Let me preface the following rant by saying I voted for the guy. I had great expectations, not quite bordering on messianic, but in that general direction. His oration; the clear, educated and trained mind – especially compared with his predecessor - was lucidly refreshing.

Yes, those of us in Israel were worried that he’d take too soft a stance vis a vis Iran. But, as I wrote prior to the elections, I was sure that those negotiating overtures would come to a quick demise after the Islamic Republic made clear it had no intention of modifying its hard line position.

Ditto on Israel. Yes, there might be some tougher rhetoric, but the bonds between the U.S. and the Jewish state are too strong to fall into any kind of serious crisis.

It is therefore with true regret that I find my support of U.S. President Barack Obama, at least when it comes to our little corner of the world, to have been misplaced. Many of my sublimated fears, the ones I blithely tossed into the dust accumulating under my bed, seem to be coming true.

President Obama’s speech last week in Cairo started out on the right foot. He had promised a message of reconciliation and he was quick to deliver. He was tough on terrorism while speaking passionately about democracy, religious freedom and women's rights in the Arab world.

When it came to the Jews, I was taken aback – in a good way. Here was a U.S. President, appearing in an Arab capital, saying that under no uncertain circumstances Holocaust denial is wrong. “Six million Jews were killed, more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless. It is ignorant, and it is hateful,” Obama told the crowd (to no applause).

Obama went on to say that “the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied. Around the world the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries. And anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust.”

The unstated but undeniable message: the Jews deserve a state because of tragedy, persecution and, in particular, the Shoah.

And that’s where he got it so wrong.

The Holocaust is not the reason we’re here in Israel. It may have been the final catalyst that made the Jewish state viable in the international community, but the connection between the Jews and the land goes back thousands of years. And Obama never once mentioned this historical fact.

What he did was play right into the Arab narrative: that Israel is a foreign entity in an Arab land brought about solely from European guilt. It frames Israel’s existence from a negative: we were killed, therefore give us something in return.

The Arab world makes no bones about rejecting this justification wholeheartedly. “Why should we have to pay for European crimes?” is a common refrain. After all, haven’t Yassar Arafat and all his would be successors claimed for years that there was never even a Jewish presence on the Temple Mount?

And, with no historical connection, just a fading feeling that a safe haven for the Jews might be a good thing, why not give the Jews a less controversial homeland. Like Uganda? Or, as in Michael Chabon’s alt-history novel “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union,” a small, wet and miserable corner of Alaska.

The Zionist movement rejected the Uganda option in 1903 because, as the Jerusalem Post wrote in an editorial earlier this week, “Uganda did not belong to the Jews.”

If this is truly Obama’s position – that Israel is simply payback for genocide - then he is sadly misinformed…and dangerous to boot. He may be striving for even-handedness, but when history is disregarded, then only the most recent positioning becomes valid and this will, as sure as Al-Queida is planning another attack, doom any real prospects for peace.

But Obama proceeded to make it worse. In a line that must have been carefully calculated and worked over for months by speechwriters and policy makers, he stated, immediately after his exhortation against Holocaust denial, “on the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people… have suffered in pursuit of a homeland."

Now, I’m no hard-core right-winger. I will be the first to acknowledge that the Palestinian side has legitimate grievances that must be addressed.

But to even compare the murder of 6 million Jews with the results of a war where the Arab side attacked the nascent state of Israel is unconscionable. Does Obama truly believe this? Despite all his eloquence, this borders on anti-Semitism itself.

At this point in his speech, I was so flabbergasted I could barely expect anything worse. But here it came. His long awaited tough approach to Iran. We expected negotiation, yes, but with the stick of sanctions and just a hint of military action.

Instead what we got was a namby pamb,y brief monologue (a mere 8 paragraphs vs. 25 on the Arab-Israel conflict) on how it would be perfectly fine with the U.S. for Iran to have a peaceful nuclear program as long as it wasn’t military in nature. Right. Isn’t that what Iran has been saying for years to forestall U.N. inspections?

Obama, in a few short paragraphs, gave Iran a free pass, making it clear that the U.S. would take no substantive action, to stop Iran’s relentless pursuit of the bomb (and the missiles to deliver it). Couple that with his delegitimization of Israel’s historical connection to the land, and it’s painfully clear that we are totally and completely on our own.

I was elated at the election of Barack Obama. I had great expectations for a new world order, with a leader who promised, and might truly succeed, in bringing about real change. And still he might. But that change doesn’t look particularly good for the Jews.

To paraphrase the other big message regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (and one that I won't get into here), we are not the obstacles to peace. The president of the United States is.

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I know I’m not the first person to write about these issues. But I would be very interested to hear your comments. Do you agree with my analysis? Do you think I’m over-dramatizing the speech? Or am I hopelessly naive? Please post your comments to the blog and let’s start a conversation.

Ever since I saw the 1965 classic sci fi flick Fantastic Voyage, I have been fascinated with seeing the inside of the human body.

In Fantastic Voyage, a team of scientists in a submarine are shrunk and injected into the body of a man to repair a blood clot in his brain. The team, most notably featuring Raquel Welch as eye candy, has only one hour in which to reach its destination before the shrinking process reverses itself. The submarine faces numerous obstacles as it navigates through mid-1960s cheesy graphics – in particular unexpectedly harsh turbulence while traversing the heart, which forces the crew to induce a temporary cardiac arrest – before successfully completing its mission with, naturally, five minutes to spare.

My own view of the guts and goo of the body, however - other than a furtive glance at my wife’s intestines when I was allowed a quick peek behind the curtain during the C-section of our oldest son - had not been realized…until now.

The Body Worlds exhibit, launched in 1995 to worldwide acclaim (and not a small amount of controversy), opened last month in Israel for a three month run. Body Worlds’ founder, German anatomist Gunther von Hagens, invented a process in the late 1970s called “plastination” which dehydrates bodies and replaces the fat and water with a plastic polymer solution.

The result is a little like embalming but with all the skin removed so you can see the bones, muscles, nerves, and organs up close and personal. The result is both disturbing and engrossing.

The Israeli version of the exhibit consists of 20 full body “sculptures” and 140 individual organs under glass. Each body has a different cut-away. Some show the muscular system with red ligaments attached to bone (the resemblance to raw beef was nearly enough to turn this avid carnivore into a vegetarian). Others highlight the nerves, with white strands extending from the brain to the extremities of the body. The blood vessels and arteries were particularly riveting: I never knew the aorta was so thick and long.

Each body is “open” in a different way: in one, the rib cage was pulled apart so you could see the heart, lungs and stomach. In another the brain was removed. Eyes, tongue and lips were generally preserved “as is,” creating the eerie impression that the body may still be alive in some way.

Ditto on the penises and testicles – Body Worlds doesn’t sugar coat the experience. Interestingly, freed from their protective sack, the testes dangle quite far from the body itself, adding a visceral new meaning to the ribald camp version of “Do your ears hang low?”

Body Worlds deliberately crosses the line between science and entertainment. To spice things up, the bodies don’t just stand at attention as in a museum, but are posed into different “artistic” dioramas. There were a couple of runners flexing their calve muscles; a doctor performing open heart surgery; three bodies playing poker (with a video of the James Bond film Casino Royale, which features Body Worlds, running in the background); and the exhibit’s only female body (von Hagens eschewed using women to avoid appearing voyeuristic) posed like an Olympic torch bearer, inexplicably holding all her innards above her head. The wildest display laid a body out horizontally suspended by cables and sliced into 11 equidistant sections.

The Hollywood quality of the exhibit may give some people the willies, but the Body Worlds team assures visitors that everything on display was donated by explicit consent, so presumably donors knew what they were getting into. Indeed, more than 8,000 people have given signed permission to undergo the process when they die, including disgraced pop icon Michael Jackson (why doesn’t that surprise me?) Von Hagen employs 340 people full time at five laboratories in three countries to keep up with the demand.

Body Worlds’ Israeli home is the Haifa’s MadaTech, a rundown museum of science exhibits, many of which no longer work. The Body Worlds show is so popular – 26 million people around the world have visited – that we wound up having to wait several hours before we were granted entrance (tip: book your tickets online before you come). The exhibit costs about $20 and includes entrance to the rest of the MadaTech.

