TLV FW

November 22, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: General 

There’s already been mention of Tel Aviv Fashion Week, or TLV FW, in David’s recent post, but here’s a little more from behind-the-scenes at today’s shows.

Black and vests...

The event, which was a big deal because there hasn’t been a Tel Aviv fashion week of sorts in about 30 years, was fab-o because it was just one of those scenes, an Israeli bubble situation of designers, models, celebrities and journalists, and the vibe was extremely positive and fun. Held at Hatachana, the Station Compound for the trains that once ran through here, the fashion folk wandered around and about the tents set up for the event, many wearing black — but of course — even the Israelis, who are usually more known for their love of color. (Truth to tell, I wore black as well since it’s just easier when you don’t want to compete with those around you.)

Designer Dorit Bar Or

Many heels were high, bags were big. Lots of fur vests, jeans were completely acceptable, as this was an Israeli crowd, short tunics over leggings, matte red lipstick on the myriad of ‘hafuch’ coffee cups littered around. The Italian and French fashion writers were the best-dressed, not surprisingly, while the Brits and Americans were fine but more uneven in overall look. But for Ophir Lev, the Israeli fashion entrepreneur who is primarily responsible for making this three-day fashion week happen, the success is that all those people were there, some 600 in total, writing about the designers, surroundings and events of the week.

Designs from Yaniv Persy

He told me that he made it happen by turning to the Jews he knows in each country — Italy, France, England, U.S. — and making contact with their contacts. He isn’t contact-less himself, having worked in Milan as a model and then in Turkey as part of a fashion production business. Now that he got designer Roberto Cavalli to come to Israel, he’s hoping to get Prada, Dolce Gabbana, Perry Ellis, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, and pretty much any other major designer out there who has a connection of some sort – or not — to the Jewish and Israeli community.

For now, he’s succeeded. The Israeli designers who showed their collections at the event were pleased with the turnout, but are unsure of what it will lead to, if anything. They’re accustomed to producing primarily for this market, and being satisfied with limited exposure to other markets.

Nevertheless, this kind of exposure is a good thing, and no one will ever say no to almost-free PR. And hey, ‘siba lemesiba.’ (A reason for a party.)

Tags: , , ,

Exposing Tel Aviv Fashion Week

November 22, 2011 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Art, Business, design, General, Israeliness, Life, Pop Culture, Travel 

Designs by Shenkar students will be among those on display at the Israel Fashion Week.

I just returned from a long weekend in Milan, but the real fashion sense seems to be in Tel Aviv.

Israel Fashion Week is taking place, featuring 18 shows by foreign and local designers. Among the local designers presenting their summer 2012 collections will be Sasson Kedem, Mira Zwillinger, Dorin Frankfurt, Galit Levy, Gideon Oberson, Shai Shalom, and Alon Livne, along with fashion works by students from the Shenkar fashion school.

The guest of honor is Italian designer, Roberto Cavalli, who will display his summer 2012 collection, but the focus will be on Israeli design, which is slowly but surely taking its place behind the marquee Paris, New York and Milan magnets.

To make sure that Tel Aviv is given the proper media exposure, the Tourism and Foreign Ministries are hosting over leading fashion and lifestyle journalists from elite magazines around the world.

“Fashion aficionados tend to follow new and leading trends, and are attracted to cultural, historical and entertainment options which are all part of Israel’s unique tourism product,” Tourism Minister Stas Misezhnikov said in a statement released this week.

At the gala opening Sunday night at the Old Jaffa Railway station, a reception hosted by Italian Ambassador Luigi Mattiolo and attended by Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai, an agreement was signed between Ofir Lev, the deputy CEO of the Israel Fashion and Textile Association, and Mario Boselli, president of the Italian Fashion Chamber chamber, which basically adds Tel Aviv to the international fashion calendar.

