• Home
• Archives
• About
• Links
• Contact

Israel’s size becomes an issue

It may be that frigid winter up there freezes the brain into thinking about nothing but sex, but our Canadian friends of Israel seem to have gone off the deep end, with a new campaign on universities to promote Israel.

‘Size Doesn’t Matter’ is the name of the campaign and web site that is touting many of the same things we do here at ISRAEL21c and Israelity – Israel’s diversity, innovation and achievements and how the tiny country is contributing to make the world a better place.

The site includes a blog, a selection of photographs of Israeli personalities and places, and a listing of campus activities that Size Doesn’t Matter is hosting throughout the year.

However, their first oral, er… I mean viral effort at trying to attract the attention of Canadian university students relies more on ’spring break’-like wink and nod innuendo than any particular factual information.

Which, I guess, may be a smart move in order to attract a crowd. But on what level do we have to stoop to portray Israel positively? Even YouTube has censored this one for an 18-year-old plus audience. Check it out here.

The Hilton lottery

It seems that the Israeli Lottery thinks people will buy more lottery tickets if they will get to go on a shopping spree with socialite Paris Hilton.

A number of celebrity blogs are talking about Hilton’s latest celebrity turn, as she was spotted filming a commercial on the streets of New York City for Mifal Hapayis, also known as ‘Lotto’ or Israel Lottery.

Wearing a leopard print coat and carrying many bags, the sense is that the winner will get to shop on Madison Avenue, although that is completely unconfirmed. They might just be heading to Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff, Kikar HaMedina, Sheinkin and Gan Hachashmal for some Sabra duds.

Sheikh Jarrah in your face (book)

For a few Fridays now, there have been demonstrations in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in east Jerusalem against the move by Jewish settlers to remove Palestinian residents from homes they claim are Jewish-owned.

Over 20 protestors on the Israeli Left were arrested at last week’s demonstration, which drew over 300 people. And tomorrow, sparks are expected to fly when a counter-demonstration by members of the extreme Right like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Baruch Marzel takes place opposite the Left demo.

While the media in Israel has been covering the protests, most of the information coming out – both in terms of mobilization for these events -as well as the play by play of what’s going on there – have been disseminated through social media sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, along with a slew of blogs.

Rather than waiting until the nightly news to watch footage of arrests of protests, viewers can go straight to YouTube and watch the unedited action.

According to a story in The Jerusalem Post, activists and journalists both described a situation in which protesters were relying on the Internet to try and affect change on the ground and raise awareness of the arrests made during demonstrations in the neighborhood.

“It’s all Facebook, e-mails and Twitter,” said Didi Remez, a human rights activist, who has become noticeably involved in the Sheikh Jarrah protests as of late. Remez was arrested during a protest there last Friday.

Remez also said that distant audiences, like American Jews, who might be deprived of Sheikh Jarrah coverage due to the mainstream media’s lack of interest, were instead staying abreast of the situation via social networking sites.

“The American media is for some reason refusing to cover this,” he said. “Even though it’s becoming a major issue in Israel. And still, despite that, there’s a lot of awareness [of this issue] among Jewish Americans, the reason being that they are increasingly connected through Facebook, Twitter, blogs and so on.”

Sure enough, this morning, my Facebook page was full of posts calling on people to mobilize against the Right demo tomorrow.

Hagai El-Ad, the director of the Association for Human Rights in Israel and one of the protesters arrested two weeks ago, said that the use of new media was a driving force behind the success of the Sheikh Jarrah protest organizers. But, he added, that’s only part of the battle.

“Yes, the mobilization happens online,” El-Ad added, “but the end result is the most classic form of civil protest.”

A taxing issue for Bar Refaeli

It’s not a good month without a posting on Israel’s supermodel Bar Refaeli. Despite her being – with the possible exception on tremendous NBA rookie Omri Casspi - the most successful and effective PR tool that Israel could possibly hope for, there are some who have it in for her.

