Iconic interior design has blossomed in the land of Israel—the unique fusion of ancient, soulful beauty, multicultural sensuality, and edgy contemporary design. Israeli interiors are unique in their sensitive and creative use of stone, grilles, arches, and mosaics. But what inspires the designers and makes their work so compelling is the changing Mediterranean light.
True style stems from the soul.
In our uniqueness lies our individuality.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Clothing should be quieter than the woman
so that her true beauty can shine through.
Elie Tahari
The moment a melody overwhelms your senses, despite not understanding the lyrics, is represented by the accompanying Hebrew songs. The classics never required lyrics; it’s a relatively modern invention to set words to music. But when done right, it will connect to your soul, thus deepening the meaning. Sometimes, understanding the words is unnecessary, for the intensity of emotion—how they are sung—carries the meaning.
Let the melodies lead you to your own personal interpretation.
God wants, man dreams, the work is born.
Fernando Pessoa
Beauty is God’s handwriting.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.
Goethe
“I sense Light as the giver of all presences, and material as spent Light.
What Light makes casts a shadow
and the shadow belongs to Light.”
—Louis Kahn
Is it serendipitous or just natural that so many Israel-based architects, in their own statements about their work, use the language of light and illumination to describe the expected user’s metaphysical and psychical reactions, and not just the physical, mechanical ones. And while transcendence is not something typically included or easily accomplished in the quotidian programmatic presentations architects make to their clients to justify their work, there are occasions when, by talent or fortune, the rudimentary, economic components of the construction process result in conditions disposed to make possible an ethereal experience for the “end user.” When this happens, it is often because the building blocks were the sculpted, shaped, and situated conveyances of harnessed, yet fleeting, materials of light. And then the experience is of a person.
Here are a few examples.
Old Jaffa House 4, Jaffa
Pitsou Kedem Architects
On the side of a hill in the ancient port of Jaffa, Pitsou Kedem has turned a broken jumble of 300-year-old stone buildings surrounding an almost-central, ill-defined, open transitional space into a single family apartment residence with a courtyard at its heart; whose vintage, but for a few contemporary stylistic concessions, it would be hard to guess conclusively. The project provides an object lesson in adaptive reuse. In this case, of an historic building, which, though “Ottoman” in pedigree, is not of any immediately recognizable period style. Like much Middle Eastern architecture, as like the Middle East itself, it’s a mongrel collage of influences—from Early Western European Romanesque to Late Eastern Mediterranean Byzantine, with the occasional ancient Roman or Greek salvage being put to some new ignoble purpose. In the hands of Ottoman Turks and Arabs, styles were famously further crossbred with unhesitating disregard for their individual integrity.
The building’s original materials and methods of assembly—limestone arches, vaults and corbels, plaster finishes, and blackened metal hardware—were treated with new fastidiousness and respect. The architects took a paradoxical sort of actively hands-off approach: It requires much effort and attention to seem to intervene as little as possible so as to preserve as much as possible the accidental, unaffected, and artlessly beautiful as might remain.
Where necessary infill is made to areas of stone cladding whose original configuration was legible but not intact, the faces of the new stone were not hewn to simulate the old stone, but rather it’s been allowed, even intended, to distinguish itself subtly but not unnoticeably by having a simpler (smoother) texture, lighter color, and more practical ashlar shape rather than the tumbled, darker, random-cut rubble originally used.
Where fixed lighting is wanted along the side of rooms, rather than interrupting the integrity of restored stone walls by breaking into them with armed sconces or dated track lighting, lightweight, stripped-down and geometrically minimal customized tube LED armature is hung almost invisibly from above at a continuous remove from the face of the walls.
Regarding floors, a designer of a multi-room, custom home in a tony neighborhood directly on the Mediterranean might be inclined to fuss over multiple patterns of stone tile; or to cover existing walls with deep blue and aquamarine tapestry, or other seaside platitude. But here floors are uniformly a cool polished concrete, with their only decorative detail the faint lines caused by control joints. Walls are selectively treated with crisply outlined areas of plaster, all in a single, warm yet neutral color. The result is typical for the attitude taken for the whole renovation: focused but comprehensive; understated in its intervening touch, with drama coming from the existing organic palette of materials; and with finishing touches devised to reflect the golden natural light that pours in from all directions.
Mount Herzl Memorial, Jerusalem
Kimmel Eshkolot Architects
There are numerous small and significant details in this pavilion dedicated to the memory of fallen soldiers and security personnel, part of Israel’s National Cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. As a hall built for modestly sized memorial events, it serves mostly as an empty space set with temporary seating.
