Idol Worship
When we were kids, I wanted to follow in my brother’s footsteps. Now, as adults, I’m reminded why.
| 7:00 AM Mar 19, 2010
Etgar Keret is a columnist for Tablet Magazine. A Tel Aviv-based filmmaker and fiction writer, his most recent book is The Girl on the Fridge.
When we were kids, I wanted to follow in my brother’s footsteps. Now, as adults, I’m reminded why.
| 7:00 AM Mar 19, 2010
Being polite to telemarketers can land you in the grave
| 7:00 AM Feb 19, 2010
Ehud Olmert, like the author’s son, believes in the feline defense: ‘I’m a cat, not a regular person, and the rules don’t apply to me’
| 7:00 AM Jan 22, 2010
Ehud Olmert, cat.
CREDIT: Sarah Lazarovic
In preparation for the meeting with Lev’s preschool teacher, I shaved and took my good suit out of the closet.
“It’s a ten-in-the-morning meeting,” my wife laughed. “The teacher will probably be wearing sweat pants. And with that white shirt and jacket, you’ll look like a groom.”
“Like a lawyer,” I corrected her. ...
Sniffing out anti-Semitism, overt and imagined, takes its toll on an Israeli visiting Europe
| 7:00 AM Nov 20, 2009
With a nuclear threat from Iran hovering, a Tel Aviv family dispenses with housekeeping
| 7:00 AM Oct 16, 2009
A few weeks before our son Lev was born, four years ago, two weighty philosophical issues came to the fore.
The first, will-he-look-like-his-mom-or-his-dad, was resolved quickly and unequivocally at his birth: he was beautiful. Or, as my dear wife so aptly puts it, “The only thing he inherited from you is the hair on his back.”
And ...
In Sweden for Rosh Hashanah, the author does PR for Yom Kippur
| 7:00 AM Oct 1, 2009
My visit last week to the Gothenburg Book Fair in Sweden got off to a stressful start. Several weeks before I arrived in that peaceful city, which boasts Northern Europe’s largest amusement park, a local tabloid published a story accusing Israel of stealing organs from Palestinians killed by the IDF. The story managed to ...
An Israeli nightmare about rootlessness leads to financial ruin
| 7:00 AM Aug 25, 2009
It all began with a dream. A lot of troubles in my life begin with a dream. And in this dream I was at a train station in a strange city, behind a hot dog stand. A horde of impatient passengers were huddling around it. They were all jumpy, impatient. I couldn’t understand them. They were dying for a hot dog, they were afraid of missing the train. They were barking orders at me in a strange language that sounded like a scary blend of German and Japanese. I answered them in the same strange, nerve-wracking language. They tried to make me go faster, and I did my best to keep up. My shirt was so splattered with mustard and relish and sauerkraut that the few places where you can still see the white look like spots. I tried to concentrate on the buns but I couldn’t help noticing the angry mob. They looked at me with the ravenous eyes of predators. The orders in the incomprehensible language seemed more and more menacing. My hands started shaking. Beads of salty sweat dripped from my forehead onto the thick hot dogs. And then I woke up.
Mamas who don't want their babies to grow up to be soldiers
| 7:00 AM Jul 17, 2009
I don’t want to brag, but I’ve managed to earn myself a unique, somewhat mythic status among the parents who take their children to Ezekiel Park, my son’s favorite spot in Tel Aviv. I can’t attribute that special achievement to any overwhelming charisma I might possess, but rather to two common, lackluster qualities: I’m a man, and I hardly ever work. And so, in Ezekiel Park, I have been dubbed “ha-abba” or “the father,” an almost religious and slightly gentile nickname intoned with great respect by all the park’s regulars. It seems that most of the fathers in my neighborhood go to work every morning, so that the inherent laziness that has plagued me for so many years is finally being construed as exceptional sensitivity and affection, showing a genuine understanding of children’s tender young souls.
Ehud Barak led Israel's Labor Party to irrelevance. Can anyone revive it?
| 1:07 PM Jun 12, 2009
One cold and rainy morning last February, Israel’s Labor Party woke up to a political reality it had never known before. For the first time since it was established in 1968, when several left-wing parties united under the leadership of Mapai, Labor found itself outside the exclusive club of the two parties with the largest ...
So what if he's in diapers? He waves! He smiles! What more could you want in a leader?
| 10:49 AM Apr 12, 2007
A year and three months after our son Lev was born, my wife and I could no longer repress what we’d been feeling all along. He’s a beautiful child, that’s true, and far from being an idiot, but the minute we manage to step back from our subjective proud parent status and take an objective ...