Maybe it’s because she managed to break out of the tiny confines of Israel and becoming a worldwide phenomenon, thanks to her Sports Illustrated spreads and advertising campaigns. Or maybe it’s because of some out-of-context quotes about her feelings about Israel that were blown out of proportion by Israel’s yellow media (which unfortunately is also the country’s biggest and most popular daily paper – Yediot Aharonot). Or maybe people are just jealous of her success.

The latest barb against Bar was in today’s Ha’aretz, which reported that Refaeli has asked the Israel Tax Authority to grant her nonresident status for tax purposes.

Refaeli has paid tax here over the years as required, but is now looking at ways to save hundreds of thousands of shekels annually by changing her status.

It seems the authority will find a solution in an effort to keep her paying at least some Israeli taxes. The question of residency status for tax purposes revolves around issues such as how many days a year a person spends in Israel, where he works and if he owns a home here. In any case, Refaeli does most of her work in countries that have tax treaties with Israel, so she will most likely pay part of her taxes here and part abroad.

Now, I don’t know of anyone living here and paying taxes who hasn’t bitched and moaned at one time or another over the tax burdern we working stiffs shoulder. If any of us had a loophole to save some of that precious income, wouldn’t we jump at the chance? And don’t tell me those self-employed among us aren’t writing off every possible item they can to lower their tax burden.

If Refaeli is abroad most of the time, and getting paid for assignments in other countries, why shouldn’t she take advantage of an opportunity to save some money. Maybe she doesn’t want to go on – like the rest of us – funding haredi families whose whose main potential breadwinner studies all day and relies on the welfare our taxes make possible.

Ah, but I digress. This is about Bar Refaeli, and she’s demonstrated time and time again that she’s an Israeli patriot, representing Israel at tourism fairs, always speaking highly of the country in public, and presenting a beatiful face of Israel to the world. If it was smart, our top officials would waive all her income tax and put her on the government payroll.

Sweatshops and social justice

I’ve apparently started running a sweatshop. I didn’t mean to. It’s just what the market seems willing to bear.

It began with a small task. I wanted to move the content on my personal blog from one platform to another. Over the last 7 years, I’ve written well over 400 articles.

I estimated that it would take between 3-5 minutes per post to transfer. That involved copying and pasting, adding categories and tags, and downloading and then re-uploading any images. An XML shortcut cut down some of that time, but I still didn’t relish the idea of spending hours at a mind-numbing task.

So I set out to find a “virtual assistant” who could do the job for me. I initially thought about posting an ad on eLance or oDesk but I really preferred to give it to someone local.

I was thinking that it would be a perfect job for a high school student, so I priced it at NIS 20 (about $5.00) an hour. The candidate who won the job was not a teenager, though. She was a mature adult whose hours working in the office of a major Jewish Federation had just been cut.

I felt terrible about employing someone so competent for such a paltry sum. But she’d accepted the offer willingly.

A week later, I put out another ad, this time for voice talent to record a number of dialogues for a language learning project I was hired to produce. I offered 50% more than my fist go – NIS 30 ($8)/hour for about 3 hours of work. I was inundated by calls and emails – close to 50 within two days – including semi-professional actors, singers and performers with TV and radio experience. No one was balking at the low pay even though a proper rate for this kind of work would be 3-4 times higher.

The whole issue has given me pause for concern. Is the economy so bad that people are willing to settle for so little? And is it right for me to offer such rates?

And yet, if I outsourced the work to India or Malaysia, I would be a fool to pay Western salaries. And indeed, I recently had a logo designed via the Internet for the ridiculously low price of $30. A highly qualified local designer quoted me $700 for fully branding.

What’s the Israeli approach to the issue of employment, I wondered. The sweatshops where many of our grandparents worked on the Lower East Side of New York could get away with near slave labor prices, but that wasn’t good for the workers, nor would I say for the souls of their employers. A socially just policy should have the boss paying a fair rate, regardless of what the market can bear.

