Comedy of Israeli errors
Filed under: A New Reality, Blogging, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, Pop Culture
Raised in the metro Washington, DC area, Daniella Ashkenazy (pictured) has been living in Israel for over 40 years and working as a journalist for about half of that time., currently covering the environmental beat for The Jerusalem Post’s weekend Metro section.
Launched a few months ago, Ashkenazy’s Chelm-on-the-Med website is an ever-growing collection if local soft news items – those curious, often humorous stories that would sound like they are urban legends if they weren’t in the mainstream news media.
Among Chelm-on-the-Med’s gems are the tale of a farmer who used his LoJack–like car theft recovery device to recover bales of hay that had been stolen from him, a Knesset proposal to combat the ever-lowering water levels of the Dead Sea by importing water from Turkey, and a Hassidic man who proposed throwing books of Psalms at enemy entities as a poetic response to falling rockets (because in Hebrew, the word for missiles, Tillim, is similar to the word for Psalms, Tehillim).
Chelm-on-the-Med’s beat is relatively similar to ISRAELITY’s in that both sites attempt to take Israeli life out of the realm of hard news and into the realm of real life. As Ashkenazy puts it in her FAQ….
Beyond life and death issues, Israel is an outrageously amusing and lively place to live, and it’s strange that Jews, famous for their humor from Charlie Chaplin to Seinfeld, haven’t a clue about the humorous side of Israeli life.
She also sees the site as a useful tool for spreading a positive image of the country, especially among Diaspora youth:
A lot of things that make some adults uncomfortable will be viewed as very cool by adolescents. In fact, I think the zany, irreverent intriguing encounter with Israel that Chelm-on-the-Med offers will make Jewish kids think Israel is a very neat place – a vast improvement from the image of a gloomy and dangerous…and yes, dead serious and humorless ‘tight-ass’ country that focus groups have found.
Although the site is relatively new, the concept is not. In the late Eighties, Ashkenazy launched the column under the moniker “Gleanings” in the now-defunct Israel Scene magazine, and it has run in a variety of additional publications under other names as well.
Come Out To DC Film Event To See Where Young American Journalists Meet Israel In “The Editors”
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence
They couldn’t have come at a more dangerous time. Six university newspaper editors from America visited Israel for the first time last December, and the already planned trip happened to coincide with the first week of the recent Gaza Conflict.
In a reality style documentary, the young Americans had their week-long visit taped by a camera crew hired by Project Interchange, a Washington-based organization that develops seminars for Americans and international guests in Israel. The film is being screened tomorrow at Georgetown University.
In Israel, the editors, including Georgetown’s The Hoya newspaper editor Andrew Dubbins, met with a wide range of leaders and citizens in an attempt to get beyond the headlines to learn the complexities of the Middle East peace process.
(Vadim Lavrusik, Editor-in-Chief and Co-Publisher, The Minnesota Daily, University of Minnesota)
The documentary was written and directed by Patrick Ryan Morris from Project Interchange, and features Dubbins, along with other editors who were in Israel from December 30th to January 5th.
“I was an editor of a newspaper in college,” says Morris. “From that experience, I know that you cannot bring journalists to Israel, or anywhere for that matter, and force an ideology on them or a version of the truth.”
He hopes to screen the film at campuses throughout the United States.
Project Interchange brings new delegations of “influentials” to Israel twice a month from around the world. Muslim leaders from France came to a seminar in Israel in December, meeting Israeli President Shimon Peres and the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. In November, women executives from the U.S. construction business enjoyed a week-long seminar. Before that, European environment leaders were in Israel. Each group of guests enjoy tailor-made trips, adapted to their interests and expertise.
The world premiere of the The Editors, the film, will take place tomorrow evening – April 20th at 8:00 pm, at Georgetown University’s ICC Auditorium. The screening will be followed by a wrap party at Cafe St. Ex.
For more details and a map of how to get there, see The Editors on Facebook.
For more about Project Interchange, see the ISRAEL21c feature story on the organization.
CNN scents ISRAEL21c flower story
CNN World Report this week broadcast Molly Livingstone’s excellent piece for ISRAEL21c on floral scent research at Hebrew University.
Technology for the Birds
Filed under: Business, Environment, General, Israeliness, Technology, Travel
It almost sounds like a joke – something out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon, maybe. But “bird strikes” are apparently a serious problem for pilots and planes. That’s, apparently, what happened to a U.S. Airways jet that was forced to land in the Hudson River after taking off New York’s LaGuardia Airport minutes before. Nobody was hurt – amazingly – but in the battle between birds and pilots, humans haven’t always fared so well against avians. Luckily, Israel is on the case, working on ways to keep birds and planes away from each other!
According to experts, bird strikes – where a bird gets sucked into a jet’s engine, discombobulating the avionics (check out the photo of what an engine hit by birds looks like) – is not all that rare, and has plagued planes and even rockets. While not common in civilian aviation, bird strikes appear to be a near-plague for military flyers, according to this website which lists dozens of crashes, ejections, and even deaths of pilots due to bird strikes (at least two Israeli pilot deaths are listed). 
