Motorists in Jerusalem have for several months now been stuck in severe traffic jams while traveling near or through the city center. That’s unfortunate, though not entirely unintentional, explains Marc Render, partner and co-founder of AmAv, a transportation planning consultancy that has been actively involved in designing traffic pattern changes in the Jerusalem area.

The problem, says Render, is that the timing for modifications to the city’s traffic flow and the new mass transit system aren’t in synch. Traffic lanes once dedicated to cars are now reserved for buses and the light rail system, but the trolleys and high density buses aren’t running yet. When they are, it will still be difficult for cars to reach the center of town, but there will be attractive mass transit alternatives.

Why was the timing so poor? We asked Amnon Elian, Community Relations Officer for the Jerusalem Transport Master Plan Team, who basically shrugged his shoulders. “We have to start somewhere,” he told In Jerusalem. “Otherwise it’s just talking. We admit that it’s not ideal the way we’re doing it now. It’s frustrating for us as well. But there’s no way we can do it all in one go. We are initiating a transportation revolution. This is a mega project that will take years.”

When the new transit design eventually comes online, Jerusalem is set to see some major changes in its bus system, affecting nearly every line in the city. The current system, in place for decades now, of local bus lines feeding into Jaffa Road downtown and ultimately passing by the Central Bus Station will effectively end.

Jerusalemites will instead be required to transfer between feeder routes in the outlying neighborhoods and the main high speed trunk lines – the red line light rail system that travels from Pisgat Ze’ev to Kyriat HaYovel via the center of town, and the blue line “busway” which is already mostly in place and bisects the city, running from Gilo in the south to Ramot in the north by way of the Har Hotzvim industrial zone. North south running buses in the busway won’t turn onto Jaffa Road either. A major transfer point at the corner of King George and Jaffa will enable travelers to continue their journey.

This is the first time such a hierarchical system has been tried in Israel, though it’s commonplace in other parts of the world, Render says, particularly in Europe. And the results are faster travel times. Render gives Pisgat Ze’ev as an example. “Would you rather take a local bus that slowly winds in and out of neighborhoods on its way downtown, or transfer from a feeder route to a high speed line that has travels in its own lane and gets you to the city center 15-20 minutes quicker?”

Not all local buses will be transformed into feeder lines. In Talpiot, for example, the 7 line will travel through the neighborhood as it does now, then join the busway on Derech Hebron for the rest of its journey into town – though not turning to head towards the Central Bus Station as it does today.

Render says he already avoids taking his personal car downtown from his office in Talpiot. Instead, he drives to the free Liberty Bell Park parking lot and jumps on one of the frequent buses that travel via the busway, thus shaving off traffic time and parking costs.

The first of the changes to Jerusalem’s bus system were set to begin on February 24. A new 74 express line will travel from Har Homa up the busway to the center of town. Another new line, the 66, will act as a feeder in Pisgat Ze’ev. The old number 5 bus has been reestablished and will run from the Central Bus Station through the Talpiot Industrial Zone ending in Har Homa. The 21 line will now run from Ramat Sharett to Givat HaMatos by way of Emek Refaim, replacing the number 14 bus. Finally, the venerable 6 line has been rerouted to connect Pisgat Ze’ev and the Malcha shopping mall by way of the Begin highway.

In addition, buses will be rerouted downtown to give work crews room to lay tracks on Jaffa Road, currently scheduled to begin on April 27. Buses traveling from the Central Bus Station will now head east past the Mahane Yehuda marketplace, then turn left at Strauss and right on Nevi’im. Buses heading the other way, will turn right on Strauss and left on Nevi’im. Riders from the periphery – Ma’aleh Adumim, Givat Ze’ev, Bet Shemesh, Mevesseret Zion and Betar Illit – will now either end their trips in the center of town or at the Central Bus Station, requiring a transfer to continue on.

“It’s going to be a big mess,” Render says, “because almost every bus route in the city goes on Jaffa Road.”

Once in place, the new system will include a transfer ticket mechanism so that riders don’t have to pay twice. Currently 39 percent of all trips are made by Egged’s unlimited ride monthly pass. 40 percent use the multi trip punch card (“cartisia” in Hebrew) while only 12 percent pay cash. Daily tickets will also be offered when the new system is in place.

Jerusalem has been quite bold in its transportation planning policy, Render says. It wasn’t always this way. Render was involved in the original Jerusalem Area Master Plan. Back then, budgets were tight and vision was short. Render points out that the Begin Highway was originally conceived as one lane in each direction with traffic lights along the way, rather than how it turned out – a four-lane expressway with onramps and offramps and state of the art interchanges.

The light rail system is ultimately intended to comprise 8 different lines. Only one has been built so far with another two in the planning stages. “We have a planning budget but the routes have not been decided yet,” Community Relations Officer Elian told us.

But it’s the busway that’s gotten a lot of the flack. Lanes for cars have been redirected to buses only from Derech Hebron up through Keren Hayesod Street and King George, across Jaffa Road and through Geula and Mea Shearim to the Har Hotzvim industrial zone. Monumental traffic jams now exist along all these routes at peak times of the day.

High density buses will run in the busways. In practice this means the current articulated double buses, though some three part buses may be added in the future. Bus stops along the busway will also be hi-tech, indicating how long until the next bus arrives. Busway buses will be tracked by satellite GPS. The goal is to make public transit a viable alternative.

If taking your car downtown becomes less comfortable, where will riders park to take the new transit lines? Three “park and ride” lots are planned. The first, at Mount Herzl with 530 spaces, is ready to go. “In Israel, the fact that we have even one parking lot waiting for the public is a dream come true,” muses Elian. A second, intended for drivers coming from out of town, will be built by the new Road 9 near Ramat Shlomo. The third is planned for the Ramat Eshkol area.

The existing parking lot at Binyamei HaUma will also be doubled, providing drivers from Tel Aviv with a convenient transfer point to the light rail. All of these lots are intended to be open when the light rail is done in 2010.

Even when the new system is in place, though, some buses will still run direct from the neighborhoods to downtown. For example, the 31 and 32 routes from Gilo and Ramot will be rerouted to travel on Agrippas Street, affording better access to the shuk.

Was there any consideration given to the desirability of bus travel in an age of suicide bombers? Render turns philosophical for a moment. “Our whole existence in this country is not logical. My attitude is that you have to assume that life here could be normal and that problems will be temporary. The light rail will have all kinds of security systems including camera.”

Elian is less prosaic. “We are working actively with the police and the army to deal with security. A lot of thought has been invested. This is part of our work.”

Render points out that in the U.S., passengers also avoided public transportation for security reasons – in that case crime. Authorities responded and now “public transit use in the U.S. has been going up every year for the last five years.”

With bus fares steadily rising, is there a point when the price will simply be too high? Render says that studies show “the least sensitive factor affecting ridership is price. People are much more concerned with reliability, comfort and speed of travel. That’s important data, because if there’s more money coming into the system, it’s better to use that money to provide more frequent service than to reduce the price. Conversely, if you have a budget problem, it’s better to raise fares than cut back on frequency.”

Render’s firm AmAv was founded in 1992 and has worked on hundreds of projects in Israel from Haifa to Eilat as well as in Eastern Europe and Africa. Render has a master’s degree in urban planning and made aliyah from Chicago in 1978. Elian also has a background in urban planning and has been the official spokesperson for the Jerusalem Mass Transit system for 7 years.

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This article originally appeared in The Jerusalem Post's In Jerusalem section. The link is here.

Despite the controversial subtitle “A True Story of Sex, Drugs and Orthodoxy,” Reva Mann’s new autobiography “The Rabbi’s Daughter” is neither as shocking or inflammatory as its name would suggest. Rather, Mann’s powerful memoir will seem familiar to many Jews who grew up in secular homes, crossed over to a more extreme practice of religion and ended up in a relatively moderate middle ground.

“The Rabbi’s Daughter” reads like a good blog – personal, confessional and addictive. When the book opens, Mann is studying at a religious girls seminary for the newly repentant in Jerusalem, striving to live the life of a good Jew while frequently flashing back to a more tawdry past.

That past includes doing lines of coke in her hometown of London, losing her virginity on the bima of her father (the Rabbi’s) synagogue, anonymous sex in a public restroom, getting busted for trafficking 10 kilos of hashish in Jerusalem, and becoming hospitalized after contracting hepatitis B from a junkie who shot wine into his veins. “I wasn’t addicted to a particular drug,” Mann writes. “I was addicted to the false sense of intimacy that I reached when I was stoned out of my mind.”

