Category Archive » Diversity
Tel Aviv goes Irish
Local social network organizes night of fun and Irish whiskey to mark Saint Patrick’s Day in Tel Aviv
Tel Aviv is gearing up to mark Saint Patrick’s Day on March 17th with green outfits, Irish whiskey, and parties across town.
International Israel, a local social network for expats and foreigners living and visiting Israel, is holding a special event that will bring people from across the world together and expose them to the best Tel Aviv has to offer on the special day.
The event will start at the Gordon Inn Hotel and Guest House on the corner of Gordon and Ben Yehuda Streets, where participants will enjoy the traditional Kilbeggan Irish Whiskey, before heading to three St. Patrick’s parties for a night of fun, Irish drinks and mingling.
“I think most internationals who are coming to our tours and events want to have a good time and, most importantly, they want to meet many people from all over the world and celebrate together,” says the social network’s organizer, former Israeli model and writer Timor Bar.
“The event will start relatively early,” says Bar, “so it’s important to be on time, as Tel Aviv’s streets can get very crowded on St. Patrick’s Day.”
Saint Patrick’s Day, also known as Saint Patty’s, is an old Irish tradition that was made an official feast day in the early 17th Century. Today it is marked worldwide, including in the United States, Scandinavia, and now in Israel as well.
Source: Ynetnews.com
Tel Aviv market a bonanza from ordinary to exotic (Chicago Tribune)
TEL AVIV — Visiting a food market in a far-flung destination is a great way to get a sense of the people who live there. Israel is no exception. The market in Tel Aviv, Israel’s largest city, showcases the small desert country’s agricultural innovations and the immigrant backgrounds of many Israeli residents.
Tel Aviv’s Carmel market, also known as Shuk Ha’Carmel, is close to the shore and a short walk down Allenby Street from the city’s hotel area. It’s part flea market, with vendors selling clothes, trinkets, cosmetics and cigarettes — there’s something quirky about seeing Camel cigarettes for sale in a place where you often see real camels — but mostly it’s a foodie haven of dried fruit, exotic spices, local olive oil, imported cheeses and fresh fish, meat and poultry. You also could spend your time dealing with the more immediate needs of an empty stomach by visiting stalls that sell persimmon smoothies, imported chocolates, mounds of colorful candies, fresh falafel, halva, lamb shawarma and borekas, the salty stuffed Turkish puff pastries that seem to be everywhere in Israel.
Tel Aviv chef Yair Feinberg, 35, gives market tours to travelers as part of his culinary business Fein Cook. He also offers cooking classes, specialty dinners and works on an Israeli television version of “Iron Chef.” Feinberg, the son of Argentine immigrants, grew up on a kibbutz in Israel’s Negev region and trained to be a chef at L’Institut Paul Bocuse in France. He later worked in several Michelin-star-receiving restaurants in Paris, Provence, France, and Tuscany, Italy, before returning to Israel in 2005.
It’s easy to wander the market alone and relish your solo discoveries. But a trip with someone like Feinberg can add insight and explanations about what you are seeing.
Take the giant lemons, for instance. After sampling some of the largest and juiciest clementines I’d ever tasted, I was convinced I was in the land of giant fruit when I came across what I was sure were the largest lemons I’d ever seen — about the size of a 16-inch softball.
Feinberg said the fruit actually is a pomelo, a large citrus fruit originally from Asia. The pomelo is now grown in Israel, where it also is crossbred with grapefruit to create Israel’s Sweetie. Sweeties are similar in size to a grapefruit but sweeter, with thick green or yellow skin and a remarkable 40 or fewer calories per fruit.
Feinberg is happy to talk about Israel’s agricultural innovations. He said that when the country was young and dealing with its lack of arable land and water, farmers worked at developing fruits and vegetables that would survive and thrive in the desert climate. The results include special varieties of mushrooms and strawberries that grow large and sweet in greenhouses where insects are used to fight common diseases that limit growth, he said.
If your schedule is flexible, plan to visit the Carmel market on a Tuesday or Friday, when local artisans display and sell their wares on the nearby pedestrian mall and the area is turned into a kind of street fair. Jewelry, wood carvings and stained glass are among the offerings.