But undergirding and overwhelming any prosaic function the building may serve, however venerable, the architecture is enacting its own tour de force performance of pure poetry, conveying our temporal-terrestrial dimensional continuum. Space: carved out of the base of a sacred mountain and shaped into a spiraling vortex of custom cast white bricks capped by the sky. And time: expressed by the infinitely divisible passage of constantly changing daylight, reflected and refracted, collected and disbursed to animate and reveal the molded space. This is a place built to experience the evanescent and the eternal at once, and it succeeds.
Midbarium: The Jack, Joseph + Morton Mandell Animal Park, Be’er Sheva
A. Lerman Architects
The Midbarium (from the Hebrew midbar, “desert”), is a protected park area on the outskirts of Be’er Sheva landscaped to present four central desert typologies (canyon, plain, oasis, savanna), and to serve diverse species of animals for teaching and building awareness about environmental conservation.
Scrims, screens, lattice, and brises soleil, configured in myriad ways and scales of perforation, are the pervading architectural device: modulating, tempering, and enhancing desert light. Rendered chiefly in cast concrete, they are particularly well-suited to this climate and geography as well as the program’s goals of effective energy use.
The multi-functional facility marking the entry to the park consists of a vast concrete spaceframe pergola spanning 1,800 square meters. By its depth, tilt, and triangular geometry, it is able to cover a large area economically and provides, along with other integrated passive air-circulation systems, yet another layer of non-mechanical shading as it shifts its boundary-setting footprint according to the sun’s movement overhead, and serves as entry porch, enclosing roof, and directional ceiling over meandering walkways between exhibits.
An interior/exterior concrete tile floor in a tegular but nonorthogonal pattern looks like the formalized geometry of a cracked mud ground plane, and presents as an extension of the surrounding landscape.
By building in neutrally hued concrete, both massive and lightweight, the structure and its expansive, monolithic, lace-like canopy work to coordinate with the tough but inviting natural context, at the same time serving as its foil. As an instrument for both purposeful study and incidental discovery, the design succeeds on multiple levels, steering, shielding, and illuminating the way.
The Friends of Zion Museum (Yedidi Tziyon), Jerusalem
Ollech + Tol Architects
For a museum dedicated to telling the story of the modern State of Israel’s founding, and the aid offered by non-Jews to that end, architects Ollech and Tol created a 3-dimensional story-board: a physical path through four floors of exhibits telling four chapters through the personages of key Christian Zionist protagonists and their contributions.
As FOZ occupies an existing structure previously built in this historic neighborhood for other purposes, the primary mode of space-making is interior, by way of elaborately crafted, uniquely configured displays for multi-sensory, interactive exposition of the storyline. High-definition LED projection touch screens, backlighted artwork, holographic and 3-D cinematic projection, as well as sound and music are integrated to focus the visitors’ attention in discreet yet immersive mini-environments.
While the visitor’s trajectory begins at lobby level with an account of the modern State of Israel, the narrative itself, interestingly—especially given recent provocations by Israel’s detractors to make such statements controversial—begins on the 2nd floor with the “theoretical foundations of Zionism,” as the ancient homeland is revived, and the birth of the state is explained.
That a multi-thousand-year-old story of true events lived by real people according to universal philosophical ideas and particular religious convictions can be told by way of projected light is an apt metaphor for a scrappy, ancient people’s journey through time to become a tech giant, self-sovereign in the same land where they began.
Dead Sea Desert Hotel
Bar Orian Architects / Lambs + Lions Studio
A joint effort of Bar Orian Architects with Lambs & Lions Studio’s luxury resort Dead Sea Desert Hotel will open its 109-suite doors overlooking five acres of its monumental namesake terrain in 2025.
In a country for whose indigenous culture the Judean Desert and the Dead Sea are such defining, intrinsic, constitutive features, any new permanent structure of such a scale begs to be both timeless and contextual, which the renderings promise to do.
Its exterior envelope is low-slung, hugging the earth; and unassuming, which suits its solitary siting. Nobody is coming to this building to see the building. It’s from within the building, looking out, that the architecture confidently yet unobtrusively asserts itself. With subtle nods to the ancient “resting place” conventions of desert nomads and conscious borrowing of the austere primordial stagings imagined by Stanley Kubrick (and some unconscious ones from the biomorphic bachelor-pad eccentricities of John Lautner), the designs show centralized spaces for gathering; cool, clean, but sand-mottled surfaces at once in tune with the dominating, expansive dune site, yet luxurious in their refined details.