My wife Jody and I went with 15-year-old Merav and 11-year-old Aviv. Merav found it all terribly gross but nevertheless valuable given that she’s taking a pre-med elective at school. Aviv said he felt nauseous and, after viewing the first couple of sculptures, refused to look anymore and generally skulked through the hour and a quarter it takes to take in the entire exhibit.

While the exhibit is, according to its website, intended for “health education,” Body Worlds has encountered opposition wherever it goes.

In 2007, Manchester, England Catholic church leaders accused the exhibitors of being "body snatchers" and claiming that donation of bodies for plastination would deprive the U.K.’s National Health Service of organs for transplant.

More recently, the Archdiocese of Vancouver criticized the exhibit, saying human bodies are sacred and the show is improper. And last month, a French judge ruled to shut down a Paris exhibit of Body Worlds, writing that exhibiting dead bodies for profit was a “violation of the respect owed to them” and that under law “the proper place for corpses is in the cemetery.”

There’s even a web page set up specifically to oppose the exhibit (see http://dignityinboston.googlepages.com/.

Israel has been no stranger to the controversy either. Writing in the Jerusalem Post, David Brinn spoke to Haifa Chief Rabbi She'ar-Yashuv Cohen who said that, even if none of the body parts in the exhibit originally came from Jewish donors, there's a prohibition against Jews viewing the finished product due to respect for kavod adam, human dignity. Cohen didn’t call for protests but suggested that Israelis “stay away.”

Compounding concerns is the fact that founder van Hagen’s father had been a member of the SS during World War II. Aviad Hacohen, an attorney representing a group of Israeli protesters put it this way in an interview with Haaretz: "Would, by contrast, anyone conceive of an exhibit of the bodies of Jews that were found in the extermination camps in one of the Holocaust museums being accepted with such aplomb in the state of Israel?"

Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger went even further, writing prior to the opening of the show, that if it the exhibit were eventually held in Israel, “Our outcry would reach the ends of the earth.”

Perhaps the most poignant complaint came from Yehuda Meshi-Zahav of the ZAKA organization which goes to great lengths to preserve every part of a body after a terror attack. "As an international organization that takes extreme measures, during daily routine and in crisis, to save and honor each body, and which sees to it that human bodies, which were created in the image (of God), are extended the same treatment worldwide, we cannot agree that things will be different in Israel."

When we went visited, there were indeed few religious visitors (although a couple of haredi men surreptitiously seemed to be having a good time).

The Blum family take is that Body Worlds represents a once in a lifetime chance to explore a world generally hidden from ordinary eyes and is well worth the trip.

And, if you get the chance, watch Fantastic Voyage first to see how far we’ve come in imagining our innards in the last 45 years. You can watch a ten-minute “making of” trailer for the film here.

Other links:
The opening sequence and the last 10 minutes.

Bernard Madoff’s multi-billionaire dollar swindle has been called a “Ponzi Scheme,” referring to a similar scandal perpetrated by Charles Ponzi beginning in 1920. There has been no surfeit in articles on Ponzi, but nearly all have focused on comparing and contrasting Madoff and his would be inspiration.

That’s one reason Chapter 3 in my father’s 1968 biography “Benjamin H. Swig: The Measure of a Man” is so fascinating. The book - which was commissioned by the Swig family to chronicle the life of Benjamin Swig, a well-known banker and philanthropist in San Francisco - describes how Ponzi operated long before Madoff came on the scene.

As a tribute to my father, who passed away just over a month ago on March 22, I am pleased to present here an excerpt from his book.

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To Ben Swig, it was a most peculiar site: this dapper little man with the carnation in his lapel who strode into the Tremont Trust Company [the bank owned by Ben Swig’s father Simon Swig in Boston] one day in 1920, his arms overflowing with wastebaskets, the wastebaskets in turn overflowing with money.

Charles Ponzi had struck it rich. No gold mine was the fountain of his wealth, however, but the dollars of simple men and women withdrawing their life savings, selling Liberty bonds, borrowing from loan sharks, cadging, stealing, appropriating every possible penny that could be pressed into the willing hands of a man already acclaimed throughout Boston as the “Wizard of Finance.”

Ponzi, they said, had discovered money. His plan was simplicity itself. He would buy depreciated foreign currency with U.S. dollars, convert the currency into International Postal Union reply coupons at par, then convert the coupons back into dollars. Result: immediate profit. The coupons were incontrovertibly safe; they were regulated by an international agency which stipulated they could not be sold for less than 28 centimes gold.

The investor was given a tempting choice: he could double his money in 90 days – and many did – or he could hold on and make even more. An organization called the Securities Exchange Company (no relation to the present Federal agency) was set up to accommodate anyone who wished to avail himself of the scheme. But the mere mathematics of the thing staggered the imagination. By a simple process of calculation – of doubling, tripling and quadrupling – it became obvious that anyone joining Ponzi’s operation couldn’t help but become rich.

Of course, it was a swindle – one of the most fantastic, and certainly the most successful fraud of its kind ever perpetrated in the United States.

But it worked. By July of 1920, Boston was literally money-mad. In the first eight months of its operation, the scheme netted Ponzi $15,000,000 from 40,000 people. They were lining up around the block to get in. Ponzi was serving them free coffee and frankfurters as they waited. He was collecting $250,000 a day; his chief assistant, an ex-butcher’s helper, was earning $7,000 a week.

The money that poured into his dingy office at 27 School Street carpeted the floor, overflowed into closets and those unbelievable wastebaskets, lined the vaults in the basement of the million-dollar showplace he had built. He acquired large holdings of Boston real estate, purchased the controlling stock of the Hanover Trust Company, bought out the brokerage firm (Poole’s, which had employed him as a stock boy three years earlier), stocked a cellar with rare wines, and drove around town in a custom-built blue limousine. Wherever the limousine went, Ponzi was mobbed by investors begging him to take their money.

It was Simon Swig’s misfortune to be chosen as one of the bankers with whom Ponzi deposited his ill-gotten rewards. He watched the little “wizard” pyramiding his fortune, depositing more and more money with the bank. He eyed the hysteria that had gripped his adopted city, and worried. Then one day, just on a hunch, he got in touch with a financier friend, Thomas L. Lawson, and asked him what he thought of the Ponzi scheme.

Lawson sent out and bought one of Ponzi’s notes, and discovered to his horror that the lithographed document bore a promise to pay “at any bank” – obviously an impossibility – and not just any bank in Boston, but any bank in the country. Lawson’s advice to Swig was short and sweet: “Get Ponzi’s deposits out of your bank without a moment’s delay!”

Simon Swig moved fast. He wrote a letter to Ponzi, ordering him to withdraw his account and outlining the reasons. “People have come to us and said that your company has given us as a reference,” he added with controlled indignation. “We know nothing about your company, and you had no right to give us as a reference…”

Meanwhile, other minds in Boston were working along the same tracks. One of these was Richard Grozier, publisher of the Boston Post. Suspecting that Ponzi might be a racketeer, the Post assigned one of its top newsmen, William H. McMasters, to get the real story. Between them, the Post and Simon Swig pricked the bubble of Ponzi’s scheme, and the air rushed out with a terrible hiss. Thousands of small investors were caught in the downdraft. Five major banks had to close their doors. For a while, the entire economy of the city was threatened.

The resulting investigation revealed that, in the last six years, the entire issue of postal-reply coupons had amounted to only $1,000,000. Yet Ponzi had already accumulated over $10,000,000 in just a few months. How was that possible? The answer was simple: Ponzi hadn’t bought any postal-reply coupons at all. In the manner of the classic swindler, he had merely used the latecomers’ money to pay off the early birds. Since he kept no books, there was no way of telling where Ponzi was getting his money. When pressed for an answer, the little man had a ready excuse: “Why, I’ve just used the postal-coupon idea as a blind,” he said. “I didn’t want the Wall Street boys to get even a hint of what my real scheme was.

There was no “real scheme,” of course. But the little swindler was as brazen with lies as he was adept in manipulating money. Faced with exposure, he promptly offered to refund all the money taken in, rented an office, and for several days busily handed out cash at the rate of $500,000 a day. Did that end it? Not at all. Before long, new money was pouring in. Police inspectors, assigned to investigate Ponzi, ended up investing in his company. Even after the Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning expose, Ponzi managed to collect more than $5,000,000 in additional investments.