I’ll probably send my artwork requirements overseas again. But when it comes to my virtual assistant, I’m doubling her pay next time. There’s more to business than bragging over a bargain.

Quote this

Israelis like quotation marks. I’m in the midst of puzzling this one out, as it’s frustrated me for some time. Why, for instance, would the name of a school, as depicted at the front of the building, be spelled with quotation marks around its name? Or the names of two elephants gifted by Thailand to the Biblical Zoo? The end result is that any kind of text reads like a contract, with everyone referring to themselves in quotation marks.

I decided to research this a bit, after noting that an English translation of a press release I was using referred to the organization in, yes, quotation marks. Here’s what I found:

According to Wikipedia, acronyms in Hebrew are denoted with a punctuation bit called the geresh, which is often typed as an apostrophe. The geresh is singular to Hebrew because it started out life in the Torah, where it was used as punctuation and is now used primarily as a note of cantillation in the reading of the Torah and other biblical books. A double geresh (״), known by the plural form gershayim, is used to denote acronyms; it is inserted before (i.e., to the right of) the last letter of the acronym. As in Tzahal (צה”ל), the Hebrew acronym for the IDF, which is also an acronym for the Israel Defense Forces.

Anyway, until the early 1970s, most of the printed Hebrew texts put opening quotes low and closing quotes ones high, often going above the letters themselves. The word “ישראל„ would be a good example.

However, this distinction in Hebrew between opening and closing quotation marks has completely disappeared, and today, quotations are done as in English (ex. “ישראל”), with two high quotes. This is due to the advent of the Hebrew keyboard layout, which lacks the low opening quotation mark („).

Yet the use of quotation marks in what seems like odd places – to an English speaker like myself — appears to be rooted in the German language roots of Hebrew. When Hebrew was revived as a modern language by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (whose seminal Hebrew-English dictionary is currently celebrating its 100th anniversary), the Russian revolutionary followed the norms of those who had come before him, basing modern Hebrew on biblical Hebrew, but with touches of Eastern Europe, where many of the first pioneers were born and raised. According to one blogger, Hebrew grammar and punctuation were based on Western standards, and the German punctuation system was adopted, until 1994, when the Academy of the Hebrew Language changed it to the English system. And in German, quotation marks are often used where English would use italics. Quotation marks are used in English for the titles of poems, articles, short stories, songs and TV shows. German expands this to the titles of books, novels, films, dramatic works and the names of newspapers or magazines, which would be italicized (or underlined in writing) in English:

So the names of two elephants, instead of being italicized, underlined or left alone, are instead placed inside quotation marks. To me, the American English speaker, it appears incorrect. To those educated in the local system, it’s just right.

‘I just went out to get milk, and I’ll be right back’

I may not be in Israel right now, but I want it to be known that someone is constantly in my home. It’s not empty! There’s no reason for burglars to think that it’s an easy target.

There, maybe I’ve covered my butt with my insurance company. According to reports floating around the blogosphere and Facebook, some Israeli insurance companies have started denying payments to clients whose homes have been robbed if they previously posted their plans on Facebook.

There’s already been well-discussed incidents of Facebook users getting in trouble with their employers after calling in sick and then posting photos of relaxation on the beach in Bahamas. But that’s just sheer stupidity.

This time, there’s alot more gray area. When I post on my Facebook updates that I’m going to travel to the US, only my 300 (very odd) friends are supposed to see it, not the villains from ‘Home Alone.’ I can only think of a handful of friends who might actually rob homes and most of them have either given it up for the straight life or aren’t even in Israel, so I should be safe, right?

Not according to some insurance companies evidently. As regular readers may notice, I’m not a fan of the insurance biz, neither in Israel nor abroad, and this is just one more example of their attempts to weasel out of valid coverage by hard-working home owners.

