A few days ago I called the director of a Jewish cultural institution in one of Western Europe's more liberal countries, in order to request that he send me some press information and photos by email. I gave him a Y*hoo! e-mail address that I use exclusively for work.

He, in a surprised tone: "You don't have a work email address?"

Me: "Er, no. I do have an address from my ISP that's connected to Outlook, but it doesn't have enough space to handle heavy attachments."

He: "Israel never ceases to surprise me."

Thursday night I was at the Dvir Gallery, visiting a friend who works there and sorting through some photos by Adi Nes (whom I interviewed today for an upcoming article), when a blast from my New York past walked in the door. It was Ashkan Sahihi, an Iranian-born, lapsed Bahai, Frankfurt raised, New York-based photographer. I hadn't seen Ashkan in nearly five years, not since Josh Harris's legendary "Quiet" party in Tribeca.

Those were the days when a thirtysomething dot.com millionaire could spend $2 million of his own money on a week-long happening in a five-story industrial space in lower Manahattan. There were video installations showing a loop of infamous disasters or destructive events (Chernobyl, the bombing of Hiroshima, Mt. St. Helens), a shooting gallery (with live ammunition), live fetish performances featuring many rolls of industrial plastic wrap and a rather uninhibited Argentinian, DJs from Twilo (then the hottest club in town), a room in which capsule-like bunk beds had been built for volunteers who lived 24/7 on camera - including showering and relieving themselves in a bizarre translucent installation set up in the middle of the room - for the duration of the party, there was unending free booze and unlimited catered food (poached salmon and wild rice, anyone?).

The fact that the party was only for those who knew the password that got one past the forbidding 150 kg security guards sitting at the unmarked entrance made us all feel like hyper-cool beings, of course.

And then there was the holy-of-holies - the VIP room. It was there that I met Ashkan, whose Drug Series portraits lined the walls, providing an endless source of conversation. Drinks in the VIP room consisted of innocuously sweet but deadly marijuana and opium infusions, served by some young women who were dressed in black leather fetish outfits. They made everyone in the room very, very mellow.

For me, Quiet absolutely symbolizes the insane decadence of the final months of the dot.com boom. Within a year a fair chunk of the people at that party were unemployed; Josh and his ex-girlfriend Tanya were dissecting the failure of his company and their relationship on a long (long) and bitter (so bitter) thread on a site called fuckedcompany.com; and the World Trade Center was a heap of rubble. Today Josh lives on a farm in upstate New York, where he grows apples, and most of the people he'd hung out with when he was the high tech "it" guy turned out to be fair-weather friends (such a surprise!).

It turned out that Ashkan - who, by the way, is a delightful, warm and hyper-intelligent guy - was in Israel at the invitation of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, to promote his Women of the Israeli Defense Forces series. We sat in the gallery and talked for awhile, and reminisced about those crazy last years of the 1990s. So much had happened since then, that it was almost impossible to digest it all. I'd left New York for India just as the dot.com bubble burst and arrived in Israel about three weeks before the Al Aqsa Intifada began. Was there really a time when practically anyone with a university degree could get a cool job with a good salary; when Israelis believed that it was only a matter of months before it would be possible to drive to Turkey through Syria, stopping on the way to eat lunch in Damascus; when peace with the Palestinians seemed like a done deal; when hardly anyone had heard of Al Qaida?

After awhile my friend closed the gallery for the day, and the three of us walked and talked our way up Dizengoff Street. Ashkan told me that he'd first visited Israel in 1969, when his parents brought him from Iran to visit the Bahai temple in Haifa. Evidently it was love at first sight for Ashkan. Since then he's been to Israel many times, and he has a thing for Tel Aviv - which he described as a perfect mix of third world and Europe.

At one point he said to me, "You seem very different here."

"Yeah," I said jokingly, "I'm a lot less neurotic."

Ashkan laughed and said, "Neurotic. Is there anyone in New York who's not neurotic?"