Now, at last, the forces of law closed in on Ponzi. It was discovered that he was an ex-convict who had served time as a forger. The United States Attorney moved for an indictment, and the Post Office, which had been working undercover on the case, revealed the extent of its investigation. Still, Ponzi remained unruffled. Leaving Simon Swig’s Tremont Trust Company, he was asked by a reporter if he would mind disclosing how much he had withdrawn. “No, I don’t mind,” Ponzi replied airily. “Almost $200,000.” It was left to the treasurer, looking with distaste at his unwelcome customer, to furnish the exact total. “It was $185,600,” reported Ben Swig, who as usual had everyone’s finances – including a swindler’s – at his fingertips.

Ponzi was indicted on 86 counts by the Federal government. He spent the next three and a half years in prison for mail fraud. Released, he tried to launch a comeback with a “200 percent profit” land swindle in Florida, was jailed again, and in 1934 deported to Italy. He died in 1949 in a Rio de Janeiro charity ward, blind in one eye and partly paralyzed. When his effects were settled, it was discovered he had left an estate of $75. Few who read his obituary even knew who the little swindler was.

As head of a technology startup a few years ago, one of the most important components of our software development was quality assurance - the process of looking for bugs and reporting them to the programmers to fix.

Like most startups, we were on a pretty tight budget. Hiring a team of two to three QA staff would have cost a chunk of money we didn't have. So I wound up doing the checking myself, on top of all my other founder duties, putting in 80-hour weeks pouring through spreadsheets and bug tracking software.

Would that uTest were around at the time.

uTest is a new Israeli startup with a unique mission: to allow both small companies and more established ones to save money by "crowdsourcing" all their QA needs.

Crowdsourcing refers to the idea that functions that were once performed by an individual or team within a company can be done more effectively - and for less expense - by outsourcing it to an undefined and generally large network of professionals via the Internet.

Using the wisdom of crowds

As the Internet has grown, applications for crowdsourcing has expanded along with it. Wikipedia is probably the best-known example: Thousands of volunteers have collaboratively created the world's most used encyclopedia. Other sites include Threadless.com, which aims to offer more fashionable t-shirts by opening up design to its community members, and CrowdSpirit which is using the "wisdom of crowds" to develop a range of $200 or less electronic devices.

uTest may turn out to the most profitable of the bunch - at least that's what Longworth Venture Partners and Egan-Managed Capital seem to think: they led a Series B funding round of $5 million in December last year. That's on top of $1.7 million the company raised earlier in the year.

uTest is playing in a lucrative field. According to research firm Gartner, software testing is a $13 billion business, and bugs cost US companies some $60 billion.

The uTest service is deceptively simple. Doron Reuveni, uTest's co-founder and CEO describes the process: A company posts a QA request to the uTest platform. uTest then disseminates the request to the 12,000 testers in its community. The company can limit the request to only certain types of testers it wants - mobile, Windows and Macintosh are some of the parameters - or it can browse testers' resumes and select only specific individuals.

Once a group of testers has signed up, the company needing the QA pays only when a bug is found and "approved" by the company. Payment is not static. Reporting a "showstopper" bug pays more than a lower level problem. Testers also earn more based on their past success records. The minimum average payment for a bug, Reuveni says, is $6-$7 but it can quickly climb to $20 or more.

Why wouldn't a company simply take the results of a tester, not approve it and therefore not have to pay a penny? "Companies want good results," Reuveni says. "If they don't approve bugs, testers won't come back. It's all based on the rules of a social community. We sometimes find companies paying the testers even if they reject the bug in order to keep them involved."

A fifth the cost of a QA employee

uTest requires that companies spend a minimum of $1,000 per month (they can of course spend much more if they want). The $1,000 amount usually results in about 50 approved bugs and 25-30 participating testers. It's a great deal, Reuveni explains. "$12,000 a year is a fifth of what a QA person in Israel would cost."

Software companies seem to like what uTest offers. In less than a year, uTest has signed up 50 customers. Clients include 888 (the world's largest gaming and casino company) and Babylon in Israel, Eminent in France, and Move Networks, Xobni and On24 in the US.

The 42-year-old Reuveni, who founded uTest with fellow Israeli Roy Solomon, knows what he's talking about. The Technion-educated Reuveni managed QA teams at companies including Blue Security and Enigma before starting uTest.

uTest doesn't have much competition. Companies can find individuals on sites like eLance and RentaCoder, but there's nothing like uTest's marketplace matching up virtual testing teams and the companies that need them. uTest also runs educational "webinars" and regular "bug battles" to give the testing community a fun break.

uTest can keep costs down, in part, by tapping into a community of testers in developing and less expensive countries. Jeff Howe, author of the book Crowdsourcing: Why the power of the crowd is driving the future of business, points out that more than half of all freelance testers reside outside the United States.

The economic downturn, ironically, may serve to be a boon to uTest. With layoffs and cost cutting spreading across the high-tech world, a solution that actually reduces internal overhead will be hard to resist. uTest seems poised to survive the test of these tough times.

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This article originally appeared on Israel21.org.

You would think that after voting for a Barkat and a Barack respectively in the local Jerusalem and U.S. elections, the logical next choice would be to support a Barak (Ehud that is) in the upcoming Israeli national elections.

Would that it were that easy.

The major parties fielded for the 2009 elections have got to be the worst in years. Which is too bad.

When elections were called after newly minted Kadima party head Tzipi Livni couldn’t form a coalition last year, I initially felt it was the right thing for the country.

Kadima, under the now disgraced Ehud Olmert, has veered significantly from the mandate under which it had been elected. Olmert’s public declarations on how much territory he would be willing to cede in a peace deal with Palestinians are from the consensus.

So elections, I thought, would allow the Israeli public to choose a leader who was more in sync with where the people stand today, one who made it clear which way he or she planned to take the country.

Except that we have no idea what the candidates are for at all, because they simply won’t tell us. A public debate like in the U.S.? Not here.

David Horowitz, writing in last week’s Jerusalem Post, nailed it on the head.

Is the Likud under Bibi Netanyahu committed to expanding settlements in the West Bank, Horowitz asked, or will it limit those to “natural growth,” possibly even proposing its own permanent borders?

Will Livni pick up the negotiations with the Palestinian Authority from where Olmert left off, or will she turn more hawkish like her political rival in Kadima Shaul Mofaz?

What about Labor? Ehud Barak proposed borders at Camp David in 2000 that fell far short than those contemplated by Olmert. They were subsequently rejected by Yassar Arafat and met instead by a protracted campaign of suicide terror. Will Barak now harden his stance?

And where do the candidates stand on the economy – not an insignificant matter in this time of global doom and gloom. Only the Likud – riding on Netanyahu’s tenure as finance minister – has spelled out a comprehensive plan.

But the real question that has to be asked: How did we get to a situation where two out of the three candidates competing for the premiership have already held the position…and were unceremoniously booted out of office? Where is our Barack Obama, a leader who seemingly comes out of nowhere to galvanize the country?

Traditionally, I have voted for one of the big parties. I want to have my say over who will be prime minister and, in Israel’s antiquated party coalition system, where there’s no such thing as U.S. style direct election of the country’s leader, that’s the only way to do it. I’m not beholden to any particular party. Over the past three elections, I have voted for all of them – Likud, Labor and Kadima, in that order.

But when the choices are as dreadful they are, I’ve turned my attention to the smaller parties. Not the ridiculous new pairing of the Holocaust Survivor’s Party with a spin off of the Green Leaf movement which has broadcast commercials of senior citizens pushing for legalization of marijuana.

No, the party that’s captured my interest is the Yeruka-Meimad list.

Yeruka-Meimad is an amalgamation of an environmentally conscious list (“yarok” is Hebrew for green) and the tolerant religious party Meimad. Together they stand for many of the issues I have always cared deeply about.

The green side wants to clean up the country’s increasingly polluted environment. It aims to safeguard national parks, promote clean energy and speed up the development of desalinization plants – an issue that will be of paramount concern when Israelis wake up this summer, after another rainless winter, and discover there’s no water left in the Sea of Galilee to drink.

The religious positioning aims to address the widening gap between religious and secular Israelis. Party head Michael Melchior has already introduced legislation to create a new pluralistic educational track that is neither entirely Orthodox nor ignorant of Judaism. The endeavor has a budget of NIS 34 million. Social issues are also paramount on the platform. As Melchior says, if we ignore our poor, how can we call ourselves a Jewish state?

