Rosh Hashanah 2009/5770

RISHON LEZION, Israel — Benji Lovitt of the humor­ous blog “What War Zone?” takes a trip through the streets of Tel Aviv to inter­view Israelis on what they think of the Jew­ish New Year.

But do not be mis­led by the light­ness of Lovitt’s video. As Israelis and Jews move into the year 5770, they are increas­ingly frus­trated and anx­ious over recent events. Here are some head­lines from just this past weekend:

• Iran report­edly has the abil­ity to pro­duce a nuclear bomb and is on the way to mak­ing a mis­sile sys­tem that could deliver it.
• The Israeli gov­ern­ment urgently warned Israelis in India that Islamic extrem­ists are plan­ning addi­tional attacks there soon.
• Britain’s Trade Union Con­gress is call­ing for a boy­cott of Israeli goods.
• Iran is increas­ing its con­trol over Hizbol­lah, the Islamist group in south­ern Lebanon.
• The Jerusalem Post remem­bers Capt. Assaf Ramon, who died recently in a mil­i­tary plane crash. His father was the first Israeli astro­naut, and he died in the Colum­bia space shut­tle explosion.
• IDF Brigadier Gen­eral Avichai Man­del­blit talks to the Post about defend­ing Israel from inter­na­tional, legal crit­i­cism of the military’s con­duct dur­ing the recent war in Gaza. The United States has said that a UN report on the issue was “unbalanced.”
• A United Nations con­fer­ence con­demned Israel’s atomic program.
• Jew­ish celebri­ties includ­ing Natalie Port­man, Sacha Baron Cohen, Lisa Kudrow and Jerry Sein­feld are defend­ing the Toronto Film Festival’s deci­sion to spot­light Tel Aviv.
• There is still riot­ing in Jerusalem over the open­ing of a park­ing lot on the Sabbath.

But not all of the news is bad. (Besides, many Jews at Rosh Hashanah din­ners over the hol­i­day likely told the centuries-old joke with a shrug: “They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat!”) Here is a col­lec­tion of opti­mistic, inspir­ing, or light-hearted tid­bits from the week­end papers.

• Israel and the United States are work­ing together to pre­pare for “every pos­si­ble scenario.”
• Amotz Asa-El com­mends Bank of Israeli Gov­er­nor Stan­ley Fis­cher for sav­ing Israeli from the worst of the world­wide reces­sion and mak­ing the coun­try one of the first to bounce back.

• The Jerusalem Post pro­files twelve young Israelis for their con­tri­bu­tions in areas rang­ing from the arts to sports to gov­ern­ment to music.

• Herb Keinon inter­views sol­diers like Isabella Fhima, a 21-year-old, Moroc­can Jew, who came to Israel by her­self to join the army because she believes in the coun­try. I know many lone solid­ers from all over the world, and each one deserves a fea­ture in a national newspaper.

As for me, I’ve been lis­ten­ing to a recent pop song by the Israeli artist Sarit Hadad (in Eng­lish) to get away from the headlines:

Although I gen­er­ally hate pop music, I have to admit that this song is infec­tious and sunny. As non-Hebrew speak­ers can prob­a­bly under­stand the video, the words are about run­ning away from life’s stress for a short while and run­ning to the beach. The sum­mer is on its way out here, so we only have a few weeks left to do that.