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.
Duplex of Dreams
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence, education, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, News, Politics, Social Justice
While the newspapers are packed with commentary on the ‘Tent Protest’ and the fact that some 150,000 Israelis took to the streets Saturday night (July 30) in the name of social justice, seeing the pictures and reading about it just isn’t the same as actually being there.
It was to “see” and “feel” a bit of history in the making that we went to Rothschild Boulevard last night.
As any Tel Aviv resident knows, Rothschild Boulevard is always teeming with people. And wandering up and down this street is an endeavor cherished by all of this city’s dwellers.
Now, the thoroughfare has been transformed into a campground. But this is no regular campsite; these campers are armed with wit, a desire for change and loads of energy.
This is a well-oiled happening. There’s a kitchen tent area, an information center, a communications tent, a yoga space and a barber tent. Some people pitched just a tent while others brought their living rooms with them.
And it was difficult not to be swept up by the enthusiasm as we walked around the tents, reading the handmade signs posted wherever the tape would stick.
Some signs were political, others were hilariously witty. Each sign was in support of one of the social crises at stake: housing, health, education, gasoline, child care, etc.
There were signs we disagreed with, and others that we endorsed.
"Duplex on Rothschild: If to dream about an apartment, then all the way." (Photo: Viva Sarah Press)
“Duplex on Rothschild: If to dream about an apartment, then all the way,” read one sign.
“Looking for a groom with his own apartment,” read another.
There were also “house numbers” on each tent, but instead of Rothschild Boulevard, the name of the street was listed as Tents Boulevard.
Tents Boulevard instead of Rothschild Boulevard. (Photo: Viva Sarah Press)
Rothschild Boulevard is often the site of outdoor exhibits. In a way, the protest tents are an exhibition of today’s word on the street.
And the word on the street is that social services are constitutional rights. As Daphni Leef, one of the leaders of the ‘Tent Protest’ said: “We do not want to replace the government, we want much more than that – to change the rules of the game and say loud and clear: Social services are rights, not commodities.”
There were tens of thousands of people, but no one pushed. The atmosphere along the boulevard was one of hope.
The protestors are people who love their country but also want social justice. They are people who are not just asking for cheaper rent, but those who want to be able to be able to afford living in a place they call home.
Havdallah on Rothschild Blvd. during the Tent Protest. (Photo: Viva Sarah Press)
A medley of everyone seemed to be represented. A group of ultra-orthodox men held a havdallah service about 10 tents away from a young group of dread-locked Israelis, singing and dancing and jamming on their guitars. An older couple sat on one of the benches lining the paths watching as families with children on their parents’ shoulders walked by.
The pedestrian traffic going to and from the central tent area was non-stop.
I wonder how the founders of the city would react to today’s ‘Tent Protest’ taking over the boulevard that in 1909 was planned explicitly as a central public space.
Wedding by Ikea
Ikea store (sorry no photos of the happy couple)
Haaretz has an article on how the entry of the Swedish furniture giant Ikea into the Israeli market has created a design revolution. While most of the piece delved into the business of Ikea and what Carmela Jacoby Wellek, head of the interior design department at the College of Management in Rishon Letzion, labeled the “democratization” of design, there was one tidbit that caught my eye: weddings by Ikea.
By that, I don’t mean a wedding decked out in Ikea furniture. Rather, a wedding staged at Ikea itself. OK, I go too far. But Asaf and Noa Miron did at least stage their wedding photographs at the Netanya branch of Ikea a few months before it burned down.
The two were snapped in the parking lot in front of the blue cube-shaped store, laying on beds in the bedroom section, and modeling the latest stainless steel appliances in the kitchen division.
Why did they do it? Are they Ikea addicts? Not really. “Yes, we shop there,” Asaf told Haaretz. “I don’t know if we have a lot, but it’s more than a little.”
That said, the photo session was more of a lark than a mission statement. “We thought it was an original idea (although) later we heard that other people had done it too,” Asaf said.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised. When Ikea first opened, I took the family to the coast just to walk through. We ogled a plenty, but only bought a couple of kitchen mittens and some salad tongs.
And Ikea has fulfilled other social needs in Israel. Apparently, according to the article, religious singles in the vicinity of the store are using it as a neutral meeting space for first dates. That’s a lot cheaper than the lobby of the Tel Aviv Hilton. And think of the icebreaker opportunities. “Gee this bed feels a bit too firm, what do you think?” Or “Look at these lovely childrens bunk beds. And how many kids were you thinking of having?”
Japan Earthquake No Insurance for Israelis Living on Fault Line
Filed under: Environment, History and Culture
Israel has offered to help the shaken country of Japan emerge from the rubble. Now with a possible nuclear meltdown looming, Japan’s woes may only have just begun. Globally, what’s been happening in Japan has sent shockwaves and tremors to the nuclear energy industry, and environmentalists with their tongues sticking out, use the catastrophe to remind the world about the dangers of mixing nuclear energy with natural disasters.
You can buy house insurance, and of course car insurance (if you still drive a drive a car that is, along with plenty of cheap car insurance quotes out there) but one thing the world can’t buy is nuclear meltdown insurance.
Remember the Chernobyl meltdown and the wine produced that year –– wine whose grapes were contaminated with nuclear fallout? Just like the dust cloud after the volcano eruption, the fallout from a nuclear meltdown in Japan could wind around the globe, affecting animals, people and plants in its wake. Damage done to our DNA from radiation doesn’t end with one or two generations but can persist to eternity. There is no insurance in the world that can cover this damage. Read more
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