With Friends Like These

The international guidebook giant Lonely Planet recently published a list of the ten hottest cities to visit in 2011, and Tel Aviv is one of them.

The joy here in the White City is only matched by the surprise at the flattery, and all over Israel people are beaming with pride over this blue-and-white achievement – even people who spend large chunks of their day bitching about Tel Aviv in general, and the things that the good people at Lonely Planet laud in particular – hedonism, open homosexuality and the bar-synagogue proportions, for instance.

It’s great of course, and I’m as happy as the next Tel Avivian about this honor that’s been bestowed upon us from the dons of backpacking. But I can’t help to feel that this compliment is just as much a backhanded insult.

What do I mean by that?

Well, the thing is that Lonely Planet people love slightly dodgy, rundown and preferably dangerous places where you see as few white, clean and rich people as possible. They call it “authentic”, and think it’s all the rage to spend a little time there, checking out the natives and sampling the local cuisine. This is what causes them on the one hand to trash the bazaar in the Old City of Jerusalem, which is reasonably clean, well-organized and caters to everyone, as inauthentic and even too touristy (the ultimate insult), and on the other to extol the virtues of the smelly, dingy and utterly uninteresting suq in Akko as exotic, exciting and authentic.

If you’re not convinced, I can only recommend that you take a look at the other cities on the list. In the media people keep on saying that we’re number three after New York and Tangier, but they tend to skip that other tourist magnets on the list include Iquitos, Ghent and Newcastle.

I rest my case.

UPDATE: Also the Svenska Dagbladet travel blog questions Lonely Planet’s selection, asking if these really are the places that one must visit in 2011 — and answers its own question with: “Well, possibly if one has travelled as much as the editors at Lonely Planet.”

I Am Student Hear Me Roar

This week, the students finally took to the streets to protest the unfair treatment they get compared to the yeshiva bochers. In my humble opinion, that protest was years overdue, and I can only wish them the best of luck in demanding equal rights for students at universities and in yeshivot.

In that spirit, let me offer a word of advice: with all due respect to closing off roads in Beer Sheva, if you really want results it’s the access roads to Ben Gurion Airport (not University) that you need to block.

Simultaneously in Tel Aviv

Last week, Israeli grandmaster Alik Gershon broke the Guinness World Record in simultaneous chess by playing against 527 other chess players, winning 87 percent of his games. The event took place at Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square on Thursday and Friday.

The previous record, set in 2009, was held by the Iranian grandmaster Morteza Mahjoub.

The Ministry of Defense has yet to announce whether systematically going through the book of Guinness World Records and breaking every single Iranian record is a new form of psychological warfare against the Islamic Republic.

Closet wide Shut

On Friday, Israeli media revealed that the popular singer Harel Skaat is gay. Over the weekend this has been the hottest news item in all sorts of media outlets.

The nation is in a state of shock.

Rumor has it that similar scoops are to be expected in the following days, revealing that water is wet, the sun is hot and Elvis is dead.

Loyal Lifestyle

Yesterday, the government decided to promote a bill in the Knesset that would create the so-called Loyalty Law. This law would demand of non-Jews who wish to take Israeli citizenship to swear an oath of loyalty to the state of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.

The decision had hardly been made before various pundits and intellectuals started to throw the good old F word around. There was, however, no lack of less hysterical critics. Several cabinet ministers voted against, including all Labor ministers.

One can’t help to ask how Avigdor Lieberman, who’s been clamoring for a Loyalty Law for ages, thought that the law would work in reality. Maybe he wants the Ministry of the Interior to draw up a list of non-Jewish citizens, and if – sometime in the future – the Jewish majority in the country is threatened, they will be asked to convert to safeguard “the Jewish character of the state.”

The Malmö Monologue Continues

If anyone thought that all would be peaches and cream in Malmö now after the mayor established the Dialogue Forum, I’m afraid I’ll have to disappoint you.

On October 2, a seventeen-year-old member of the Christian Democratic Party’s youth movement, who had criticized the mayor Reepalu for his lax attitude to antisemitism, was attacked and beaten up on his way home from school.

Fortunately, and rather surprisingly, the police actually managed to apprehend the assailant this time – partly because he had published a threat on the victim’s Facebook page a few months ago, stating “You’ll die, Jew lover”.

Confessions of a Traveler

Bitte Hammargren, the Middle East expert at Svenska Dagbladet wrote a column recently where she reflected on the fact that Israel, arguably the most flight security conscious country in the world, has such an apparently cavalier attitude to passengers bringing fluids onto planes departing from Ben-Gurion international airport.

I have a similar experience, and – after having flown extensively back and forth all over Europe this summer – I must say that Ben-Gurion has the absolutely best and most efficient security checks of all the airports I’ve ever been to, leaving Rhodes, Ataturk, Kastrup and Barajas far behind. Copenhagen’s airport Kastrup stands out with its especially inefficient and painfully slow security check.

The key to the expedient security procedures at Ben-Gurion is the interview that all passengers are put through before they’re even allowed to check in. Once they pass the eye of that needle, the mechanical check of luggage and pockets is fairly painless – the logic being that if you’ve been let through to that stage you’re probably mostly harmless.

