Tasty commentary on politics, law, religion and more, without the fattening dogma. (The views expressed on this blog are the author's alone, and do not represent those of any past, current or future employer or his past, current, and future soulmate.)
April 30, 2010
This blog has moved
This blog is now located at http://michaelpine.blogspot.com/.
You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds, or you may click here.
For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to
http://michaelpine.blogspot.com/rss.xml.
January 13, 2010
Returning to Zion (Part II)
The Ever-Dying City
According to the reports, Jerusalem is dying. To which the correct response is which Jerusalem. After all, the Old City remains full of holiness and haggling. Arab Jerusalem isn’t going anywhere. And Haredi Jerusalem is bursting at the seams, spilling out of its traditional neighborhoods. No, the Jerusalem whose eulogies are being prepared is secular Jerusalem, the Jerusalem of Yehuda Amichai, the Israel Museum and the Cinamateque. During the course of our trip, the refrain is repeated by secular Yerushalmis who have fled the city or plan to do so as soon as possible. There is a growing disconnect between the city’s ever-rising real estate prices and dismal job prospects. While welfare-yeshiva complex grows, draining far more resources than it provides in taxes, the city’s best and brightest, the next generation of the cultural elite, are moving to Tel Aviv.
We arrive in Jerusalem on Saturday night. For the remainder of the trip, we’ll be living out of rented flat in the German Colony. If the trip hadn’t felt like a extended family visit before, the fact the landlord is my mother-in-law’s college roommate completes the picture. The leafy German Colony, named for its early 20th century settlers, is firmly in sophisticated Jerusalem. In the past 20 years, it has been a magnet for the non-Haredi English speaking olim (immigrants). You can easily get by with little to no Hebrew.
I had stayed with my wife-to-be during her year in Israel in apartment on the main street, Emek Refaim. Back then, the strip had a tasteful cluster of cafes and restaurants – a refined alternative to the bustling (or formerly bustling) City Center. Stepping out to the street 9 years later, we have arrived at the world’s first kosher restaurant row. Spread along both sides were more than a dozen upscale kosher dining options, ranging from steakhouses to Latin to Asian fusion. These were supplemented with a cozy Yemenite restaurant, a burger joint, noodle bar, two bagel places and half-dozen cafes. The restaurants were not simply kosher, but “mehadrin” – literally translated as “beautified”, in practice more stringent than the Chief Rabbinate. But sprinkled in among this glatt hot stop were a few establishments for late-night Friday munchies or Saturday morning cappuccinos. If sophisticated Jerusalem was dying, Emek Refaim was clearly the last place to observe the trend. Knitted kippahs mixed seamlessly with leather boots. We repeatedly bumped in to old friends. We had flown half-way around the world only to arrive in the Upper West Side.
We had been warned that the City Center “looked like a war zone.” It was a particularly inapt description. On our last visit, Jerusalem was very much on the front lines of the 2nd Intifada. Ben Yehuda had been eerily empty – a shell of the vibrant strip that I roamed in the late 1990s. Compared to those lows, the midrachov had recovered nicely. The music store where I bought my first guitar, the Judaica shops with the endless selection of knitted kipot, the frozen yogurt bar that has welcomed generations of American teen tours were all still there. The Yemenite Step and the “Cadillac of shwarmas” were gone, but Max Brenner and a restaurant had filled the gaps.
Central Jerusalem did not in anyway look like the victim of war. It did however, bear more than a passing resemblance to Boston during the Big Dig. Jerusalem’s Big Dig is an ambitious light rail line designed to connect Pisgat Ze’ev in the far northeast to Har Herzl in the west. So far, it has primarily served to scar the entirely length of Jaffa Road with a massive ditch. As a result, traffic is hopelessly snarled and the stores that line the commercial boulevard turned construction site are empty. Jerusalem’s Big Dig even has its own spectacular cable bridge, the “Chords” bridge, designed to carry the light rail line over the frequently clogged road as the western gate to the city. With the train nowhere in site, it is currently the world’s most expensive pedestrian cross-over. The striking bridge feels grafted in from another city.
If the Light Rail is a testament to the failings of Israel’s once-proud public sector, the Mamilla Mall is concrete evidence that the private sector has no such problems.
