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Pomegranate economics

As we say goodbye to the ‘chagim’ period, the month-long span of Jewish holidays, a piece of news about pomegranates, a major fruit in the Rosh Hashana new fruit ritual. The pomegranate has also become a major component of the health food trade, given its antioxidants that lower blood pressure and reduce risk factors for heart disease. As a result, Israeli farmers have doubled the size of their pomegranate orchards over the past five years to 20,000 dunam from the previous 10,000 dunam, or 2,500 acres. Them’s a lot of pomegranate seeds. As a result, an oversupply of the red-seeded fruit has led to a 30% drop in prices over the last few weeks, and at the height of pomegranate season, according to a recent item in Ha’aretz.

That’s great for the Israeli consumer, who’s now buying pomegranates at the supermarket for NIS 10 a kilogram, down from NIS 14 at this time last year. So if you’re so inclined, and live in this pomegranate-heavy region, here’re are some recipes from Haim Cohen and Eli Landau, the current recipe-testers and writers for the Ha’aretz weekend magazine. They also offer the same advice as my sister for getting the seeds out of the pomegranate: Fill about half of a good-sized bowl with water; cut the pomegranate in half and place the cut side down in the water. Then just peel off the seeds in the water, which will prevent you, the peeler, from getting sprayed with ruby red pomegranate juice. It’s a a great ‘patent‘, as we say in these parts.

As for the recipes, this is the one I’m thinking about trying this week:

Pomegranate risotto

A slightly sour and wonderful-tasting dish.

half kg. rice for risotto

1.5 liters hot vegetable stock

1.5 cups pomegranate juice

seeds from 1 pomegranate

1 medium-sized onion, finely chopped

100 gm. butter

olive oil

4-5 tbsp. grated Parmesan

salt and pepper

In a heavy, medium-sized pot, melt 50 gr. butter with 2 tbsp. olive oil. Add the onion; saute over medium heat until it becomes transparent. Add the rice and saute for another minute or two, while stirring. Add half a cup pomegranate juice and cook until it evaporates almost completely. Add one ladle full of vegetable stock. Add salt and pepper; stir until the liquids are absorbed. Gradually add one ladle full at a time, while stirring. After about 15 minutes of cooking, when the rice is still hard, add the pomegranate seeds and continue to cook until the rice softens. The risotto should be well cooked, not al dente.

Turn off the flame and add 50 gr. butter; stir until it melts. Add the Parmesan, mix well and serve.

Trying to explain Tel Aviv

Yet another take on the Tel Aviv bubble, this time from the Christian Science Monitor. This time it’s done – both in writing and on video – with insight and knowledge by the CSM’s Josh Mitnick, who knows the city from the inside.

To mark its centennial, Tel Aviv has staged a public tribute heavy on pyrotechnics, as well as a nocturnal citywide block party. It has lured international cultural acts like Italy’s La Scala opera. But its birthday comes at a time when the liberal city seems increasingly out of step with Israel’s shift to the right.

Hanoch Marmary, a former editor at the Haaretz newspaper, says Israelis have a love-hate relationship with the city: “Tel Aviv is an icon. It is a dream. It’s a concept. It symbolizes success, an open life, and hedonism,” he says. “But it also raises feelings of jealousy. On the one hand you want to be part of it, and on the other hand there’s condescension, fear, a recoiling, and jeering” of Tel Aviv.

The debate between what is the ‘real’ Israel will go on for eternity. But it’s undeniable that Tel Aviv certainly represents a valid version of Israel – as valid as the versions represented in Jerusalem yeshivas, West Bank hilltops and drab development towns.

Summer high-tech scandal keeps Israel amused

Israel is agog. This week we’ve watched the best high-tech scandal to unfold since Kobi Alexander ran off to Namibia.

It all began at the start of the week when an Israeli newspaper broke a story about Bnei Brak company, Life Keeper, which has developed a heart monitor patch, selling a 37 percent stake in the company to a Taiwanese computer hardware manufacturer for $370 million, at a company value of $1 billion.

In these recessionary days, journalists across the country leapt on the story. Israeli company makes good – we just love that kind of story here. There were a few puzzling things, however. Number one of which was why no one had actually heard of this company before, especially given that it was developing such cool technology – the patch apparently could forecast when you were going to have a heart attack and send your location to a doctor.

The next day the doubts began. Israel’s financial daily, Globes carried out a bit of uncharacteristic investigative reporting into the sale and discovered that the Taiwanese company, Micro-Star International (MSI), hadn’t actually reported the deal, while its London office claimed it didn’t know a thing about it.

