The insider’s reference

May 4, 2012 - 7:48 AM by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Entertainment, General, History and Culture, Life, Pop Culture, tv 

It’s not exactly Israel-related, but it’s always funny when TV screenwriters put in hamevin yavin — ‘for those in the know’ — references for characters. This time, it was in the new HBO show, “Girls”, which is about a group of young women living in New York, post-college. In one of the recent episodes — it just started up in mid-April — Jessa Johansson, a Brit and her cousin, Shoshanna Shapiro, are crossing the street somewhere downtown when a guy calls out to Shoshanna, reminding her that they knew each other in Camp Ramah and that she carried out the best kitchen raid he’s ever experienced.

Yes, it’s the Camp Ramah reference, appealing to all those who attended one of the seven, now eight, Ramah camps in North America, established and run by the Conservative Movement, and with programs in Israel as well. It’s not the first Ramah reference on TV. On “Will and Grace,” actress Debra Messing sometimes dropped Ramah references, thanks to one of the screenwriters who attended, and supposedly Messing did as well.

Ramah Israel has also made onto the Israeli small screen, although more unobtrusively, as part of the opening scenes in “Srugim”, which shows images of Jerusalemites walking to shul on Friday night, when some cameraperson captured the students on TRY — Tichon Ramah Yerushalayim — making their way to a local synagogue.

It’s a small thrill, but a thrill nonetheless. Clearly, you write about what you know.

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Celebrity at the wedding

October 4, 2011 - 11:43 AM by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Entertainment, Life 

Ori Lachmi from the Israeli TV hit "Srugim"

The young man in the light purple shirt and the small knitted kippa looked awfully familiar. He was sitting in the row in front of us at the chuppa of the daughter of close friends. My wife Jody went up to him. “I recognize you, but I can’t place from where,” she said.

He held out a hand. “Ori Lachmi.” Jody continued her quizzical look. “Maybe from ‘Srugim,’” he offered. “Of course!” she blushed, shook his hand and sat down. I did the same, adding “I recognized you immediately,” although I hadn’t.

Lachmi played the character of Ro’i, doctor Nati’s religious gay brother, on the popular Israeli TV series, Srugim. He had one of the only good roles in the show’s rather dreary second season, creating a believable persona and raising some issues that are usually swept under the unpolitically correct carpet in the God-fearing world.

As the real-life wedding proceeded towards the meal and into the dancing, I kept my eye out for Lachmi. Despite the fact I grew up in California, I’ve never seen – or cared much – about movie stars. The last time I was in the presence of a celebrity, it was David Schwimmer who played Ross on Friends, at a sushi bar and frankly it was no big deal. The tempura didn’t taste any different. But this was Ro’i – from my all-time favorite Israeli show.

“You’re a bit smitten, aren’t you?” Jody commented. “Go up and talk to him.” “What would I say?” I replied. “Anyway, I’d get all flustered with the Hebrew.”

When I got home, though, I did what any good journalist with a crush would do – I googled him. It turns out that Lachmi is a local Jerusalem boy who grew up religious (unusual on Srugim where all the actors playing religious Israelis are actually totally secular).

Lachmi attended the religious Horev schools (where a number of children of our friends go) but got into hot water after Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated when he set up a memorial corner without official school permission. He was suspended from the student council for three months and some students compared him with Rabin’s killer, Yigal Amir, saying they “both took the law into their own hands,” Lachmi told Maariv NRG in a 2010 interview.

He subsequently transferred to the Hartman High School (from which our oldest son graduated). Lachmi majored in theater.

As upset as Lachmi was from his treatment at Horev, that wasn’t the last straw. He had received an offer to act in a film and he ran the script by his mother. There was a scene in which he had to kiss a woman. His mother vetoed his participation. It was Shabbat and “after that, I just got up, turned on the TV and turned it off, turned it on and turned it off several times,” he said. “And the sky did not fall.”

Lachmi is now a proud, but ambivalent, datlash – an Israeli acronym for someone who is formerly religious. He still visits his family regularly on Shabbatot, but says he can’t abide by stringent religious laws that require strawberries to be soaked in soap for five minutes or that forbid eating brocoli at all, for fear of ingesting forbidden worms, he told Maariv.

What was his connection to the wedding? His still religious brother is married to the groom’s sister. And, it turns out, I could have actually talked to him without getting tongue-tied – he’s half Anglo (his mother is from Australia). I did the next best thing: I friended him on Facebook. Perhaps I should now go and stalk the other actors from Srugim. I kind of have a crush on Hodaya too…

Srugim returns to Israeli screens later this month on Yes.

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Fashion show faux pas?

July 26, 2010 - 3:08 PM by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Holidays, Pop Culture 

Actress Sharon Fauster emcee'd a Tu B'av fashion show in Jerusalem

Tu B’av – the fifteenth day of the Jewish month of Av – is the closest Israelis have to a Valentine’s Day: just substitute a bit of ribald wisdom from the rabbis of the Talmud for a martyred Roman saint and a lot of cuddly Cupids.

According to tradition (and Wikipedia), on Tu B’av, “unmarried girls would dress in simple white clothing (so that rich could not be distinguished from poor) and go out to sing and dance in the vineyards surrounding Jerusalem.” Young men who had not yet married would “go to watch and choose among them wives for themselves.”

That spirit of joy and free love has been expanded over the years. This week, the City of Jerusalem pulled out all the stops with a jam-packed evening of Tu B’av events at the German Colony’s Beit Yehudit community and cultural center.

