Pulse and gait

From the New York Times travel section:

But if the intermingling of many different kinds of people is what gives Tel Aviv its pulse, it’s the clash of old and new that still gives this city its surprising and slightly uneven gait...

Tel Aviv is “half Iran, half California; it’s a synagogue meets a sushi bar,” ... filled with impossibly good-looking 20-something surfers and hipsters...

Not to toot my own horn, but the themes of this article would probably most perfectly be illustrated by my snap of this Migdal Hameah shopper:

Living a holy life

I'm not religious, so it's less relevant, but I know someone who could really use this:

Gay shul's siddur features prayer for 'unexpected intimacy' (JTA)

Send that link to Moshe Katzav. Or just put it up in his office for the employees...

sheikh mate: the herb for leaders

Lebanese Druze jefe, Walid Jumblatt drinking yerba mate (apparently)

We don't pitch on Yawm Kipper

Haaretz learns about Jewish history from the Coen Brothers:

"However in 1965, Koufax's team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, played the Minneapolis Twins in the World Series, and the game was scheduled for the afternoon of October 6, which also happened to be Yom Kippur. As the team's best pitcher, Koufax was asked to pitch the first game. Koufax refused. He informed the team's management that he did not pitch on Yom Kippur. That refusal has turned out to be the single greatest moment of Kiddush Hashem (Sanctification of the Name) in American history, so much so that in the movie The Big Lebowski, actor John Goodman could say, 'three thousand years of beautiful tradition: from Moses to Sandy Koufax.'"

Caucasus Table Reports

During the height of this summer's Caucasian crisis, the Russian Foreign Minister responded to the British Foreign Secretary's demands by asking, "Who the fuck are you to lecture me?"

Apparently, someone. Foreign Secretary David Miliband is the grandson of a Red Army vet and the son of a leading Marxist. Who knew?

Wouldn't it be great if we had a Secretary of State (or Foreign Minister in Israel, for that matter) with such illustrious parentage? Screw Black Republicans and the Irgun, gimme more Jewish commies.

The mirth of tabrets ceaseth

Continuing from last Wednesday's post, the BBC has brought us a much fuller and more interesting account of the kosher music patrol. They've even printed the rules; unsurprisingly, there are ten in number.

My favorite is #4:
"The use of percussion accompaniment in slow, quiet music is generally ridiculous"

Apparently, inspired by Isaiah 24:8.

The day that changed everything

As always, Tom Segev tells it like it is:

"Everyone also spoke about the patriotism that had swept America, a clear expression of insecurity and a conservative attempt to hold on to the values of the past. I remember a large American flag that was hung above the entrance to one of the last sex shops that still survived in New York. Most of those shops have since disappeared, one reason being that porn today is purchased via the Internet; in the past seven years the Web has changed the lives of far more people than did the attack on the World Trade Center. "

Thanks Al Gore. If only you could have been president...maybe we wouldn't have had 9/11 in the first place. True.

Ridiculous

Was airport security screaming "Dance, boy, dance!" in Southern accents? Ugh, I want to vomit at the thought.

Meanwhile, the Pensioners' Party is planning to go abduct Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Eichmann-style, yo), a sitting democratically-elected president, and send him to the Hague for a trial. I doubt they'll take him.

Stories like these make me think even "a nation like all the others" is overly idealistic.

Disclaimer

I know it's fucked up to joke about these things, but I just want to state clearly that the infanticidal mother currently gracing the front pages of Israeli newspapers is not me:

Das Goyenthum in der Musik

The Jerusalem Post reports that a Bnei Barak NGO, the Guardians of Sanctity and Education is formulating a series of guidelines to "add transparency to the delineation between acceptable or 'kosher' Jewish music and forbidden or 'treif' music." Senior member Mordechai Bloi that "Bach or Beethoven, music with class" is kosher. The treif list includes:

• 2-4 beats
• rock and disco
• 'improper' use of bass, guitar, and saxophone
• profaning sacred texts
• mixing of milk and meat instruments
  

In response to a growing number of Haredi pop-style musical acts, the ultra-est of the ultra-Orthodox declare: "We want to protect ourselves from what we see as negative foreign influences. We are trying to maintain our own authentic music styles...stay(ing) loyal to our roots."

Compare to 1850, Richard Wagner wrote:
The Jews could never take possession of this art, until that was to be exposed in it which they now demonstrably have brought to light— its inner incapacity for life. So long as the separate art of Music had a real organic life-need in it, down to the epochs of Mozart and Beethoven, there was nowhere to be found a Jew composer: it was impossible for an element entirely foreign to that living organism to take part in the formative stages of that life. Only when a body's inner death is manifest, do outside elements win the power of lodgment in it—yet merely to destroy it. Then indeed that body's flesh dissolves into a swarming colony of insect-life: but who, in looking on that body's self would hold it still for living?"