Because Israel is on the main north-south migratory route for birds, the IDF has been very concerned with bird strikes. According to the “Bird Strike Committee Proceedings” for 2002,
the Israeli Air Force (IAF) has focused attention in bird strike prevention on collisions between aircraft and migrating birds during low-level flight operations. Only in the last 2 years has the IAF begun to tackle the problem of reducing bird-aircraft collisions at or near airfields. A dramatic shift in thinking has led the IAF to initiate complete wildlife control programs at its airbases, featuring the employment of border collies and wildlife control officers to help eliminate the risk of wildlife collisions within the control zone (CTR) of each airfield.
As a crucial component of this program, the IAF has initiated major changes in habitat management at airfields, eliminating agricultural initiatives and undergoing large-scale modifications in airfield maintenance practices. Additionally, the IAF has altered flight and ground operations where possible to attenuate the risk imposed by birds and has coordinated efforts within various departments at each airbase to address bird strike control issues. Awareness and the resolve to eliminate wildlife hazards at its airfields are key features to the IAF’s new directive on bird strike prevention. Though still in its infancy, the IAF’s new wildlife control program has already shown dramatic improvements in the reduction of bird strike hazards at airbases.
My friends at the Fisher Institute in Herzliya have been on this problem as well, and have developed some new technology to ensure that both planes and birds can share the skies, that I hope to be able to report more about soon.
IBA’s Close Up feeds news jones
Filed under: A New Reality, Politics, Pop Culture, War
Earlier this week, the relatively new free daily nationalist tabloid Yisrael Hayom (Hebrew-only informational website viewable here) reported that mainstream Israeli news websites have been experiencing around a 30% spike in traffic since the start of the current Gaza conflict – hardly a surprise, and hardly a trend relegated to the video-heavy, Hebrew-language outlets cited in their stats.
With the thirst for Zionist-friendly war-related information peaking even among English speakers, the Israel Broadcasting Authority has been wise to initiate the launch of a new English news program called Close Up. Airing Wednesdays at 5:25 PM on the IBA’s Channel 33, the live in-depth weekly analysis magazine Close Up premiered this week with a half hour’s worth of content headed by IBA talking heads Steve Leibowitz and Leah Zinder.
The program joins the growing stable of English-language IBA news reports, which includes the ten-minute weekday News Bulletin and the 20-minute daily IBA News, all of which streams over the web on-demand at the IBA’s video mini-site (like most Israeli websites, works best in the Explorer browser).
For the inaugural episode, Zinder and Leibowitz were joined at the news desk by panelists Effi Eitam, a controversial MK from the hawkish religious National Union, and left-of-center David Horovitz, the editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post. Eitam remarked on the high levels of motivation among IDF, proclaiming that “The spirit of confidence will prevail amongst the soldiers, and, I might add, amongst the citizens.” Horovitz commented on pragmatic goals for ceasefire arrangements.
In other segments, Hebrew University’s Dr. Robbie Sabel, a former legal adviser to the Foreign Ministry, spoke about the ethical issues of the war, reporter Leah Stern gave over a timeline for how diplomacy breakdown led to the current battles, and a visit to opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s office yielded a predictably “I told you so”-style statement.
Foto Friday – Behind the lens with Israel Press
Filed under: Art, Foto Friday, General, Israeliness, Life, War
If a news photographer does the job right, they will render themselves anonymous. Viewers will focus on the image itself and forget that there was someone who created that image. But there are people behind the lens, often a phalanx of them, roasting in the hot sun in hopes of spotting Madonna, Leonardo DiCaprio and Bar Refaeli or any other visiting or local celebrity; standing around for hours while police drag the Yarkon river at a crime scene; or, as they have for the second week in a row, laying their lives on the line on the Israel-Gaza border.
Getting the shot, however, involves a great deal of hanging out, watching and waiting, and shutterbugs might click off a few shots of their own to stave off the boredom. Often, the subject is the person standing next to them.
Photo credit: Koko
Tomeriko, photo editor and staff photographer at Yediot Aharonot, is also the founder of a Israel Press, a Flickr page where Israeli news photographers upload the pictures they take of one another. Taken as a whole, the pictures document a tiny brotherhood – including a few sisters – of people who know each other very well.
Photo credit: Koko
“I started it because I had a lot of pictures of photographers from all sorts of events and didn’t know what to do with them,” explains Tomeriko. “At first, I thought I would send the pictures individually but I also wanted other people to see them. So I started the Flickr page and uploaded about 1000 pictures. When the other photographers heard about it, they started to send pictures to me. It’s kind of a family album.”
Photo credit: Koko
“It came from boredom,” laughs photographer Gilad Kavalerchik. “If you look at the beginning of the album, you’ll see a lot of pictures from football games and so on. But it’s become a way of having a souvenir of an event.”
Right now is not at all boring and Kavalerchik is running between jobs in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and the front, where he managed to snap a few such mementos.