But worst of all, in her parent’s opinion at least, was her relationship with a non-Jewish man, a photographer who worked for a rock music magazine, that got her kicked out of her observant household as a teenager and led to even further debauchery.

Mann describes her tumultuous formative years with candor and honesty, all the while framing it from her new lifestyle as an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva student. Indeed, the opening half of “The Rabbi’s Daughter” seems almost like an apologetic for her youth, presenting religious life as lovingly bathed in the warm light of enlightenment.

“The Rabbi’s Daughter” is written for a broad audience. Mann carefully explains the details of keeping kosher or her monthly immersion in the mikveh prior to having sex with her husband. But it is insiders who will ultimately get the most out of the book.

That’s because Mann’s journey mirrors the religious evolution of many modern observantly struggling Jews (albeit without the extreme use of drugs and promiscuity). My own history is telling: I grew up in a devoutly non-religious home where I nevertheless (and some will say miraculously) decided, during a spontaneous trip to Israel in 1984, to pursue a more religious lifestyle.

At first that meant taking on as much of Jewish law as I thought I understood, though never to the extent of Mann who describes in great detail a loveless haredi marriage to a husband whose true lover, Mann writes, was always God and never his attention starved wife. He was “horny only for heaven,” says Mann, adding that she ignored an early warning sign: when he asked her to marry him, he gave her a prayer book instead of an engagement ring.

3 children and a divorce later, Mann abandons her faith, slaps on a pair of skin tight jeans and returns to wanton ways, taking up first with the local handyman and eventually settling into a destructive relationship with a vulgar yet passionate man she meets in a bar. Mann’s fall from grace is as rapid as the writing is breathless.

My own subsequent descent from more stringent spiritual seeking to a place of relative moderation was certainly less flamboyant than Mann’s, but I can still relate. I know what it’s like to go to an extreme and come back down.

Mann never lets us forget that hers is a true tale, even if the names have been changed. Mann’s father was Rabbi Morris Unterman, the late spiritual leader of London’s posh modern Orthodox West End Marble Arch synagogue. Her grandfather was Rabbi Isser Yehuda Unterman, who served for 26 years as the second Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel.

As I was reading “The Rabbi’s Daughter,” I at times wondered whether it would be easier to take in if it were fiction, like Naomi Ragen’s novel “Jephte’s Daughter” with which it must be compared. In Ragen’s book, as in “The Rabbi’s Daughter,” an ultra-Orthodox woman finds herself in a loveless marriage in Israel, flees, takes up with a non-observant (or non-Jewish) man and eventually returns to a more moderate path.

But the voyeuristic quality of Mann’s book is part of what provides the story its power, even more so because Mann is a neighbor (she lives in Jerusalem’s German Colony) and, though we’ve never met, I fully expect to bump into her one day sipping a Chai Latte at Aroma Café or buying bagels around the corner. At which point I’ll be privy to more intimate details than most people ever know about strangers. Will that make the meeting uncomfortable or titillating?

The Rabbi’s Daughter received a flattering six page spread in The London Sunday Times which called it “hard to put down” and a “publisher’s dream, a gripping tale of a woman searching in all the wrong places and ultimately finding herself.”

Comments on the London Times’ website were more mixed. One poster wrote “Great book, but I can’t believe it’s true.” Another commented “What an obscenity! What some people will do for a dollar!”

Mann, now 50, is more introspective. She began penning the book while recovering from breast cancer. “Writing everything down was about my beginning to be a new person. I wasn’t just getting it off my chest,” she explained in an interview with Haaretz.

Mann closes her book, surprisingly, away from Israel on a trip to India with her now teenage children where she reflects back on her life. She is no longer the outcast; her rebellious nature has been tempered. She broke off her abusive relationship with Sam six years ago, and now laments that she lives “the life of a nun and worry I am once again going to an extreme, this time of sexual abstention.” She knows that “Jewish souls can only find true closeness to God through the Torah” even while she admits having difficulties keeping the laws herself.

“The Rabbi’s Daughter” is a riveting drama of sex, drugs and Orthodoxy to be sure, but also one of acceptance and healing. For those of us who have been on Mann’s path, it’s even an affirmation. I’m happy with the middle way I’ve chosen. I’m not entirely sure by the end of Mann’s book that she is. Still, “The Rabbi’s Daughter” is a sort of comfort; a reminder that the road many of us take is not quite so lonely.

"The Rabbi’s Daughter: A True Story of Sex, Drugs and Orthodoxy," by Reva Mann, is published by Hodder & Stoughton in the U.K. and The Dial Press in the U.S. It’s available at local bookstores and online at Amazon.com. Her website is www.revamann.com.

Last Thursday, my wife Jody and I roused ourselves out of bed at the ungodly hour of 4:50 AM in order to arrive at Ben Gurion Airport, not for a trip to some exotic destination, but in time to greet an El Al flight of 191 new immigrants making aliyah to Israel. The process was inspirational and exhilarating. We were among more than 500 similarly minded Israelis who came to cheer, applaud and otherwise show their support for the new arrivals.

It made me think back to our own family’s aliyah. My, how times have changed.

When we arrived in Israel almost 13 years ago in October, 1994, we were the only new immigrants on the plane. We told our flight attendant about our exciting new status and she merely shrugged her shoulders in a typically Israeli way (shades of things to come) while muttering a muted mazel tov. There was no one at the airport to greet us. No flag waving. No enthusiastic hordes.

Instead we scrambled like everyone else to be first through passport control, then made our way upstairs to a cavernous hall that had been built to handle a plane load or two of Russians all arriving together. We had, in fact, been worried that we might come at the same time as a Russian aliyah flight and get stuck for hours in immigrant processing. Instead, we were shown into a small room where a perfunctory clerk stamped our papers and gave us our teuda oleh and temporary immigrant passports.

Flash forward 13 years. New immigrants from North America now fly together on a plane designated just for them where Ministry of the Interior officials walk up and down the aisles completing all of the paperwork from tablet computers.

Upon arrival, the new immigrants walk between two lines of cheering crowds waving flags, holding up hand decorated signs and otherwise keeping up a remarkable amount of energy for so early in the morning. It reminded me of the “Shalom Kita Aleph” ceremony for first graders entering elementary school…only this time with adults.

The front rows of the two lines were reserved for a cadre of army soldiers; behind them were a gaggle of religious seminary girls wearing blue and white who’d painted their faces with Israeli flags and “I love Israel” in little hearts. A big bearded man blew a shofar as each busload of immigrants disembarked. A live band (well, a guy with a keyboard) played “Heveinu Shalom Aleichem” over and over. The arriving immigrants looked overwhelmed by all the attention after a 12-hour mostly sleepless flight.

Among the new immigrants on this flight was our cousin David Gilbert, a radio news reporter who, after nearly 8 years living in Israel as a tourist, finally took the plunge to become a full-fledged Israeli citizen.

Once inside the arrivals hall, there was a large stage set up in front of the baggage claim conveyer belts for speeches. Dignitaries included representatives from various government ministries; Elazar Stern, the head of the army’s manpower unit; Danny Ayalon, former Israeli ambassador to the U.S.; and Tal Brody, who years ago was a star basketball player for the Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team and remains one of the best known North American immigrants to Israel.

The hoopla was choreographed by Nefesh b’Nefesh, an aliyah organization that has had a remarkable track record in boosting immigration from North America and the U.K. This was Nefesh b’Nefesh’s 31st chartered flight, the 18th of 2007. All together, Nefesh b’Nefesh has brought over 13,000 immigrants to Israel since its establishment in 2002, nearly 3,000 alone this year, and an 80 percent increase in the past five years.

Last Thursday’s flight included 82 singles, 32 families with 25 children, 30 future IDF soldiers and a former ballerina for the Zurich Ballet who made aliyah from New York with her husband and two children. The youngest oleh in the group was 3 months old, the oldest was 96. The flight also included 6 dogs and 2 cats. Pictures taken by long time aliyah advocate Jacob Richman can be seen at http://www.jr.co.il/pictures/israel/history/2007/a260.htm.

Nefesh b’Nefesh, which was started by Rabbi Yehoshua Fass and businessman Tony Gelbart, has been instrumental in the dramatic increase of immigrants from the West. The Jewish Agency, however, disputes Nefesh b’Nefesh’s numbers, saying that immigration from North America actually dropped 7 percent this year and that aliyah from the U.K. is down 20 percent. The Agency claims that Nefesh b’Nefesh has deliberately inflated its immigration numbers to justify the group’s request for more funds from the state and from Jewish philanthropists. Nefesh b’Nefesh says it needs the money and claims to have a waiting list of some 20,000 Jews.

