TEL AVIV AND JERUSALEM – Tel Aviv is the perfect bohemian city: secular, cultured, youthful, compact, hip, and ideally situated on the shore of the Mediterranean.
It is the opposite of spectacular and glitzy. This city has not been to finishing school. It’s worn around the edges, slightly seedy in the corners, and refreshingly not as Western or California-like as expected.
Tel Aviv has been described as the Miami of the Middle East, which it sort of is. But only for one street along the beach. The rest of the city is Beirut with Jews and (slightly) fewer machine guns.
It’s Greenwich Village on the beach. But it’s Greenwich Village on the beach in the Middle East. Beirut may be similar, but there’s nowhere else in the world exactly like it. Benjamin Kerstein in Beersheva told me about a picture he once had of a guy wearing a long-haired blonde wig and a pink tutu with a machine gun slung over his shoulder. “That’s Tel Aviv,” he said.
Tel Aviv is cool. Tel Aviv is fun. Jerusalem isn’t fun. There is too much Reality in Jerusalem for it to be fun.
I hate to say this but Miami is only Miami within one block of the beach. Anywhere from there for 15 miles west is dirty, crowded, dangerous and ugly.