Artists decide where it’s kosher to perform

Call it the theater of the absurd, and Israel is the main stage. It started at the end of August when a group of Israeli actors, directors and playwrights signed a public document announcing that they’ll refuse to participate in plans by the country’s national theater, the Habima, and other leading theaters like the Cameri [...]

Turning 50

“Today I become a man.” That’s a declaration more commonly associated with a bar mitzvah boy but, as I turn 50 tomorrow, I feel I am passing a milestone even more auspicious. For what does one really know about being a grownup at a mere 13? Perhaps, once upon a time, that was closer to [...]

Lotto flash mob

Everybody’s looking for attention, including Mifal Hapayis, Israel’s legal national lottery. This time they used the now-common flash mob to draw crowds at a Rishon Lezion beach just a few days ago. Using a medley of Abba songs, beach balls — and, they cheated a little — professional dancers, the results were fun, although a [...]

Osama’s house?

It might be just a crafty pitch to draw in the tourists, but an East Jerusalem attorney is claiming that a house in the city’s Shuafat neighborhood was once owned by the Bin-Laden family. Not only that, but Osama himself stayed there “on several occasions in the 1960s,” says the property’s current owner, Advocate Mu’in [...]

Nostalgia Sunday – Shana Tova postcards

This year, the Israel Postal Company has launched a campaign urging people to send New Year greetings by mail. “Bring back the excitement,” exhorts the leaflet stuffed in our mailbox (inserted by hand and not by mail, I should note). “Facebook, MMS, SMS – they’re not personal. It’s no longer exciting. Now more than ever [...]

A wine glass half full or half empty?

The launching of peace talks between Israel in the Palestinians last week in Washington are just the beginning of a long haul, which if proved successful, will undoubtedly mean that many Israelis living in certain settlements in the West Bank will have to be uprooted. The AFP news agency has found one settler, Yoram Cohen, [...]

Stop the clocks

The big topic at the playground this afternoon was the changing of the clocks next Saturday night, an annual occurrence that is a subject of outrage for many in Israel, particularly those with small children. It’s timed to happen before Rosh Hashanah, so that the Yom Kippur fast will end at 6 rather than 7, [...]

Foto Friday – Drora Spitz

Photographer Drora Spitz is one of Israel’s leading lights in the field of artistic and architectural photography. Since 1972, her art works have been presented at museums and galleries in Israel, Germany, Spain, the US and the UK. Between 1978-2004, Spitz was director of the Department of Photography at the Faculty of Architecture, Urban Planning [...]

Riding the night train

I had the enlightening experience last night of riding the ‘kavei laila’ (night lines) of the Egged bus system. In most Israeli cities, bus service stops at around 12:30 am every night. But in recent years, Egged, the national bus company, has initiated late night service on Thursday and Saturday nights (not on Friday, of [...]

Poland and getting away from technology

I wrote in an earlier post about how human beings aren’t built to truly multitask – an action we increasingly rely on to parse all the data coming at us from the web or our mobile devices. New research is trying to figure out not only what happens psychologically when we try to do two [...]