No cultural boycott of Israel for Janis Ian
Filed under: A New Reality, Entertainment, General, Music, Politics, Pop Culture
Janis Ian in Israel in the early 1980s with top DJ Yoav Kutner
It brings Ian a warm and fuzzy feeling – “the promoters were no more surprised than I was, it’s fantastic,” said Ian, adding that she’s looking forward to returing to Israel.
“The older I get, the more I realize that I might not get another opportunity, so I take that into consideration when I accept offers to perform.”
Janis Ian today (Photo: Peter Cunningham)
When asked if she had any problems, as a humanist American liberal, coming to perform in Israel, which has been the target of a cultural boycott among a small percentage of artists, Ian said absolutely not.
“I try really hard not to comment on other countries, when I’m not there to experience what goes on there. I have enough problems commenting about my own country,” she told me.
“Nobody’s pressured me not to come, and anyway, I don’t believe in cultural boycots, so it’s not an issue for me.”
Which is a good thing for the fan who will be flocking to Reading 3 on January 20, 21 and 22 to see Ian perform her long list of hits, including “At 17,” “Jesse” and “Society’s Child.”
Nostalgia Sunday – A look way back
Filed under: Blogging, education, Entertainment, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, News, Nostalgia Sunday, Politics, Pop Culture
It’s the first day of 2012. A good day to check what was happening in Israel a decade ago, courtesy of the wonderful Wayback Machine, an online historical archive of preserved web pages going back to 1996. The Wayback Machine crawls the Internet, taking “snapshots” of websites which are added to the archive. Visitors to the Wayback Machine can then type in a URL, select a date range, and view the archived versions.
On December 16th, 2001, when Wayback Machine visited The Jerusalem Post, the headlines were concerned with an IDF crackdown on the Palestinian Authority in the wake of shelling from Gaza, a falling Cost Price Index and relations with PA Chairman Yasser Arafat. JDate was the dating site of choice for Jpost readers.
The lead story on Ynet on December 17th, 2001, (only available in Hebrew at that time), was about victims of a shooting attack. Other stories included the opening of a second McDonald’s franchise in Jerusalem and the Bank of Israel’s fight against forged checks while online messaging pioneer ICQ offered up its ultimate tip guide and Ynet ruminated over who would be its choice for Person of the Year. Cupid.co.il was the premier dating site for Hebrew-speaking Israelis at that time.
That same day, December 17th, 2001, Haaretz also ran the story about the West Bank attack victims. US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice said the US had no plans to invade Iraq and Arafat called for an end to violence against Israel. (It must have been true ’cause it was in the papers!) And JCupid, the English-language version of Cupid.co.il, was offering an end to lonely singledom.
Wayback didn’t crawl Globes around January 2002. It visited Globes on November 8, 2001, at which time the financial news headlines were concerned with, among other things, the acquisition of cement block maker Ytong, the public sector workers strike and the short-lived reopening of troubled Phoenicia Glass Works. There were no dating ads; the one advertiser was a bank.
Israelity didn’t get started until 2005. When it did, it looked like this:
And what of our own Israel21c? Unfortunately, due to its archive structure, the Wayback Machine isn’t able to reconstruct its “snapshot” — good thing I made a screenshot some time ago for another posting!
The Wayback Machine is operated by the Internet Archive, which collaborates with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian. It’s great fun to go in and crawl around.
Foto Friday – 2011 beginnings to be continued
Filed under: A New Reality, Entertainment, Foto Friday, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Israeliness, Life, Picture of the Week, Politics, Pop Culture, Social Justice
2011 was a year of tentative beginnings. Burgeoning consumer awareness sparked by skyrocketing cottage cheese prices brought Israeli citizens to the streets. They then proceeded to sleep on those same streets for the rest of the summer in protest of the high cost of housing. The peaceful tent city campaign culminated in a really big rally…
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
But for most of the summer, it looked like this…
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Sadly, it still does look like that in Jerusalem’s Sacher Garden, where the truly homeless continue to reside in the cold and wet. The next chapter in the Social Justice movement remains to be written in 2012.
Some chapters were closed in 2011, which marked the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the homecoming and start of a brand new life for Gilad Shalit after over five years of imprisonment by Hamas.
Photo: IDF Spokesman via Wikimedia Commons
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Defense Ehud Barak were present at Shalit’s release — so much so that they were accused of being publicity hounds (does no one know anything about politicians?) — and Netanyahu’s image was used to create the first Israeli photo meme.
