Golda Meir's American Accent

I just read Nextbook's account of the TV super-special ABC ran for Israel's 30th birthday, which included a live video conference between Barbra Streisand and Golda Meir.

Golda Meir was a Ukrainian-born American woman who moved to Israel and eventually became its fourth prime minister at an advanced age. I had always assumed she must have really "Israelified" herself because she changed her name (formerly Meyerson) and made it into the top office.

On Independence Day, the national satire TV program Eretz Nehederet (A wonderful country) broadcast spoofs of what the show might have looked like through the years. They played a section from 1973, on the night before Egypt and Syria surprise attacked Israel in the Yom Kippur War. They had Golda Meir speaking Hebrew in a thick American accent. If you read Hebrew and have the patience to watch to the 9-minute cast, including references to the Israeli version of Survivor, it's here.

Naturally I went on Youtube to dig up old clips of Meir speaking Hebrew. Here she's talking about the pity of national television satiring the Minister of Finance.



In the second clip she is talking about bringing the first record player to Israel.



I also went into Ben Gurion's clips - and he speaks with a heavy Russian accent. I found it very funny to see these freshly minted immigrants-turned-prime ministers.

Lag BaOmer: A Holiday American Jews Will Never Adopt

If Purim has succumbed to American influence, rest assured that Lag BaOmer is far out of the reach of neurotic Jews in the States.

The origins of Lag BaOmer are unclear, but it is connected with the great sages of Jewish tradition. There was a plague in the time of Rabbi Akiva that killed off 24,000 of his students, and Lag BaOmer was the day it ended. It's also the day one of his best students, Shimon Bar Yochai died.

Israeli children celebrate the holiday by dragging wooden boards, old furniture and anything flammable to bonfire sites and then torching it all, with or without parental supervision. There's usually a grill going at the same time. Also, there are often special campaigns to convince kids to stop throwing live cats and dogs into their fires.

Unsupervised children, unsanded wooden surfaces, kids being out at night alone, fire - the average American insurance policy for this sort of holiday would cost more than all the wood, meat and lighter fluid used in Tel Aviv on the occasion.

The bonfires go up in the countryside and in Kikkar Hamedina, a tiny circular park surrounded by Ralph Lauren, Prada, Gucci and the other flagships of Tel Aviv's upscale shopping district.

I biked to the circle to see how Tel Aviv's classy area would look like with bonfires blazing ten feet apart. I have never seen so many observant Jews in my city of sin. They were giving out yellow "Mashiach" (Messiah) flags and hanging out for the most part in gendered groups.


Foreground: bonfire. Background: the signs of the shops in Kikkar Hamedina.

There was a bewildered-looking woman in a hijab with her husband shooting video of the bonfires. I went over and talked to them - Abdulhamid is an accountant at the Egyptian embassy in Tel Aviv, and Zainab is his wife. I tried explaining the story of the holiday in Arabic, which was a challenge. They walked off with a "those crazy Jews" expression on their faces.

Abdulhamid and Zainab, two confused Egyptians.

I spent about half an hour trying to get free food from the families who were grilling. At first I played the curious tourist and asked about the holiday. This got me diet coke. Then I went for the direct approach: "Do you need help getting rid of leftovers?" This got me nothing. I decided to keep my dignity and bought grilled meat at the overpriced neighborhood restaurant.

Here, a fire is born.

Kids put the finishing touches on the teepee-shaped bonfire skeleton.


They dump live coals onto the base and fan like hell.


Soon the whole base starts to glow, again with the city lights in the background.


And eventually the whole structure is up in flames, and parents are unruffled.


And the fire rages on unattended.

High-Class Herzl

The Truth Herzl is going upscale with a new domain name and a Technorati Profile. Enjoy, and if you really like this site then mark it as a favorite to boost its rankings and visibility.

Liking Stuff

It was a matter of time.

With the smashing success of the Web site Stuff White People Like, which treats the white race as a minority with tastes that include New Balance Sneakers, Book Deals, Organic Foods and the Apple Company, other minorities have jumped on the bandwagon.

Taking their place among Stuff Iranians Like, Stuff Educated Black People Like and Stuff White Trash People Like, the Jewish lists are out.

This news came as a blow to me because I had just figured out how to explain Stuff White People Like #71 - Being the Only White Person Around - in Hebrew to describe the sinking feeling I get when surrounded by other Americans in Israel:

“The arrival of the “other white people” to either restaurants or vacation spots instantly means that lines will grow, authenticity will be lost, and the euphoria of being a cultural pioneer will be over.”

In keeping with what I am sure will be item 42, “Having three opinions for every two Jews,” there are two lists. Despite the clunkier title, Stuff Jewish Young Adults Like is a more established blog than its competitor, Stuff Jewish People Like.

