1,000 strip for Dead Sea nude shoot

A group of selected Israelis takes part in Spencer Tunick's first mass nude shoot at Dead Sea, as curious bystanders hover nearby

Ynetnews  |  by Keren Natanzon

A group of 1,000 Israelis especially selected to take part in Spencer Tunick's first mass nude shoot at the Dead Sea, arrived by buses overnight at the famous landmark on Saturday.

The chosen location was not revealed until the moment of arrival so as to prevent religious officials or curious bystanders from disturbing the photo shoot.

The group of Israelis, consisting of both men and women ages 18 to 77, gathered on the beach around 1 am, awaiting the photo session to begin with the sunrise. When the sun finally came up, Tunick instructed a 1,000 Israelis to enter the salty water, as he photographed them floating in the Dead Sea.
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The Tribal Update interviews General Tantawi and brings you to the deck of a Turkish warship

Weekly update from LatmaTV - Israel's most trusted news source 

Tunick's Dead Sea shoot to be thwarted?

Some 1,000 Israelis prepared to take off their clothes for famous American photographer on Saturday, but Tamar Regional Council head says won't allow 'provocative event' to go through

by Danny Adeno Abebe

After the Alps, the Sydney Opera House, the Vienna soccer stadium and other famous landmarks, the lowest place on earth will be hosting its first mass nude photo shoot this Saturday – if all goes as planned.

More than 3,000 Israelis have asked to take part in Spencer Tunick's Dead Sea shoot. But the 1,000 who have been selected may be in for a disappointment.
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Q&A: Scott Ian

Before the “Big 4” heavy metal show at Yankee Stadium, the Anthrax guitarist and lyricist talks Queens, Jews, and Louis Farrakhan

Tablet Magazine
by David Samuels

Scott Ian was a 14-year-old kid from Bayside, Queens, when he saw his first KISS show at Madison Square Garden. Now 47, and living in California with his wife Pearl Aday, who is Meat Loaf’s daughter, the rhythm guitarist and primary lyricist for the heavy metal band Anthrax is an energetic little man with an outlandishly long and pointy billy-goat beard that immediately marks him as a stage performer of some kind, or a refugee from a reality show or a circus.

A proud freak and knowing fan, a talented performer, a songwriter and businessman who has sold over 10 million albums of his music worldwide, Ian is a funny mix of brainless extrovert and outer-borough sharpie. Born Scott Ian Rosenfeld, he at first denied that being Jewish meant anything in particular to him growing up. As he tried to solve the riddle of why a Jew from Queens would be attracted to the music of meth addicts and assembly-line workers, he revealed a streak of ethnic pride that helped him explain why the Jew and the metal-head in him are actually the same person.
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The Turkish dumbbell and the sorrows of the evicted

Weekly update from LatmaTV - Israel's most trusted news source 

Orphaned Land: Heavy metal envoys to Muslim world

Heading to Istanbul for a show in the wake of downgrade in Israel-Turkey ties, band says they have become Israel’s only ambassador to Turkey.

JPost
by Ben Hartman

Israel’s sole remaining “ambassadors” to the Turkish Republic have long hair, tattoos and legions of fans across the Muslim world.

While heavy metal music probably can’t repair shattered Turkish-Israeli ties, Israeli metal band Orphaned Land is confident leaders in Ankara and Jerusalem can learn a lot from their fan base, which includes Israelis, Iranians, Syrians and other metal fans from across the Arab and Muslim world.
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The Revered and Reviled Bernard Lewis

A Retrospective Of The Scholar Who Provided The Intellectual Ammunition For The Iraq War

MOMENT MAGAZINE
by Daphna Berman

Bernard Lewis has just moved to a small apartment in the manicured suburbs on Philadelphia’s Main Line. At 95, it was time for the man the Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing calls the “most influential postwar historian of Islam and the Middle East” to leave Princeton—his home for more than 35 years—for a senior living facility known for attracting retired academics.

“I’m getting old, I’m no longer sure about dates,” he tells me in his polished British accent, though this moment of self-deprecation is hardly convincing: Our conversation reflects his uncanny ability to recollect dates, time lines and facts—both from his lifetime and several centuries before. As we talk, Lewis recalls the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 as easily as the Turkish elections of 1950. He also regales me with stories, though it is impossible to predict which millennium they will date to. One minute, it’s the Marx Brothers skits he shared with the Shah of Iran in the days before the revolution, the next, an eighth century Arabian joke about a sinful woman praying to Allah for mercy before she dies. And he speaks with eloquence, his ideas organized into complete paragraphs.
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More than just bricks in a wall: What the entire Kotel looked like

Two thousand years after King Herod’s builders laid the foundations for the Kotel on the Temple Mount, Israeli archaeologists have reached these foundations. The Wall’s architectonic picture is nearly complete and will soon be unveiled publicly.