It appears that from now on, there won’t be any excuse for Israelis to continue dressing down, like I do. It may be time to move to Italy…

Tags:

Rabbi condemns Steve Jobs as consumerist Moses

November 21, 2011 by · 2 Comments
Filed under: Business, Religion, Technology 

Moses (er...Steve Jobs) introducing the iPad

Late Apple founder Steve Jobs has often been likened to a hi-tech prophet, sensing consumer need before the public had any idea that they desperately desired a portable music player or a tablet computer. Now, Britain’s Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks has accused Jobs of playing Moses for the modern day, “coming down the mountain with two tablets, iPad 1 and iPad 2,” and laying down the foundations for a “consumer society.”

The result, Sacks says, is not positive this time. “We have a culture of iPod, iPhone, iTunes. It’s all i, i, i, nowadays. (But) when you’re an individualist, egocentric culture and you only care about ‘i’, you don’t do terribly well.”

Now, Israel is certainly as i-Crazy as anywhere else in the world. I may be even more so. As a Mac-addict since nearly the beginning (I bought my first boxy Mac SE in 1998) and as part of a family that owns two iPhones, an iPod Touch, three iPods in various states of disrepair, and a growing brood of Macintosh computers (we only have one working Windows machine left), I don’t take particularly kindly to Sachs telling me my buying practices constitute values that “aren’t ones you can live by for terribly long,” and that western society has built “the most efficient mechanism ever devised for the creation and distribution of unhappiness.”

Thanks, Jonathan, for bumming out my day, not to mention disrespecting the genius of Steve Jobs who undoubtedly had many more similarly debased tricks up his digital sleeve before his painfully premature passing.

Now to be fair, Sachs isn’t entirely off base. I fully agree that an overly consumer-focused society goes too far into making one pine away for what you don’t have, rather than being grateful for what you do. This is not a trivial problem by any means, and it’s certainly been an important subtext to both the recent Occupy Wall Street protests in the U.S. and our own social justice demonstrations this summer.

And Sachs solution – “the world of faith, which the Jews call the world of Shabbat, where you can’t shop and you can’t spend and so you spend your time with things that matter, with family” – is right on, whether you’re religious or not. In our house, when the Sabbath comes, we urge our family to do their best to unplug; to turn off the electronic devices, for at least those 25 hours a week.

We’re not always successful, but Sachs has got that one right, and it’s been a critical factor to our family’s cohesiveness. But that was no reason to go and dis Steve. And no matter what you say, Lord Sachs, I’m still buying that iPhone 4S, whenever Israel actually lets it into the country that is (see my previous post here).

One more point: Rabbi Sacks’ office has subsequently tried to tone down their boss’s comments, saying that, “The chief rabbi meant no criticism of either Steve Jobs personally or the contribution Apple has made to the development of technology in the 21st century.” He was simply “pointing out the potential dangers of consumerism when taken too far.”

And, the statement added, the Rabbi “uses an iPhone and an iPad on a daily basis.”

Tags:

Nostalgia Sunday – The Yekke spectrum

November 20, 2011 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Art, design, Entertainment, General, History and Culture, Immigrant Moments, Movies, Nostalgia Sunday, Profiles, Travel, tv 

Yekke. The term, according to Urban Dictionary.com, “refers to Jews originating from Germany. Sometimes used in a derogatory or cynical manner, it refers mainly to their attention to detail…The origins of this title are unclear, ranging from referring to their short jackets… to a conjugation of the Hebrew dayek – to be precise.”

Between 1931 and 1939, 100,000 Jews came to pre-State Israel, most of them from Germany having fled the rise of Nazism. Unlike the previous four waves of aliya, the members of this Fifth Aliya were not necessarily kibbutz bound. Instead, they headed for towns like Tel Aviv, where they engaged in five o’clock tea dances and other bourgeoisie amusements and Jerusalem’s Rehavia neighborhood, home to professors and intellectuals. German-Jewish immigrants founded Nahariya, home to some of Israel’s leading entrepreneurial families: Strauss, Soglowek and Wertheimer.