As a white, young adult Jewish person, I present my favorites from the two:

• Remembering the Holocaust
• Self-Deprecation
• Answering a Question With Another Question
• Avoiding Large Jewish Organizations
• Florida
• Having Catholic Friends
  

Zionist Fallacies

There are many ways to protest the way Israel treats the Palestinians - you can pick olives with farmers on the West Bank, sign petitions, write letters to your local newspaper...or parade a massive phallus up and down Rothschild Boulevard in the heart of Tel Aviv.


Last year's event planners described the mission: "On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Israel's glorious victory in the 6 day war; To celebrate the ongoing screwing of the Palestinians by the occupation army and Israel's governments; And in worship of the generals who have shown us over and over that theirs is the biggest; We shall hold a march to salute and worship the national erection of the Zionist state."


On Friday, May 9 at about 3 pm a few dozen people walked a giant pink effigy around the area to the sound of beating drums and anti-Occupation slogans. They lasted for a few minutes, but then, according to their report in Indymedia:

"The cowardly police waited until the erection had separated momentarily from the crowd, attacked it violently and tried to dismount it from the bike trailer on which it was erected."


The scuffle between the police and protesters wound up with two arrests and one circumcision.


It was one of the best-attended leftist rallies I have seen in Tel Aviv. However, I heard that at last year's demonstration the apparatus squirted blue and white Zionist fluid, which was lacking this year.


"We salute the National Erection!" Photo courtesy of activestills.org.

Apartment Laundry Wars

Recently I heard that a true aging Israeli man has no hair and a giant potbelly. My neighbor fits the description gracefully, and he has it in for my apartment.

It began about two weeks ago. I had done hand laundry in a bucket, a common event. It's an energy-efficient (ok, cheap) way of washing my shirts. I was clipping the wet clothes to the clothesline outside our kitchen window when my neighbor, a bald man in a white undershirt, looked up and started screaming. Our conversation reveals some interesting facts about my living situation. Note: most Israeli homes do not have dryers. Hanging laundry here is as ubiquitous as sushi stands.

Neighbor: Hey!
Me: (frightened) Hi.
Neighbor: What are you doing? Every day you do your laundry and every day you drip right on us!
Me: Look man, this is what it means to live in an apartment building. Everyone else uses clotheslines too.
Neighbor: They don't drip! Do you need me to come up there and show you how to wash your clothes?
Me: (frightened) No!
Neighbor: When you take your clothes out of the washing machine--
Me: We don't have a washing machine.
Neighbor: --hang them on a rack in your living room.
Me: We don't have a living room. And it's early morning, isn't that a good time to wash the clothes?
Neighbor: You do it in the morning, you do it at night, you do it all the time!
Me: Look, we have no other choice.
Neighbor, disgruntled, gives up.

I thought we had reached a stalemate where we would continue to hang our clothes and maybe wring them out a little better, and the neighbor would stop screaming. This morning I was hanging laundry again when the neighbor appeared downstairs and glared up at me. I ran away from the window and cowered inside for a half hour, checking our peephole to see if he was standing outside our door with a hatchet. Sure enough, as I left the apartment the neighbor was standing outside on the sidewalk. I pedaled across the street and fled the area.

This may be ruining any chance of convincing him to start a compost pile in the backyard. On the other hand, the rest of my apartment building has turned into a hub of social activity because of the common roof. Gradually, from the top floor down, we are starting to hang out, to invite each other to gatherings on the roof, to eat ice cream together, to play guitar and smoke hookah. It's a really unusual stroke of luck that we are for the most part all between ages 23-30 and extroverted.

Photos on NPR

Some of the photos from the Givot Olam organic egg farm have made it onto NPR's Marketplace. Go there and listen to Daniel Estrin's radio report, and then check out the photo credits.

Biodiesel in Gaza

This Reuters article from the end of April reports that because of Israeli-imposed fuel shortages, Palestinian drivers in Gaza are filling their cars with a mix of used felafel oil and turpentine, or else with fresh cooking oil. In other words, biodiesel as a product of necessity. Thanks Dalia, who posted it on her Facebook profile.

Well, I guess we all have something to look forward to when world oil reserves run out. I wonder what the recovery rate of oil is now in Gaza - as in, what percentage of felafel oil is getting a second life as fuel rather than being tossed? Maybe after the situation calms down someone in Gaza can publish a "best practices" handbook for reusing deep-frying oil. Here's a photo from the article:
This biodiesel story is typical of so many environmental stories, in that politics creep in when you least expect them. Want some organic eggs? They were probably laid by free-range chickens in an ultra-right wing settlement. How about the best tehina in Israel? Made in Nablus and bought by bohemians in Tel Aviv.