Mamilla sits just west of Jaffa Gate, on the site of the pre-1948 shopping district which has languished as a dead zone ever since. The Mamilla complex fills in the gap between the Old City and City Center with a multi-tiered outdoor arcade and mall, somehow integrated organically into the topography of the valley and bedecked in Jerusalem stone. It filled with upscale shopping (and even a Gap) and galleries sharing space with trendy cafes and restaurants. The site is continuing to fill in and expand. It’s about as tasteful as a mecca to consumerism minutes away from the holiest sites of three faiths can be.
Jerusalem’s current mayor, hi-tech mogul Nir Barkat, seems to fit the city as naturally as the Chords Bridge. His election was the result of a grass-roots revolt over the Haredi-zation of the city and a fortuitous dissent in the Haredi ranks. Barkat’s efforts to transform the municipal government from a Haredi patronage machine have had mixed results. Hard-line Haredim have taken to repeated rioting over assorted provocations, such as Barkat’s decision to open a municipal parking garage for free on Shabbat, municipal social services intervention to protect a Haredi child from an abusive mother and Intel’s decision to open 7 days a week. To his credit, Barkat had held his ground.
In contrast to my friends who have given up on the city, there is Tara, an old friend who made aliyah and refuses to accept the death of secular Jerusalem. While most of her contemporaries have left, she has remained to fight the good fight. Yes, Tel Aviv is tempting, but its not why she made aliyah. Jerusalem is special. As Tara explains, the grass-roots movement that helped elect Barkat and serves as a counter to the Haredi riot squad is a result of a re-framing of the debate. The struggle is no longer for secular Jerusalem, but Zionist Jerusalem. Secular and religious Zionists have put aside their differences to preserve a vision of a city, which incubates Jewish cultural and intellectual curiosity. As a start, Tara is working to marshal the cultural resources of the city – its World-Class university, its art schools, its theater to come together a whole that is more than the sum of its parts.
As the statistics cited by Jerusalem’s undertakers note, the challenges the city faces are daunting. But as you walk the leafy streets of Rechavia, Katamon and the German Colony, the reflected glow of the Old City walls– you realize that the beauty of Jerusalem is resilient. It survived waves of suicide bombers, a Haredi mayoralty and a botched light rail line. There is no reason why the capital of the ever-dying people shouldn’t similarly shrug at the odds stacked against it.
According to the reports, Jerusalem is dying. To which the correct response is which Jerusalem. After all, the Old City remains full of holiness and haggling. Arab Jerusalem isn’t going anywhere. And Haredi Jerusalem is bursting at the seams, spilling out of its traditional neighborhoods. No, the Jerusalem whose eulogies are being prepared is secular Jerusalem, the Jerusalem of Yehuda Amichai, the Israel Museum and the Cinamateque. During the course of our trip, the refrain is repeated by secular Yerushalmis who have fled the city or plan to do so as soon as possible. There is a growing disconnect between the city’s ever-rising real estate prices and dismal job prospects. While welfare-yeshiva complex grows, draining far more resources than it provides in taxes, the city’s best and brightest, the next generation of the cultural elite, are moving to Tel Aviv.
We arrive in Jerusalem on Saturday night. For the remainder of the trip, we’ll be living out of rented flat in the German Colony. If the trip hadn’t felt like a extended family visit before, the fact the landlord is my mother-in-law’s college roommate completes the picture. The leafy German Colony, named for its early 20th century settlers, is firmly in sophisticated Jerusalem. In the past 20 years, it has been a magnet for the non-Haredi English speaking olim (immigrants). You can easily get by with little to no Hebrew.
I had stayed with my wife-to-be during her year in Israel in apartment on the main street, Emek Refaim. Back then, the strip had a tasteful cluster of cafes and restaurants – a refined alternative to the bustling (or formerly bustling) City Center. Stepping out to the street 9 years later, we have arrived at the world’s first kosher restaurant row. Spread along both sides were more than a dozen upscale kosher dining options, ranging from steakhouses to Latin to Asian fusion. These were supplemented with a cozy Yemenite restaurant, a burger joint, noodle bar, two bagel places and half-dozen cafes. The restaurants were not simply kosher, but “mehadrin” – literally translated as “beautified”, in practice more stringent than the Chief Rabbinate. But sprinkled in among this glatt hot stop were a few establishments for late-night Friday munchies or Saturday morning cappuccinos. If sophisticated Jerusalem was dying, Emek Refaim was clearly the last place to observe the trend. Knitted kippahs mixed seamlessly with leather boots. We repeatedly bumped in to old friends. We had flown half-way around the world only to arrive in the Upper West Side.