I lived in New York for 10 years, but I really don't miss much about it. Except the Strand bookstore. Once I loved it, I had a great time, I knew a lot of people, I had a rent-controlled apartment and a good income. And then, suddenly, I realized that I did not want to grow old there. I didn't know anyone who was happy. I hated the winters. Most of my Israeli friends, many of whom had lived in the city for years, had moved back home. They told me I should come and see how great it was - the warm social life, the wonderful weather, the cafe and cultural life.

So I came. And stayed.

Ayman Sikseck is a young Israeli Arab who lives in Jaffa. Beyond those two facts, I know nothing about him except that he is a seriously talented writer - sensitive, insightful and with a true gift for using the ordinary individual's experiences to illustrate universal truths. This is his latest story, published in the Friday edition of Haaretz.

For those of us who live in Tel Aviv, it's easy to forget that our city is actually called Tel Aviv-Jaffa. Tel Aviv is a young city, established in 1909 just outside of Jaffa; it is the first city built by Jews since ancient times. It grew so fast that eventually it swallowed up Jaffa - which is old, and quaint. (Tel Aviv is young, it is dynamic, it is exciting - but it is not quaint). Jaffa has a beautiful, gentrified - and expensive - area of renovated Ottoman-era homes overlooking the sea; it has that lovely refurbished square near the clock tower where we go to listen to outdoor concerts; it has an endlessly fascinating flea market; it has a few good restaurants and some excellent places to eat hummous. It also has an impoverished inner city, a very high level of street violence, a thriving drug trade and a large minority Arab population that lives with high unemployment and a lot of social problems.

What is it like to be an educated, westernized Israeli Arab who speaks fluent Hebrew, living in Jaffa? To be a product of a socially conservative environment but live side-by-side with a liberal one? How does it feel to know everything about the majority's culture, yet not feel accepted by it - and also not quite a part of one's own culture? What is the emotional price one pays for straddling two worlds?

These are questions we liberal Tel Avivians don't think about too often. We are aware of the social problems in Jaffa, but we do not talk about them. Few of us have Arab friends, and fewer still speak Arabic - beyond a few words that have been incorporated into Hebrew as slang. There are many Jews living in Jaffa - some rich, some poor - but almost no Arabs in Tel Aviv. We live in the same city, and they know us - but we do not really know them. It's a class issue, a cultural issue, and of course it's a political issue too.

Ayman Sikseck shows us his world - but he does not tell us. He does not lecture his readers; he compels them, with his beautiful prose and subtle observations, to empathize. You can read his previously published story here. (the stories were written in Hebrew and translated into English).

Update: I see that Karen was similarly moved by Sikseck's story (Nov. 19 entry). She took the trouble to copy out an English translation of a poem by Nizar Qabbani, who is promently mentioned in the article. Here it is, a most beautiful poem about love:

A Clarification to My Readers
by Nizar Qabbani

And the fools say of me:
I entered the lodges of women
And never left.
And they call for my hanging,
Because I write poems
about my beloved.
I never traded
like others
in Hashish.
never stole.
never murdered.
I have loved in broad daylight.
Have I sinned?
And the fools say of me:
with my poems
I have violated the commands of heaven.
Who can say
love ravages the honor of heaven?
Heaven is my intimate.
It cries if I cry,
laughs if I laugh
and its stars
grow in brilliance
if one day I fall in love.
So what if I sing in the name of my beloved
And plant her like a chestnut tree
in every letter.
Fondness will remain my calling,
like all prophets.
And infancy, innocence
and purity.
I will write of my beloved
Till I melt her golden hair
In the heaven’s gold.
I am a child,
And hope I never change,
scribbling on the walls of the stars
as that child pleases,
till the value of love
in my homeland
matches that of the air,
and to dreamers of love I become
a dictionary,
and on their lips I become
an A
and a B.

