The Old Country

Ireland, Identity and Avoiding Anti-Semitism

September 24, 2014

“If anyone asks where we’re from, say America, not Israel.” Those were the instructions I gave to my wife and children for how to minimize friction while traveling outside of Israel after a summer where protests bordering on (and sometimes overtly embracing) anti-Semitism raged across Europe. Our vacation – ten days in Ireland, hiking, drinking […]

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Why’d You Want to Live Here, Anyway?

July 25, 2014

An article a few weeks ago in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz questioned why someone would ever want to make aliyah from a comfortable country like the U.S. Especially these days – with the murders of the Naftali Frenkel, Gil-ad Shear and Eyal Shach still on our minds, the revenge killing of Palestinian teenager Mohammed Abu Khaider stinging at our […]

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Embracing the Third Culture

June 13, 2014

Ever since we moved to Israel 20 years ago, I’ve always felt like I don’t quite fit in anywhere. I’ll never be truly Israeli, since I didn’t grow up with all the pop culture references someone born in the country knows intuitively. And I’m not fully American anymore either, since I haven’t resided in the […]

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Troubles at my Alma Mater

March 13, 2013

My alma mater was all over the Jewish news last week, but not for good reasons. Oberlin College, which I attended as an undergraduate some 30 years ago, has inexplicably seen a number of racist and anti-Semitic incidents in the past month. On February 15, students found a note reading “Whites only” tacked above a […]

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Pink Floyd Comes to Jerusalem

February 12, 2013

It was just like being at a Pink Floyd concert…maybe even better. At least that was how I felt walking out of the “Echoes” show at Jerusalem’s Zappa Club on Thursday night. Echoes is an Israeli Pink Floyd “tribute band.” That means that they don’t just play covers of Pink Floyd songs; they attempt to […]

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Buses Here and There

December 7, 2012

I grew up in a small suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area with no public transportation. This was tough because I have always been fascinated (my family would say obsessed) by buses, trams, trains and the like. San Francisco had pretty much everything a transit head like me could desire, including electric trolleys, streetcars […]

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Retiring to Protea Hills

July 11, 2012

It’s too bad I haven’t hit retirement age yet. Because when I do (and it won’t be for a good many more years), I know where I want to live: Protea Hills, a brand new retirement “village” in the final stages of construction high up on a mountain at Moshav Shoresh, about 20 minutes from […]

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Audited

April 18, 2012

For the 17 years that we have lived in Israel, we have been boy scouts when it comes to paying our U.S. taxes. We file our 1040s dutifully, even though there is rarely any tax to pay (we pay our 45% pound of flesh to the Israeli authorities and then the double taxation treaty with […]

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Canadian Cop

March 6, 2012

The woman at the rental car agency desk at Toronto’s Pearson Airport eyed my Israeli driver’s license suspiciously. She looked at the laminated card, then up at me, then back and forth several times. “You’re going to have a problem if a policeman pulls you over,” she finally said, explaining her hesitation. “There’s no English […]

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Snow-tubing!

March 1, 2012

We were all ready for snow in Jerusalem a couple of weeks back, but there was none in the end. Now snow is back in the weather for Friday, and I’ve already seen a few flurries today. But, after a week in Toronto, where we just were for a family wedding, I’ve seen more snow […]

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