While North American aliyah may or may not be up, both sides agree with the Absorption Ministry which reports that the overall figures are down. In 2007, 19,700 immigrants arrived in the country, a decline of 6 percent from the previous year and the lowest number since 1989 after the wave of immigration following the fall of the Iron Curtain. The largest number of immigrants in 2007 still came from the former Soviet Union at 6,445. In second place was Ethiopia at 3,607. North America had 2,957 and France held strong at 2,659.

Israel’s total population is about 7 million. Approximately 118,000 people have moved to Israel from North America since the founding of the state, and over 1 million have come from the FSU.

Nefesh b’Nefesh certainly puts on a good show and makes for a comfortable and supportive landing. But new arrivals eventually have to move past immigration and deal with the “absorption” part of the process where, I’m afraid, no cheering crowds or speeches by well dressed dignitaries can properly prepare a new arrival for Israel’s plethora of crazy drivers, surly store clerks and questionable customer service.

But the fact that 191 new immigrants nevertheless chose this week to throw their lot in with the rest of us was good enough news for me – and reason to get out of bed in the wee hours of the morning.

Last Saturday night we went to a house concert performed by Laurie Ornstein, an English teacher turned folk singer who has taken to busking for a living during the protracted high school teachers strike. The concert was lovely – full of new and classic protest songs, some rewritten to focus attention on the teachers’ current plight.

For those of you who haven’t been following this wrenching Israeli development, the Secondary School Teacher’s Organization (SSTO) has been on strike for more money and better conditions for 45 days as of this writing. Kids from 7th through 12th grades have had no school, teachers haven’t been paid.

A second organization, the National Teacher’s Union (NTU), which mostly represents elementary school teachers, settled with the government earlier in the year, meaning that K-6 kids are continuing with their regular school routine (though the NTU has threatened to join the SSTO strike in solidarity next week).

But despite my sympathy for the teachers and the clearly deplorable conditions they must work in, I cannot fully support them in their current work action. This puts me at odds with many of my friends who are teachers or who work in education. The problem is: the teachers demands are justified, but they’re not willing to give back what’s really needed to reform the system once and for all.

Don’t get me wrong, the teachers have a legitimate beef and one that deserves our collective concern. With a starting salary for new teachers of just NIS 2800 ($700) a month and a maximum after 36 years of service of NIS 15,000 ($3,500), teachers in Israel are among the lowest paid workers in the country but have unquestionably one of our most important jobs. Attracting and retaining quality teachers simply cannot be done on the paltry wages teachers earn. Moonlighting is both expected and required just to get by.

In addition, teachers work in conditions that make it near impossible to educate a class. My younger son Aviv’s class has nearly 40 children. How can you do anything other than play policeperson in a class that size?

The teachers have also lost over 8 hours a week of teaching time due to budget cuts over the past several years but are still expected to cover the same amount of material. This, said performer Ornstein at her house concert, turns classrooms into bagrut factories. One student asked Ornstein, “are you going to be teaching us sections e, f, and g?” referring to what would be on the upcoming matriculation exams. Ornstein answered “I’m going to teach you how to read, write and speak English.”

The teachers are therefore demanding higher wages, lower class size and a return of the hours taken away. All worthy goals. So why the impasse between the teachers and the government?

The government wants the teachers to agree to a broader reform of the educational system. This reform started with the Dovrat Plan which was approved by the cabinet of then prime minister Ariel Sharon. The Dovrat Plan called for significantly higher wages but demanded that teachers work a full five day work week in a single school. It stipulated that teachers pass accreditation exams just like lawyers, doctors and engineers, and be regularly evaluated. Most importantly, it empowered principals to hire and fire based on merit, thereby weeding out ineffective teachers and rewarding rising stars.

The Dovrat Commission was headed by Shlomo Dovrat, a businessman from the hi-tech giant ECI Telecom who looked at the broken education system as something to be fixed by applying the kind of management and personnel expertise that built his own company.

Dovrat should have been the only game in town, but when Ehud Olmert assumed the prime minister’s office, he put in place a new education minister, Yuli Tamir, who unveiled her own watered down reform plan, one she said would place less emphasis on management and more on pedagogy. It still included the call to empower principals. The result nevertheless was that the impetus of the Dovrat Plan was lost and the teachers saw weakness which they translated into an opportunity to make their own demands without agreeing to the reform.

I shouldn’t say all the teachers. Many agreed with Dovrat and many agree with the new reform too. The problem is the head of the teachers union, Ran Erez, who Amotz Asa-El, writing in the Jerusalem Post, calls “coarse,” a “ruffian” and a “hoodlum.” To Erez, a school principal’s empowerment is his own disempowerment. His job is to keep as many teachers employed as possible, even if this isn’t in the best interests of the system.

Erez reportedly went so far as to liken the Dovrat plan to the “Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact,” a reference to the deal Hitler struck with Stalin before setting his sites on the rest of Europe. Tough words from a tough guy who is known to hurl profanities in negotiations and never brought either reform plans up to a vote by the very teachers he claims to represent.

My friend Rafi Rottman, an English teacher and guidance counselor at Jerusalem’s Keshet School, disagrees with my analysis. Erez and the teachers union aren’t against the reform, he told me, but the salary increases proposed are not enough to cover the increased hours the reform demands. “Teachers will still need to run to another job” to make a decent living, Rafi explained.

And even though the government has offered to up salaries by 26%, this neglects to take into account that the teachers have been working since 1999 without a contract and were promised a 15% increase in 2002 which never came, Rafi went on. In addition, for the last 5 years, salaries have not been linked with inflation, eroding in real terms another 10%. Parents who can afford to pay “extra” do get smaller classes and more programs, but this only exacerbates the divide between haves and have nots. In this light, the government’s offer doesn’t look quite so enticing.

That’s not the way the government portrays it of course. Education Minister Tamir says she asked Ran Erez “why the teachers didn’t strike for years? Through 16 cutbacks, they didn’t strike. He (Erez) told me ‘we could prevent the reform without striking.’ Their objective now,” claims Tamir, “is to prevent the reform.” And implementing the reform remains the crux of the government’s position.

The bottom line is that 44,000 teachers have been on strike for 45 days while 600,000 teenagers grow increasingly disaffected and bored as they wander from shopping mall to street corner looking for something to do with their long and empty days.

How will it all end? I’m still backing the government on this one, but with reservations. Maybe the reforms need to be modified to address the teachers’ real needs. But to reject reform out of hand, as Erez is leading his union to do, is unnecessarily obtuse. One side ultimately has to back down.

Or maybe not. Perhaps the struggle will continue for another few months, at which point most of the school year will have been lost. It’s hard to even imagine what that will mean. Will students have to learn for another year, thereby delaying their entry into the army? Will they head off to college with only partial knowledge?

Any way you look at it, it spells disaster for the innocent teenagers and well meaning teachers who have to suffer from a bully’s intransigence.

How much is a human life worth? According to a Washington D.C. federal judge, $12.9 million. That’s the amount that Judge Royce Lamberth awarded to the parents of our cousin Marla Bennett who was killed in the July 31, 2002 bombing attack on the Frank Sinatra Cafeteria at Hebrew University.

Lamberth found that Hamas, which claimed credit soon after the attack, “is an organization supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran, dedicated to the waging of Jihad, or a holy war employing terrorism” and was responsible for the “willful and deliberate killing of Marla Bennett.” Lamberth ordered Iran to pay the $12.9 million to Marla’s mother, father and sister for their suffering and Marla’s lost income.

Specifically, the judge calculated the loss of income to be generated by Marla’s estate as $404,548.00. The judge also awarded Marla’s parents $5 million each and Marla’s sister Lisa $2.5 million. The amounts awarded took into account a fact that was previously unknown to me – that Marla’s death was not instantaneous. A resuscitation tube was found on her body at the scene, which indicates there was some sign of life when the emergency medical team arrived.

The court ruling provided further details on Marla’s assailant, Mohammed Uda, a maintenance worker at Hebrew University, who was a member of the Silwan Gang, a Hamas sub-group named after the Jerusalem suburb where Uda lived, and who meticulously planned the attack using a bomb hidden in a backpack placed on a table adjacent to Marla in the cafeteria. The Silwan Gang also planned a previous attack at the Moment Café in Jerusalem earlier that year.