For someone who grew up in the uber-tolerant and environmentally aware San Francisco Bay Area, the party’s platform is inspiring. Some highlights:

• Reduction of air pollution by 50% during the next four years.
• An agenda to promote Jewish identity through education instead of coercive legislation, including new laws on who can marry whom in Israel.
• A compulsory national service law that “integrates the ultra-orthodox into the life of the state without prejudicing this group’s unique needs.”
• Immediate development of a public conservation policy to reduce energy consumption by 25% with an accelerated move towards establishing renewable energy sources.
• An increase in funding for public transportation from the Transport Ministry’s infrastructure budget to 50% from a woefully inadequate 15% today.
• Higher salaries and better work conditions for Israel’s teachers.

On security, the party accepts the formula of “two states” for “two nations” but demands a commitment to strong security guarantees for Israel as part of any final agreement. With such a plank, Yeruka-Meimad could probably join any coalition that’s formed.

Some have accused Meimad’s Melchior of being opportunist. Since 1999, he’s aligned his party with Labor to ensure a seat in the Knesset. This year, with Labor projected to receive so few mandates that his spot would no longer be “secure,” he jumped ship to join up with Yeruka where he is at the top of the list.

I’m sensitive to that, but I also think that, based on his track record, having Melchior in the Knesset is a real asset, one that we shouldn’t squander. He has consistently been the parliament’s biggest champion of both environmental and pluralistic religious issues. He’s served as deputy foreign minister and deputy minister of education. Indeed, voting for a small party candidate who shares many of your own interests is probably the closest thing we have in this country to proportional representation.

But when I started Twittering about my interest in Yeruka-Meimad last week, the responses I received were overwhelmingly critical. There were the expected right-wingers who told me I had to vote for the National Union party or Lieberman’s neo-racist Israel Beiteinu. But there were also a number of comments that I was throwing my vote away, that Yeruka-Meimad would never pass the threshold to get a seat at the table.

At this point, that’s a risk I’m going to have to take. The party insists that its internal polling shows it will receive up to 3 seats, that the young people’s protest vote that went to the Pensioners last election will go to Yeruka-Meimad this year. If no one were to vote for them, they’d have no chance at all.

If you were to walk around our neighborhood, you’d think the whole country was going green. There are Yeruka-Meimad posters hanging from windows and balconies all across our southern Jerusalem enclave. As soon as you leave, though, it’s the same old story: Bibi, Barak and Livni.

Despite my passion for Yeruka-Meimad, my enthusiasm remains tempered by the bleary future the major parties portend. Perhaps the true test is that in the Hebrew ulpan class I attend twice a week, I learned a new phrase last week that seems ironically appropriate to this election season:

Ha Matzav Midakei Oti. The situation depresses me.

Residents of the southern part of Israel in range of missiles from Gaza can now make phone calls up to 30 minutes to their friends and relatives entirely for free, thanks to a new Israeli startup called PokeTalk. The service, which is already operational in 60 countries around the world, is good for any calls between two phone numbers in Israel's 08 area code.

PokeTalk has been flying high since its launch three months ago. The company, founded by two 25-year-olds in Tel Aviv - Shai Genish and Boaz Bahar - has signed up 70,000 users nearly entirely on word of mouth and viral marketing alone.

The service is the only one on the market that uses voice-over-IP to connect regular phones, not just two computers ala Skype, at no cost to the caller.

As with any good idea, though, there's a catch: calls are limited to 10 minutes. The promotion on Israel's front lines triples that amount.

Ten minutes on the phone is usually enough

Ten minutes (or even 30) may seem like a deal breaker but, says Genish, the average call placed is only two minutes and 40 seconds. And 70 percent of calls from a mobile phone are a mere 80 seconds. "Other than for business calls, 10 minutes is usually more than enough."

PokeTalk is essentially an automated version of the call back systems that were once popular in Israel as a way of saving money. But rather than calling a certain phone number, with PokeTalk you enter your number and the number you want to call on the PokeTalk site. A few seconds later, your phone rings. You pick up and PokeTalk places the call.

I took a test drive and the quality is quite good - better than most voice-over-IP systems like Vonage, Gizmo5 or even Skype.

So how can PokeTalk offer even 10 minutes of talk time for free? On-site advertising. Since you're required to initiate your call from the web, PokeTalk can show you advertisements on screen. That's a whole lot less annoying than some other free phone systems that put 10-second audio ads before a call is connected.

It's also much less invasive than a firm like Pudding Media, which actually monitors your phone calls to serve up targeted ads from its website, delivered by e-mail, or inserted as audio ads. (That company is based in Silicon Valley but was founded by a team of Israeli software managers.)

In addition to advertising, PokeTalk plans to make money by providing a premium service where users can talk for more than 10 minutes, along with other goodies such as voice mail and call transfers from one country to another.

PokeTalk's main phone-to-phone competitor is another Israeli-founded company Jajah, which also places calls between two regular phones. But other than the first call, it's not free.

Free calls originate from 13 countries

PokeTalk is far from profitable - only 50 percent of calls are covered by ad revenue - but the small eight-person company has raised $1.25 million from Maayan Ventures and private investors. Genish says he hopes to be in the black by the end of 2009.

PokeTalk calls can originate from 13 countries - including Israel, the US, Canada and Germany, though notably not the UK - and can be connected to 60 nations, from Kazakhstan to New Zealand. Mobile phones are supported in nine countries.

Of PokeTalk's 70,000 users, 40,000 are in Israel (including 15,000 from Tel Aviv University alone where the company did more active marketing). A viral "refer a friend" program has been successful at recruiting new users too (if your friend signs up, you receive an extra 10 minutes on your next call).

On an average day, up to 7,000 users login and make close to 18,000 calls.

The company has been featured on Israel's Channel 10 news and in The Marker and Globes business supplements. Genish estimates that a series of interviews that appeared in the VoIP Guides online publication led to some 10,000 new users.

The company's current promotion in the south of Israel probably won't generate a significant number of new customers, but it's a noble gesture that helps local residents in tough times.

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This article was originally published on Israel21, a great website whose mission is to "focus media and public attention on the 21st century Israel that exists beyond the conflict." Israel21 reports on Israeli innovations in technology, health, culture, democracy and clean tech. If you haven't visited the site, check it out. (You can also find a bunch of my articles there.)

Our friend Joan called last night just as the news broke that the IDF had begun its ground operation in Gaza. Joan was panicked. She knew a number of families in our neighborhood who had boys in combat units. “Why are we doing this?” she said. “Can’t we pull them all out now?”

My first reaction was detached, though certainly not uncaring. I had been obsessively following the geo-politics of the last week’s aerial bombardment of Hamas. While inspiring in its precision and speed, it was clear a ground operation would be ultimately required for Israel to achieve its objectives. The duration and effectiveness of the operation would in large part depend on internal Israeli decisiveness, as well as how Israel responded to world pressure to submit to a cease-fire. My initial thoughts, then, were more like those of a strategic analyst than a parent.

Joan’s call, though, reminded me of the very real dangers for the Israeli troops now heading into booby trapped roads and hidden bunkers where Hamas terrorists lie in wait. I thought of my own children: 17-year-old Amir who will be drafted as early as six months from now, and 10-year old Aviv who has eight more years to go when, we all pray, there will be no need for any re-occupation of Palestinian territory.

But what choice do we have? Israel has stood by for close to a decade now while rockets have rained down on its southern cities and towns. Children in Sderot have grown up in fear, sleeping in bomb shelters, watching their homes blown up and their friends killed while Israelis around the country feel emasculated and impotent, their government unable (or unwilling) to act.

Now the rockets from Gaza have reached Beersheva and Ashdod. In another year of unabated smuggling, they could conceivably reach Tel Aviv and even the outskirts of Jerusalem. Should we just wait, maybe accept another temporary cease-fire? Our enemies certainly won’t be standing still.

There are many who say Israel cannot win this war. That the result will be just like the ill-fated 2006 war in Lebanon where Hezbollah emerged triumphant and emboldened. That Israel hasn’t truly prevailed since 1967.

That’s not entirely true. As David Horowitz wrote in The Jerusalem Post over the weekend, “Operation Defensive Shield, carried out in the spring of 2002, was a carefully planned and effectively executed attack on the Palestinians' suicide-bomb infrastructure in the West Bank that remade our reality in the years ever since.”