When I was at university I took a course on modern Arabic literature (in English translation). It was taught by an Egyptian woman professor who, I recently discovered, died of ovarian cancer a couple of years ago. I don't think she was even 50 years old. She and I did not like each other very much: she thought my interpretation of a certain novel written by a Somali author smacked of cultural imperialism; I thought that any woman who denied the horror of female genital mutilation in the name of "cultural sensitivity" forfeited the right to call herself a feminist. I also couldn't stand her knee-jerk anti-Western and anti-Israel opinions, and didn't hesitate to challenge her in class; this was possibly arrogant and unwise, especially since I was the only Jewish student among her Middle Eastern fan club. (She took her revenge by failing to return my final paper, ignoring my many inquiries via phone messages and notes left with the departmental secretary, before disappearing for summer vacation at the end of my final semester). But I did learn quite a lot from her. I especially remember her saying that in the Arab world poetry is a popular art form, whereas in the West it tends to be more for the elites. I think this poem illustrates her point rather well.

It's Friday afternoon and everyone is relaxing into the weekend except me. I will be spending the next two days churning out a couple of 2,000 word articles and editing another three that were translated from Hebrew by my favourite translator. Fun, fun, fun.

I felt really guilty about calling my man of the moment - whom I have neglected for several days - to tell him that I would have zero time for him over the weekend, that in fact I will be on a work marathon until well past midnight on Monday-Tuesday. I expected recriminations, or at least self-pity - but no! Mr. Unbelievably Understanding merely sympathized and asked if I had had time to go grocery shopping, and if not should he bring me something to eat. (I think he likes me).

Meanwhile, someone needs to take my Internet away from me until I finish my homework. The potential for procrastination is endless. Friends and relatives want to chat via IM; there are blogs to read and new articles on the New York Review of Books Web site that are essential reading. I think I left my self discipline in yoga class.

And there is Site Meter, which today informed me that somebody from Saudi Arabia searched for "Israeli Sex" on Alta Vista (doesn't everbody use Google these days?) and found me. He didn't stay long, though; somehow I don't think I was quite what he was looking for.

So my question is, do Saudi guys think it's, like, pervy to lust after Israeli chicks?

And my other question is, how come I automatically assumed this person was a man?

Ever since wonder blogger Hatshepsut turned me on to Site Meter I've become addicted to checking out who's been over to visit. And while I'm reluctant to infringe on anyone's privacy, I must admit to being overcome by curiousity regarding a few regular readers. Who are you, you people from Yale, Cornell, MIT, Yeshiva University, University of Delaware, the US Department of Justice (?!) and Harvard? How did you find me and do you have anything to say? And you, yes you, from Hungary: szia and I think I know who you are (you fly, but you don't have wings; you speak perfect English and Hebrew as well - am I right?).

Anyways, I'm not trying to force any of you out of hiding; but if you're not shy, I'd really love to hear from you.

I was out for a mind-and-spirit-cleansing brisk walk when the first rain of the season arrived. It started with staccato drops that left wet spots on the dusty pavement and rinsed the black soot off the tree leaves, and rapidly worked its way into a full-throttle deluge. At the juice stand on Ben Gurion Boulevard and Dizengoff, the perpetually smiling young guy with the curly blonde hair and big blue eyes who squeezes the juice from fresh pomegranates for me was doing a "welcome rain" dance on the boulevard. Leaping like a Cossack and waving his arms skyward, he let out whoops of joy and shouted "rain! rain! it's wonderful! it's fabulous! it's amazing!"

I grinned at him from beneath my dripping hair; in response he grabbed my wrists and whirled me around in a clumsy, foot stomping dance of praise to the rain gods.

I stood under the concrete awning above the stand and sipped my juice as I watched the rain. The gutters backed up (as usual, the municipality didn't clear them) and within minutes miniature lakes had formed at the intersections. Buses sluiced through them, spraying dirty water on hapless moped riders who got in the way. And on me, too. But hey, never mind, I was already wet. And muddy.

