Why nice Jewish boys fall in love with Israel
Nice Jewish girl (Natalie Portman) with Nice Jewish Boy
If there is one aspect of a nice Jewish boy’s lifestyle that is drastically altered whenever he sets foot in Israel, it is the dating scene. A nice suburbanite Jewish boy growing up in a South Florida neighborhood or say in New Jersey or New York is always on the lookout for a nice Jewish girl. He lives in his own Jewish world, typically attending Jewish summer camps, Jewish day schools, Jewish basketball leagues, Jewish youth movements and even Jewish parties. Now this Jewish 16 or 17 year old boy might tell you that he is keen on participating in Jewish events because he appreciates Jewish culture or wants to be well-connected with the Jewish community, but whatever this Jewish boy tells you, there are two main reasons why he does what he does. First and foremost: Jewish girls (trust me on this one). Second and just as important, is the Jewish boy’s mother who always prods at the Jewish boy to hangout with other Jewish boys. Whatever this Jewish mother tells you, her main reason for having her Jewish boy hangout with other Jewish boys is basic: so that the Jewish boy meets a nice Jewish girl. So we conclude from this what was rather intuitive, a Jewish boy’s main goal in life during his teenage years is to intermingle with Jewish girls. Of course he thinks about real estate or medicine from time to time (both career options quite successful at snatching Jewish girls) and he allots a major portion of his time to weight-lifting or basketball or soccer, (quite conducive in attracting Jewish girls as well) but most of the time, Jewish boys are thinking of the supreme end which we all know. The nice “catch”, as Jewish mothers so often refer to.
Eventually the nice Jewish boy graduates from High School and makes his way to a large campus university, preferably with a condensed Jewish girl population. When was the last time that you met a nice Jewish boy who studied at NotreDame or Lafayette College or Ohio State or AveMaria College? A nice Jewish boy goes to Harvard or Columbia if he can. If not, he settles for GWU, BU, UMaryland, American, Emory, Rutgers or one of the multitudes of schools where the bait is high. NY city schools are popular as well and so are well-known state schools. In college the Jewish boy is faced with a conundrum. He now has less access and time to all the “Jewish events” which he was so fond of during Middle School and High School. However, the Jewish boy hustles through the same way he did at the JCC Maccabi games. He goes to the Hillel for Shabbat every once in a while even though he detests the awkwardness of walking though campus entirely too well-dressed. He goes to social gatherings for Jews such as Matzah Ball or his college’s “Students for Israel” meetings. Every time he’s asked by his nice non-Jewish friends where he’s going so fresh and so clean he responds, “Oh just some Jewish stuff” (so as not to deal with having to explain what a Matzah Ball really is because he himself is still trying to figure out why they had to come up with such a corny name in titling the event). So the Jewish boy, unless he lucks out and finds that nice Jewish girlfriend, struggles in college. He goes to wild frat parties with his friends often to meet REALLY nice non-Jewish sorority girls which he certainly does not refrain from engaging with. Often times, he engages with them for a substantial amount of time until images of his mother start popping up in his head so frequently. The Jewish boy’s paranoia, from dating a non-Jewish girl, multiplies exponentially with each day until he can’t take it anymore and like a true mench, ends the relationship. Some nights, the nice Jewish boy sits home at night just wondering how life would be if all the women around him were Jewish. He pulls out his financial calculator and calculates how much his returns on Jewish girl dating would increase if the 20% Jewish population in his campus climbed up to 100%. The Jewish boy looks at the final figure in his calculator and becomes bewildered. Immediately, he logs on to Facebook and clicks on the Jews of ____ group page. He clicks on the Birthright link and next thing you know, in December, he and three other Jewish boys from AE? are off to Israel.
The American Jewish boy in an Israel tour trip is like a rookie NBA player who just came into his first million dollar check, he is paralyzed by the enormity of his options which were never in existence before. He hears the row call, “Veronica Feldman, Jessica Adler, Grace Ruthberg, Jesse Greenberg, Naomi Waismann, Erica Saltzberg,…” and so on. He doesn’t need to do anymore background checks. He’s gold, they’re all Jewish. The security girl is Jewish, the waitress is Jewish, the madricha is Jewish, even the McDonald’s vendor is Jewish (unthinkable in the US). No need to mention- all the participants in the trip are JEWISH. Israel to him, now becomes a huge Jewish camp. Whether he roams over to Zolly’s or Laila in downtown Jerusalem, or the myriad of clubs in Tel Aviv, the Jewish boy and his friends are in paradise. And then, after 3 maybe 4 “engagements” in amongst his all-nighters in the hotel rooms with all the vibrant Jewish youth in Israel, in a jam-packed 10-day stay at the amusement park, the Jewish boy reluctantly returns to the United States. It is no surprise after all, that Jewish boys are unanimously in love with Israel. –David Wainer
Away in a Manger
Two intrepid Israeli journalist/bloggers headed for Bethlehem on Christmas eve. Who? Lisa and Rinat, of course. Here’s Lisa’s photos and Rinat’s post.