Photo credit: Gilad Kavalerchik
Photo credit: Gilad Kavalerchik
Tomeriko emphasizes that Israel Press is a non-commercial enterprise, and isn’t intended for people to promote themselves or their news organization. He is very careful, however to credit each image, and provide contact information. He’s also divided Israel Press into disciplines – news, sports, camera-persons, reporters and of couse, the celebrity press. (The t-shirt in this photo says “Caution- Paparazzi before you”).
Photo credit: Tomeriko
Some of the photos are exercises in photographic composition.
Photo credit: Tomeriko
Sometimes, they are opportunities to try out in-camera effects, as in this picture of veteran photographers Koko and Moshe Shai, at the starting line of the Tel Aviv night run this past summer.
Photo credit: Tomeriko
Others document the camaraderie of a particular event – like the DiCaprio-Refaeli paparazzi stakeout – where photographers camped out for days. “This is our work. This is our shared experience,” says Koko.
Photo credit: Tomeriko
Photo credit: Tomeriko
Israel Press is a closed group with membership limited to Israeli photographers both here and abroad. Says Tomeriko: “You have to register to comment. Of course, people are interested in the behind-the-scenes of the media and we want people to see the pictures, but it’s really for us.”
Since the war started, Tomeriko has added some new photos of what the front is like behind the camera. “We’ve gotten some e-mails from people who want to give us encouragement, which is very nice. I posted them on the site.”
Coexistence Exists
Filed under: Blogging, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, Politics, Religion, coexistence
It’s no surprise that main stream news is focusing on the current situation in Gaza and southern Israel. Watching CNN’s coverage Israel looks like a battlefield right out of any epic war movie. The images are constantly played over and over again—which means I get worried phone calls from America, over and over again.
But there is more to life than the images on the news. In Jerusalem, all is pretty much quiet. Yes, tensions are high and I feel the added stress, but life is still not the media’s picture of Israel. In fact there is more coexistence happening on a daily basis than most people are aware of.
Here is Jerusalem Jews and Arabs work together building fancy new high rises or the new light rail train across the city. Today I spoke with an Arab-Israeli who was taking a five-minute-break from his moving job. He sat drinking coffee with his co-workers, both Arabs and Jews, and spoke about the weather (the very cold Jerusalem winter) and my dog’s funny looking sweater (I though he might be cold, but the dog clothing thing is just not for me). The point is that small talk still exists—talking still exists and not all forms of communication are from one rocket to another.
On a larger scale, I think back to the recent coexistence projects I filmed in the Israeli mixed cities of Acre and Lod. Again, the news’s projection is all about violence and crime in these areas, rather than focusing on the positive stories taking place.
Most people now think of Acre as that city that had riots this past Yom Kippur. But Acre quickly recovered from the fighting and both sides remain relatively calm during the current military operations. When I was there in November, I didn’t feel tensions, but rather found the coexistence projects’ efforts really taking effect. The Israel21c video below shows some of the projects, sponsored by the Jewish Agency, that are taking place in Acre.
Last month, I filmed a story about a new coexistence project in Lod. Aviv Wasserman, a native Israeli, founded The Lod Community Foundation about six months ago with the goal of getting this poverty-stricken city back on its feet. Aviv is hardcore, and now lives in Lod where he has set up shop in his apartment. From his office-apartment to monthly meetings, he has built a network of concerned citizens that want to rebuild the city together. Lod is a very diverse city (Jews, Arabs, Russians, Ethiopians, Bedouins, Christians, etc.), but Aviv has managed to have representatives from each community take part in the committees and meetings. Again, you can watch the video below to learn more about his incredible project.
So, there you have it, the other side of conflict. It does exist, even if it doesn’t make the news.
What Becomes of Ex-Presidents
Filed under: Business, General, Israeliness, Life, Politics
The may not much like soon to be former President George Bush in the U.S. – or in Iraq – and now that he’s leaving office, he may have a future in Israel – with his name emblazoned in lights on a business!
Most people will remember that Bush received a very high approval rating among Israelis when he came here at the beginning of 2008. Now, with Bush ready to leave office, Israeli commentators will be coming out with articles like this one looking back with nostalgia at the positive relationship between Israel and Bush.
Tough on the outside but sweet on the inside, Israelis are actually very sentimental – and have a good business sense, as well. So the chances of some ingenious Israeli adopting the name “Bush” for their business are good (maybe for a gardening service?). Admittedly, “Coffee Annan,” named after former UN Secretary Kofi Annan, was too obvious not to do something with. But other than having eaten it, Bill Clinton had little if anything to do with pizza – but that didn’t stop this Jerusalem entrepreneur from using the ex-president’s name to promote his slices. And chances are business will improve dramatically now that Hillary is going to be Secretary of State!
kIDs tALk NEWS: It is time the news is reported by the little people!
It is time to hear the news from kids! Enough of bias reporters and jaded stories…let’s hear what they have to say.
Ok…here you go. Check out what my video chug has been up to, reporting from the streets of Jerusalem. This news package is on cell phones. This is their first story of many to come. Also check out the blooper reel. And we want your feedback. Tell us what you think we should report. We would even be happy to report about your companies, non-profits, special events, interesting people, etc. Just let us know!
This post was originally published on The Big Felafel.
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