Life returned to normal in Israel not because the terrorists decided to stop trying but because the army continues to operate every single night in Jenin and Nablus and other cities across the territories, making arresting and ferreting out bomb factories. The security barrier has helped too.

That would seem to be the ideal end game for the current operation as well. An end to the rockets (the Gaza equivalent of suicide bombers) along with the ability for terrorists to smuggle in the supplies to make more. Is that achievable? I don’t know. I’m not an army planner or a politician.

The Second Lebanon War had similar goals but failed due to its poor execution (something lame duck prime minister Ehud Olmert still refuses to acknowledge). A new army chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, and a more qualified defense minister, Ehud Barak (politically unloved but undeniably more experienced than his pathetic predecessor Amir Peretz), gives those of us sitting on the sidelines greater confidence in the current operation than during the summer of 2006.

That the current war has been in the planning for months represents a dramatic change from the impulsive leap to engagement that characterized the conflict in the north. So too the diplomatic initiative. The Israel Defense Forces established a YouTube channel with videos of air force bombings of weapon stockpiles, interviews with soldiers and briefings in English. As of Sunday morning Israel time, the channel had received just under 750,000 views.

As I write this, I am aware that my heart is beating faster than normal. My fingers are trembling and my eyesight is blurred after an uneven sleep. I am at once cheering the army on and terrified at what the day will bring. I know I’ll be checking the news obsessively, refreshing Haaretz and the Post and YNET all day, to the detriment of the “real” work I get paid for.

The name for the war in Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, refers to the lead Hanukah dreidels that were popular before the advent of plastic. Poetic but also ironic: you never know on which side a dreidel will end up.

I have no idea how long this war will last and how hard it will be. But I know we have no choice. It has to be done. And this time, we must succeed.

It's been a particularly tumultuous holiday shopping season. With pocketbooks worldwide squeezed especially tight this year, price conscious consumers have been weighing every decision particularly carefully, pouring over reviews posted online by both professionals and other users.

With sometimes hundreds of reviews appearing for a new camera or cell phone, that process can be daunting to say the least. A new Israeli startup hopes to ease the pain.

Two-year-old ViewScore does the hard work of reading the reviews for you and assigns a numerical score from 1-100 to each product so you can quickly decide if the item is for you. To work its magic, ViewScore scans over 1,500 sites, from the big boppers such as CNET, to mom and pop’s like Steve’s Digi-Cams.

ViewScore founder and CEO Ami Zivov says that the technology running behind the scenes is anything but simple. “It’s a very sophisticated system that took us a full year to develop to make it accurate. We’ve published several patents around our algorithms.”

ViewScore starts by crawling the Internet for anything that looks like a review (that part’s not so hard to do – the crawler looks for the word “review” in an article). From there, artificial intelligence and natural language processing parses each review to assign it a score. The technology is “self-learning” – as new reviews are indexed, a product’s score is updated.

Reviews are given different weights depending on who wrote it – professional reviews are ranked higher than the user comments, say, on Amazon.com. That’s intended to generate less biased reviews - a number of less reputable manufacturers and their PR agencies have used blogs to artificially inflate a product’s status, ViewScore spokesperson Uriah Av-Ron explained.

ViewScore isn’t alone in the field. Competitors include ConsumerSeach and Wize. But ViewScore does something the other two can’t – it assigns a numerical score to a product even if the individual reviews don’t display such a number.

Zivov came up with the idea for ViewScore after being injured in a motorcycle accident. While recuperating he wanted to buy a new computer monitor that would be easier for him to use. But a Google search for “monitor” resulted in an unmanageable 10 million results. He plowed through the data for two weeks until he realized that software could streamline the process.

The six person Tel Aviv-based company has landed seed funding so far from private investors. ViewScore is now looking to raise a Series A venture capital backed round. But with money for startups drying up, a key question will be how ViewScore intends to make money.

The first way comes when a customer makes a purchase. Visitors to the ViewScore site can click to order their desired product online from a participating store. ViewScore has cut an agreement with PriceGrabber which provides the store links; the two split revenues.

A potentially more lucrative direction is to “white label” the service where a third party integrates ViewScore’s product rankings into its own site. The Israeli comparison shopping site Zap.co.il is ViewScore’s first retail partner. To see an example, choose the “Electric and Electronics” category, then the link for “Cameras” and scroll down. You’ll see the ViewScore rating for most of the items listed.

ViewScore also has a deal with Korean electronics conglomerate LG’s mobile phone division. Search for the “VX5500” on the LG site, then click the Reviews tab – you’ll see the ViewScore rank there.

ViewScore currently only covers consumer electronics – a criticism leveled at the company by a number of Internet pundits - but with additional financing, Zivov aims to add more categories. “Travel, cars, restaurants, books, we can do it all and it won’t take a lot of resources,” Zivov says.

We’d give that a 100.

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This article originally appeared on Israel21c.

It’s been six years now since I’ve been unable to sleep without pills. It’s not something I like to talk about, despite the big drug companies’ reassuring promotion of sleep medications as a safe and tested long term solution for the some 30% of sufferers around the world who report regular bouts with insomnia.

I didn’t come to sleeping pills lightly. I tried every alternative before settling on traditional meds. I did Chinese herbs, acupuncture, homeopathy, vitamin supplements, SAM-e, melatonin, peanut butter (for the magnesium in it), Valerian, Calms Forte, reflexology, magnets, and more. I exercised regularly. I limited my caffeine intake. Nothing seemed to help except the pills.

My pill of choice has been Zopiclone (sold in the U.S. under the brand name Lunesta). When I first started it, I got a guaranteed 7 hours of sleep. But over time, that dropped down to 4-5 hours. So I’ve had to supplement. Sometimes that meant a half a Zopiclone or an Ambien in the middle of the night. Other times it was a Lorivan (a benzodiazepine also known as Ativan in the U.S.) which acted as a further tranquilizer.

The problem was, the more meds I took, the more tolerance I seemed to develop. Even with all the crazy cocktails I put together, I couldn’t seem to get more than 5-6 hours sleep when I really need 7-8 to feel productive the next day.

I didn’t want to keep upping my dosages. And I certainly didn’t like some of the side effects (Lorivan reportedly can impede memory function, and mixing too much can zonk you out for hours in the morning).

So I decided to go cold turkey. To stop taking the drugs entirely and see what happened. My doctor recommended the approach. He said that maybe once the drugs were out of my system, my sleep cycle would return to a more normal one. It wasn’t going to be easy, he warned me. I might go for days without sleep before finally collapsing into uneasy slumber.

What I essentially planned on doing was the equivalent to checking myself into a personal home-based rehab program. The first step was accepting that I was just as much an addict as Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears (though not to the same drugs of course).

I needed a period of time when my detoxification wouldn’t interfere with my work. That opportunity presented itself following a recent vacation. We returned a day before the beginning of a long weekend in the U.S. That meant my clients overseas wouldn’t be needing me for a few days. It wasn’t a lot of time but it was a good starting point.

I took my pills on a Tuesday night, got a paltry 5 hours of sleep, then jumped into a 24 hour plane journey home the next day. I don’t sleep on planes anyway, so that automatically cut down my sleeping time and gave me an excuse not to lie in bed unsuccessfully trying to snooze.

On Thursday night, after 36 hours of being awake, I finally hit the sack…to no avail. I got maybe 2 hours of restless sleep total. I would have gotten out of bed (the sleep specialists tell you that if you don’t fall asleep within 20 minutes, you should get up lest you begin to associate the bed with negative behavior patterns) but I was too exhausted to move.

Sleep is a critical component to one’s life. It’s the time when the body heals itself and revitalizes the immune system. You can only go so many hours without sleep before you die. That’s why sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture.

In the morning, after 48 hours of not sleeping, my bones ached. The cut I’d gotten on my knee a few days earlier remained stubbornly resistant to repair. I was developing a cough.

Worse yet, I was stumbling when I walked, missing stairs and nearly tripping. I was agitated, alternately short tempered and depressed. It felt like I was in the midst of a never-ending jet lag.

I called my doctor. He said that what I was experiencing was a both a result of lack of sleep and withdrawal symptoms from the meds.

Friday night I finally got some sleep. Not enough - 5 hours – but it was on a par with how I was resting with the drugs. On Sunday night, I slept nearly 7 hours and felt absolutely great the next day. Monday night I dropped to 4.5 hours.

