Christmas Carols and Coexistence in Jerusalem

December 26, 2012

I can’t remember the last time I heard Christmas Carols sung live – not in the 18 years that I’ve lived in Israel and before that probably only on TV and radio for years. But this Christmas Eve, we attended the YMCA’s annual Christmas Carols Concert. The official reason: our 14-year-old son, Aviv, was performing […]

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On Journalists Who Write Fiction

December 24, 2012

A who’s who of Anglo Jerusalem journalists and other well-wishers came out on a blustery winter night last week to cheer on one of their own. Ilene Prusher, a former international foreign correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor and more recently working locally at The Jerusalem Report, The Jerusalem Post and Haaretz, has just published her […]

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New Israeli-Made Documentary Takes Us to the “Fringes” of Jewish life

December 19, 2012

The most remarkable thing about Paula Weiman-Kelman’s new documentary, “Fringes,” is how unremarkable it is. I don’t mean that in a bad way. Rather, the Jerusalem-based filmmaker’s latest movie, which opened to a sold-out theater at the Jerusalem Cinemateque’s Jewish Film Festival last week, presents the lives of three communities on the “fringes” of Jewish […]

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Bezeq’s Hanukah Miracle

December 16, 2012

This isn’t the story I thought I was going to write. In that first draft, Bezeq, Israel’s main telecommunications provider, was an evil temptress, bait and switching unsuspecting customers with promises of super fast Internet only to be told that they were among the unlucky who’d be stuck with old technology for the rest of […]

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Comedy for Koby Mea Culpa

December 7, 2012

My post earlier this week about the Comedy for Koby show that recently toured Israel set off a storm of criticism. I was pilloried by readers who were shocked by my denunciation of two of the original comics on the program who backed out when Operation Pillar of Defense began. “I don’t expect people to risk their […]

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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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Mallard and Missiles

November 22, 2012

Just like in the movie with Steve Carell and Tina Fey, my wife Jody and I try to go out for a “date night” every week or so. Groupon and its many Israeli clones have been a godsend for saving money while eating hearty. So, when Jody saw a half price coupon for Eucalyptus, one […]

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Politics and Electric Cars

November 21, 2012

Does electric car company Better Place discriminate against driving across the Green Line? Now, certainly, Better Place will be happy to sell you a shiny new 100% gasoline-free Renault Fluence, no matter where you live. But in our brief time driving our own Better Place car, OSCAR – the company’s personable if flaky GPS – […]

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Working through War

November 20, 2012

Are we at war? Because, if so, then I have a valid excuse to miss my deadlines. If not, if this is still an “operation,” then I’m just a procrastinator with a short attention span. Such are the realities of being a news junky, a passionate defender of Israel, a father of two children in […]

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First Siren

November 19, 2012

When I was growing up in California, I had a terrible fear of being caught in the shower when an earthquake hit. What would I do, stressed my pre-teen self; would I run out into the street stark naked in order to save myself? How would I live down the embarrassment? Or would I risk […]

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