Next to me a middle-aged woman stood with her 18 month-old grandson in his carriage. "Grandma!" he said, "Look! Water!" Yes darling, she said, it's rain. The last rains were 8 months ago, so of course he couldn't remember. He was confused. What was this stuff called rain? He grinned up at his grandmother and said, triumphantly, "Water!"

Oh well, the novelty will wear off soon. The temperatures will drop to the low-teens and I'll spend evenings at home hugging my portable heater, wearing two long-sleeved T-shirts under my sweatshirt. I'll have to start shlepping my laundry to the laundrette to use the dryers, because if I hang it out it'll go mildewy before it dries. I will wish that I'd bought a dryer instead of that lovely silk skirt I wore to all those weddings I attended in the summer. I'll start visiting my friends who live in modern apartments with central heating and windows that actually fit properly in the frames, and maybe reconsider my allegiance to location-location-location (over comfort) in terms of choosing apartments.

I will forget to be grateful that I don't have to live through another 6-month East Coast winter with ice, snow and sub-zero temperatures.

I will start wishing again that I could afford to go to India in January.

An Israeli court has ruled that common-law partners of the same sex may be considered spouses in terms of the inheritance law. The ruling was made by a court in Nazareth, and not in ultra-liberal Tel Aviv, which is interesting. This is a development of the "it's about time" variety, but don't expect it to be a stepping stone to the legalization of same-sex marriage. That's a looooong way off: as it is, there is no civil marriage in Israel - and there won't be as long as the religious parties, which are only becoming stronger as time passes, remain active in the Knesset and in the government.

It is not possible for two people of different faiths to marry in Israel; nor is it possible for two Jews to be married by a non-Orthodox rabbi. Couples who are of different faiths, or who wish to be married in a non-religious ceremony, often nip over to Cyprus to tie the knot. They can then register the marriage in Israel, and it is considered completely legal. I also have committed Reform and Conservative Jewish friends who were legally married in civil ceremonies in Cyprus or elsewhere in Europe (one couple got married in a gorgeous ceremony in Tuscany), then had the religious - but not legal - ceremony with a Conservative or Reform rabbi in Israel. How's that for irony? Religious Zionists who are loyal Israeli citizens, but do not identify with the Orthodox movement, cannot be married in Israel.

And speaking of couples, this evening after work I finally spoke with my photographer friend - the one who stood me up on Friday, when we were supposed to go to Ramallah for Arafat's funeral. (No, I wasn't planning to pay my respects: I was hoping to find an interesting story to write, and I was also simply curious).

So, I said to my friend, What happened to you on Friday? Why didn't you call and tell me you couldn't make it instead of leaving me hanging all day?

Um, I couldn't, he said. I was tied up in bed.

My friend has a tendency to mumble, so I thought I misheard him. Tied up in bed? I asked. What the hell does that mean? You were too tired to send me an SMS?

No, no, he said. Tied. Up. In. Bed. Literally.

It took a second before the penny dropped. I was standing in the middle of the Levinsky market in Florentine, holding a bag of vegetables in one hand and a bag of freshly baked Turkish flatbread in the other, the phone wedged between my shoulder and my ear. The narrow streets were crowded with evening shoppers, pushing for access to the barrels of goods that spilled out of the shopfronts onto to the sidewalks. In the middle of all that hubbub I yelled into the phone at my womanizing photographer friend, "You stood me up because of a FUCK?!"

The man who sold me the fresh flatbread leaned over the counter, winked and called out to me, loudly, "Sweetie, you tell him he's an idiot if he's looking at other women when he has a cutie like you around."

