Meet the Mossad

March 1, 2012 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence, General, Israeliness, Life, News, Politics, Profiles, War 

It’s not every day that you get to meet the one-time top spy in Israel. If you’re expecting Efraim Halevy to walk out of the pages of a John Le Carre novel or a James Bond movie, then you’ve got the wrong impression of the former head of the Mossad and a career spook since 1961.

The British-born Halevy is an unassuming, mild-mannered gentleman, evoking the cultured tones of Abba Eban and the appearance of an uncle you look forward to visiting with.

I was honored to introduce Halevy when he spoke to a rapt audience in Jerusalem this week as part of a lecture series at Kehilat Moreshet Avraham, a Conservative synagogue. Halevy spoke on the subject of “Are We The Victims of our own Biases?” – a title I didn’t really understand until he explained it.

According to Halevy – and he’s been involved with events in the region whose details will likely go to the grave with him – the Palestinians and the Arab world aren’t the only ones who’ve intentionally or not, prevented the normalization of relations between Israel and everyone else in the neighborhood. We’re also to blame.

Halevy, who led the Mossad from 1998 to 2002, doesn’t think Israel needs to insist on the Palestinians or anyone else for that matter recognizing Israel as a Jewish state or approving its right to exist. According to a report in The Jerusalem Post, he said that Israel is a Jewish state and that any treaty or agreement signed with Israel by any other state or entity is tantamount to recognition, and it’s one of our biases based on insecurity that we insist on that extra step.

After reaching a peace agreement with Egypt, which had been Israel’s “most formidable enemy,” Israel should have surely gained an enormous injection of self-confidence, because in this achievement, Israel had broken the Arab anti-Israel alliance of solidarity, said Halevy.

Although Israel has many near miraculous achievements to its credit, Halevy believes that Israelis have not overcome an inherent Jewish perception of being the victim. After 2,000 years of suffering, being despised among the nations and victims of anti-Semitic actions that resulted in massive loss of life, Israelis still have difficulty in being self-confident when it comes to personal and national security. Israelis always labor under threat despite the fact that “we have the most efficient, most capable and most brutal defense capability in the region.”

Halevy also ruffled some feathers in the crowd when he said that Israel is wrong to always focus on and end to the conflict.

. “There will never be an end to the conflict. We need to translate conflict into something you live with in different terms, he said, citing several conflicts in which the adversaries have found a way to live together without peace treaties or final borders. “So why should we demand a final border?” he asked. “Why should we always want the ultimate?”

It was food for thought from someone who’s been in the trenches of diplomacy and espionage for decades. And thankfully, at the end of the evening, he hadn’t disclosed any secrets that would have necessitated disposing of the entire audience.

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Foto Friday – Retrospective for fashion-forward Mula Eshet

January 20, 2012 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Art, design, Foto Friday, General, History and Culture, Pop Culture, Profiles 

In our time, photo manipulation has become as much a part of fashion photography as the photographers themselves. Without Photoshop, a new photo exhibition, opening this week at Holon’s Beit Meirov Art Gallery, takes that concept to task, presenting works from the 60s, 70s, and 80s by fashion photographer Mula Eshet. In those times, as the title implies, photographers worked hard to present the camera lens with the most arresting and interesting scenarios because there were no second chances.

In a radio interview today, Eshet said that he, together with his wife, the artist Dalia Eshet, always tried to find unusual locations and tell a story that expressed thought and originality. Venues like the Dead Sea, the zoo, the streets of Tel Aviv and even the Lebanon War were his backdrops. The couple served as stylists, makeup artists, directors, producers, designers — even model scouts, as there were no modeling agencies when they first started.

Eshet: “In the pre-modeling agency days, the relationship between fashion houses and myself was direct. Entire collections were sent to my studio and from that moment on until I got the photo I wanted I dealt with finding the models, designing and producing the image (including location and accessories) — and ‘decorating’ the model (the term ‘styling’ didn’t exist [in Israel])”.

Dalia Eshet: “He loved select the ones that came with a background in dance and movement. The model’s personality was an important component expressed in his photography”.

The exhibition presents photographs of those personalities, including Israel’s leading fashion models of the period, such as Penina Rosenblum circa 1972, before she became Israel’s most famous cosmetics queen / reality show / hoochie mama / ex-Knesset member…

Heli Goldberg went on to an acting career – including one of her best-known roles as a shopping cart bashing pudding thief in “The Battle For Milky” commercial…

The amazing Michaela Berko, Israel’s first 80s supermodel export (who recently paid homage to her famous Vogue cover on the cover of Israel’s La-Isha magazine)…

Exotic Tami Ben-Ami, who lived a supermodel’s life before they gave it a name. She dated wildly popular basketball player Aulcie Perry and was Gottex’s first house model. Sadly, she died of cancer in 1995 at just 40 years old.

The exhibition photos were selected from tens of thousands of images saved by the Eshets over the years, published in Israeli fashion magazines, catalogs, posters, ads and more. Definitely worth checking out, as is this report about Mula Eshet in his heyday.