There were other beginnings as well. A rare sand cat was born at the Ramat Gan Safari…
Photo: Tibor-Jager
Jerusalem held its first marathon and got its first Light Railway…
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
The Dead Sea was not selected as one of the New 7 Natural Wonders of the World…
Photo: New7Wonders
On the other hand, the nomination campaign may have served to draw public attention to the salt lake’s plight — just this week, Israel Corporation subsidiary Israel Chemicals reached an agreement with the Ministry of Finance on terms for the Dead Sea’s rehabilitation from excessive salt harvesting. It’ll be interesting to see if this promise, along with many others made in 2011, will be fulfilled in 2012. Here’s to that, and to a hopeful and happy New Year!
Hanukah, extremism and light
Maccabee t-shirt for sale on Australian website
Hanukah is probably the most confounding holiday on the Jewish calendar. If we move beyond the toys and the gelt of 20th century Christmas catch-up, the story itself has been interpreted in so many ways that it’s difficult to get a lock on the pshat (the simplest understanding).
For what is Hanukah? Is it the tale of a miraculous jug of oil that lasted for eight days, which today is commemorated in our lighting the candles on the hanukiah (the Hanukah menorah)? Or is it an historical account of a great military victory reestablishing, however briefly, Jewish sovereignty in our ancient land?
The answer is both…and neither.
It was “parent’s night” at the mechina (the pre-army seminary) where our daughter is spending a year before being drafted; a year of studying, volunteering and learning to get along with a group of forty other 18-year-olds (I wrote about it here). Part of the evening included a parent-child activity where we read selections from the first and second books of Maccabees, the two primary Biblical-era texts that refer to Hanukah (but which did not make it into the Hebrew canon).
The books present very different messages from the holiday. In First Maccabees, written about 40 years after the event itself by someone who presumably participated in one way or another, there is no mention of that universally known jug of oil at all; it’s all about the rebellion against the idolatrous Greeks and their assimilated Hellenistic Jewish wannabes. The second book, written 100 years after the first, downplays the military success and introduces the oil with an emphasis on God and miracles.
Historically, the attempt by the rabbis of the Talmud to sideline the fighting narrative makes sense, explained the head of our daughter’s mechina. There was at the time both a struggle between the rabbinic and priestly leaders for ascendency (the Maccabees were priests), and a desire to caution against military hubris (while the Maccabean revolt was successful, the next Jewish rebellions led to both the destruction of the Temple and the expulsion of the Jews from most of the land of Israel, definitely not events to emulate).
Seemingly ignoring the historical post-rebellion fall out, modern Zionists have eagerly adopted the holiday as emblematic of the brave fighters who liberated the land in our days. Whether that represents a miracle depends on one’s political and religious orientation. But there is no lack of Maccabean symbolism: many of our sport teams are named Maccabi and, in a striking irony, so is the Israeli version of that greatest representation of Greek culture the Olympics (dubbed the Maccabiah Games).
But there’s a darker side to the Hasmonean era military victory that tends to be whitewashed. The Maccabees were religious extremists; their goal was to rid the country of not only its Greek overloads but to compel the overwhelmingly secular Jewish population to adopt more stringent religious practices. Anshel Pfeffer, in this weekend’s Haaretz cites the late Christopher Hitchens as referring to the Maccabees as “bloodthirsty religious fundamentalists.”
Clearly over the top, but that interpretation seems chillingly appropriate this Hanukah as modern day extremists are once again bent on imposing their rigid agenda on the wider population. Open any Israeli newspaper in the last two weeks and it’s all over the front page: – from coerced separation between men and women on buses and sidewalks, to the removal of women’s images on outdoor advertising in Jerusalem, to the truly horrendous verbal and spitting attacks on an eight-year-old girl for “lack of modesty” revealed during a weekend TV news show. And don’t even get me started about what’s going on with the “price tag” burning of mosques, unprovoked uprooting of Palestinian olive trees, and now even Jewish attacks on Israeli army bases.
Is this what the pioneers intended when they adopted the symbol of the Maccabees as their own?
Perhaps what we need today is to look at the story truthfully and learn from it with eyes wide open. To quote from Spiderman, “with great power comes great responsibility.” Religious power without accountability, without compassion and tolerance, necessarily leads to corruption (as happened, by the way, to the original Maccabees once they assumed the throne in ancient Judea).
The time has come to meld the two books of the Maccabees. Let us focus on light – the key symbol from the second book – as a metaphor for clarity; for the kind of clear thinking that can temper the violence of the first book. It’s as critical today as it was then. That would be a true Hanukah miracle for our times.
Hadarat Nashim
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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