Old in Tel Aviv, Young in Jaffa
A lot of people (Israelis especially) hate on Tel Aviv, and I guess you can’t really blame them. It’s the beach party, the most modern, international city in a country where history and tradition are tremendously important to the national identity. I was in Tel Aviv last Thursday for Laila Lavan, the annual White Night […]
Getting Back to Essentials
It’s been one month to the day since I left my job to travel, since I left the States for Israel. At the start of this trip, I was one of a cohort of 48. Now I’m on my own. I’ve traveled solo before, but always in a structured context: for a wine conference in […]
Holy Holy Holy
“Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!” “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!” God is great, God is great, the women chant. They follow the armed escort, which is there to protect three Jewish men, and to prevent them from engaging in vandalism and prayer. We are on the Temple Mount, the spiritual epicenter of Arab-Israeli hatred, the focal point […]
Hallelujah
I find no religion in churches. Temples leave me bemused at best, bored at worst. Mosques are nice to look at, but within their walls I feel no closer to God, divinity, spirituality, that great whatever-it-is in the sky. In the footsteps of poetic hoboes before me, I get my religion kicks from the echoes […]
Fortress of Vanity
The cultural treasures of Israel are sequestered by boundaries of politics and violence. One of the great tragedies of conflict is that it reduces access to the sum of human knowledge. A trip like Birthright, no matter how immersive, cannot be comprehensive, since much of the shared cultural heritage of this land is blocked off […]
Shabbas in the West Bank
It is Friday night in Tekoa, and my friend Nachshon’s mother lights the nerot shabbat. From the kitchen window, I can see the minarets of Beit Lechem—Bethlehem—where the muezzin sounds the evening prayer for the first Friday of Ramadan. Tekoa, an Israeli settlement considered illegal under international law, sits atop the Wadi Tekoa, a vast […]
On Finishing Birthright
“Tel Aviv is sweet, bro! For four days I would just sleep on the beach, wake up, smoke some hash, and go for a swim!” This was the advice I got from the bedouin tent DJ when I told him I was staying in Israel. He wore fingerless wool gloves in the middle of the […]
Bitches Brew
In a past life, I was Miles Davis. In this life, I can barely play the triangle. Anyway, your unemployed narrator who used to be Miles Davis was reminded of his previous self this morning when, on a brief deviation from his Sea to Sea Trek, he visited the shrine of Nebi (Prophet) Sabalan in […]
From Sea to Shining Lake
Were this a normal Birthright trip, it would now be over. Instead, we’ve only just begun our Sea to Sea Trek from the Mediterranean to the Sea of Galilee, also known as the Kinneret. A more technical name would be Sea to Lake Trek, since like most seas in Israel, the Kinneret is not actually […]
Simultaneous Histories
Israel is a country where the forces of geological time and human history are frequently—often simultaneously—evident. At Rosh Hanikra, on the border with Lebanon, railways tunnels built under the British Mandate lie mere meters from ancient grottoes, hollowed out over millennia by the pounding of Mediterranean waves on limestone. These caves are home to fruit […]
