Loving Israel through its music

March 3, 2012 by · 3 Comments
Filed under: A New Reality, Blogging, Entertainment, General, Israeliness, Music, Pop Culture, Travel 

Infected Mushroom will be mesmerizing the US and UK bloggers this week in Tel Aviv.

It’s not a new idea, but it’s a really good one. For the last few years, government offices like the Foreign Ministry and Tourism Ministry, and private advocacy initiatives like ISRAEL21c, StandwithUS and the Israel Project, have been flying over journalists, policy makers and celebrities to Israel. Their aim? To show them the Israel that we write about – the vibrant country behind the headlines that’s leading the way in high tech, innovation and the arts.

It’s a great idea because you can’t get every person to come and visit Israel, but if one popular blogger comes over and gets a good impression of the country, then everyone who follows that blogger is going to be reading about Israel in a different light.

A new player in the game is Kinetis – a young Tel Aviv-based advocacy organization that aims to promote Israel as a vibrant and inspirational source of creativity and innovation. Their pet project focuses on bloggers and is called Vibe Israel.

Previous Vibe Israel trips have focused on ‘mommy bloggers’ and design bloggers, and this week, their third group has landed, consisting of five popular music bloggers.

• Rebecca Schiller of the New Musical Express from London,
• New York’s Samantha Edussuriya of MTV Iggy
• Luke Britton of This Fake/DIY from the UK
• Rory Hamilton of Feel My Bicep from Scotland
• and Brandon Bogajewicz of The Burning Ear, blogging from California.

Collectively, they boast over nine million readers.

Their week-long visit, which encompasses the Mardi Gras-like atmosphere of Purim, includes meeting a slew of top Israeli musical talent including Koby Farhi, the frontman for Orphaned Land, Idan Raichel, Geva Alon and Ivri Lider. The group will also attend a Purim show by Mashina and Infected Mushroom in Tel Aviv.

There’s no way they’re going to come away with a bad impression of them, or of Israeli music in general, and maybe, with their clout, it could start a groundswell that will push the names of some of them into the international spotlight. And if not, the bloggers’ posts from their week in Israel will surely open the eyes of their readers to the astounding variety of world class music we have here.

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Israel’s chocolate wars

February 22, 2012 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Blogging, Food, General, Israeliness, Life, Social Justice 

Having lived here a long time, I’ve gotten used to prices for certain consumer goods having no connection to reality – like the cost of automobiles, gas, deodorant, and imported Post Cranberry Almond Crunch cereal. Other aspects of living here make up for it, like paying arnona and dealing with our cell phone providers.

However, I was all for the cottage cheese revolution last summer which found the populace fed up with the price gouging of our big conglomerates. And thanks to that initiative, some of the prices of our cheese and milk products have indeed been lowered by companies like Strauss and Tnuva.

However, one Israeli who lives in the US wasn’t satisfied. He happened to be in a grocery store in New Jersey and saw a display of Israeli Pesek Zman chocolate bars (made by Strauss) being sold for 69 cents, about a third of what the hard-working Israeli chocolate lover pays for it here.

He posted a photo for his Facebook friends, and presto, the chocolate Watergate was flowing.

The news snowballed and the media, apparently unaware that we’re under an Iranian threat, reported that other chocolate bars manufactured by flagship Elite company (also owned surprisingly enough by Strauss) are also being sold at similarly low prices abroad.

Strauss said in a statement that it cannot control the price that retailers place on their products, and said it believed that the prices were lower in Jewish communities in the United States in advance of Purim.

Nonetheless, after sensational headlines and much chocolate binging, it’s been decided that a month-long boycott of Strauss and Elite chocolate bars is set to begin on March 1, just as we’re entering the chocolate-intensive week of Purim.

We’ve endured hardships before, from milk and egg shortages during the War of Independence to the more recent hummus shortage, which admittedly did cause some of us to crack. However a month without chocolate bars is tearing the Zionist dream at its fabric. We can only sacrifice so much.

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Nostalgia Sunday – Nostalgia Online

February 11, 2012 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Blogging, design, education, Entertainment, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture, tv 

Get ready to get nostalgic, big time. The wonderful Nostalgia Online site, (at Nostal.co.il)，　a collection of documents, videos, audio tracks and images curated by collector/editor and contemporary history buff David Sela, sent out an email this past week announcing that all site content, text and images were now available for download, free-of-charge, for non-commercial use for private studies, homework, research and other educational needs including news report citations. Yay!

Sela, who only a few weeks ago, launched Radio Nostalgia, an online music channel playing Israeli hits from 25 years ago and beyond, has clearly tapped into a wellspring of human emotion: the good feeling elicited from seeing an old movie poster, classic naaley bayit slippers or even the relief felt from seeing a picture of a rusty old kerosene heater and being able to say, “Well, thank goodness we don’t have to use THAT anymore!”

The site is a comprehensive, non-profit enterprise with content written by Sela and a team of volunteer researchers, with materials contributed by thousands of visitors, private entities and institutions all interested in preserving the collective memory of the modern State of Israel. The site is divided into dozens of sub-sites (portals) and tens of thousands of entries, images, presentations, audio and video clips and various visual images.