Tamra, Land of Amazing Dairy

Last week I bought a liter of yogurt that really blew my mind. It was a little sour, but not overwhelmingly so. It had a great consistency - not too thin or thick. It comes in a large jug. Since a lot of food here comes with the phone number of who made it, I called up the Rajab dairy and asked to come on a tour of the factory. So at 9 AM on Friday I got off the bus at the entrance to Tamra, a Muslim town of 26,000 about 20 minutes away from the city of Akko in the north of Israel.


The factory is a bright teal building topped by a massive white sign in Arabic and Hebrew at the entrance to Tamra. The factory floor is downstairs, where workers in blue suits and white rubber boots take milk and turn it into yogurt, labane and cheese. In one area of the factory, giant yellow bags hung, dripping whey onto the floor as labane hardened inside. In another, a machine spun plastic sheeting into little bags to hold the labane, which is a white spread between cream cheese and yogurt.

Labane in large cloth sacks, which are washed and reused.

Eyal Hen, a truck driver, showing the scale of the bags.

Labane goes into bags on the factory floor; the workers spend a lot of time horsing around.

Rajab is owned by seven brothers who inherited the plant from their father, Mustafa Abu Rumi. The dairy was founded around 50 years ago, and grew from a local outfit into a national brand. Rajab is the largest dairy run by Palestinian-Israelis, and it's also one of the biggest businesses run by Palestinian-Israelis, according to Hashem Abu Rumi, one of the dairy's owners.


Umaima, the wife of Mahmoud Abu Rumi (another brother/owner), makes lunch for the workers each day. They plowed into hummus, ful, cheese, pitas and vegetables.

Mahmoud holding the labane and brinza he gave me as a sample to take home.

Mahmoud and Umaima fight over whether she should be in the picture or not at the factory's entrance.


Like the factory, the town of Tamra is also warm and friendly.


I walked around for an hour before going to Rajab and asked a family if I could photograph them drinking coffee. "Come and join us!" they insisted, and poured me Turkish coffee, then brought out zaatar-covered pita and olives. Here are Ahmed and Musa. Ahmed's mother declined to be photographed.

The buildings are different colors like blue, pink and orange.

Tractors drive through the streets in the morning.

These are blankets printed with the face of Fulla, the Islamic barbie doll.

And Tamra, just like most Israeli cities, has cats digging in its trash cans.

Memorial Day in Israel

There is a sequence of holidays lined up over eight days which shows the narrative of the founding of the Jewish State. Last week was Holocaust Remembrance Day. Tonight is Memorial Day, which at sundown tomorrow turns into Independence Day.

To mark Memorial Day, I went to Rabin Square, where thousands of people showed up to hear live music, sing along and see videos of mostly women who lost husbands, kids and brothers to war. It was an emotional ceremony, and some people were crying and hugging as they watched the videos.

The idea of the holiday line-up is that without the Holocaust, and without all the soldiers who died defending the country, Israel would not be here.

That sequence is difficult to take in. It's not that the Holocaust and soldiers dying in battle aren't integral to Israel's creation - but these holidays make it seem like they are the only thing that counts. What about the urban immigrants from Odessa who scratched out a living farming in the late 1880s? There isn't any mention of these pilgrims. Or the revival of the Hebrew language? Or the building of a place like Tel Aviv from scratch?

Tom Segev in Haaretz today looks at the paper's May 14, 1948 edition, and then writes that the Israeli public at the time of Independence had a huge amount of culture to take in over a weekend.

"Newspaper readers could travel to Magdiel for a friendly chat with Mrs. Zimmerman from the Women's International Zionist Organization. After Shabbat they could attend the opera in Tel Aviv, conducted by Mordechai Golinkin and starring Adis de Filip. If there were no tickets to be had, they could go to the opening of the new rooftop garden, Hermon Ice Cream, at Beit Moghrabi in Tel Aviv....

"An examination of the newspaper suggests something that the 60th anniversary celebrations tend to blur and that many Israelis tend to drown in the outpouring of nostalgia swirling around them: that 1948 was not Zero Hour. Israeli identity was born many years before Israel."

Pioneering Water Technology!

It's almost to be expected in an apartment where the ceiling falls on you as you shower that eventually the toilet would stop flushing as well.

Despite my rommate's and my best efforts to fix it, the toilet is actually in worse shape now than when it started. Not only can we hear water uselessly, constantly running, but our attempts to realign the flusher have made it impossible to close the tank.

We have managed to make the toilet work by dumping buckets of water into the bowl, which get rid of whatever is in there. I have taken to showering with the empty bucket, so it collects the water from the shower to use in our defunct john. The plumber is going to come today. This may be the end of my virtuous flirtation with greywater.

