Made in Israel

April 21, 2012 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Business, design, education, Entertainment, Environment, General, health, Holidays, Israeliness, Life, Medical Breakthroughs, Music, Science, Social Justice, Technology 
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It’s getting to be that time of year again – where the national holidays come fast and furious. Holocaust Remembrance Day just passed and this week we have Memorial Day and Independence Day right on top of each other as Israel prepares to celebrate its 64th birthday.

While there’s no shortage of subjects to be worried, fearful, skeptical or angry about, I would say that overall, the country’s in pretty good shape. But if the Iranian threat, the political situation, the social welfare crisis and the glut of TV reality shows are getting you down, take a couple minutes and check out this clip that ISRAEL21c’s Nicky Blackburn and Viva Sara Press have put together.

In addition to providing some surprising information about just what Israel has achieved in the past 63 years, it will undoubtedly raise your morale and have you whistling a happy tune going into the coming eventful week. Happy Independence Day Israel! We’re proud of you.

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Where to Find Good Levant Food Recipes

April 20, 2012 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Environment, Food 

food blog recipes
I spend a lot of my time thinking about the environment and the things we can do to tread lighter on this planet. Home cooking is a big favorite of mine, because any items you can buy in bulk or without packaging like fruits and vegetables for instance, the lighter you tread on this earth. The health benefits are enormous. Processed and packaged foods are full of preservatives and chemicals to extend shelf life, and manufactured flavors to enhance taste. Keeping it real, by that I mean home cooking, the environment and your body will thank you.

If you know something about Israelis, one of the first things that will come to mind is their food. Israelis, unlike Jews you might meet in America, do not necessarily eat potato kugal or gefilte fish. In fact the first time I tried these things were not in the kitchens of native Israelis, but Americans who’d immigrated to Israel. The palate of the average Israeli is diverse. The question is if you love to cook where do you find good blog food recipes? With so many blogs out there, the choices are enormous.

My personal website Green Prophet provides a Middle Eastern inspired food recipes every week thanks to Miriam, and if you like fusion and the Israeli style of cooking another favorite cooking and food blog that I personally love is Food Bridge. It focuses on Israel as part of the Levant, and not separate from it.

On Food Bridge Sarah Melamed pens an incredibly local and current food blog on food from the land of Israel and beyond. She goes way beyond any type of Jewish stereotype you might find, embracing local cultures and traditions from nearby Lebanon, Syria, and the Palestinian Authority. She writes about what foods are in season, where to get them, and pictures them so wonderfully that you might even be inspired to start a food blog yourself. The blog is great for Americans, because as an American Sarah is one of the few I know who lets her past go and really celebrates the food diversity in the Levant region, without politics, without religion. Give her blog a taste.

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Israeli Pebble Carpet Designed for Heart Health?

April 20, 2012 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: design, Environment 

Neora Zigler pebbles carpet
An Israeli designer creates a rug that incorporates real pebbles. Walking on them is like a foot massage!

It’s pretty common these days to see pottery and household objects from Israel that are designed to resemble nature.
While you may see pathways made of pebbles at resorts and spas, it’s not likely you’ll find them inside your carpets. Inspired by the east, Israeli designer Neora Zigler chose to sew pebbles inside layers of synthetic fabric and the result is her Pebbles Carpet. Zigler says it forces one to walk slowly, with concentration, but I bet walking on it is good for your health, and heart. Read more

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City non-planning

April 18, 2012 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: design, education, Environment, General, History and Culture, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life, Politics 

The Hursha event flyer

I posted back in November about some neighborhood excitement over the planned recycling area in the Hursha, a neighborhood playground and garden. At the time, we were all disappointed because while an area had been paved for recycling bins, no bins were ever brought to the paved area and it seemed clear all these months later that it just wasn’t going to happen. Meanwhile, the garden’s been taking off, as well as more heavy-duty recycling in other nearby neighborhoods, enabling people to gather their cardboard, batteries, plastics and metals more easily. It’s still nothing like cities that I know in the States, where you just bring your recyclables curbside on the appointed day (yes, I know people who have to freeze their garbage because pickup is so infrequent). But, it’s something.

And then, a major scoop on why it is that the Hursha recycling area never happened. During a ‘heppening’ — Hebrew for a gathering, an event — that was taking place yesterday at the Hursha playground, sponsored by a local Jerusalem political and social action party, a municipality official taking part in the event told a friend that the reason the bins were never put in place is because the space wasn’t planned well, and there was no way the recycling trucks would ever be able to access the bins.

