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Our Strange Victory Over the Coronavirus: Quarantine Reflections

(This post was originally published in the Tel Aviv Review of Books in late May, after Israel all but declared victory over the coronavirus outbreak. By mid-July, Israel was up to around 1,500 new infections per day, amid talk of a new closure to stop the second wave.)    I knew that victory was near when my elderly neighbor sent a

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July 14, 2020
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My grandfather was a death row doctor – he tested LSD on Texas inmates

The following article was the result of several months of research and investigation in Huntsville, Houston, the Texas State Archives in Austin, and in a series of boxes of family keepsakes held by my aunts. The full article can be read here Eusebio Martinez was polite — even happy — as he entered the death chamber that August night in

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October 31, 2017
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My Gaza War

I rear-ended some settlers in a mini-van in the West Bank that afternoon, just before pulling into the settlement of Talmon for the funeral. There was no damage and we parted ways with a smile, joining the convoy snaking up to the ceremony. Hundreds of people were waiting in Talmon to bury 16-year-old Gil-Ad Shaer, murdered 18 days earlier on

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June 12, 2016

Between the Straits – Visiting Israel in the Summer of 2025

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This post was written as a guest post for my good friend Alex Stein’s great substack “Love of the Land.” Since it was originally posted in late August, the war has been brought to a close, and 20 living hostages have been returned. May we see better days, Shana Tova.  Evyatar David didn’t make the world stop turning. On Friday, August 1st, the 7th of Av 5785, Hamas released a video of the 24-year-old from Kfar Saba who was taken hostage […]

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Go to Sleep, You Weary Hobo: Richard “Kinky” Friedman, 1944-2024

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A good joke bears repeating, especially one told by Kinky Friedman – novelist, humorist, country singer-songwriter, Texas gubernatorial candidate, UT Austin Plan II student and Hartman family friend.  I was just 10 years old when I was on the business end of one of these jokes, one of my first memories of the man who was an old college friend of my late father and an institution of his own, especially at Echo Hill Ranch, the summer camp his family ran

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The Next Time I See You

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Remember when we were young, in Tel Aviv?  Were we beautiful like the kids at the Nova festival?  Remember camping out in fields and parking lots all over the country? Weed covered in sand and only four types of beer at the bar? Kapulski and Spaghettim? Shotei HaNevua and Beit Habubot?  Remember our wedding in Herzliya? Do you know where the video is?  Remember thinking maybe they didn’t kill the three teens they kidnapped in 2014?  The Breakfast Club? The Champa

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What Hartmans Do in the Shadows

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–In 2005, two vampire mockumentaries first saw daylight – one was an indie feature film shot in Austin starring my brother that made it to the film festival circuit, the other was a short film that nine years later became What We Do in the Shadows, a hit film and eventually an FX series. Nightlife never quite made it out of the shadows, but the film and the Austin of 2004 that it depicts remain immortal.  By Ben Hartman He may

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The Men Behind the Counter

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I don’t think Reggie was an anti-Semite, he was just asking questions.  Reggie was a musician who did some time “for cocaine” and was on parole and working in the bakery-deli-meat market section of the Randall’s on Lake Austin Boulevard when he decided to ask my dad why in all the time he was in the penitentiary, he never met any Jews.  “Is this because y’all look out for each other? Jewish judge, jewish lawyer – you’re gonna help each other,

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The Last Great Escape – the NBA in 2020

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Jazz Center Rudy Gobert was on my fantasy team this year but the first time I actually saw him on TV was in March. Crouched like a daddy long legs over a podium, he wiped his hands on the press conference mics to make a joke about the Coronavirus Pandemic. He later became the first NBA player diagnosed with COVID-19, leading to the cancellation of the season. It was his most dominating performance of the season. The cancellation of the NBA

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The Third State Solution

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I woke up hungover in downtown Austin on Juneteenth 2002, three months before I moved to Israel for the first time. I called my pop from a payphone and waited for him across the street, at a park where a church was having a BBQ or a picnic. A nice older woman gave me an orange soda and offered me a plate, perhaps seeing what state I was in. I chugged the can and waited for my pop, but by the

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Our Strange Victory Over the Coronavirus: Quarantine Reflections

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(This post was originally published in the Tel Aviv Review of Books in late May, after Israel all but declared victory over the coronavirus outbreak. By mid-July, Israel was up to around 1,500 new infections per day, amid talk of a new closure to stop the second wave.)    I knew that victory was near when my elderly neighbor sent a different kind of message to the building WhatsApp group. A former chef, for the duration of the lockdown he had been

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I Can’t See You Try to Kill Me

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On the final evening of our former life, an old feeling came back. Leaving work after sundown, I started wondering if I should take a cab home because I was too afraid to take the bus, an open air petri dish like so much else in Israel.  In the end, I got a ride home most of the way with a colleague, and took a cab for the final leg as a wind storm raged outside. On a main street near

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The Israeli Gangster’s Reading List

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(This article covering the life and times of Israel’s most notorious gangster was first published in the Tel Aviv Review of Books.)  In a Tel Aviv courtroom last December, the most sophisticated and ruthless underworld boss in Israel’s history set out to tell his life story, meandering between his years as a teenage drug trafficker and murderer to how books inspired a prison “rehabilitation” that never quite happened. —– The gangster at the center of the biggest organized crime trial in the history

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