The spacing is different on this email-use the control on the bottom of the email and These Jewish Artists Transformed Paris and This Is Judaism, Stop Apologizing! by Rabbi Benjamin Kahane and 9 Things To Know Before Visiting Captivating Tel Aviv and Interactive: How the U.S. Population Has Changed in 10 Years, by State
Yehuda Lave is an author, journalist, psychologist, rabbi, spiritual teacher, and coach, with degrees in business, psychology and Jewish Law. He works with people from all walks of life and helps them in their search for greater happiness, meaning, business advice on saving money, and spiritual engagement.
9 Things To Know Before Visiting Captivating Tel Aviv
I recently had the opportunity to chat with Dr. Christine Wilson, former education specialist at the Walworth Barbour American International School in Israel. Wilson lived in Tel Aviv for three years while she taught at Walworth Barbour. She loved the warm, welcoming Israeli culture; the long and varied history of the region; the beautiful beaches; and the tantalizing cuisine.
This intriguing cosmopolitan city has captured the hearts of visitors who come for the food, the beaches, and the friendly citizens who immediately treat you like family.
Here are nine things to know before visiting this captivating city on the Mediterranean coast.
1. Spring And Fall Are The Best Times To Visit
"The best time to visit is in spring or fall. The weather is beautiful, and it is not too crowded," said Wilson.
Spring (March and April) and fall (September through November) are the best months to visit if you are looking for temperate weather and off-season prices. During the summer (May through August), you'll encounter throngs of beachgoers looking to perfect their Mediterranean tan. The winter can be crowded as well, since it's the time when many Northern Europeans seek an escape from the cold. Temperatures in Tel Aviv range from a low of 49 degrees to a high of 87 degrees, so the weather is pleasant almost all year long.
There is an 8.7-mile stretch of beach along the Tel Aviv shoreline where sun lovers and outdoor enthusiasts can walk the long promenade, lounge on the beach, or sip a beverage at one of the outdoor cafes.
Each of Tel Aviv's beaches has its own flavor; there's sure to be one that's right for you! Check the Visit Tel Aviv beach page for information on the more than a dozen area beaches. Keep in mind that some beaches are limited to people of a particular gender on certain days due to religious beliefs. As a tourist, you are expected to respect these restrictions.
"For swimmers, riptides can be especially dangerous on the Israeli coast, and tourists need to know the flag system for warnings that mark the beach swimming areas and whether or not you can go in at all," Wilson cautioned.
Israel's beach flag system includes a red flag that indicates dangerous swim conditions, a black flag that indicates swimming is not allowed, and a purple flag that warns about jellyfish. However, when the white flag is flying, you are free to enjoy the beautiful Mediterranean waters.
A must-stop foodie destination is the Carmel Market. The vibrant market is lined with stalls offering gorgeous fruits and veggies, spices, and other items. You will encounter tourists and locals winding their way through the crowds, and your senses will be delighted with the sights, sounds, and aromas. Some of Tel Aviv's trendiest eateries can be found at this market, too. Stop at a bakery for some warm, cheesy breadsticks; lunch at a cafe for a kebab; and sip a locally produced beer at a pub. You could easily spend a day here, happily shopping and munching away.
Wilson's favorite market, however, is the Sarona Market, with its stalls that offer some of the finest meats, cheeses, and wines in the city. The market's restaurants serve up traditional and inspired local dishes that both look and smell amazing. You will find an eclectic selection of cuisines from the region and plenty of happy, satisfied patrons.
Be sure to enjoy a traditional shakshuka — creamy eggs poached in a tomato sauce flavored with olive oil, peppers, onions, and garlic and spiced with cumin, paprika, cayenne, and nutmeg — while you are visiting. You will remember the culinary experience for years to come!
"I enjoyed biking in Israel. I biked to work daily — 24 miles a day on farm roads through orange orchards," Wilson recalled.
The busy city streets and backcountry roads of Tel Aviv are the perfect places to bike. The city makes biking easy by providing bike lanes on all major thoroughfares. They also operate Tel-O-Fun, a bike ride-sharing program. You'll need to sign up for an annual rental; however, the cost is not prohibitive if you are planning on riding around the city for a week or more.
5. Read Up On Judaism Before You Go
Wilson recommended doing some research on Judaism before a trip to Tel Aviv.
"Judaism defines everything in Israel. Having a basic understanding of the religion will give you insight into how the people live and how the country operates," she said.
For example, Yom Kippur is an important Jewish holy day.
"During this official holiday, businesses nationwide close at noon, and there is virtually no traffic on the streets except for emergencies. As the sun sets at the beginning of the holiday, airports, border crossings, broadcast stations — the entire country suspends work for about 30 hours," said Wilson.
