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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
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

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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

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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High Spies of the Mossad: Israeli Mystery Man Inspires New Strain of High-Grade Medical Marijuana

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This article originally appeared in the May 2014 issue of High Times. It only dawned on me this week that I could upload it here with the PDF: High Spies of the Mossad The voice on the other end of Alex Barak‘s phone on the evening of July 14th 2003 asked about some used furniture Barak had put up for sale, after the bar and cafe he ran in central Tel Aviv went under after a couple of years in operation. Barak went downstairs, and moments later a

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

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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,

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

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“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?

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After Pittsburgh, looking back at November 2016

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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

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

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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,

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

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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

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From InfoWars to CustodyWars – Covering the Alex Jones Trial

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“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 –

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Longhorns, pass by

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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

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My Gaza War

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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

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