Being so far from home and everything that is familiar is rather strange, and I find myself regularly trying to find things here that I can relate to back home.

The first step is to look at the local population. I find that, generally, there is an every person for themselves sentiment here, which translates as rude to me. I understand that people back home are rude as fuck, but they're subtle assholes. Not like here.
This brings me to two people that I've met here. These people embody the American ideal of community.
We have a neighbor, Shoshana. She sits on the steps out front of our apartment building with us every day, smoking cigarettes. Yet, every day, she cooks us food. None of us ever ask, or expect it, but every day she brings us a shitload of food. More than we can ever eat. Another member of our little 'Merica on the third floor asked her about it, to which she replied: "it makes my family feel bigger."
Shoshana knows everybody in the neighborhood by name. She knows who lives in our apartment building, despite the fact she lives in a neighboring complex. She brings strange characters that enter or exit our building up to us. This isn't in a paranoid manner, however. She just displays serious concern for the well being of her neighbors and their appetites. She provides the sense of American community that I never see back home. At least not where I'm from.

Then there is Ben. Ben is responsible for maintenance of the building.
Ben and I have had quite a few conversations and have become friends. A few weeks ago, I went to Tel Aviv. I took the train. I left my knife in my back pocket (where it usually lives) before departing. It didn't make it through security, so I stashed it in a trash can outside of the building as to not miss my train. I called Ben, and asked if he would try to find it. I mentioned that he was in no way, at all, obligated to look for it. Fuck man, I wouldn't dig through a strange trashcan for most people I know.
All it took was some asshole he barely knows to ask him to go out of his way to dig through a trashcan, and he did it.
He did me a serious favor, and refuses to take anything in return. I barely know this guy, and he dug through a trashcan for me.
I realize there are good people, along with bad, everywhere. It's just remarkable how quickly one can find either in each category in such a foreign place.
These two represent, to me, what we consider an idealized American community, yet it is so far away from home.