Visitors should note that on these holidays, everything may be completely shut down, leaving the unprepared without dining or transport. However, these times of celebration can also be an opportunity for lots of fun.
It was at this time that I joined a group of enthusiastic bikers to ride from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. It was a downhill ride for most of the way on highways that were empty of all vehicles except for two- or four-wheeling bikes or skateboards," Wilson recalled.
Wilson emphasized that there is a shopping adventure in Tel Aviv for everyone.
The Dizengoff Center is an iconic shopping destination with a dizzying array of shops, restaurants, and entertainment options.
Shenkin Street is the place to go for the trendiest shopping spots. Here you will find classic, high-end name brands alongside Israeli designer boutiques. This is the place to shop if you are looking for something out of the ordinary — something nice to remember your Tel Aviv adventure by.
Tel Aviv's newest shopping destination is the TLV Fashion Mall, home to other popular name-brand stores.
Jaffa, also known as Yafo, is an ancient port city and the oldest part of Tel Aviv. With buildings tightly packed together, Jaffa is a tangle of narrow streets, hidden courtyards, and small shops. The neighborhood is a mix of Jewish and Arab peoples living and working together in harmony. You will find great restaurants serving a wide range of Middle Eastern cuisine plus unique shops and galleries tucked away along the passageways.
After exploring the area, find an outdoor seat at a cafe by the water, order your favorite libation, and watch the beautiful sunset for a picture-perfect evening.
8. Make Time For A Day Trip To Caesarea
Less than an hour north of Tel Aviv is Caesarea. This historic coastal city was originally a Phoenician settlement, and then a great Roman port city. Caesarea is known for its archaeological dig, the remains of a hippodrome (a large Roman amphitheater), and its beautiful historic port.
Wilson highly recommends visiting the beach area of Caesarea Maritima as well.
"There are museums, wonderful restaurants, and a beach full of Roman ruins. It's not to be missed," she said.
9. You'll Love The Welcoming Culture
You've probably heard the Hebrew toast L'Chaim, which translates to "To life." Life in Tel Aviv centers on family, friends, and celebrations. The culture is warm and inviting, and you become part of the family as soon as the introduction is completed.
"On Friday, four of my colleagues and I would bike back from school directly to the beach in Herzliya, where we would cool off in the Mediterranean and then get beer and chips with hummus at one of the beach cafes at Rainbow Beach to celebrate the beginning of the weekend," Wilson recalled.
Celebrating with friends over a meal is an important part of the culture in Israel.
An adventure in Tel Aviv is the trip of a lifetime for some, and a yearly pilgrimage for many. With its beautiful beaches, amazing cuisine, and wonderful people, the city has become a popular destination for travelers of all ages.
RABBI BINYAMIN ZE'EV KAHANE
Parashat Dvarim
This Is Judaism, Stop Apologizing!
By western standards, the book of "Dvarim" would have to be defined as an ultra-nationalistic doctrine. Its concepts are the very opposite of liberal western concepts. Its laws are illegal by western standards. The book is based on conquest. Stressed over and over again is the uncompromising commandment to conquer the land of "Canaan" from the gentile nations who have lived there for thousands of years, and to change the name to "Eretz Yisrael".
If this isn't enough, we are even commanded to disinherit (to expel), and if necessary to annihilate the inhabitants of the land. This is an inseparable component of the positive commandment of "settling the land".
The Book of "Dvarim" also centers around the choseness of the Jewish Nation. The concept appears most prominently in Parashat Vaetchanan (7: 6-8), in Parashat Eikev (10:15), Parashat Re'eh (14:1-2) and almost all other parshiot of the book. This "ultra-nationalism" continues right on through to the book of Joshua and beyond.
Judaism is not a Supermarket!
We want to now delve into the "morality" of all this. We do not do so in order to make the Torah more palatable for all the non-believers and Hellenists around who simply reject the book of "Dvarim" as they do the rest of the Torah, considering it primitive and racist. Rather we direct our words to G-d fearing Jews who understand that the Jewish Nation is dependent on the Torah, want to fulfill it, and ask all the same: These are the enlightened traditional Jewish ethics and values that everyone speaks about? This is the Jewish morality we so often hear about: Conquering, expelling, chosen people?
The answer is yes. What can one do when the "traditional Jewish values" that so many Jews speak of simply do not exist! Do not exist? There is no such thing as traditional Jewish ethics and values? Of course there is! But they are something entirely different. At the core of Jewish ethics and morality setting in apart from the ethics of mortal man is the concept of the acceptance of the yoke of heaven. That is, we DO NOT pick and choose the "merchandise". First and foremost, we accept upon ourselves the values of Hashem WITHOUT ASKING QUESTIONS. Only then do we "check the goods". While it is true that in the world of business one does not buy until he examines the product, the mitzvot and concepts of Hashem are not a business negotiation. They must be accepted unconditionally. Thus it is written, "It is better than all other goods" - for it is a product that one does not "check" before "buying".