Judge Lamberth acknowledged that money will never bring Marla back. Lamberth's opinion states that “though it is impossible for this court to make the plaintiffs completely whole again, the court hopes that this award helps begin the healing process and that one day the plaintiffs’ hearts and minds will be mended by the fact that some measure of justice, no matter how incalculable, was done on their behalf.”

Collecting the damages from Iran won’t be easy. Previous victims of terror attacks who have successfully sued Iran have sought money from frozen Iranian assets in America, but those resources are limited.

Marla’s family will also be competing to a certain extent with another award granted by Lamberth last week which stipulates some $2.65 billion to be paid by Iran to the families of the 241 U.S. service members killed in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. Hezballah, which carried out that attack, is trained, supported by and ideologically aligned with Iran.

Nevertheless, plaintiffs in such cases have been encouraged lately by Libya’s eventual decision to accept responsibility for its role in the bombing of a Pan Am flight over Scotland.

Iranian government spokesman Gholam Hossein Elham told reporters in Washington that Iran considers Lamberths’ rulings “baseless. Some U.S. court issued a verdict without any investigation or listening to opinions from the other sides. The verdict is not legally defensible and we can see the political pressure from the decision to grab Iranian assets in America.” Nevertheless, no one from Iran or its intelligence ministry which were co-defendants in the 2003 case, appeared in court to defend the lawsuit.

Freelance journalist Karmel Melamed wrote on his blog last week that Lamberth’s decision deserves “high praise” and “gives hope to victims of Iran's reign of international terror that while justice may not be immediate it does arrive in due time.” Melamed also points out that Iranian Jewish victims of Iran's terror have followed a similar path. Last September the families of 12 Iranian Jewish victims imprisoned in Iran filed a federal suit seeking to collect damages from former Iranian President Mohhamad Khatami. The suit holds Khatami responsible for the kidnapping, imprisonment and disappearance of Jews imprisoned by Iran between 1994 and 1997.

Shurat HaDin, an Israeli organization that gives legal aid to terror victims and that has been at the forefront of bringing more than two dozen lawsuits over the past several years against terrorist organizations and states sponsoring terrorism, has successfully collected on judgments from suits brought against U.S. banks holding funds used by Palestinian terror groups.

In March of this year, B’nai Brith Canada filed suit against Iran’s current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejhad for incitement of genocide against the Jewish people in a federal Canadian court. The suit also calls on the Canadian government to ban Ahmadinejhad's entry into Canada.

Marla’s mother Linda said she did not intend to use the money, if she’s able to collect, for the family’s own personal gain “If only it would bring her back, that would be ideal,” said Bennett who still lives in the San Diego home where Marla grew up. “But we know that’s not going to happen.” Linda who traveled with her husband to Washington in March to testify in the case said she was “gratified by the ruling” and expressed the hope that she could “do some good for other people with this judgement. That’s what Marla would have wanted.”

The Bennetts set up several programs after Marla’s death. One is a charity run by the local San Diego Jewish Federation that helps Jews and non-Jews in distress; the other is a fund to help young people who want to study in Israel. Marla was a student at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies and had been studying in a Hebrew ulpan at Hebrew University when she was killed along with eight others.

The Bennett’s family lawyer Edward Carnot stressed that he would “make every effort to collect upon the judgement. It’s not going to be an easy task, but we have some avenues we want to pursue.”

Following Lamberth’s ruling, the Hebrew University issued a statement saying that it “pays tribute to the memory of Marla Bennett and all of the other victims of the terrorist attack and expresses satisfaction at the decision of the court, which perhaps will ease, if only slightly, the sorrow of the family.”

Lamberth praised the Bennett family for “their courage and steadfast pursuit of justice through legal means. This noble effort is made even more so when contrasted with the heinous and brutishly unlawful acts undertaken by the defendants and the individuals they support.” Lamberth called Marla “a shining light in the lives of so many.”

The full court judgment can be found here.

The audio version of this post can be found here.

“This is the longest Shabbat ever,” pouted thirteen-year-old Merav over the weekend. The reason for her distress was having to wait until Shabbat was over in order to claim her copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows from our local Steimatzky’s book store.

Religious Jews around the world were at a distinct disadvantage in the race to learn “who will live and who will die?” as advertisements for the seventh and final installment in the Harry Potter series have been teasing for months. The book went on sale at midnight Saturday morning, that is, on Shabbat. In Israel, that posed not only an economic, but a political problem.

According to the “Hours of Work and Rest Law,” stores in Israel are supposed to be closed on Shabbat; those that violate the law are to be fined. In practice, however, stores in many parts of the country other than Jerusalem and cities with a particularly religious character are regularly open. Harry Potter launching on Shabbat with all its incumbent publicity just brought the issue into Industry, Trade and Labor ministry officials’ faces, with minister Eli Yishai leading the anti-Harry Potter crusade. “Vendors should wait until after Shabbat,” Yishai of the religious Shas party said. “The law is that they can’t work on Shabbat.”

That didn’t stop Steimatzky from holding a gala party at the old Tel Aviv port early Saturday morning. Video screens broadcast an interview with Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling from London and many attendees came out in costume. Other branches of Steimatzky opened at 10:00 AM Saturday morning, while rival chain Tzomet HaSefarim began selling copies at 2:00 AM. Some 4,000 Israelis reportedly pre-ordered the English edition (the Hebrew translated version won’t be out until December). Three branches of the Tzomet HaSefarim chain were eventually fined NIS 5,000 each for opening on Shabbat.

In holy Jerusalem, the only way to get a copy of The Deathly Hallows before the end of Shabbat was a trip to the eastern part of the city, where the small Arab-run Educational Books store opened at 5:00 AM on Saturday morning. Owner Imad Muna had offered to take pre-orders for Jews from West Jerusalem who don’t handle money on Shabbat and would be willing to walk to his Salah a-Din Street store to pick up a copy.

Anxious readers ready to break the law could also download a copy of the book: someone had nabbed a pre-release copy and painstakingly scanned every single page and posted it as a grainy file on various Internet file sharing services. The New York Times confirmed last week that the web version was the real deal.

Back in the Blum household, there was no question of stealing and we weren’t about to hoof it over to East Jerusalem to gain a few extra hours of what would fast become essential Shabbat reading. We had to wait until our local Steimatzky opened at 9:30 PM an hour after the conclusion of Shabbat. Hence Merav’s increasing impatience.

“Only three hours and 25 minutes more,” she duly informed me as the dull Jerusalem afternoon heat began to wane.

Mind you, Merav wasn’t alone in her anticipation. I’ve been just as hotly awaiting the final book. I’m not ashamed to say I’ve read all the books twice already – once to myself and a second time aloud to nine-year-old Aviv before bed (a process that has taken several years).

Now, for Shabbat lunch, we had guests visiting from the States who had a teenage daughter the same age as Merav. Merav and Penina didn’t know each other, and their initial moments were awkward and tentative. As soon as they discovered their mutual Potter fandom, though, they became as thick as thieves, making a plan to get in line as soon as Shabbat was over to pick up the book. Penina wouldn’t be getting her own copy until she returned back to the U.S. in another two week’s time, giving Merav the definite home court advantage.

By 9:00 PM, the line outside the Emek Refaim branch of Steimatzky already stretched down the street past the new branch of Aroma. Merav and Penina were joined by a who’s who of English-speaking southern Jerusalem teenagers and adults, some in black capes, all moving excitedly towards the shop door where they were asked whether they wanted the British or U.S. version of the book (with the U.K. editions referring to the “Philosopher’s Stone” rather than the Sorcerer’s Stone as in the U.S.) The queue advanced quickly and by 9:45 PM the girls were home with the thick orange tome in hand.

“Let me see, I want to read the first page,” I implored but to deaf ears. Merav and Penina grabbed the book out of my eager hands, swept into Merav’s room and slammed the door.

An hour later, when I came to say good night, the two girls were hunched over their shared copy reading the book aloud in turns. Penina’s father eventually came, leaving Merav the onerous but exciting task of finishing all 700 pages before Thursday, when she was due to leave for two weeks of sleep-away camp, sadly sans Harry.

They say that the Harry Potter series has increased literacy among young people. It also apparently can turn complete strangers into friends. Maybe there is such a thing as magic after all.

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The audio (podcast) version of this post can be found here.

