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.
Graffiti overcomes Kassams in Sderot
Filed under: A New Reality, Art, coexistence, design, General, Israeliness, Life, Social Justice
Fixing a hole - one of the urban artists from Artists 4 Israel in Sderot. (Photo: Ron Friedman)
That’s why an international group of graffiti artists under the Artists 4 Israel moniker have descended upon the southern city to brighten up the surroundings and give the residents of Sderot some color back in their lives.
“Unfortunately, people here have to live with bomb shelters. We’re here doing a little something to bring some color to something that’s here for an ugly reason,” said American graffiti artist Cycle, summing up to The Jerusalem Post the aim of the group’s “Murality Project’ mission to Israel.
The 25 urban artists from the United States, Spain, Mexico and Israel, including some of the top names in New York City urban art, have been decorating the city’s bomb shelters for a couple days already beautifying the bombarded city’s public bomb shelters.
“You can still feel the tension in the air. People aren’t at ease,” Texas graffiti artist Saul Schister told The Post.
“One of the artists was working with headphones on, listening to music, and a resident came up to him and yelled at him. He told him that it was dangerous because with the headphones on, he wouldn’t be able to hear the sirens,” said Schister. “I guess that for them, these bomb shelters on every street are a constant reminder that they live in a war zone.”
An Israeli artist who goes by the name of Psycho said that the experience was even special for him – because he wasn’t used to painting public buildings with the permission of the municipality.
“I used to paint illegally, but then I was caught by the police. Since then I’ve been doing commissioned work,” he said. “I don’t really care about the politics. For me it’s more about the art. But I know that the people here have had a rough time and if my work can help, I’m happy to do it. So far people’s reactions have been really positive. Some people have even asked if we can come paint their house.”
In a trance on the beach
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence, General, Holidays, Israeliness, Life, Travel
When Israelis go camping, they tend to keep things as close to home life as possible. Meaning they’re right on top of you.
I try to go camping on the beach with my kids at least once a year, and last weekend we packed up the tent and mangal and headed to Palmachim beach, just south of Rishon Leziyon with two other dads and kids (for an inexplicable reason, some wives prefer to stay in the solitude of a lone house rather than with their family in a cramped tent).
Palmachim is an ideal destination because there’s a spacious grass/dirt area just a few yards away from the beach, enabling you to pitch a tent and cook without sand getting everywhere, but still close to run right in the Mediterranean whenever you want. As a bonus, the entrance fee is only NIS 20 per car (about $5 for a weekend in the sun).
One of the families with us knew the drill from previous excursions, but the other family, veterans of numerous camping trips in their native US, were making their first foray into the sport of Israeli camping. There are differences.
First of all, you need to have certain expectations, or more specifically, lack of them. Don’t expect to get any sleep – if you think you’re going to have a restful night, stay at home.
There are no ‘norms’ about shutting off the music and turning in at midnight. There are parties all night, and it’s not just boom boxes.
Israelis bring sound systems on their camping trips, booming PAs that can simulate a high speed drill or a jackhammer. On the plus side, you can look at it as a sociological experience. Camping in Israel provides a microcosm into Israeli society like no other.
Down on the beach, there was typical rave, with droning, pounding noise disguised as music, and a dozen ecstatic 20-somethings undoubtedly spurred on by some ‘ecstacy’ of their own. Unfortunately, they didn’t pass any around to the rest of us.
But no matter, because over 30 yards or so in the grove of trees near the public bathrooms was a group of also 20-something Ethiopian Israelis camping and they were playing native music at equally ear splitting levels and dancing in an exotic, sensual manner – men and women inches from each other in a hypnotizing form of chicken dance. We couldn’t take our eyes off them. That is, until a group of boisterous campers from Georgia (the country, not the US state) began doing their own ethnic dances and songs.
By around 2 am, our third family couldn’t take it any more and packed their stuff and went home. The dad had enough of the noise, the smoke from other grills wafting into his tent, the proximity of the other campers – in short the Israeli camping experience.
But I wasn’t perturbed at all by the shenanigans around me. I had gone for a moonlight midnight swim in the balmy sea with my children. We laughed, jumped on each other, and hugged, untethered by schedules, computers, TV, work and school. I didn’t hear a thing.