So I did not go to Arafat's funeral in Ramallah. My photographer friend didn't come through. First he woke me up with a phone call at 7:45 AM (after I'd gone to bed at 4:30 AM) to announce that we'd be leaving in less than one hour, then he called back 30 minutes later to say that he and the journalist who was supposed to drive us had decided we should leave at noon, and then he just disappeared - didn't answer his mobile phone or respond to my SMS.
I was so irritated with him that I didn't answer the phone when he finally called me in the evening.
All my other weekend plans fell through as well, for various reasons. I even found myself locked out of my beloved Saturday morning yoga class because I was three minutes late. Grrr.
Re. the funeral: it's probably just as well that I missed it. Based on what I've heard from reporters who did cover the event, it was a pretty unpleasant scene - with huge crowds of people surging forward and threatening to trample those who stood in the way. I've experienced that kind of shoving and chaos at demonstrations in Abu Dis; once I was literally knocked off my feet, and was pulled up by the surprisingly strong arms of a kindly Palestinian grandmother wearing a traditional long dress and headscarf.
Before I close, here's a plug for a new weblog: my friend Y., who goes by the nom de blog Snowlet, has just started writing about her life as a high-powered Tokyo yuppie working in the cut-throat world of international finance. Go visit the Urban Tokyo Neurotic.

I spent Thursday evening at a lecture/presentation given by some well-known Israeli photographers. Among them was Adi Ness, who gave a fascinating and articulate talk about how he plans and executes his carefully staged photographs, most of which are based on or influenced by iconic images such as Da Vinci's Last Supper. This is Ness's modern Israeli interpretation of that iconic painting. Ness's homosexuality is also a strong influence on his art. This work is his "homoerotic" version of the famous photo of the first Israeli soldier to bathe in the Suez Canal after the IDF's victory over Egypt in the Six Day War.
A photographer friend invited me to the lecture. Friday morning he is going to photograph Arafat's funeral in Ramallah, and I'm going with him. So stay tuned for an eyewitness account that will go well beyond the crap you're likely to see on Friday's evening news.
On the Face: it's not the 9 o'clock news.

