Political puppy

May 31, 2011 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Israeliness, Life 

Cutest puppy ever?

We got a puppy last week. He’s probably the cutest little thing ever, but then I’m biased. Monty, as we’ve named him, kind of fell into our laps (not hard when you’re talking about a Maltese, tiny even when it’s fully grown). We received an SMS from a friend on Wednesday morning telling us he was available and were we interested. By Wednesday night, he was ours.

Monty (it’s variation of Malt-y for Maltese, get it?) is his very own melting pot of Israeli society. His mother is Israeli, his father an Italian immigrant, he was born in the home of South African Jews living in Jerusalem and, before we received him, he stayed for a short time with an American family living in a settlement.

That’s not the only “political” part of our newfound puppydom. When we received Monty, his owner gave us a pile of newspapers to potty train him on. “Make sure you buy only Haaretz, he said, indicating his disapproval of Israel’s most left-wing newspaper. But he must have goofed because when we got home, the paper we’d received was Makor Rishon, one of Israel’s most right wing rags.

When Monty had gone through all the newspapers we’d taken home, we found a pile of papers next to our recycling bin with a mix of more mainstream tabloids – Yediot Achronot, Maariv and Israel HaYom. It seems that our puppy will be an equal opportunity offender after all.

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Stan Fischer contemplates the IMF

May 31, 2011 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Business, General, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, News 

With the chief IMF (International Monetary Fund) position open following the resignation of former managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn after he was accused of attempting to rape a New York City hotel maid, Bank of Israel Governor Stanley — known as Stan to his buddies — Fischer is considering the job, if he wins the IMF election in mid-June.

The news has been circulating in the Israeli papers, but he said it himself at a Tuesday morning address at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, while addressing the 41st Board of Governors meeting.

“All of the press has been very nice to read compared to what is usually in the Israeli press, but, when I was job hunting at MIT, the professors there taught: ‘Don’t accept a nomination you haven’t been offered yet,’” he said, which occasioned a round of laughter in the packed hall.

He added that it’s still early stages, and not all the nominations are in, and, he “really loves this job [as governor of the Bank of Israel].”

He’s certainly well-liked, and has succeeded in helping Israel weather the worldwide recession well “because it was in good shape beforehand,” he told BGU.

Fischer came into his job in 2005, after serving as chief economist of the World Bank, becoming an Israeli citizen for the job, which was a prerequisite, and learning Hebrew, which was definitely helpful. He’s currently in the second year of his second five-year term as governor, and according to the UK Jewish Chronicle, is under pressure from his wife Rhoda to spend more time with his children and grandchildren, all of whom live in the U.S. Not gonna happen if he gets and takes the IMF job.

Good luck to you, Stan.

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Doing Tel Aviv in ’60 minutes’

May 31, 2011 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Israeliness, Life, Pop Culture, Travel, tv 

Those of us that live in Israel or have visited know that Tel Aviv is just about the coolest city in the world. Now we’re about to get some validation from ’60 Minutes.’

The long-running American investigative TV series is wrapping up a segment to be screened at some point in the future on the virtues of the coastal metropolis.

According to a report on Ynet, A 60 Minutes crew, led by veteran correspondent Bob Simon, spent a month probing the city life, events, beaches and personalities of Tel Aviv, aided by the Tel Aviv Municipality.

Their conclusion? Tel Aviv is an island of sanity within the craziness of the Middle East. It shouldn’t have taken a month to figure that out!

Here’s a video reminder of the joys of summer in Tel Aviv from ISRAEL21c.

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Where to eat?

May 30, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Food, General, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life 

From Jerusalem to Rechovot

Having lived here for just about 16 years, I’ve lost touch with the way one does things in the States. Like searching and finding a good restaurant in a neighborhood other than your own. If someone needs a restaurant recommendation in Jerusalem, even Tel Aviv, I can hold my own. But send me farther afield and unless I’ve actually been somewhere that’s worth recommending in the last year or so, I’d be hard-pressed to offer an idea.

When those moments arrive, I often turn to the various local restaurant websites, such as eluna (for kosher restaurants in Israel), 2eat, or rest.co.il. Eluna is pretty reliable, with its 10% off coupons and reader recommendations — although you do have to read between the lines, because one reader’s idea of a great meal is not necessarily yours. And the others are good in terms of the sheer breadth of information, but what’s up there depends on the restaurant and not all restaurants keep their pages up to date.

So when friends from the States wanted to meet us for dinner, and were staying in Rechovot, I immediately thought of nearby moshav restaurants and Facebooked a friend in Mazkeret Batya for recommendations. She came through, but most of her ideas were too far afield for us, beyond Rechovot and too long of a drive. We needed something meat, not in Tel Aviv, and within a 30-minute drive for each of us. The moshav restaurants I did find looked good — check out Cramim — but weren’t kosher, which didn’t work for us. When they nixed coming to the outskirts of Jerusalem, I sighed and told my husband that we were driving to Rechovot.

Now, where to eat in Rechovot? That wasn’t so hard, after Googling Rechovot, restaurants, kosher. We came up with Oro, a kind of fancy Moroccan restaurant that served good food, tagines and all kinds of ‘cigars’, but to my mind would have been better suited with a simpler, more homey kind of atmosphere. And, in very typical Israeli style, was housed in a mall — it used to be in a gas station, always a good bet for solid eateries, at least in this country.

But we ate our tagines, drank our wine and laughed and joked with each other and the waiter. Our friends were grateful that we drove out to them, and we left, knowing it had been a decent dinner, and worth the effort.

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Sarah Silverman at the park

May 30, 2011 by · 3 Comments
Filed under: News 

The Silverman sisters (Sarah - second from left, sister Susan to her right)

Sarah Silverman is coming to town. Finally. The caustic comedienne – who, for those not yet familiar with her offbeat self-deprecating humor, was thrust onto the national scene with her tongue-in-cheek viral video urging Jews to visit their bubbies and zaidies in Florida and urge them to vote Obama in the last election – has never visited Israel. This despite a very outward Jewish sensibility in her act and TV show.

Silverman will visit Israel next month to take part in the Israeli Presidential Conference. According to Haaretz, she will host a performance of fellow comedian Todd Glass. Silverman is also performing a night of stand up comedy in Tel Aviv on June 25.

But what I want to know is: will Silverman take her nieces and nephews to the park? You see, Silverman’s big sister, Rabbi Susan Silverman, is our neighbor. She and her entrepreneur husband Yosef Abramowitz just moved in a couple of months ago and their kids will clearly want some slide and swing time with Aunt Sarah.

Will Sarah have a retinue of bodyguards as she helps the little tykes throw dirty sand at the local stray cats? Will the paparazzi scare away all the other parents and kids so that Sarah gets her own personal playground? And will Sarah’s up close encounter with Israeli dog poop lead her to develop a whole new set of jokes to taunt us with on stage?

Score me some tickets to the Tel Aviv show – and bring on the insults. Sarah, we love you.

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