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Moshe Dayan, the Israeli military genius who defeated the Arab armies in the six day war

The global peace was at very serious risk, as there was a danger that the Soviets could react aggressively to the embarrassing defeat of their allies’ Soviet equipped and trained armies, therefore, the presence of the top diplomats of the world was necessary and they surely came to meet at the UN and they had to eat at the very dining room where I was busing tables. As a result, I was able to meet personally, serve bread and water and even talk one on one with several of the most important people in the world in those days, among them UN Secretary General, U Thant; US Secretary of State William P. Rogers, the Minister of Foreign Relations of the USSR Alexey Kosygin; Abba Eban, minister of Foreign Affairs of Israel, Lord Caradon, the British Ambassador to the UN (the author of the final Resolution) and a long list of names I had forgotten since. June, 1967 is perhaps one of the most interesting months I´ve ever lived through. The hot war stopped as the cannons were silenced, for awhile, in the Middle East as a result of those meetings, though the cold war between the superpowers continued for many more years…and real peace is nowhere to be seen in the Palestine and Israel lands

Israel still holds all the territories taken in the six day war, except the Sinai Peninsula which was returned to Egypt after Anwar Sadat had the courage to sign a peace treaty with Israel. Sadat paid his courage with his life a few months later, when a fanatic assassinated him during a military parade in Cairo, while Egypt, Israel and the world were celebrating the newly achieved peace!

Just as to become the icing on my personal cake in the month of June 1967, on June 30, as I became 25, five beautiful bunnies at the Playboy Club actually sang the happy BD song for me, and gave me a piece of cake with a lighted candle on top. I was thrilled, a picture was taken by the club’s photographer with the bunnies surrounding and throwing kisses to me. That great photo is now missing and I would pay anything to recoup it. My wife Fanny swears she doesn’t have anything to do with the disappearance of that photo, and I have to believe her, of course…



This is how The Bunnies looked like when I worked at The Play Boy Club, in NYC, in 1967


In mid May, 1967, I completed the sixth level of ESL at The New School for Social Research (“TNSFSR” or “The U”), and immediately took the TOEFL test to register for academic courses in the following semester at the same school. Having approved the ESL test with relatively high marks, I decided that I would keep my night shift job at the Playboy Club and would continue to take day time classes at the U. Following is a brief history of The U.

The New School for Social Research was founded in 1919 by a group of intellectuals teaching at Columbia University in NYC during the First World War. Fervent pacifists, they took a public stand against the war and were censured by the university’s president. The outspoken professors responded by resigning from Columbia and later opening up their own university for adults in New York’s Chelsea district as a place where people could exchange ideas freely with scholars and artists representing a wide range of intellectual and political orientations. Throughout the almost 100 years since its foundation, The U has maintained the original spirit of its founders and free thinking is the most important principle to which the school adheres. The Huffington Post ranks The U among the "The Top Thirteen Non-Traditional Colleges" in the United States. Shimon Peres, the current president of Israel, Eleanor Roosevelt and the famous screen writer Tennessee Williams are among its more famous alumni.

The New School for Social Research had a "student-directed curriculum", which did not require undergraduates to take general education courses. Instead, students were encouraged to explore before focusing on a major, selecting topics that were of interest to them. Students were expected to be the primary designers of their own individualized education. I took full advantage of this system and decided to focus on Economics with emphasis on micro economics, business planning and administration.

I decided to test waters and dared to take 18 credits in the summer, and did just fine; The department of Economics used to offer a broad and critical approach to the study of economics, covering a wide range of schools of thought, including Keynesian and post-Keynesian economics as well as the classical political economy of Smith, Ricardo and Marx; I finished the summer classes with a GPA of 3.3 which qualified me for financial assistance covering approximately 30% of my tuition and fees. That was certainly a great financial relieve for me. Over the following semesters that financial assistance was not only maintained, but increased to over 50% of the total tuition and fees.

By October that year and thank to my greatly improved English, my friend Jorge Alberto Terreros, suggested me that I should apply for a job as a waiter in the night time shift at the Canterbury Restaurant in the heart of the Broadway theatres’ district in the lower floor of the Edison Hotel on 47TH St. at Broadway. My application was approved after an interview with the manager, and I was immediately hired. I started to make more money than I ever thought I could. Not only was I a New Yorker in many ways and my horizons were opening faster than I had ever expected, but I felt that I could do more, however, my sweetheart, Anita, started to complain that I was not seeing her enough. She lived in Hackensack, NJ, about forty minutes away from NYC, by bus, and I was visiting her only on weekends for a few hours as my schedule was pretty tight. Not that I did not care about her, I did care a lot about her, but I just did not have the time to see her more often and/or for longer periods of time. It wasn’t the ideal situation for either one of us, but it was what I was able to do under the circumstances.

I have to go a few months back: when I arrived in NYC in late January, I had advised Anita that I was coming to NYC, so when I showed up, unannounced in her place the first weekend after my arrival, she was extremely happy to see me at her door. I told her about my plans, which included going to school and I requested her not to let her father know about my presence in NYC. We agreed fully on that, but I made it clear that our dating had to be limited to weekends and holidays, which she also agreed upon. A few weeks later I advised her to register for Saturday classes at the same school I was attending in NYC, which she did and tried it for about a month, but her stamina and desire to improve her English were not as intense as mine. She soon quit studying English. Anita’s English was only basic and her work did not allow for much improvement as she was working in a perfumes’ factory nearby the place where she lived, making a salary of $44/week. She was interrelating mainly with Latino (mostly Cuban exiles) people; therefore she felt that she didn´t need much English anyway

In my next posting: SWEET AND SOUR NYC