Beshert | Encounter in Eilat
I heard a female voice, a voice that seemed to be addressing me. “Hi, how are you today?” It was, to my astonishment, the sabra from the hotel lobby.
20
Jan
09
Nov
Groundswell: Alon Eliran on Forest Cities
Dr. Alon Eliran is a member of CityTree, a Tel Aviv based knowledge center focused on forest cities, urban ecology and climate resilience.
01
Aug
Whose Side Is the U.S. Really On?
As U.S.-brokered negotiations begin–again–between Israelis and Palestinians, both sides want to know: Hey, America, whose side are you really on?
After living in Jerusalem for seven years and working in the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I encountered that question on more than one occasion.
My answer came after an unexpected ride on a sherut, the 10-person van that shuttles passengers between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. One night out in Tel Aviv, it was well past midnight and I was ready to go home to Jerusalem. The regular buses had stopped running, so the only way to get home was via the Jerusalem sherut.
Haphazardly huddled by the side of the road where the sherut picks up its passengers just a few of us were waiting when I first arrived, but eventually a small crowd amassed. Thirty of...
28
Oct
Sky-Scraping Prices in Tel Aviv
by Merav Levkowitz
HGTV recently aired the Israel episode of House Hunters International, where two Chicago sisters with a $500,000 budget searched for an apartment in Tel Aviv. After being shown the three options available, they found themselves seriously debating between a rooftop duplex that was smaller than what they were looking for and a vintage apartment that was in such bad shape it would require at least $100,000 worth of repairs.
Ultimately they chose the duplex, but the fact that a crumbling apartment with a price tag of half a million dollars was featured hints at the real estate markets in what was recently declared the nineteenth most expensive city in the world—a whole ten spots ahead of New York! How did Tel Aviv become so expensive?
For one reason, on a broad economic scale, Israel’s banking practices...
03
Dec
Crazy New Tel-Aviv Port
By Benjamin Schuman-Stoler
Not sure how we missed this, but we recently saw some pics of the new Tel-Aviv port, designed by Israeli firm Mayslits Kassif Architects in collaboration with Galila Yavin, and it blew us away. We caught the pics, of all places, on Kanye West's blog. West and worldarchitecturenews.com had this to say:
Situated on one of Israel's most breathtaking waterfronts, the Tel Aviv Port was plagued with neglect since 1965, when its primary use as an operational docking port was abandoned. The recently completed public space development project by Mayslits Kassif Architects, managed to restore this unique part of the city, and turn it into a prominent, vivacious urban landmark.
The architects saw the Tel Aviv Port project as an opportunity to construct a public space which challenges the common contrast between private and public...
03
Sep
"Beautiful Israel:" See it Here
One of the cheesier keepsakes I’ve ever bought in Israel came, not surprisingly, from a touristy shop on Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda Street. A fridge magnet, it shows a zebra on a grassy veldt under the slogan, “Hello from Israel!” Of course there are no zebras in the Holy Land, but you had to stop and think there for a minute, didn’t you?
Aside from gags like that, you’d be hard-pressed to find visual surprises among Israel posters, souvenirs and postcards. You can probably picture most of them without even springing for a stamp: sober depictions of daveners at the Wailing Wall; shots of dusty ruins; sunset glinting off the Dome of the Rock; cartoon maps dotted with little icons showing camels in the Negev and snorkelers in the Red Sea and so on. Flip through a...