American Zuckerberg to sue Israeli Zuckerberg?

December 17, 2011 by · 2 Comments
Filed under: General 

An Israeli high tech entrepreneur has devised a novel idea was to avoid being sued by Facebook. He’s legally changed his name to Mark Zuckerberg.

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Rotem Guez runs an online business – Like Store – that promises to enhance companies’ online reputations by offering Facebook users free content only accessible by clicking “like” on the companies’ profiles. Guez acknowledged his company violates Facebook’s terms of use, but said many US. companies offer similar services.

When Facebook lawyers threatened to close him down this week, Guez did the name switch, responding to the lawyers: “If you want to sue me, you’re going to have to sue Mark Zuckerberg.”

Guez, who has a page on Facebook with more than 3,000 likes, responded to one talkback calling him a “huge joke,” with “The world is big enough for more than one Mark Zuckerberg.”

Guez said that he had received mostly “funny reactions” since his story appeared on television news in Israel Thursday.

“I’ve had a flooding of phone calls, as well from people I haven’t seen for years. The people I did talk to think it’s a mad idea, but take it with a smile,” he wrote in an email to the Los Angeles Times.
“It’s amusing, you know, because I’m so small while Facebook’s huge,” he added.

Since the story of the name change came out, Guez said that Facebook has had only one reaction: they disabled his personal profile.

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Foto Friday – Israel in 3D

December 16, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Art, design, Entertainment, Foto Friday, Picture of the Week, Technology, Travel 

We’ve written before about 19th century stereoscopic images of the Holy Land. The 20th century version was the ViewMaster (more on that another day) and the anaglyph, popularly known as 3D vision.

Anaglyph images provide a stereoscopic effect when viewed through glasses with two different colored lenses. The technology is enjoying a 21st century comeback due to Photoshop and other programs that allow people to easily create anaglyph images and post them online. So, get your red and cyan spectacles on! It’s time to view the sights and sounds of the Holy Land in three dimensions!

Israel - 3D - Anaglyph

Israel - Tel Aviv - 3D - Anaglyph

Israel - Tel Aviv - 3D - Anaglyph

There’s been a resurgence in anaglyph movies as well. Production company Highlight Films provides a range of services to facilitate and manage TV, film and video productions, including researchers, production fixers, camera crews, HD cameras and equipment, location scouting, personnel and, of course, 3D film and video. Enjoy.

3D HD landscapes of Israel

3D Dead Sea 7 Wonders

3D Jerusalem

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Iraq asks for Israel’s help for desertification

December 16, 2011 by · 3 Comments
Filed under: coexistence 

Can desertification bring us together?

Sometimes coexistence between Israel and its Arab neighbors can happen in the most out of the way locations.

While, officially, Israel and most of the Arab world are officially at war, and while Israelis and Palestinians seem locked in a perpetual state of avoidance through declaration, at the recent Conference on Climate Change in Durban, South Africa, representatives from Iraq and Tunisia approached staffers from the Jewish National Fund at the latter’s booth. Their goal: to seek Israel’s help in fighting “desertification” in their countries, reports Yediot Ahronot.

The U.N. has defined desertification as “land degradation in arid, semi-arid, and dry sub-humid areas resulting mainly from adverse human impact.” What causes desertification is as hotly contested as the peace process. Some say it’s the result of wind erosion; others that it comes from overgrazing by livestock. For the politically correct, it’s a part of overall climate change and global warming.

Whatever the reason, Susan Sami Jameel Albanaa, who is head of air pollution control at the Iraqi Ministry of the Environment, started the ball rolling by requesting Israeli assistance, and said she “hoped an open dialogue on the issue of desertification could be kept open” between her office and the Israeli representatives. Yediot adds that her colleague, Mohamed Bahir, also asked for our help in controlling greenhouse gas emissions.

And, as if Iraq and Tunisia weren’t enough, apparently an Afghani representative “swapped stories” with JNF officials at the conference, saying that he “never conversed with Israelis before and was very glad for the opportunity.”

As are we.

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International photographers looks for other angles in Israel

December 15, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Art, education, General, Israeliness, Travel 

Rosalind Solomon is one of the photographers taking part in the six-month project, (New York Times)

A group of top international photographers are spending six months in Israel exploring and shooting the stories and scenes outside of the headlines.

French photographer Frederic Brenner, who spent 25 years documenting Jewish life around the world for his book “Diaspora,” initiated the project. According to Isabel Kershner’s story in the New York Times, Brenner raised $3.5 million from a consortium of more than 60 almost exclusively Jewish donors and foundations in the United States and Europe.

Brenner said that the impetus was the Second Intifada when he was “very sad to see how Israel was being portrayed. We were in a binary paradigm — for and against, victim and perpetrator. There was such a lack of complexity in describing this place.”

Brenner was able to invite 11 acclaimed photographers, including Jeff Wall from Canada and Thomas Struth from Germany, and the end result is unknown – there’s no mandate to make Israel look ‘good,’ according to Brenner. We’ll know in about two years, when a traveling exhibition exhibition opens with a catalog of all the artists’ work and a digital offering.

