Naked Israelis Expose New Life at the Dead Sea
Filed under: A New Reality, Environment, Technology
The world was talking about the 1,000 naked Israelis at the Dead Sea last week, and thanks to that coverage, I wonder how many more are interested in the dating profiles of Israelis. But it turns out, whether you support the liberal idea or not of the Spencer Tunick’s naked photo shoot, it has led to some good green karma for the Dead Sea, as Tunick had hoped. (You can find many Israelis, by the way, on one of 20 great top dating websites a friend of mine has put together). It includes the popular JDate site.
This morning I interviewed an Israeli researcher Danny Ionescu, a microbiologist, at a Max Plank Institute in Germany. His latest studies on the extreme environment of the Dead Sea shows that there is more Dead Sea “life” there than previously thought. He and colleagues from Hebrew University and Ben Gurion University spent last June surveying underwater springs at the Dead Sea.
He and a diving colleague strapped on some special deep-sea diving gear (the Dead Sea water will burn and sting your eyes and even kill you if ingested) and discovered to their surprise mats and layers of green microorganisms lining the Dead Sea floor around the newly discovered springs.
While the micro-organisms are not likely to survive up further in the higher salt content and minerals of the Dead Sea, the micro-organisms which have found a rare niche living in the Dead Sea, proving it contains more life than ever. It is believed they get their energy source from sulfur.
As someone who is a bit of a cheerleader for planet earth, I was very excited to hear about this new discovery. Because when scientists are able to show the complicated and delicate balance of nature, it makes it harder for industrialists and politicians to make sweeping decisions that could wipe out millions of years of evolution.
There is a call to fill the depleting Dead Sea with desalinated water from the Red Sea. Environmentalists believe this will upset the delicate balance of minerals at the Dead Sea, already highly disturbed by man-made causes while mining for minerals like bromide and phosphorus. The latest study on what’s down there, researcher Ionescu agrees, will give more food for thought on future engineering solutions.
And social action featuring naked Israelis could be used for saving a lot more environmental problems that Israel and the region faces. How about getting naked for the Jordan River? Getting naked for the Mediterranean Sea, getting naked for solar energy or getting naked to support ____? Would you sign up to support a good cause?
Come Meet the “Other” at TEDxJaffa Today – Streaming Live!
Filed under: A New Reality, Life, Medical Breakthroughs, Music, News, Politics, Religion, Science, Technology
Watch the stream live today from Jaffa starting at 9 am EST.
It’s really easy to sit at your kitchen table in Brooklyn, Toronto, Vancouver, or Berkley and shoot off comments about the Middle East conflict. It’s harder when you live in it. It’s hard when you have to think twice about taking the bus, plane, or train because it might blow up, and it’s hard knowing that every person who shares your society with you are paying the majority of their taxes to a staggering defense budget.
I live in Israel. I live in Jaffa, Israel — a city next to Tel Aviv populated by Muslims, Christians and Jews. Some of us are atheists, some traditional and others defiantly religious. I chose to live here and it’s a crazy place. It’s not crazy because people here care about their religion, enough to fight over it or talk about it incessantly. It’s crazy because of its improbability.
In Jaffa, some Muslims call themselves Palestinians. Some Christians call themselves Israeli Palestinian Christian Arabs. The Jews are just Israelis of course, unless they come from Arab countries and they are Sephardic or those from Europe say they are Ashkenazi. You can find escaped donkeys galloping down the streets at midnight. You can find the best European chocolate cake beside a working man’s morning hummous joint. My husband says he wouldn’t be surprised to wake up one morning and find a dead body on our front porch: there is also a lot of crime in Jaffa.
But Jaffa has its charm. Its own rhythm is marked by the five calls to prayer, with the one at sunset telling my baby daughter (who is Jewish) it’s time to go to sleep. It’s got a roughness, and sharp corners, and just when you think it’s too hard to handle, you’ll catch a new smell reminding you of some other time from our collective memory when civilization began, somewhere around here.
But more than people know, Jaffa — the city of the Bible where Jonah disembarks from before getting swallowed by the whale and spat out on shore near Nineveh — is a lens through which the world can understand cultural diversity, and cultural freedom in Israel.
Today at my home the East West House we will help host TEDxJaffa under the theme the Desire to Know the Other. There is a strong line-up of people from Jaffa, like my musician husband Yisrael Borochov, but also people from Israel and the Palestinian Authority who will tell their personal and professional stories on working to know the other. One speaker survived a terror attack and was afraid to look in the mirror to see how much of her face was left; one speaker will be a successful Palestinian policeman turned businessman; and if you log on to our simulcast today (or see the videos later) you’ll meet Haya Samir, an Israeli Muslim whose family came to Israel as political refugees from Egypt. Raised as a Jew, she found out as a young woman that she was in fact a Muslim.
Haya is an Israeli diva. And we are so glad to know her. Today she will sing songs of the pioneering days in Israel – Debka Fantasia – before 1948 when young Jews met Bedouin and Arab shepherds. These pioneers longed for a culture that combined, not defined, the Middle East with European values. I think this is what the people in the Arab uprisings are coming to terms with.
Would you like to get off your chair and dance to a little music with us LIVE? Maybe meet someone whose views might change your worldview about the Middle East conflict?
