A Loss for the Community

October 26, 2006 - 9:09 AM by Allison

English-speaking journalists and writers in Israel lost a fixture of their community yesterday, as did the Israeli blogosphere, when Robert Rosenberg passed away. This tribute was posted online. If you didn’t know his work, honor his memory by going to his site, Ariga, where you can see both his journalism and his poetry.

A tribute to Robert was posted here.

The Brevity of King Lear

A deeply depressing day – Robert Rosenberg, an old friend, drinking companion, and incomparable raconteur, most unfairly passed away this morning at the age of 55 after a brief and fruitless battle with cancer. He seemed like a man in the flower of youth, bursting with ideas and projects to occupy the prime of his life ahead.
Novelist, journalist, editor, translator and sometimes poet, Robert was born in Boston but was best known in Tel Aviv. In this appropriately raffish, dashing, rebellious city he spent most of his life as a seemingly eternal and indispensible fixture on the cultural, journalistic, literary, intellectual and cafe scene.
In his time Robert was a UPI desk man, reporter and photographer, a Time Magazine reporter, a US News and World Report correspondent. He was the first Israeli writer to be published in Playboy, in 1986, with a story about the Jerusalem bomb squad called Tick, Tick, Tick. In 1991, he authored the New York Times Notable Thriller, Crimes of the City, which grew into the critically acclaimed Avram Cohen Mystery Quartet.
For 12 years, he was a reporter for the old Jerusalem Post (when it was a real newspaper, before the right-wing Canadian crooks destroyed it) with a thrice weekly column called “Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv.” Robert co-founded two business magazines, a venture investment online database for hi-tech startups, and in 1995, one of the first successful websites – or “peace portal,” as he preferred to call it – Ariga (Hebrew for “weave”, as in weaving peace).
It remained the only one-person owned, operated and unaffiliated Israeli website passionately dedicated to coexistence and Middle East peace efforts. One American university blog last month called Robert “the Dean of liberal Israeli-Palestinian peace bloggers.”
Since 2003 Ariga has carried Today’s Situation, a Monday-Friday, 1,000-word analysis of the day’s news from Israel and the Middle East, written by Robert, every morning. That was before he began his real day’s work. And then, after that, there was his night shift on the International Herald Tribune-Haaretz news desk, as a lightning-fast and flawless Hebrew-to-English translator and editor. In between that, and the cafe, and the pub, and his friends, he would file reports for English-language radio stations, including the BBC, Deustche Welle, and occasionally PBS.
Robert had more friends than any of us could ever count, and even his whiny, petulant critics on the extreme right were not immune to his utter charm. He leaves behind his Argentine-born wife Silvia, an artist and interior designer, and their daughter, Amber, who is a video editor in San Francisco.
After Robert died this morning, the heavens opened and thunderstorms roared and flashed across Tel Aviv all day.
And so they damn-well should. The city knows it’s a poorer town tonight.

Neither music / fame nor wealth, / not even poetry itself,
could provide consolation / for life’s brevity,
or the fact that King Lear
is a mere eighty pages long, and comes to an end…
[From "Twigs," by Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali]

Israeli 21c and Israelity offer their condolences to Robert’s wife, Silvia.

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