Etgar Keret

Gary Shteyngart

The International Writer’s Festival has returned to Jerusalem packing heat. The biennial event, which kicked off on Monday, has nearly as many international writers present as Israelis, many of whom defied pressure back home to steer clear of Israel, according to Uri Dromi, director general of Mishkenot Sha’ananim, the main location of the festival (events are also taking place at cafes, cinemas and even the Mahane Yehuda market all during the week).

Dromi was speaking at the opening to an enjoyable, often raucously funny meet-up between American writer Gary Shteyngart and Israeli surreal short story’ist Etgar Keret. My wife and I always try to attend at least one session during the festival, as much for the atmosphere – hundreds of Israelis who have come together for literature! – as well as the specific authors.

At the sold out dialogue between Keret and Shteyngart, the latter read from his latest book, “Super Sad True Love Story,” set in a dystopian future where everyone wears a necklace of sorts that broadcasts one’s social status and financial status – it’s Facebook gone crazy with any hints of privacy entirely eviscerated.

Keret mostly played the interviewer although he peppered his questions with a few stories of his own, mostly about his father who passed away six weeks ago. In a touching and original way, Keret has replaced the religious “Kaddish” that is traditionally said for a year after a parent dies with a pledge to speak about his dad in any public appearance he makes. His main story at the Shteyngart meet-up involved cancer, coughing and coffee.

The Mishkenot Sha’ananim setting is, to indulge in a cliché, picture perfect. Our session was held in a large white tent erected specially for the festival, open on one side, with a spectacular view of the Old City.

Other international writers appearing at the festival include Lukas Barfuss from Switzerland, Aimee Bender from the U.S. (whose latest book has the unflappable title “The Girl with the Flammable Skirt”), Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbo, and Tracy Chevalier whose best known work, “The Girl with the Pearl Earring,” sold four million copies and was made into a successful movie.

Tracy Chevalier

Chevalier was in the audience for the Shteyngart–Keret shindig, which was a treat for me because we both went to Oberlin College, graduating a year apart. I was sure that we must have known each other (I was a Creative Writing major, she was in the English department), but alas, it seems we never crossed paths and my chance at reminiscing with a true literary celebrity was reduced to a few friendly words and some pleasant small talk.

If you’re in Jerusalem and you have an hour or two to spare, the International Writer’s Festival continues until Thursday.

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Back in 2007, after the death of former model Hila Elmalich who was 34 and weighed less than sixty pounds, he told me the following for Women’s Wear Daily:

“The problem is with society, and the low self-esteem of these girls,” says Barkan. “We need to put this out there, to make it a societal norm in Israel and the rest of the world. People need to see these anorexic bodies and move their butts and do something about this.”

Israel21c interviewed Barkan several times about the issue, and posted the following video:

In March, his perseverance paid off, as the Knesset passed what is being called the Photoshop law, for the aspect of the law that regulates the use of Photoshop to make women appear perfect in advertisements. That’s a huge accomplishment. The bulk — no pun intended — of the law focuses on banning underweight models based on their BMI, or Body Mass Index.

The law is making waves in Israel, and around the world. Can Israel set the precedent for changing the way the fashion industry views and uses models’ bodies?

Interestingly enough, it was on Israel’s new fashion channel, Fashion.net., that a panel of fashion professionals, including clothing designer Yosef and a local fashion magazine editor, agreed that despite the new law and its groundbreaking potential, the fashion world will still view impossibly thin model bodies as the ultimate in goal.

“No one wants to see a curvy, zaftig model,” said Naama Chaisin, who is the second generation in the Tovale designer line of clothing. “And I say that as someone who is curvy and has fought to lose weight my whole life.”

Here’s to hoping she’s wrong.

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YouPhone is one of the new cellular carriers hitting the Israeli market

Israelis won’t be saying “hallo” on their cell phones, but that doesn’t mean low prices aren’t coming.

A few weeks ago, a much-rumored new discount-priced Israeli cellular phone company called Hallo dropped its plans to launch after it emerged the company didn’t have the contacts in place it needed to operate . The company had promised an incredible deal – NIS 99 for unlimited talk time, unlimited messages and 2 GB of data surfing. A similar offer at one of the big three carriers – Orange, Cellcom and Pelephone, would cost at least double that.

But this week, three new operators hit the market with innovative pricing that will further shake up the cell phone market in Israel. It brings to five the number of “mobile virtual network operators” (or MVNO’s), a fancy way for saying that the new guys buy time from the existing carriers, piggybacking for a price on the antennas and infrastructure already built.

