Arts Editor

Although people in the Arab world hate U.S. foreign policy, they love America.

That's the conclusion of the District's Benjamin Orbach, who spent more than a year in Jordan and Egypt and whose book, Live From Jordan: Letters Home from My Journey Through the Middle East (American Management Association, 2007), has recently been published.

In his book, Orbach recounts an evening at a posh Jordanian nightclub and his thoughts on the way home at 4 a.m.

"I couldn't stop thinking about all of these wealthy Jordanians and Palestinians, dressed in American and European labels, dancing and singing to American music with such joy," he writes. "I tried to reconcile that image with the anti-Americanism that is so prevalent here, but I couldn't help but feel as if these people loved America. In their most valued downtime of the week, they spoke our language with each other and lived our popular culture. ... These Jordanians' feelings surpassed admiration for American culture. Their feelings were ones of radiant ownership; my music was their music, too."

They criticize U.S. support for Israel and its "potential invasion of Iraq," he wrote in December 2002, before the war.

"But America is a second home and a cultural standard" for many Jordanian elites, he writes.

As a result, Orbach, 32, says his American identity was a bonus in meeting Jordanians and engaging them in conversation. He had gone to Jordan in July 2002 on a language and research fellowship to learn Arabic as part of his master's program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

But he hid his Jewishness from most Jordanians he met.

In an interview, he explains that if he had told people he was Jewish, conversations would have focused "on my being Jewish and the differences between the Torah and the Koran. I was more interested in talking about foreign policy issues."

There also was the issue of personal safety. "I wasn't worried about the people I knew," Orbach says, but there were Islamists in Jordan and terrorist incidents, and he took precautions.

"I told some people I was Christian, others that I came from a mixed [Muslim-Christian] marriage," the author says.

Many people assumed he was an Arab American because of his coloring and simply that he was there, he says.

In February 2003, as the war in Iraq loomed on the horizon, the United States evacuated Orbach, as a recipient of a government fellowship, from Jordan. He went to Egypt, and there he had friends who knew he was Jewish.

Despite keeping his Jewish identity secret, Orbach had some uncomfortable moments in Amman. He recalls going to a friend's home for dinner. There, he met his friend's brother, who expressed an interest in converting him to Islam.

"I was there [in the house] on my own, and that was uncomfortable," he says. "I felt insulted, not threatened. But that was an exception. Most people welcomed me as an American."

Orbach, who grew up in Pittsburgh, says his interest in the Arab world and in learning Arabic stemmed from a year at Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1996. (He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan the following year and a master's from Hopkins in 2003.)

"The first month I was there, there were two suicide bombings on bus No. 18 in Jerusalem," a bus that he took, he explains. "I was terrorized and couldn't understand why someone would do that. I became interested in the world surrounding Israel and understood that I needed to learn Arabic."

The author hadn't intended to write a book when he went to live in Jordan. However, to lessen his family's fears, he sent frequent e-mails describing what he had seen. Those e-mails were forwarded to other people, and from comments he received, he began to realize that there weren't many feature stories about people in the Arab world.

The book, which took him a year and a half of nights and weekends to complete, is based on those e-mails and a journal he kept.

Orbach, who this month left a job with the State Department, is soon to begin working for Creative Associates, an international development company.

A majority of Jordanians and Palestinians whom he met in Jordan "recognize that Israel exists," according to the author, but demand a contiguous Palestinian state alongside it as well. An exception are Palestinians living in refugee camps ‹ "they live in hardship, and their salvation is the return to their homes," he says.

A Palestinian leader needs to tell them that they will receive compensation, but cannot return to their homes inside Israel, Orbach notes.

He does see room for hope. Going back to visit relatives in Israel, he stopped to buy some sweets. There, in a Palestinian's shop, he was able to find ruggelach in pastry boxes marked "kosher."

"Ordering kosher pastries in Arabic from a Palestinian in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City was an optimistic moment," he writes. "It left me scratching my head, though, as to how I could buy kosher pastries in Palestine, but not use the word 'Israel' among Jordanian-Palestinians I know in Amman, who consider themselves staunch supporters of the Palestinian struggle. On the seam between Israel and the Arab East, where lives and mutual interests overlap, some Palestinians are able to reach a coexistence with Israelis that angry members of the diaspora would find impossible to understand."