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Martha’s in town

There’s a lot going on this country right now, but that didn’t deter home entrepreneur Martha Stewart from traveling here last week as a guest of the Tourism Ministry. I would have loved to meet Martha — get some ideas from her about flowers for my garden and perhaps some Rosh Hashanah recipes — but I had to make do with her Tweets and Twitpics from her adventures around the country.

She didn’t, however, post any pics from the September 4 wedding she attended at the Rockefeller Archeological Museum, that of Discovery show host Josh Bernstein and Lily Snyder, daughter of Israel Museum director James Snyder.

But she did hit several of my favorite hotspots, including:

Glad you had fun, Martha!

#46

Mazal tov, James Snyder! The director of the Israel Museum was recently included in a pretty prestigious list of the 100 most influential people in the art world, as compiled annually by the Journal des Artes, the French sister-edition of The Art Newspaper.

Snyder was 46 on the list which includes collectors such as Leonard Lauder, colleagues Glenn Lowry, director of The Museum of Modern Art (James’ previous place of employment); artists Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor (whose sculpture current graces the redesigned museum); architects Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid; designers Ron Arad and Philippe Starck, who have their own Israel connections (Arad designed the well-regarded Holon Design Museum and Starck did the Yoo Tel Aviv, a prestigious set of high-rise apartments).

Snyder has been the director of the museum since 1997, which recently completed a massive, $100 million renovation, the most comprehensive since its 1965 establishment.

Hard to say how much longer he’ll be here, but it’s been good to have him here.

The amateur tour guide

We’re in a hosting week. Given that it’s Christmas-New Year’s week, it’s time for visitors to come, well, visit. For us, there’s the added incentive of my nephew’s bar mitzvah — Akiva, my special, special-needs nephew who did fabulously at his bar mitzvah on Monday morning — and the more than 30? 35? friends and relatives who decided to take advantage of a vacation week and come celebrate with us over here.

And so, I’ve got four cousins staying with me, plus some more family up the block in a rented apartment, and a variety of others staying in a range of hotels, from the simple to the more luxe. When that happens, you become tour guide for the week. Or ten days. Or two weeks.

It’s a funny thing. I mean, what do I know about being a tour guide? I didn’t take the tour guide course, of course, but when you’ve lived somewhere for 15 years, and it’s a place that people like to visit, you end up gathering information and knowledge about this kind of stuff. Plus, it doesn’t hurt that I just finished a project updating the Jerusalem section of the Fodor’s guidebook, and am now a local expert — among family and friends — about where to eat, stay and shop in Jerusalem.

We’ve tramped around Machane Yehuda, wandered through the newly renovated Israel Museum, walked around the ‘Mitcham HaRakevet’ in Tel Aviv and gone shopping in Gan Hachashmal. I’ve sent them to eat and see a flick at the Jerusalem Cinematheque, feed the goats in Moshav Tel Shachar and munch on grilled chicken in the shuk.

It’s fun to rediscover your fave places through the eyes of others. And, hey, to vacation in your own town.

Foto Friday – Dead Sea Scrolls Digitized!

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, Google is dedicated to digitizing the world’s books — and the People of the Book are one lucky beneficiary of that mission. This week, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), together with Google, announced the launching a unique project: The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, that will document the entire Dead Sea Scrolls collection.

This is the first time that the collection of Scrolls will be photographed in its entirety since the 1950s — and that includes the earliest known copy of the Ten Commandments on the bottom of 2nd column and 3rd-4th column in this Deuteronomy Scroll.

The IAA will use advanced technologies to image the entire collection of 900 manuscripts comprising c. 30,000 Dead Sea Scrolls fragments in high resolution and multi-spectra and make the digitized images freely available and accessible to anyone anywhere in the world, via the Internet.

The IAA will collaborate with the Google R&D center in Israel to upload not only all of the digitized scrolls images but also additional data online that will allow users to perform searches across a broad range of data in a number of languages and formats. The hope is that this unprecedented access to the Scrolls, to both the academic and general public, will result in new research and scholarship.

The innovative imaging technology to be used in the project has been developed by MegaVision, a California-based company that lists the US Library of Congress and Los Angeles’ Getty Museum among its clients. The MegaVision system – be installed in the IAA’s laboratories in early 2011 – will enable the digital imaging of every Scroll fragment in various wavelengths in the highest resolution possible and allow long term monitoring for preservation purposes in a non-invasive and precise manner.

The IAA states that the images will be equal in quality to the actual physical viewing of the Scrolls, thus eliminating the need for re-exposure of the Scrolls and allowing their preservation for future generations.

The technology will also help rediscover writing and letters that have “vanished” over the years; with the help of infra-red light and wavelengths beyond, these writings will be brought “back to life”, facilitating new possibilities in Dead Sea Scrolls research. For example, these images of a fragment from Deuteronomy Scroll with Moses’ blessing in three different wavelengths — notice how the writing clarifies gradually.

Uploading the images to the Internet will be achieved with the assistance of Google-Israel and will be accompanied by meta-data including transcriptions, translations and bibliography.

The project funding was lead by the Leon Levy Foundation with additional major funding from the Arcadia Foundation and the support of Yad Hanadiv Foundation.

Foto Friday – Michal Heiman

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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  Israel is often seen as a place of conflict and strife. In reality there is much more: there's business and research; art and culture; community and family. At ISRAELITY, Israelis blog their daily thoughts, experiences and insights. It's the real Israel, not the media's Israel. It's people living ordinary lives in an extraordinary place.

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