An Israeli Halloween

November 1, 2011 - 1:47 PM by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Art, Business, Entertainment, Environment, Food, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life, Movies, Pop Culture 

Halloween cookies from the Cupcake Caterers

Halloween’s over, and I’m thinking about how this Celtic and then Christian holiday has entered the Israeli consciousness, or at least to my knowledge.

Not having celebrated myself growing up — rabbi’s kid, although we did hand out candy to all the neighborhood kids — I don’t have any strong connections to the holiday. And because we were the rabbi’s family, our house did not usually get pelted by raw eggs and such — neighborhood protection. So it was the best of all worlds; appreciating someone else’s ‘chag‘, despite the anti-Semitic associations (we lived in a fairly non-Jewish neighborhood) but not having to take it on ourselves.

Living in Israel, I haven’t really given it much thought, except for cruising through various online store catalogs for Halloween costumes that could work well for Purim. But something’s happening this year, at least through my lens. Halloween has always been different for me than Thanksgiving, which I’ve always celebrated here in Israel, and have continued to do so, despite light censure from Israeli-born nieces, nephews and stepdaughters who think that the American-born adults in their lives are crazy to continue with such a blatantly chulnik (Israeli slangish for ‘foreigner’) celebration.\

Maybe it’s Facebook, and the exposure offered to what other people are doing and celebrating. Or perhaps it’s that global village thing, in which we adapt and adopt others’ trends and rituals because they seem worthwhile. All I know is, Halloween is out there, now translated to ליל כל הקדושים, All Hallows Eve.

There are parties advertised online, mostly hosted by Americans, exhorting invitees to “Do it the same in Israel as we would at home!!” There’s also the potential for doubling up on costumes, wearing what you wore for Purim on Halloween, and vice versa. And there are the comments from many, missing that easy availability of candy corn, half off Halloween candy the day after.

Halloween isn’t the American version of Purim, as Senator John McCain once mistakenly noted, despite the similarities. But it does have its appeal, particularly to those of us who hail from the land of the U.S.A. Check out the cookies made by Sidra Collins Muoio, owner of Cupcake Caterers, for her co-workers.

And, finally, there’s Rabies, Israel’s first horror film, which had its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival last May and played in Toronto in honor of Halloween.

If it’s a celebration of candy, costumes and good times, I’m actually all for it. And I can never argue with an Israeli film that succeeds on North American terms.

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Nimby

October 31, 2011 - 10:04 PM by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Business, coexistence, General, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life, News, Politics, Sports 

A story I wrote last week for JTA brought me to a neighborhood near my own — literally, a 10-minute walk — that I had never visited before. Two neighborhoods, really.

The first was Givat Hamatos, or Hill of the Airplane, named for a plane that crashed there during the 1967 Six-Day War. Givat Hamatos is now known as the latest site for Green Line construction, as the prime minister is planning on extending his contiguous Jerusalem line that will cut off any possible Palestinian string of neighborhoods, as well as Palestinian East Jerusalem. But until a few years ago, Givat Hamatos was the caravan neighborhood for Russian and Ethiopian immigrants, as well as some down-on-their-luck Israelis, like Barak Hasid’s family, interviewed in the story.

What struck me about Barak Hasid and Givat Hamatos, is how close he is to my home, and our very different existences. His family has made do with very little for quite a while, and has found some kind of peace — or at least he has — in their story. A lemonade out of lemons kind of narrative. And then I drove through Beit Safafa, the adjacent neighborhood, trying to get a sense of the place, the people, and the location, which is sandwiched between Givat Hamatos and the Talpiot industrial zone on two sides.

It’s a nice neighborhood with fairly large homes, a very new soccer field (thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation), and is the home to Yad B’Yad, or Hand in Hand, the Jerusalem branch of Israel’s bilingual Arab-Hebrew schools. I can’t tell you much more than that, because I didn’t find anyone to speak to me. But I’m still working on that. I figure there has to be more to the Beit Safafa story, given its history and existence of coexistence.

It’s strange to think of a possible residential neighborhood down the road from me as a) settlement construction and b) possibly part of a future Palestinian Jerusalem. What I do know is real estate locations, and there’s no question that Givat Hamatos works from a geographical standpoint. It’s off a main road, close to a busy business area and has access to major transportation. But nothing is ever that simple in these parts, so we’ll have to see what happens in this particular section of my backyard.

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Mothers and brain function

October 26, 2011 - 11:11 PM by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: education, General, Life, Medical Breakthroughs 

A mom mouse and her pups

I’d had a sense that some kind of instinctive mothering call had been installed in my brain upon becoming a mother — and there are many who would agree — but now two Hebrew University researchers have proof, thanks to mice.

According to Dr. Adi Mizrahi and his post-doctoral colleague Dr. Lior Cohen, and based on research conducted on mice, neural changes integrating odors and sounds lie behind a mouse mother’s ability to recognize and respond to distress calls from her pups. In other words, those certain behaviors associated with motherhood are driven, at least in part, by alterations in brain function.

