The Most Memorable Seder

April 10, 2012

Chabad Kathmandu As an early icebreaker just before we began to read from the Passover Haggadah Friday night, my wife Jody asked the assembled family and guests to name their most memorable Seder. For me, there was no question. Exactly one year ago, our family was sitting in a luxurious ballroom at the Yak and […]

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Orange You Glad I Didn’t Say Pelephone?

April 3, 2012

Orange has a nifty iPhone app that shows you exactly where they’re ripping you off Last week I wrote about my new iPhone 4S on the Israelity blog. I took a rather crafty approach in obtaining the phone. The local cell phone operators – Orange, Pelephone and Cellcom being the largest – are more than happy to […]

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REM returns to Israel in the form of Robyn Hitchcock

March 29, 2012

Peter Buck and Robyn Hitchcock on the left In 1995, I got fired from a job. It was the first job I’d had in Israel and the first time I’d ever been fired from anything. Suffice it to say I was pretty despondent on that day. REM saved me. The night after I was laid […]

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A Celebration of Young Ethiopian Musicians

March 21, 2012

Avraham Terifa Avraham Terifa is in the eighth grade but he looks like he’s only nine-years-old. A tiny dynamo of a boy, he stands before an audience of several hundred at Jerusalem’s Mishkenot She’ananim concert hall and begins to play his violin. All around the room you can hear jaws start to drop as the […]

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Stranded in the Judean Desert

March 15, 2012

Admiring the view…before the sun went down I got the SMS around 3:00 PM on Friday. “Abba, I’m OK. But we’re kind of stuck on top of a mountain.” It was our 14-year-old son Aviv who was out with five students from his school, plus one of his teachers, on a “preparation hike.” The idea […]

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Canadian Cop

March 6, 2012

Toronto’s Pearson Airport 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. […]

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Snow-tubing!

March 1, 2012

Snow-tubing in Canada…is Israel next? 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 […]

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Gur Hasidim and Sex: Haaretz Spices it Up

February 16, 2012

The “Beis Yisroel” with his Hasidim They say that nothing sells newspapers like sex and Haaretz had a doozy last week: the second part in an expose (OK, just a spicy research study) on the sex lives of a particular group of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel – the Gur Hasidim. The article was the talk […]

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No more lying for “religious” girls

February 10, 2012

We know a girl named Liat who lied to get out of doing army service. Despite living a secular lifestyle, she told the army she was religious, which gave her an automatic exemption. She then made matters even worse: instead of signing up for national service, which most non-haredi religious girls do, she instead fled […]

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Castration Clinic

February 1, 2012

Monty: before At first glance, it looks like any other veterinarian’s office. Pictures of dogs and cats on the walls, efficient and busy animal doctors flitting around in blue cotton smocks. But the pets coming this morning to the Jerusalem Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (JSPCA) in Jerusalem’s Talpiot Industrial Zone all […]

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