Book of National Policy
The Book of "Dvarim" is the national policy guideline for the Jewish Nation. It is the morality that G-d conveys to us on subjects connected to Israeli nationalism. If someone wants to call it "ultra-nationalism", so be it, for it is true Jewish ethics. It is not a system of values that is subject to change according to the whims of one generation or another as another passing fad, but rather it is an eternal morality that we, our fathers and our forefathers clinged to for thousands of years. This value system withstood all the passing tides of the past thousands of years, while modern western culture which evolved during the last one hundred (100) years will melt away as did its "enlightened" predecessors: Greek, Rome, Assyria, Babylon, east and west, of one generation or another...
No Guilt!
Precisely today when the sabotaging of all Jewish concepts are intensifying; at a time when the so-called "national" camp is non-existent, it is an obligation to read the parshiot in the Book of "Dvarim", and in particular "Ekev", to strengthen our "emunah" in these authentic Jewish concepts. We must do so in order that we, the spiritual right side of the spectrum, can speak our piece clearly, unequivocally, and without guilt: The Almighty is stronger than all the nations, and if we believe in Him and fulfill His difficult "immoral" mitzvot, so to speak, we shall overcome our enemies (both political and cultural), and re-establish the Torah Republic that we have dreamed of for 2,000 years!
These Jewish Artists Transformed Paris
Chagall, Modigliani and Soutine were just a few of the Jewish artists to find liberation in the French capital. Two new Parisian exhibitions celebrate the École de Paris
"We were a band of children and scholars from the 'heder,' exhausted from long years of analyzing talmudic texts. Having only just taken up pencil and brush, we immediately started dissecting not only the world around us but ourselves. Who were we? What was our place among the nations? What was our culture? And what should our art be?" declared avant-garde artist El Lissitzky in 1923, writing in the newspaper he started during his studies in Berlin.
The critic Pierre Jaccard wrote: 'Not only do Jews lack a sense of color, but also a sense of form. The Jewish race has always lacked talent for the plastic arts'
This was a nonhomogeneous school in which styles, influences and forms intermingled, and it dominated the Paris art scene from the early 20th century until the onset of World War II.
"Paris was the only place where it was possible to melt different streams … to mix a modern cocktail of Viennese psychology, African sculpture, American detective stories, neo-Catholicism, German technique, Italian nihilism. Paris was the 'Internationale' of culture," wrote American critic Harold Rosenberg in 1942, in the monthly Partisan Review.
This was a cosmopolitan ferment unique in the history of art. Among those streaming to Paris, many were Jews from towns in Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire. Bulgarian-French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva wrote in the book "Strangers to Ourselves" that for intellectuals and artists, the exit to freedom was "an eruption of repression, which was expressed in crossing a border."
"'Paris as a School,'" says curator Pascale Samuel in a phone interview, referring to the exhibit title, "is the way in which the artists from Eastern Europe, who aspired to social, political and religious emancipation, saw the city – those for whom the path to an artistic career had been blocked because they were Jewish, because of the 'numerus clausus' or because of a ban against living in the big cities. In Paris, they sought freedom to create, modernity and an exposure to new artists. Their arrival in the city was an exit from the ghetto to the varied communities of Montparnasse."
How does this exhibition differ from many past exhibitions about the School of Paris? Right now, there's also a small exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art called "Visiting Master: Amedeo Modigliani, Among Friends."
"The 'Paris as a School' exhibition focuses only on Jews who were an integral part of the Paris school, and mainly on those born between 1880 and 1885, the generation that arrived at the beginning of the century, before 1915, and constituted the 'first school.' The war that erupted in 1914 changed their lives and helped their integration – mainly artists such as [Ossip] Zadkine, [Moïse] Kisling, [Louis] Marcoussis, who joined the army as part of [a Polish company in] the Foreign Legion and at the end of the war received French citizenship."
Pascale Samuel, from the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris.Credit: DR
Yiddish in the corridors
About 200 artists, most of them foreigners, occupied La Ruche at the beginning of the 20th century. It was a legendary building in the Passage de Dantzig, built in 1902 by Gustave Eiffel, with 140 studios. "Yiddish reigned in the corridors and between the floors," Samuel recounts. "In 1911, Marc Chagall arrived in Paris and settled there together with sculptor Zadkine and artists Michel Kikoine and Chaïm Soutine. It is said that Soutine, the native of a small village in Belarus, knew only Yiddish and it was in La Ruche that he learned a few new words in Russian."