If you want to sit down for a meal during your market visit, consider HaBasta restaurant, a favorite of local chefs. Chef Maoz Alonim is known for his use of fresh ingredients.
For a good cup of strong coffee in a funky little storefront, head a few blocks southwest of the Carmel market to Levinsky Street and its spice shops. Stop in at Kaymak, 47 Levinsky St., where the American expat owner will give you something warm to drink, as well as a place to sit and watch the world go by. It’s impossible to walk through a market and not consider the people who shop there. While talking about how Israeli olive oil is different — strong and bold — Feinberg said that the description also might apply to Israelis.
“The culinary world in Israel is a mixture of a lot of influences from all the immigrant communities in Israel and the Arab background of the region,” he said. “One of the main characteristics of the Israeli food is that it has a very pronounced taste. The sweets are very sweet, the coffee is very bitter. … We use a lot of spices, fresh herbs.”
If you go
Tel Aviv is a cosmopolitan city where you can find myriad food choices in restaurants that offer cuisine that spans the globe. The Israel Ministry of Tourism’s website for North America, goisrael.com, offers a lot of good information about the entire country. You can search the site for details on Tel Aviv’s Carmel market and restaurants and night life.
Chef Yair Feinberg’s company website is feincook.co.il, but unless you can read Hebrew you’ll only be able to look at the photos. You can reach him by email, however, at yair@feincook.co.il. He speaks and writes in English.
Source: Chicago Tribune
Tel Aviv documentary festival puts gay issues and politics in the spotlight
The 14th annual Docaviv festival, which will take place May 3-12 in Tel Aviv’s Cinemateque, will focus on political conflicts and gay issues.
Documentaries about gay Palestinians hiding in Tel Aviv and a facility for men who have abused family members are among the 12 films that will contend in the Israel competition of the Docaviv International Documentary Film Festival in May.
The 14th annual festival, which will take place May 3-12 in Tel Aviv’s Cinemateque, will focus on political conflicts and gay issues. More than 80 films will be screened, and there will also be discussion panels, special events, artists’ master classes and workshops.
The Israeli contestants, chosen from over 70 entries, include Yariv Mozer’s “The Invisible Men,” which follows a gay Palestinian couple hiding in Tel Aviv after being persecuted and threatened in the West Bank.
In Eyal Goldberg’s “Powder,” the filmmaker, a leftist gay activist, is shown doing reserve duty as a tank commander. Omer Yifman’s “All the Happy Mornings” documents his conflicts as a bisexual man, and Zohar Wagner’s “Days of Splendor” shows what happens when an old videotape shakes a man’s faith in his partner.
Yael Sherer’s “Dirty Laundry” focuses on a woman who files a civil lawsuit against her father, who was convicted and jailed for sexual abuse.
Miri Laufer’s “One Day, After Peace” is about a woman who must face the possibility that the sniper who killed her son while he was serving in the territories may be released from prison as part of the Gilad Shalit prisoner swap.
Other contenders include Irit Gal’s “White Night,” about a group of Palestinian women who take the the long, treacherous journey from their village to crawl through a hole in the fence into Jerusalem illegally every night, so they can support their families by working as cleaners.
Marcus Vetter’s “Cinema Jenin” is about a German-Palestinian group that sets out to rebuild an abandoned movie theater in Jenin, hoping to prepare the ground for social, cultural and economic independence in Palestinian society.
Noam Pinchas’ “The Cripple and the Buddhist” focuses on the filmmaker’s return to his childhood kibbutz to save a crippled friend who has become a recluse, and Amit Goren’s “Dangerous Children” is about an institution for men who have abused family members.
Two other contenders are Dan and Noit Geva’s “Noise,” about a man who decides to go to war against the noise invading his Tel Aviv home and Reuven Brodesky’s “Home Movie,” documenting the last phase in the disintegration of the filmmaker’s family.
In the course of the festival, Israeli movies that are not contending will also be screened, as will seven films that are running in the student competition.
Source: Haaretz.com
VIDEO: Gay characters in Israeli Films + Trailers
Israeli film has given more prominence to gay characters in recent years, and allowed for a more diverse, and less stereotypical portrayal of them, concludes a new scholarly survey of the topic.