Free Range Eggs, Revisited

I met up with a journalist friend who is writing a story on free-range eggs and other organic products being sold in Israel proper but produced in settlements in the West Bank. This is a story I have been interested in for a while, so I went with him the settlement that is Israel's largest producer of organic eggs, and a player in dairy products made from goat milk.

The ride from Jerusalem to Givot Olam took about an hour and a half of driving through the rolling hills of the West Bank on empty two-lane asphalt, and then through a slow street in the outskirts of Nablus, until we got to Itamar, a Jewish community of about 120 Orthodox families. We entered through a yellow metal gate guarded by one soldier armed with a machine gun.

The drive to Givot Olam was another ten kilometers on a steep and narrow strip of road until we got to the farm, which is a cluster of small homes, animal shelters and a guard tower. The view from the farm is spectacular. In the valleys farmland spreads in a flat green and gold sea, broken only by pristine West Bank hilltops covered in low olive trees and scrub. The concrete buildings of Nablus sprawl bluish grey at the feet of some hills. Most of the land is undeveloped in a way unparalleled inside Israel. Here's a view from the road right by the farm.


Givot Olam raises just under 9,000 chickens in seven coops. Each coop has 30 dunams, or about 7.5 acres, for the chickens to flap around outside. The goats go out to pasture daily. The animals lead an idyllic life on lots of land.

"That land must get expensive," I remarked to Asaf, who is the community's stone artist. "Actually, land isn't an issue here," he said. "We just take it from state land."

This is the odd thing about Givot Olam. On the one hand, the farmers preach sustainability and humane treatment for their animals. On the other, these animals range on land stolen either from Israeli State Land - which is land confiscated from Palestinians - or directly from the villages themselves. Givot Olam's owner, Avri Ran, is known as a vigilante who leads groups of boys from the area in endeavors like beating their neighbors, torching their diesel generators and destroying their crops.

We asked about the history of Givot Olam. Fifteen years ago, the Ran couple began moving across the hilltops stretching east of Itamar. Each time, they set up tents at first, then gradually brought in caravans and eventually built permanent structures. Givot Olam is the fourth hilltop in the chain of hills Itamar has seized. Each outpost expands Itamar's area and makes the settlement more entrenched, thus less likely to be given up in a peace agreement with Palesitnians. Sharona, Avri's wife, complained that the hilltop is monitored by Peace Now planes and that getting water from the state is a constant struggle.

We had lunch at the farm, eating feta cheese, labane spread and fruit-flavored yogurt. We visited the coop and took photos of the chickens and the packing room. I recognized some of the labels for eggs that the owner of my local nature store had claimed were made in Israel proper - their label bore no mention of Givot Olam.

It was a confusing day. The organic philosophy of raising chickens and goats with enough room to move and live is a refreshing change from the usual industrial approach in Israeli collective farms, where cows stand in their own excrement all day until their teats are milked by mechanized hands. On the other hand, the only reason places like Givot Olam can afford to farm like this is because the land is beyond cheap - it is stolen.

Sharona said she loves waking up in the morning and seeing the Biblical land of Abraham stretch around her. She added that a lot of volunteers come to the farm, agreeing to observe Sabbath and dress modestly. Many of them leave the farm as more observant environmentalists and as more observant Jews.

We drove to Tel Aviv on the Samaria Bypass Road, which allows travelers to get around the West Bank without going into the Palestinian villages in it. The road is for Israeli travelers only - meaning people with Israeli citizenship, permanent residency, or who would qualify to move to Israel under the Right of Return, that is, who are Jewish.


The Givot Olam delivery truck. This is the logo for the farm, which is an illustration of the outpost including the guard tower.

Goats lounge at the base of a dairy storage tank.

Chickens have room to walk around and take in the sun.

These chickens are eating all organic meal.

They are not in cages. There are no more than six chickens per square meter.

Packing the eggs. This guy is 24 and moved to the farm from Petach Tikva, a city near Tel Aviv.

The labels for the eggs. The blue-orange ones say Givot Olam on them. The green ones say "Live Group" on them, and have an address of Moshav Adanim, which is inside of Israel. Live Group is a marketing company that sells eggs from multiple producers and doesn't specify that some eggs are made in the settlements.

"Welcome to the Samarian Bypass Road. This road is intended for traffic of Israelis only. It is forbidden to drive/transport a person who is not Israeli on this road!! "Israeli" - resident of Israel, whoever lives in the area and is Israeli or is entitled to immigrate to Israel through the Law of Return of 1950, and whoever is not a resident of the area and has a valid permit to enter Israel."