Not so, said SafeSky CEO, Dr. Gabi Picker. “The deal is valid and alive,” he told Globes. “We hold an MOU signed by a notary by both sides from Seligman & Co. law firm that accompanied the negotiations. They have a copy of the document.”

Globes also pointed out that none of Israel’s VC funds had heard of SafeSky – the company’s parent company, and nor had any of Israel’s leading doctors.

The next day Ha’aretz waded in, pointing out that the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem – supposedly conducting clinical trials for the device – had no connection to the company or the patch.

Picker, who joined SafeSky just a few weeks ago, also seemed to be getting cold feet, hinting that company director Hagai Hadas – a former Mossad man who had encouraged him to join the firm – for the mess. Ha’aretz said Picker told confidantes that he wasn’t entirely sure that either the product or the deal were real.

Doubts also surfaced about Aharon (Arik) Klein, supposedly the inventor of the patch technology. Turns out he’s serial con man who has numerous debts and various prison sentences for fraud. Even the police in Cyprus are hunting for him.

Now the latest news in the saga is that Picker has resigned. His resignation comes after a lawyer at Seligman & Co. refused to give Picker’s attorney a copy of the document about the transaction.

So what comes next? We’ll just have to wait and see. Ah. There’s nothing like a good scandal to keep you going through the slow, scorching days of summer. Far better than stories about aliens and crop circles.

A new take on the news

Hebrew Book Week began this week, and the Haaretz newspaper marked the moment by replacing many of their regular journalists with writers and poets for Wednesday’s edition, reporting the news as they experienced it.

With the exception of business and sports, the country’s top writers — David Grossman, Etgar Keret, Haim Be’er, Yehudit Katzir, Nurit Gertz and others — covered the news of the day, from Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s speech and the visit of U.S. envoy George Mitchell to the ongoing dramas of former President Moshe Katzav’s trial and the motives behind entertainer Dudu Topaz’s recent criminal actions.

The writing was entertaining, and familiar, in that the writers recounted the news in their voices, not the usual objective voice of the reporters (not that Israeli reporters are always so objective)…In writing about Dudu Topaz’s fall from grace, Ram Oren, Israel’s best-selling author, talks about being painfully jealous of Topaz and how Topaz will turn this event into a book opportunity. Keret, in recounting his brief interview with Defense Minister Barak, tries to work in the fact that Barak was speaking at, and they were meeting in, his former school. Shahar Magen was charmed by the arrival of new giraffes at the Ramat Gan Safari and Sami Michael introduced the whole lot:

“What have we done to your newspaper?…Is the author’s point of view necessarily different from that of the reporter, directly touching the live flesh of exposed reality? And what, in any case, is the link between life and literature, between news and fiction?…My colleagues featured as guests in this enterprise have answered the call to serve as reporters examining the profound link between labor and poetry, between reality and imagination.”

But my favorite piece was the weather report, written by poet Ronny Someck:

Summer Sonnet

Summer is the pencil
that is least sharp
in the seasons’ pencil case.
With it I compose
a billet-doux
to the seamstress who snipped
from women’s clothes
collars that had hidden napes
and lopped
an inch or two of winter
from the bottom of their dress.
Perhaps this year too
it will be hot
in the low-lying spots.

Sabra happiness

A poll recently published by the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies shows that 86% of the 1006 adult Jewish Israelis surveyed are very happy or happy in their life, and 53% are very happy in their marriage, while another 44% are just happy. I found myself noting this particular aspect of the poll, which was sent to me via email, because it reminded me of the “happiness quotient” asked of the family profiled each weekend in Ha’aretz, in which the interviewees respond on a scale of one to ten. I always wonder how I would answer, and how one’s response can easily change from week to week.

Anyway. According to the poll, those Sabras surveyed with higher income tend to be happier, particularly if they are anticipating a rise in income. But while being married tends to increase happiness, at the same time, married people have to share their income increase with their spouse, and therefore have less of a “happiness boost” when their family income increases. Which made me think about the article I read this morning, discussing the fact that those living in Israel’s Dan region, aka, the greater Tel Aviv area, have been hardest hit by the recession that supposedly hasn’t yet hit Israel. These are the folks that used to have higher incomes, but now have lower or no income. Which, in theory, would make them unhappy. Unless they’re married.