Over the course of the next weeks, I averaged maybe 3 good nights to 4 bad ones. That was worse than in my pill popping days. Nevertheless, I am categorizing my rehab experience as a cautious success. It’s not so much how I feel physically but my emotional response. I have taken a huge step towards healthier living. I have faced the abyss head on and while I haven’t necessarily won, I can hold my head up with pride that I at least tried.

I can’t tell you yet where I’m going to end up. Too many nights of 4-5 hours and I may go back to pills, albeit hopefully on a lower or more sporadic level. For now, I’m muddling through with a lot of optimism…and not a small amount of caffeine.

To my insomniac readers – please feel free to drop me a line with your thoughts (and encouragement).

* * * * *

For more information on insomnia, I recommend Gayle Green’s excellent new book Insomniac. Green writes about her life-long fight with sleeplessness. She’s tried detoxing too, but to no avail. She goes into great details about which pills she’s taken, what the side effects are, what she’s using now. A good read, especially for doctors who must treat their patients (when sleep education in medical school consists of a 4-hour seminar, according to Green).

Another book I've learned a lot from is The Promise of Sleep by Dr. William Dement of Stanford University.

Finally, Crazymeds is a great community site about psychoactive medical drugs. Irreverent, lots of personal anecdotes, and distills medical knowledge about the drugs. Also check out Sleepnet.

Stepping into one of the sleek and shiny new light rail vehicles set to zip through Jerusalem in the next year and a half, it’s hard to imagine the controversy the system’s roll out has engendered.

CityPass, the international corporation that is building and operating the Jerusalem light rail system, recently opened the doors to its hi-tech transit depot and we joined the tour. We learned more than we wanted to know about the facility’s electricity system and the minutiae of how the maintenance staff cleans dusty wheels.

The highlight for us, though, was getting a chance to wander through the train cars themselves. Despite seats still wrapped in plastic, the enormous vehicles - five times the size of a normal bus - were immensely impressive and a stark contrast with the desert landscape around them (the depot is located just west of the northern Jerusalem satellite community of Pisgat Ze’ev).

Each car consists of five articulated sections and can seat 64 (with a total capacity of 250). There are LCD screens to announce stops and magnetic card readers throughout. 24 cars out of a total of 46 have already been delivered so far.

The Jerusalem light rail has a few features not found in other locations, like France and Spain, where CityPass is operating. The vehicles have to contend with Jerusalem’s notorious hilly terrain. And all the windows have been reinforced to be resistant to stones and Molotov cocktails. A controversial security decision has meant that the light rail travels through the Arab neighborhood of Shuafat...but makes no stops.

Nevertheless, visiting the depot and seeing the cars all in one place gives one the feeling of being in a sci-fi flick: could these state-of-the-art contraptions ever roll through the historic but out of fashion center that represents Israel’s capital?

But that’s just the point.

Jerusalem used to have a more vibrant downtown. But in recent years, many of its more upscale shops have relocated to the Malcha Mall and tourists now flock to the Emek Refaim area. Much of the town center has been reduced to a sad medley of hole-in-the-wall shops selling cheap shmatas and rowdy teenagers who haunt the night hours.

That’s why I’m so enthusiastic about the light rail. Upon its completion, Jaffa Road will turn into a pedestrian-only walkway with the new fangled trolleys running down its center.

Freed from the narrow sidewalks and never-ending traffic, the street will experience a resurgence. Already you can see a row of new cafes in the space of a few blocks, flanked by my favorite The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf (the only branch in Jerusalem). A European-style walker-friendly promenade is just the ticket for revitalizing Jerusalem’s core.

Getting there may not be so easy.

Jaffa Road is in the process of being dug up. Large swaths are currently blocked off entirely. Buses have been diverted to adjacent Nevi’im Street which is much too congested to handle the flow. Construction has been painfully slow, leading mayor-elect Nir Barkat to call for the entire project to be stopped and be replaced by high-speed buses.

I’ve already lived through this once. When I was growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, the City’s main artery, Market Street, was dug up for nearly a decade during the building of the BART subway. Businesses folded and Market Street was off-limits for private cars and buses alike.

Eventually, construction was completed and the street now boasts a range of trendy shopping and entertainment facilities. The subway brings in visitors from all over the Bay Area, conveniently and quickly. No one discounts BART’s effectiveness today.

The same will undoubtedly be true for Jerusalem.

A project as grand and complex as Jerusalem’s light rail system has never been attempted before in Israel (the high speed train between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv may eventually top it, if it doesn’t get derailed for the umpteenth time). After a peek at the vehicles that will, hopefully no later than 2010, rattle through town, I remain an enthusiastic supporter.

The just concluded Jerusalem election, while certainly not as important on a world stage as last week’s U.S. presidential contest, was in many ways spookily similar to its overseas counterpart. For those who supported Nir Barkat, who beat his main competitor Meir Porush by a commanding 9 points (52 to 43 percent), the sheer jubilance that erupted across the city (though certainly not in all parts of it) reminded me of what I’d heard from so many friends and family in the U.S. after Barack Obama bested John McCain.

That tolerance had triumphed over extremism. That inclusiveness would now prevail, not sectarianism. And most importantly, that hope, pride and patriotism had been restored - in the case of Jerusalem, at a time when many residents were saying, either outright or under their collective breaths, what one Beit Hakerem resident was quoted by Haaretz as lamenting: that this election would “determine whether I’m staying” in the city.

The resemblance between the two races extended beyond just the similarity in the winning candidates names. One candidate preached change, the other more of the same. One ran a relatively clean campaign, while the other (or his supporters, it’s not clear) spent much of his political capital on negative attack ads.

To wit: I took a walk several days before the election. There were posters claiming Barkat was really a closet leftist; that with only five years in politics he “lacked the experience” to manage such a complex city as Jerusalem. Sound familiar?

Barkat, to be sure, didn’t run a flawless campaign the way Obama did. He flip-flopped on political positions and took pot shots at low hanging fruit (the light rail fiasco, the over priced “Bridge of Strings”). Posters appeared on city streets in the waning days of the contest almost messianically proclaiming him “HaTikva,” a play on words: the literal translation is “The Hope” but it’s also the name of the Israeli national anthem.

But Porush had his own Sarah Palin debacle when he was caught on tape boasting that, following his presumed election, "there would be no more secular mayors anywhere in Israel within 10 years.” Once publicized, that statement more than any others did the job of scaring away any remaining voters still on the fence.

As in the U.S., both candidates were Internet savvy. Their websites were filled with information and video and opportunities to get involved. Barkat’s people sponsored a MoveOn-inspired email campaign where recipients were asked to personalize a letter urging friends to vote and automatically send it to up to 25 others at once. I’m not sure if Porush did the same – after all, many of his supporters are not supposed to be on the Internet at all.

As the campaign dragged on, it became difficult to find a neutral ground. Barkat supporters decried Porush as a religious fundamentalist who would turn the clocks back 100 years. The Porush people painted Barkat as an operator who’d promise anything to anyone for a vote. Both made a desperate effort to win over the city’s swing vote – the national religious public – our equivalent of Ohio and Florida.

Like Obama, an inordinate amount of expectation has now been placed on Jerusalem’s mayor-elect. Obama ostensibly has it easier. With Democratic control of Congress, Obama will be able to push through more of his policies than Barkat who still has to cobble together a coalition with a motley bunch of small to moderately sized parties, each with their own agendas.

These range from the ultra-Orthodox (UTJ and Shas) to the uber-leftist (Meretz) and everything in between (there’s one party with a slate of civic-minded young people, another that got in to push a single issue: easing the traffic jams from the satellite neighborhood of Pisgat Ze’ev). Would that it were as simple in Israel as having just the Democrats vs. the Republicans in power (but then, what fun would that be?)

The new mayor of Jerusalem will not be expected to repair an ailing economy on a grand scale as in Washington, but the creation of jobs, ensuring that the city’s diminishing tax base can cover municipal services, and creating a viable partnership between public and private enterprise are all badly needed parts of the post.

Here too Barkat’s election inspires confidence, for who better to address these issues than a businessman who made the jump from the private to public sector himself. And unlike the bankers on Wall Street who refuse to part with their exorbitant bonuses, Barkat has promised not to take a salary at all.