Skylights, ceiling monitors, and an oculus here and there puncture concrete slabs that deftly seem to defy their mass by being cantilevered or deeply overhung beyond their slim supports. Softly graded or sharply raked the abundant natural light is shaped and thrown, diffused and washed in all its infinite degrees and colors. The strongest feature though is the orchestration of all this silent infrastructure to make sweeping, horizontally framed views to sand, sea, and sky: the real attraction of this resort.
Iron Swords Monument, Jerusalem
Ollech + Tol Architects
To commemorate victims of Hamas’s October 7 attack and the soldiers who fell in the defensive Iron Swords war that followed, this powerful monument was, as the Friends of Zion Museum, designed by Ollech and Tol and erected across from the new National Library in Jerusalem.
Freestanding, large-scale iron shards, each with a distinct organic geometry of its own, peel up from the ground in gently bending postures that belie the sturdy material from which they are made. Though shaped like fallen leaves or slivers of fire, their seemingly casual configuration in a loose circle around unseen, recessed uplights within gives them the slightly anthropomorphic appearance of a clutch of figures leaning on each other shoulder-to-shoulder. The lighted space in their midst forms an impromptu outdoor room, at once enclosed for contemplation of names and other text inscribed on the vertical surfaces, yet also open to the sky above and between the six bowing walls to unite with the urban capital beyond.
The architects created a place that is sober in its mood yet warm in its materials; symbolic in its expressive purpose of honoring the dead but commodious in its practical, physical function as a place to be; abstract in its formal references, and viscerally quiet in the rites it makes available to visitors. It is serious in its memorial mission, yet not stiffly ceremonial in its effects.
Cleared for publication
הֻתַּר לְפִרְסוּם
Cleared for publication
That our hearts are broken
And in hidden places
In empty rooms
Thousands of sobs
Are silently choking.
Cleared for publication:
That open season was declared on us
We were plundered in the dark
Of the most precious of the precious
It is already cleared for publication:
That the magical shining light
Of our beloved’s face has been extinguished.
However, beneath the same soil
A stubborn plant is sprouting
Sending roots without end
Tightly grasped with love.
הֻתַּר לְפִרְסוּם
.כִּי לִבֵּנוּ נִשְׁבַּר
וּבַמִּסְתָּרִים
בַּחֲדָרִים רֵיקִים
רִבְבוֹת יְבָבוֹת
.נֶחְנָקוֹת לְלֹא קוֹל
הֻתַּר לְפִרְסוּם
.כִּי דָּמֵנוּ הֻתַּר
וְנִבְזַזְנוּ בָּאֲפֵלָה
.מִן הַיָּקָר מִכָּל יָקָר
כְּבָר הֻתַּר לְפִרְסוּם
כִּי זִיווֹ הַקָּסוּם הַמַּבְהִיק
.מִפְּנֵי זֶה שֶׁאָהַבְנוּ, כָּבָה
אֲבָל תַּחַת אוֹתָהּ אֲדָמָה
כְּבָר מֵנֵץ צֶמַח עַקְשָׁן
מַשְׁרִישׁ עַד אֵין קֵץ
.וְנִלְפָּת אַהֲבָה
Poem by Dael Rodríguez Garcia engraved on the monument.
Originally published in Shiva Poems of October 7
The Institute for Jewish Research and Publications, August 13, 2024
“‘…And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land of thy sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God.’”
Genesis 17:8
“When does one first begin to remember?” begins Winston Churchill’s majestic autobiography, My Early Life. The Jewish people have consistently done so ever since Mosheh told them in D’varim 31:19 to “Now therefore write ye this song [the Torah] for you, and teach thou it the children of Israel; put it in their mouths, that this song may be a witness for Me against the children of Israel.” This Mr. Churchill, a dear and life-long friend of the Jews, knew.
Despite colonization, massacre, dispersion, and genocide, the Jews reside today as then in their ancient home, speaking their ancient language, and clinging with heroism and righteousness to their ancient religion. Nearly three and a half millennia have turned to dust since signs and wonders brought them to a land flowing with destiny. The roots planted in the day of Yehoshua’s sword, though neglected for a time, now bloom as the fruits of their fealty.
The tongue which the One who shaped us in the womb used to spread the stars to the farthest ends of space is spoken again throughout the cities of Yehudah. As said Yir’miyahu long before fine, fluted columns graced Hellas, in the streets of Yerushalayim are heard the voices of gladness and joy, the voices of bridegroom and bride. Familiar in their mouths and freshly remembered, the strains of David’s lyre sweeten the air like the scent of olive groves. The eagles’ wings rest and their nests are warmed and full.
