So far tests on the unfinished product—which the developers say will be a small, inexpensive device resembling a stirrer that lights up discretely or sends a message to a cell phone if the drugs are present—have been 100 percent accurate.

According to reports, the device simply needs to be placed into a drink:

“The sensor works by picking up a bit of alcohol and mixing it with a patent chemical formula, which was also developed by Patolsky and Ioffe.

So far, the sensor can detect gamma-hydroxybutyric acid (GHB) and ketamine. The scientists want to develop the sensor to detect Rohypnol, commonly known as ‘roofies.’

The sensor never failed to detect the presence of the two drugs. It can be used several times until it detects a drug.”

However, some predict the device won’t find mainstream success—its sudden use might seem accusatory, say, on a date—while acknowledging the unpleasant reality that date rape can occur without the presence of drugs.

Has Your Drink Been Spiked? This Sensor Could Let You Know [International Business Times]
Date-rape drug detector tests for ketamine and GHB; Scientists call test ’100% accurate’ [NY Daily News]
A sensor that can detect date-rape drugs? [The Week]

The story begins, as such stories often do, with an academic conference, this one dedicated to political blogging. Among the invited panelists was Benny Ziffer, the editor of Ha’aretz’s literary section and a popular and provocative blogger on the newspaper’s website. Last year, when Yitzhak Laor, a noted Israeli poet, was accused by a female acquaintance of rape, Ziffer took to the blogosphere, writing strongly in support of Laor and questioning his accuser’s motives.

None of this, of course, has anything to do with the panel to which he was invited, but in Israel, as well as in academia in general, the political and the personal are conjoined. Laor’s accuser, an artist named Eshkar Eldan Cohen, contacted Dr. Orly Lubin, the Comp Lit department chair, and demanded that Ziffer be uninvited. Lubin, a thoughtful scholar whom I’d had the pleasure to briefly meet while myself an undergraduate at TAU, wrote Eldan Cohen a long letter, explaining that uninviting Ziffer is tantamount to censorship and that if Eldan Cohen was so inclined, she, too, would be invited to the panel where she could freely confront Ziffer.

None of this sufficed to Eldan Cohen, who proceeded to lobby the family of the late professor in whose honor the conference is held annually. Realizing that the panel was growing needlessly controversial and counterproductive, Lubin announced last Friday that she was canceling it altogether. That, too, apparently, wasn’t enough: A few days after the panel had already been cancelled, Eldan Cohen took to her blog and demanded, once again, in an open letter to the university’s governing body, that Ziffer’s invitation be rescinded.

This, apparently, was all Lubin could take. She resigned. She couldn’t accept, she told Ha’aretz, that the gender studies program, which falls under the purview of her department, would be tainted by accusations of not being sufficiently committed to preventing violence against women. Reached for comment Tel Aviv University said it knew nothing of Lubin’s resignation. This is probably not where the story ends.

What makes this incident more interesting than a run-of-the-mill Israel-related controversy is that Atwood offered a staunch defense of her decision without making any sort of argument about Israel, the Palestinians, or Gaza. Rather, she opposed the very idea of a cultural boycott:

We don’t do cultural boycotts. I would be throwing overboard the thousands of writers around the world who are in prison, censored, exiled and murdered for what they have published. Why do these things happen to artists? It’s easy. Artists don’t have armies. What they do is nuanced, by which I mean it is about human beings, not about propaganda positions. They are going to offend someone no matter what they do. They are easy targets. They have names but no armies.

Irish composer Raymond Deane responded angrily. While most his rebuttal is premised on a condemnation of “the tissue of lies that the Zionists and their defenders have woven,” at one point he argues, “Culture is not a sacred realm floating far above the tribulations of the real world, and … artists in Israel and elsewhere are all too often complicit in the crimes of their governments—either by their silence, or by their willingness to allow their work and their presence to be appropriated by oppressive states.”

Atwood Says ‘We Don’t Do Cultural Boycotts’ and Accepts Israeli Prize [ArtsBeat]
Atwood Accepts Israeli Prize, Defends ‘Artists Without Armies’ [Bloomberg]
Open Letter to Margaret Atwood: Reject Tel Aviv University Prize [Oregon Salem-News]

• In a case of people-unclear-on-the-concept, 90-year-old alleged Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk—extradited by Germany from the U.S. last year—called his trial, currently proceeding in Munich, “torture.” [JTA]

• A report on global anti-Semitism released by Tel Aviv University last week claims that incidents doubled last year—because, leftist journalist Max Blumenthal says, it includes such dubiously qualifying events as the release of the Goldstone Report (written, of course, by a self-identifying Zionist Jew). [Huffington Post]

