Featured Posts
featured

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

Read More »
July 14, 2020
death row

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

Read More »
October 31, 2017
featured

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

Read More »
June 12, 2016

Israel’s most famous trap rapper and German condom spokesman ain’t done yet

By /

This post originally appeared in the Times of Israel, read the full article here The biggest story in Israeli hip hop in 2018 was a vulgar, skinny, goofball rapper who made one viral video after another, racking up millions of views and drawing the ire of polite Israeli society. Dudu Faruk — famous for his hits “King David (Arak, Arak, Arak)” and “Black Belt (in smoking hookah)” — has, in less than 12 months, become something close to a household name, […]

Israel’s most famous trap rapper and German condom spokesman ain’t done yet Read More »

Ann Richards wasn’t a lesbian, and Beto isn’t a senator (yet)

By /

“Ann Richards is a lesbian!” The words were shouted at my mom by a frat boy in the bed of a pick-up truck in downtown Austin and it’s still one of the most bizarre and hilarious things I can remember. It was sometime in 1990, when Ann Richards was running for governor against central casting Texas rancher manchild Clayton Williams. My mom and brother and I were walking back from an event downtown (a political rally or the Pecan Street Festival?

Ann Richards wasn’t a lesbian, and Beto isn’t a senator (yet) Read More »

After Pittsburgh, looking back at November 2016

By /

An elderly Jewish man and a Jewish college professor almost got into a fistfight at a Kosher BBQ buffet dinner and I missed it. It was a few days after Trump was elected, and I was invited to attend a meeting of the “Jewish men’s club speakers’ series” held at the Austin JCC. After the meal, a Jewish history professor from UT gave a lecture on the “Rise and Decline of the American Presidency,” which had been planned months earlier, but

After Pittsburgh, looking back at November 2016 Read More »

“The Talmud of Texas” – revisiting ‘Lonesome Dove’ 20 years later

By /

In a dusty boomtown on the plains, not far from the train depot and a dry river bed, an old friend hid in plain sight. On that morning in Tel Aviv I strolled into a used book store near my work and out of only a handful of English books, the greatest of them all was on sale for 20 shekels. It’d been about 20 years since I’d first read ‘Lonesome Dove’, and almost 30 years since the TV miniseries aired,

“The Talmud of Texas” – revisiting ‘Lonesome Dove’ 20 years later Read More »

My grandfather was a death row doctor – he tested LSD on Texas inmates

By /

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 Huntsville in 1960. He may not have understood his time was up. A few years earlier, Martinez had been convicted of

My grandfather was a death row doctor – he tested LSD on Texas inmates Read More »

From InfoWars to CustodyWars – Covering the Alex Jones Trial

By /

“Which one of y’all tweeted about the cookies?” The attorney posing the question looked down the corridor where I was sitting on a bench at the Travis County Courthouse in Austin working on my laptop. I raised my hand and apologetically took credit for the tweet. Jury deliberations had stretched for hours and the legal teams had left for dinner. The legal team for Alex Jones’ ex-wife Kelly had left cookies and brownies in some Tupperware on a bench and I’d tweeted –

From InfoWars to CustodyWars – Covering the Alex Jones Trial Read More »

Longhorns, pass by

By /

It was at a shitty pizza place in south Austin that I first realized sports dreams come true sometimes. I was 17 that afternoon in 1996, sitting at Double Dave’s on South Lamar with my best friend and his cousin, watching the unranked Longhorns beat #3 Nebraska in the first-ever Big XII championship. The 8-4 Horns were three touchdown underdogs against a Nebraska team that was undefeated in the peak of the Tom Osborne era, when they were every bit what

Longhorns, pass by Read More »

My Gaza War

By /

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 June 12th along with teenagers Naftali Frenkel and Eyal Yifrah, after they were kidnapped at a hitchhiking post in the West

My Gaza War Read More »

Frontline Reporting: My Coverage of the Eurovision 2016 Finals

By /

One of Israel’s most famous haircuts – and also a singer – did not emerge victorious at the 2016 Eurovision contest in Sweden on Saturday night, but it wasn’t due to a lack of effort. Sparkling like he’d been attacked by a 12-year-old with a spray can of foam on Independence Day three nights earlier, he took to the stage with “Made of Stars,” a ballad that was either dark or uplifting, and packed with nonsense lines like “You ride a

Frontline Reporting: My Coverage of the Eurovision 2016 Finals Read More »

Not your average Tel Aviv rally

By /

In my experience, when people announce a protest against the IDF and the security establishment, it’s a small group of far leftists in Tel Aviv. They usually number in the dozens, maybe a bit more, and when the protest actually happens, it’s mostly the same faces from the time before. This week presented a much rarer spectacle though – a mass rally against the IDF, not organized by the far-left bloggers and activists of Tel Aviv, rather by uber-patriots, former MKs,

Not your average Tel Aviv rally Read More »

Scroll to Top