The Jewish people are a family, a nation, a land, a book, a story on which the sun never and will never set. For they fear no evil.
“‘…Thus saith the Lord GOD: Behold, I will take the children of Israel from among the nations, whither they are gone, and will gather them on every side, and bring them into their own land… I will make a covenant of peace with them—it shall be an everlasting covenant with them; and I will establish them, and multiply them, and will set My sanctuary in the midst of them for ever.’”
Ezekiel 37:21, 26
“The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of singing is come,
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.…
Awake, O north wind;
And come, thou south;
Blow upon my garden,
That the spices thereof may flow out.
Let my beloved come into his garden,
And eat his precious fruits.”
Song of Songs 2:12, 4:16
“Should you have been banished to the very sky’s end, your God will gather you again even from there….”
Deuteronomy 30:4
The ongoing war of cultural organizations against “Zionists” (the fig-leaf euphemism for Jews) bears interpretation through the prism of the First Law of John O’Sullivan.
O’Sullivan, a speechwriter for Margaret Thacher, unveiled his timeless maxim in 1989 in The National Review:
All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing. I cite as supporting evidence the ACLU, the Ford Foundation, and the Episcopal Church. The reason is, of course, that people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don’t like private profit, business, making money, the current organization of society, and, by extension, the Western world.
The post-10/7 version might say, “All organizations that are not politically neutral or actually pro-Jewish will over time become explicitly anti-Zionist, taking that as a euphemism for anti-Jewish.” In his mention of an advocacy group, a deep-pocketed foundation, and a mainstream Protestant church, Sullivan deftly captured the great sweep of groups aligned behind the social justice agenda that lacks a line for Jewish concerns.
Since 1989, what’s been the direction of O’Sullivan’s examples? His comments hold up well. In 2021, the Washington Free Beacon published an article by Alana Goodman titled, “ACLU Becomes Top Legal Defender of Anti-Semitic BDS Campaign.” She wrote,
The organization has led legal challenges against anti-BDS laws in numerous states, including Arkansas, Arizona, Kansas, and Texas. The group has also registered to lobby against federal anti-BDS legislation from 2017 to 2020, according to lobbying disclosure records.
Last April, the ACLU sent a letter to Representatives urging them “to oppose H.R. 6090, the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act. Federal law already prohibits antisemitic discrimination and harassment by federally funded entities. H.R. 6090 is therefore not needed to protect against antisemitic discrimination; instead, it would likely chill free speech of students on college campuses by incorrectly equating criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism.
The bill passed in the House of Representatives by a 320-91 vote, with 21 Republicans and 71 Democrats opposing it.
The Ford Foundation, whatever its social justice inclinations when O’Sullivan wrote the First Law, deserved some credit for a major statement, “Rejecting the Rising Tide of Antisemitism,” written by its president, Darren Walker, on September 15, 2023 (keep that date in mind). Walker summarized recent attacks in Pittsburgh, Poway, and Monsey. Comparing the situation to that of Jews in Nazi Germany, he wrote,
We must look to the lessons of history, which affirm—as do the Jewish high holy days this week—that there can be no reconciliation without atonement, no justice without accountability.
I feel this obligation acutely as the leader of an institution that protects and promotes democratic values, which also was founded by Henry Ford—an icon of innovation, and industry, and philanthropy, and one of the twentieth century’s most virulent American antisemites.
Further, all of us engaged in building a fairer, more just America ought to embrace our responsibility to speak out about this ancient strain of inequality—this category of caste—exactly as we call out racism, sexism, ableism, and homophobia.
While the statement covered a lot of ground, it was all strictly domestic ground; the statement said nothing about Israel or the rising anti-Semitism worldwide. Still, Forward columnist Aviya Kushner liked it while also asking pointed questions on how Walker could follow up, noting,
I would like to see Walker look toward the future, not just the past. In conversation, many Jewish writers and artists have told me they feel excluded from more and more literary and cultural spaces. Walker might want to take a hard look at current grant funding — is overtly Jewish literature, art and culture something the Ford Foundation ever funds with its billions? Can the Ford Foundation itself fund research on antisemitism in America’s cultural spaces—or support conferences for those who are studying it, right now?
Less than a month later, Walker posted a short statement on October 10, then another on October 19, “Ford Foundation Responds to the Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza,” that showed the foundation’s laser-like focus on “events” in Gaza, omitting any reference to events in Israel:
This week, we are devastated and disheartened as we continue to learn more about the tragic events occurring in Gaza and their impact on the Palestinian and Israeli people.
It is our hope that world leaders will continue to commit the resources needed to support immediate humanitarian relief efforts. And philanthropy must also respond.