In addition to Radio Nostalgia, there’s a video archive that gathers together over 1000 YouTube clips, an audio archive with sounds from famous historical events, a collection of downloadable PowerPoint presentations and print materials. There’s even a daily trivia factoid. For example, 34 years ago today in 1978, the film Eskimo Limon (Lemon Popsicle) — itself a nostalgic look back at wayward Tel Aviv youth in the　late 1950s — premiered and became a national sensation.

Nostalgia Online also publishes an online magazine called Kova Tembel (in Hebrew) distributed free to 146,000 subscribers, runs an information center and also answers individual questions about the various historical aspects of Israeli culture and heritage.

The Nostalgia Online team assists organizations and institutions in creating displays for employees and/or the public and has also formed a non-government organization (NGO) for the purpose of establishing a museum of Israeli nostalgia.

You can show your support by joining their Facebook page. And if you’ve got any Israeli knick-knacks, bric-a-brac or any other cool old stuff lying around, take a picture and share — it will surely be appreciated!

For old time’s sake, here’s the trailer for Lemon Popsicle.

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Foto Friday – Benefits of Rain

February 10, 2012 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Blogging, Entertainment, Environment, Foto Friday, General, Israeliness, Life, News, Picture of the Week, Pop Culture, Sports, Travel, tv 

It’s still raining and I’m still not a fan. My surly attitude notwithstanding, the benefits are beginning to make themselves felt: the water level at Lake Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee) rose 55 centimeters in January, and as of yesterday stood at 212.94m below sea level. Which means we’ve just passed the lower red line of 213m below sea level. That’s good news. Or, as Tweeted by Kinbot, a computer generated daily report of the Kinneret water level, “Good show, Israel!”.

Tel Aviv Beach – Wintertime 2012
Photo by Ilan Malester, Courtesy of the Ministry of the Environment

Well, yes. It’s definitely an improvement but reaching the line doesn’t mean we’re done with the drought yet. The lower red line is a fluctuating government-recommended level below which water should no longer be drawn from the lake. Beyond it, there’s the black line, at 215 meters below sea level, the point at which pumping water becomes dangerous and must be shut down. We hit that on November 29, 2001. There is also an upper red line, set at 208.80 meters below sea level, which is the high-water mark. We haven’t been there since the great flood of Tiberias in 1934. So, we still have a way to go.

The rain has also brought out Israel’s storm chasers in droves. Jessica wrote about these hardy — or do I mean foolhardy? — folks two years ago. Since then, the popularity of driving 4x4s and jeeps into the desert or the mountains in search of rushing water has only increased, judging from the activity on the various storm chaser forums, chat groups and recently posted YouTube videos. Even the Society for Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI) has gotten into the storm chaser act, offering hikes specially geared towards those with taste for flash. Er… flash floods, that is.

For those of us who’d rather chase storms from the comfort of a nice warm living room, here are a few recent clips, courtesy of the Israel Nature & Parks Authority.

Floods in the northern Dead Sea region – January 2012

Floods in the Carmel mountain range – Nahal Oron

Initial moments of a flood in Judean Desert dry river beds

And here’s a local news item from northern Israel, reporting on snow on Mount Hermon and flash floods in the Golan and Galilee.

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Icecream for breakfast

February 4, 2012 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Blogging, Entertainment, Food, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Life 

Ben and Jerry's Israel ad for their ice cream club

According to my calendar, today was International Ice Cream for Breakfast Day. I always thought that certain friends of mine down our Jerusalem block were the creators of this particular chag, LOL, but it turns out — thanks to the Facebook world — that they’re not, and many other communities worldwide celebrate the day.

In fact, when I typed ice cream for breakfast into the search bar of Facebook, dozens of posts popped up for celebrants around the globe, from Mexico, Seattle, Louisiana and Philly to Maine, Albany and Shanghai.

According to Serious Eats, all you need to do is eat ice cream, for breakfast, and on the first Saturday in February.

We’ve always celebrated on Saturday, Shabbat in our house, which is the only day that we’re all around, fairly calm and relaxed, and have the time to enjoy the wonders of ice cream for one’s first food of the day. Usually it’s a good selection of Ben & Jerry’s, sometimes with homemade ice cream as well, thanks to my nephew Natan, the artisanal ice cream connoisseur. Toppings? Not always, but it does add to the experience.

Serious Eats also adds that “the holiday was started in the 1960s in Rochester, New York by Florence Rappaport, who let her kids eat ice cream for breakfast on the first Saturday of February to make winter more bearable for them. Now this custom is done all over the world, from Minnesota to Israel to Australia.”

Turns out, there’s an official IEICFBD blog, where you can list your own celebration — there are four in Israel, including one in my own neighborhood of Talpiot (I think that one is hosted by other neighbors of ours) and one down at Kibbutz Ketura, where given the hot weather nearly year-round and a surfeit of American-born kibbutzniks, they’ve been celebrating for some 30 years.

It comes down to the fact that you just need to celebrate sometimes, and even with the upcoming holiday of Tu B’shvat, which, lord knows, offers ample opportunity for celebration, February can be a bleak month. So, if you missed it today, go for it next week. We won’t tell.

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