Category: what a country

  • Highway coffee love happiness.

    It suddenly dawned on me, walking along the highway outside Tzur Hadassah for the 3907584376th time… …our highway signs advertise coffee as the pit stop attraction. Maybe they did in the US too, but the icons here look like a hafuch (cappuccino). I dunno why, I just love it.

  • Women’s rites.

    It stresses me to my inner core to take out the garbage. The communal bins are at the end of the block, and I have to pull and pray the thin orange membrane containing three days of garbage doesn’t tear and turn the situation into an episode of Sitcom Liz. This morning, after boker tov-ing…

  • Shuffling through the IDF [VIDEO]

    So I’m unabashedly obsessed with this as of… 11am this morning. At the end of March 2012, Ron Bronstein enlisted in the IDF (I’m assuming as a shlav bet oleh deal) and documented the experience of going from civilian to soldier to, I guess, civilian again by shufflin’ his way through it. Love the support-despite-the-wtf of…

  • Like the Rabbanut… on Facebook.

    A couple months ago, out in Jerusalem, we noticed that kashrut certificates for restaurants seem to have been updated: Hmmm… I didn’t even see it at first, but that ubiquitous blue F doesn’t stay out of your eyesight for too long. The Jerusalem Rabbanut on Facebook – how kosher can that be? So – would…

  • Home.

    I looked up when, among the mumbling, I heard the word ‘מעליב.’ Standing in a long, slow-moving line at a Staten Island department store, I suddenly felt at home. And yet, it wasn’t because I was in Staten Island, or a department store. She turned around to complain about the long line in English, and…

  • Yes, circumcision is barbaric. If you’re this baby.

    Can you imagine living in the very best, warm, well-dimmed, well-fed place in the whole  universe for 9 months, going through the exhausting trauma of birth, feeling the cold, hard shock of the outside world, finding your only solice in being held in the arms of your tender mother and cuddled for 7 days, and…

  • Why we stay in Israel: a hint.

    For those wondering why I stay here… including myself… maybe this offers a hint. Because it ain’t the politics. Or the prices. The 10 Happiest Countries in the World For the second year in a row, 24/7 Wall St. examined the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s report on life satisfaction in the developed world.…

  • It’s starting to look a lot like…

    The annual hanging of the flags across Israel (or Tzur Hadassah specifically): Yom Haatzmaut 64, here we come!

  • Einstein spending Purim in Beitar Illit?

    One of the best things about Purim is the idea that you can enjoy the humor, the sass, the tongue-in-cheek quality of opposites. You can turn the world upside-down, you can defy the laws of gravity with a sprinkle of humor and darkness. So why was I so amused to find, in Beitar Illit, my…

  • Like, my baby’s so ironic.

    Just want to a take a quick sec and point out this ironic bib. I’m pretty sure ‘bibi’ is the chic brand name. But… yeah. That there is a paradox.

  • Israel: Environmentally-encouraging?

    Posted under a day ago, Israeli dude Evgeny Vainshtok Broitman shared a shameful scene he witnessed at יער הנשיא, a park off the 44 and 38, near Beit Shemesh. And while the crime is so disgusting, the fact that Evgeny decided to take the perpetrator up on it means there’s hope. Apparently this guy proposed…

  • Beit Shemesh, united against extremists.

    The protest in Beit Shemesh was impressive. We really did have all kinds of people – people with dreads, people with payot, women with head coverings, women with leggings, kids with their parents, charedi guys willing to speak to the news cameras, women holding pamphlets, men holding signs thanking god for making them women. I…