We had been warned that the City Center “looked like a war zone.” It was a particularly inapt description. On our last visit, Jerusalem was very much on the front lines of the 2nd Intifada. Ben Yehuda had been eerily empty – a shell of the vibrant strip that I roamed in the late 1990s. Compared to those lows, the midrachov had recovered nicely. The music store where I bought my first guitar, the Judaica shops with the endless selection of knitted kipot, the frozen yogurt bar that has welcomed generations of American teen tours were all still there. The Yemenite Step and the “Cadillac of shwarmas” were gone, but Max Brenner and a restaurant had filled the gaps.
Central Jerusalem did not in anyway look like the victim of war. It did however, bear more than a passing resemblance to Boston during the Big Dig. Jerusalem’s Big Dig is an ambitious light rail line designed to connect Pisgat Ze’ev in the far northeast to Har Herzl in the west. So far, it has primarily served to scar the entirely length of Jaffa Road with a massive ditch. As a result, traffic is hopelessly snarled and the stores that line the commercial boulevard turned construction site are empty. Jerusalem’s Big Dig even has its own spectacular cable bridge, the “Chords” bridge, designed to carry the light rail line over the frequently clogged road as the western gate to the city. With the train nowhere in site, it is currently the world’s most expensive pedestrian cross-over. The striking bridge feels grafted in from another city.
If the Light Rail is a testament to the failings of Israel’s once-proud public sector, the Mamilla Mall is concrete evidence that the private sector has no such problems.
Mamilla sits just west of Jaffa Gate, on the site of the pre-1948 shopping district which has languished as a dead zone ever since. The Mamilla complex fills in the gap between the Old City and City Center with a multi-tiered outdoor arcade and mall, somehow integrated organically into the topography of the valley and bedecked in Jerusalem stone. It filled with upscale shopping (and even a Gap) and galleries sharing space with trendy cafes and restaurants. The site is continuing to fill in and expand. It’s about as tasteful as a mecca to consumerism minutes away from the holiest sites of three faiths can be.
Jerusalem’s current mayor, hi-tech mogul Nir Barkat, seems to fit the city as naturally as the Chords Bridge. His election was the result of a grass-roots revolt over the Haredi-zation of the city and a fortuitous dissent in the Haredi ranks. Barkat’s efforts to transform the municipal government from a Haredi patronage machine have had mixed results. Hard-line Haredim have taken to repeated rioting over assorted provocations, such as Barkat’s decision to open a municipal parking garage for free on Shabbat, municipal social services intervention to protect a Haredi child from an abusive mother and Intel’s decision to open 7 days a week. To his credit, Barkat had held his ground.
In contrast to my friends who have given up on the city, there is Tara, an old friend who made aliyah and refuses to accept the death of secular Jerusalem. While most of her contemporaries have left, she has remained to fight the good fight. Yes, Tel Aviv is tempting, but its not why she made aliyah. Jerusalem is special. As Tara explains, the grass-roots movement that helped elect Barkat and serves as a counter to the Haredi riot squad is a result of a re-framing of the debate. The struggle is no longer for secular Jerusalem, but Zionist Jerusalem. Secular and religious Zionists have put aside their differences to preserve a vision of a city, which incubates Jewish cultural and intellectual curiosity. As a start, Tara is working to marshal the cultural resources of the city – its World-Class university, its art schools, its theater to come together a whole that is more than the sum of its parts.
As the statistics cited by Jerusalem’s undertakers note, the challenges the city faces are daunting. But as you walk the leafy streets of Rechavia, Katamon and the German Colony, the reflected glow of the Old City walls– you realize that the beauty of Jerusalem is resilient. It survived waves of suicide bombers, a Haredi mayoralty and a botched light rail line. There is no reason why the capital of the ever-dying people shouldn’t similarly shrug at the odds stacked against it.
January 12, 2010
Returning to Zion - Israel at the Start of New Decade (Part 1)
Flying With Family
“Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to remind you that this is a full flight. Please refrain from making last-minute requests change your seats as we can not accommodate them.”
“Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to remind you that this is a full flight. Please refrain from making last-minute requests change your seats as we can not accommodate them.”