It’s been over 30 years since I was at a baseball game, but that unintended hiatus ended this week when I joined my family to root, root, root for the home team as the Modi’in Miracle suited up to play the Ra’anana Express as part of the Holy Land’s first professional baseball league.

The afternoon game we attended, at Kibbutz Gezer’s newly built field of dreams in the center of the country, not far from the Latrun junction off the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway, also gave me a chance to fulfill not only an expatriate’s national pastime but a father’s obligation: to teach my kids the rules of the game. There I was, with nine-year-old Aviv on one side and thirteen-year-old Merav on the other, extemporizing on the difference between a foul ball and a pop fly, explaining how and when a player might steal a base, and bemoaning a double play that ended an inning with my favored team failing to score.

I had forgotten how much I used to love baseball.

For most of the mid-1970s, our family were huge Oakland A’s fans. This was already traitorous to our friends and neighbors because we lived in clear San Francisco Giants territory, on the west side of the San Francisco Bay. But The A’s had spunk, they had color, and for the years we were attending games at the Oakland Coliseum, they also won the World Series three years in a row.

Those were the days when the team had a roster of amazing all stars: Campy Campaneris, Sal Bando, Reggie Jackson, Joe Rudi, Gene Tenace, Catfish Hunter, Vida Blue and Rollie Fingers. In my diary from 1974, I have cut out newspaper clippings with box scores and player rosters pasted onto the pages. We listened to every game on the radio and watched on TV whenever we could.

Then the A’s stopped winning and I went off to college and got busy with “more important” things. My baseball fanaticism withered and by the time I arrived in Israel for the first time in 1983, it didn’t bother me that “football” (and not the American kind) rather than baseball ruled the land.

Now, all that’s changed with the establishment of the Israel Baseball League (IBL), Israel’s first professional league (the non-professional Israel Association of Baseball has been promoting baseball in the Middle East since 1986). The IBL, which launched two weeks ago, consists of six blue and white teams – the Beit Shemesh Blue Sox, the Netanya Tigers, the Petach Tikva Pioneers, the Tel Aviv Lightning, and the aforementioned Modi’in Miracle and Ra’anana Express.

Former American ambassador to Egypt and Israel Dan Kurtzer is serving as the league’s first commissioner, and team managers include three former U.S. major leaguers: Ron Blomberg, Art Shamsky, and Ken Holtzman (once with my beloved A’s, he is on the record books as the winingest Jewish pitcher in Major League Baseball history).

There are a number of differences in how the game is played in Israel – there are only seven innings (Israelis, it’s supposed, don’t have the patience to sit through a full nine), with ties decided by a “home run derby” rather than extra innings; and the “fifth inning stretch” is as likely to include a break for the afternoon mincha prayer service as a trip to the snack bar for peanuts and crackerjack (or the Israeli equivalent: a bag of bamba and some bisli). The view from the stands at Kibbutz Gezer is also uniquely Israel – rolling shrub-covered fields covered with sunflowers and the ruins of an ancient Canaanite town, a far cry from the urban landscape of Oakland or New York.

Still, the excitement of watching a professional ball player pick up a bat and take a crack at a ball hurtling towards him at 95 miles an hour retains much of the big league thrill from back in the old country. And then there was the young man who boldly called out over the intercom “Dalia Gold, will you go out with me?” just like in the States (she said yes, by the way).

Nevertheless, the game in Israel still has a few bases to run. The fledgling IBL had to look overseas for players to step up to home plate in its inaugural 45 game summer season: only 10 out of the 120 players on the six Israeli teams are sabras. Maximo Nelson, the Modi’in team’s star pitcher, hails from the Dominican Republic and barely speaks English, let alone Hebrew. Still, some 40 percent of the players, mostly U.S. imports, are Jewish.

Crowds are also not even at U.S. minor league levels. While the opening game two weeks ago attracted a respectable 4,000 or so fans, this week’s match at Kibbutz Gezer had a mere 400. The upside: we got front row seats along the first base line, better than we ever got for the A’s in their heyday.

Who did we root for? The Israel Baseball League strives to be purely professional, all the way down to the players’ uniforms which they’ve cleverly chosen to match the branding of some of the leading U.S. teams. The Modi’in Miracle (the name refers to the Maccabees, the Hanukka heroes who hailed from Modi’in) were in Mets’ pin stripes (no accident given that Miracle's manager Art Shamsky won a World Series with the Mets in 1969). The Ra’anana Express were decked out in A’s green and yellow. Clearly we had to cheer the A’s clones. Big mistake. It was a baseball bloodbath with Ra’anana getting clobbered 9-1 by the Miracle (the next night, Ra’anana got nailed again, this time by the Tel Aviv lightning, by a score of 16-1).

Will baseball in Israel catch on? So far, it’s mainly an Anglo sport with even the play-by-play being done in English. Still the new league gets high marks for trying. And there’s something misty about singing Hatikva, the Israeli national anthem, before “take me out to the ballgame.”

Surprisingly, Jerusalem, Israel’s capital, has no team. That’s not deliberate, league officials say; there’s just no field suitable for baseball in the capital...yet. That didn’t stop the IBL’s “Official 2007 Yearbook” from superimposing a picture of a baseball stadium next to an image of the Old City, just alongside the Temple Mount, effectively obliterating a large chunk of mostly Arab East Jerusalem.

In Israel, it seems, even baseball can’t avoid straying into political territory.

(Here's the picture from the cover of the IBL Yearbook)


The podcast version of this article can be found here.

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Like all the California hotels, even a New York hotel has one of those travel agents who can get you seats on Orlando flights or even Vegas flights in emergency. Otherwise ideally they prefer allegiant airlines if one does have to fly. In other case, they are ardent fans of national car rental firms.

When does something as innocuous and pleasurable as going to the theater become a political statement? When you’re seeing the British touring company of Mama Mia in Israel, that’s when.

The Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot ran a story last week headlined “ABBA musical boycotted in Israel?” which reports a claim in the U.K.-based London Times that Israel is boycotting the extravaganza of 70s pop hits that’s been playing Israel over the last two weeks.

“The ABBA musical Mamma Mia could be the first casualty of a growing Israeli backlash against the British academic boycott of Israeli universities,” the article blustered. The boycott being referred to, of course, was the one approved last month by Britain’s University and College Union (UCU) refusing cooperation with Israeli academic institutions and academics. Last week, Britain’s largest labor union, UNISON, joined in the anti-Israeli jamboree, voting to boycott not only Israeli goods, but cultural, academic and sporting activities.

To which I say: balderdash. Not about the British boycotts but the Israeli response. My wife Jody and thirteen-year-old daughter Merav attended an evening performance of Mamma Mia in Tel Aviv last week, and I can report that while the hall wasn’t 100% sold out, many thousands of Israelis came out to the Nokia Sports Arena, more typically the home to the Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team than musical comedy, to enjoy what is essentially a lightly scripted excuse to string together 20 or so of the Swedish pop group’s kitschy classics from “Chiquitita” and “SOS,” to “Dancing Queen” and, of course, the show’s signature song “Mamma Mia.”

Good times aside, the whole Mamma Mia boycott issue nevertheless raises some important questions of why Israel is being boycotted…and how Israelis should respond to these actions which have roundly been condemned as myopic, biased and discriminatory.

Bradley Burston, writing in Haaretz, does an excellent job of pointing out the absurdity of the British academic boycott. “Just for the sake of argument, let's suppose that you're a British academic,” Burston wrote. “You believe strongly that the occupation must end, that the Palestinians should have an independent state, that Israel's military and diplomatic policies are wrongheaded...What to do? Simple. Find the one group within Israeli society which has consistently campaigned against the occupation since its inception. Then attack them. Single them out for professional ruin. Do your best to get as many of their colleagues around the world to shun them.”

Thomas Friedman similarly supports Israeli academia in an article in last week’s New York Times where he commented on how he attended a graduation ceremony at Hebrew University two weeks ago and was struck by how many Ph.D. students were Arabs. One woman even received her degree while wearing a tight veil over her head, something Friedman pointed out would be banned in public schools in France.

“How crazy is this,” Friedman wrote, that “Israel’s premier university is giving Ph.D.’s to Arab students, two of whom were from East Jerusalem…all while some far left British academics are calling for a boycott of Israeli universities….singling out Israeli universities,” Friedman concluded, “in the face of all the other madness in the Middle East” is nothing less than anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism is also how the U.S.-based Anti-Defamation League labeled the UCU boycott. In one of the most effective series of advertisements I’ve seen lately, running as quarter pagers in several publications including The New York Times, the ADL stated the facts in black and white: “400,000 murdered in Darfur…700 human rights activists detained and tortured last year in Zimbabwe…38 reporters arrested last year in Iran…and British academics are boycotting Israel?”

