Israel

Cliff’s Air Conditioner, Climate Change, and the Jewish People

January 19, 2010

My friend Cliff called this week to say he was getting rid of an old air conditioning unit and would I want to take it off his hands…at no charge? Cliff knew that I had spent much of the summer sweltering in my top floor home office. I have an air conditioner already but, at […]

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Srugim Rocker Erez Lev Ari in Concert

January 10, 2010

The popular TV series “Srugim” is returning to the airwaves tonight after a year and a half hiatus. Season Two of the show, about a group of young religious singles living in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Katamon (known affectionately as “The Swamp”), has been anxiously awaited by its fans (who have established several active Facebook […]

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Room 124

January 7, 2010

Israeli bureaucratic institutions have been slowly but surely modernizing over recent years. You can get in and out of the infamous Interior Ministry in less than a day…and you don’t have to line up at 8:00 AM just to shove your way in through the heavily guarded front door. The health funds now have computerized […]

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Prediction Tradition

January 4, 2010

Growing up, our family had an annual tradition on New Year’s Day. My father, my brother and I would gather around the family room table and put down in writing our predictions for the upcoming year. We would then open the envelope that had been sealed “upon pain of death” from the previous year. Our […]

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Branding Israel

January 26, 2007

During the 2003 run up to the war in Iraq, France found itself bitterly opposed to U.S. plans, earning it derision from conservatives who went so far as to insist that U.S. government cafeterias rename certain “French” foods as freedom fries and freedom toast. But at no time did France lose its image of also […]

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Iran as Psychotherapy

January 4, 2007

I was interviewed this week by Michele Chabin, a reporter from the New York Jewish Week, and asked to give an “average Israeli’s” opinion on the threat from Iran. How did it make us feel? Were we afraid? Did we have thoughts of leaving? Was the world community’s response comforting or confounding? The interview came […]

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Between A Rock and a Hard Case

November 30, 2006

Shabbat afternoon in the park with my friend Eliot from out of town, eight-year-old Aviv and Eliot’s two little boys, Liav and Avidan, both of them under the age of 10, playing happily, riding scooters around a mostly empty basketball court while their parents chatted about whatever it is adults chat about. The weather was […]

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Thanksgiving in Israel

November 23, 2006

Every year, just about this time of the month, I get a flurry of emails from friends and colleagues all with pretty much the same message. It goes something like this: “Happy Thanksgiving, that is if you celebrate it over there…er, do you?” So, what do immigrants from the U.S. to Israel do on the […]

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A Fallible Nation

November 16, 2006

Nicholas Goldberg, editor of the Los Angeles Times’ op-ed section, published an article in that paper portraying Israel as a nation exhausted and suffering from a deep malaise. The summer’s failed war in Lebanon, the inability of the Israel Defense Forces to stop the Kassam barrage coming from the Gaza Strip, and ongoing corruption and […]

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