Nostalgia Sunday – Yemenite Embroidery

February 15, 2009 - 10:14 PM by Rachel Neiman · 2 Comments
Filed under: Art, General, History and Culture, Nostalgia Sunday, Profiles, design 

Back in the early Sixties, most kids’ mothers wore frilly cocktail aprons to entertain. Not my Israeli mother. Hers looked like this.

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And her miniskirts and pantsuits looked like this.

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My mother, a singer of international folksongs, had a great collection of gowns. Many were created at Esther Zeitz, a Jerusalem house of fashion that employed a team of Yemenite seamstresses that sat, day in and day out, stitching threads of silver and gold onto splendid garments. Who needed jewels when you had something like this bedecking your neck?

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Wearing Yemenite embroidery was very cool among Israeli women who came of age during the 1940s and 50s. This dress was made for my mother when she was a teenager during the 1948 War of Independence.

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In the Sixties, after the 1967 war and the reunification of Jerusalem, she combed the Old City looking for a velvet jacket with Bedouin embroidery to wear over a black velvet gown. She found one, too.

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In the early Seventies, she scored some Bedouin-style embroidered garments from the Arab Women’s Union of Bethlehem, an embroidery cooperative.

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But my favorites will always be the Esther Zeitz outfits. As I recall it, Zeitz – whom I remember as a large woman with swollen arms – closed down in the Eighties when she became too ill to manage. It would be nice to find out more about what happened to the workshop, which was located at the junction of Ben Yehuda and Bezalel streets – I think it is a hairdressers’ today.

My sisters and I wore many of these garments during the Go-Go Eighties. Today, however, they are fragile – the polyester fabric is forever but not the cotton threads that hold down the metallic threads. We are not sure what will happen to this collection, and so decided to document the clothes that, for us, are part of a happy memory.

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Dynamic duo Ahinoam Nini and Mira Awad

January 12, 2009 - 5:55 PM by David · 2 Comments
Filed under: General, Israeliness, Music, Pop Culture, coexistence 

Mira Awad

Mira Awad

[caption id="attachment_7472" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Ahinoam Nini"]Ahinoam Nini[/caption]Even as we’re fighting for the lives of residents of the South, we Israelis are also keeping a close eye on how we’re being perceived by the rest of the world. I don’t mean the anti-Israel protests that have plagued European and Asian cities the last two weeks, but where it really counts – the entertainment world.

Perhaps that’s why the Israel Broadcasting Authority committee which choses Israel’s performer to represent the country at the annual pop schlock fest Eurovision Song Contest, has selected a Yemenite Jew and a Christian Arab – Ahinoam Nini and Mira Awad - to perform at the May 16th show in Moscow.

Although purported to have no political influences, the much derided song contest has always blown hot and cold with Israel – depending on whether we were the good little children of the Oslo era or the big bad guys who invaded Lebanon, the West Bank, Gaza, take your pick…

So what better antidote to the anti-Israel blues than to package a beautiful liberal singer with a beyond Israel’s borders reputation like Nini (known in the rest of the world as Noa) and a well regarded Israeli Arab singer and actress like Awad.

At least the two are highly regarded professionals, and a few notches above the Israel Idol caliber of our recent reps.

YouTube Preview ImageThe two have collaborated previously on a Middle-Easternized version of the The Beatles’ “We Can Work it Out”. Whatever song they end up choosing, the coexistence message that Nini and Awad will likely offer is bound to captivate the spangle and glitter polyanna crowd at Eurovision and the millions of bored Europeans and Asians who gather around the continent to view and vote.

Count this bored boy in.

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