I know that the interview can be far from a breezy formality. Anyone who can be suspected of harboring ill will, and particularly a will to blow a plane up, are given the third degree by the security staff. Israelis usually are unaware of this annoying routine – unless they happen to be Israeli Arabs – because Israeli passport holders get through fairly quickly. Single European males are also regarded with suspicion, and before I got my Israeli passport I was usually held up for a ten to fifteen minute chat at this point when leaving Israel.

Since I did quite a lot of travelling to and from Israel in the decade or so before I settled here permanently, I developed a keen sense for what kind of answers would shorten the interview.

In the end, the temptation to lie to get past this hurdle quicker turned out to be too big for me.

At first I only lied a little bit to expedite matters, but soon enough it turned into a sport. I would make up long and intricate stories that I would feed the girls (why are they always girls, by the way?) who interviewed me. I know that this is an extremely risky business, and if I had been caught lying it would have reduced my time in the tax free shops considerably. Nonetheless, I always got away with it, and at the end I don’t think I ever spent more than a minute or two being grilled.

Thankfully, I don’t need to employ that kind of tactics anymore.

Herzl and a High Holiday in Hungary

I spent Yom Kippur in the beautiful Hungarian capital Budapest.

Coming from the northern part of the European Diaspora, I was struck by two things. First of all, I hadn’t really realized how many Jews still live in Hungary. Apparently, there were twenty different minyanim in Budapest on the Day of Atonement. Secondly, the security level was almost non-existent. So, not only are there tens of thousands of Jews in Budapest, but they feel safe and act accordingly.

For Kol Nidrei I went to the Great Synagogue on Dohány Street, the biggest Jewish house of worship in Europe and second only to Temple Emanuel in New York. The gilded, three-story synagogue has 2,964 seats and on the eve of Yom Kippur it was filled to capacity. Of course I’m not sure that there was a minyan of people who were actually following the service, but that’s not the point.

I, who actually did follow, can say that it was a fascinating experience – something of a combination of a Roman Catholic mass and an evening at the opera. Admittedly, it would be easy to make fun of the Neolog rite with its choir, organ and theatrical choreography, but one has to admit that it was a splendid spectacle and I would recommend it to anyone.

And all those party-poopers who tut disapprovingly and complain that what went down in Dohány isn’t Judaism, should remember that we actually have this kind of Habsburg baroque extravaganza to thank for the existence of the state of Israel.

Theodore Herzl, the Budapest-born father of political Zionism, was obsessed with finding a solution to the Jewish Question. One of his first ideas was conversion en masse of all the Jews, and he had even decided to lead by example and undergo baptism. (Yes, I know, that particular tidbit is usually left out of his biography at Bnei Akiva summer camp.)

However, Herzl decided that he would attend Kol Nidrei services one last time, and he was so overwhelmed by its beauty and grandeur that he decided to remain Jewish and find another solution to the predicament of his coreligionists.

The rest is history.

Monkey Business

I’ve just returned from Sweden, where I stocked up on books published since my last visit, and now during Rosh Hashanah I started to work on the stack of Swedish literature whenever I had a moment over between the davening, eating and shnatzing.

One of the books I read was Stephan Mendel-Enk’s Tre Apor (“Three Monkeys”). The story is about a Jewish boy growing up in Gothenburg in the 1980s, and what happens when his mother leaves his father for her non-Jewish boss.

Thematically, the book is more or less a version of A Serious Man, but related from the perspective of the son, but the Swedish 1980s setting creates a few unique literary gems. Mendel-Enk’s description of the cut-out Per Ahlmark columns on the fridge, his War-traumatized grandfather who divides the whole world into Jews and antisemites and the sporadic upholding of religious customs that no-one seems to understand anymore is priceless.

Another priceless scene is when the whole family is gathered in front of the television in 1979 to watch the Eurovision Song Contest hosted by Israel. Mendel-Enk describes how everyone where both immensely proud and deeply nervous that the idealized Jewish state would make a fool of itself – and of them – on live television before the whole world. Maybe, they asked themselves, she isn’t ready yet and should still keep to easier chores, such as winning wars in the desert, and not be entrusted with truly important tasks, like entertainment.

Tre Apor is a short novel. Maybe even a little too short, to my taste. It wouldn’t have hurt to add a little more meat to the bones, flesh out the characters and – to stretch a metaphor beyond breaking point – to give the reader a little more to chew on.

Or maybe that’s just me being greedy.

The Hardest Word

Israel has now received its own, admittedly watered-down, version of the Abu Ghraib scandal. In the original, American service men and women posed next to naked and humiliated Iraqi soldiers. In the Israeli version, a female ex-soldier from Ashdod has posted pictures of herself on Facebook next to blindfolded Palestinian prisoners.

The pictures have caused outrage more or less everywhere, from the IDF to the international media, and the girl is met with universal condemnation. What, then, is her response now in the month of slikhot?

According to Israel Hayom, she says: “I’m sorry if I hurt anyone.”

If you hurt anyone? If?

It would seem that the ability to accept responsibility displayed by the Chief of Staff Ashkenazi the other day doesn’t extend all the way down through the organization.