Tel Aviv by night

Went out in Tel Aviv last weekend just for the night. Stayed up 'til dawn walking the streets, stopping for the occasional beer. Tel Aviv is a very walkable place — there's a long street called Rothschild that has a double-lane bike highway running through the middle, flanked by grass and benches. There are open air kiosk-style restaurants every couple of blocks or so, and people stay out all night. Tel Aviv is a good place to shoot photos — chock full of weird lights, weird buildings, and weird people. It's a good place to be a weirdo.

Tel Aviv is known as a "bubble city." It's a place you can go to escape the tension of Jerusalem. Which is to say, it's a place you can go to escape Israel. Or to escape Palestine, in my case. Tel Aviv's residents give the air of blissful detachment from the hostile, hateful politics and cutthroat geopolitics that make their lives (and my escapist weekends) liveable and colorful. I can't blame them — they're in too deep. Why not enjoy the sea, pretend to anarchist sympathies, crank up to punk rock, and go out for sushi?

Down the street from Tel Aviv is the old Palestinian city of Jaffa, or Yafo in Hebrew. I regret that I wasn't able to photograph Jaffa on this trip. The old citadel juts out into the sea, gleaming under yellow lights in the distance. The storefronts in downtown Jaffa are vaulted arches affixed with cast-iron-latticed windows. It's beautiful, and tragic. Jaffa is still a predominately Arab city, but Jewish Israelis are busy buying up the choicest properties, just like everywhere else.

Tel Aviv was a boondocks when Jaffa was in its prime. Tel Aviv was a Jewish settler outpost when Jaffa was the pearl of the British Empire's holdings in Palestine. Now Tel Aviv is spiked with sky scrapers, filled with bars, bikinis and modern art. There are also drugs, prostitutes, Russian mafiosos. You have to take the good with the bad ...

Jaffa is still sleepy by comparison. It's maintained its tranquil seaside aura amidst all the turbulence and disappointment of the last six decades. Its walls and arches will outlast decades to come, that much is certain.

Japanika: a booming kiosk shushi restaurant on Rothschild St., Tel Aviv


Cool lights on the sidewalk on Rothschild St.


One of Tel Aviv's crumbling anachronisms


Rothschild St.


Poster graffiti, Tel Aviv subterranean




Stencil graffiti in a bar explains the Tel Aviv bubble

Jerusalem, Old City: Orthodox on Shavuot

Friday, May 29, was a Jewish holiday called Shavuot. I went to the Old City to watch the Orthodox Jews pour in through the Damascus gate on their way to pray at the Western Wall, sometimes jogging — clutching their big fur hats to their heads, strollers rattling across cobblestones — to get to the Wall before sunset. I didn't know until now what the Shavuot holiday signifies. I just Googled it and found out that it marks the day when God handed the Torah over to Moses at Mt. Sinai.

I would have known last Friday, on Shavuot, when I asked four or five Orthodox to explain the significance of Shavuot to me. Each successive person looked at me with a look of disdain or discomfort, or some mixture of both. No one would answer me, or even respond to my "Shalom," and the dozen or so people that I made eye contact with and smiled at looked straight through me, as if I weren't even there. Maybe there's a prohibition against smiling on Shavuot — when the Orthodox observe Sabbath conditions — or maybe they were reluctant to speak to me for fear of embarrassment or because of poor English language skills. Whatever the case, the experience caused me to wonder if the Orthodox behave similarly to more secular Jewish Israelis, or if the silent treatment is reserved for foreigners and Arabs. Do they not condescend to acknowledge my presence because they are God's chosen people, and I am not one of them?

I walked home in the quickly cooling air of early evening. I stopped to take a picture of some Arab kids playing soccer in a park lit by electric lamps. A few of them came up to talk to me. We talked about all sorts of simple things — food, geography, soccer (mentioning Barcelona is a quick way to make friends, even if you, like me, know nothing about soccer), etc. Then I said I had to go, and as I started to walk away, I heard a kid yelling "Cous ukhtek, cous imek." Your sister's pussy, your mother's pussy. Two common insults hurled at me for no reason that I could understand, other than the fact that the kid probably thought it would be funny to make fun of me loudly in a language I couldn't understand. But I did understand, and I made him aware of the fact that I understood. I asked him why he would say such a thing.

Instead of apologizing, he threw a rock at me.

A Palestinian woman sells parsley next to the Damascus Gate as Orthodox Jews pour in on Shavuot


Foot traffic inside the Damascus Gate as Orthodox Jews make their way to the Western Wall


The Orthodox have large families, rivaling the Arab "population bomb" with their reproduction rates.


Orthodox men speculate on what's causing the blockage at the Damascus Gate.




Oranges and apples inside an Israeli soldier's helmet at the Damascus Gate.