Harsh words were also conferred by the British press. The Guardian called the academics’ boycott “bad and one sided”; The Financial Times labeled it just “stupid.” Uriel Lynn, President of the Federation of Israeli Chambers of Commerce, additionally referred to the UNISON labor union’s boycott  as “scandalous and completely one sided.” Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mark Regev added neither boycotts “help the Palestinians, the Israelis or peace.

But how should ordinary Israelis respond? The report in The London Times suggested that several Israeli politicians are now lobbying to enact laws that would launch an Israeli consumer “counter boycott” of British imports. Hit them where it hurts, the thinking goes, by cutting sales of Schweppes soda water and Cadbury chocolate in Israel. Jeremy Newmark of the U.K.’s Jewish Leadership Council also feared a “tit for tat boycott of British goods.”

Even if it were effective, though, is that really what we should do?

I think the answer must involve two elements: fighting back – not the kind of cat fight of a counter boycott that sounds more like a playground brawl between seven-year-olds than the actions of a mature country with one of the world’s most robust economies – but identifying the boycotts for what they really are and speaking up, like Columbia University President Lee Bollinger did when he wrote in a letter to Tel Aviv University President Zvi Galil:

“If the British UCU is intent on pursuing its deeply misguided policy,” Bollinger said, “then it should add Columbia to its boycott list, for we do not intend to draw distinctions between our mission and that of the universities you are seeking to punish. Boycott us, then, for we gladly stand together with our many colleagues in British, American and Israeli universities against such intellectually shoddy and politically biased attempts.”

Concurrent with fighting, we must also ignore these boycotts. Yes, that’s right – pretend they don’t exist. That’s perhaps the most Israeli thing to do, to go on with our normal life treating the actions of a few immoral activists in the U.K. as the trivialities that they are. The opposite approach – giving the boycotts too much credence – would only encourage more.

Ultimately, we must talk tough and at the same time keep enjoying British products and imports as always. That includes singing along to “Take a Chance on Me” and “Souper Trouper” at the Mamma Mia show when it comes to Tel Aviv.

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The audio (podcast) version of this post can be found here.

We recently learned that a neighbor in our apartment complex is trying to sell his flat, identical in size and layout to ours, for 50 percent more than we paid for our place two years ago. While this is certainly good news for the value of our property, it’s bad for the neighborhood. It means that essentially the only people who’ll be able to afford to move in will be those from overseas and these days that means, more often than not, absentee owners from North America and France who only come twice, maybe three times a year during the Pesach, Sukkot and Rosh Hashana holidays.

Now I don’t mean to dis anyone wanting to support Israel and stake his or her claim in the Holy Land. But unlike in some parts of the U.S., where space is king and having an acre of property with no other houses in sight is ideal, Israelis actually like having neighbors. It’s not just that we don’t have the geographic expansiveness to support mile after mile of single-family houses; it’s that we enjoy living in close proximity to each other. It supports our local infrastructure – the myriad schools and shuls and community centers within walking rather than driving distance.

Having too many absentee owners has already turned certain neighborhoods, particularly in Jerusalem, into virtual ghost towns, empty most of the year. It happened most famously to the luxurious and over-priced David’s Village, just outside the Old City – only 20 percent of the property owners actually live in their homes year round, a resident once told me.

There are scores of new developments popping up around Jerusalem, all claiming to be more exclusive and elegant than the next. The Jerusalem YMCA sold off a huge parcel of land to transform into real estate. Who can afford those apartments? Not the people who actually work in Jerusalem. They live in the outskirts of the city, in places like Pisgat Ze’ev and Tsur Hadassah, where they are forced to take public transportation to the city each day or else – more likely – private vehicles which clog the roads with more and more cars. Any look at the ever increasing traffic jams in the city will tell you that residents aren’t by and large walking and biking to work.

The trend is not just limited to David’s Village or the YMCA project. Already, there are four units in our complex that stand empty most of the time and a new building springing up across the street will reportedly be 50 percent foreign owned. I should point out, so as not to be too contentious towards potential immigrants, that it’s not foreign ownership per se that I’m against (after all, I’m an oleh myself); it’s just owners who don’t live in their flats year round.

“Yes, but what’s so terrible about not having neighbors?” my friend Bob asked me as I was lamenting the current state of affairs. “I wouldn’t mind having a little peace and quiet from the people next door to me.” On a personal level, his argument makes sense: all this proximity can be a bit much at times especially when late night parties by rowdy teenagers with thin shared walls mar the Shabbat evening solemnity.

A talk by Allen Ledden, an urban planner from London, at a recent parlor meeting to bolster the Sustainable Jerusalem Coalition, an offshoot of the local Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI), provided some insight. Ledden described how London, one of the most expensive cities in the world (even more so than beleaguered but ever popular Jerusalem), has fallen afoul of the same demographic disaster, its inner city devoid of affordable living space for the firefighters and clerks and taxi drivers who actually work there.

An area with an over-abundance of absentee owners can lead to an increase in crime and drug use, Ledden said, and even homelessness (any look at the downtowns of major American cities will confirm this). Furthermore, empty apartments don’t contribute anything to the local economy. They don’t support area restaurants or photo shops or electrical supply stores.

But how can you stop developers from selling to the highest bidder? That’s how the free market works, isn’t it? If there are hundreds of buyers ready from Teaneck who want to be my sometimes neighbor and are willing to pay a premium, how can we stop that?

A look at London suggests it’s still possible. A new consciousness for “environmental sustainability” is slowly emerging. Its basic tenets are that unless we as a society take into account more than buildings and arnona, our cities will become unlivable and will further contribute to their inevitable decline. London, as a result, is now trying to grapple with its own empty apartment syndrome by promoting mixed use projects combining office, residential, and commercial functions, and mandating that 50 percent of all new construction in the city must be affordable housing. So far, Ledden conceded, the numbers have been more like 20 percent. But it’s a start at least.

Could the same thing happen in Jerusalem? Part of the success of London’s invigorated urban planning involves fostering more of a partnership with the public. No plans can be approved without input from the people who will be affected by it.

But Jerusalem is not known for such “transparency” in city planning. The SPNI’s victory earlier this year over the “Safdie Plan” which environmentalists claimed would have built tens of thousands of unnecessary housing units in the Jerusalem Hills (perhaps more affordable but still far from the center city), took years of wrangling through a highly opaque bureaucracy.

Unfortunately, it starts from the top: Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is currently being accused of buying an apartment for $300,000 under its market value in exchange for granting favors to a building developer. Similarly, can anyone in Jerusalem not wonder whether the massive Holy Land housing project near the Malcha Mall – which once was intended to be a tourism center with a large public park – was not accompanied by massive bribes that filled either personal or city coffers?

Still, there may be hope yet for Jerusalem. The Jerusalem Post reported several weeks ago on how the city in 2005 took a time out from its massive development plans in the northwestern neighborhood of Romema. The area, which has been an ugly panoply of empty lots, junk yards, small factories and repair shops, had been rezoned for residential housing and parceled up between developers with no coordination whatsoever. The city realized that by working together with local residents they could create a much more livable environment, with green areas and community services. A master plan was created in 2006 and has since paved the way for similar initiatives in Givat Shaul, Beit Hakerem and Rehavia. If the city can think proactively about its future in these neighborhoods, maybe it can do something about ghost town developments elsewhere in the city.

In the meantime, my personal battle against the ghost town-ification of Jerusalem continues. If you know anyone who’d like to be my neighbor, and who would like to live in that apartment year round, please do have them drop me a line: brian@ThisNormalLife.com.

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The audio version of this article can be found here.

Last month the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot carried a small item that the U.S. restaurant chain Hooters plans to open its first branch in Israel this summer. That was followed by a piece indicating that a Tel Aviv radio station is in negotiations to bring the Howard Stern Show to the Israeli airwaves.

Now, regular readers know that I am not one of those who pine away for the “good old days” in Israel when all the women were strong and the men were good looking (apologies to Garrison Keillor). I like the comforts of modernity and in general the ever-shrinking gap between Israel and North America, both in terms of distance and culture, is a good thing.

But this may be going too far.

