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Archive for April, 2008

Nimrod’s Coffee of Love

Rosh Pina in Tel Aviv’s Port. The below is a story of Nimrod’s Coffee house which was opened in 2007 with the purpose of immortalizing the heritage “The Good Life” that Nimrod left his sister in his death. Below is the background of the creation of Nimrod’s Coffee of Love. Nimrod’s sister writes. I admit. I didn’t believe in love. Actually I was one of those who didn’t believe love existed until Nimrod married Iris. And then everything changed. I needed that my only brother would get married in order to believe that true love existed. “What’s the secret of happiness?” I asked him. “The Good Life,” he answered in his simple way. We left Rosh Pina. Nimrod became a high-tech manager at Microsoft and I moved to America. In my visits, I discovered Nimrod was having a dilemma which was more preferable; to go with his beloved Iris and little Omer and Vick, to our childhood village, Rosh Pina, or take them to the harbor in Tel Aviv. What is love? Nimrod taught me. In love, there are no boundaries, no barriers. It’s an endless flow. I had a tour contract in Mexico and Nimrod was in the middle…

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Hagai Segev on Art, Design & Architecture

Hagai Segev, an Israeli friend of mine recently edited and translated the book Improvisation: New Design in Israel by designer Mel Byers. Hagai was a foreign exchange student near my hometown in the early eighties and 23+ years later, we’re still in touch. Hagai is an international art curator in Tel Aviv, where he spends some of his time doing shows for up and coming Israeli artists and some of his time editing design and art books. He started his career as a curator at the Israeli Museum in Jerusalem where he primarily focused on archeology and architecture. This led him to conduct historical tours of old Jerusalem, including some of the greats in art and literature like Hungarian nobel prize winner Umbrae Curtis, Umberto Eco, Paul Auster and Irish writer Iris Murdoch. He planned a large exhibition of art history in Jerusalem for the 3000th anniversary in 1995 and for awhile, was also the Director of the Gallery at the Technion Institute of Technology in Haifa. He grew up on Kibbutz Nahal-Oz near the Gaza strip, not that far from Kibbutz Zikim, where…

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Hertzel Street

Hertzel Street in southern Tel Aviv. I loved this building. It reminded me in some ways of the buildings in the old mill town where I grew up in upstate New York. Today, after the leather factories are no more, the delapitated buildings live on.

A Slow Walk Through Old Jerusalem

I had a marvelous slow walk through old Jerusalem last week. Bear in mind that this is a city which has been conquered thirty-seven times, controlled successfully by Jews, Babylonians, Assyrians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Ottomans, and during World War I, the British. Below is a sample of what I captured from a total of over 1,000 shots.

Recent Works of Haya Ran

Below are recent works of Israeli artist Haya Ran. These paintings were based on photographs of family members from the twenties and thirties when they lived on a kibbutz in the south. Her fixation with legs in these paintings was apparently due to the fact that she saw an emphasis on young girls legs in the photos and wanted to highlight them in her work to demonstrate this point.

Integrating Waldorf Education

My Tel Aviv friends Hagai and Anot are sending their kids to a Waldorf School. I had heard about the Waldorf philosophy over the years, but don’t know anyone in the states who has gone that route. Alas, not only did I learn the pros through their eyes, but by also watching their children in action. Waldorf Education integrates the arts and academics for children from preschool through twelfth grade. It encourages the development of each child’s sense of truth, beauty, and goodness, and provides an antidote to violence, alienation, and cynicism. Apparently from ages 7-14, you focus on emotional development, including the basics, like how you treat others. Ages 14-21 are key for developing your physical body. Children are encouraged to physically act out what they learn. One example they gave me was ‘walking the letter B before and after saying it and writing it.’ Instead of reading through an entire novel or a chapter on the History of Ancient Greece, children are encouraged to draw what they hear and learn. I saw notebooks from third and fourth grades that showed the Waldorf approach to mathematics. Their kids did their multiplication exercises on artistic pads using pastels…

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Tel Aviv Market

A stroll through Tel Aviv’s market

Can Hillary Really Win?

Is this ever going to end? Superdelegates who haven’t yet declared for Obama or Hillary are waiting it out under the pretense of letting the remaining voters have their say. And then come June or perhaps July–when they feel like it, I guess, or when they’re sure Hillary is toast and they can be assured of not alienating her–they’ll happily weigh in. That’s all very democratic of them, but aren’t they ignoring something? No matter how aggressively Hillary touts herself as a populist, the gal who can single-handedly repair the economy on Day One, the gal who can best terrify Iran, the gal who can best beat McCain in November, she won’t have enough delegates to win the nomination. Even if Florida and Michigan by some miracle got to vote. Or she won every single contest here on out. Which is unlikely. The only way she can pass Obama is if the superdelegates throw it to her. As James Carville might say, it’s the math, stupid! This is a point the beleaguered Chuck Todd, NBC News’ political director, has been repeatedly trying to make since Hillary scored in Pennsylvania. Setting off a frenzy of hope among her tireless supporters. I…

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