Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2003 | 1:11 a.m.
What does hate look like to a child?
What color is friendship, hope, fear and disappointment?
Nine years ago Maureen Kushner flew to Israel to find out.
The former elementary school teacher from Brooklyn, N.Y., had spent 20 years working with students in upper Manhattan, where she had used humor to teach children to read and write, to look at crime, drugs and conflict in their neighborhoods.
In Israel, she was an outsider, a lively, red-haired Jewish woman from America who spoke Hebrew and Arabic with a Bronx accent.
"I opened my mouth, they start laughing," Kushner said recently in a phone interview from her Brooklyn apartment. "It was an immediate icebreaker."
Conversations with Jewish, Arab, Druze and immigrant schoolchildren followed. They talked about war and peace and the meaning of words. Mostly, they would focus on humor. "Humor is their survival technique," Kushner said. "The people are so tired of war. The soldiers are tired of war.
"When you're laughing with someone, it's a sense of equality. When you do it in groups of 25, it's teaming."
The four-year effort was Kushner's "Peace Through Humor" project, a creative and colorful assemblage of images and thoughts created from 1994 to 1998.
A selection of art from "Peace Through Humor" will be on display and available for group viewings through December at Temple Beth Sholom, 10700 Havenwood Lane, off Town Center Drive between Sahara Avenue and Desert Inn Drive.
"We had been working months and months to get it here," Robert Mirisch, executive director for Temple Beth Sholom, said. "It gives us a much different look. This is today's life through today's children's eyes.
"The children of these peoples can recognize the importance of peace. If a child can understand it, an adult can find a way."
Looking at a painting called "The Suicide Bomber," Mirisch said. "This is the most frightening of all.
The painting was created by Moroccan and Kurdish Jews. It depicts a suicide bomber with grenades and dynamite strapped to his body. He is surrounded by images of death -- army tanks and skulls and crossbones.
Another painting, "The White House Picture," was created by 10-year-old Druze children and features former President Bill Clinton, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the front lawn of the White House.
Bedouin children created a vibrant piece called "The Tree of Peace" inspired by the Bedouin belief that water, sheep, camels and the date palm tree are symbols of peace.
Humor and healing
Kushner, who is in her 50s, seems outrageous in conversation. When picking up the telephone she shrieks, in a voice that makes it sound as if she is smiling, "Is this really Las Vegas?," then jokes, "You can bet on that."
It's easy to see why children take to her. At Public School 132 in the Washington Heights area of Manhattan, she was regarded by staff as "a creative teacher who was extremely dedicated to her students," according to a faxed statement from the school.
She began touring the "Peace through Humor" artwork in 1996 in Oklahoma City, an area also shaken by terrorism. While there, Kushner visited schools and hospitals to work with children who were affected by the bombing.
Following a 1999 shooting at a children's summer camp at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Grenada Hills, Calif., Kushner set out to work with those affected.
Kushner worked with children in joke-writing workshops at an area hospital.
"We would all make up jokes and we actually had a comedy show and all these children had IVs next to them," Kushner said.
When the "Peace through Humor" exhibit hung in Miami airport, children visited in groups and participated in comedy workshops in front of the paintings.
Breaking through
Kushner learned Arabic in a refugee camp in Gaza in 1982, and Hebrew while working on a kibbutz (community farm) in Beit Hashita, Israel. She said She majored in International Relations at the City College of New York.
At her Kids Comedy Club in Washington Heights, she used cartoon characters from conflicting countries to introduce children to the international language of humor.
Mickey Mouse was joined with the Russian cartoon mouse Cheburashka. Eventually cartoons from all over the world were incorporated into the program.
The comedy club included youth comedians, cartoonists, writers, designers and critics.
"Socially I saw what happened," Kushner said. "They all ended up working together. The comedy club was a working collaboration.
"It wasn't easy in the beginning and, of course, everybody would bring me their problem children they wanted out of their class."
But through humor they pulled it together. Each year would be a different theme and expression.
"I was teaching in a school ... where the whole surrounding was drugs," Kushner said. "And these children weren't reading and writing well. I saw that humor was very akin to thinking. Every joke has a pun, a relationship. They have logic. They have sequential thinking."
In Israel, Kushner visited 24 schools, where she would have children create long lists of words relating to war and peace: dreams, war, reality, tragedy, grief, ambivalence, confusion, fear, mistrust, disappointment, border, funeral and noise.
"Jewish and Arab children, the one thing they hate is noise," Kushner said. "The whole country is filled with ambulances and sirens."
The words were explored, animated into action, formed into collages and painted. To open their minds, Kushner had them explore root words common to both Hebrew and Arabic terms. Many of the words were made into cartoons or puppets.
"With satire and parody, you're exaggerating the image, you're taking away masks," Kushner said. "I wanted the children to see what's inside the words.
"All the children's words are different. It also depends on the current events. If there was a terrorist attack, the children might say 'blood,' they might say 'death,' 'funeral,' they might say 'fear,' 'afraid.' They might say 'revenge.'
"If it's a time of relative calm, then it's 'sadness,' or it's 'hope,' or 'friend.' It depends on the time it's happened. It depends where it's happened. In the north of Israel, both for Jews and Arabs, they get hit by the katushas (rockets) in Lebanon. Arab children near Lebanon border dealt with issues of separation."
While the world wonders whether there will ever be peace in the Middle East, Kushner, who is again in Israel, says her project with the children "is not about the long-term effect, but to create a beautiful environment for children who are sharing ideas, cooperating, laughing, helping each other.
"Somehow they see that sharing with each other is fun. We hope there's a continuity. I know children do want peace. They don't sit down and think about peace. They have a different kind of framework."
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