Sounds like an adventure.
From getting there with east-Jerusalem guys, to the challenge of entering the Nativity church in the middle of the mass just to take some pics of Abu Mazen, the incredible people we found on our way, like cute Ahmad in the picture, and the coming back in a taxi with five people smashed in the middle of the night and having to walk back the road to save a friend stuck in a checkpoint… Not to mention the sahlab in Damascus Gate at 4 am and the fight we saw there.
Lisa hasn’t posted yet, but she told me on the phone that she and Rinat spoke in Hebrew freely, and when people asked where they were from and they said “Tel Aviv,” that the locals were surprised, but pleased. Gives one hope in these rather dark days…
A Poetic New Voice
Here’s a lovely new blogger who came to my attention today: Former London Girl in Tel Aviv. Somehow, she makes even today’s soggy weather sound profound.
Living statues have started becoming a feature of Tel Aviv. Having experienced the magic of Covent Garden for many years, and having spent many a weekend having to push past hordes of wonderstruck, picture snapping tourists cooing with delight, I am singularly unimpressed with them here.
Last night: having parked at the Dizengoff Center (or the “Diz Center” as the loudspeaker advertisements apparently wish us to refer to it now), a living statue. An angel, replete with halo, all white with a white face and silver hair, holds a violin as if just about to serenade us, probably with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, as this is what all buskers play on violins in public places.
Suddenly, a roar of cherubic rage. The angel leaps from his pedestal and runs past us, brandishing his violin as a weapon, in hot pursuit of an ars * teenager. “Come back here, you little shit!”, the angel yells in a distinctly non-seraphic manner, as he aims a kick squarely in the teenager’s tuchis. “I’m going to kick your arse right off!”
Today: Rainstorms. The rain falls in sheets as lightning flashes illuminate my walls. Watching it, you can imagine how Noah felt and as the rain starts to flood in through our balcony door, I wonder if I should start to build an ark. For some reason beknownst only to them, our builders have made the balcony slope upwards towards the drainage pipe. Water does not run upwards. So, it’s flooding our living room, I am trying to block it with towels, plastic bags, tape; every time there is a break in the rain I have to wring out all the towels and sweep the water – inches deep – off the balcony.
Someone once tried to capitalise on the rather silly Kabballah red string fad, by selling bottles of Tel Aviv tapwater to Hollywood stars, as “holy water from the holy land”. And on the internet you can buy bottled air, and bottled earth, from my very own local area. Am I sitting in a lake of gold?
Rooty Tooty Fresh ‘n Cardiac Arrest
Boker tov (good morning), readers! Benji here, first-time Israelity blogger coming at you from Tel Aviv. More introductions later…but first, let’s talk about something we can all relate to.
We all remember our first time. The discomfort. Confusion. Wondering…”is this NORMAL?” Ah…I too remember my first Israeli breakfast. Vegetables??? IN THE MORNING??? American teenagers, cucumbers, and tomatoes don’t mix well, especially around eight in the morning. You won’t catch us eating anything red and green at that hour unless it’s Lucky Charms. Cereal and eggs…mmm.
Sixteen years later, I’ve reached a happy place with cucumbers and tomatoes. But it wasn’t until I talked about it with some of my Israeli friends that I realized that…wait a second, maybe we’re the ones who eat weird stuff in the morning (Americans, that is). Last fall, I found myself in an International House of Pancakes in South Florida with my Israeli co-worker Shirly (that’s Sheer-li, as in “sing to me”, not Shirly, as in Laverne’s roommate. By the way, what was the most ridiculous sub-plot of that show? The fact that the girls actually agreed to hang out with Squiggy, who clearly suffered from major social awkwardness, or that Laverne had her first initial embroidered on every single shirt? Let’s discuss…)
Shirly, on shlichut to the States, was shocked at the, um, CRAP that we Americans choose to eat for breakfast. Well, maybe not WE Americans, but at least the ones who keep places like IHOP and Denny’s in business. Check out IHOP’s staple dish for the last 20+ years, the Rooty Tooty Fresh ‘n Fruity: two eggs, two bacon strips, two pork sausage links, two ham strips, hash browns, two fluffy buttermilk pancakes, and two clogged arteries (no extra charge). Not to state the obvious, but is it any wonder that Americans are grossly overweight? Shirly brought up the vast difference in the breakfasts that Israelis eat. Bye bye, donuts; hello, fruits and cheeses. Labane, white cheese (no other translation for g’veenah l’vana), yogurts, and of course, our good friends Misters Cucumber and Tomato.