Those who follow Israeli cinema have probably realized in recent years that local filmmakers, including quite a few who are heterosexual, are increasingly choosing to include gay characters in their movies – not rarely in principal roles.
Jonathan Sagall’s “Lipstikka,” Doron Eran’s “Melting Away,” Veronica Kedar’s “Joe + Belle,” Haim Tabakman’s “Eyes Wide Open,” Dan Wolman’s “Tied Hands” and Yair Hochner’s “Antarctica,” as well as Avi Nesher’s “The Secrets,” Eytan Fox’s “The Bubble,” and Yuval Shafferman’s “Things Behind the Sun” – all these films made in the past six years are joined by a respectable harvest of documentaries, shorts, student films and of course television series starring gay characters.
This is precisely the subject of Nir Cohen’s recently published book “Soldiers, Rebels and Drifters: Gay Representation in Israeli Cinema.” While this English-language book (published by Wayne State University Press ) largely deals with male homosexual characters and leaves the lesbians to other scholars, it offers several interesting observations concerning the history of homosexual representation in our local cinema, and the trends that have been prominent in it.
During the first decades of Israeli cinema, gay characters had no place whatsoever on the screen. Pride was the domain of the Zionist characters – warrior types, patriotic and straight. The infiltration of gay characters into local films began as a slow trickle. Cohen’s starting point for his study is the cinema of the 1970s, when the so-called bourekas films reigned. The introduction to his book mentions, for example, “The Bull Buster” (1973 ), directed by George Obadiah, and “Beautiful Troubles” (1976 ), directed by Assi Dayan – two of the first movies to feature gay characters.
Cohen emphasizes that “The Bull Buster” portrayed homosexuality stereotypically through minor characters, in a handful of scenes; in Dayan’s film the subject crops up in the form of an Italian hairdresser who speaks no Hebrew. In both cases these characters were secondary, Cohen notes, and as in other films from the same period, the homosexual community was depicted in a grotesque, marginalized and frivolous manner.
Avi Nesher’s film “The Troupe,” which was a critical and box-office success here in 1978, also gave us a problematic representation of gays. In one scene, Benny, the character played by Menahem Einy, comes out to his friends during a game of Truth or Dare, but Cohen argues that Benny’s character actually undercuts the claim that this was a liberal film for its time: Not only is the gay soldier the least developed character in the movie, but also in contrast to his fellow members in the army entertainment troupe, whom we see involved in all sorts of complex heterosexual relationships – we hardly know anything about Benny’s personal life.
Only in 1983, seven years after Amos Guttman’s short film “Drifting” (1976 ) was banned for broadcast on local television, did his first feature-length film of the same name appear. The feature-length “Drifting” (“Nagu’a” in Hebrew ), about a young gay man who works in his grandmother’s grocery store and dreams of making movies, became an important landmark in the history of local gay culture and of Israeli cinema in general.
Guttman, the first Israeli filmmaker to treat the gay subject matter seriously, is one of the two main directors that Cohen’s book discusses, the other being Eytan Fox; indeed, up until a few years ago, pride of place in this realm belonged to these two filmmakers. Like Guttman, Fox dared to place the gay experience at the center of his work, and to rebel against the traditional approach that preferred to ignore the existence of gays in Israeli society or to present them in a stereotypical and warped fashion.
Cohen devotes an entire chapter to each man. “I call them ‘the founding fathers of gay and lesbian cinema,’” he says in a telephone interview from London, where he teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies. “I find it quite interesting that Guttman and Fox are the ones who serve to anchor the book and are given this title, because really the filmmaking of each is very different from that of the other, and likewise the political statement that each makes, as I perceive it.”
Cohen, 35, left Israel for London 11 years ago. His book is an expansion of the doctoral dissertation he wrote at University College London. “My aspiration was to present a cultural history survey of the evolution of gay and lesbian cinema in Israel since the late ’70s, and to look at the connection formed between it and the gay community or movement in Israel,” he says.
