DJ saved my life
Filed under: A New Reality, Crime, Entertainment, General, Israeliness, Life, Music, News, Pop Culture, War
While East Coast Americans were hunkering down as Tropical Storm Irene wreaked havoc along the eastern sea board, in Tel Aviv, high school students were gathering at the famed Haoman 17 nightclub for a back to school dance party.
Internationally known Israeli DJ Yinon Yahel was spinning the discs inside, and 1,000 teens crammed the club for one of their last free nights ahead of the school year which begins on Thursday.
Unbeknownst to them, however, right outside a drama was unfolding, as a terrorist, rammed a stolen taxi into the police barrier right outside the club. He then emerged from the taxi and went on a stabbing spree, injuring seven people, five Border Police officers, a security guard and one civilian.
The suspect was tackled, taken into custody, and brought to Wolfson Medical Center in Holon in light condition. Inside the club, Yahel was informed about a terror attack outside the club shortly after it happened, but was asked by management to keep playing.
“The management came and told me that there was an attack outside the club, but told me to keep playing and not to say anything, so that people wouldn’t panic. Everyone was inside by then so they didn’t seem to know what was going on,” Yahel told The Jerusalem Post.
An hour later, around 3 a.m. when the attacker had been subdued and the scene restored to order, the club was finally ordered evacuated and the teens sent home.
For the 33-year-old Yahel, who performs at some of the top clubs around the world, and is an in-demand remix specialist for dance artists ranging from Kristine W and Deborah Cox to Christina Aguilera and P Diddy, it wasn’t a typical evening.
When I talked to him last year for a story, he said that his music usually brings people together, regardless of their origin.
“I get Palestinians and Lebanese attending my shows and coming up to me to talk. In a club, we’re all just people,” he said.
Sunday night in Tel Aviv, his music almost became the backdrop for a horror movie, one that was thankfully averted. While the club goers interviewed by the Post made light of the situation after the fact when they found out about, it’s likely bound to be a back to school event they’ll never forget.
Nostalgia Sunday – On the radio
Filed under: A New Reality, Business, Entertainment, Food, General, History and Culture, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life, Music, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture, tv
It’s hard to describe how important radio was — and is — to Israelis but we’ll give it a shot. In a land where up until 20 years ago there was but a single television station — and a non-commercial one that shut down broadcasts at midnight, at the very latest — radio was where you got your news, every hour on the hour. Radio announced the founding of the State. Radio brought you the latest music. And it was radio that broadcast ads with catchy jingles which stuck in your head and the heads of everyone else around you, and everyone in the country, really.
The power of this collective commercials consciousness is so strong that even today, should you chant to people of a given age group, “Bo ligdol eetanu”, they will immediately snap their fingers twice and holler back, “Bank Hapoalim!” (click on this link and all the other links in this post and you’ll hear the jingles).
Shapam is the official broker for commercial airtime on the Voice of Israel and, by uploading a tiny portion of their archives, they have done a wonderful public service for all of those scratching their heads and going, “What was the name of that awful carbonated wine we used to drink because there was no good wine in Israel?” (Fantasia), “Did I imagine it or was that really Sassi Keshet singing the Dogli song?” (Yes, it is he), or “How long has Osem been using that same tag line” (At least since 1961, if we go according to the release date of this early “Zeh tov, zeh tov, zeh Osem” spot).
Some very famous singers supplemented their incomes by writing and singing ad jingles, from The Dudaim pitching Wissotzky Tea in the Sixties, Arik Einstein hawking Telma instant soup or Danny Sanderson promoting Yosef the Carpet King in the Seventies. It’s understandable, as Israeli artists didn’t earn much then — or even now.
Following the great egg dearth of the 1973-4 Yom Kippur War, entertainer Gadi Yagil was hired to promote egg consumption in 1977 in the spot known as “Beitzim, beitzim“. The ad became a classic due, in no small part, to the fact that the listening public didn’t necessarily associate the song with the primary topic but rather, with its secondary meaning.
That same year, the airwaves got up and boogied to the disco beat with an ad for a new soft drink named for that thriving metropolis, that glorious city on the hill, that new Jerusalem which beckoned to all Israelis: Queens. Seriously.
Shandy, a mixture of beer and lemon soda, has recently been launched on the Israeli market. But this isn’t the first time. For a brief moment in 1982, there was a beverage on the market known as “British Shandy“. It was apparently terrible (one friend used to call it “British shandeh“) but the jingle has looped in my brain ever since. Another that arises unbidden in the dark hours of the night: Achim Farag (Farag Brothers)… 1,2,3,4 photo studios!
If you, like me, know with certainty that Dor ha-jeans shoteh Queens (The jeans generation drinks Queens), don’t wait a minute longer. There are many more jingles to click on and listen to at the Shapam site.
Amy Winehouse was headed to Israel
Filed under: A New Reality, Entertainment, General, Israeliness, Music, Pop Culture
Mark Ronson and Amy Winehouse back when they worked together.
Ronson, who produced the acclaimed album Back to Back for Winehouse, who died last month in London, honored the late singer by playing reworked versions of several of her songs before the packed crowd of 5,000. According to a report in Ha’aretz, with tears in his eyes, he then asked the audience to applaud in honor of Winehouse, and noted that her brother, Alex, was in the audience.
