Nostalgia Sunday – From Zeev to Zeev

April 5, 2009 - 10:55 PM by Rachel Neiman · 1 Comment
Filed under: General, Holidays, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture 

Illustrator and comics artist Zeev Engelmayer creates works that are rooted in nostalgia for an Israel gone by. In his new Passover exhibition, “Matza & Tequila” — which opened last week at Tel Aviv’s Urbanix Gallery — Engelmayer displays illustrations, collages, and original hand written texts from the “Engelmayer Haggadah”, ceramics, animations and pieces inspired by the Haggadah, which was published 10 years ago and has now been reissued by the Israel Cartoon Museum.

engelmayer_hagaddah

Engelmayer likes to mix visual references of Israeli culture with combined with cinema images from the 50’s, commercial advertisements, catalog photos and schoolbook illustrations. His text are usually a dopey play on words that nonetheless strike a deeper chord. For example, this picture whose title, loosely translated, is something like, “Behold, the Prom-assed Land.”

engelmayer_land

And this one, entitled “Hametz On the Arava Highway,” which could be a reference to the “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” genre of horror film, or could equally be a comment on the panic demonstrated by vigilant family members trying to rid their homes (or perhaps the world…) of unleavened bread before Passover.

engelmayer_hametz

zeev-farkash1Another exhibition that opened this past week: a retrospective of works by the late Yaakov “Zeev” Farkash, whose cartoons and caricatures were a staple feature in Ha’aretz for 40 years. I remember Zeev from the glory days of Cafe Tamar, a small, modest smiling man who, every year at Passover, created a new and different “Gone On Vacation” sign for proprietor Sarah Stern in his signature pen and ink style. The works — and Sarah– are still there today.

“Matza & Tequila” runs through April 16th at Urbanix, which specializes in urban art and vinyl toys. The Zeev retrospective will be up through June 20th at the Israel Cartoon Museum.

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Marketing ritual as family values

July 29, 2008 - 1:52 PM by Harry · 3 Comments
Filed under: General 

Kiddush with the familyIn Israel, Fridays are similar to European and North American Sundays in many ways, a key one being the extra-thick newspaper. When Israel Israeli sits down to watch soccer on TV and spit sunflower seeds into his Turkish coffee regs, nothing makes for better reading material than a multi-kilo pile of not-quite-dry ink on super-thin paper containing hyper-local news tidbits, the following week’s TV highlights, in-depth feature articles illustrated with full-page photos, a circular outlining the latest cosmetics on sale at SuperPharm and fliers selling religious ritual to the presumably uninitiated.

Statistics have been said to indicate that the Passover Seder is Judaism’s most popular ritual (I know, it does seem odd that it would beat out henna parties, the Fast of Gedalia and upsheirin), so it makes sense that on the Friday preceding Passover, an advertising-laden Hagadah gets included in the pile. But this week, the Yediot tabloid included a Shabbat Kiddush flier insert that not only touted the sanctity of the Friday night family meal but also included the relevant liturgical text.

It’s not clear what kind of market research went into this initiative, nor what religiously coercive organizations were secretly involved (a comment on the flier here notes that Yediot publisher Nachi Dankner’s Supersol supermarkets are currently engaged in a stiff competition with Shefa Shuk, a chain which has made some enemies in the ultra-Orthodox world), but the sales pitch angle is an interesting one.

The flier doesn’t focus on man’s ritual obligations to his Maker, nor on the mystical attributes of the seventh day. Rather, what’s being sold here is happy, wholesome family time. In Israel, even for the secular, Shabbat (and the Friday night dinner that ushers it in) is a time when we surround ourselves with the people and tasks that really matter: taking it easy with the immediate clan. The smiling mother, children and wine goblet-wielding father sit at a table that’s in a “reserved” parking space, and the headline reads “Friday [night] is reserved for family.” It’s not easy for one’s heart to remain unwarmed.

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