Shana Tova! Thank you for all of your support in 5786. Your generosity has allowed me to push out more content and even hire, yes, a real, human editor (you’ll see no AI slop on this Substack). To celebrate the new year, I’d like to offer 36% off paid subscriptions, now through the end of September. Paid subscribers get access to Notes From Tel Aviv, my weekly series of personal dispatches from Israel for the price of two shawarmas. I’m excited to see what we can do at the Middle Ground in 5787.

— Eli

At a dinner with friends on Monday night, over a plate of pasta at Taverna Romana in Tel Aviv, I was expecting to get a break from talking about elections, the conflict with the Palestinians, and the future of our country.

I was meeting two friends, both American. One of them—I’ll call him David—is being forced to leave Israel.

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Shana Tova! Thank you for all of your support in 5786. Your generosity has allowed me to push out more content and even hire, yes, a real, human editor (you’ll see no AI slop on this Substack). To celebrate the new year, I’d like to offer 36% off paid subscriptions, now through the end of September. Paid subscribers get access to Notes From Tel Aviv, my weekly series of personal dispatches from Israel. I’m excited to see what we can do at the Middle Ground in 5787.

— Eli

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On Wednesday I was sitting at one of my favorite hummus spots, Abu Hasan in Jaffa. I had just taken my dog for a vaccine, and we sat down so I could eat a quick mana.

Abu Hasan is an institution. Ali Karawan started selling hummus from a cart in Jaffa in the 1950s, and his family has run the place on Dolphin Street since the 1970s. We used to live around the corner, and I’ve been there dozens of times. I’ve always seen it as a symbol of coexistence in Jaffa: an Arab family serving hummus to a mostly Jewish crowd, everyone crammed together at the same tables.

The hummus is delicious, though I know the question of favorite humusiot is a contentious topic in Israel. It has the perfect balance of tahini and lemon. I usually go for half masabha and half ful, which is fava beans. I literally eat it like soup sometimes. It’s that good.

I was in Abu Hasan, minding my own business, mowing down my mana, when I heard him.

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I say achi too much. My friends tell me. My wife tells me. Translated literally, it means “my brother,” but it’s basically the Hebrew equivalent of “bro,” which is to say, it usually means nothing. I use it on people I have known for 20 years and on people I met four minutes ago.

There is a restaurant around the corner from our apartment called HaAchim, “the Brothers.” We eat there often enough that I stopped hearing the name a long time ago.

Our older son, Eitan, is three and orders the fries, which, as far as he’s concerned, is the entire point of the place. I was there Wednesday night with friends and found myself reminiscing about previous visits. We have had countless meals there. With my parents when they visited, and we’ve celebrated birthdays. My father had his Air Force reunion there the last time he was in Israel, a table of men in their seventies who had not seen each other in fifty years.

After October 7, HaAchim printed T-shirts, one for each of the communities in the south that were attacked that morning, and sent the money to those places to rebuild. During the campaign for the hostages, the restaurant closed on days there were major protests. Everyone who worked there went to Jerusalem to demand a hostage deal. A shuttle left directly from the restaurant. Think about it: a small Tel Aviv restaurant gave up a full day of covers because there was somewhere more important to be.

There’s a little shop attached to the place. For a long time it sold a tote bag with hostage Carmel Gat’s name on it, with the money going to her family. When they started selling it, we were still saying “bring her home.” Then she was murdered in the tunnel in Rafah with five others. They kept selling the bag, and they only took it down a month or two ago. We just marked two years since her death.

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My father’s soccer career never happened, and he tells that story beautifully.

My dad played for the youth team of Hapoel Be’er Sheva, itself the professional soccer team for the southern Israeli city where he grew up. He competed alongside boys who made the senior side. One of those teammates was Yaakov Cohen, who was there for the championship squads of the 1970s and then went to the storied English team Brighton & Hove Albion for 40,000 pounds. My father left for Canada in his mid-twenties and played semi-pro in a league that ran for a few seasons and then stopped existing. He still has the brochure.

I inherited my father’s Hapoel Be’er Sheva affiliation from him: when I watch Israeli soccer, that’s the team I root for. In practice, this meant sitting through two decades of losing. The club was broke. Games turned into three-hour cursing sessions led by grown men standing ankle-deep in sunflower seed shells (garinim), which are now banned from the stands. These were not fun family outings, but tense experiences where I felt tolerated rather than welcome. The only time in my life that anyone has stolen my phone was at a Hapoel Be’er Sheva match in the second division. It is also where I learned what ben zona means (if you don’t know, look it up).

Notes From Tel Aviv arrives every Thursday evening for paid subscribers — a slice of life from Israel before Shabbat.

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Last week I wrote about reconciling a baby name between two grandmothers with strong opinions. This week, I’d like to talk about my own name, which nobody negotiated for on my behalf, and which has caused me more trouble than my son Neri’s ever will.

Eli is for my great-grandfather from Baghdad. Saba Eliyahu, the Hebrew for Elijah. In Israel, this is the least remarkable fact about me.

My middle name is where it falls apart.

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Ten months ago, our second son was born. That meant it was time for one of the toughest negotiations of Israeli family life: picking a name.

My mother is Ashkenazi, born in Queens. In her view, you name a child after every relative who has passed away, and if you can fit four of them into two names, you have done well. My mother-in-law is a secular Israeli, and she considers this practice borderline abusive. “You are hanging the dead on a newborn,” she says. “You are loading a soul with weight it never asked for.”

I did what I always do. I went for the middle ground.

The plan was simple: We would pick a name that could plausibly be passed off to my in-laws as one that just sounded nice, while retaining subtle significance for my own mother. The baby would not bear the name of any dead person, but there would be a connection.

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So, what did we pick?

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Notes From Tel Aviv arrives every Thursday evening exclusively for paid subscribers, a little slice of life from Israel before Shabbat.

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Last week I mentioned that I don’t sound like an Oleh when I speak Hebrew, and that the origins of my Hebrew fluency would be a story for another dispatch. That story starts not in Israel, but at a Chinese restaurant in Vancouver.

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This dispatch is the first in a new slice-of-life series I’m calling Notes From Tel Aviv, dropping every Thursday evening. Today’s installment will be available for all subscribers with a free trial; subsequent Notes From Tel Aviv will be exclusive to paid subscribers.

There’s a photo on my phone from Saturday, April 23, 2022, and every year it feels a little stranger to me.

That morning, I was walking my dog Igal on the Tayelet—in Hebrew, “the boardwalk”—the beachfront promenade where Tel Avivim jog, ride scooters, argue, and sip iced coffee.

On weekends, plenty of locals avoid the Tayelet altogether because it fills up with people from all over Israel.

But on this particular Saturday, I decided to brave the crowds and venture out. Even amid the heavy weekend foot traffic, you just can’t beat a springtime Mediterranean breeze. Igal needed a good walk, anyway.

Near the Dan Hotel, I noticed a group of large men in plain clothes moving quickly, out of sync with the usual boardwalk pace. Then I saw the white hair and the black polo shirt.

It was Benjamin Netanyahu, power-walking right down one of Tel Aviv’s busiest pedestrian thoroughfares.

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