How Magic Can Help Underprivileged Israeli Teenagers Get Ahead

When is a trick more than a trick? When Ophir Samson uses it to teach confidence, leadership, and work-related skills

By Iris Mansour for Tablet Magazine

Ophir Samson was sitting with a friend last year at one of his favorite restaurants in Jaffa when a young waiter approached the table, reached behind Samson’s ear, and pulled out a gold coin. After a brief moment of confusion, Samson smiled as he managed to place him: Over eight weeks in early 2012, Samson had taught magic tricks to a group of 15 teenagers at Jaffa’s Arab-Jewish Community Center. More than a year had passed, but this former student clearly remembered what he’d been taught.

The kids at the Community Center, Samson said, were typical teenagers: hard to control but energetic and engaging. They’d call their British-born teacher “Harry Potter” but would quiet down at the chance to learn a trick and the subtle steps and technical skills—practiced for hours, yet unnoticed by an audience—that turn a rusty amateur into a confident magician. To perfect the coin trick, for instance, your fingers have to move faster than the audience’s eyes, and you have to be able to direct someone else’s gaze where you want it to go.

Through the Smadar School for Young Magicians, Samson has taught dozens of Jewish and Arab Israelis, as well as refugees and children of undocumented parents living in Israel, to pull coins out of ears, make handkerchiefs disappear, and levitate banknotes. Held at places like Save a Child’s Heart, which provides life-saving medical procedures to children from the developing world, or Bialik-Rogozin, a school for children of asylum seekers and undocumented workers, Samson’s classes are meant to get teenagers fired up about magic, as well as build their confidence, develop their leadership skills, and get them used to speaking in public. “The purpose is to show them these skills are transferable in other areas,” said Samson. “Magic has done a huge service to me and developing my career.”

This summer, funded by a $1,000 grant from the Schusterman Foundation, Samson and four volunteers will be teaching four-week magic programs to more children at Bialik-Ragozin, a WIZO foster home, and kids living with their mothers at a shelter for battered women in Herziliya. Samson said: “I’m really excited about reaching new communities.”

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