Hooters is a paradigm of the worst of Western decadence: an establishment that plies overt sexuality to cut through the competition. Hooters operates 435 restaurants in the U.S. and across 23 in countries from China to Brazil. The company employs over 15,000 “Hooters Girls” who dress in a uniform consisting of orange shorts and a white low cut tank top. Hooters says that its hostesses are “as socially acceptable as a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader, a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, or a Radio City Rockette.”

Furthermore, Hooters absolutely does not exploit women, the company insists. According to Hooters’ logic, “Hooters Girls have the same right to use their natural female sex appeal to earn a living as do super models Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell. To Hooters, the women's rights movement is important because it guarantees women have the right to choose their own careers, be it a Supreme Court Justice or Hooters Girl.”

Ultimately, though, Hooters makes no bones about its motto and states it quite clearly: “Sex appeal is legal and it sells.”

As for the name, Hooters puts an owl inside its logo “to allow debate to occur over the meaning's intent. In the end, we hope Hooters means a great place to eat.” So why are 68 percent of customers men between the ages of 25-54? Is there some American fascination with wide-eyed nocturnal forest creatures I missed in the nearly 13 years I’ve lived in Israel?

Ofer Ahiraz, who bought the Hooters franchise for the Holy Land told Reuters that he strong believes “that the Hooters concept is something that Israelis are looking for. Hooters can suit the Israeli entertainment culture." Ahiraz tried to offer some comfort to worried residents, explaining that the restaurants, which will launch initially in Tel Aviv but are eventually expected to number five around the country, would not open “near large religious populations.” Not surprisingly, Hooters in Israel will not be kosher.

Hooters is planning to open 17 additional international restaurants over the next few years in Colombia, Dubai, Guam, New Zealand…and India. Hooters Girls in sexy saris…oy vey! Hooters also runs magazines, a swimsuit issue, a casino in Las Vegas and even had its own airline that at its peak a few years ago served 15 cities.

Israel is certainly not immune to the raunchier “charms” of the West, nor would I want it to be, though it pains me that the country feels it necessary to import a chain as blatant as Hooters. Perhaps a homegrown alternative would be more appropriate. How about a local bar called “Frechot,” after the Israeli stereotype of women who wear too much make up and similarly revealing clothing?

Hooters and Howard Stern have long gone together. Stern has broadcast a syndicated male-oriented radio talk show for over 20 years featuring strippers and porn stars. Stern has over the years regularly promoted Hooters on air. Unlike Hooters, which I have never visited, I was for awhile a devoted listener to the Stern show which, between the adolescent fart and penis jokes, was often genuinely funny and gave me a handle, especially after moving to Israel, on American pop culture references. Stern moved his show a year ago to the Sirius satellite network where it became even more sexually explicit.

Howard Stern was fine when he was a North American phenomenon, to catch on the occasional visit to the old country. But Stern in Israel? The Yediot report said that Radio Lelo Hafsaka, 103 FM in the Tel Aviv area, is looking into airing an edited version here late at night. Executives at the radio station said that “financial and commercial differences remain between the sides” and that “it’s is still too early to discuss.”

Does Israel need a nightly dose of Howard Stern’s “unique” perspective on culture and the media? Does it need a chain of restaurants that exploit women to sell barbecued chicken wings? How far will we go in our tawdry ogling and emulation of all things American? I don’t know about you, but I’m almost starting to pine away for the good old days, when there was only one state-run television channel which broadcast in black and white, and where a hot night on the town consisted of falafel with extra hot sauce.

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Listen to "Howard's Hooters" and subscribe to the podcast - here's the link.

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Sites on flights carry information on all kinds of flights, be that New York flights or Australia flights. Their elaborate layout and articles and reviews on time travel even make car rental companies appear more interesting and fun than a New York hotel.

It’s traditional to learn Torah on the Jewish holiday of Shavuot which began this past Tuesday night. Nine-year-old Aviv’s class had a pre-Shavuot student-parent study session at school earlier in the week and my wife Jody and I went. But by the time we walked out, I found myself drawing political rather than religious conclusions.

We assembled in the school library to review several texts from the Midrash that concerned the custom of pilgrimage to Jerusalem. According to tradition, Jews in Biblical times were commanded to ascend to Jerusalem three times a year – for the holidays of Sukkot in the fall, and Pesach and Shavuot in the spring. But wouldn’t all the Jews going on holiday at the same time cause their homes to be left empty and unguarded, open to burglary and pilferage, the ever practical Midrash wondered?

The Midrsah describes several potentially unfortunate cases. In one, the homeowner forgets to lock the door before leaving. In another, nasty non-Jewish neighbors can barely bide the time until the Jewish family’s departure in order to proceed with plans to rob the home.

In both cases, a miracle occurs and the homes are spared. In the first, a snake magically wraps itself around the doorknob preventing entry by those who don’t belong. In the second, God sends angels to Ashkelon who take on the guise of family members to give the home the appearance of being occupied while its owners are actually away.

The stories are simple, charming and on the surface unassuming, seeming to do nothing more than support the Midrash’s main theme: that those who are going out to do a mitzvah cannot be harmed.

Except that they don’t ring entirely true. That is to say if you leave your house unlocked for an extended period, you most likely are going to get robbed. And if you’ve got overtly thieving neighbors, leaving town without any precautions in place and hanging a sign up essentially saying “here are the keys, come on in,” might not be the smartest thing to do. Why is the Midrash, I wondered, teaching what seem to be outright falsehoods?

Don’t be such a grump, you might say. These are kid-friendly stories designed to teach a lesson with a nice pat moral even if the plot isn’t particularly plausible. If so, then why is it that when it comes to contemporary politics, our leaders seem to be struck by the same kind of magical thinking – and this time there are no miracle snakes or angels coming to protect us.

This was the week that rockets returned to Sderot and the western Negev communities that border the Gaza Strip (not far from where we went biking back in February). True, the Kassam attacks have been going on pretty much non-stop since last summer’s escalation which ran in parallel with the Second Lebanon War, but the level of the violence in the past week (140 rockets, one dead, many more injured) was enough to send Israeli troops and tanks back into Gaza in what looks to be a protracted operation.

What struck me as unforgivable, though, was not the inevitable return of the rockets but the utter lack of preparedness that our government showed all along the Gaza border. It’s almost as if the “kids” in our government have been waiting for the kind of magic and miracles the Midrash promised to the Jews making the Shavuot pilgrimage to Jerusalem rather than making concrete plans to take matters into our own hands.  

Since the disengagement from Gaza two years ago, we’ve turned a blind eye as terrorists in the Gaza Strip have smuggled in mortars and guns and Kassams and anti-tank weapons. We’ve watched as Hamas has built, armed and trained a not insignificant army of more than 10,000. That army hasn’t yet mobilized (against Israel at least), though the fighting between Hamas and Fatah forces in Gaza shows that it is certainly ready to roll in a Palestinian civil war. Nevertheless, over the past six years (including before the disengagement), the southern area round the Gaza border has absorbed some 4,500 rockets.

The most high profile destination for those rockets has been the beleaguered border town of Sderot which this week was proposed to be granted the emergency status of a “front line” community (which carries with it various tax breaks) for the first time ever. Along with that change came shocking revelations about the city’s readiness for the next major Kassam salvo.

Of the 58 public bomb shelters in Sderot, only 23 are considered actually usable. The rest lack electricity, ventilation, even running water. The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews pledged $1.5 million to rehabilitate this poor state of affairs. Then along came Arcadi Gaydamak, the Russian billionaire who is the closest Sderot has seen to a contemporary angel.

Last week, Gaydamak poured millions into busing out traumatized residents to hotel rooms in safer places. He then pledged to refurbish the shelters and build the safe rooms that the government has waffled over for so long – critical because many residents, particularly the elderly, can’t make it to the public shelters in the 20 seconds warning they’re given before a missile lands. Last Friday afternoon, Gaydamak offered to fund the cost to the tune of about $50 million. Gaydamak says that there are some 3,500 apartments that need to be reinforced or need security rooms built in them.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz, not wanting to be out trumped by an angel (who just so also happens to be planning a run for mayor of Jerusalem), on Sunday finally committed to building 200 safeguarded rooms a month with construction supposed to begin immediately. Other rules were proposed as well, including cutting the usual red tape involved for individuals wanting to reinforce rooms and approving requests when only 50 percent of the residents in a building agree (today, it’s three-fourths).

But where has the government been for all this time? It’s been a year since a “ceasefire” went into place that stopped the bulk of the bombs from flying over the border. Why has Israel lifted nary a finger to protect the population in Sderot which this week was catapulted back into the front pages?