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Nostalgia Sunday – Old Israeli songs

January 15, 2012 by · 3 Comments
Filed under: Art, Entertainment, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Music, News, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture, Profiles, tv 

Last week was a busy one in the world of Israeli musical nostalgia. David Sela, a prolific online archivist and proprietor of the wonderful Nostal site, launched his latest labor of love: Radio Nostalgia an online music channel playing Israeli hits of yesteryear, 24/7.

In an interview with Israel Hayom, Sela stated that he and music editor Yoram Siman-Tov, had selected a library of about 4,500 Israeli oldies going back at least 25 years — 25 being the cut-off date (or is that the starting point?) for being considered an “oldie”. Each year, the station plans to add another year’s worth of old songs to the database.

Sela also said he was reviewing several proposals for radio broadcasts as well.

The Nostal website itself houses tens of thousands of images, some 1,000 videos, hundreds of audio clips, as well as scanned newspapers, magazines, posters, postcards, books, toys, trinkets and other ephemera. Sela stated that the site had visitors from 132 countries and estimated that 19 percent of users are Israelis living abroad.

Another great source of old Israeli songs is the YouTube channel called, not surprisingly, OldIsraeliSongs. It’s run by record company NMC United Entertaiment, which holds the rights to the old Hed Arzi music catalog.

The 90s may be less than 25 years away, though not by much, but enough time has elapsed to give music aficionados some historical perspective. Radio host and pop music historian Yoav Kutner has deemed that decade the most important in Israeli rock and produced a five-part series for Channel 8, The Albums, about five seminal works: Simanei Hulsha by Berry Sakharov, Plonter by Rami Fortis, Zman Sukar by Eifo Ha-Yeled, and the debut albums of Ziknei Tsfat and Eviatar Banai.

Following is a Ynet report on the series which features period clips as well as interviews from the launch party with Israeli rockers like Aviv Geffen (“We all lived on Sheinkin Street… there was a Sixties vibe in the air”), Gilad Segev (“I was most influenced recently by Berry Sakharov in working on my latest album”), Chemi Rudner (“Being unfashionable is the most fun”), and performances by Rudner and by a now-religious Eviatar Banai.

All agree that what happened at that time can’t be replicated — they cite commercial hype and the reality-TV-ization of the music industry, and that includes Geffen who is currently one of the judges on the Israeli version of The Voice.

But, as Rudner says, there’s still a place for artists who create for the love of it.


NOTE: If you can’t see the embedded video, click here to view.

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Foto Friday – Tal Menkes’ Dreadful Delights

January 13, 2012 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Art, Blogging, design, Entertainment, Foto Friday, General, Israeliness, Picture of the Week, Pop Culture, Profiles 

Tal Menkes is a copywriter at advertising agency Mccann Erickson, Tel-Aviv, Israel. In addition to his day job of penning award-winning ads, Menkes’ fevered brain works overtime several times a week to create Mutzar Ayom, a photoblog of seemingly useful yet cheerfully useless objects.

The name takes the hackneyed shopping channel phrase mutzar ha-yom, “product of the day”, and replaces it with the word ayom, meaning “horrible”. And indeed, many of the products are in fact, delightfully dreadful examples of visual wordplay.

Some of the ideas are universal in nature — others are unmistakably Israeli, for example, this toy soldier armed with mother’s cooking…

Water concentrate, as opposed to the ubiquitous sugary red mitz petel, so ingrained in the Israeli child’s psyche — and the Israeli child’s teeth!

A reversed three-fer electric adaptor…

A floor squeegee that actually gets into corners…

And my personal favorite, the real and original dubon coat.

Menkes also runs a Mutzar Ayom Facebook page in which followers are invited to comment on recent postings and share their own imaginary product ideas. Who knows, some might even make it into production — after all, if the Crembox can be an actual product fulfilling an actual need, then anything’s possible.

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Nostalgia Sunday – Yaffa Yarkoni

January 8, 2012 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Art, coexistence, Entertainment, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Movies, Music, News, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture, Profiles, tv, War 

It would be remiss of me if I did not mention the death of singer Yaffa Yarkoni at the age of 86 last week.

The papers, both local and international, reported on her passing — she was indeed the symbol of the War of Independence generation and a singer of some of Israel’s most beloved songs.

But she was also loved for being a fixture on the Israel Song Festival and Children’s Song Festival circuits, in the 1960s and 1970s, respectively.

For many years, she was an unofficial cultural ambassador for Israel, who charmed visiting international celebrities like Sean Connery, Cliff Richard and Sammy Davis Junior.

Like many women performers with a strong personality and powerful stage presence she, like fellow diva Shoshana Damari, inspired a generation of local drag queens.

Most of all, Yarkoni was a dyed-in-the-wool performer who was born to be onstage. In later years, she came out strongly as a member of Israel’s peace camp. In this interview, she covers topics ranging from cataloging her gowns, (so that she would never wear the same dress twice to a given venue), to face lifts (she didn’t have one and shows the back of her ears to prove it). She also describes the time she went down to Sinai to perform for the troops and ended up giving an impromptu performance to an onlooker who happened to be an Egyptian soldier on the other side of the line. “On the way back, I said to myself, ya allah, maybe we can end this war simply with song?”

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