I know no candidate is perfect. Like Barack Obama, Nir Barkat holds views I don’t necessarily agree with. But I truly believe he will try to run the city like the hi-tech manager he is. I can imagine Barkat appointing a “CTO” for the city as Obama is trying to do for the U.S. Both will push for transparency. Their joint goal is nothing short of restoring the good name of their respective constituencies worldwide.

There’s one area, though, where the similarities between the elections end and the essential Israeliness of ours becomes paramount. This was the first election where my oldest son, Amir, has been able to vote. Four hours after the polls closed, Amir flew off to Poland.

Visiting Poland to experience what Jewish life was like before and during the Holocaust is a right of passage for seniors (and sometimes juniors) in Israeli high schools. It is a life-affirming trip that cements the students’ identity as Jews and as Israelis. The timing this year served to further drive home the fact that the Jews weren’t given the right to vote from the death camps. They weren’t given the right to live.

For us, being able to participate in the building of a thriving community in Israel, as the homeland for the renewal of the Jewish people as a sovereign democratic nation, is not just a privilege, but an emotional and poignant responsibility. Living up to that challenge is our patriotic duty, and casting a vote to shape the kind of society we want to live in, is a critical part of how we exercise that right.

I am proud of my nation, my city and my family for coming out this week to cast a ballot that may at last return hope to Jerusalem, the most important city in the world.

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Next week…we’ll be back to a more normal “This Normal Life” – no more politics (for awhile at least).

I don’t usually write about the same topic two weeks in a row, but, with less than a week to go, the upcoming Jerusalem mayoral elections is so critical that I feel compelled to post again.

Last Friday, the Haaretz newspaper, considered Israel’s version of “The New York Times” (and a paper which I regularly read) published an editorial slamming mayoral candidate Nir Barkat and endorsing “a responsible haredi” (a code word for Meir Porush, the only ultra Orthodox candidate running for the position). Many Jerusalemites like me were outraged.

The reason for Haaretz’s position is that Barkat has come out in support of building a Jewish neighborhood near the Arab village of Anata, at the foot of the Jerusalem neighborhood of French Hill. The area has long been a thorn in the Palestinian’s side: building there would help connect Jerusalem to the satellite city of Ma’aleh Adumim in the West Bank, but it would also have the effect of preventing territorial contiguity for a new Palestinian state.

Barkat says that building this new Jewish neighborhood will help solve the city's "shortage of housing for students and young people." But it’s also a clear ploy to help win over Jerusalem’s “swing vote” – the Modern Orthodox residents who, according to recent polls, are split between Barkat and rival Porush. Given that most of the city’s voters, whether religious or secular, tend to be right wing, it’s not a bad campaign tactic.

Whether you agree or disagree with Barkat’s position, Haaretz - by coming out against the current front-runner in the race - is saying something far more disturbing about Israel’s attitude towards Jerusalem.

Haaretz is, in effect, giving up on Jerusalem. Or perhaps they already have. In the eyes of the Tel Aviv-based newspaper, Jerusalem is already all religious; there’s nothing to do here; no nightlife; it’s too far away; too dangerous; too tense; and ultimately not even worth a visit. The Western Wall, the Old City, the quaint alleyways and gourmet restaurants, the cool summer air, the unique architecture, the spirituality, the Knesset and center of government – all of these are unimportant to the enlightened readers of Haaretz where the heaviness and tension that are part and parcel of Israel’s capital might, God forbid, impede the never ending pursuit of next party.

Indeed, to Haaretz, Jerusalem is not a city at all. It’s a metaphor, a bargaining chip on the geo-political stage to be divided in an eventual peace. Anything getting in the way of that end must be resisted, fought, denigrated. Haaretz couldn’t care less about the problems the city faces, from transportation gridlock to cleanliness and jobs, reverse emigration, religiously-mandated unemployment, and a rapidly deteriorating education system, all areas for which Barkat - in contrast to the other mayoral hopefuls - has clear, step-by-step plans for rapid execution. The quality of life in Jerusalem can go to hell, Haaretz is saying, as long as the next mayor doesn’t stoop to interfere with the inevitable outcome of Oslo and Annapolis.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no right wing extremist. I think Barkat was wrong to inject such a controversial issue into a local election campaign at the last minute. It seems too pandering. And, at least in our liberal Anglo bubble, not an insignificant number of people have vowed to submit an empty ballot on election day.

But it’s not as if mayoral competitor Porush holds a significantly different view. Haim Watzman, writing in the excellent South Jerusalem blog, points to Porush’s campaign site where the haredi mayoral candidate also advocates building Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, although he’d make them ultra-Orthodox rather than ear marked for students and young people as Barkat proposes.

In the end, though, how much influence does a mayor even have over national issues like where to build and which settlements to keep? That’s for the next prime minister to decide along with the rest of the Knesset. And in any case, if Barkat wins – and despite this misstep, I sincerely hope he does – he’ll need to put together a municipal coalition that will almost certainly have to include the left wing Meretz party, which will temper if not entirely block Barkat’s right wing ambitions.

Who becomes Jerusalem’s next mayor is important not only for the city but for the future of Israel as a whole. Listen to what Porush said this week to a private gathering of Belz Hassidim:

“God willing, in another ten years' time there won't be a single secular mayor in any city. Maybe just in some run-down village," Porush told the assembled crowd in Yiddish.

“Dear teachers and esteemed scholars, look at what is taking place here,” Porush continued. “We are currently in a situation where we already have an ultra-Orthodox candidate in Jerusalem, there has been one for five years and there will be another one for another five years. Not far from here, in the city of Beit Shemesh, God willing within ten days there will be an ultra-Orthodox mayor. And so on and so on.”

Someone in the hall made a surreptitious recording of the talk which was widely distributed across all of the news media. Porush later that night visited a street party on Jerusalem’s trendy (and decidedly non-haredi) Emek Refaim Street. When asked to elaborate on his comments, Porush at first denied them entirely. When he learned that an audio recording of his speech was making the rounds, he backtracked, claiming that he had only been speaking about the connection between the national religious and haredi sectors.

Haaretz ends its editorial by urging Labor and Meretz voters to withdraw their support for Barkat. It stresses that Barkat “lacks political wisdom.” I disagree. Barkat has vision. He can, like the hope placed in U.S. President-elect Barak Obama, mend the widening rifts between populations in this beleaguered city. He truly does represent change.

I say to residents of Jerusalem: don’t let Haaretz scare you. There’s too much at stake. We need a mayor who will represent all of the city's diverse population. So, get out to vote this coming Tuesday. And, for the sake of Jerusalem, vote Barkat.

I’ll admit that when I first heard about Twitter, I thought it was the most ridiculous thing in the world. As a journalist and a long time blogger, I take pride in crafting a well thought out story, with a beginning, middle and end, and a common theme running throughout.

So the idea of “micro-blogging” in bursts of no more than 140 characters at a time, as you do on Twitter, seemed to me to be entirely untenable. How could a serious writer work under such artificially composed constraints? Who would read such hastily shot off drivel?

Well, apparently a lot of people. Including me now.

Against all my better instincts, I’ve become a Twitter addict. In the age of Web 2.0, the new definition of addiction has become “someone who presses the refresh button on his or her browser more than 20 times an hour.” Guilty as charged. Twitter now has 2 million users. That's an audience that online media properties of all types need to take note of - and get twittering themselves.

Twitter is part of an overall trend towards providing web users with a constant stream of updated information. A blog – the rage of the last 5 years – seems positively passé today. When you post a “tweet,” as they’re called, you’re likely to receive a comment in return not in hours (as on an “old fashioned” website or email list) but in minutes, sometimes even seconds.

In the U.S., you can set Twitter to send a whole stream of discussion to your cell phone as SMS messages. I tried that for a while; the service is free. At first, the tens of messages I received a day made me feel important. “Look how many SMS’s I’m getting. I must be popular!” Eventually all the checking, reading and deleting got to be too much and I shut if off.

Whether via SMS or on the web, this instant gratification is like a drug. You want more so you post more. There are Twitterphiles who update their status every hour…or less. One person I follow got stuck in the airport while returning home; he tweeted his status in real time. “Plane delayed 30 minutes.” “Visiting the bookstore now.” “Finally pre-boarding business class.”