One of the new guys, Golan Telecom has the exact same attractive pricing that Hallo promised. Another, HOT Mobile, has a fee structure includes unlimited talk and text for just NIS 89 – NIS 10 less than Golan – but doesn’t include data in the price.

HOT Mobile also has a plan for “light users” – no monthly fee at all, then 10 agorot per minute and the same per text message and per megabyte of Internet access. Golan’s light user plan costs NIS 10 a month and includes 60 minutes of talk time, 60 text messages and 10 megabytes of Internet access. The third operator, YouPhone, will be charging NIS 18 a month, then 18 agorot per minute of talk time and 15 agorot for messages. Internet will also be 15 agorot per megabyte.

The different packages for each carrier sound confusing, but they’re actually a bit clearer (although not much) than the traditional cell phone deals which include x number of minutes free to other subscribers on the same network, another package of minutes to family and friends, discounts if you bought a phone via the carrier and speak at least 200 minutes a month…it got so confusing that Orange, one of the big three, came out with its own “clear” package that sets a base price of NIS 69 (and as a result, the cost of purchasing the phone through the company listed is listed separately).

If you’re a heavy mobile Internet user, HOT Mobile’s offer of 10 agorot per megabyte can add up. 2 GB = NIS 200, so the NIS 99 all you can eat package is a much better deal. If your Internet usage is less – say 250 MB a month like me, that’s only NIS 25. If you then talk 200 minutes a month and send, say, 100 text messages, that’s another NIS 30/month, making the combined price less than at the big carriers.

YouPhone’s doesn’t offer a more expensive package with a higher data level, so if you like to surf on-the-go, stick with Golan or HOT.

Perhaps the most intriguing element – at least for immigrants with strong ties to the “old country” – is Golan’s offer of free overseas calling to landlines in 29 countries. HOT’s overseas calling price is a shekel a minute.

On the other hand, YouPhone has a deal with the Mega chain of supermarkets and Alon gas stations (the same holding company owns all three) so that if you buy groceries or gas, you get free minutes. For every NIS 100 customers spend, they will receive 10 minutes of airtime at no charge, up to a maximum of 200 minutes per month per customer. The idea is that talking on the phone is as much a necessity as eating and traveling in your car, but that pricing brings us back to the familiar complexity the new companies seem to have been trying to avoid.

The other two MVNOs are associated with the Rami Levy supermarket chain and the Home Center DIY chain.

If you want a full service cellular carrier with a proper office and repair facility, you won’t get that with the newbies – YouPhone and Rami Levy are using their supermarkets and gas stations to sell their services and Golan has just a website – they’ll send you a SIM card in the mail.

The bottom line: if you’re willing to shop around, you can save a lot in the new cellular landscape. And that’s good news for competition. Now if only it would extend to cottage cheese.

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But even when it looks like easy street, there is danger at your door. And I’m not talking about existential threats… but earthquakes.

Friday night was gorgeous, one of those spring evenings with a beautiful breeze that provided a nip to the air. We had dinner outside in our back yard with a few guests, including one visitor from the US on a 10-day tour of Israel.

After filling up on the great food, including delicious challot from Russell’s Bakery in Mahane Yehuda, we were sitting around the table munching on fresh fruit salad and rogelah from Marzipan.

I didn’t know it then, but it was precisely 9:48 pm when I felt my garden chair below being to vibrate. I immediately looked around to see if either of the people sitting to my left and right were shaking their legs against my chair, and was surprised that they weren’t.

After about five seconds, the vibrations stopped. I looked around at the seven people sitting around the table, and none of them had stopped, or expressed any kind of surprise in their faces. Well, I thought, maybe I was experiencing some kind of drug-induced flashback from my wild youth, because nobody else seems to have felt what I felt. So I didn’t mention it.

Imagine my surprise, when on Saturday night, after Shabbat, I went online to check out the news of the last 24 hours and read that a 5.3 magnitude earthquake shook the eastern Mediterranean on Friday night at 9.48 pm.

Thousands of Israelis evidently called the police to report the tremors which were felt from Rishon Lezion in the south to Safed in the north. Luckily, no damages or injuries were reported. Political pundits noted that the quake was probably just the seismic aftershocks of last week’s cataclysmic events in the government. Talk about thunder and lightning…

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Among the 38 documentaries entered into the competition this year is Shadows In Palestine, a new look at the millennial movement of German Templers (not to be confused with the Crusader Knights Templar), a community of religious Protestants who lived in the Holy Land for three generations, from 1868 to 1941, in settlements known today as the “German Colonies” of Haifa, Jerusalem, Jaffa, Sarona (in central Tel Aviv), Wilhelma (adjacent to today’s Ben Gurion Airport), Waldheim (now Moshav Alonei Abba) and Bethlehem of the Galilee.

