Yes, the new season is about to begin.
No, silly, I am not talking about the NFL. Nope, in Israel there is a different type of Fall tradition (timed to coincide with the reopening of schools and count down to the chagim):
I am talking about the official opening of strike season. Unions May Shut Down Country [...]

Well, it looks like my recent blog post on How Israel Can Become a Better Democracy is really making some waves. (Just kidding, but the coincidence is a bit strange). I just read that the selection process for Supreme Court judges was just changed to make it less subject to poltics. The selection committee is [...]

Here’s a new piece of Israel-born ingenuity. From the creator of the Arrow defense missile, we now have…Arrow garbage recycling:
The idea sounded simple enough: to treat solid waste using water. But their point of origin, says Zadik, was revolutionary. “Europe was still considering how to treat segregated trash, and assumed they could teach the public [...]

We are moving to Yad Binyamin.
We first heard about Yad Binyamin from some friends a few years ago. We had been talking about potential communities to live in, Yad Binyamin came up in conversation as one of the new "in", up-and-coming communities in Israel that Americans (including young families) were beginning to flock to. As [...]

This Shabbat we ate a meal with a couple visiting from the US. Part of the conversation (as usual this year) was about shemittah, how difficult it is to observe, what to buy and what not to buy, etc. Then, as another example of something else that they might find interesting about buying food in [...]

…we just had our first big rain storm of the season. Thunder and lightning galore (and no power outages!).
Anyone who is driving in Israel tomorrow, please remember that over the Summer lots of car oils and fluids collect on the road, and are not washed off until the first or second rain storm. So after [...]

Over the last 6 years, I have lived in three different places where at some point or another we would say one or two chapters of Tehillim every morning (and sometimes evening as well) after davening. The reason ostensibly given for this is invariably “The Matzav” (”The Situation”), referring to the “situation” in Israel where [...]

Aside from the fact that they do not mention Otzar Beit Din at all, the NY Times does a pretty decent job of reporting on what is going on in Israel with disputes over heter mechirah and yivul nachri (non-Jewish owned and grown produce). They even manage to quote a few pesukim from Shemot, do [...]

Seeing a Jewish blogger complaining about the two three-day sets of Shabbat/Yom Tov** led me to wake out of my blog-slumber (two months since my last post, and only one in the two months before that, my driest spell since I started nearly three years ago). As you can see from the time when I [...]

Michael Eisenberg writes about how the weakening US Dollar and strengthening shekel (up 11.6% over past year) is affecting business in Israel:
Little noticed in the discussion in Israel about corruption, Prime Minister Olmert’s survivability, economic growth and planning for the next war, is the strengthening Shekel (NIS). Today the Shekel dropped below 4 NIS to [...]