So next time you’re planning a vacation, think twice about letting anyone know about it – or if you do squeal, make sure you let everyone know about the IDF battalion that is going to house sit for you.

Afraid to go to sleep – Paranormal Activity hits US cinemas

It’s the surprise hit of the year. Audiences across the US are afraid to go to sleep after watching a horror film made by Israeli filmmaker Oren Peli. The low budget movie reportedly cost just $11,000 to produce, but reviewers are calling it the most scary film ever made. Think Blair Witch Project, only worse.

The movie, Paranormal Activity , was filmed in 2006 over a seven-day period. It was set in Peli’s own suburban tract home with a crew of just three including his then-girlfriend Toni Taylor, and best friend (also Israeli) Amir Zbeda.

The film was released in fewer than 200 theaters, but raked in $7.1 million in one weekend – a record for a limited release film.

The film, about a couple who think their house is haunted, has now been picked up by Paramount Pictures . It bills itself as “the first-ever major film release demanded by you.”

Peli is not your usual blockbuster movie type director. He dropped out of school at 16, to set up his own software company. Three years later he immigrated to the US with Zbeda and began work developing animation and video game programs.

He got the idea for the film when he moved into a new home and found the sudden quiet of suburbia disturbing. The house was new and still settling, and at night he could hear the house shifting and groaning.

He wrote a script, fixed up his house a bit, held a casting session in Hollywood, and hey presto, shot a movie. He edited it on his own home PC, and then submitted it to Screamfest – a boutique festival for cult horror in LA.

The film was released in September with limited late-night showings at just 13 college towns, but the ball started rolling and the film became a web sensation on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. Critics also jumped on board giving excellent reviews.

Originally Paramount planned to reshoot the film with better-known actors, but studio heads – including Steven Spielberg – decided it could stand as it was, with only a few tweaks.

Peli is now onto his next movie, a thriller called Area 51, but in the meantime Paramount Pictures releases Paranormal Activity at cinemas across the US on Friday. Get ready for some sleepless nights.

Saying goodbye to Asaf Ramon

In a country as tiny as Israel, it doesn’t take bad news long to spread. Yesterday was no exception. Even before his death was announced in the press, rumors were spreading that Asaf Ramon, son of the ill-fated Ilan Ramon – Israel’s first astronaut – had been killed in a training accident in an F-16.

No death in the Israeli army is ever taken lightly. This is a place where every father, son, brother, cousin or boyfriend has to serve, but the tragedy of this death, coming just a few years after his father’s, was apparent to all.

In February 2003, an intifada-scarred Israel watched with pride as Ilan Ramon became the first Israeli in space. His progress on the US shuttle Columbia, his reports back home, gave Israel a ray of hope in what was frankly an awful time. Even kids in kindergarten knew of his accomplishments and spoke about him as if he were a national hero.

On re-entry into earth’s atmosphere, the shuttle broke up and Ramon and the rest of the crew were all killed. All that remained of Ramon were a few pages of his diary , which were found two months later in a field – ironically, in the town of Palestine in Texas.

Asaf Ramon was 15 when his father died. He decided to follow in his father’s footsteps, and vowed that one day he too would go into space.

Like his father before him he was a top student, and he completed his flight-training course in the IAF as the best cadet in his class. In his passing out ceremony in July, President Peres gave him his wings.

We still don’t know what happened, or why Asaf Ramon crashed. He was flying at 720km an hour when he lost control of the plane near the Hebron Hills. Was it technical error or pilot error? What is clear is that in Israel this isn’t the personal tragedy of one family, it’s a tragedy for all.

The tributes are pouring in on blog sites everywhere, from Diamond Pilots, which carries a full story of the crash , to Dvir Reznik, who writes on his blog :

“Asaf – I hope you’ll find joy and peace where ever you are, watching over us from high in the clouds, reunited with your father.”

On NASA Watch, readers discuss in awe how a 20-year-old could be flying an F-16.

