!” he repeated, and speared a mushroom to make his point.

Alyssa nodded. “It’s the best shwarma in the city. I’ve never found anything like it. They do it just like how they do it in Israel.”

“Just like in Israel,” Jeffrey repeated, munching happily.

Olympic Pita does seem like it belongs somewhere in Israel, perhaps near the Shuk Ha-Carmel in Tel Aviv or in the Ben Yahuda quarter of Jerusalem. Not only is the food a perfect reflection of the country, but so is the political spirit of the place. This past summer, when Bill Clinton was pressuring Ehud Barak to trade Israeli soil for Middle Eastern peace, the atmosphere at the restaurant was as charged as it must have been in the Old City. The waitresses were short-tempered. The restaurant seemed overheated. Teenage boys in black yarmulkes sat in angry huddles, cursing the the treacherous “peace.” One night, an American made the mistake of telling her dinner companion, a little too loudly, that she couldn’t understand why Israel didn’t make concessions. What were a few holy sites, she asked, in comparison to a human life? She was interrupted by a man at the next table. “Leave,” he said. “Your ignorance makes me sick – I will not be able to continue eating until you are gone.” The man proceeded to stare at her blackly until she dropped a twenty on the table and left.

In a city where land-for-peace seems a reasonable trade, Olympic Pita – and much of its surrounding neighborhood – is a stronghold of support for Israel’s integrity. “This restaurant is a piece of Israel, so of course it’s a political restaurant,” said a skullcapped diner on a recent Thursday, ruminating on the Middle East in between bites of his chicken kebab. “Anything Israeli is also by definition political.” And that includes restaurants in New York City. “Israel,” the man added, “is not only defined by her physical borders. She exists in Jewish people everywhere.”

But of course, Israel is defined by her physical borders, and the customers at Olympic Pita know this. With the conservative Ariel Sharon in charge of the Knesset, the restaurant’s customers smile a little more and linger a little longer at the tables. No longer is their homeland in danger of division; it is now much less likely that Jerusalem will be partitioned. “Let’s just say it’s a little better these days,” said an American-born woman in a long skirt, sitting near Jeffrey and Alyssa. When asked whether or not the peripatetic violence in Israel bothered her, she said that it did, of course. “But violence is temporary, a moment.” On the other hand, a dismantled Israel could crumble forever. She, and most of the others at the restaurant, are always aware of the fragility of home.

Walking down the blocks near the restaurant, one will come across the Sukkah Depot, the Glatt Mart, felafel stands and kosher supermarkets. The neighborhood overflows with opportunities to taste Israel. But New York’s more intrepid foodies, the ones who celebrate Astoria’s Greek restaurants or Brighton Beach’s Russian, have yet to cultify Midwood. Perhaps this is because most foodies seek dinner without a side order of politics – an impossibility in this part of Brooklyn.

Is Political passion what gives this food flavor?

“Nah,” said Alyssa, who had shlepped in from midtown. “I don’t come to talk about politics. I just come for the shwarma.”

A man at the table beside us called out, “But shwarma is political!”