The evening featured a marathon of movies with “love” as a theme; a festive world music dance party put on by the Boogie organization; a provocative lecture entitled “Forbidden Love in the Talmud” by Dr. Micha Friedman; and a special concert by former Friends of Natasha co-founder and front man Micha Shitrit hosted by rocker Erez Lev-Ari.

The most popular event of the evening was the concert. An only-in-Jerusalem mix of secular and religious young adults (my wife Jody joked that we brought the average age of the crowd up by several percent) packed the grass to cheer on Lev-Ari who deftly blends spiritual and physical longing in his atmospheric compositions.

But before the show started, TV star Sharon Fauster, who played the lovelorn Reut in the popular series Srugim about religious singles in the very neighborhood where the event was taking place, took to the stage to introduce a Tu B’av-inspired “white” fashion show.

Onto the improvised catwalk paraded four models in skimpy miniskirt and strapless ensembles. They paraded and preened, blowing kisses to the crowd and tossing back their heads of ample (and mostly blond) hair.

The audience shifted uncomfortably. You could see some of the religious men (not the women, mind you) look around, avert their eyes and even get up to step out until the show was over. Others lapped it all up – Jerusalem doesn’t see a lot of long legged, high-heeled models strolling the Ben Yehuda Pedestrian Mall (they’d probably get stoned, and not in a Tel Aviv kind of way).

Then a strange thing happened: about half way through, the models started wearing scarves and jackets. The cleavage, which had been so abundant just moments before, was now obscured (although tastefully and still in white, in keeping with the evening’s Tu B’av theme).

Jody and I couldn’t figure it out. Was this part of the show? Or did someone run backstage brandishing fashionable cover-ups? Was this subtle religious coercion, along the lines of the Bridge of Strings debacle, where a pre-teen dance troop was forced to wear sweaters while going through their routines in order not to offend local sensibilities? Or was the point to demonstrate that Jerusalemites could be both sexy and modest at the same time?

Indeed, the scarves and jackets didn’t seem alien – in most cases, they served as nicely matching accessories rather than some hastily improvised capitulation.

We may never know (I’m not on a first name basis with Fauster…yet – I did try to friend her Facebook). So I can only report what I saw from first hand observation – and, oh yes, I stayed firmly in my seat, eyes forward.

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Second seasons

January 18, 2010 - 10:55 AM by · 5 Comments
Filed under: Art, coexistence, General, Israeliness, tv 

Last week’s heavily anticipated start of the second season of “Srugim,” the Israeli TV show about religiously observant singles living in the Katamon neighborhood of Jerusalem hasn’t been without its own stops and starts.

Fans — myself included — had to wait many months to find out the fates of Yifat and Amir, Hodaya, Nati and Reut. It was hard. We were impatient. Would Yifat and Amir get married? Would Hodaya, the show’s datlash (acronym for dati leumi lesheavar, that is, a formerly religiously observant person), finally lose her virginity? Would Nati, the selfish med student, come to grips with his ego? Would Reut, the successful accountant, find herself in India? At this point, one show in, some questions have been answered and I’m eagerly awaiting last night’s second episode. (Didn’t get to it last night and non-Yes satellite TV subscribers can watch Srugim online at Walla!)

But what’s also been hilarious about this surprisingly popular show is how it has caught the attention of some unusual groupies. One Arab blogger, Mohamed, writes that he can identify with many of the show’s issues, from attempting to date someone from a different background to equating love and marriage. Surprisingly, Mohamed likes Srugim.

Of course, not everyone feels the same. A group of ultra Orthodox rabbis have complained about the Srugim billboards which have been plastered throughout the country, because they use religious scriptures as part of the advertising campaign, a play on words whose irony was lost on this particular special interest group. Supposedly the billboards are now going to have to be buried in a geniza, because they contain holy words.

To edify, the billboard says “Paamayim ki tov Srugim, back for a second season.” “Paamayim ki tov” is translated as “Twice, because it is good,” referring to the words spoken by God on the third day of creation. Clever, but not acceptable to some. Maybe they’re just afraid of the buzz generated from a television show about religious singles.

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Sex in the holy city

June 25, 2008 - 9:00 PM by · 1 Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Israeliness, Pop Culture 

Well, actually, there’s no sex in Srugim (roughly translated as Knitted, for the crocheted yarmulkes worn by the mostly Modern Orthodox guys in this series), the new Yes satellite channel relationship drama about religious twenty- and thirtysomethings in Jerusalem. That’s because this is a show about the dating dilemmas, romances and friendships of this very particular crowd, who may kiss, but not necessarily, and generally don’t do boy-girl sleepovers either, except if they’ve had too much to drink and shouldn’t be driving.

And when they do sleep over, as one male character does in the first episode of the show, he asks if either of the two female roommates has tefillin that he can use, which, of course, they don’t. When they get him a pair from the next-door neighbor who is both female and American, he says he can’t use a “Reform lesbian’s tefillin.” At which point, the roommate with whom he had been on the date, tells him to leave.

It’s fairly ground-breaking stuff for Israeli television, given that Laizy Shapira, the creator of the series, takes a long, detailed look at the world of dati, religious Israelis, but with an honest lens. There’s nothing derogatory about the focus either, which may say something about how far Israeli society has come. There was a time, and not so long ago, when I don’t think Israeli television could support a show about the challenges and mores of modern, religious Israeli society.

But times seem to have changed, and here’s a drama that offers pathos, humor and some necessary sarcasm in looking at the lives of these singles and their search for love and truth. Judging by the comments on the YES website, viewers are ready for the next episode, although one did comment that a show without sex just isn’t a TV show. I guess they’ll have to wait and see.

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