Category: Miscellaneous

 Weekend in Nazareth: Dig in

The Jerusalem Post, September 25, 2009

The small green door, peeking out onto a sliver of an alley in Nazareth’s Old City, is deceptively humble. The low frame makes visitors bow their head, as though they were in prayer, as they enter. But the gesture feels appropriate. Stepping into the plant-lined courtyard and standing under the Ottoman-era arches of Fauzi Azar Inn is a magical, almost transcendent, moment.

It was this same feeling that inspired Maoz Inon to turn what was once a derelict mansion into the bustling guesthouse it is today.

Inon discovered the site in 2005. Fresh from a year hiking with his wife in the States and South America—a journey that convinced the couple to open their own lodgings on the Israel National Trail—Inon was wandering the Old City. The cobbled lanes were empty. The metal shutters of store fronts were clamped shut. And the Azar mansion—with its marble floors, 19th century frescoes, and domed windows overlooking Nazareth—sat still.

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 A wildfire of art in Tel Aviv

The Jerusalem Post, September 18, 2009

It’s a Thursday night in Tel Aviv and the sparks are literally flying—outside the Engel Gallery on Gordon Street, artist Jack Jano is using a blow-torch to put the finishing touches on his installation, soferstam (torah scribe). Art enthusiasts mill about, sipping wine and watching from a safe distance. The brave dart past Jano and enter the gallery to explore.

A sandy path leads the viewer through heaps of Hebrew, forged from iron. The metal is rusted and, in some spots, coated with a green patina; the font is reminiscent of ancient script. From the piles of letters, words emerge, lying prone on the ground or standing proudly, rising from the surrounding babble. The viewer steps around “emet” (truth) then walks past a large “shma” (hear)—the first word of the Shma Israel prayer. Following the trail through the Hebrew language, the viewer feels the gravity of the Jewish people’s history and religion’s weight in this shared heritage.

Jano continues to play the role of wordsmith in a video installation in the gallery’s inner room. In an endless loop, the artist appears before the viewer on half a dozen screens, in half a dozen disguises, prattling away in multiple languages.

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 The Missing Mizrahim: review of Rachel Shabi’s Not the Enemy: Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands, and Q & A with the author

Zeek, August 31, 2009

Some critics have faulted Rachel Shabi’s Not the Enemy: Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands as one-sided. Shabi neglects the animosity that existed between Jews and Muslims long before 1948, the critics say. She exaggerates how good things were for the Jews of the Orient, they moan.

But it seems that Shabi’s detractors might have missed the point.

The pivot that Shabi’s work revolves around is, perhaps, easy to miss. It is simple, a delicate foundation for hundreds of pages. Fortunately, Shabi has taken care to illuminate it in an old-fashioned thesis sentence. She writes: “This book is focused on the stifled, small-voice analysis seeking to break this stalemate formula.”

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After the ‘non-revolution’

The Jerusalem Post, August 21, 2009

I’ve tucked away my guidebook and happily stumbled upon an unmarked bar on a low-key street in Budapest. The scene is relaxed—simple blue jeans on casually crossed legs, uncomplicated drinks like beer and wine on plain wooden tables. The bright lighting, high ceilings, and a cluster of birds painted above the bar give the impression of openness.

“Where am I?” I ask a man at a neighboring table.

“Siraly,” he says.

I jot the name down and he looks on.

“No,” he says. He takes the pen and paper from my hands. “Like this,” he says, drawing a firm accent line over the r. “Siraly. It means seagull.” He offers my notebook and pen back to me.

I write “seagull” and then my neighbor’s unsolicited take on the scene. “It’s traditional alternative. But post-socialist,” he says.

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 Clothes like days

The Jerusalem Post, July 17, 2009

“It’s a kind of a dance,” says Michal Bassad. The designer is perched on a table next to her sewing machine. Her studio, which also serves as her store, has only a few racks of clothing, reflective of her artistic approach to fashion.

Though the space is minimal, it’s energetic—loud music streams though an old radio, and the teal walls serve as an impromptu chalkboard. “Anger is energy” is scrawled in white beside the makeshift dressing room of little more than a corner partitioned by paper patterns hanging from a steel rack. Her clothes are as dynamic as the environment they are created in.

“My clothes are very organic in that manner, they are not planned, they are intuitive,” Bassad says. This approach explains why no two pieces are identical.

“Each is one. It’s like days,” says Michal, “no day is the same, no day repeats itself.” While each piece is distinct, they are all reflective of Bassad’s unique vision— part punk rock, part recycled, entirely fanciful.