The Hursha, you see, is situated between two streets, Efrata and Korei Hadorot, accessed by what we call a simta, a kind of open alley or path that connects the two streets. The recycling space is at the front of the park, about midway up the simta, formally known as Barzilay Street, and therefore inaccessible to cars or trucks. It’s quite true, there is no way to access large recycling bins and clearly someone in the municipality made a big mistake when they poured the cement for this particular corner.

So that’s it. No cardboard or metal recycling corner for Talpiot, or not yet. And it seems doubtful that the city would post an apology sign, letting us know that they screwed up. Instead, the orange-painted area has become a default hangout space for parents and their toddling kids, until someone comes up with another, better idea.

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Foto Friday – The Innovators Way

March 30, 2012 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Business, education, Environment, Foto Friday, General, health, Medical Breakthroughs, News, Picture of the Week, Profiles, Science, Technology, tv 

The Innovators Way is a new photo exhibition showcasing 27 researchers whose innovations, developed at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, improve quality of life and human welfare worldwide in fields such as health, safety, environment and nutrition.

The exhibition celebrates the work of those researchers whose initiatives have led to commercial products on the market today.

These creative initiatives came about as the result of intensive and wide-ranging scientific research, followed by patent registration, commercialization and finally marketing by Israeli and international companies.

None of this would have been possible without Yissum – the Technology Transfer Company of the Hebrew University. Yissum is solely responsible for the commercialization of innovations and technologies originating at the university. The company was among the first of its kind in the world when it was established in 1964, and is today ranked among the world’s 15 leading companies in this field.

To date, Yissum has registered more than 7,000 patents on more than 2,000 inventions, and has established 72 spin-off companies.

The scientists and innovations documented in the new exhibition include:

Prof. Haim D. Rabinowitch (right) and Prof. Nachum Kedar established the foundations for the introduction of genes for extended fruit shelf-life into standard tomato cultivars, turned cherry tomatoes into a global commodity, and developed the cluster tomatoes. (The original research was conducted jointly with Prof. Yosef Mizrahi of Ben Gurion University and Dr. Ehud Kopeliovitch. The seeds are produced and manufactured by Vilmorin (France), Monsanto (USA), Syngenta (Switzerland) and Bayer (Germany).

Prof. Marta Weinstock-Rosin who developed Exelon, a medicine prescribed for people with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease. Exelon can slow the progression of the disease in a significant proportion of patients and improve cognitive function in some subjects. Exelon is manufactured by Novartis (Switzerland).

Professor of Chemistry David Avnir, developer of Sol-Gel Technology for the formation of new materials which combine the properties of glasses or ceramics with the properties of organic and biological compounds. Applications of Sol-Gel Technology have been developed in the fields of optics, catalysis, sensing, polymers, biochemistry and pharmacy. Many researchers at the Hebrew University have participated in the various developments. Sol-Gel Technologies, Inc. (Israel) was established to commercialize products based on these newly invented materials, and is active especially in the fields of dermatology and agriculture.

Prof. Alexander Vainstein, the Wolfson Family Professor of Floriculture, who developed the MemoGenetechnology which enables the creation of new traits in plants and the enhancement of agricultural crops through genetic modification. MemoGene is a groundbreaking process for targeted and site-specific plant genetic modification, using highly innovative novel tools for genomic modification. The technology, which was patented jointly by Yissum and Danziger Innovations (Israel), is applicable to all plants.

Prof. Shmuel Peleg has developed technologies upon which two Israeli startups were founded. One technology creates panoramic stereo images from photographs taken by an ordinary camera, which has been commercialized by HumanEyes Technologies (Israel). The second is a technique for video synopsis, which enables hours of video surveillance footage to be viewed in minutes, and which has been commercialized by BriefCam. [Full disclosure: I work for BriefCam and know Prof. Peleg personally. I also thought the photo really captured his spirit.]

The exhibition’s photographer, Nati Shohat, is the founder of Flash 90, a photographic agency that supplies images to newspapers, magazines and other customers in Israel and abroad. Shohat’s news photography and artistic and portrait work have been exhibited in many venues and in publications such as Stern Magazine, Paris Match, Le Monde, Time and others.

Hebrew University has about 1,000 senior faculty members and a student body of approximately 23,000. To date, it has conferred over 120,000 degress. The University has some100 research centers and more than 4,000 research projects. Faculty members and alumni have been awarded 8 Nobel Prizes, 1 Fields Medal, 269 Israel Prizes, 12 Wolf Prizes, 18 EMET Prizes and 41 Rothschild Prizes. Founders include Chaim Weizmann, Albert Einstein, Martin Buber, Chaim Nachman Bialik.

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