Happy birthday, Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv turns 100 on April 9. To celebrate, I’ve written a paean to my beloved city for the Forward. It starts like this:

“Every few weeks, gay Arab men from all over Israel gather for a party at a rented nightclub on Tel Aviv’s Herzl Street. The highlight of the evening is a drag show, with heavily made-up amateur performers dressed as sexy, pouting Arab pop stars. They are followed by Raafat, a performance artist from Jaffa, who lip-syncs old-fashioned Palestinian nationalist songs. Nearly all these men lead double lives; if they were to reveal their sexual orientation in their conservative communities, they would risk ostracism or even death. But in Tel Aviv they are free to celebrate their Palestinian, gay identity — at a club located on a street named after the founder of modern Zionism.

This scene probably wasn’t exactly what Tel Aviv’s founders had in mind when they envisioned the first Hebrew city. But when one recalls that their intention was to build a truly modern city, informed by the ideals of 19th-century European liberalism and of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, it makes perfect sense. They laid the groundwork for the Middle East’s most forward-looking and culturally vibrant metropolis.”

Click here to read the rest.

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This entry was written by Lisa Goldman and posted on April 1, 2009 at 10:21 pm and filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment(Latest is displayed first) or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

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6 Comments so far (Add 1 more)

Wonderful article! I can’t think of anyone who could do a better job of serenading the city on its centenary.

1. Wahine Toa
on April 2nd, 2009 at 2:45 am
In Bubot niyar, “Paper Dolls,” the poignant documentary on foreign workers in Israel who are transvestites, a protagonist says that despite the challenges of their labors and others’ ostracism, in Tel Aviv they can be who they are. Your opening salvo brought that worker to mind, and your thumbnail history to the present reinforces that breath of fresh air (often metaphoric, of course;-)

2. Tamar
on April 2nd, 2009 at 7:44 am
Great article, just one correction:

“when the commanding officer of the home front said that a relatively small percentage of fallen soldiers came from Tel Aviv — indicating, he said, a lower level of patriotism amongst denizens of the Big Orange.”

This should be attributed to Maj. Gen. Elazar Stern, who was head of the human resources directorate (or: personnel directorate, the name keeps changing).

3. Aviv
on April 2nd, 2009 at 8:55 am
Great article. Excellent writing for an excellent city.

4. Yohay
on April 2nd, 2009 at 9:51 am
Lisa, it’s a great article (once again), but I don’t agree with you on architectural history. You say, “architects trained in Le Corbusier’s International style designed and built what ultimately became the world’s first Bauhaus city”, but those architects were actually trained at the Bauhaus, and among the big three of International style (Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe) Le Corbusier is the only one who never taught there. You may love him most nontheless, as Tel Aviv, of course.

5. Ralf
on April 2nd, 2009 at 7:22 pm
“Peace and hope may no longer be part of Israel’s national vocabulary, but Tel Aviv proves that it is possible to live and experience joy even in their absence” … Well said!

As I was reading through this article many things popped into my head, but one that was there all the time was a yearning desire to one day (despite all what’s happening around us) be able to say Tel Aviv co-exists so blissfully with its Arab capitals with a constant flow of cultural influence from both places to on one another. This might not happen in 20 or 30 or 50 years, but it eventually has too, or the whole region is destined for an all out destructive war.

I thought of my city Beirut and the similarities in such an ironic way with Tel Aviv. Thoughts of how a cultural dialogue between open minded individuals can bridge gaps and destroy hate. Forgetting all the ideological issues I have with the state of Israel and its existence, the fact of the matter is that its there, and people live there. I might not like who the Israelis are choosing as their representatives, and have been doing so since the establishment of this state, and I certainly dont see a bright future any time soon (things seem to be getting diabolically worse), but I do hope that in a city that seems so open, peace loving thoughts will eventually emerge out of the darkness that only leads to more darkness, and will spread out.

6. Firas Kay
on April 3rd, 2009 at 3:39 pm