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Body and Jewish souls: review of Melvin Konner’s The Jewish Body

The Jerusalem Post, July 10, 2009

Who knew that Dr. Ruth, the grandmotherly sex expert, was a Haganah fighter in Israel’s War of Independence? How often the Nazis’ considered the “final solution” a public health program? And when we think of the nose job do we categorize it as a form of therapy, as some did in the 19th century?

Surprises such as these are sprinkled throughout Melvin Konner’s The Jewish Body. Konner, who earned both his PhD and MD at Harvard and is a professor at Emory University, is a well-known and well-published scholar. And it is in Konner’s able hands that the Jewish body comes to life, representing the individual and collective, the literal and metaphorical, the corporeal and spiritual, and the historical and contemporary. The result is a dense, entertaining text comprised of a variety of topics that ordinarily might not appear between the covers of the same book—from religious law to golem to Jewish boxers to Kafka to current genetic research. Though Konner’s rich and provocative study is at times a bit scattered and occasionally over-simplistic, it ultimately pushes readers to consider the Jewish people, past and present, in a new light.

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 No honeymoon in Tehran: review of Azadeh Moaveni’s Honeymoon in Tehran

The Jerusalem Post, June 26, 2009

If the turmoil surrounding Iran’s recent presidential elections offers a glance at the inner psyche of Iranians, Honeymoon in Tehran offers a penetrating stare. Though the deceptively light title suggests that readers are getting a romance (and they do) the heart of the book is the turbulent love story between the Iranian-American author, Azadeh Moaveni, and Iran.

Moaveni was born and raised in northern California, amongst an enclave of successful Iranians-in-exile, her parents included. As an adult, Moaveni spent 1999 to 2001 in Iran wrestling with her identity during a time that the country wrestled with its own—the result was a journalism gig with Time magazine as well as her first book, Lipstick Jihad.

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Waiting for Taha: review of Adina Hoffman’s My Happiness Bears no Relation to Happiness: a poet’s life in the Palestinian Century

The Jerusalem Post, June 5, 2009

The story begins with an unlikely friendship between a Jewish American woman who has come to call Jerusalem home and a Palestinian poet, old enough to be her father, who today lives in Nazareth just miles from a home that no longer exists.

The story begins with a young Palestinian boy eking out a living for his parents and siblings during the British Mandate period.

The story begins with the tumultuous events of 1948, with villagers who weren’t fully aware of the magnitude of the events around them and with young Jewish soldiers who were, by some accounts, equally naïve.

Adina Hoffman’s “My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness” is about all of these narratives, more, and none. And in the space where all these stories converge—where they fade in, fade out, and bleed into each other—dwells Taha Muhammad Ali, a lesser-known Palestinian poet and the subject of Hoffman’s biography.

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 Identity and crisis: review of Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh’s Surrounded: Palestinian soldiers in the Israeli military

The Jerusalem Post, May 15, 2009

An Israeli Arab friend of mine, Saleh, is married to an American woman. He is conflicted: Though part of him would prefer to raise his children here among his family, he chooses to raise them in the US. One of the reasons he gives is that his two boys, as the children of a Muslim Arab, will not be able to join the army and thus will not reap the benefits of serving the State of Israel. When Saleh comes to visit the village he grew up in, a stone’s throw from Lebanon, he looks at the army age young men standing around, “doing nothing,” and he doesn’t want his sons to join their ranks.

But what happens when Israeli Arabs join the other ranks – those of the IDF? This question serves as the touchstone for Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh’s academic yet accessible Surrounded: Palestinian Soldiers in the Israeli Military.

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 From Tripoli to Damascus

The Jerusalem Post, March 20, 2009 (published under a pen name to protect the identity of the interviewees)

I’d spent five days in Beirut partying too hard and sleeping on a friend’s small couch. I needed a respite from the city lined with bullet-pocked buildings and booming nightclubs. I considered Tripoli—a coastal city that has been swept by waves of successive empires, including the Phoenicians, Persians, and Romans, amongst others. But Tripoli has been swept by waves of recent violence as well and I’d come at a bad time—just two weeks before, Tripoli had been rocked by a series of explosions.

My host recommended a day trip to Byblos instead.

I boarded the half-empty northbound bus in central Beirut armed with a book, a cup of coffee, and a wristwatch. I usually don’t wear a watch, but my host had insisted, “Byblos is hard to spot, so be prepared to get off the bus about 20 minutes out of the city. Keep an eye on the time, or you’ll miss the stop.”

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