Travel

Turning empty hotel rooms into “healing holidays”

September 17, 2018

“You look like you need a l’chaim,” the yeshiva bocher said to me, extending a plastic cup. “I can’t,” I responded. “But it’s Shabbos!”

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Transforming FOMO to JOMO on the road

April 7, 2017

FOMO is the “Fear of Missing Out.” The antidote: JOMO – “Joy of Missing Out.” But what’s ROMO? And how do you move from one to the other?

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When God offers you a raft, take it

November 16, 2016

My wife Jody and I recently spent a relaxing weekend at a small vacation bungalow in Poriah, a moshav overlooking the Sea of Galilee, with our friends David and Shelley. On Friday afternoon we had a few hours to kill before we needed to get ready for Shabbat and we wanted to go on a […]

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Re-entry syndrome and the five stages of aliyah

September 27, 2015

“It’s called re-entry syndrome,” my therapist friend Nomi explained to me as I was describing the difficulty I was having returning to Israel after our recent vacation abroad. “It happens to everyone.” It’s especially acute, she added, when you’ve just come from an especially polite country such as Norway, where we’d just spent two weeks […]

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Hitchhiking now and then

August 20, 2015

Exactly 30 years ago today, I was in a car with a group of German strangers on my way to a standing room only soccer match just outside what was then West Berlin. As part of a two-month trek across Europe, I was feeling young and adventurous when I decided to try hitchhiking. Getting to […]

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Tragedy in Nepal Brings Back Trekking Memories

October 31, 2014

The tragedy in Nepal two weeks ago, where 40 trekkers, including four Israelis, lost their lives in a sudden freak snowstorm along the well-traveled Annapurna route brought back a flood of memories from my own trip to the Nepalese Himalayas. In 2011, my family and I went hiking in the same Annapurna region, and, although […]

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Will the World’s Largest Seder be Canceled this Year?

March 25, 2014

The sanctions and now full strike at Israel’s Foreign Ministry have already wreaked havoc with the country’s diplomacy. First, a planned trip by the Pope to the Holy Land appears to be on the verge of cancellation. Next, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s historic visit to Latin America also looks likely to fall to the editing […]

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Waze in the South Pacific

July 24, 2013

That Waze is one of Israel’s biggest hi-tech success stories of the last year – perhaps even the last decade – is old news by now. The crowd-sourced mapping and traffic app has saved countless hours and hassles by travelers around the world. But just how far has Waze penetrated? Would it work on, say, a small […]

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Glass Half Full – Better Place Transforms Station Error into Customer Service Case Study

February 20, 2013

Hey Better Place electric car aficionados: ever wonder what would happen if you pulled into one of the company’s fully automated battery swap stations and it didn’t work? Well, I’m here to tell the tale. It’s a classic glass half empty/half full situation. Half empty: the station broke down and we weren’t able to get […]

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Waze to go, GPS

January 9, 2013

I wrote last week on Israelity about some innovative ways that data from the Israeli traffic and mapping app Waze is being used by researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Waze was in the news again this morning, but for less positive reason. When the intense rains that have hit Israel over the past three days flooded […]

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