Once considered an embarrassment among young German emigres trying to fit in among the native-born sabras, their children and grandchildren are now exploring their Yekke roots, discovering that there was much more to the German-Jewish immigrant experience in Israel than simply being a nicely dressed, punctual minority among the Russian-Polish Socialist-Zionist majority, chronically late and clad in dusty, drab workman’s gear.

Two movies have come out recently that reflect aspects of the German-Jewish immigrant experience in pre-State Israel. Duki Dror’s Mendelsohn – Incessant Visions, explores the life of Erich Mendelsohn, the man who changed the face of modern architecture.

Dror’s fascination with Mendelsohn began in 2003, when UNESCO declared Tel Aviv a World Heritage Site. “I tried to understand the connection between this ugly city, where I was born and raised, and this declaration of cultural significance. I started looking at buildings… and I tried to figure out where this town came from… Who was the source of these modern ideas? Very quickly my investigation led to Mendelsohn It was clear that his presence infuses the plaster and concrete of Tel Aviv. And then I realized he had never built in Tel Aviv, but influenced all of the architects who built it.”

Dror tells the story of Mendelsohn’s life through the architect’s correspondence with wife Luise Mendelsohn. The letters, along with excerpts from Luise’s diary, provide personal insights into history: Mendelsohn’s technique of crafting tiny sketches with the power of a large rendering was the result of paper shortages during World War I. Luise, a cellist who played in a string quartet with neighbor Albert Einstein, wangled Mendelsohn’s first important commission: the Einstein Tower (Einsteinturm) in Potsdam, Germany– an astrophysical observatory built to prove (or disprove) the theory of relativity. At the height of his success, Mendelsohn’s architectural practice had commissions from all over Germany for buildings in his pioneering International Style. Luise tells of Erich’s obsession in creating their dream house — completed just in time for him, along with all other Jewish members, to be ejected from the German Architects’ Union. Realizing that their assets were about to be seized by the Nazis, the Mendelsohns left Germany for the England in 1933.

It was in London in 1934 that Mendelsohn met Chaim Weizmann. The future President of the State of Israel invited the architect to design the future State of Israel according to his modernist vision. Mendelsohn had already been to Palestine before, in 1923, on the invitation of Pinhas Rutenberg, head of the Palestine Electric Company who had the British Mandatory government concession to create an modern electrical infrastructure. Although his design for the first power station was rejected by the British for being avant garde, Mendelsohn was captivated by the idea of fusing ancient and modern in a Jewish homeland.
Read more

Tags:

Word games

November 20, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Business, design, education, Entertainment, General, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life 

It’s Bananagram time. Hebrew Bananagrams. For the uninitiated, Bananagrams is Scrabble un-boarded, kind of Scrabble and Boggle combined, with each player working fast to create words out of their tiles. It’s fun, it’s fast, not quite as fast or competitive as Grab-Scrabble or Anagrams, but since it was created by a fellow Anglo immigrant, I’m partial to trying it out. Even though there’s really no way I can play a Hebrew word game well, even after 16 years in this country.

The story’s like this. Robert Dalfen, a Montrealer, and his family were playing the English-language Bananagrams on a Shabbat afternoon with their kids’ Hebrew-speaking friends looking on enviously. When challenged to create a Hebrew version of this still fairly new game, the Dalfens agreed, and have now set out to sell their Hebrew version.

It’s ironic, in a way, that an English-speaking family is introducing a Hebrew-language game to the Israeli public. But for the Dalfens – self-described word games-aholics – the venture fell into their laps.

So wrote Viva Sarah Press in a recent piece for the Canadian Jewish News. And it’s true, it is ironic. But not so ironic that an Israeli family, yes, immigrant, but still imbued with a certain Israeli mentality, decided to create and sell something on its own. This is a place filled with entrepreneurs, of all types.

Check it out — it’s a great game whether in Hebrew or English, but it is a great way to improve your Hebrew, perhaps with a dictionary by your side, as an accepted handicap.

Tags: , , , , ,

Page 3 of 812345...Last »

 

© 2012 ISRAELITY | Site by illuminea | Sitemap