Israeli film ‘Ajami’ headed to the Oscars?
Filed under: A New Reality, Crime, General, Movies, Pop Culture, coexistence
There’s something about Israeli films – they keep getting recognized for excellence. After two years in a row of Oscar nominations for Best Foreign Language film – for Beaufort and Waltz with Bashir respectively, it looks like we might get a hat trick.
The Academy of Arts and Sciences announced on Wednesday their shortlist of nine films out of hundreds of applicants for the category – and it included Ajami, Israel’s official selection for the Oscars.
This year’s shortlist also includes films from Argentina, Australia, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Kazakhstan, The Netherlands and Peru. The final five nominees will be announced when all the Oscar nominations are revealed, in a press conference on February 2.
Hannah Brown, The film critic for The Jerusalem Post, described Ajami as a gritty drama about crime in Jaffa. It was co-directed by two first-timers, Scandar Copti, an Israeli Arab Christian, and Yaron Shani, an Israeli Jew.
The film – which is in both Hebrew and Arabic – received a special mention at Cannes, as well as winning the Ophir Award, the Israeli Oscar, which made it Israel’s official selection.
Ajami is competing for one of the five nominated movies with Germany’s “The White Ribbon,” which won the 2010 Golden Globe for best foreign movie, “El Secreto de Sus Ojos” from Argentina; “Samson and Delilah,” from Australia; “The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner,” from Bulgaria; “A Prophet,” from France; “Kelin from Kazakhstan; and “Winter in Wartime,” from The Netherlands, in which a Dutch boy aids a downed British pilot during World War II.
Maybe this will be the year – following the nomination of nine Israeli films in past years – that one of ours – especially a ‘coexistence’ project like ‘Ajami’ will walk away with Israel’s first Oscar.
Balancing the heroic and the profane
Filed under: A New Reality, Business, Crime, General, Israeliness, Life, Politics, Pop Culture, Social Justice
With the death toll due to last week’s earthquake in Haiti rising to unprecedented numbers, there’s been a lot of coverage in the Israeli media – and resultant pride – about our rescue operations and field hospital which has been finding trapped victims, treating them, and even helping a woman give birth to a baby, which she subsequently named ‘Israel.’
But just like in other countries like the US, where coverage of the tragedy is competing for space with the Jay Leno – Conan O’Brien NBC fiasco, there are other less noble stories here which remind us that we shouldn’t pat ourselves on the back as higher developed forms of life too hard.
Goel Ratzon in court last week.
Near the end of last week, the police disclosed the results of a year-long investigation culminating in the arrest of Tel Aviv resident Goel Ratzon, a self-professed cult leader accused of enslavement and rape of some of the 32 women who lived with him as his ‘wives,’ along with almost 90 children their unions produced. He is also suspected of extortion, incitement to arson and solicitation to commit suicide.
According to Ha’aretz, police suspect that Ratzon imposed a harsh and unforgiving regime on his household, which had a rule book complete with punishments. Prohibitions in the book include interrupting Ratzon, idling, arguing with him or with each other, and laughing indoors.
The arrest followed a long investigation involving hundreds of police and Labor and Social Welfare personnel, who originally began probing Ratzon back in 2006. They evidently handled the investigation with kid gloves out of the fear that Ratzon had forged a suicide pact with his ‘wives’ in the event the apartments they lived in were ever raided.
While not as horrifying, but still given ample space in Israel’s leading daily paper Yediot Aharonot, was the disclosure last week that a former housekeeper for Sara Netanyahu, the wife of our prime minister, was suing her for a basket of grievances including mental abuse, humiliation and exploitation.
The 44-year-old woman – Lillian – claimed that her relationship with Sara involved constant humiliation and an overall hostile atmosphere. According to the paper’s report on the lawsuit, Netanyahu expected Lillian to be on call 24 hours a day, and once even phoned her at 2 a.m. to reprimand her for failing to properly cover a pillow.
She also charged that Sara forced her other employees to call her “Mrs. Sara Netanyahu” and would often boast that she had a beautiful house, telling her housekeeping staff how lucky they were to be working for the Netanyahu family and saying she was the “mother of the State of Israel.”
The Prime Minister’s Office responded by saying that the lawsuit was full of “lies and slander,” and that extensive coverage of the story in Yediot Aharonot was part of a “tendentious media campaign lacking any journalistic ethics.”
“In total contrast to what is written in the lawsuit, the plaintiff Lillian received warm and affection treatment from Mrs. Netanyahu. It is this treatment that led her to stay six years with the Netanyahu family,” the statement read.
Whether the claims are true or not is for the court to decide – but many are claiming that the ’scoop’ by Yediot was part of a business vendetta against competitor Yisrael Hayom, which is owned by Bibi-friendly American mogul Sheldon Edelson.
