Prickly surprise

November 29, 2010 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Food, Travel 

Cactus on the Israel Trail

They looked so ripe and delicious. How were we to know that eating sabra fruit in the wild is an adventure intended only for the foolish – animal, human or otherwise?

We were in the middle of another wonderful family tiyul in Israel. This one started at Mitzpe Missua, a look out point at the top of a high hill slightly southwest of Beit Shemesh on Highway 38. Mitzpe Missua used to have a lovely country restaurant that served awesome fish dishes with a view to kill, all the way to the ocean. The establishment has sadly since closed.

Most of our Friday morning hike was through Park Britannia along a scenic, shaded path that doubles as the Israel Trail, winding its way to the archaeological dig at Tel Azeka. On our return, following a dusty jeep trail, we encountered a veritable forest of sabra – Hebrew for cactus.

Now, when you buy sabra at the supermarket, the fruit has none of the spiky characteristics you’d associate with a typical cactus. The peel feels like a bumpy orange; it’s shaped like a pear and has a sweet, soft interior filled with seeds.

It’s this combination of a hard exterior and a pliable inside that’s given Israelis the nickname of Sabras – gruff when you meet them on the street, but willing to go the extra kilometer when you get to know them personally.

Our oldest son picked up a solitary sabra that had fallen on our side of a barbed wire fest; Jody then held it gently by the ends and pried the sabra open with two fingers, careful not to prick herself. We all took bites and were happy with our impromptu culinary discovery.

Unbeknownst to us, though, both the peel and the edible part of the fruit itself are infested with tiny, nearly microscopic, thorns which immediately lodged themselves in our lips and tongues, causing a not life threatening but nevertheless stinging pain. Imagine your lips have gone to sleep and are in a prolonged state of near wakefulness.

Complaining loudly, as is my wont, 17-year-old Merav took me aside and, like a mother monkey to her babies, began to “groom” me by plucking the thorns out of my lips one at a time. Ten minutes later, satisfied that I was indeed prickle free, we continued down the trail.

(Only later did we learn from Israeli friends that, before eating non supermarket-scrubbed sabras, it’s recommended to roll them around in the dirt to blunt the tang of the tiny thorns.)

A few hours after our return home, Shabbat came in, After candle lighting, I leaned over to kiss Jody (as is also my wont). But not for long – the pain returned, redoubled! Apparently, Merav wasn’t able to get them all.

It wasn’t until the chicken soup that I found relief, proving once again the healing powers of this classic Jewish dish – not only for colds and flu’s, but apparently also the slings and arrows of wild sabra fruit.

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Your CV

November 29, 2010 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Business, education, General, History and Culture, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness 

If you’re looking for a job in Israel, you might want to include a headshot with your CV, aka resume. True, it may hurt your chances of getting the job according to two BGU researchers, but then again, this is the country where you routinely get asked if you’re married, expecting to have more children and other personal questions.

But back to the headshot. If you’re a guy, make sure you’re good looking. That’s the guiding result of BGU’s (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) recent working paper, “Are Good-Looking People More Employable?”, by two BGU economics researchers who have proved that there is a double standard for good looks in men vs. women.

They sent 5,312 resumes to 2,656 advertised job openings in Israel. Each resume was sent twice (for a total of 5,312), once without a picture while the second, almost identical resume contained a picture of either an attractive male/female or a plain-looking male/female. The quest was to see whether the employer emailed or called back the candidate for an interview.

According to Dr. Bradley Ruffle, a researcher and professor in BGU’s Department of Economics, the resumes of attractive males received a 19.9 percent response rate, nearly 50 percent higher than the 13.7 percent response rate for the ‘plain’ males and more than twice the 9.2 percent response rate of no-picture males. So an attractive male needs to send five resumes to obtain one response, while a plain-looking male needs to send 11 for a single response.

Among women, however, contrary to what you’d think, particularly if you watch “Mad Men” on a regular basis, ‘attractive’ women are called back for a position LESS often than ‘plain’ or ‘unattractive’ women as well as women who had no picture on their resume. No-picture females had the highest response rate, 22 percent higher than plain females and 30 percent higher than ‘attractive’ females.

So attractive and plain women are better off skipping the step of adding a photo to a resume since it decreases their chances of a callback by 20 to 30 percent.

Yet the number of attractive women who were subjected to discrimination depended on who was hiring them,. When employment agencies received resume, attractive female candidates were no worse off than plain candidates and only modestly affected compared to no-picture females. But if an organization directly recruited someone, attractive women received half the responses received by plain and no-picture women. The researchers explained that with the large number of women in human resources staffs.

You see, they conducted a post-experiment survey in which they spoke with the person at the company who screens candidates. Most of those staffers were young (23-34) and single (67 percent) and seemingly more jealous of a young, good-looking possible co-worker.

Maybe your best bet is to skip the pic.

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No need to plug these leaks

November 29, 2010 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Blogging, General, Israeliness, News, Politics, Technology 

Israeli officials were quivering in their chairs on Sunday in anticipation of WikiLeak’s release of the trove of diplomatic cables it had obtained. The weekend papers warned that there would be much embarrassment on both the Israeli side over revealed US government assessments of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, and former PMs Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert.

Netanyahu went so far to remind reporters on Sunday, before the documents were published on news websites around the world, that Israel was not expected to be the focus of the documents.

“Israel is not the center of international attention,” Netanyahu said during a visit to the southern border with Egypt. “Normally, there’s a gap between what is said publicly and what is said privately, but in this case, the gap is not large.”

