From a recent article in The Marker, Ha’aretz’s business section (by the way, can someone explain to me why Israelis love to use English words for companies/things? See examples here, here and here):

“אשר לפתרון העתידי הוסיף ריבלין: “אני מעדיף שהפלסטינים יהיו אזרחי המדינה הזו, מאשר לחלק את הארץ”

My translation: “Regarding a future solution, Rivlin [Speaker of the Knesset] said: “I would prefer that Palestinians become citizens of this state, rather than divide the land.”

Surprising, no? I’m curious to know what he thinks of Israel’s demographic problem in this respect.

Music writer and connoisseur of all things wonderfully absurd, Sarah Shay, just alerted me to the presence of this blog: Bad Hebrew Tattoos. As the name suggests, it’s basically a collection of tattoo photos where something has been spelled wrong, or just doesn’t make sense…or is just plain ugly. Very amusing.

Next week, May 4, is the 40th anniversary of the afternoon four students were shot and killed at Kent State University by national guardsmen during an anti-war protest. The Forward reports that three of the four students were Jewish, and as a result, the annual memorial ceremony that takes place on campus has taken on a Jewish flavor, having been initially organized by a Hillel rabbi.

But if the shootings themselves were not a Jewish tragedy, the first commemorations of them were overwhelmingly so. “What happened that day was not a Jewish event,” said Tom Sudow, an alumnus who transferred to Kent State in the fall of 1973. “The response to May 4 in a lot of ways, though, became a Jewish event.”

The article is certainly worth a read, not so much as an illumination of some Jewish connection to what happened at Kent State, but because the Kent State tragedy was such a defining and terrible moment in U.S. history. Interestingly enough, this is a point that the writer, Jonah Lowenfeld, goes out of his way to make.

The Jewish prayer for the dead has been recited regularly at this annual event since the early 1980s — a reflection of the fact that three of the “four dead in Ohio” famously memorialized in song by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were Jewish.

Neither at the time of the shootings nor since has anyone looked closely at this odd fact — one that seems odder still for a campus where Jews have never made up more than 5% of those enrolled. Karen Weinberger, a sorority sister of Sandra Scheuer, one of the slain, recalled that back then “it wasn’t anything that was really of great significance. The significance was the fact that you had four students that died and nine that were injured.”

It’s very true. Kent State wasn’t a Jewish tragedy. It was an everyone tragedy.

This is the Israeli band Crossfire. Perhaps Israel’s only glam rock act. They sing in English, which I find a little disappointing. But still, I think you’re gonna like it.

The Tablet is running a series of stories on Israelis who go to India to travel and do hella drugs after completing their IDF service. This is a common practice and a pretty interesting phenomenon. You can read the first of The Tablet series here. It begins thusly.

Maor Hagay is homesick in India. He’s a handsome young Moroccan Jew from where Jaffa used to be who avoided his Israeli military service through a series of weird injuries that he would rather not explain. The real reason he ran away, his friends told me, was that he would have had to serve behind enemy lines in Gaza.

Maor loves Israeli music, food, the whole bit. He is so homesick that he can barely leave his room. The weather is perfect: Sunny, cloudless, and 90 degrees with very little humidity, as it is almost every day in Goa, a small state on India’s western coast. He is at a beach resort, but he doesn’t swim because of his new tattoos, which include lines of barbed wire across both biceps and a word in Indian script that he believes is his name inscribed along the length of his spine. Instead of going swimming, Maor sits alone in his room at his computer, looking at photos and listening to music by Israeli pop artists. The photos on his computer screen are from his first month in India, before he was arrested.

A couple of years ago, a documentary was made on this very topic, called Flipping Out. I think it played at the Seattle Jewish Film Fest. Preview below.