Celebrity Shavuot

June 2, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Entertainment, Food, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Israeliness, Movies, Music, Sports 

Shavuot partying in Tel Aviv

In researching a certain Shavuot article that then got killed, as sometimes happens in the professional writing world, I researched some somewhat interesting info about what Israeli celebrities think of Shavuot, the holiday that often gets ignored. Here’s what they — and I — had to say:

Despite being yet another three-day school vacation right before Chofesh Hagadol, the big school break, Shavuot is a very Israeli kind of chag, and even Sabra celebrities, including those not currently living in the land, endeavor to celebrate. Take former Miss Israel Gal Gadot – who currently holds her own as an ex-Mossad agent with Vin Diesel in the latest “Fast Five” movie – and is planning on making her specialty cheese lasagna for her family’s big Shavuot feast. “The reason why I like this holiday is the food,” admits Gadot.

Tennis player Shahar Peer says she always anticipates her family’s festive Shavuot dinner with its plethora of fruit and dairy dishes.” “That’s the food that I love,” adds the tennis player, who often tweets about what she’s about to eat, whether its Belgian waffles and chocolate in Brussels or her plan to “eat the entire fridge” whenever she’s home.

Besides the dairy emphasis, Shavuot in Israel is still fairly agricultural in nature, with plenty of opportunities to celebrate the summer harvest. Peer remembers donning a wreath of flowers when she was in the third grade and participating in a school play, a fairly common scene around this time of year. Some cities have tractor parades in the days leading up to Shavuot, marking the farming contribution of the country’s moshavim and kibbutzim, with tractors making their way from the farms outside the city.

Model and actress Gadot reminisces about going with her family as a child to a moshav or kibbutz to watch the cows being milked. She also remembers having water fights with her friends, while Sha’anan Streett, lead singer of hip hop/funk band Hadag Nachash, has a vivid memory of dumping an entire pail of water on his synagogue rabbi, who only grimaced and went on with his sermon.

Water fights a while back

Streett was only following tradition. Shavuot has always been Israel’s water festival, as kids swarm the streets with water guns and balloons, celebrating an early-in-the-season water day. Some claim it’s a custom from North Africa, where Jews equated Torah with water – both life-giving sources. It could also be because Shavuot falls in the late spring/early summer, when the weather starts heating up.

For psychic Uri Geller, Shavuot is very special, particularly the learning aspect of the holiday, which he says he tries to do from his home in London. “What’s interesting to me about Shavuot is its spiritual angle and the aura and the energy that emanates fro this holiday,” he says. “It is the holy holiday of the achievement of spirituality and you count back from Passover, it’s 50 days, it’s like going up a ladder that counts 50 steps and 50 in the Kabbalah is the number of infinity, so it has significant ritualistic meaning to me of spirituality.”

Whatever your angle, enjoy your celebrations.

Tags: , , , , ,

Where to eat?

May 30, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Food, General, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life 

From Jerusalem to Rechovot

Having lived here for just about 16 years, I’ve lost touch with the way one does things in the States. Like searching and finding a good restaurant in a neighborhood other than your own. If someone needs a restaurant recommendation in Jerusalem, even Tel Aviv, I can hold my own. But send me farther afield and unless I’ve actually been somewhere that’s worth recommending in the last year or so, I’d be hard-pressed to offer an idea.

When those moments arrive, I often turn to the various local restaurant websites, such as eluna (for kosher restaurants in Israel), 2eat, or rest.co.il. Eluna is pretty reliable, with its 10% off coupons and reader recommendations — although you do have to read between the lines, because one reader’s idea of a great meal is not necessarily yours. And the others are good in terms of the sheer breadth of information, but what’s up there depends on the restaurant and not all restaurants keep their pages up to date.

So when friends from the States wanted to meet us for dinner, and were staying in Rechovot, I immediately thought of nearby moshav restaurants and Facebooked a friend in Mazkeret Batya for recommendations. She came through, but most of her ideas were too far afield for us, beyond Rechovot and too long of a drive. We needed something meat, not in Tel Aviv, and within a 30-minute drive for each of us. The moshav restaurants I did find looked good — check out Cramim — but weren’t kosher, which didn’t work for us. When they nixed coming to the outskirts of Jerusalem, I sighed and told my husband that we were driving to Rechovot.

Now, where to eat in Rechovot? That wasn’t so hard, after Googling Rechovot, restaurants, kosher. We came up with Oro, a kind of fancy Moroccan restaurant that served good food, tagines and all kinds of ‘cigars’, but to my mind would have been better suited with a simpler, more homey kind of atmosphere. And, in very typical Israeli style, was housed in a mall — it used to be in a gas station, always a good bet for solid eateries, at least in this country.