The Templer sect (Tempelgesellschaft) was a German Protestant sect with roots in the Pietist movement of the Lutheran Church. They believed that living in the Holy Land would hasten the second coming of Christ and were expelled from the church in 1858 because of their millennial beliefs. In 1868, at the urging of their leader, Christoff Hoffman, the emigrated to the Holy Land and built their first colony in Haifa.

According to Wikipedia, “The colonists built an attractive main street that was much admired by the locals. It was 30 meters wide and planted with trees on both sides. The houses, designed by architect Jacob Schumacher, were built of stone, with red-shingled roofs, instead of the flat or domed roofs common in the region.

“The Templer settlement of Sarona was one of the first modern agricultural settlements in Palestine… In August 1871, the Templers purchased 60 hectares of land from a Greek monastery north of Jaffa.

“The colony’s oranges were the first to carry a ‘Jaffa orange’ brand, one of the better known agricultural brands in Europe, used to market Israeli oranges to this day. The Templers established a regular coach service between Haifa and the other cities, promoting the country’s tourist industry, and made an important contribution to road construction.

“In 1873, after establishing colonies in Haifa and Jaffa, members of the Templer sect from Württemberg, Germany, settled on a large tract of land in the Refaim Valley, southwest of the Old City of Jerusalem. The land was purchased by one of the colonists, Matthaus Frank, from the Arabs of Beit Safafa.”

The Templers brought modern farming methods to the region, importing agricultural machinery, introducing soil fertilization, better methods of crop rotation and new crops with a focus on crops and products they could readily sell. ‘The researcher and author Sven Hedin wrote of his visit to Sarona in 1916 ‘…many plants were in blossom. They mainly grow grapes, oranges and vegetables, [but] like in old times they also produce milk and honey.’”

But the idyll began to fracture when in 1917, during World War I, General Edmund Allenby conquered Palestine from the Ottomans. “The German colonists were regarded as enemy aliens. Many of the colonists were recruited for the units of the German Imperial Army, which fought together with the army of the Ottoman ally against the British conquest.”

The German colonists — now into their third generation — chafed under British rule and became increasingly influenced by German nationalism. “In 1937, 34% of the Templers were Nazi party members. At the start of World War II colonists with German citizenship were rounded up by the British and sent, together with Italian and Hungarian enemy aliens, to internment camps in Waldheim and Bethlehem of Galilee. 661 Templers were deported to Australia via Egypt on July 31, 1941, leaving 345 in Palestine.”

“Sarona, together with the three other agricultural settlements – Wilhelma, Bethlehem of Galilee and Waldheim – became ‘perimeter’ compounds into which all Germans living in Palestine were interned. Sarona held close to 1,000 persons behind a guarded, 4 m high barbed-wire fence. In July 1941, 198 people from Sarona, together with almost 400 from the other internment camps were deported to Australia on the Queen Elizabeth. They were interned in Tatura in Central Victoria Australia until 1947. By November 1944, most of the remaining Sarona residents had been moved to the camp in Wilhelma. The last group was sent there in September 1945.”

However, according to the new documentary, “during the thirties, the Templers were pressured to embrace and form a Nazi party” and fell victim to a secret exchange between Germany and Britain. “The Nazi party set free a number of Jews from concentration camps and in exchange Britain, who controlled Palestine at the time, sent the Templers back to Germany. Despite the fact that only a third of Templers joined the Nazi Party, all of them were forced to leave their new homeland.”

It will be interesting to see this new account of the Templer’s history. (Right now there is only a movie trailer on YouTube). The movie includes first-hand interviews with Templers who speak about the past and their exit from Mandatory Palestine. For Israelis who don’t necessarily know the background to these German Colony neighborhoods, it’s a chance to learn about the Templer movement, its accomplishments and contributions to the development of the modern State of Israel.

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The international musicians of The Bridge Project.

But it was no joke for Ittai Shaked, Andy Bussuttil and Umit Ceyhan who make up The Bridge Project - based in cyberspace but coming down for landing this week in Israel.

All three musicians have a day gig at the successful Israeli startup Waves, which was profiled in ISRAEL21c a few years ago. Violinist Shaked is a quality assurance manager for the Grammy Award-winning company that develops audio mixing software for the digital age for sound engineers and producers. And Bussutil, a multi-talented musician who runs his own recording studio in Australia, and Ceyhan, the Turkish Muslim who currently lives in France and teaches sonic and cinematic arts at the University of Toulouse, are part of Shaked’s team testing the company’s new products.