The announcement of the Continental gate agent is given in a world-weary tone. For most passengers, the first sentence would naturally imply the second. But the group gathered for the Christmas eve flight to Tel Aviv is not an ordinary group of passengers. It is almost entirely composed of Members of the Tribe, Israeli and American branches. Prior to giving the message, a steady stream of passengers had followed the age-old Jewish adage that it “never hurts to ask.” The gate agents do an admirable job corralling the crowd in a semblance of a line when it comes time to board the plane, through repeated verbal herding. I may technically still be in America, but I am clearly on the way back to the Jewish state.
The flight over is more eventfully than I had hoped. I am seated in between two ba’al teshuva defense attorneys in their 40s. The attorney on my right has gone the Full Monsey. He is full of good cheer, peppering his speech with “Barukh Hashem” and armed with plenty of food for the flight. His friend on the left is for the moment, going with the clean-shaven black leather kipah look. Our generally cordial conversation runs aground at one point with his claim that we are in the midst of a World War 3 with the entire Islamic world, and that there was no substantive difference between the Iranian Regime and the Green movement opposing. A sensible person would have retreated to his on-screen game of Othello rather than attempting to conduct an impromptu class in Islamic Law 101.
I’m jostled awake in the still dark morning as the plane begins an emergency descent into Rome. Even in my groggy state, my rusty Hebrew is enough to pick up the standard “kol beseder” promise that Israelis give when they have no idea what the problem is. The business-like English announcement in contrast does not promise that “everything is OK. The stop in Rome is chaotic. It is Christmas morning in the Holy See, and the Continental ground crew had the day off and needs to be roused. The large observant contingency is palpably aware that the margin of error for arriving in Israel before a Friday sundown is dwindling. And yet, the more chaotic the scene, the more the passengers pull together. A young modern orthodox woman possessing one of the few functioning blackberries, lets me send a message ahead to my wife, who has long sicne arrived in Tel Aviv. Two haredim break out an impromptu fiddle and guitar performance. After five hours, Continental fixes the electrical system sufficiently to continue on to Israel. The flight staff offers any shomer Shabbat passengers an opportunity to stay in Rome, but warns them they are “on their own.” Armed with a ruling from Israel, even the frummest passengers opt to take their chances on the flight. On arrival in Ben Gurion, my aisle mates, along with the other strict Shabbat observers bound off the plane, leaving luggage and customs for another day as they pack into taxis for the nearby haven of B’nei Brak.
It has been 9 years since I’ve last visited Israel, more than 13 since I lived there for a year. In the interim, much has happened – the collapse of Oslo, the horrors of the Second Intifada, the building of the fence/barrier/wall/border, the withdrawal from Gaza, the Lebanon War, the Gaza War, and somehow throughout all of this, the rise of Israel as Start-up Nation. I am traveling to see what remains familiar, what has changed. It is not really a vacation – rather a visit to extended family. The metaphor is more apt this time, as I am traveling with my wife to find her long-lost extended family.
After clearing customs, I am greeted by the welcome site of my wife, who had been conducting dissertation research in Cairo for the past month. We immediately head out to Zikhron Ya’akov, 23 miles south of Haifa, to meet her presumed long-lost cousins, who live in. On the basis of no more than the same, extremely rare last name, we are warmly welcomed into the lovely home of Yoni, his wife Sara and their 19-year old son, Ofer. Both my wife and Yoni had believed that all but their immediate family had perished in the Shoah. Yet through the miraculous power of a typo and the internet, here we are, sharing Shabbat dinner with them. The next day, the rest of the family streams in to meet us. One asked if they know for sure if they are related. No, Yoni replies, “but we’ll give her the benefit of the doubt.”
Yoni and Ofer both give us tours of the town. Zikhron Ya’akov was one of the first Zionist settlements in Israel, established in 1882 and settled with funds from Baron Rothschild. Today it is best known as the home of the Carmel winery. There are spectacular views of the mountains and the sea. Completing the Bay Area vibe are the fruit trees that line the block. In contrast, the call to prayer from the neighboring Arab village of Faradis brings you back to the Levant. The center of town has been converted to a pedestrian mall, with many of the original structures preserved. Everything about Zikhron Ya’akov stands in contrast to the Israel I most familiar with - the extremes of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. It is neither timeless nor evanescent, neither purely religious nor secular, neither wholly separate nor wholly integrated with the outside world. It offers a tantalizing glimpse of a rooted, balanced Israel, the Israel that is rarely seen by the tourist or even resident student. It is tempting to say that here is the “real” Israel. But on further reflection, while the beauty of Zikhron may be representative of Israel, its sanity certainly is not.