Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree Over winter break, I didn’t want for activity. There were people to see, films to screen and a wealth of exhibitions to behold, one of the most inventive of which was a modest but arresting show at the Jewish Museum, on until February 3, called “Collection Tableaux.” Taking the…
One year after Israel’s social protest movement was born, activists are battling over its soul. Throughout June, protestors once again started to flow into the streets of Tel Aviv on Saturday nights. They all claimed to be reviving the demonstrations held weekly last summer, when tent cities proliferated all over the country. But it quickly…
You never drink alone. Dozens of enthusiastic youngsters trooped to the opening of Israel’s first cooperative pub, founded in Tel Aviv’s bohemian Florentine neighborhood by a group of leaders of the social protest movement. About half the revelers at Bar Kiama (Hebrew for “Viable”) were shareholders who had invested NIS 1,000 each, and will be…
In early June, more than 10,000 Israelis took to the streets on a Saturday night chanting “Bring back hope and justice,” in a resurgence of 2011’s protests against income inequality, shrinking social programs and the crisis of politicians driven more by self-preservation than by the needs of the country’s citizens. “We don’t want a government…
The question of how big the Jewish tent can be when it comes to Israel is one of the thorniest ones that American Jews deal with. Who gets to sit inside and who should be excluded? And just how open does the Jewish community want to be when discussing the issue of Israel? On the…
Is Occupy Wall Street an outgrowth of the J14 protests, the social justice movement begun in Tel Aviv on July 14 that drew nearly half a million Israelis to the streets? The tents, the youthful organizers, the anarchic hodgepodge of themes and complaints certainly make it easy to draw the analogy. In fact, we wish…
As the largest social protest in Israeli history engulfed the streets of Tel Aviv last summer, a small group of American Jewish students witnessed the commotion from a unique vantage point: the Israeli business world that was one of the protest’s broadly defined targets. Twenty students spent the summer in Tel Aviv as part of…
It took all of nine weeks for Israel’s summer protests to cross the oceans to America. What began on Rothschild Boulevard (or, truth be told, in Tahrir Square, in Cairo) on July 14 and moved from there to dozens of cities and towns in Israel came to New York City’s Wall Street on September 17…
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