The simulcast starts at at 9 am EST time today Wednesday if you are in New York City. Log on at the TEDxJaffa site to see it. Officially in Israel the event starts at 3.
Alli Meets Aladdin
The idea for TEDx in Jaffa started with my friend Alli Magidsohn, who is producing and curating the event. The fellow Jaffinian, who is from LA, was inspired to fulfill this dream after an encounter with a man (a genie?) in Sinai named Aladdin.
Her words: “We felt lucky to have the opportunity to meet and form a new friendship in an overall context that might have otherwise limited us as enemies and spoke about the area’s conflicts, spirituality, Love, and many other things together. His perspectives broadened my mind and this encounter made me realize that as an American Jew living in Israel, even opposite an Muslim Egyptian man, there is still so much more that we have in common than there is that separates us.
“Other encounters in Sinai, Israel and Palestine led to further ‘broadening’, deeper respect and more curiosity, and TEDxJaffa is the manifestation of this process of personal expansion. ‘The Desire to know The Other’, for me – not necessarily for the event’s speakers – isn’t about explicit things like politics or peace or coexistence, it’s really about that desire to look from the inside, outwards, and to try to take in, understand, or somehow be enriched by exposing oneself to another person’s experience.
Log in folks at 9 am if you are New York or Toronto. All other cities: the event’s at 3 PM + 7 hours EST. Link from here.
Ido Tadmor is Dancing for the Dead Sea
Internationally-acclaimed dance Ido Tadmor does an enigmatic dance for the Dead Sea at Kalya Beach. (image by Inbal Marmari)
Becoming one of seven natural wonders can have enormous benefits for tourism, though competition is steep. Among the 28 candidates for the present campaign are the Great Barrier Reef, the Galapagos, and the Grand Canyon. Scores of people, even Harley Davidson riders, have shown their support for the Dead Sea campaign, which will be a boon to Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian territories. But there’s more to the campaign than generating money. The founder, Bernard Weber, intended for this global initiative to protect remaining beautiful places, to generate unity and respect. Perhaps more than any other pledge of support, Ido Tadmor’s Dead Sea dance – choreographed by him – does just that. Read more
Foto Friday – Kobi Israel’s Fragments of Life
Filed under: A New Reality, Art, coexistence, Foto Friday, General, Life, Picture of the Week, Pop Culture, Social Justice, Travel
Photographer Kobi Israel uses the medium of photography to explore his experience of growing up gay in the macho Israeli society of the mid-70s and early 80s.
Israel was born in 1970 in a suburb of Tel-Aviv to parents of Moroccan and Egyptian origin and first began exploring photography in 1994, while working as a flight attendant. He studied cinematography at the New York Film Academy, then completed a five-year program in Cinematography & Still Photography at Tel-Aviv’s Camera Obscura school of visual arts.
In his first series, entitled “Views”, Israel recreated scenes from his days as a soldier in the Israel Defense Forces. The images he states, “addresses the fine line that divides the homo-social and the homo-erotic aspects of lives of soldiers in the army. These images depict soldiers living their lives in their brotherly proximity to each other and hint at the tensions and desires that may have existed between these young men, as they had for me during my youth in the army.”
His next series, “Fragments of Life” from 2000-2003 is a series of staged images through which he leads the viewer into his world of memories, conflicts and trapped emotions. “I recreated and reinvented fragments of my own life as an adolescent discovering his sexuality, growing up in a non-tolerant conservative society,” he states.
In 2002 after a brief stint in Madrid, he settled in London, studying for an MA in Fine Art, Central Saint Martins – University of Arts, and working on photographic series and mixed-media works. Israel is a masterful technician in terms of lighting and composition, and his photographs have been published in books and magazines, plus he’s received several prestigious awards.
Israel’s latest works look at his new life as a stranger traveling in strange lands: England, Cuba, Iceland. His works — which with time have become more thematically abstract, exploring ideas such as memory, yearning, dream and reality — are part of private and public art collections. More images are on view at his website.
Foto Friday – Michal Heiman
Filed under: Art, design, Foto Friday, General, History and Culture, Picture of the Week, Pop Culture, Profiles
Michal Heiman is one of Israel’s most prolific multimedia artists. Since the early 1980s, Heiman has been on the art scene, working in photography, painting, performance, installation and video. Two weeks ago, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, selected Heiman as the first recipient of the Shpilman International Prize for Excellence in Photography, a new biannual prize that aims to catalyze and support international research projects exploring theoretical and practical issues in photography.
Heiman teaches at the M.A. Interdisciplinary Program, Faculty of Arts, and the Advanced Studies Psychotherapy Program at the Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University and her work draws on her extensive research in psychology and philosophy. The prize money will fund a new project investigating the interaction between art and psychoanalysis, concentrating on the role of photography and visual imagery as diagnostic tools.
Heiman’s works ask the viewer seemingly simple questions: “What did you see?”, “What are you thinking?“, “What didn’t you see?”, “What’s on your mind?“. But the questions gain in complexity when juxtaposed against images that are original, found, or found and modified.
For the new project, Heiman will interview the creators of visual psychological tests and investigate aspects of photography—including portraiture, stereoscope, and World War I documentary imagery—that influenced and were influenced by such tests. Visit her website to learn more about this important Israeli artist.
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