In the Red South
Filed under: Environment, General, Israeliness, Life, Travel
After consecutive weeks of rainy weekends, Israelis flocked outdoors this weekend to feel the nature.
Several went to the beach. Some headed north to the Galilee and Golan Heights. But based on the traffic jams we encountered, the majority went to the North Negev to the Red South Anemone Festival.
Red South Anemone Festival (Photo: Viva Sarah Press)
With cameras at the ready you could hear “cheese” in just about every language.
The Anemone Festival is my favorite event of the year – and it takes place every weekend in February. These little red flowers carpet the northern Negev area (and can usually be found in the western part as well) and make getting in touch with nature all the more fun.
There are hiking options, biking routes, four-by-four tracks, guided tours and cultural activities.
Our group opted for just sitting down and enjoying a picnic. Our kids loved running and jumping among the flowers.
Jumping over anemones at Red South festival. (Photo: Viva Sarah Press)
And though there were thousands of other families at each field we visited, the flowers managed to keep the spotlight. It truly was a great day out.
Sukkot is the Jewish Environment Holiday in Israel
This week marks the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. Jews will build small huts and live in them for a week.
Tonight marks the first night of Sukkot, the Jewish Festival of Booths. This post cross-posted at Green Prophet by Alex Gutman, explains the history and traditions of this inherently green holiday. If you are in Israel this week and notice people living in small wood huts, it’s not the tent protestors, but Jews of all ages living in their booth, to remind them of Exodus from ancient times.
Sukkot, also known as the Feast of Tabernacles, couldn’t come at a better time than now. After the heaviness of Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), Sukkot joins Passover and Shavuot as a Jewish holiday which celebrates agriculture and is known as Z’man Simchateinu, the season of our rejoicing. It is the most festive of all the holidays and lasts for seven days and has a direct link to the environment. Read more
Green Poker Anyone?
Filed under: A New Reality, Technology
Founded by a small group of Israelis, Playtech is a multi-million gambling tech company that provides an engine for online casinos (if you like gambling online for real money). My sister, for one, can sit on Facebook for hours and play slots for points while she is chatting to her friends. But other people believe they can make real money online by gambling.
Based out of Israel, Estonia, and the UK, and more, for legal reasons Playtech does not operate in the United States: there are US laws that prohibit some kinds of online casinos –– like poker, a Playtech specialty.
This could change now that American legal eagles are deliberating on whether or not to allow online poker to be regulated in the United States, once again. Gambling addicts can certainly get their fix at Las Vegas, or in online casinos that offer blackjack, slots and any other favorite gambling game –– except poker.
In a New York Times article this week, it was reported that American legislators may once again allow for an online poker industry run by a few and which was shut down over Ponzi-scheme suspicions. But just like cigarettes, booze and gasoline, imagine all the taxation possibilities that gambling could bring in? Read more
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.
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