At the Ford Foundation, we are committed to the principles of human rights and international law. We are steadfast in our pursuit of a world where all are able to live safely, with dignity and the full expression of their humanity. It is because of these beliefs that we cannot ignore the suffering, anguish, and pain that countless families are experiencing in Gaza at this moment.
In response to this crisis, the Ford Foundation will support immediate humanitarian relief efforts in Gaza and the Middle East. Administered by our colleagues in the Middle East and North Africa regional office, the resources will go to partners in the region to provide life-saving support and other essential needs to the affected Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
Tablet magazine picked up on the emphasis and in an article titled “The Ford Foundation Carries on the Legacy of Its Namesake.”
The Ford Foundation is a major funder of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, both of which regularly criticize Israeli “apartheid,” and it has more recently donated millions to the Tides Center, part of the dark-money Tides Network that, as the Scroll reported yesterday, funnels money from progressive billionaires such as Peter Buffett and George Soros to anti-Israel NGOs, including IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace, which organized the Oct. 18 rally at the U.S. Capitol against the Israeli campaign in Gaza.
Statements from the Episcopal Church express some empathy for Jews, through its ecumenical programs. Still, a statement issued on 10/7 firmly painted Israel as the source of problems, no mention of terrorism:
Churches for Middle East Peace (CMEP) is deeply grieved by the news coming out of Israel and Gaza today. CMEP condemns all acts of violence against civilians that have occurred in the past twenty-four hours, as fighting has escalated between Hamas and Israel. As of late Saturday (EDT), reports indicated that hundreds have been killed and thousands wounded, both Israelis and Palestinians. CMEP mourns with the victims of the violence and their families.
The actions of Hamas and the Israeli response in Gaza in no way advance peace, but rather cause loss of life and harm, grief, and devastation, not only to the individuals affected, but also to the legitimate cause of the Palestinian people in seeking an end to the decades long occupation and the blockade of the Gaza Strip.
Throughout this year, CMEP and allies have urgently been calling attention to the evolving context, characterized by escalating levels of violence between settlers, soldiers, and Palestinians. The increased nationalism and radicalization within Israeli society have led to more frequent and numerous incidents of hatred, racialized tensions, settler attacks, and incursions onto Muslim and Christian holy sites such as Stella Maris Monastery in Haifa and the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. These realities are not justifications but have long been ignored by the international community, including the longstanding frustration and desperation of the Palestinian people who seek an end to the oppression of the occupation and Israeli desires for lack of fear and for security. It is time for the US and the international community to strengthen efforts to de-escalate the systemic violence that has gone on for decades.
A quarter-century after O’Sullivan’s insights, any revision would also need to include university faculties, cultural forums, and professional organizations. Once dedicated to scholarship, the arts, and serving the needs of groups like physicians and authors, many have embraced the anti-Israel hysteria. Examples could fill a book. Some lowlights:
What to make of these and thousands of other datapoints? Some reflect executive mandates, where leadership wants to take the anti-Israel line; think of universities and their faculty-lounge mujahadeen. In other instances, leadership does the right thing but lacks the backbone to tell Hamasjugend workers to take a hike if they don’t like the museum or corporation’s programming; kudos to Alamo Drafthouse for still showing September 5.
Elsewhere, effective pushback comes from several directions. Alumni who withhold hefty donations can get the attention of university presidents quaking under their desks waiting for the next violent building takeover. A decline in applications from top students wary of harassment and tainted education at Hezbollah-on-the-Hudson and other institutions gets alarm bells ringing in the admissions offices.
Another approach: bypass the professional associations that bend to the anti-Israel winds. Don’t like the American Association of University Professors? Try the National Association of Scholars, which boldly declares it “upholds the standards of a liberal arts education that fosters intellectual freedom, searches for the truth, and promotes virtuous citizenship.” Disappointed in the direction of the ACLU? The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is fearless in defending free speech. If you need a lodestar for evaluating organizations, please refer to John O’Sullivan’s First Law.
And if the candidates of your longstanding political allegiance are steering hard in a direction that goes against your values, well . . . you know what to do at the ballot box. That’s been known to happen recently.
Progressivism, like all totalitarian ideologies, rejects objective truth, goodness, and beauty, as these concepts limit power. True art transcends political agendas, embracing these timeless values.
A poem by Darren Glick
With the globalized intifada moving into stage II—destroy the West—the growing cultural boycott of Judeans will soon become a mere footnote in today’s Islamic crusade. What we can do is use this as an opportunity to show the parallels of culture and ideology, and how they need to be viewed together: one forms the basis…