Israel Hayom | by Nadav Shragai

These past few months have witnessed the completion of a historic work undertaken in the City of David: the uncovering of the lowest point of the Western Wall’s foundational structure. The discovery, which has been hidden deep underground for thousands of years, was made possible by the uncovering of a Herodian-era drainage canal by archaeologists. Now the Western Wall’s entire architectonic picture is nearly complete, and it will be unveiled publicly in the next few weeks.

The tens of thousands of Jews who streamed toward the Western Wall two nights ago to ask for divine forgiveness could not have known that just south of them, deep underground, a real archaeological drama was unfolding. Two thousand years after King Herod’s builders laid the foundations for the Western Wall on the Temple Mount, Israeli archaeologists have managed to reach these foundations and expose them anew.
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Anti-Semite Louis-Ferdinand Céline and the Jews Who Read Him

Forward.com
By Benjamin Ivry

Fifty years after his death on July 1, 1961, French modernist author and ferocious anti-Semite Louis-Ferdinand Céline is still causing controversy. Last January, an attempt by France’s Ministry of Culture to “celebrate” Céline on this anniversary ran aground after noted Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld pointed out that Céline was not merely the author of such recognized landmarks of modern fiction as 1932’s “Journey to the End of the Night” and 1936’s “Death on the Installment Plan,” but also of three lengthy anti-Semitic tracts, published before and during World War II, that were, as author Pierre Assouline notes, “authentic calls to murder” Jews.

Novelist Catherine Clément resigned from France’s High Commission for National Commemorations to protest Céline’s official celebration, a nationwide uproar ensued and Céline’s name was eventually dropped from the list of cultural figures honored in 2011.
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Yiddishkeit

The last fully realized work by the late Harvey Pekar illuminates the bluntness and delight of American Yiddish in the last century. An excerpt from a new anthology of comics.

Tablet Magazine
by Neal Gabler

Perhaps the greatest difficulty in trying to describe “Yiddishkeit” to an English-speaking audience, as this book attempts to do, is that there is really no English equivalent for the word. “Yiddish culture” comes close, but Yiddishkeit is so large, expansive, and woolly a concept that culture may be too narrow to do it full justice. “Jewish sensibility” comes closer still because it internalizes the notion of Yiddish, places it in the head as well as on the stage and the page, but sensibility is itself a rather loose and elusive idea and within Yiddishkeit there are several sensibilities that, while closely connected, are still not congruent. In effect, Yiddishkeit isn’t a thing or even a set of things, an idea or a set of ideas, which may explain why a book about Yiddishkeit is itself so sprawling, kaleidoscopic, disjointed, eclectic, and just plain messy. You really can’t define Yiddishkeit neatly in words or pictures. You sort of have to feel it by wading into it.
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In the Picture

Bruce Jay Friedman’s darkly comic novels, short stories, and screenplays place him among the past century’s best American writers. In his new memoir, Lucky Bruce, he reminisces about many of them.

Tablet Magazine

Bruce Jay Friedman has been writing across genres and media for more than half a century. Literary types remember Stern, his 1962 breakout book, referred to by one critic as “the first Freudian novel.” Movie buffs know him as the screenwriter of blockbusters like Splash and Stir Crazy. The film The Heartbreak Kid was based on his short story “A Change of Plan.” And then there were his several plays, including the popular 1970 Steambath.
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Roman Holiday

Italy’s glorious food is well-known, but not its rich Jewish culinary heritage, spanning 2,000 years. In honor of the 40th birthday of Chez Panisse, I’m planning a menu of Italian Jewish classics.

Tablet Magazine
by Joan Nathan

Years ago, when I was in graduate school, I spent a wonderful summer in Chieti, a city in the Abruzzi region of central Italy, leading a group of high-school students. I lived with a local family, the patriarch of which we called Signor Franchi. Every day we sat down for an enormous lunch. When the pasta came out—a big bowl of it, before the main course—a hush would fall over the room. We would wait for Signor Franchi to take the first bite. He would taste it, checking to make sure it was perfectly cooked, al dente. It almost always was. Then he would shoot a smile at his wife, and we would all dig in.
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