There’s even a category called the “Twitter novel” where a few new media pioneers are writing a book in real time, posting in 140 character snippets and receiving fast feedback.

Twitter seems to be divided into two classes. Users who post every little detail about their lives (“3:00 AM, finally going to sleep,” “Which flavor of ice cream should I buy?”), and serious users who upload valuable insights and links to web pages of serious interest (TechCrunch, GigaOm).

My Twitter posts have included both. I have asked questions and received feedback that have helped me position my new startup. I learned about web applications provider Zoho though a post from one Twitter member I “follow” sent to another (I wasn’t even in the conversation). On the other hand, I have also tweeted about my enthusiasm for the new season of Heroes (the latter resulted in a flame by a disappointed fan) and who has the best ice coffee (hint: it’s not Starbucks).

It’s not just Twitter, of course, that’s changing the face of web interaction. Social networking services of all kinds allow you to update your status and broadcast it to your friends. I can track my daughter’s moods from what she posts on Facebook. One time she wrote “I hate her!” I instant messaged her. “Who do you hate?” “Don’t ask me,” she quickly replied, “or I’ll ‘de-friend’ you.”

Facebook, in particular, is also a godsend for finding old friends. I have re-connected with people I knew from high school, college and various projects I’ve been involved with over the years. LinkedIn, a business-focused social network, is even better for finding out what old colleagues are now up to. Other services include Dopplr (for reporting where you’re traveling) and Tumblr (for quickly tossing online a stream of the pictures, videos or websites you’re looking at).

On both Facebook and LinkedIn, there are “groups” that allow you to mass message other participants – I’m a member of “Jerusalem Web Professionals,” ”Six Degrees of Jewish Separation,” “Guerrilla Marketing Tips for Small Businesses,” “Israel High-Tech” (which boasts an impressive 3,500 members), and “Cool Jew: The Ultimate Guide for Every Member of the Tribe,” among others. When I put together my indie music podcast, I use my MySpace ID to contact the bands.

With all the information flowing this way and that, you’d think that the noise pollution on the web would have reached unbearable heights. At what point do you have to ask, “Who really cares what I’m doing at every hours of the day?”

An article last month by Clive Thompson in the New York Times suggests that people do care.

Thompson says that social scientists have given the sort of incessant online contact that Twitter and Facebook engender a name: “ambient awareness.” It is, Thomson writes, “very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye.”

Thompson goes on. Each little update is insignificant on its own. “But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating.”

Twitter can even be seen as a partial solution to social isolation. Robert Putnam, in his book “Bowling Alone” describes a world in which the mobile workforce requires people to travel more frequently for work, leaving friends and family behind. Ambient intimacy becomes a way to “feel less alone.” And the kind of “weak ties” you have on social networks can actually help you solve problems more efficiently.

Thompson continues: “If you’re looking for a job and ask your friends, they won’t be much help; they’re too similar to you, and thus probably won’t have any leads that you don’t already have yourself. Remote acquaintances will be much more useful, because they’re farther afield, yet still socially intimate enough to want to help you out.”

So far, I’m enjoying the new world of ambient intimacy. But I’m always looking for more friends ☺ If you’d like to join me, my Twitter address is http://twitter.com/brianblum.

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This article originally appeared on the AimGroup.com site where I blog about trends and developments in all things interactive media - check it out: www.AimGroup.com.

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Other social networking resources you might enjoy:

15 Things You Should Never Do on Facebook
Twitter Facts
The 7 Twitter Types

I just received my absentee ballot for the upcoming U.S. elections in the mail and I’m psyched. Yes, I know that some critics will question whether an American living outside the country has the moral right to vote for a president of a country in which he is no longer living. But I plan on exercising my democratic right. So, here’s my take on U.S. politics – from an Israeli point of view.

First of all, it’s clear – even from here – that this November’s presidential elections represent a perhaps unique opportunity to steer the U.S. in a new direction, one that can help move the country away the political, social and economic animosity that has increasingly divided Americans. Both candidates know this – from Barack Obama’s repeated calls for “change” to John McCain’s positioning as a “maverick.”

On the international stage, the world is at a crossroads. From the war in Iraq to the potential of not only a nuclear Iran, but nuclear armed terrorists who would be even less afraid of using weapons of mass destruction. Al Qaida, Hamas and Hezbollah are anything but on the retreat. Terror in Pakistan, India and Afghanistan is back in the news. Whichever candidate wins in November will have no choice but to address these threats quickly and decisively.

The catastrophe on Wall Street is also waiting for the kind of guidance only a new president can provide. As we all know now, the credit market’s stupendous decline is no longer just a U.S. domestic issue (for the Israeli perspective, just take a look at how the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange has crashed along with the rest of the world).

No doubt, the candidates will have a lot on their plates this fall. But to read the news in Israel, you’d think that there was only one issue of importance on the agenda: Who will be better for this country? Israelis are not totally off base here. Obama and McCain, not to mention vice presidential candidates Sarah Palin and Joe Biden have jumped through hoops to address all the major Zionist talking points, with each trying to one-up each other in terms of their support for the Jewish nation.

Israelis on the right wing side of politics (which includes a large percentage of Anglo immigrants here) tend to be pro-McCain, citing his experience and a more hard line approach to terrorism. They decry Obama’s naïveté and his repeatedly stated eagerness to meet with Iran and other totalitarian enemies, in contrast to McCain’s policy of continuing the Bush doctrine of isolation.

Yes, Obama would probably have a tete-a-tete with Iranian president Ahmadinejad, but my guess is that it would go nowhere and Obama’s foreign policy will quickly look much like McCain’s. And another 9/11 event – God forbid – would see either candidate responding in a similar fashion.

On the Israel-Arab peace process, Obama would be hard pressed to demand radical concessions from the country (the pro-Israel Congress wouldn’t let him). And the assumption that liberal Democrats are tougher on Israel than Republicans is not necessarily grounded in reality. Let’s not forget that Bill Clinton was a great friend of this country while the Annapolis process, initiated by George Bush, has bore little fruit and even catalyzed outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert into making far-reaching – and in my view irresponsible - statements essentially giving away the store that will brand any future prime minster (whether Livni or Netanyahu) as backtracking on a publicly stated "agreement."

Ultimately, though, my take is that there’s just not that much difference between the candidates when it comes to foreign affairs. A little window dressing here, a rallying cry there. What’s really important is domestic U.S. politics. And that’s where I think Obama trumps McCain.

I truly believe that Obama’s mantra of change will make a difference. Even if it’s just psychological, the U.S. – and the world - needs that message to begin the process of healing. And in terms of other domestic U.S. issues – from a woman’s right to choose and funding for sex education and birth control, to environmental policies and the teaching of intelligent design in schools – I favor Obama’s stance.

And then there’s Sarah Palin. I’m sorry but what was John McCain thinking when he nominated a small town mayor with a scant two years as the governor of a state with the third smallest population in the U.S.?

Palin effectively destroys the Republican claim that their team has a lock on experience. Palin says that she can be effective in foreign policy because Alaska shares borders with two countries. Has Canada ever gone to war with the United States? Have there been any military conflagrations between Russia and Alaska since Palin was elected? Give me a break.

When it comes to her own education, Palin’s personal record is pitiful. Four semesters in community college, while bouncing back and forth between colleges in Idaho, Hawaii and Alaska – compare that to Obama’s Ivy League pedigree and subsequent legal practice. I’m not saying that being a lawyer is necessarily an asset, but it at least means that you’re reasonably smart and have completed a rigorous program of graduate studies.

I could go on and on – from the beauty pageant winner to gun toting hockey mom to her support for the “Bridge to Nowhere” – is this really who you want a stone’s throw away from the presidency when the Republican nominee is 72 years old and not in the best health? Obama’s pick for vice president, Joe Biden, by contrast, rounds out the relative inexperience in Obama’s record, is one of Israel’s staunchest supporters, and has 36 years of distinguished service in the Senate.

This year’s U.S. presidential election stands to be one of the most critical in years. However, if all the heaviness of the decision making process is making you feel a tad morose, lighten up. Check out the Sarah Silverman (pro-Obama) and Jackie Mason (pro-McCain) videos that are circulating around the web. Whoever’s got the funnier clip, vote for that candidate.

Now, that’s wasn’t so hard, was it?

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What do you think? I welcome your comments - just click the Leave Comment button at the bottom of this post.

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.