But we ate our tagines, drank our wine and laughed and joked with each other and the waiter. Our friends were grateful that we drove out to them, and we left, knowing it had been a decent dinner, and worth the effort.

Tags: , ,

Nostalgia Sunday – In the public service

May 22, 2011 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Business, Entertainment, Food, General, health, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, Movies, News, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture, tv 

The news this week about Israel is so bleak and twisted that it seems only right to look back at simpler times. Way back before so-called Facebook revolutions could be beamed instantly over 24-hour new stations to a jaded world. Times when Israel had only one television station and each new public service announcement broadcast before the evening news was discussed in minute detail the next morning. Public service spots by ad men like director Yoram Levy that created entertainment out of the most mundane of topics. For example, national blood drives led by a little old lady trilling “taram tee dam, taram tee dam” as she skips gaily along.*

Ads promoting local produce (the eggplant segment is highly recommended)…

Milk, of course…

Even this warning about how to deal with suspicious objects is kind of fun…

And here’s a totally Eighties take on buying Made-in-Israel fashion!

* FYI: In Hebrew, taramti dam means “I donated blood”.

Tags:

Cooking up a brand for Israel

May 6, 2011 by · 2 Comments
Filed under: education, Entertainment, Food, General, Pop Culture 

Anyone who’s spent time in Israel knows that the culinary scene here is on par with anywhere else in the world. Top-line restaurants and chefs abound, not only in Tel Aviv, but even in the Jerusalem boondocks and beyond.

American fans of cooking shows will soon learn about some Israeli cooking secrets when two of the top chefs here appear on the popular shows Iron Chef and Chopped on the Food Network and Cooking Channel.

Omer Miller from the Dining Hall in Tel Aviv and Assaf Granit from Jerusalem’s Mahneyuda were chosen from of a list of 10 Israeli chefs compiled by Israeli government officials in the Foreign Ministry and the Israeli Consulate in New York, according to a report in Ynet. It’s part of the government’s rebranding efforts that have been going on for close to a decade and which organizations like ISRAEL21c have been directly involved with.

The government officials then approached the CEO of the channels, Brooke Johnson, and suggested that Israeli chefs be used on the shows, and the shidduch was made.

“I am very excited about being on ‘Iron Chef’,” says Miller, 30. “I watch the show regularly, and it’s a very impressive competition.

“It would be nice if they’d challenge me on the show with a certain kind of vegetable, because we have a huge selection of excellent vegetables in Israel. Eggplant, tomato, onion, hot pepper, even cucumber – you can play with each one of them and prepare interesting things.”

Granit, 32, is very excited too. “Omer and I belong to the new generation of chefs, which is greatly influenced from the older chefs, like Erez Komarovsky and Ezra Kedem, and I hope that sometime we’ll be able to say for certain that there is a thing called an Israeli culinary.

“I love such competitions,” adds Granit. “They bring the best out of me.”

And Israeli food, of course, brings out the best of the country. Sounds like a win win situation

Tags:

Heading up to Tel Aviv’s Fourth Floor

May 5, 2011 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Business, design, Food, General, Israeliness, Life 

Going to weddings in Tel Aviv is always an eye-opening experience – not only are the people shinier and sharper than your average Jerusalem event, but the locations also can provide a real insight into the treasures that the coastal city has to offer beneath its grimy exterior.

Last night was one such experience, as I attending the wonderfully festive wedding of Amir and Tamara at The Fourth Floor, just off the Ayalon Freeway in the heart of a dilapidated industrial zone. It could have been in SoHo.

Basically, you walk through a run down outdoor vestibule that looks like it could be a setting for a noir detective film scene in the 1960s and enter a small elevator in the equally drab entranceway of four-story warehouse-looking building.

When you exit on the fourth floor, however, you’re transported into a loft/open space as funky/elegant as you’re likely to find in Paris or New York. Overlooking a broad view of the city, The Fourth Floor’s 800 square meters – which they call ‘contemporary urban space’ – is stocked with original art works, unique design features, books and articles collected worldwide in stores and markets from around the world, as well as a gourmet kitchen providing some of the best food I’ve ever sampled at an Israeli wedding.

The modular setup of the room enables the staff – whose owners evidently also run two other establishments – Cafe Noir in Tel Aviv and Sebastian Restaurant in Herzliya Pituach – to adapt the facility to any number of intimate or large events.

The venue provided the perfectly unique setting for a perfectly unique wedding.

Tags:

Page 10 of 87« First...89101112...203040...Last »

 

© 2012 ISRAELITY | Sitemap