Another surprising result from the survey is that immigrants to Israel are more likely to be happy than Israelis born in Israel, as being born in Israel reduces the probability to be happy by 8%. That result, says the JIMS, is very unique, given that immigrant populations are usually less happy than native populations because they have less of a social network and struggle with cultural differences in their new country. But the survey found that the more voluntary the immigration, the happier the immigrant. Olim from Western countries are the happiest, and are, on average, 13.5% more likely to be happy than Sabras. Which should make me happy. I think it does.

Israeli wine demarginalizes settlers

The Israeli settler movement is often cited as a thorn in the side of peace, a rag-tag band of Wild West-inspired radicals who are keeping Israel of reaching her goals of progress. This over-generalized perception might or might not be accurate, although the headlines last month out of Hebron don’t necessarily make them look so good.

The settler movement holds a tricky place in the culture, no matter how you slice it. And even if many sectors of Israeli society make sure that the government’s attitude towards settlers remain as ambiguous as possible, the fact is that the state depends on these people to garner us international diplomatic leverage by creating “facts on the ground” rather than theoretical claims to territory, and their lifestyles – no matter how ideological or pragmatic – are therefore highly subsidized by the national budget.

For the fall holidays, the settler movement, embodied by the Yesha Council (a consciously anachronistic acronym for “Judea Samaria and Gaza”), launched a major tourism promotion campaign which packaged the territories as a kitschy roots discovery destination for mainstream Israelis (a harsh but poignant analysis of the marketing message appears here).

Now Yesha is further trying to endear itself to the center of the country by piggybacking on the oeno-tourism trend, a trend that has people around the world and around the nation visiting remote locations of Israel to check out various vineyards and barrel caves. Many of Israel’s up-and-coming wineries are kosher, but the trend is not only for the God-fearing – especially when it comes to the increasingly developed pallets of local connoisseurs.

In addition, institutions of higher learning, bed and breakfasts and olive oil presses have been employed as “facts on the ground” that have the potential to rally support from the settler-skeptical. Haaretz recently got some interesting comments on the matter from a Yesha leader:

Bentzi Lieberman, a former chairman of the Yesha Council, acknowledged shortly before leaving his post that “the settlers are living on borrowed time: if we don’t create something else for the public, something dynamic, relevant and up-to-date, if we don’t use a different, Israeli, language, that will connect the public to us, the danger of us becoming irrelevant will increase.”

Lieberman at the time cited Ariel College and the Barkan Industrial Zone as examples of successful marketing, “that blur boundaries, roadblocks and the Green Line, projects that cross borders and span across opinions, that are beyond all the little fears and connect the broad Israeli public to here.”

“If we are not able to create these kinds of projects, in terms of language, content and essence and also in the economic sense,” Lieberman warned then, “if we don’t speak a language that Israelis understand, we won’t be here.” Today, Lieberman’s vision is taking shape and increasing numbers of Israelis are visiting Judea and Samaria for reasons that are not political. Instead they are going for the experience and the fun.

Photo from flickr user ePublicist under a creative commons license.

Zach Braff hearts Tel Aviv.

‘Scrubs’ star Zach Braff recently visited Tel Aviv and like many visitors fell in love with the city. Braff was not here for publicity reasons or to promote a new television show or movie but rather came on vacation. He gave a pretty cool interview to Ha’aretz, talking about his career as JD on Scrubs and what influences him as an actor. More interesting to me was that he spoke quite frankly about his previous experiences in Israel and his Jewish identity – a topic that many American Jews in Hollywood avoid (except our beloved Natalie of course).

As an American Jew it’s an amazing feeling to come to a place where you feel you belong. You know we’re such a minority in the U.S. Even though I grew up in New Jersey, which was very Jewish, and then I went to school in Chicago, which was Jewish, and then I moved to New York, which is very Jewish, and then I went to Hollywood, which is very Jewish. But they say we’re only 2 percent of the population and shrinking because of intermarriage.”

Braff says that when you come here, “you just feel this amazing sense of community. We hear so much about Israel and politics with the Palestinians and you feel so separate from it. So I really wanted to see for myself.” He says he was “lucky” to be able to come and see things firsthand and to talk to Israelis. “As a Jew I think it’s really important to come to this place. There is such a tremendous sense of community, tremendous bond for obvious reasons. I don’t know if Israelis have a sense of it because they live here, but I love it.”

His experiences reflect exactly what many American Jews feel when visiting Israel – myself included. Except I don’t have the power to make a movie about the experience.

