Foto Friday – Guy Raivitz’s Back Yard
Guy Raivitz is an Israeli freelance photojournalist who’s worked all around the local and foreign media. He also does pro bono work for social conscience organizations, including the UNICEF Angola mine awareness project, and Integrated Rural Development and Nature Conservation in Namibia. He’s trained his sharp lens on Israel as well – he was a staff photographer for “Haaretz”, among other publications – and produced a powerful portraiture series of people in soup kitchens.
Today’s Foto Friday presents four works from Guy’s latest project – a soon-to-be published book documenting Israeli reality called “Back Yard“. Each is a stand-alone work, but there is also a logic to the way he’s set them up on his website, in pairs.
Maybe its because I commuted on that freeway for six and a half years – and sat trapped in so many traffic jams while it was being built – but I found this combination strangely moving.
Guy has captured the craziness that engulfs the country on Yom Ha’atzmaut, when we tread a fine line between revelry and violence. The next day, the city lies quiet, covered by a layer of soot and shaving cream.
Israel Picks National Bird, The Hoopoe
With bated breath, Israelis waited for Shimon Peres’ announcement yesterday: Israel’s National Bird will be the … (drum roll) …
The hoopoe!
Known as “Duchifat” (doo-khi-faht) in Hebrew, we had our first exposure to the hoopoe through Salman Rushdie’s novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, where Haroun the protagonist gets a mechanical hoopoe bird to fly him to the Land of Gup. A good read.
If you’ve even been to Israel you can see these delightful-looking birds, with a majestic headpiece, flying through Israel which is a migratory bottleneck for millions of birds heading to Europe or back to Africa.
According to the Haaretz newspaper, the hoopoe garnered 35 percent of the popular vote, barely edging out the goldfinch and the warbler. However, it won the unanimous support of a public committee, and since the national bird committee’s vote was worth one-quarter of the total vote, that gave the hoopoe a decisive victory.
In the birdwatching community, reactions to the results were mixed. Alon said he had supported the goldfinch at the beginning of the process. “The finch’s numbers are declining and it is being hunted,” he explained.
Dr Uzi Paz, a veteran birder and former head of the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, supported the warbler: “That is a bird I researched, so I was rooting for it.”
The Bible mentions the hoopoe as a non-kosher bird, and the Quran tells a tale of King Solomon who spoke to animals and told the hoopoe of his visit to the Queen of Sheba’s land.
James, a Green Prophet, has been following the vote for some time, writing a series of posts about the vote here, here, here and here; and also over on Jewcy where he talks about an unusual bird that sings in his garden. Worth a read.
Our boyfriend asked us, “Why the hoopoe? Israel should have picked the dove.” Cute. We hadn’t even thought of that possibility. What do you think? Was the hoopoe the right choice for Israel?
Israeli Women Shine at Annual Biomed Conference in Tel Aviv (Here’s Two of Them)
We’re always excited every time we meet women who are running companies, and it seems in Israel there are a lot of women focused in the biotech sector.
Meet NeuroQuest, a young diagnostics company, run by four ladies. We met two of them the other day at Israel’s world-famous Biomed conference in Tel Aviv (above).
Watch the video Israelity made, click here.
Israel brings relief to cyclone-struck Burma
Hat’s off to IsraAID!
A third Israeli relief team headed out from Israel yesterday to Burma (Myanmar) to try to help the people affected by Cyclone Nagris.
The first team flew out four days after the cyclone, when the true devastation was only just emerging. Two teams distributed over 10 tons of relief items in the crucially affected areas, and others provided training to over 500 local medical staff.
Now they’ve put together a short slideshow showing what they did there. Have a look – makes you want to book a plane out there and start helping.
Your Usual Unusual Event
I went to a typical Israeli wedding the other night. What does that mean in a country comprised of immigrants from over 100 countries? Is there such a thing as a typical Israeli wedding?
There are the denominators common to most weddings in the western world: a white gown for the bride, a gathering of family and friends, dinner and dancing afterwards. Then there are characteristics common to Jewish weddings: a rabbi, a chuppah, a ketubah, the breaking of a glass in memory of the Second Temple that was destroyed.
And then there are the things that typify your classic secular wedding in 21st century Israel: a fantasy countryside setting built on land where only recently chicken coops stood, nouvelle cuisine buffet ranging from Chinois to Juif, and an insane selection of music by the DJ to open the proceedings.
“Israelis are crazy. They are absolutely crazy,” stated my bemused significant other. At least that’s what I think he said, given the din that preceded the bride and groom’s march down the aisle – a sound bite from an old Muppets show.
We then tried to top one another with “whose been to the tackier event” stories – the bris I went to in Bat Yam where the dessert table was lowered down from the ceiling, the wedding we’d heard about where the bridesmaids and groomsmen were clad only in bathing suits, the fireworks displays that occur on a nightly basis over the wedding halls of Rishon Lezion, and of course, the famous bride and groom helicopter airlifts. Crazy.
