The Voice – Israeli style

January 13, 2012 by · 2 Comments
Filed under: A New Reality, Entertainment, General, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life, Music, Pop Culture, tv 

The Voice has conquered Israel. The singing competition/reality show which captivated the US last year debuted here last week and broke TV ratings records.

The first episode – aired by Reshet on Channel 2 on Saturday night – scored 43.4 percent rating of 1.6 million viewers. Remember, we only have eight million people in the whole country.

Just like the US version features celebrity judges/coaches Christina Aguilera, Cee Lo Green, Adam Levine, and Blake Shelton, the Israeli edition has its own star lineup – Sarit Hadad, Rami Kleinstein, Aviv Geffen and Shlomi Shabat. It’s been hyped to the hilt on TV promos, and newspaper features, so the anticipation for the first episode was high.

The premise of the show is centered on a blind audition process. The judges, with their seats turned away from the seven performers, have the length of each audition to decide whether to turn their seat around and pursue the singer for his or her team (and a season’s worth of coaching, performances and competitions) only by virtue of listening.

Among the seven competitors was one who raised the eyebrows of native English speakers – 23-year-old Kathleen Reiter, a new immigrant from Quebec. She belted out a version of Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” that had the judges swiveling around and facing her in seconds.

“How many years have you been here?” asked Kleinstein.

“I just got here a few days ago,” Reiter answered in fluent Hebrew, to the astonishment of the judges.

“Your voice is huge,” said Hadad, trying to recruit her with a common bond of “girl power.”

Geffen told her that he had a warm place in his heart for Montreal, where he frequently performed, and Kleinstein summed it up, saying “One thing is clear – we all want you.”

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Reiter eventually chose Hadad, and this weekend’s show will indicate whether she made a good choice. In the meantime, she’s happy to be in her new country, albeit equipped with decent Hebrew thanks to her upbringing with her Israeli parents who moved to the Montreal area from Kiryat Haim before she was born.

“I don’t know what the future holds, but I know that this is an amazing opportunity for me and a great start to what will hopefully be a great life here in Israel,” she told me during the week after her debut.

It’s not a bad start, indeed. How many other North Americans get off the boat and become national TV fixtures in their first few days in the country?

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Explaining flavor

January 9, 2012 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: design, Environment, Food, General, History and Culture, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness 

Chefs at work at Machneyuda

There are times, many times when I’m reading an Ha’aretz article about something — whatever — and I’m just stumped about what they’re trying to tell me, the reader. Consider the piece in last weekend’s Haaretz Magazine, “Creative, But is it Edible?”, about how — I think — local chefs go to incredible lengths to come up with innovative dishes. It takes a while for the writer to get to the idea that local chefs, mostly Tel Aviv chefs, of course, are aspiring to be the kind of chefs that create from scratch, not merely copying or interpreting but making new flavors, textures and, eventually, recipes. It takes a while because the piece begins with chefs in Spain, and while that’s interesting, it’s not clear what their connection is to us.

Anyway. I was pleased to find that they quoted Asaf Granit, one of the chefs from the very popular Machneyuda, which is in Jerusalem’s Machane Yehuda market and is considered one of Israel’s top restaurants right now. Unusual, really, as Jerusalem is seldom considered the have the best of anything trendy in this country. We may not care, but, sigh, I guess I do. So his contribution to this piece about coming up with unusual dishes was the following:

“Last week, there was a married couple and four young women here for a bachelorette party. We quickly got into a very interesting discussion and I decided to prepare a dish of beef tartare for them – right in their hands,” says Granit. “We put on their hands a layer of beef, onion, parsley and capers, all minced. We squeezed on some fresh lemon, drizzled a little olive oil, and all they had to do was lick their fingers.”

A traditional mahlabia

And down in Ashdod, a flourishing seaside city, Balzac’s Nati Shafrir (whose restaurant is possibly named after a very popular restaurant in NYC) is thinking about serving a dessert in a glass ashtray (you think there may just a little bit too much smoking around here?): He’s working on an “edible version of cigarette ash. It will be made of roasted coconut or cinnamon and cloves.”

Lovely. And, finally, a quote from Itai Rogozinsky, who owns the Vaniglia ice cream parlor chain and is most proud of his frozen yogurt made with rosewater, roasted pistachios and apricot jam, kind of a takeoff of mahalabia, a pudding dessert that is popular in many Arab countries. How does this boy who says the yogurt is “a nostalgic reminder of his childhood in Kochav Yair” — a suburban town east of Kfar Saba that has been around about 25 or so years, created by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to solidify the Green Line — know about mahalabia? Probably from the excursions his family used to take to nearby Nablus, Kalkiya and Tulkarm, three Arab towns in the vicinity.

It’s all good, drawing from memories and good flavors to create new tastes. And, interestingly, way down in the article an unnamed source commented that Israeli chefs just travel abroad to the chicest restaurants and come back to copy what they ate there. Would have liked a little more on that idea. Just a little context would help, oh Ha’aretz editors.

