In Mark Tuschman’s photographs, people aren’t just passive subjects. Whether it’s the weary expression of a nurse on break from a women’s clinic in Tanzania, or the smiling eyes of a Guatemalan girl at play in the street, each image conveys a personal story that engages the viewer.
Miriam and Saed Achwall, Yemen
The award-winning Menlo Park–based photographer has documented people and projects in more than a dozen countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America, but until recently, Israel wasn’t among them. Inspired by the experiences his son and daughter shared with him after recent Birthright Israel trips, Tuschman, who had last visited Israel in 1972, decided it was time to go back there himself — camera in tow.
Tuschman designed a project that would allow him to document an aspect of life in Israel he feels is often overlooked: the teeming melting pot of cultures and immigrants, all of them now Israeli.
“I wanted to do something for Israel, and what felt important to me to document was the diversity there, the multicultural nature of the place,” he said from Nairobi, where he’s documenting Planned Parenthood’s efforts to expand health care and sex education. 
Eliyahu and Dina Bracha, Egypt
“The Israelis: Faces and Stories of the Middle East” is the result. The photographs span four months in spring 2010, during which Tuschman traveled through Israel with a producer-translator and his daughter, Eva, a recent Stanford graduate and anthropologist, as an interviewer and writing assistant. The exhibit opens Tuesday, Nov. 1 at the Oshman Family JCC in Palo Alto; a reception will be held Thursday, Nov. 3.
“There’s a real misconception that all of Israel is Eastern European Jews who came there after the war, and I wanted to try to change that,” explained Tuschman, who was working as a computer scientist at Stanford when he took up photography as a hobby some 30 years ago.
“I started by focusing on Jews who came from North Africa and other places in the Middle East,” he said. “There are so many recent refugees, and there are also people who were born [in Israel] of every background you could imagine.”
Each photograph is accompanied by a narrative and biography of the subject, compiled and written by his daughter. “She was extremely important in that process,” Tuschman said.
His portraits show Israeli Jews from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, Libya, Yemen and Ethiopia. One shows an elderly couple posing, all smiles, outside their home; another shows a radio journalist with headphones on, pausing at work in her studio.
Tuschman was driven to highlight Israel’s diversity in part by the desire to combat “political anti-Semitism.” In a proposal to potential funders, he decried the discourse in both the U.S. and the Muslim world that has painted the country as a “foreign colonialist ‘entity’ with little or no legitimate historical connection to the Middle East, composed of right-wing ultra-Orthodox European settlers.”
Sky Getta, Ethiopia
Tuschman hopes that by calling attention to Israel’s diverse ethnic makeup, the project will spur American Jews and non-Jews to reconsider their assumptions about and relationship to Israel.
“Half of the Jews who arrived during Israel’s formation came as refugees directly from their ancient homes in the Middle East, and the other half had been scattered across the world for centuries in the diaspora before returning to their homeland in Israel and reviving their indigenous language,” said Tuschman.
Though he ended up funding the project himself, it has been endorsed by brand-management teams at two Israeli ministries, foreign affairs and minority affairs. National Medal of Arts–winning graphic artist Milton Glaser has been tapped to design a book showcasing the photographs and incorporating the narratives.
If the collection succeeds in challenging viewers’ assumptions about Israel, said Tuschman, it’s a success.
“It’s a complex project, but that’s because Israel is an incredibly complex society — in the diversity of where people are coming from, in the range of religious attitudes. And everything is magnified by the fact that it’s such a tiny country,” he said. “I’ve traveled many places in the world, and Israel is maybe the most complex society I’ve ever seen.”