Given away daily as a handout at train and bus stations, Yisrael Hayom is rapidly overtaking Yediot as the most-read paper in Israel. So true or not, the case against Sara – whom the Israeli public always loves to read about – was a savvy business move by the tabloid, which managed to squeeze in on its front page something about dozens of thousands being killed in an earthquake somewhere.
Mobile clubbing in Tel Aviv
Filed under: A New Reality, Crime, General, Israeliness, Life, Music, Pop Culture, coexistence
Tel Aviv’s fun-loving clubbers won’t be denied. Following the police closure on New Year’s Eve of some of the city’s prominent night spots due to alleged overcrowding, the dance-deprieved residents are taking their moves to the streets in protest.
The plan? To take portable music players and their headphones and silently dance all night at Gan Meir park in the middle of the city – in an act of mobile clubbing.
May, one of the event’s organizers, told The Jerusalem Post that the clubbing community feels that the city and the law enforcement agencies are trying to delegitimize them.
This is our way of protesting in a quiet and fun way, so that nobody can claim we are disrupting the peace.
For several years now the city has been corralling all the nightclubs into special enclosures – city zones that are dedicated to nightlife – and many people feel that it’s ruining the character of the city that is well known for its open and festive atmosphere. We feel that what the police did last week was going too far. We understand the need for safety, but we feel that they are picking on the wrong people. Instead of going after places because they are overcrowded, the police should be going after the places where there are fights or where alcohol is being sold to minors.”
On New Year’s Eve the police closed down 10 clubs, which they said were dangerously overcrowded. Shortly after midnight, the officers turned off the music, sent the partygoers away and issued 30-day closure orders to the clubs’ owners.
Tel Aviv’s finest said that on New Year’s Eve, officers inspected 148 nightclubs, of which 10 were closed down, some because of overcrowding, some because of fighting and some because they were selling alcohol to minors.
According to the police, some of the clubs were found to have more than two-and-a-half times the permitted amount of people. A spokesman told The Post:
“We have no desire to ruin the city’s night life, but those kinds of levels present a real danger. Never mind a bomb, in such close quarters even a fight or fireworks going off can lead to disaster.”
Whatever the result of the conflict, Gan Meir is going to be the place to be tonight – after shul, of course.
‘I just went out to get milk, and I’ll be right back’
Filed under: A New Reality, Blogging, Business, Crime, General, Israeliness
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.
Giving insurance companies an (even worse) name
Filed under: A New Reality, Business, Crime, General, Israeliness, Life
This is about as mundane a subject as is out there, but it certainly reflects that the reality of living in Israel has very little to do with the headlines most people read, and more to do with the trials and tribulations we all face no matter where we live.
I wrote a few weeks ago about the hassles of making an insurance claim after being sideswiped in a traffic accident. Well, it all seemingly worked out well, and yesterday – less than two weeks of laying out over $1,000 to fix the car and sending in the claim to the insurance company (Migdal, in case anybody is interested, one of the country’s biggest insurance companies) – I received a check in the mail.
Hurray for a victory over Israeli bureaucracy, right? Not quite. The check was made out for the amount of the claim, minus 10%. An accompanying letter stated that the deduction was due to ‘contributing negligence’ on my part.
WTF? Now, a quick recap. I was driving down a road in Jerusalem in the Romema industrial area. My nemesis wanted to turn right onto my road from a small side street with a stop sign. After stopping and supposedly looking both ways, she turned right and clomped into my right back door as I was driving, minding my own business.
Was this 10% contributing negligence? I think not. Luckily Migdal’s claim manager’s name and number were on the letter, so I called her- and got through to her! I explained to her that I was not even one percent responsible for the accident, and when I asked her to explain her reasoning, she said, “do you even know the traffic rules? Do you know that at any intersection with a stop sign, that the driver with the right of way has a responsibility to slow down?”
I said I was not aware of that rule, and that even the driver of the other car, whom she insures, admitted to being 100% responsible for the accident.
“Well, that’s what I decided. There are some claims I take off 50% for negligence, I only took 10% off of yours,” she said.
“But you weren’t even there. You don’t know what happened,” I answered.
“So what? That’s the way it is.”
I realized that this was a futile conversation and ended it, and also realized it was a pathetic attempt by Migdal to save a few measly hundred shekels by bullying and shortchanging innocent victims of accidents.
So, if you ever get hit by another driver, and think that you’re going to receive complete reimbursement for the damages rendered, you might be better off settling with the driver without involving the cheating, conniving insurance companies.
The week that was
Filed under: A New Reality, Crime, General, Israeliness, Life, War
The pace of news events developing and exploding into headlines is always seemingly propelled by steroids here in Israel. There’s never a minute to rest, and the news addiction that most of the public suffers from isn’t helped any by half hour radio bulletins, that annoying beep beep beep of the hourly news reports and nightly hour-long TV newscasts that are holy in some households.