Of all the big stories that have been clogging the news over the past week, I'm most interested in the arrest of Israeli organized crime figure Ze'ev Rosenstein. I actually first heard about him when I lived in Tokyo, if you can believe it.
Quite a few young Israelis spend a few months in Japan selling fake designer purses, wallets and watches from outdoor stands. This is regarded as an opportunity to save some money and use it to finance a trip to India or Australia, both popular stops on the "world tour" that is for many a sort of gap year between army service and beginning one's university studies. I got to know some of them in Tokyo, and that's where I learned about the long arm of Israeli organized crime.
I lived in Shibuya, one of the most fashionable and congested commercial areas of Tokyo. The streets leading from the subway station to my home were dotted with stands, mostly staffed by Israelis, that displayed fake Gucci wallets, fake Rolexes and junk jewellery imported from Thailand.
On my way home from another exhausting marathon day at the investment bank that was my then-employer, I often stopped to chat with the Israelis. It was a relief to unwind, buy a take-away coffee at Starbucks and stand around joking in Hebrew. During one of those chats, one Israeli guy explained that the fake designer goods business in Japan was run by a couple of Israeli mafia "families", in cooperation with the yakuza. They paid the Israeli kids who ran the stands 40% of the profits on what they sold, and split the remaining 60% between themselves.
If the kids working the stands got arrested by the Japanese police, however, they were on their own. Later I met a woman who worked at the Israeli consulate in Tokyo; part of her job description involved informing Israeli parents that their offspring had been arrested for a) working illegally on a tourist visa and b) selling counterfeit designer goods. Usually they were held incommunicado for several days at a jail near the airport, before being deported to Israel at their own expense. If they couldn't afford the fare, the consulate lent it to them.
Anyways, this Israeli guy told me that in the neighbouring area of Roppongi, which was filled with hostess and strip bars staffed mostly by foreign women (among them Israeli women), there was a turf war going on between Israeli and Russian mob figures over the drug trade. Rosenstein's name came up in that conversation. According to the story, one of his local drug dealers had been chased off Russian turf in Roppongi by a knife-wielding Slav, an incident that had the denizens of that seedy area buzzing for a few weeks. Street violence is very rare in Japan - practically unheard of - so it was a big story.
Fast forward about one year, back to Tel Aviv. It was December 2003, and I was working on the 26th floor of a modern office building. My window faced Yehuda haLevi Street, and featured a fabulous panoramic view of Tel Aviv, hugging the beach from Jaffa in the south up to Reading in the north. It was one of those sunny mid-December mornings, when you're fooling yourself into believing that maybe this year the gloomy winter rainy season won't ever start. We were already discussing where we would go for lunch - which is what you spend a lot of time doing when your job is so boring you want to scream - when suddenly we were shocked into silence by the concussive sound of an enormous explosion very nearby.
"Pigua!" (terrorist attack) we all shouted simultaneously, as we ran to look out the window and find the source of the blast.
It wasn't hard. There was a big cloud of dust and debris floating upwards just five minutes' walk away on Yehuda haLevi Street. It was right across the street from the restaurant at which we were planning to have lunch.
One of the guys in my office had a pair of binoculars in his desk, and I'm sorry to say that I succumbed to morbid temptation and saw things I would prefer not to have seen.
The rescue services arrived within 30 seconds. Literally. The dust hadn't even settled before we heard multiple sirens wailing from a distance, becoming louder as they approached the scene.
Radios were turned on, news Web sites were logged on to, and the de rigeur phone calls to family members ("I'm okay; are you okay?") were made.
Then we went out to lunch. At a restaurant on Yehuda haLevy - just a little further away. We sat outdoors because it was a warm and sunny day. We ate quiche and salad, and drank lemonade, watched the ambulances speed by and remarked in world-weary tones how messed up it was that we were eating lunch while just a couple of minutes' walk down the road the rescue service workers were collecting body parts.
By the time we got back to the office we knew that the explosion had been a criminal attack rather than a political one. One of Ze'ev Rosenstein's enemies had set off a bomb at a check cashing place that Rosenstein was known to frequent. The bomb was intended for the mob kingpin, but he got away without a scratch. Three bystanders were killed.
I was absolutely outraged by that incident. Here we were dealing with terrorist attacks several times per week, and all the emotional pressure that living with that fear in the back of your mind entails, and these assholes were scaring us and killing innocent people by trying to bomb each other.
The following day I read in a newspaper that Israeli police were complaining that they didn't have the funding or manpower to deal with organized crime.
And several weeks later I saw Rosenstein at one of those star-studded parties for TV and movie actors and musicians. He was sitting at the bar with a couple of rejects from the Sopranos, flirting with leggy blondes and looking as if he didn't have a care in the world.
And now he's under arrest because American law enforcement agents caught some of his guys in Queens with 700,000 Ecstasy pills. They pushed the Israelis to arrest him for extradition to the USA, and so they did. Why it took so long, why the Israeli cops needed the American cops to lean on them to arrest this scumbag, are open questions. But the important thing is, they got him. Finally.
Oh and by the way, I see that even Al Jazeera is covering this story.

Background: Mom lives in Toronto. I live in Tel Aviv - 10 minutes' walk from the Carmel Market (Shuk haCarmel). Mom knows I shop at the shuk regularly.

How to freak Mom out:

1. Forget to send her a reassuring email as soon as the news of a terrorist attack in the shuk hits the wires;

2. Be stuck in a meeting and unable to answer your mobile phone when she calls to find out why you didn't send that email;

3. When she finally catches you on your mobile phone, don't bother to hide the unfortunate fact that you were just a couple of minutes away when the suicide bomber detonated himself.

Who says I'm not a sensitive person?

There's a new joint Palestinian-Israeli radio station called All For Peace Radio.

You can listen by clicking here (broadband). The playlist is a mix of Euro/American, Israeli and Middle Eastern songs, and 'tween-song patter is in English, Hebrew and Arabic. Leonard Cohen seems to be a big late-night favourite...

The staff bios are quite interesting, as well.

Thanks to Yishay for the info.