The Fattest Holiday of Them All? Purim, Pesach, Shavuot or Hanukah?

February 28, 2013

Purim may now be behind us, but some of the sweets still remain. The holiday, which is officially about retelling the story of how the Jews were almost annihilated in ancient Persia, is perhaps best remembered going forward by one’s increased belly size after partaking of one too many hamentaschen – the classic triangular-shaped Purim cookie Ah, […]

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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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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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Israeli Spotting at the Super Bowl

February 4, 2013

Yesterday was Super Bowl Sunday and, as always, the commercials were often as unforgettable as some of the bolder plays on the field. For Israelis, the spot to watch was GoDaddy’s promotion of its web hosting service featuring Israeli supermodel Bar Refaeli. The video is all over the Internet and has racked up a stunning […]

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Jerusalem Youth Chorus Records with Israeli Pop Superstar David Broza

January 31, 2013

I’m not sure what who was more excited – our 15-year-old-son Aviv who was about to meet one of Israel’s biggest pop stars, or his parents, given that Aviv had actually never heard of said star. But we had – my wife Jody’s mom even has a picture of her with David Broza from a concert he […]

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Election Day “Live Blog”

January 22, 2013

(I decided to “live blog” election day from the Blum family perspective. The first part appeared on the Israelity website only. Here’s part two.) I don’t know if it was the fresh air or the physical exertion of our two-hour  hike earlier in the day (see the previous post), but we did it. We all made up our […]

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Religious “Hot or Not”

January 14, 2013

When our daughter was a junior in a religious high school in Jerusalem, the institution instituted a modesty check. One of the teachers was stationed at the front gate to the school and gave the girls a thorough look up and down before pronouncing whether they were dressed modestly enough to enter. Girls were sometimes […]

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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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First Person Electric

January 7, 2013

When I was growing up in the 1960s, like many of my pseudo-hippie peers, I had a typically utopian vision of how the future would play out. There would be world peace, of course. We’d be able to instantaneously zip from one location to another by stepping into street corner teleportation devices that would take […]

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Breaking “Distance”

December 31, 2012

Our daughter Merav completed an advanced communications course in the army last week that will allow her to move up in her IDF position. The one-month long program was held at a “closed” base (that’s one where you sleep there, do guard duty, and can’t leave unless given special permission) and was similar in style […]

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