“I grew up in the ’80s and personally experienced this movement’s changing status in Israel, the gay culture’s breakthrough, in film and generally, and the place that gays began occupying in the cultural-social sphere,” Cohen adds. “My study is based on cinematic representations of those same social-cultural changes.”
Trailers of some Israeli LGBTQ oriented films
Israeli panel set to discuss bill banning discrimination against LGBT community
The bill, submitted by MK Nitzan Horowitz, would add wording prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender or sexual identity to all existing anti-discrimination legislation.
The Ministerial Committee for Legislation will discuss on Sunday a revolutionary bill banning all forms of discrimination based on gender and sexual orientation.
The bill, submitted by MK Nitzan Horowitz (Meretz), would amend all of Israel’s existing anti-discrimination laws to include a prohibition on discrimination against people for reasons of gender identity or sexual orientation.
Horowitz said he was leading the move “as someone who represents a huge community that still suffers from harassment and a lack of full civil equality.” He added that the bill carried educational and social significance, in addition to its legal implications.
Noting that a number of Knesset parties had recently set up groups representing LGBT constituencies, Horowitz said, “The real test of commitment to the gay community is whether [the parties] support clear legislation that advances equal rights and fights violence and discrimination.”
A number of laws against discrimination on the basis of gender and sexual orientation have been passed in Israel over the years. Horowitz’s bill would expand the wording of all such laws to include discrimination based on gender and sexual identity.
The Knesset plenum is expected to vote on the bill on Wednesday. Horowitz promised over the weekend that he would work to expose the identities of Knesset members and ministers who vote against the law.
Source: Haaretz.com
Black Guru: One of Israel’s newest bands was born in a jail cell in Gambia
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Black Guru mixes African instruments with guitar and saxophone for a sound that’s far from conventional.
One of Israel’s newest bands was born in a jail cell in Gambia.
Ben Aylon and Yair Hashachar, two 24-year-old high school friends from Ramat Hasharon, were detained by Gambian immigration police during a trip to Africa several years ago and held in custody for four days. While behind bars, they decided to establish Black Guru, a band inspired by African music.
They got out and toured Gambia and Senegal, studying beats favored by members of the Mandinka and Wolof tribes. When they returned to Israel, they worked on arrangements and melodies. Their first album is called “Offbeat African Music,” which is also how they refer to their musical style.
Black Guru’s next performance is Saturday night, at Tel Aviv’s Haezor club.
With a nod to other forms of music that originated in African culture, Hashachar said the band’s goal is to familiarize Israelis with the kind of music he and Aylon studied in Africa.
“Well-known musical styles have roots in African cultures,” he said. “This is true, for example, of jazz. Blues also emerged out of Africa, owing to slaves who were sent to the United States and South America.”
The band, which was founded in 2010, might launch a joint musical initiative with members of the African migrant worker community in Israel.
Strings out of fishing rope
Aylon is the percussionist. Recently he has been studying the ngoni, a small wooden string instrument made out of a gourd covered by goat skin. The strings are made out of fishing rope.
In addition to the traditional percussion, Black Guru also plays Western instruments. Hashachar and Aylon’s brother, Ian, play guitar, and the band also includes jazz musicians in their 20s: Yehonatan Cohen and Itamar Shatz on saxophone and Guy Levi on contrabass. Yet their instrumental style is far from conventional.
They play jazz works, like John Coltrane’s “Your Lady,” arranged in their own distinctive neo-African style. They also play new arrangements of popular African songs.
Aylon and Hashachar developed a passion for jazz while studying in the music track of Ramat Hasharon’s Alon High School, and they joined forces due to their love of African music, including by artists from Mali such as Ali Farka Toure and Tinariwen, a band of Tuareg-Berber musicians.
Five years ago, they studied under Sabula Bangoura, a prominent musician from West Africa who established an African dance and percussion group in the northern Israeli town of Karkur.
Aylon said enthusiastically that he also studied with the “most famous musical family in Senegal.”
This is the family of Doudou N’Diaye Rose, 80, who sired a 43-member musical dynasty, all of whom perform with him on stage.
He composed Senegal’s national anthem, and wrote a number of well-known songs; he has played with Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Peter Gabriel.
Source: Haaretz.com