A few thousand New Yorkers stripping down to their Calvin Kleins in January ..but how’s that behavior fly in a Middle Eastern city with a penchant for modesty? Jerusalem hopped aboard the annual No Pants Subway Ride this month, making January 13th, more precisely, Israel’s first No Pants Light Rail Ride. In case you don’t […]
For the two years I lived in Jerusalem, I tried to bike with my crappy communist throwback – a mini gearless green metallic wonder that I bought for the flat streets of Tel Aviv. The bike looked too pitiful to steal and that’s why it suited my tastes. Transplanted to Jerusalem, the labyrinth of hilly neighborhoods, […]
Israeli and Palestinian stage performers are getting together to talk trash. Not nearly as vitriolic on the ground as an outsider might think, the discourse between Arabs and Jews has expanded to include environmental matters that affect both sides such as the cleanliness of shared waterways and skies and the growing problem of trash, among others. […]
Author of the hugely popular cookbook Plenty, Yotam Ottolenghi teamed up with co-chef Sami Tamimi to produce a cookbook that will dazzle, inspire, and satisfy your senses. Both men were born the same year in Jerusalem; Ottolenghi in the western Jewish side and Tamimi in Arab east Jerusalem. They never met until they were in […]
Seaweed is prolific in Israel’s Mediterranean Sea. It makes sense, then, that Middle Eastern ancients used it to help alleviate a host of ailments from peptic ulcers to fungal infections and wounds. Based on past and present literature, archeology, history, biology, linguistics and botany, the Natural Medicine Research Unit for the Study of Complementary, Alternative […]
Shuk Bites – for $26 you can eat your way through Jerusalem’s famous food market There are plenty of self-guided tours in Jerusalem, and even a few culinary tours. But combining the two approaches, “Shuk Bites” is the first self-guided culinary tour. [“Shuk” is the Middle Eastern word for market place, seen commonly throughout the […]
Family circumstance and curiosity led boutique and natural perfumer Ayala Moriel from the city of Tel Aviv to the other end of the world on the west coast of Canada. After landing in Vancouver in her early 20s, her sense for Middle Eastern scents helped her create a unique line of natural perfumes for women […]
A study mapping the environmental actors in Palestine shows a desperate lack of co-operation between organisations and donors keen to play it safe with ‘practical projects’ The lovely people at Heinrich Böll Stiftung had done something that I have been procrastinating about for almost lifetime (well, not quite a lifetime but a good couple of […]
Jerusalem’s water consumption during the First Temple period was not solely based on the output of a natural spring, but relied on public reservoirs. A large rock-hewn water reservoir dating to the First Temple period was recently discovered in the archaeological excavations that are being conducted in Jerusalem. The excavation, during the course of which […]
A new 2,000-square-meter facility in Jerusalem will be devoted to the study of sustainability. It will be an academic institution from the Council for a Beautiful Israel, located by the Hebrew University’s Givat Ram campus, which caters to the study of the sciences, and some of the Holy City’s most important institutions, including the Knesset […]
All conferences, regardless of their topic, are inherently unsustainable. International events with attendees and speakers from around the world often leave an enormous carbon footprint before they even begin, mostly due to guests’ air travel. And, when the events do begin, their operations often consume enormous amounts of energy and produce massive quantities of waste. […]
This venue offers dining that’s head and shoulders above the rest, literally. Dinner in the Sky is a self-contained “restaurant” comprised of tables, seats and kitchen on a platform that’s lifted skywards by a construction crane. Restaurant lifespan is fleeting, usually commissioned as part of a special promotion or business event. The system has also […]
Although building a monument to nature is something of a contradiction in terms, o2a studio has done a wonderful job of finding balance between the built and unbuilt in this striking design for the Natural History Museum in Jerusalem. A subterranean facility with stone cladding, the museum is topped with a green roof that creates […]
New rallies are taking place across Israel to mark the one year anniversary of the country’s mass social protests last summer. Some believe the Israeli movement influenced the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US last summer. In Israel, protestors took over the city streets in tent cities in protest of the high cost of […]
The High Line Park built on a historic freight line in New York City (pictured below) is one of the most talked-about urban renewal programs in history. There is an entire website devoted to it, a special team maintains the verdant 23rd street lawn and another is responsible for removing ice and snow. This park […]