Unsurprisingly, Ramon’s death has opened up the whole painful argument of whether Israel should allow combat service by sons of bereaved families. At present it requires written consent by the mother, a less than ideal solution as any pressurized mother can vouch.

Back at my home all I could think of was what Rona Ramon went through when officers from the IAF knocked on her door for the second time in six years with the very worst kind of news.

It must be Rosh Hashana time

It must be getting close to Rosh Hashana, because Benji Lovitt over at What War Zone? has posted his annual wacky Rosh Hashana video.

No matter what bad news keeps coming down the pike, from Iranian nuclear capability getting closer to the awful tragedy of the Ramon family, watching earnest Israelis trying to explain the Rosh Hashana custom of eating fish heads to a perplexed Lovitt is sure to put a smile on anyone’s face.

Lovitt, a stand up comedian by profession, did his bit on Sunday at the Second International Jewish Bloggers Convention in Jerusalem, attended by 300 bloggers.

The Nefesh B’Nefesh-organized conference, titled “Uniting the Jewish Community through Social Media,” included eight workshops followed by two panel discussions aimed at advancing Jewish, Zionist and charitable causes.

And it’s evident that one of the best ways to do so is through humor. Laughing at ourselves and allowing others to laugh along, can go a long way to creating an affinity for Israel, or at least let us see things through a little less intense lens that we’re normally viewed around the world.

So enjoy, the clip and let’s all look for the big ball to drop at Rabin Square at midnight on the Jewish New Year.

 

• Subscribe

  Subscribe to Israelity via email:

• Social Media

  • Twitter
  • YouTube
• • Facebook

• Categories

  • A New Reality
  • Art
  • Blogging
  • Business
  • coexistence
  • Crime
  • design
  • education
  • Environment
  • Food
  • Foto Friday
  • General
  • health
  • History and Culture
  • Holidays
  • Immigrant Moments
  • Israeliness
  • Life
  • Medical Breakthroughs
  • Movies
  • Music
  • Nostalgia Sunday
  • Picture of the Week
  • Politics
  • Pop Culture
  • Profiles
  • Religion
  • Social Justice
  • Sports
  • Technology
  • Travel
  • tv
  • War

• The Face of Israel Today

• 

• About Israelity

  Israel is often seen as a place of conflict and strife. In reality there is much more: there's business and research; art and culture; community and family. At ISRAELITY, Israelis blog their daily thoughts, experiences and insights. It's the real Israel, not the media's Israel. It's people living ordinary lives in an extraordinary place.

• Free newsletter

  Sign up for ISRAEL21c's free weekly newsletter Email:

• Stories from ISRAEL21c.org

  • Protecting California's grape crops with ice
  • Roche uses Israeli product in drug trial
  • Making music in the military
  • Israeli study: saliva spreads pneumonia

• Popular Posts

  • Idan Raichel project salutes Jerusalem
  • Foto Friday – Ron Shoshani’s Israel Eye Candy
  • Using the Mossad to sell food
  • Update: Boycott of Metallica results in lower prices
  • Recruiting Yossi to explain Israel

• Recently Written

  • Nostalgia Sunday – The Old Train Station is New Again
  • My brisket butcher
  • Foto Friday – Danny Yanai’s Israeli Walls
  • The week that was
  • Running the marathon – Israeli style
  • A (c)hair raising experience
  • Light, Shadow and Color
  • A little Yolki Palki
  • On the road again
  • Nostalgia Sunday – The Womens Corps
  
  

• OUR COMMUNITY

• Recent Comments

  • Nicky on Chicken pox? Head straight to the doctor
  • Agi Sommer on Light, Shadow and Color
  • My brisket butcher | ISRAELITY on On the road again
  • Activists urge musicians not to perform in Israel 17Mar10 on Santana cancels – touring glitch or anti-Israel lobby?
  • Brian Temecula on A (c)hair raising experience