The Israeli experience made such an impression on him, he says, he is thinking of his next film touching on a story about an American Jew who visits Israel. Braff, who wrote and directed the successful “Garden State,” which also starred Natalie Portman, says a story like what he has in mind is something he’s never seen in a movie and thinks it will be really interesting.

I question whether Braff would get the funding for a movie about an American Jew in Israel, but he pulled off funding Garden State on his own and we all know how successful that movie was… His co-star from Garden State, Natalie Portman will be making her directorial debut later this year with A Tale of Love and Darkness, based on the novel on Amos Oz, so perhaps she’ll help with getting Braff acclimated to the film scene here. Hey, maybe we’ll even see the two of them reunite on screen – that would be a surefire success. And mandatory viewing for all birthright participants.

Jerusalem Election Diary: Haaretz gets it so wrong

I don’t usually write about the same topic two weeks in a row, but, with less than a week to go, the upcoming Jerusalem mayoral elections is so important that I feel compelled to post again.

Last Friday, Haaretz published an editorial slamming mayoral candidate Nir Barkat and endorsing “a responsible haredi” (a code word for Meir Porush, the only ultra Orthodox candidate running for the position). Many Jerusalemites like me were outraged.

The reason for Haaretz’s position is that Barkat has come out in support of building a Jewish neighborhood near the Arab village of Anata, at the foot of the Jerusalem neighborhood of French Hill. The area has long been a thorn in the Palestinian’s side: building there would help connect Jerusalem to the satellite city of Ma’aleh Adumim in the West Bank, but it would also have the effect of preventing territorial contiguity for a new Palestinian state.

Barkat says that building this new Jewish neighborhood will help solve the city’s “shortage of housing for students and young people.” But it’s also a clear ploy to help win over Jerusalem’s “swing vote” – the Modern Orthodox residents who, according to recent polls, are split between Barkat and rival Porush. Given that most of the city’s voters, whether religious or secular, tend to be right wing, it’s not a bad campaign tactic.

Whether you agree or disagree with Barkat’s position, Haaretz – by coming out against the current front-runner in the race – is saying something far more disturbing about Israel’s attitude towards Jerusalem.

Haaretz is, in effect, giving up on Jerusalem. Or perhaps they already have. In the eyes of the Tel Aviv-based newspaper, Jerusalem is already all religious; there’s nothing to do here; no nightlife; it’s too far away; too dangerous; too tense; and ultimately not even worth a visit. The Western Wall, the Old City, the quaint alleyways and gourmet restaurants, the cool summer air, the unique architecture, the spirituality, the Knesset and center of government – all of these are unimportant to the enlightened readers of Haaretz where the heaviness and tension that are part and parcel of Israel’s capital might, God forbid, impede the never ending pursuit of next party.

Indeed, to Haaretz, Jerusalem is not a city at all. It’s a metaphor, a bargaining chip on the geo-political stage to be divided in an eventual peace. Anything getting in the way of that end must be resisted, fought, denigrated. Haaretz couldn’t care less about the problems the city faces, from transportation gridlock to cleanliness and jobs, reverse emigration, religiously-mandated unemployment, and a rapidly deteriorating education system, all areas for which Barkat – in contrast to the other mayoral hopefuls – has clear, step-by-step plans for rapid execution. The quality of life in Jerusalem can go to hell, Haaretz is saying, as long as the next mayor doesn’t stoop to interfere with the inevitable outcome of Oslo and Annapolis.

Read more

Foto Friday – Guy Raivitz’s Back Yard

Guy Raivitz is an Israeli freelance photojournalist who’s worked all around the local and foreign media. He also does pro bono work for social conscience organizations, including the UNICEF Angola mine awareness project, and Integrated Rural Development and Nature Conservation in Namibia. He’s trained his sharp lens on Israel as well – he was a staff photographer for “Haaretz”, among other publications – and produced a powerful portraiture series of people in soup kitchens.

Today’s Foto Friday presents four works from Guy’s latest project – a soon-to-be published book documenting Israeli reality called “Back Yard“. Each is a stand-alone work, but there is also a logic to the way he’s set them up on his website, in pairs.

Maybe its because I commuted on that freeway for six and a half years – and sat trapped in so many traffic jams while it was being built – but I found this combination strangely moving.

Guy has captured the craziness that engulfs the country on Yom Ha’atzmaut, when we tread a fine line between revelry and violence. The next day, the city lies quiet, covered by a layer of soot and shaving cream.

 

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