“He looks just like Amy, only with short hair,” Ronson said, who performed with his band the Business Intelligence. One special guest who was able to come with Ronson to Israel was Boy George, the one-time iconic singer for Culture Club, who delighted the crowd with some of his classic hits.
Ronson didn’t only perform here, he also spent the morning of the show speaking about peace and music with a group of young Jewish and Arab Israelis at the Peres Center for Peace, in Jaffa. It was Ronson’s second visit to Israel this year, and he ended the show by vowing that he’d be back. It’s nice for the country to have friends besides Glenn Beck.
Nostalgia Sunday – Eilat
Filed under: Environment, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture, Travel
We tend to think of Eilat as a tourist spot, a destination for fun in the sun, a tranquil if trashy oasis. The Israeli equivalent of Miami beach — if not that classy. The horrific events of this past Thursday served to remind us, like a slap in the face, that the unending desert is a facade behind which danger can, and does, hide and Eilat, like much of our little country, is a border outpost.
Umm Rashrash was the name of the town upon which the modern city of Eilat was built. The area was designated as part of the Jewish state in the 1947 UN Partition Plan. On March 10, 1949, Umm Rashrash — then under control of the Jordanian Arab Legion — was taken by the Palmach Negev Brigade in Operation Uvda (also Ovda). The aim of the campaign was to conquer the Negev and Arava regions before signing the Armistice Agreements with Jordan. It was done without firing a single shot.
Following the taking of the town’s police station, the soldiers raised an home-made flag — known popularly as “The Ink Flag” — which became a symbol of the victory. According to the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, “The improvised flag was made on the order of the then Negev Brigade commander, Nahum Sarig, who discovered that the Brigade did not have an Israeli flag in its possession. The soldiers found a white sheet, drew two ink stripes, and sewed between them a Star of David torn off from a first-aid kit. The raising of the ink flag marked the climax of Operation Ovda, the last operation of the War of Independence.”
“When the Golani advance guard arrived two hours later, the two brigade commanders, Nachum Sarig and Nachum Golan, sent the following telegram to the front commander, Yigal Allon: ‘Inform the Government of Israel: On the birthday of the Haganah – 11 of Adar – the Palmach Negev Brigade and the Golani Brigade hand over the Gulf of Eilat to the State of Israel. Eilat (Um Rashrash) 9 of Adar, 10.3.1949, 1600 hours.’” (The online Palmach museum has a presentation [in Hebrew] with maps showing the progression of the Operation Uvda campaign).
A detailed first-hand account of Operation Uvda is available online; it contains excerpts from the book “Eyes of the Beholder” by David (Migdal) Teperson, a member of the Hayot Ha-Negev (Negev Beasts) Jeep commando. Teperson notes that later on, an official flag was procured and an honor guard held.
A stamp commemorating the raising of the Ink Flag was issued in 1998, part of a three-stamp sheet presenting Israel’s three battle fronts in the War of Independence.
Eilat’s first residents worked at the Timna copper mines and, following the 1956 Sinai Campaign that opened the Straits of Tiran, at the new Port of Eilat. Initially, the city operated under a Municipal Council; it took a full decade until Eilat was officially recognized as a town with 6,000 residents in March 1959.
With the opening of the Eilat Hotel in 1958, the city’s first hotel, Eilat became a tourist spot but really took off after 1967′s Six Day War, when the Sinai peninsula was captured. The highway to Sharm El Sheikh was completed in 1969 and Eilat became a way-station for beatnikim (aka: hippies) en route to find peace of mind in the Sinai. The first direct European charter flights began in 1975 and tourism boomed. After the Sinai was returned to Egypt, Eilat branded itself successfully as a destination separate from the rest of Israel; the strategy worked for a good number of years. In 1985, it was declared a Tax Free Trade Zone and nine years later, in October 1994, Eilat was the site where the Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty was signed.
Today, the city boasts 11,000 hotel rooms and a range of activities, from snorkeling among the coral reefs, swimming with dolphins, hiking and bird watching to fun parks, VAT-free shopping, resto-pubs and nudie bars. And of course, the annual Eilat-Eilot Renewable Energy Conference (the region is slated to go 20% solar in the next half-year) — which is the only reason why I venture there. But my smug taste in holiday activities is not the point. The point is that in less than 60 short years, Eilat has become an international tourist destination, a success story, and God damn those who would try to take that away.
My City Eilat is a very interesting online archive, run in conjunction with the municipal museum, that has a wealth of photographs, news clippings and other documents about the city’s history; events such as the tragic 1954 Maale Akrabim bus massacre that so sadly echoes current events, and happier ones, as seen in this wonderful slide show by photographer and local historian Shmulik Taggar.
Go out and Gaga
Filed under: Art, education, General, Israeliness, Life, Pop Culture
Gaga, it seems, is Israeli. Not Lady Gaga, but Gaga, the movement language developed by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin. Thanks to the International Herald Tribune, I now know that Gaga is considered “a serious new way of training the body”, as developed by Naharin, the artistic director of The Batsheva Dance Company, here in Tel Aviv.
He developed the set of movements for himself when he was recovering from a back injury, and then shared it with the company’s non-dance staff. Now Gaga is huge in Israel, and it made its way to the U.S. where Gaga USA is spreading the word in New York City, and, eventually, the rest of the States. The secret to its success? It appears to force one to let go of the mind when moving, even when those movements seem silly.
It’s funky way to exercise, and you can check it out here, in an Israel21c produced video:
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