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New guy at Teva

January 3, 2012 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Business, General, health, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness 

The new guy

There’s another fairly well-known American running around town, and he’s making aliyah for the sake of his job, unlike long-time Israel Museum director James Snyder but similar to Bank of Israel governor Stanley Fischer. Interestingly, Jeremy Levin, the new CEO of Israeli pharmaceutical giant Teva, is also from South Africa — Fischer is from Zambia, part of South Central Africa — and is also an American citizen, although he has also lived in Zimbabwe, England, Switzerland and Israel.

And, like Fischer, Levin also speaks Hebrew, not however, as well as Fischer; not yet, that is.

What Teva is known for...

Like others in his position — several Maccabi Tel Aviv and Haifa basketball players (the teams require a certain number of Israeli citizens on the court during a game, so they recruited Jewish Americans), in addition to central bank governor Fischer — the CEO of Teva has to be Israeli, in addition to fairly knowledgeable about pharmaceuticals, which Levin is, as a former executive at Bristol Myers Squibb, and several other drug companies.

Of course, it’s a fairly major deal to become the chief executive of Teva, which has become one of the world’s largest drugmakers. But nice to know they also require their chief to be a local.

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A very merry Christmas

December 27, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence, General, Holidays, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life, Religion 

It’s always a little shocking how Christmas can just come and go around here with little awareness that it’s been and gone. Sure, there are the Christmas decorations on the southern end of Hebron Road, heading toward Bethlehem. And there are the occasional articles or public service announcements about where to pick up one’s KKL Christmas trees, or storefronts decorated with Christmas-like ornaments. There’s also my upstairs neighbor who decorated his window box plants with Christmas lights that twinkle from 6 pm to 10 pm most nights. I’m not sure where he got the idea — he’s a fairly born-and-bred Israeli — but the awareness is out there.

I had an interesting conversation with a local minister about Christmas in Israel, and how it characterizes itself in this land of many Jews, whether identified or not. Reverend David Neuhaus, the Latin Patriarchal Vicar at the Saint James Vicariate for Hebrew Speaking Catholics in Israel, said the following in Expeditions:

“It’s really more meaningful in Israel,” says Neuhaus. “Christmas is ultimately religious here because there’s nothing commercial or social going on, and there’s so much of that elsewhere. And then you’re celebrating it here, where everything happened.”

These days, it’s a diverse crowd celebrating Jesus’ birth. You’ve got foreign workers from all over the world, Christian Arabs, missionary types, pilgrims, and the smattering of Israelis who just like to attend Christmas Mass, which smacks of ‘chul‘ — the world out there — for them. Indu, a Sri Lankan woman I know, lit up when I asked her today about her Christmas. While it was bittersweet because she wasn’t with her four kids and family, she got to go to Bethlehem twice, on a van chartered by her and her friends.

“It was mobbed,” she told me. “So many people celebrating together.”

A different kind of Christmas, which is hopefully a good thing.

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Hadarat Nashim

December 23, 2011 by · 3 Comments
Filed under: A New Reality, education, General, History and Culture, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life, Politics, Religion 

On my way downtown this morning on the Egged bus (the 74, which makes its way from the southern end of Jerusalem to the northern end via Derech Hevron, then onto Keren Hayesod and King George), we sidled alongside a protest of some sorts, taking place on the street, along King George. We on the bus all looked on in interest, trying to figure out who and what was being protested.

For my part, I noticed the, by and large, lack of kippot or covered heads for women, so it was a clearly mostly secular crowd. It wasn’t until I saw one of the signs that mentioned “הדרת נשים”, that I realized it was another protest, one of many of late, demanding respect for the exclusion of women. And so, when the woman across from me — wearing a sheitel — asked what the protest was about, I was able to tell her. And she nodded, along with others in the bus.

The only reason I now know the term hadarat nashim, or exlusion of women, (I originally wrote dignity of women, as it was first described to me), is because it’s become a catchphrase in our daily language over the last few weeks. After the recent spate of incidents on buses, with women being told to sit in the back, to segregate themselves from the men, people are speaking out in the streets, in the newspapers, and on the buses.

I learned the term at a parlor meeting with Councilwoman Rachel Azaria, who’s becoming well-known in these parts for her great work on the part of young families in Jerusalem, but primarily for having her portfolio taken away by the mayor for petitioning the High Court of Justice to immediately remove gender barriers in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods that were erected during Sukkot. It was once more of a ‘gender studies’ kind of term, a friend of mine told me, whose sister teaches gender studies, but has now become much more common, because we appear to need to understand the concept in these parts.

In the meantime, back to the protest. Got off the bus, just across from the plaza in front of the former Hamashbir department store, where the protesters were gathering and dancing to some Hadag Nachash being blasted from the speakers.

And who should I bump into but Rachel Azaria, just making her way into the crowd, and getting ready to speak. We said hi, and I told her thanks for teaching me the term hadarat nashim. She responded, “You would have learned it sooner or later.” True, I told her, but more memorable to learn it from her.

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