For an honest, often light-hearted, portrait of Israeli culture & society, life in Tel Aviv, and other musings, go to my blog at http://melchettmike.wordpress.com/(if you enjoy, subscribe for email updates).
"It's amazing... you don't visit the site for months... come back... and, like a particularly nasty odour, the sad, self-loathing, bird lady from Brighton is - as if she's done nothing whatsoever wi(...)"Melchett Mike
With Golders Green reeling from allegations (they are, at this stage, just that) of sexual abuse against one of its foremost Orthodox rabbis, the only thing that surprises me is that anyone is surprised at all.
“Don’t be silly,” I reassure Itzik, as we sip on our sachlabs on Rothschild early last Thursday evening. “Nothing will happen in Tel Aviv.”
It might as well be the cue for the siren.
There are a surreal couple of seconds, during which the occupants of adjacent tables exchange puzzled, yet pregnant, glances: “Is it . . . ? What now . . . ?”
Last week was a singularly horrid one for all of us who know that it is our universal, inalienable right to kneel in front of armoured bulldozers without getting our new keffiyehs (they are so cool!) dirty.
While I find a ten-day getaway, each year, to some remote part or other of the British Isles to be conducive to my state of mental well-being, it can also leave me feeling rather worse than when I left, constituting a much-needed break from life in this mad little place, on the one hand, but also a painful reminder of the ‘small’ things that we can never enjoy here.
I recently had my shortest ever date (excluding, of course, the lovely Odelia). It lasted a grand total of six minutes. And it was still too long.
I am not quite sure why I agreed to meet Irit. She was a nagger even on the phone. But there was something appealing about her JDate mugshot that led to me to grant her an audience.
I knew you were something different, Moz, as soon as I – not-so-sweet sixteen, in November 1983 – first saw you, swinging those gladioli on Top of the Pops.
And I can still hear my mother mimicking the "uh-huh-hos" blaring from my bedroom after I had raced back from Our Price, Brent Cross, with my The Smiths cassette.
I was in your audience in Tel Aviv, yesterday evening.
The Israeli Olympic squad should withdraw from the London Games, starting next Friday.
Seeing as the International Olympic Committee is clearly more concerned about upsetting Islamofascist anti-Semites than marking, with a minute’s silence, the memory of the 11 innocent Israelis slaughtered by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Games, we have no place there.
A gang of nine Jewish males from Golders Green – eight English-born and one Israeli – has been convicted of grooming underage non-Jewish girls for sex, the vulnerable teenagers having been lavished with salt beef sandwiches (on rye) and latkes, and plied with Palwin No. 10, at kosher restaurants across North-West London.
I forgot to turn off my Internet radio, last night. It’s a fantastic piece of gear, that can broadcast BBC Radio 5 Live to Jaffa . . . if you want to hear it, that is.
“No need for excuses,” quipped a fellow Anglo-Israeli on the phone, as I was attempting to explain why I was at Maccabi Tel Aviv vs. Rishon Le’tzion (and thus couldn’t hear him). And Ron had not missed the irony. There was, indeed, a need for excuses!
“The Muslim faith has nothing to do with the insane acts of this man.”
So opined the French President, last week, following the latest acts of cold-blooded murder by a hate-filled Muslim, including once again – almost a year to the day since the Itamar infanticide – of three Jewish children, this time aged 3, 6 and 8.
The theory of Primary Return-to-Womb Craving describes the infant’s resentment at his extrusion from the womb, and his longing to return to it. And while this infant has, thankfully, got over the loss of that particular sanctuary, he has experienced greater difficulty in overcoming that of another: his former home town shul. I just haven’t found anywhere to replace Raleigh Close.
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RE: Chaim'll Fix It: When asking the rov may be asking for bovv[er]
"Where have you been Mike ?" Mary in Brighton
RE: Chaim'll Fix It: When asking the rov may be asking for bovv[er]
"It's amazing... you don't visit the site for months... come back... and, like a particularly nasty odour, the sad, self-loathing, bird lady from Brighton is - as if she's done nothing whatsoever wi(...)" Melchett Mike