Last week, my parents visited from the States. One morning, I had them over for breakfast. Cheeses, eggs, coffee, OJ, pita, and a large bowl of Israeli salad later, they were stuffed. “We don’t usually eat such a hearty meal for breakfast.”
I recently spoke about this culinary divide with my Israeli friend Eitam who used to work with me in the Israeli Consulate in Atlanta. “I never understood the combination of bacon and pancakes! Salty and sweet together? That’s like putting whipped cream on your hamburger!”
Don’t give us any ideas, my healthy friend. Invention is the mother of Cool Whip.
Cross-posted at What War Zone???
Just a Little Around the Sides:
David talks about barbershops:
In the old city of Beer Sheva, not far from my office, there are at least five barbershops within a two block radius of one another that fit most or all the criteria I have listed above. I try not to play favorites, but in truth I end up going to one in particular most of the time for the following reasons:
a) All of the other barbers seem to wander over to this shop when their trade gets slow in order to soak up the wisdom (basically catch up with the latest gossip).
b) The owner of the shop is an older Moroccan man who speaks in the slow, deliberate, richly accented Hebrew of an immigrant, even though he moved to Israel in 1964.
c) He has two fine old barber chairs but I have never seen another barber at work there. This means that while I wait my turn I can stretch out in the other barber chair and have a short snooze. Inevitably the owner will pause from whoever he is working on to toss a couple of hot towels over my face and neck even if I’m just there for a trim.
d) All the barbers in the old city keep to the old habit of closing down for a few hours in the middle of the day and then re-opening from 4:30 until 7:30 or 8:00PM. This allows me to wander over after work and not feel rushed.
e) I find myself drawn back there for a haircut when I feel news-starved, not necessarily when I need a haircut.
He put out a request for more barbershop stories….I have to confess, it all sounds quite laid-back and calm when compared with the high soap opera drama of the beauty parlor (Steel Magnolias and all)
Strategies for Israel’s PR Success
Earlier, I mentioned this “intense discussion” going on in the Something Something blog following up the recent Herziliya media conference. The passionate dialogue continues, and the comment below written by Don Radlauer struck me as so powerful that it deserved to be pulled out of comments and showcased.
The point here – and it apparently needs lots of repeating – is that we’re not playing (or at least we shouldn’t be playing) some kind of “moral superiority ping-pong” with the Palestinians. And I’m not even talking about “Israeli apologies” or anything else “masochistic”. I’m talking about Israel’s best strategy for being a success in the world.
Israel is not Palestine; nor is it Syria, or Iran, or even Jordan. Being thought marginally morally superior to the Palestinians would be no great victory for us! Israel is a small country whose economy depends on trade with the outside world, much of that trade in competition with other, larger countries. (Remember, too, that it’s the Israeli economy that supports the Israeli military; we don’t really have the option of telling the rest of the world to screw off, satisfying though that might be at times.) We don’t want to be thought of as better than Hamas; we want to be thought of as a great place from which to buy computer software, irrigation equipment, and so on, and as a great place for tourists to visit.
In order to understand our goal as hasbarologists, we need to get our minds out of the immediate conflict with Hamas, Hezbollah, and the rest. It’s not enough to “beat” these guys: we’re trying not even to be seen as being in the same league as they are.
I suspect that the terrorists know this, by the way, even if many of us don’t; and they would love nothing better than to reduce us to just another barbaric Middle-Eastern interest group. A lot of what Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and the rest are doing makes sense in this context: they’re not really trying to “win” in the conventional sense, but rather to provoke us into responding in such a way as to torpedo our own international legitimacy, and thus weaken ourselves. They don’t have this problem; they don’t have Intel plants, Microsoft development centers, and all the rest. They don’t care if they don’t sell anything more high-tech than a tomato, because they don’t have anything more high-tech to sell than a tomato. (I may be exaggerating a tiny bit in the last sentence, but only a bit. A more precise version just didn’t “sing”.)
This is why I’m so frustrated with most Israeli hasbara:
- It’s reactive, trying to explain what’s been done rather than influencing the formation of policy.
- It’s largely based on saying things that reassure us and our supporters, rather than communicating effectively with those who are not already on our side. (Although, as I mentioned in my last comment directed to Richard, deepening the commitment of our supporters has value as well.) As such, it may often hurt our side’s standing with the most important audiences more than it helps.
- It’s far to obsessed with “beating” our “enemies”, instead of with succeeding as a modern, thriving, Western-oriented democracy.
Amen, Don….
Ninette’s AudienceTube
You know when you’re at a concert and the performer starts singing their big hit, and decides to periodically stop singing and turns the mike on the audience so they can hear themselves? Personally, I’m not a fan of that, I’m usually thinking, “Hey, I paid to hear YOU sing, not the other way around….”
