More in ‘Tel Aviv’

Today in Tablet Magazine, the Vox Tablet podcast features Daniel Estrin’s dispatch from a Tel Aviv neighborhood where the liberal denizens have not taken kindly to Chabad’s moving in. As Marjorie Ingall’s husband and children apply for German citizenship (their birthright due to Nazi disenfranchisement), she finds herself uneasy about being left behind and ever ...

Attention Law & Order: if you’re looking for strange, ripped-from-the-headlines cases, you may want to call Shin Bet. Three months ago, the Israeli security agency arrested American-born settler Jack Teitel for allegedly murdering two Palestinians and detonating numerous makeshift bombs that targeted intellectuals, gay-rights activists, and police officers. Teitel was quick to confess many of ...

A rally in Tel Aviv was scheduled to take place tomorrow night, marking the 14-year anniversary of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination—but stormy weather has led organizers to postpone the event, at which Labor and Kadima party leaders will speak, until next weekend. Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Post reports, members of the religious Zionist movement are ...

Tel Aviv is home to the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora, but museumgoers there must be foreigners, because, says the Jerusalem Post, “according to experts, most Israeli youth pass through the state education system without a single lesson on the Diaspora.” That’s why a Russian-Israeli billionaire, Leonid Nevzlin, gave the museum a $6 million grant ...

After two weeks of taking flak for signing the controversial letter protesting the Toronto International Film Festival’s decision to honor Tel Aviv with a special City to City program, Jane Fonda now says she screwed up—not so much by supporting a half-baked boycott, but by signing something “without reading it carefully enough.” In a column ...

Are you in the market for a new shofar? Well, bear in mind that Tel Aviv’s Religious Council is warning customers against buying ram’s horns finished in either China or Morocco, which began exporting shofars to Israel last year. The Council’s members have lots of objections: the Chinese instruments are allegedly “smeared with pig fat,” ...

A handful of influential Canadian filmmakers are threatening to pull their works from the upcoming Toronto Film Festival if the prestigious festival carries out its plans for a cinematic salute to Tel Aviv. This year’s festival, to open on September 10, is set to include a retrospective of Israeli films about the city, which is ...

When Zvi Bellin, a gay Washingtonian, heard that a vigil was being organized by members of the gay and Jewish communities in the Capitol to memorialize the victims of the Tel Aviv gay youth center shooting, he decided to invite Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld. Herzfeld, who leads the modern Orthodox Ohev Sholom synagogue in Shepherd ...

Here’s a brain teaser: is a school that teaches secular subjects in Hebrew inherently religious? The people behind the Hebrew Language Academy, New York’s first publicly funded Hebrew-language charter school, think not; they insist that, like an Arabic school that opened two years ago in Brooklyn, the new school can stay safely in secular terrain ...

It was Saturday morning, and my girlfriend and I woke up in Tel Aviv. I’m here for a month from London, engaged in an ongoing flirtation with the place where I think I want to live. Poppy is here for a week, skeptical, but with an avowedly open mind. All week I have been propagandizing her about the city. Schlepping her hither and thither, wheeling her into cafes and out again, waiting, and hoping for the love to take hold. Look! The world’s first secular Jewish city! 100 years old! I listen to myself and realise I sound like some kind of publicity instrument of the municipality. But it’s genuine, I feel it—that beauty flowers everywhere here. I want her to feel it herself, that thing, whatever it is. Not Zionism, necessarily. But Tel Aviv-ism. It’s a bubble, she says. How can people live like this, not engaging? What she sees is a city of consumers—dancing, eating, hooking up, ignoring. I see that too, but feel happy: to me it’s just a city of people living their lives.