Mizrahi, who just had the findings published in the journal Neuron, commented that while the distinct brain changes linked with motherhood are known, it was the impact of those changes on sensory processing as well as the emergence of maternal behaviors that were unknown.

“In mice,” explained Mizrahi, “olfactory and auditory cues play a major role in the communication between a mother and her pups. Therefore, we hypothesized that there may be some interaction between olfactory and auditory processing so that pup odors might modulate the way pup calls are processed in the mother’s brain.”

The researchers exposed regular mice, mice that had experienced interaction with their pups, and lactating mother mice to pup odors, and then monitored both spontaneous and sound-evoked activity of neurons in the auditory cortex. The odors triggered dramatic changes in auditory processing only in the females that had interacted with pups, while the lactating mothers were the most sensitive to pup sounds. The olfactory-auditory integration appeared in lactating mothers shortly after they had given birth and had a particularly strong effect on the detection of pup distress calls.

Having been in the mother mouses’s situation, I’m commiserating. But it feels good to have science behind you.

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Gilad’s shirt

October 23, 2011 - 12:03 PM by · 1 Comment
Filed under: coexistence, design, General, Israeliness, Life, News, Politics, tv 

You may have read this already, but it’s too good to miss. Remember that shirt Gilad was wearing when first handed over — and first interviewed on TV — by the Egyptians last week?

It was probably mostly polyester, a blue-and-white collar (any significance to that?), with epaulets and a small blue-red-and-and white check. Not very attractive, and not a great look for the emaciated Gilad, but it seems to have become a fashion trend in Gaza.

Stores in Gaza are offering ‘The Shalit shirt’ in a wide range of colors, for a reasonable NIS 60, which is around $17. And it’s not just Gazans who are fans of the shirt; there are at least two Facebook pages that have been created, devoted to Gilad Shalit’s shirt.

Upon closer perusal, one page appears to be a front for some anti-Israel sentiments. But the other has become a kind of conversation, mostly unpleasant, but a forum of sorts for Arabs and Jews to write both nasty and conciliatory comments toward one another, and not about Palestinian menswear. And they’re on the same page because they’ll both ‘like’ a Gilad Shalit shirt page, but wouldn’t normally look for each other on Facebook.

Coexistence? No, not really. But does it mean anything positive to have Gazans wearing Gilad’s Egyptian shirt?

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No chickens to be had

October 21, 2011 - 3:47 PM by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: General 

Okay, we’ve reached the final, and I mean final, stage of this sometimes endless chagim period. Over here, those of us who are religiously observant, don’t have three days straight of chag-into-Shabbat, like our diaspora brethren. They’ve had three weeks of that, on Rosh Hashanah (we had that too), and then again on Sukkot and this week, for Simchat Torah/Shemini Atzeret. We sort of have it, with Wednesday-into-Thursday, but Fridays off. Then again, Fridays get used for preparing for Shabbat. So we don’t have three days straight of shul, meals and shul again, but knowing that you have to shop and cook, yet again, is pretty exhausting.

Which brings me to today, the last Friday of this month of chagim. We had a simple plan, going out for dinner Friday night and a few friends coming over for lunch on Shabbat. I even had a meal plan, which included a simple saucy chicken for Shabbat lunch, accompanied by rice, perhaps some lubia beans and a course of salads to start. Dessert? Give in and buy some sorbet and cookies. I mean, there have to be some benefits to living in a town where there are bakeries everywhere, even if they’re not so great.

Pargiyot with a lemon/rosemary preparation

But, there were no chickens to be had. Literally. I won’t say that I made an exhaustive search of all the southern Jerusalem supermarkets, but I heard and I saw in a number of butchers and counters that there were really no chickens to be had, thanks to the weeks of consecutive holidays and Shabbatot. There were, to be fair, frozen trays of pargiyot, the boneless dark chicken that’s really delicious, but kind of expensive. And I knew I had a frozen chicken in my freezer, but it would be a pain to defrost and it’s never a perfect solution to quick-defrost, at least not in my experience.

So I came up with a new plan: Corned beef, braised cabbage and potato kugel, the last item to be purchased. I had a moment of panic when there didn’t appear to be any corned beef in the supermarket freezer, but my butcher friend Suleiman came up with a few from his back freezer. And, to be expected, there were no potato kugels left in the city, really, but that’s a quick item to make at the last minute.

A fast internet search offered some new ways of preparing the corned beef, but I stuck to my tried and true recipe, although I will try this method another week, when I have more time. As for potato kugel, my favorite food blogger, Smitten Kitchen, uses this recipe, and it’s looking good in my oven. Finally, I use my pressure cooker to prepare braised purple cabbage, and I tossed in a leftover quince that I had sitting around, in addition to the green apples called for in the recipe.

It’s Irish eats for us this weekend.

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