But it’s obviously fun and an ego trip, or so many performers wouldn’t do it. Anyway, Ninette, the hottest thing in Israeli music at the moment, is touring and decided to take the technique a step further, pulling out her little video camera and taping the audience as they sing her hit back to her. And now they can go online and watch themselves sing….gee, Ninette didn’t have to work very hard, did she?
When You Want a Country Like Any Other, That Includes Whips and Chains…
I’m as open-minded and liberal as the next guy, but this news did make me sigh — after the whole Gay Pride Parade thing, do we really need THIS?
The Israel Trade Fairs and Convention Center will transform Friday into an arena for an unusual event: The greatest fetish party ever held in Israel.
The halls, which are usually crowded with businessmen and politicians, will host this weekend stands offering chains, leather straps and whips. The party will also include fashion shows of models wearing French maid and nurse’s uniforms, and a performance by a ’submissive’ and a ‘dominatrix’.
Emily, the party’s organizer, estimates that the event will be the biggest of its kind ever to be held in the Middle East. “We expect about a thousand people to arrive at the place. I’m worried that in addition, many people who are not related to the community will come out of curiosity, after it was reported that a mass orgy is planned,” she said.
“I would like to stress that sex is not the point of the party, but people who like different kinds of fetish,” she added. Emily clarified that people who are not part of the scene will be denied entrance, saying, “We don’t want people who think we are perverts to come in.”
Good luck sorting the fetishists from the perverts, guys. Sounds like a fun job.
Diplomatic traffic
Former Americans who move to Israel always cite that one of the attractions to living in the Jewish homeland is ‘when you hear news on the radio, it really means something – it affects me personally’.
I’ve always kind of liked that aspect of feeling part of the society I’m living in as well, but it never hit home like it did last night.
I had to drive my daughter into Jerusalem to pick up a math book from a friend because she had to study for a test which was taking place Sunday – on the first day back after Hannuka vacation (why she didn’t have the book home to begin with is another posting and another blog).
After borrowing the text book, we were driving through Rehavia when the 9pm news came on about the meeting taking place between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas at the PM’s residence.
Cool, I told Sarit – they’re finally meeting, explaining to her that dialogue – even with perceived enemies – is better than no communication. She interrupted me, “Doesn’t the prime minister live in Rehavia?”
Before I had a chance to respond, the light bulb went off in my head at the same time the brakelights in the cars ahead of me flashed on… we were in the mother of all traffic jams a block away from the prime minister’s house, caused by police barricades and massive media presence.
A half hour later, we drove past the throng of humanity outside the barricades, waiting for a glimpse of the leaders. And I had learned a valuable lesson of just how relevant the news really is in Israel.
Benji Mops the Floor
Sounds simple enough?
Nope, mastering the art of Israeli mopping, aka “sponja” is an epic adventure for our hapless newcomer, who fancies himself a superhero facing the superior cleaning powers of his roomate.
With “Roommate” in the other room, I must be careful. The slightest misstep will result in her yelling, or as she puts it, talking. Israel has a water shortage and I will do everything in my power to conserve. Do you remember the movie “Misery” with Kathy Bates and James Caan? I’m playing the role of James Caan’s character at the end of the film, carefully plotting my “escape” while being careful not to attract the attention and fury from the scary woman.
She tells me to fill a bucket of water which, from my understanding, will raise the water level in our small apartment by approximately 75 feet. I fill it, plotting my every move as I go. With the roommate only a few feet away in the next room, I act. Small splash here, small splash there, until the floor is covered in just enough water that I can sufficiently clean it, but not so much that it will resemble the giant tidal wave in “The Day After Tomorrow.”
With several strategic and very quick strokes, I clean the floor before the roommate knows what’s happened, dumping half the bucket into the sink as quietly as possible. Kind of like when I was sick as a little kid and poured half the serving of Triaminic Cold Medicine in the sink (except that my mom caught me).
Nice karma I have. “More wah-ter!!!” Did someone tell Picasso “more paint”? Playing along, I toss a little more water on the floor. I’m almost done. I just have to squeegie the water into the 1 millimeter by 1 millimeter hole in the wall, designed to frustrate and boggle the minds of would-be Israelis cleaners. SERIOUSLY, does that little hole automatically cause the floor to tilt the other way, or does it just seem that way? After a few minutes, including when I accidentally launch the black water all over the bottom of the wall, I am done (I love when that happens). The roommate comes in for inspection. I try not to laugh as she looks around. Whew! I passed!
Justice has prevailed. The floor is clean, water is conserved, and I amused myself for about 20 minutes. Did the superhero analogy really make it past the first paragraph of this entry? Not really. Did I buy another 2 weeks of sanity? You betcha.
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