Perhaps the lesson my nine-year-old son learned this year for Shavuot needs to be recast in a modern context where the “thieving neighbors” were literally given the keys to our old homes (those evacuated during the Gaza disengagement) and, while not robbing us of our possessions per se, have stripped too many Israeli citizens of their freedom to live lives without fear.

Once upon a time maybe God sent snakes and angels. But today, we can’t wait for Russian billionaires with their own political agendas to swoop in and solve our problems. The lesson of modern day Israel is that we are in control of our own destiny despite the sometimes seemingly insurmountable odds and problems. We need to take the basic steps of locking the doors to the homes we have left using modern, practical and thoroughly non-magical means. Only then can we claim to have learned something useful from such a simple, charming and unassuming Midrash.

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The podcast (audio) version of this article can be found here.

Issie Kirsh, a Jewish businessman who has been involved in efforts to build bridges between blacks and whites in post-Apartheid South Africa, has a vision for promoting peace in the Middle East: soft rock hits from the 80s and 90s.

Kirsh’s latest project, an ambitious joint Israeli/Palestinian radio station broadcasting in English to Israel, the West Bank and Jordan, launched in February, 2007. RAM FM, as the station is known, has assembled an international team of broadcasters in its attempt to provide a place where Israelis and Palestinians (who speak English at least) can communicate with each other in non-political talk and news forums.

But first and foremost, it’s about the music. Kirsh’s station, which is a commercial, $2 million privately financed initiative, plays 24 hours of “Adult Contemporary” hits of the past 20 years. While a playlist of Mariah Carey, Celine Dion and U2 may not be everyone’s idea of cutting edge, it does speak to what Kirsh cites as an audience in excess of 500,000 in the greater Jerusalem and Tel Aviv areas who understand English as a second language. Listeners in the north and south of Israel will not be able to pick up the station, which is broadcasting at 93.6 FM. Some areas of Jerusalem were also spotty and a second frequency – 87.5 FM – is being tried out.

RAM FM has assembled a multi-national on air crew. The breakfast show is hosted by John Berks, a South African DJ from Kirsh’s previous effort at using radio to bridge national gaps and foster democracy – a station called Radio 702 operating out of Pretoria. News director Andrew Bolton also moved to the Middle East from South Africa. The mid-morning slot is hosted by Michael Brand, an Israeli, while afternoons find Hayat Alahami, a Palestinian and Barry Hill, an Australian, on the air.

The news teams, under the banner “Middle East Eyewitness News,” will be similarly balanced between Israelis and Palestinians, with all staff needing to be “tri-lingual.” The station has agreements with the Associated Press and Al-Jezeera’s English service to use audio clips in its news reports.

RAM FM draws its name from where it’s broadcasting from: Ramallah, though the Hebrew “Ram” also means “lofty” or “high.” The station is licensed by the Palestinian Authority, not Israel. Kirsh, who has experience in Israeli radio – he was a founder and remains a co-owner of Radio Tel Aviv 102 FM – admits this was a concession. “We knew that getting a license from the Israeli authorities would take years and might be impossible completely,” he said.

It didn’t hurt that Palestinian station manager Mayoon Odeh-Gangat is married to the former South African representative to the Palestinian Authority. Odeh-Gangat met Kirsh while in South Africa and began dreaming up the new vision for on air coexistence three years ago. Odeh-Gangat now lives in the Shuafat neighborhood of East Jerusalem.

RAM FM maintains two studios – one in Ramallah and the other in Jerusalem’s Malha hi-tech park – another concession. “Israelis are not allowed to travel into the Palestinian Authority,” news director Bolton commented at a press conference, and Palestinians without the proper permits are banned from entering Israel. Bolton put a positive spin on such complex realities of the Middle East: he says he’ll use Palestinian reporters to cover news out of the West Bank and Gaza from the Ramallah studios; Israeli reporters will work out of the Jerusalem office. Stringers have been signed on in Cairo, Damascus, Beirut and even Baghdad, Bolton said.

The news, which is broadcast every half hour in the morning and hourly throughout the day, is billed as “independent and impartial.” What does that mean in the turbulent Middle East? When asked whether a suicide bomber would be referred to as a “terrorist” or a “martyr,” Bolton responded that the station would use neither term, simply reporting that “a man wearing an explosives belt blew himself up in a crowded café today.”

Whether that level of neutrality can be maintained during the station’s talk shows – planned to launch in another 6-12 months and the ultimate focal point of RAM FM’s coexistence strategy – remains to be seen. Talk shows will be hosted jointly by an Israeli and a Palestinian. “This will be an opportunity for Israelis and Palestinians, in the comfort of their homes, to gather to talk, possibly to politicians; to question people and to establish some form of understanding of each other's views," Kirsh said.

“We take freedom of speech as a given, but in South Africa, it was not a right from the beginning,” Bolton pointed out. “So we really understand how staying objective and maintaining accuracy will be key to our credibility.”

RAM FM follows in the footsteps of Abie Nathan’s legendary Voice of Peace, which broadcast from “somewhere in the Mediterranean” off a floating studio in international waters where Nathan docked his ship throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The Voice of Peace also played middle of the road Western pop music and broadcast in English.

More recently, the joint Israeli/Palestinian “Radio All for Peace” has been on the air at 107.2 FM for nearly two years now. That station, however, broadcasts primarily in Hebrew and Arabic (with a few shows in English as well as Russian) and makes no attempt to hide an avowedly left-wing agenda.

Kirsh feels that there is room for a station like RAM FM. “All of the existing stations, in both Israel and on the Palestinian side, broadcast news from state run sources. We are the only privately owned commercial station with an independent news operation in the region,” he explained.

The station will rely on advertising for now – Kirsh hopes to be profitable within three years – with syndication of the station’s news and talk show programming planned for the future. Internet audio streaming was launched earlier this month. RAM FM has used Kirsh’s South African connections to line up a number of international advertisers including Coke, Dove, Lipton and Western Union.

It will be interesting to see if local businesses and services from both Israel and the Palestinian Authority choose to advertise. A commercial for an plumber in Tel Aviv followed by one for a trendy café in Ramallah on the same station – now that would be true coexistence!

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A shorter version of this article appeared in the May issue of Hadassah Magazine's "Cut & Post" section.
The audio version of this article can be found here.

Last Friday the Jerusalem Post, as part of a new arrangement to reprint articles from This Normal Life, published my piece “The Royal Mikve,” Jody and my adventure searching for a mikve while on vacation at the Dead Sea. The story, which chronicles a less than modest encounter with the staff in charge of the ritual bath at the Royal Hotel just south of Masada, was first printed on the This Normal Life blog in June 2006 and elicited strong responses at the time for its frank discussion of Jewish laws surrounding sex. But the Jerusalem Post “talkbackers” have taken the debate to a whole new level. In case you missed the piece last year, here’s the link to its page on the Jerusalem Post.

The discussion on the JPost.com website has been divided between folks who were offended by my broaching the subject matter entirely and those who thought me a loony for ascribing significance to the ritual of mikve in the first place.

Baruch summed up the first position succinctly. “So if the whole mikve experience is supposed to be discrete, why is the author sharing the experience with the entire world?” “You should read more Torah before you make your comments,” added Yosef. “I pray that HaShem (God) accepts the author’s t'shuva (repetentance) speeedlisly (sic) and that in the future he will be both more inspired and more discrete,” wrote Mookie. “Do you believe that, as an American, following the law is optional? Is filing taxes optional? The Jews have their own law, the Torah, that we are required to follow as well,” added Yoni.

Then there was Mo who threatened that I was in for a harsh response for not following the laws of mikve down to the letter. “Most of us are not refined enough to perceive how our actions affect our neshamah (our soul),” he wrote. “So the manufacturer (G-d) gave instructions on how to operate this precious equipment. Mikve is just one of the calibrating tools.  In the next world, you will see. Yes, G-d will fix the damage, but it is an unpleasant experience. This isn't a threat, just a fact of faith.”

David J was representative of the opposite tack. In his response, titled “That’s why there is Reform Judaism,” he wrote: “While I applaud the resourcefulness and religious fervor of the author and his wife, in my view it would have been a lot better to simply enjoy their love without feeling guilty. I am glad that my wife and I do not have to deal with those marital constraints while I still am able to feel comfortably Jewish. I hope G-d understands.”

Another talkbacker, A