• The Israeli government has denied conductor and political provocateur Daniel Barenboim permission to perform with his youth orchestra in Gaza, on the grounds that no concert shall be held while Gilad Shalit remains imprisoned there. No word on whether Hamas wants to trade Shalit for a 15-year-old second violist. [Coteret]

• Tomorrow you can buy Real Housewife of New York City Jill Zarin’s new book, Secrets of a Jewish Mother, in which “you’ll learn how to make her methods your very own.” Then you too can go on Good Morning New York and apologize for acting like a crazy person on reality television.
[My Fox New York]

But now, as a regular visitor to Israel, I see a different country, especially in Tel Aviv, a city that has pioneered a free-flowing hedonistic lifestyle that promotes free expression in art and fashion. The campus of Tel Aviv University offers a parade of inked bodies. Which is partly why, though I’m not an Israeli, I decided to join Israel’s tattooed ranks during a visit this summer. But, unlike the bulk of Tel Aviv’s inked masses, I’d recently survived a harrowing ordeal, and a tattoo seemed as good a way as any to mark it.

The Jewish taboo against tattooing is culled from a verse in Leviticus: “You shall not make gashes in your flesh for the dead, or incise any marks on yourselves: I am the Lord.” There is a great deal of additional rabbinical commentary supporting this prohibition, including the notion that the human body is created in the image of God and, thus, to tamper with it is a kind of blasphemy. In recent times, the taboo has become more rooted in contemporary history than in biblical injunction—linked as it is to memory of the Holocaust. The sight of survivors’ tattoos traumatized a nation and a people, as it should have. A friend of mine whose grandparents perished in Auschwitz nearly threw his oldest son out of the house on their kibbutz when the son came home with a tattoo.

After making an appointment at Kipod on King George and Allenby Streets, I had to choose a design. Until I entered the tattoo studio, I had little sense of the final marking. But I knew where I wanted it to be (my upper right shoulder), and I knew that I wanted something that had a somewhat generic elegance to it, since it and I would grow old together.

I came equipped with pictures of lotuses and roses, different shapes and colors, but it wasn’t until I sat down in the studio and looked through the picture books that I decided on a final design: a rose with a sense of movement that makes it look like it is budding right on my back. And I chose the color black; Tel Aviv women may not dress in black from head to toe, but me and my fellow New Yorkers are persistently robed in it, and so it seemed to make sense to me to have my tattoo match the rest of my wardrobe.

The operative word in the previous sentence, though, is “chose.” As it turns out, my new rose is the third tattoo on my body—but the only one I asked for. Sixteen years ago, I was diagnosed with treatable breast cancer, and I had to go through a six-month radiation treatment. Prior to this treatment, the doctors outlined the area to be radiated with two tiny tattoos. Some women get these removed after their treatment, though it’s advisable to keep them in case you have a recurrence so that a doctor will see these telltale signs when considering further treatment.

Sometimes, I stare in the mirror and try to smudge away the unsmudgeable—these navy blue dots that appear intermixed with my natural body markings. These tattoos were not by choice; they mark an attack on my body and on my life by a deadly disease. As fixtures on my chest, they are reminders of the disease and of my triumph over it; but either way, they are reminders of a time in my life when I was out of control.

My new tattoo is something I did for me. It has no political or religious significance for me, nor does it show disrespect for my body, as the Leviticus passage implies. Rather it is a sign of respect for my body—and for me—to create a unique design on my skin that is not harmful. It doesn’t connote something dark or destructive. It’s about my own personal choice, making a decision for which I was fully in control. It’s playful and distinctive, like the city where I had it done, born from the past but not wedded to it, influenced by its own people’s history but not fated to relive it.

Jo-Ann Mort writes frequently about Israel for a variety of publications.

I was reminded of those days shortly after seeing Adam Sandler’s new movie, You Don’t Mess With the Zohan. As I stumbled out of the cinema, I couldn’t help thinking that for all the attention I paid to Hollywood’s misrepresentations of just about every minority imaginable, one group never crossed my mind: my own people, Israelis.

Israeli protagonists in American film, I realize now, belong to two basic groups. The first—Paul Newman’s Ari Ben Canaan, say, or Kirk Douglas’s Mickey Marcus—consists of strong and silent men whose chiseled shoulders carried beautiful blondes, large guns, and the entire weight of Jewish history. The second—think of Richard Dreyfuss as a somber commando in Victory at Entebbe or of Avner, Eric Bana’s character in Munich—consists of men who differ from their brethren in that they seem to prefer brunettes and follow up the killing with a debilitating shot of self-doubt, guilt, and shame.

Amazingly, Adam Sandler has just forced on Hollywood an entirely new category of Israeli hero, and in doing so he and his co-screenwriters, Robert Smigel and Judd Apatow, along with director Dennis Dugan, may just have created the first film that strips the Israeli-Palestinian conflict of its distorting filters and instead presents the century-old battle in all its raw absurdity.

