This is a recent piece that the WSJ presented as their “editors choice” . We also found it informative and indicative of the splendor of living in Tel Aviv.
People who live in Tel Aviv speak of their city as a “bubble,” an urban refuge where the chaos, conflict and politics of the rest of Israel seemingly belong to another people in another place at another time. There’s a good deal of truth to this metaphor. Blessed with nine blue-sky months and nearly nine miles of aquamarine coastline, Tel Aviv feels like a Middle Eastern Miami—all white-washed architecture, boogie-boarding beach bums and palm-lined boulevards stretching to the sea.
It wasn’t always this way. When it was founded by 66 Jewish families back in 1909, Tel Aviv was little more than camels and sand dunes. But the world’s first modern Hebrew metropolis quickly grew as Zionist pioneers and Jewish refugees arrived en masse during the following six decades. Much of what they brought with them still defines Tel Aviv one half century later: Bauhaus architecture from Germany in the city’s historic core, casual Levantine coffee culture down in the Florentin and Neve Tzedek districts, spicy North African cuisine near the Carmel Market and Central and Eastern European traditions of dance, theater, literature and poetry city-wide.
Today, Tel Aviv is the ultimate East-meets-West city, accented by ample doses of American pop culture and the one million recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union to Israel. It’s also Israel’s economic engine, home to a thriving high-tech industry and buoyant banking sector that helped the country escape the recent global financial crisis relatively unscathed.
Flush with cash and newfound confidence, Tel Aviv is finally ready for its close-up. New cultural endeavors such as the Design Museum in next-door Holon, the annual Fresh Paint contemporary art fair and the biannual Art TLV festival are placing Tel Aviv on the global art map. Meanwhile, a clutch of “boutique hotels” and world-class restaurants are welcoming record numbers of bon vivant tourists to a city still unsure exactly how to handle them. With its warm weather, compact size and anything-goes atmosphere, “Tel Avivis”—as natives call themselves—always knew their city was special. Many still seem shocked the rest of the world is finally beginning to agree.
For much of its first 100 years, the city stood in the shadow of nearby Jerusalem, unable to compete with the capital’s holy sites and history. Now as it enters its second century, Tel Aviv is trading its low-profile past for a far higher-profile future. And why not? With its mix of beach and Bauhaus, culture and commerce, Tel Aviv may not be holy—but for locals and newcomers alike, the city has become its own kind of promised land.
—David Kaufman
For more on this story WSJ
Rothchild Street in the heart of Tel Aviv
Rothchild Street in the heart of Tel Aviv