But even veteran observers are hard pressed to remember a week of news events – aside from wars and intifadas – that rolled in like a tsunami, pushing the previous one off the front page with an ease that is creepy and disconcerting.
First up at the beginning of the week was the disclosure that police had arrested an American immigrant – Yaakov Teitel – a resident of a West Bank outpost on suspicion of murdering two Palestinians in 1997 and carrying out a string of previously unsolved hate attacks against other targets, including planting a pipe bomb outside the home of prominent left-wing Israeli professor Zeev Sternhall which injured him, and sending a bomb package to a family of messianic Jews from Ariel, seriously wounding their 15-year-old son.
This was huge news and the media covered it from every angle, from settlements spawning extremism to questioning whether the Law of Return which enables all Jews to immigrate to Israel should be reconsidered, or at least more stringent.
But no sooner had we started to digest this horrific news, Israelis were presented with something even more uncomprehensible the next day. The police announced they had caught the suspect in the brutal murder of six members of a Russian immigrant family in Rishon Lezion last month. It was considered the worst murder case in Israel’s history, with many pundits speculating that it involved the Russian mafia and a hired killer.
However, police said that the suspect, Damian Karlik, 38, who was arrested with his wife, parents and two other female relatives, killed the Oshrenko family because he had been fired as a waiter a couple months earlier from the family’s restaurant.
Dmitry Oshrenko fired Karlik, who was headwaiter at the Oshrenkos’ high-end restaurant Premier, after accusing him of stealing a bottle of vodka. Karlik said he felt humiliated and began to nurture his hatred for his former boss. Expressing no remorse at the murders, which included two young children, Krilik allegedly bragged to the police that he was a “bad motherfu**er.”
Disoriented at the front pages of our newspapers being turned into True Crimes magazine, we felt things returning to ‘normal’ yesterday with the disclosure of a dramatic high seas capture by Israeli naval commandos off the coast of Cyprus of the “Francop”, an Antigua-flagged freighter packed with 3,000 Iranian rockets and shells headed for Hizbullah in Lebanon.
Related
If it had achieved reaching its destination, the shipment would have provided Hizbullah with almost the entire rocket arsenal they unleashed against Israel in the 2006 Second Lebanon War.
Israeli sources say the shipment violates not only the UN Security Council resolutions from the 2006 war, but also those that forbid Iran from engaging in any arms exports. More importantly, it shows how Iran is attempting to incite the region, coming a day after Hamas in Gaza tested an Iranian-supplied rocket that has a range to reach Tel Aviv.
But hey, these are headlines that we’re familiar with -Iran, rockets, terror. However, by this morning, I found myself yearning for one of those days when the worst thing that could happen was The York Yankees winning the World Series, or narrow-minded citizens from my home state of Maine repealing same sex marriages. Both of those items are indeed reflections of a sorry state of affairs, but I’ll take them over the world gone crazy pace of news events we’ve had to put up with this week here in Israel.
Nostalgia Sunday – Gil Gibli Investigates Past Crimes
Filed under: Art, Crime, General, History and Culture, Nostalgia Sunday, Profiles
Artist Gil Gibli is perhaps best known in Israel for the pen and ink cross-hatched portraits of Israel’s business elite that illustrate the pages of business daily Globes each evening. But Gibli is also a noted police forensic sketch artist — whose work has been cited in international professional literature — and when he looks back at the past, he often does so as an investigator into crimes whose trails have gone cold.
On his website, Gibli describes several cases where his forensic art brought the truth to light: reconstructing a portrait of Warsaw Ghetto uprising leader Pavel Frankel (pictured left) based solely on eye-witness accounts, bringing together two Yom Kippur War compatriots after 35 years, and the most chilling case: identifying a man, a nameless drifter, killed in a terror attack. The story – and Gibli’s uncanny ability to elicit details from eye-witnesses – was documented in the award-winning documentary No. 17 is Anonymous.
More of Gibli’s work may be found at his virtual gallery. He’s also a jazz aficionado and portraits include a series of jazz greats - more nostalgia, but of a cooler, gentler kind.
Gibl’s YouTube channel has several videos (in Hebrew) about his work.
A dark day in Rishon Lezion
Three members of the Oshrenko family who were discovered dead on Saturday.
The security fence, for all its ugliness and negative implications, solved the problem for the short term. But the problem facing Israel today can’t be solved by a fence or wall – unless each Israeli builds their own and isolates themselves.
The news that greated people on Saturday, or Saturday night if they’re religiously observant, talked of police calling it the ‘worst crime’ in Israel’s history being committed. A day after her Revital Oshrenko celebrated her third birthday in her Rishon Lezion home with her family – grandfather and grandmother Edward and Ludmilla, both 56; parents Tattiana, 28, and Dimitry, 32; and 4-month-old brother Netanel – the whole family was stabbed to death and their apartment set on fire in an apparent effort to cover up the murders. Some of the victims were said to have been stabbed repeatedly.