When, over a year ago, Shaked posted a message to his more than 100 testers around the world asking if anyone wanted to get together virtually and create some music, Bussutil and Ceyhan responded. Thus began ongoing file sharing and music creation between the three, with each adding his own instruments and ideas onto the previous take of their world music combining everything from Middle Eastern sounds to klezmer and Balkan beats.

The chemistry between us was amazing – we found out we shared and loved the same kind of music, more or less, with different spices,” Shaked told me. “And all three of us play instruments that combine together very nicely. At some point, I realized that what we’re doing here is making an album.”

The result is Three Waves Under the Bridge, the fruits of their online efforts, and the arrival in Israel of Bussutil and Ceyhan this week to meet Shaked and each other face to face and perform a series of live shows around the country.

Three Waves Under the Bridge, mixed by Shaked and mastered by Bussuttil, is a reflective world music mosaic brimming with musical ideas, and featuring a genre-hopping range of instruments – North African percussion like bongos and darbukas, strings ranging from violin, viola and cello to clarinet and sax, and traditional Turkish instruments like the duduk, kopuz and saz.

The music is only part of their accomplishments. As Bussuttil said, “Our efforts were an attempt to unify people rather than divide them. And we hoped to demonstrate that people from different backgrounds can create more than conflict, we can create things of beauty as well.”

If you’re in the country, you can catch the Bridge Project on May 14 at the Tmuna Theater in Tel Aviv. Other shows on the mini-tour, supported by the Foreign Ministry and the Australian Embassy in Israel, include The Jame Club in Acre on May 17, The Jazz Club in Mitzpe Ramon on May 18, and Hemdat Yamin in the Galilee on May 19.

But anyone can enjoy their music here.

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Multi-media, multi-platform, multi-expensive

You know it’s bad news when a newspaper refers to a new web initiative it’s launching as “the start of a new era.” But that’s exactly what Haaretz did this week in announcing a program that “will enable us to provide you with accurate and comprehensive news coverage, analyses and commentary on Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world.”

In other words, they’re going to start charging for access.

Haaretz hasn’t shared specifics of its new digital subscriptions program yet, but the parameters are clear – they’re identical to what The New York Times launched earlier this year: a limited number of free articles per month with the rest nestled behind a pay wall. Print subscribers will get access to the whole kit and kaboodle. A subscription will cover all digital platforms: web and mobile, including smart phones and tablets.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I know well the dire circumstances newspapers are in (I report on the subject for the AIM Group). But sequestering your content for paying subscribers works only if you’re the undisputed leader in your space: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Economist have all succeeded. Other attempts to cut free access have failed, many miserably, before being unceremoniously retracted.

Is Haaretz the clear king of the Israeli news space? Their Hebrew edition certainly has elements of The New York Times, particularly in terms of its writing, columnists, features and investigative reporting. I’ve been a regular reader for years. But the online competition – in English, certainly – is fierce in Israel. The Jerusalem Post’s website has far more readers than Haaretz; indeed, it’s the web’s number one English language site on Israel and Jewish subjects in terms of traffic.

More recently, The Times of Israel has come on the scene. The writing is uniformly excellent, superior even than to Haaretz (which consists of direct translations from Hebrew). It quickly made it to the top of the sites I visit first in the morning.

True, Haaretz has faster news coverage, and it’s been my go-to site after a terrorist attack or midnight coalition re-alignment, but if you flit from The Times of Israel to The Jerusalem Post to Ynet to some of the more right wing papers, you can get your fix without ever needing to pay an agora to Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken.

Haaretz has one thing going for it that the other English-language online Israeli news sites don’t, though: a top-notch mobile app. Haaretz’s iPhone app makes it so easy to consume news, I don’t even bother with the west. The Times of Israel’s David Horowitz told me that a smart phone app is on the newspaper’s development horizon but in the meantime a browser version optimized for mobile will be out soon. I hope it’s as functional and friendly as Haaretz’s, or – gulp – I may wind up paying in the end after all.

When I posted about Haaretz’s going pay on Facebook, I was met with a barrage of Haaretz hate: the paper’s politics are loathed by many Anglos in Israel. While I may not always agree with the editorials at the paper either, my post was about business models not Gaza.

What will save the newspaper industry? We’re still trying to figure that out. Sexier interactive advertising (see what Yoni Bloch’s Interlude is doing), better behavioral tracking (despite our shuddering the thought), even setting up as a non-profit are all being discussed and tried.

In the meantime, we can cool our heels with this ambiguous pronouncement from Haaretz:

As we approach our first centennial, we hope you will join us as we embark on a new chapter in our history, one in which will pledge our allegiance to maintaining the standards of journalistic excellence and integrity that are the bedrock of Haaretz as we explore the new frontiers of the modern digital age.