The white holiday
Filed under: Food, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Israeliness
Shavuot is approaching, and what I like about this holiday in Israel is that you can celebrate it from a variety of approaches. If you’re observant, there’s the standard ‘yontif‘ handling of the holiday, which means food, prayers, something white to wear, and heading to a tikkun on Shavuot eve to learn all or part of the night.
But as one of the three pilgrimage festivals — Sukkot and Passover are the other two — Shavuot ranks up there in Israel, with all kinds of alternative and traditional festivities that appeal to even the most secular of Israeli Jews. There are the kibbutz celebrations, which include small children dressed in white, arms akimbo in order to hold baskets of recently picked fruit and vegetables to mark Shavuot’s stance as an agricultural festival. There are the usual family gatherings, as Israelis so love to do, including tables groaning with all kinds of homemade dairy fare, since this is considered to be the ‘dairy’ holiday. (See this great JTA article about alternatives to dairy on Shavuot.)
And since Israelis also love their dairy — we have more types of yogurt drinks per capita than any other country — one of the local dairy companies, Tnuva, puts out a Shavuot magazine each year, as an insert in the local newspapers, with dairy recipes from the kitchens of their employees. Nicely done, and, I have to say, it has been the source of more than one good recipe that’s come out of my kitchen.
There are also the learning celebrations, given Shavuot’s source as the holiday celebrating the giving of the Torah, and that has led to the traditional tikkun, all-night learning that takes place on the night of the holiday. In my city of Jerusalem, a city of much learning, there are hundreds of tikkunim to choose from, held at every synagogue, yeshiva, school and place of learning. But what I’ve loved in years past is to head to Tel Aviv, where the streets are full of people dressed in white heading to all-night lectures of the more alternative type. Those can include poetry readings, yoga and Torah, discussions about the place of Torah in a secular society, or, for the more party-oriented, all-night clubbing in honor of Shavuot. For that matter, since Tel Aviv is considered the white city for its collection of Bauhaus architecture, you could celebrate Shavuot by doing a midnight tour of Bauhaus structures.
I will be making cheesecake, but I won’t be heading out for some all-night (not that I ever did) learning this year. But if you’re in J-town, I did notice some great options for the Tikkun, including an Israeli singdown and a 12:30 am walk around the Old City, hosted by the Tower of David Museum.
Happy learning and eating.
Jazzy Jay and other esoteria
Filed under: A New Reality, General, History and Culture, Music, Pop Culture
Just because the Israeli concert-going market can’t support more than one or two performances from A-list-ers like Paul McCartney each summer, doesn’t mean that we need to deal with washed-up international talents like Deep Purple the rest of the time.
The best of the not-quite-mainstream pop talent whose art is uncompromised, esoteric and less disposable have been entertaining us here more and more often, whether it’s Devendra Bernhardt, Low, Blonde Redhead, Lee “Scratch” Perry or Morrissey. Thankfully, more and more performers along these lines have been making their way to Israeli stages in recent years.
And despite the ongoing violence in the south of the country in recent weeks, the show must go on. No notices announcing a cancellation of this Friday’s Urbanology Festival have reached this cultural correspondent’s desk so far, which means that old-school talent DJ Jazzy Jay is still expected to hit the decks this weekend at the Cult Club at Herzl St. 154, Tel Aviv (tickets available at 057-777-4422).
Jazzy Jay is one of the founding fathers of hip hop. A scratch turntablism pioneer, he spun at street parties in the Bronx in the late Seventies and in downtown Manhattan clubs in the early Eighties. Part of Afrika Bambaataa’s Universal Zulu Nation collective, Jay was also a co-founder of the influential Def Jam Recordings. His “It’s Yours” single was the label’s first-ever release, and he helped broker the partnership between notorious trailblazing rap moguls Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons. His own Jazzy Jay’s Studio was an early home to luminaries like A Tribe Called Quest Brand Nubian.
Jay comes to Israel for the Cult Club’s Urbanology party, branded as a celebration of everything associated with old-school hip hop culture – rap, breakdancing, graffiti and more. Events like these have been taking place at venues across Israel for years, but none with a marquee performer of this stature. Other participants include local talents like the disco funk-fixated DJ Alarm, DJ Mesh, local old-schoolers Quami and Kottage, the Tachlis Band and alt-rappers Peled and Ortega.
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