Rescue services only discovered the bodies when they were called to the home after a report of a fire. While a gag order has been placed on the police investigation, family friends and acquaintances, including Tourism Minister Stas Misezhnikov and the mayor of Rishon Lezion, said that the family members were model citizens.
Suspicions are rampant that the murders were ‘business’ related, pertaining to restaurants and clubs catering to Russian immigrants that Dimitry owned and operated. The murder is just the latest in a series of sensationalist killings that have taken place this year in the country, where non-terror murders were once considered a rare occurrence.
I would kind of prefer it going back to the old ways – at least then you knew who the enemy was. I still feel safe here, walking around at night, or sending my children unsupervised on buses. But slowly, with Israel’s social fabric in danger of being ripped asunder, there’s a growing sense of lawlessness – when I’m out jogging at night now, sometimes I think twice about running past a group of teens gathered at a street corner – it’s a feeling that a security fence will be powerless to prevent.
IDF chief of staff confined to quarters
Filed under: A New Reality, Crime, General, Immigrant Moments
When I was in basic training in the IDF many years ago, I had a leave cancelled because while cleaning my M-16 rifle, I lost a little internal pin. Apparently, I wasn’t the first, because the pin even had a name – the Shabbat pin – because if you lost it, it meant you stayed on the base for Shabbat.
I flashbacked to those days when I was reading last week that a revolver was stolen out of the Tel Aviv office of IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi. The thief, a young soldier on guard inside Ashkenazi’s inner sanctum, also stole his credit card data which was used by a third party to purchase NIS 2,000 worth of items. The decorative handgun was a gift to Ashkenazi from a US military counterpart.
According to Ha’aretz, the investigation into the incident exposed serious lapses in the arrangements for protecting Ashkenazi. Along with the security provided by the General Staff Security Unit, a number of positions on the office’s security perimeter are still being carried out by regular troops assigned to guard duty. These troops are not required to go through rigorous combat training, nor are their backgrounds substantially screened. The Military Police’s investigation revealed that the suspect had been involved in fights and a stabbing, and had piled up debts to underworld figures.
So, I was wondering, what would be the appropriate punishment for Ashkenazi for the breach of security? If I got confined to the base for a weekend for losing my Shabbat pin, I think he should at least have to do a couple shifts of guard duty at the Kirya, the IDF headquarters where he sits. However unlikely that scenario is, it somehow makes me feel better about my army service.
Dudu Topaz, the King of comedy, ends his life
Filed under: A New Reality, Crime, General, Israeliness, Pop Culture
Waking up this morning to the news that disgraced entertainer Dudu Topaz had ended his life by hanging himself in his Ramle jail while awaiting trial was an inevitable end to his sorry saga.
Topaz was going to be tried for initiating a series of violent attacks on top Israeli TV executives who had spurned his ideas for TV vehicles for himself. It was a case of the worst of Israeli society, with Topaz hiring goons to bash in the execs. A judge at an initial hearing for the case today described Topaz as a public menace.
It was a huge fall from grace for the comic who dominated television in the 1990s when the Israeli cable industry was getting on its feet. His unsophisticated, often vulgar humor made him a ‘people’s’ entertainer, however he was never fully accepted by the the intelligentsia.
I remember soon after my aliya watching him host an Israeli version of The Dating Game. My wife and I would guffaw as Topaz blurted out non sequitors and insults – like a combination of Don Rickles and Howard Stern. But you could tell that there was something about his delivery that showed that it wasn’t all in good fun.
And his mean streak was noticeable long before attacks. In 1995 he publicly attacked a television critic and crushed his glasses following a bad review. In 2003 he was accused of sexual harassment and indecent acts, although the two cases collapsed for lack of evidence. That same year he bit a female Latin-American soap star on the arm for no apparent reason during a live broadcast.
Despite his knack for controversy, Topaz had all but disappeared from TV screens recently, as younger hosts and reality shows took over what was once his domain. I don’t know if there’s a uniquely Israeli angle to this story, as former celebrities missing the spotlight and resorting to crime can happen anywhere.
But because we’re such a small country, there’s a sense of familiarity here with celebrities – they’re not in some ivory tower – they still go to the same restaurants and makolets, and pay the same mortgages (albeit a little easier than the rest of us).
I don’t think any of the victim’s of Topaz’s unbalanced cruelty would have wanted to see this ending to the story. They would have preferred that he suffer in prison. However, now the country will be spared a long trial filled with gossipy details of the attacks and the personalities behind them. It may be the most compassionate thing Topaz ever did for his viewing audience.
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