Amos Schocken will be holding an online Q&A session Tuesday May 15 at 4:00 PM Israel time. Ready your outrage.

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Pardo studied photography at Hadassah College, Jerusalem, then worked in New York for a year, returning to Israel to open his pet photography business.

Pardo works with Israel’s pet food manufacturers, ad agencies, breeders, animal-related publications, professional and non-profit organizations as well as pet-lovers, shooting commercial studio work and portraits, and photographing animals in the great outdoors.

One organization that has benefited from his talents is Shaar HaGai Kennels, breeders of Israel’s national dog, the Canaan.

Pardo has documented kennel owner Myrna Shiboleth on her treks to seeks out new desert and Bedouin bloodlines so as to retain the natural characteristics of this “semi-feral” breed.

A previous post reported on Shaar HaGai’s current woes: the kennel — and with it its Canaan breeding program — is under threat of closure by the Israel Lands Administration (ILA). Shiboleth, a world champion dog breeder, dog show judge and the world authority on Canaan Dogs, is lobbying for public support via on an online petition. (50,000 signatures are needed and she’s up to 39,855, so if you support this cause, please sign and share the link).

Far from the wild, Pardo also photographs dog shows for the Israeli Kennel Club.

And cat shows, too!

A cat-owner himself, Pardo has stated that although his specialty is dogs, it is from cats that he’s learned the most about photographing animals.

“It is the dog’s nature to please his owner. When the owner brings them to a photographer, from the dog’s perspective, the photographer is an ally… The cat is not interested at all to please humans… but fortunately, he is also very curious and we can take advantage of this curiosity when we take the pictures.”

Great photos of animals of all kinds can be found on Yigal Pardo’s page at PetNet.co.il.

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Mitch Pilcer in front of the grave he discovered. (Arieh O'Sullivan)

That doesn’t likely happen too often in most parts of the world, but it did in Israel, to Mitch Pilcer, who owns picturesque bed-and-breakfast country establishment in the Galilee village of Tzippori, the home of early rabbinic sages.

Pilcer’s 2009 discovery of Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Levi’s grave, whose commentaries appear in the Talmud and legend has it was a close friend of Elijah the Prophet, has sparked an ongoing struggle with the Israel Antiquities Authority who have been demanding that Pilcer allow them to excavate the tomb.

According to a report by The Media Line, the IAA won a court order, and late 2009 it conducted a dig on the property and confiscated the headstone door, which had been inscribed in plainly legible Hebrew: “This is the burial place of Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Levi Hakapar.”

Later the IAA filed charges against Pilcer for carrying out an illegal excavation, damaging an ancient site and possession of antiquities. Pilcer’s trial began at the Nazareth Magistrate’s court last week where he pleaded not guilty. He has also made formal demands to have the stone returned to its original site.

Full disclosure here is that Pilcer is an old friend, and I’m on his side of this battle over the ownership of the stone and the site. Read the full story about his battle with the ‘Man’ here.

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So I switched to another favorite web source of news and, damn, it had basically the same headline. Could this be? How could a nation that at midnight was 95% of the way heading to early elections with the Knesset about to dissolve itself have veered so drastically in a few hours in which most sane people are fast asleep? Welcome to Israeli politics.

Whether the largest national unity government in the short history of the country is good for us or not, I’ll leave to the political pundits. But the whos, whys and hows behind the dramatic turnaround that caught everyone – including the nation’s usually plugged in media – totally off guard will be the subject of speculation and dissection for weeks to come.

Most people, whether they admire or disdain him, are calling this Bibi Netanyahu’s master stroke, strengthening his government and creating a national consensus for everything from changing the Tal Law to planning to cope with the Iranian threat. And it’s not a bad deal for Kadima either, which was on its way to the dust bins of history – with one leader, Tzippi Livni out the door, and its new figurehead, Shaul Mofaz fighting to create a persona for himself.

Now he’s a vice premier, and Kadima is in the government, even though he had repeatedly stated Kadima would never join a Likud-led government and has been widely quoted as calling Netanyahu a “liar.”

But that’s all politics, he told today’s joint press conference with Netanyahu where they announced the deal, and as opposition leader, he was required to criticize the leadership.

Fair enough. Regardless of the cynicism of self-serving interests surrounding the decision, it’s maybe time to let this government see what it can do, and determine if Bibi and Mofaz are just spouting more politics or are serious about working together to better the country at a critical time in its history.

I’m willing to give them a chance, but I’m a little scared about going to sleep tonight and waking up to find another unbelievable headline in the morning.

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