And yet…
I was invited to this wedding, even though I’m barely related to the groom on my father’s side, because his family is small – most relatives had perished in the Holocaust. While standing and watching the ceremony, I ran into cousins from my mother’s side and it turned out they were related to the bride, as was the rabbi who performed the ceremony. Her family comes from Saloniki, a Greek community that was also decimated in WWII. His father was a general in the Israeli army. Her father ran a spice business. There were people there of all ages, first, second and third generation Israelis. In the midst of the dancing, a bouzouki player came out, line dancing began, and plates were smashed for good luck.
Typical? There is nothing typical about any wedding here.
New York Artist Sends Free Boxes of Peace to Israel
(Israelity blogger Karin holding her free box of “green” peace)
Everyone around this area of the world seems to be talking about peace a whole lot, with not much being done.
What if peace were free and could come in the mail if you just placed your order?
That’s just what happened when we heard about Franck de las Mercedes, a New York based artist who as an expression of his art and desire for peace, sends free peace boxes to anyone around the world who asks for one.
Labeled FRAGILE, Contains: Peace, your postal carrier might look at you strangely when you have the box delivered. The weightless, odorless and tasteless contents inside don’t look like much, but the gift sure can get your friends and family thinking.
(An up-close look at our “green” peace box sent to Jerusalem)
Our peace box pictured above, was sent during the month of April to honor Earth Day. That’s why it’s a “green” peace box. Order yours today! Or as Ziva from Designist Dream says, Give Peace a Stamp!
Israel’s 60th & the Mets
Wanna celebrate Israel’s 60th Birthday AND get your baseball fix?
JCRC, the Mets and Shea Stadium are hosting a special “Israel night” May 29 – pre-game Israeli music and dancing, Glatt Kosher food, commemorative pins.
Play ball.
Airless Jerusalem apartment? Sold for $1.05m.
Mmm. What would I do if I had $1 million to spend?
Buy an airless apartment in Jerusalem of course…
Things are getting so ludicrous in the real estate market here that a small 75-square meter apartment in Kfar David, which overlooks the Old City, sold for $1.05 million recently, even though the windows only face in one direction. What a bargain!
The purchaser was a Jewish European businessman who paid about $14,000 per square meter. Other apartments in the complex (those with more than one set of windows) sell for up to $25,000 per square meter.
Real estate agents were complaining that the drop in the dollar rate against the shekel was impacting sales.
Not too badly it seems.
Ah, to be a millionaire. The treasures it buys.
Farmer creates crop graffiti for Israel’s 60th
We all have our own unique ways of celebrating Israel’s 60th anniversary. At our house we hung up an Israeli flag that we got free inside a newspaper.
Peter Viner went a little further, however.
The farmer, from Beit Sh’ean, decided to inscribe a huge message “Israel at 60″ on a 17-acre piece of his land, using five different types of grain.
Apparently, no-one’s ever done this kind of stuff before. Well, apart from aliens who have been decorating our fields with rather attractive mathematical patterns for some years now.
Art experts are calling this new form of art, Crop Graffiti.
Actually I just made that up.
Anyway, this isn’t Peter’s first foray into the world of art. He’s an old hand at turning his fields into canvases and has done about 25 of these works, starting in 1994 after the peace treaty with Jordan. Then he wrote the word ‘peace’ in Hebrew, English and Arabic.
For Peter this is all philosophical stuff. “I am a man of the land and deeply connected to this country. The field is my canvas, and my tools are the paintbrush,” he told the guys at Ynet.
You can see Peter’s sign for the next few months, until it’s harvest time no doubt.
Wonder what he’s planning to do if Israel signs a peace treaty with Syria?
Ehh, no-one believes that’s going to happen anytime soon.
Pulver Dating Service
Filed under: Blogging, Business, Pop Culture, Profiles, Technology
If you know about Jeff Pulver then you know he’s a futuristic technology sort of guru guy who predicts where we’re headed and creates the vessel for getting there.
Take VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol). That’s Jeff.
He’s the co-founder of Vonage and he pushed FCC legislature a few years ago with “The Pulver Order”.
He’s also the globe-trotting guy behind uber successful “Social Networking Breakfasts”.
Last week he held one such breakfast in Tel Aviv. And we @ Israelity (that would be moi-self) were in attendance.
And in talking to Mr. Pulver, found out. . .
That the impetus behind his social networking breakfasts was Harvey Weinstein. While attending a NYC benefit with the famous mega-producer, Pulver was at a loss for ice-breaking words. When his attempt at striking up a conversation with Weinstein fell flat – “So you like poker?” he posed, referring to Weinstein’s Miramax-backed film Rounders.
Nope came Weinstein’s stilted reply – Pulver pondered: How do business people do this? How do they break the ice with each other on a routine basis?
Thus was born his “tagline” social breakfast networking event concept. You’ll have to read about them to know how it works. But he took a simple idea from the Internet world of taglines and translated it back to face-to-face interaction. And it works. Well.
Next up in Pulver’s idea forum? Dating events following the same theme.
Only problem is how to appropriately “stick” the sticky notes.
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