In case a twelve-year-old hasn’t described the plot to you yet, Zohan Dvir, portrayed by Sandler with a tragic haircut and a strange, throaty accent, is Israel’s number one spy, a sexually omnipotent supersoldier who can catch bullets in his nostrils. Tired of the endless cycle of violence, and moved by a lifelong dream to become a famous hair stylist, he fakes his own death, moves to New York City, finds work in a beauty salon owned by a Palestinian woman, falls in love with her, and learns to transcend his own prejudices and hatreds.

It sounds like a simple, even simplistic, story. And it is. That’s the whole point.

Unlike his Hollywood ancestors, Zohan is virtually incapable of reflection. The only history he is truly concerned about has nothing to do with Zionism and the fate of the Jews; rather, he worships Paul Mitchell, the legendary hair guru whose outdated 1980s stylings Zohan still perceives as the height of fashion. When he sends a Palestinian terrorist flying off a balcony, or blows up a building in Beirut, he does so because he likes it and because he is good at it. In Zohan’s world, these are the only two reasons a man could ever need for doing anything.

The other thing Zohan both excels at and enjoys is sex. After struggling to make an impression as a stylist, he finally succeeds when he turns the traditional cut-and-color into an orgiastic free-for-all that begins with suggestively shooting shampoo from his pelvis and ends with a quick romp with his clients in the salon’s back room. That the clients are mostly women of a certain age matters not at all to Zohan; to him, women are women and sex is sex and anything else—like age, for example, or looks, or propriety—would simply complicate things.

Here lies Zohan’s true brilliance. He realizes instinctively that waging war and making love are two frighteningly similar acts—the French had it just right when they mused about la petite mort—and that both are so thrilling precisely because they allow the body the rare privilege of escaping the nervous and contemplative tyranny of the mind. In combat and in copulation alike we do whatever comes naturally, guided by muscle memory, never for one second succumbing to analysis or thought of consequence.

In a sense, then, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to argue that killing and fucking are among the very few things that are truly universal, that strip us of the constructs of culture and religion and nationality and unite us in primordial grunts of rage or passion. Killing and fucking, in other words, may tear us apart, but they may also bring us together.

That is certainly the case with Zohan. After spending much of the movie scuffling with the Phantom—a Palestinian archterrorist played by a delightfully hammy John Turturro—he finally realizes that he and his nemesis are more alike than they’d thought. As can be expected from a summertime comedy starring Adam Sandler, this realization arrives in the form of a third-act bonding, with both men hugging out their differences and committing themselves to peace, love, and Mariah Carey. But what truly brings them together is something darker and more complex: as they go about trying to kill each other and/or bed throngs of women, Zohan and the Phantom slowly come to understand that the hypermacho ideology on which they were both reared—the ideology that determined their fates, that places so much store in sex and death and the body—has infected their societies, oppressed their people, and turned their respective homelands into a wilderness of death and desire.

This, I think, is what Zohan really means when, stowed away in the cargo area of a transatlantic flight, he lectures two woolly dogs on the Israeli-Palestinian cycle of violence: Coco barks at Scrappy, he explains (using a metaphor he hopes the dogs will relate to), and Scrappy bites Coco, and both run around in circles and shove their noses into each other’s privates. The problem with this scenario, Zohan soon realizes, isn’t so much its pointlessness—after all, he himself takes great pleasure in shoving his nose into other people’s private parts—as its mindlessness. Like Coco and Scrappy, Zohan recognizes, Israelis and Palestinians are incapable of stepping back and thinking about their actions, and therefore have little chance for change.

It is precisely this thoughtlessness that delivers the movie’s funniest moments. One after another, we are presented with a gallery of hilarious characters: the Israeli swindler who swears an overpriced gadget is really a Sony product only mildly refurbished; the would-be Palestinian terrorist who is more enraged with the Mets for signing a generous deal with the aging and ineffective slugger Carlos Delgado than he is with Israel for bombing his native village. These characters are only slightly exaggerated versions of the real-life strivers who man moving companies and electronics stores and taxi cabs all over New York. But it’s this approximate realism that shapes them into small-scale tragic figures: We laugh at their bravado and their accents, but we also realize that they are who they are because entire societies exist to make sure they turn out that way, societies that need and value soldiers above all, societies that long ago gave the body free reign over the mind.

The film’s real achievement lies in demonstrating that if we ever want to make sense of these societies, not to mention change them, we had better begin to look at them not through the usual lens—contemplative, elegiac films saturated with ideology—but rather as they really are, rollicking and robust and deeply impulsive.

Of course, I could point out the irony in a stereotype-bashing movie that relies on indelicate depictions of gun-loving rednecks and lascivious old gay men as comic foils. But I’ll leave that to the undergrads.