For some it was their first time in Israel. Most came with a keen awareness, if only from newspaper headlines, of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Several said they found being here difficult.

Josef Koudelka, a Czech photographer who recorded the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968, has been photographing the high concrete wall that makes up the Jerusalem section of Israel’s West Bank barrier. Though he is not a political person, he said, “it is not easy for me in this country. I don’t see things that make me very cheerful.”
He said he was focusing on “the crime against the landscape, in the most holy landscape for humanity.”

An American photographer, Rosalind Solomon, the oldest of the group at 81, began shooting portraits in the Palestinian city of Jenin in the northern West Bank. She was a few minutes away when Juliano Mer Khamis, a famed Israeli-Palestinian actor and theater director, was gunned down by a masked Palestinian in the city’s refugee camp in April.

“I just feel the turbulence,” she said. “I think on both sides people are very affected by the climate they are living in.”

The group – which is also visiting places like the Negev and the Weizmann Institute of Science, also includes Wendy Ewald, an American conceptual artist and educator; Martin Kollar from Slovakia; Jungjin Lee from South Korea; Stephen Shore from New York; and Nick Waplington, a Briton who has been focusing on settlers. They’ve also been hearing lectures – and giving their own – sessions at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design.

It will be interesting to see what they decide to focus on – falling back to the clichés of the conflict – or exposing the other Israel that’s waiting to be discovered.

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Tel Aviv faces 2012 threat with kabbalah

December 14, 2011 by · 2 Comments
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Israeliness, Life, Pop Culture, Religion, Science 

People enter the Kabbalah Center in Tel Aviv this week adorned with blue and white baloons spelling out '2012'

The hundreds of people making their way into well-kept, handsome building just off of Dizengoff Circle this week looked like they could have heading to the theater or opera. They were also handsome, well-dressed and coiffed.

But the theater they’re attending has nothing to do with entertainment and everything to do with enlightenment Rabbi Eitan Yardeni, the kabbalah teacher to the stars like Madonna, was about to give a free, public lecture at the Kabbalah Center.

The ancient Jewish texts are defined by the Israeli-born, Los Angeles-based Yardeni as “the ancient universal teaching that helps us to understand the purpose and the meaning of life, and gives up practical tools for pure and lasting fulfillment.”

They were codified in Safed in the 1500s by Rabbi Isaac Luria, and poularized by the hassidim of the 1800s, have long been restricted to learning by devout married men over the age of 40. But in recent decades, at places like The Kabbalah Center in Tel Aviv, where over 1,000 people learn Kabbalah in weekly classes, and in its over 50 other locations around the world which were founded by Rabbi Philip Berg and his wife Karen, kabbalah study has trickled down to the masses – religious or not, Jewish or not. And the influx of celebrity devotees, like the Material Girl, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher have done little to help convince detractors that the Berg’s version of kabbalah is nothing more than a facile, self-help fad.

Perhaps, it’s that new age essence that has raised the hackles of members of the Jewish establishment who over the years have criticized the Bergs and the Kabbalah Center, and who call their empire a ‘cult’ which fuels their lavish lifestyle. Even the IRS is currently conducting an investigation into their finances.
But none of that was important on this night, as over 500 Israelis – some already students of kabbalah and some here out of curiosity – jammed the Kabbalah Center auditorium to hear Yardeni lecture on the topic “2012 – Certainty in a World of Uncertainty.” We all know the Mayan theories about the world coming to an end next year, and apparently, kabbalah has some insight into it.

“What tonight is about is opening our eyes to realize a certain direction and place to where the universe is pushing us. As 2012 approaches, the choices are becoming even more extreme. We’ve seen political revolution and social revolution, the pace that things are happening is so fast” he said with a backdrop of Dafna Leek speaking at one of last summer’s social protests.”

“What I want to tell you is that we have a choice – we don’t have to wait for bad things to happen in 2012. We’re at a junction where we can create change and avoid much chaos, pain and suffering. In business, when markets or real estate fluctuates, there’s some corrections or adjustments that need to be made. In life too, when there’s too much imbalance, selfishness and chaos, some corrections will need to take place. Do we have to wait for the chaos to take place to correct ourselves, or is there something we can do practically to change the situation?”

The crowd was rapt, and applauded throughout the speech. Near the end, the speaker plugged the center’s introductory kabbalah courses. Outside the building, one middle-aged down-on-his-luck-looking man riding a bicycle reads the flyer, and asks a passerby, “Is something bad supposed to happen in 2012?”
When he’s told about the Mayan civilization legend that allegedly predicts a cataclysmic event during the year that will bring about the world’s destruction, he laughs, and misinterpreting the explanation to mean the destruction of Israel, responds, “People have been trying to kill us ever since we’ve been here. Don’t worry, we’re going to be fine.”

He rode away chuckling to himself.

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