It turned out that he was right. While the documents released Sunday night included some titillating tidbits about other public figures – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was referred to as “Hitler,” French President Nicolas Sarkozy as a “naked emperor,” the German chancellor was called Angela “Teflon” Merkel and Afghan President Hamid Karzai as “driven by paranoia,” Vladimir Putin was referred to as “Alpha Male,” while Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is “afraid, hesitant,” Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s full-time nurse is a “hot blond,” and Berlusconi loves “wild parties,” – the material pertaining to Israel is serious and to the point.

• Maj.-Gen. Amos Yadlin, who stepped down as head of the IDF’s Military Intelligence last week, said in a meeting in 2009 with US Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Florida) that Israel was not in a position to underestimate Iran and be surprised like the United States was on 9/11.

• Mossad director Meir Dagan told Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns in 2007 that Israel and the United States need to do more to create regime change in Iran.

• Dagan also told Frances Fragos Townsend, assistant to the US president for homeland security and counterterrorism, in the summer of 2007 that IDF operations against Hamas in the West Bank were preventing the terrorist group from taking over the Fatah-controlled territory, according to a cable from the US Embassy in Tel Aviv to the State Department.

• According to another cable sent from the embassy in Tel Aviv, Barak revealed to a congressional delegation in 2009 that Israel tried to coordinate Operation Cast Lead with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

According to an analysis by The Jerusalem Post’s Yaakov Katz, “while there were some comments made by Mossad director Meir Dagan regarding leaders in the Middle East – the emir of Qatar is “annoying,” and the king of Morocco is not interested in governing – that are slightly embarrassing, Israeli politicians were spared the more embarrassing analyses of their personalities that French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi received.”

Not even a mention of Bibi’s comb over. And Katz also surmised that from an Israeli perspective, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the WikiLeaks documents may have helped Israel.

By presenting the Arab leaders as more extreme in their remarks than Israeli leaders, the cables show the dissonance in the region and the danger involved in allowing Iran to continue with its nuclear program.

So, our initial pre-embarassment over the release of the classified documents has turned into satisfaction. At least until the more damning ones come out.

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Nostalgia Sunday – British Pathe and the Partition Plan

November 28, 2010 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, Movies, News, Nostalgia Sunday, Politics, War 

It was 63 years ago minus one day, on November 29th 1947, that the UN voted for the partition of Palestine and the creation of an independent Jewish state.

The archives of news company British Pathe are an amazing way to travel back in time, and see how the news was reported around the world. Here is their report about the United Nations session on Palestine.

UN SESSION ON PALESTINE

British Pathe’s archive include films that are a rare glimpse into what life was like in 1947. For example, this footage documenting life in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv when martial law was declared following the bombing of a British officers’ club.

MARTIAL LAW IN TEL AVIV & JERUSALEM

(PALESTINE TODAY)

Raw footage from the Exodus when it docked in Haifa.

HAIFA REFUGEES SHIP

Of course, as important as these issues were — and are — to us, plenty of other things happened during that year. To put things in context, here’s a roundup of all the headlines from 1947.

LOOKING BACK – ON 1947

There’s plenty more to view and review at the British Pathe online archives.

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Encountering Jerusalem’s finest

November 28, 2010 by · 2 Comments
Filed under: A New Reality, Crime, General, Israeliness, Life 

Most Israelis go through life without ever seeing the inside of a police station, which is probably a good thing. It’s not a very nice place – cold, impersonal, miserable people generally milling about, and surly cops.

I know this because I did get to see the inside of a Jerusalem police station last week – not because of anything I did, but because my teenage son had bear witness in a case.

It was a combination of circumstances that led to police involvement in the case. Among them was group of macho seniors playing ‘heavy’ with my son, a junior, in order to find out who painted some derogatory graffiti about them on a school wall. Another was a zero tolerance policy toward violence implemented by the school principal.

The result was, instead of an in-house investigation and punishment, a call to the local police and the opening of a ‘tik’. That meant a call home from the shaken boy to tell his parents to come get him and bring him to the police station.

First of all, nobody tells you where to go, so after 20 minutes of trying to find the right wing of the massive structure in Jerusalem’s Talpiot neighborhood, we finally located the ‘youth wing.’ There were no painting of butterflies on the walls, believe me – just a delipidated corridor facing a reinforced locked door.

Every once in a while, some scruffy adult individual or another would emerge – evidently a police man in plain clothes – leading an also scruffy younger person. Whenever I told one of them why we had been sent there, they just said, ‘stay here, someone will come get you.’

Within an hour, that did happen, and we were led inside the reinforced door into another neglected corridor with offices. After another long wait, we were ushered into one of them, where an officer, also in civilian dress, and with the personality of… a cop, sat us down and demanded to get a play by play of my son’s ordeal. He wanted names, places, who did what, who said what, and when my son faltered, he yelled at him that his time was being wasted.

Reminding him to differentiate between the victim and the perpetrator, I gently steered the investigation back toward civil territory, as the officer gamely typed the testimony into the computer. At the end of a the two-hour stay, he simply said, ‘you can go now.’

We weren’t even sure why we had been summoned. We hadn’t called the police in, and my son was now scared that there would be physical retribution for his testimony from the senior bullies. My wifw said later that the principal had done the right thing by bringing the police into the matter, because if she hadn’t, and it the situation had escalated into one of real violence, everyone would have said, ‘why didn’t she call the police?’

On the other hand, some parents were outraged that what they called a high school prank gone bad might now scar the records of these boys who, within a year, will be joining the IDF.

I didn’t really care either way, I was just happy to walk out of that police station, and like the vast majority of Israelis, return that aspect of our society back to the far reaches of my mind.

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