Chagall was born to a Hasidic family in a town near Vitebsk in the Russian Empire (today Belarus). However, because he was Jewish, he was not accepted to the Imperial Academy in Saint Petersburg but only to the drawing school of the Imperial School for the Preservation of the Arts. In Montparnasse, he became friends with writer Blaise Cendrars and poet Guillaume Apollinaire, and spent his days studying in the galleries of the Louvre in front of works by Eugène Delacroix and Gustave Courbet.
When he returned to Russia in 1914, World War I broke out, followed by the Bolshevik Revolution. He was forced to remain in Vitebsk, where he started an art school with artist Kazimir Malevich, one of the leaders of the Russian avant-garde. Only in 1922 did Chagall return to Paris, where he became a great success.
Most La Ruche artists were not preoccupied with Jewish folklore, but the artists Yosif Chaikov, Marek Szwarc and Henri Epstein – all Eastern Europeans who had moved to Paris – founded a journal with the Hebrew name "Mahmadim," showcasing "the Jewish style in the plastic arts."
Before the arrival of the Jewish wave, the French painter Georges Braque and Picasso had invented Cubism – a revolutionary style for its time that influenced disciplines such as architecture and music. The Cubists rose to prominence with the support of the German-Jewish art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. The sculptor Lipshitz was also influenced by Cubism, while the Expressionist Soutine impacted a range of Futurist, Cubist and Abstract artists. In response to the monochromaticity of Cubism, in 1912 the Ukraine-born Jewish artist Sonia Delaunay exhibited paintings emphasizing bright colors and light.
But the influx of Jewish artists into Paris, who were a kind of "enclave of the other within the other," according to Kristeva, also provoked waves of antisemitism typical of the nationalist movements of the 1920s. The art world wasn't spared. For example, in the July 1925 edition of Mercure de France, the critic Fritz R. Vanderpyl asked, "Is there such a thing as Jewish painting?" He called on his readers to visit all the halls of the Louvre and to witness that, "except for one painting by Pissarro – the son of a Portuguese Jew – there is no such thing as Jewish painting at all."
The critic Pierre Jaccard wrote in the same edition: "Not only do Jews lack a sense of color, but also a sense of form. The Jewish race has always lacked talent for the plastic arts. They are the only race in the world that has left no trace of plastic artistic activity."
Claims of a lack of talent that is "typical of the Jewish race" failed to hide the envy of certain French artists, given the growing success of Jewish artists such as Soutine, Pascin and Lipshitz.
And so, the "School of Paris" was born, in direct response to the various attacks, referring to all those foreign artists who flocked from all over the world to Paris and saw it as their school.
The second exhibition at the Paris museum, "Hersh Fenster and the Lost Shtetl of Montparnasse," is a kind of memorial to 84 Jewish artists, also members of the School of Paris, who perished in the Holocaust in France. Only a few of their works have survived.
Hersh Fenster, a Galician-born Yiddish journalist who came to Paris in 1925, worked as the secretary of the writer Sholem Asch and wrote in Yiddish magazines about the development of contemporary Jewish culture. In the late '30s, when tens of thousands of Jewish refugees who had fled the Nazi menace arrived in France, he opened Foyer amical on Rue des Rosiers (in the heart of the Jewish Quarter), which served as a meeting place for refugees from Central and Eastern Europe, including many artists.
The humble spot operated a canteen, and a small hall was used for lectures, concerts and celebrations. At the outbreak of World War II, Fenster was arrested by the Vichy administration, sent to labor camps for two years but managed to escape and flee to Switzerland.
In the book "Undzere farpainikte Kinstler" ("Our Martyred Artists") that Fenster self-published in Yiddish in 1951, he recalled the vanished community. For the introduction to the book, Chagall – who found refuge in the United States during the war – added an impressive poem.
After careful research, Fenster tracked down the names and works of 84 Jewish artists who perished: Not only those like Soutine and Otto Freundlich, who gained recognition, but also many whose artistry was cut short and only a small part of it is still held in private collections or select museums around the world.
In honor of this exhibition, the book by Fenster, who died in 1964, was translated from Yiddish into French. The author's son, Ariel, who continues his father's research, made his private archive available to the museum.
Asked if there were important artists among the 84, Samuel notes that there were important but not particularly well-known artists among them, "such as Jacob Macznik and David Brainin. Some were recognized in their countries of origin after the war. For instance, the Czech Georges Kars, or the Hungarian István Farkas. What's so special about Fenster's careful research is the presence of oral and written testimony about other artists they knew."
