We’ve got a little exclusive video of the Gottex swim suit show last night at Bryant Park as part of NY’s somewhat nauseating fashion week. As you can see, attractive yet emaciated women in beautiful clingy fabric meant for the beach, always makes for a good time. Enjoy!

*UPDATED:*
here are some of the good reviews:

MyIt Things

Bubblegum Pop

Advice Sister

“God will surf with the devil, if the waves are good.” –This is the best thing I’ve heard all week.

From Ynet:

Jewish-Hawaiian surfing guru donates surfboards to Gazans

‘I hope this gesture will get Israelis and Palestinians to catch the same peace wave,’ 86-year-old Dorian Paskowitz says

An 86-year-old Jewish surfing guru from Hawaii donated on Tuesday 12 surfboards to Gaza’s small surfing community, in a gesture he hoped would get Israelis and Palestinians “catching the same peace wave”, Yedioth Ahronoth reported Tuesday.

“God will surf with the devil, if the waves are good,” retired doctor Dorian Paskowitz said Tuesday. “When a surfer sees another surfer with a board, he can’t help but say something that brings them together.”

A little news about an alternative summer break…

From Courant.com:

Escape From GriefBy THOMAS KAPLAN

Courant Staff Writer

August 13, 2007

Yaniv Aharonov hears the knock on his family’s front door on a sweltering August day. He sees three shadows outside. They are soldiers - and he knows what they are going to tell him.

His father is dead, a casualty of a Hezbollah rocket. Yaniv is 11, going on 12, and, now, fatherless. His mother won’t stop crying. A soldier pulls the boy aside.

“You have to be the strongest in your family,” he tells him. “You have to.”

It’s a scene that has played out hundreds of times across Israel for decades, as violence claims the lives of soldiers with tragic regularity. Yaniv is one of hundreds of children in Israel left fatherless, or orphaned entirely.

Today, it’s been a year since that knock. Yaniv recounts the day, slowly, until he is stopped by tears. But then he remembers, as he does so often, what that soldier told him.

Yaniv tells his story sitting in the shade outside the mess hall at Camp Laurelwood, a Jewish sleep-away camp in Madison. For his bar mitzvah gift, he is enjoying an all-expenses-paid, three-week visit to America, along with more than 40 other 12- and 13-year-olds, their fathers also casualties of war in Israel.

Israelis are notorious for their good-looks. Whether it’s the Mediterranean sun, intense military training, or high consumption of hummus, it’s clear that Israelis know how to flaunt their goods. And celebrities are no exception. Here’s a list of the hottest Israeli icons keeping their country at the forefront of the world fashion scene.

Vered, the New-York based Israeli singer-songwriter, is set to unveil her third album this September. The indie, folk-rock musician definitely knows how to draw a crowd with her free-spirited acoustic tunes.

In one of her recent performances at a venue in downtown Manhattan, Vered joked onstage about the hassle of having to renew her Israeli passport that week. And to the delight of every man in the room, she added: “Yes, I am Israeli. And I was in the army.” The entire crowd clapped and cheered. Somehow, that army bit always does the trick.

Check out Vered’s MySpace page to sample some tracks from her unreleased 2007 album.

***Video of performance at Pride 2005: made by Lovenikka***

I met Dror Cohen 3 years ago a few months before the Athens 2004 Paralympics. He came to Athens to literally test the waters before the actual sailing competition. I was truly impressed by his determination and love for sports and life, which by the way, has played a pretty unfair game to him. Against all difficulties, the Israeli team came first in the competition and made us all who had worked with them really proud.

But getting the gold was apparently not the end of the road for him but a step to achieving new and higher goals. I admit I was not surprised to read that he is getting ready to take part in the Paris- Dakar race, one of the toughest ones in the world. No matter what the outcome he is definitely a winner from any angle you want to look at it.

From Israel21c:
Disabled Israeli athlete takes on Paris-Dakar rally
By Hannah Meyers June 03, 2007

It’s been a long, winding road that has taken 39-year-old Israeli extreme athlete Dror Cohen from combat planes to a wheelchair to the 2008 Paris-Dakar Rally, the world’s toughest off-road race.

By his own admission, Cohen has been a daredevil since he was a boy. “Whenever we had trips, I never went on the track, I always went off-road,” he told ISRAEL21c.

As he grew up, Cohen continued to seek out physical challenges, becoming an army combat pilot (F-16s and Skyhawks) and flight instructor. But then tragedy struck: an army car accident in 1992 left Cohen, then 24, paralyzed from the waist down. It seemed that his active days were over, and he would be relegated to a life of immobility.

At first, Cohen went into a dismal depression over his condition. Slowly, however, he began to exercise again, participating in the basic sporting activities that were available for the disabled. And then, while abroad, Cohen had the opportunity to try out skis and water-skis adapted for the disabled, and was thrilled to return to the adrenaline-producing sports that he loved.

“I need adrenaline; if I don’t have it sucked into my blood, I lose interest very quickly,” he explained.

But when he returned home to Israel, he found that extreme sports facilities for the disabled were not available.

***Get the rest at Israel21c***

Traveling to Israel this summer season? Here’s the low on the new shops on Shenkin. Brought to you by these guys.

New York Magazine did a nice write up this week on a 4 day trip to the ‘Big Falafel’ aka ‘The Little Sand Wedge’ aka ‘The Land of Milk & Honey’ etc, etc… more specifically, to TA (Tel-Aviv) our capital of fun and sun on the Mediterranean.

The trip sounds great, but 4 days may be a little rough when factoring in the lag…

Enjoy:

Tel Aviv, Israel

Club-hop until the sun comes up over the Mediterranean.

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Hours From New York: 10
TYPE OF VACATION: Party
MODE:

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Tel Aviv may be in the heart of the Holy Land, but its all-hours, pansexual, smoker-friendly, inexpensive club scene is anything but pious (and the city is increasingly safe). The weekend starts Thursday night, so leave Wednesday night (El Al has an 11:50 p.m. flight from JFK that lands just in time for dinner the following day). Book the Cinema Hotel (from $120; 972-3-520-7100), a converted thirties movie house a short stroll from the Mediterranean. Having slept on the flight, get your groove on early with dinner at Nanuchka (28 Lilenblum St.; 972-3-516-2254), a Georgian supper club; wash down tinakali (cheese dumplings with yogurt) with vodka shots, and maybe some dancing on tables to post-Soviet Slavo-pop….

Read the rest here:

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. Today time stops, literally stops, in the Jewish State for two minutes. This, in my opinion, is one of the most unique aspects of Israel. Every year on Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Ha’ Shoa), a siren rings in every corner of the country for two minutes. During the siren, everyone, no matter what they are doing (unless they are saving a life) stops completely and stands in silence. Every driver stops driving, every pedestrian stops walking, and it is as if every clock stops ticking. The moment creates a remarkable sense of complete collective unity and mourning across an entire nation, something I have only experienced in Israel.

So today, let us remember every person who was murdered in the Holocaust and let us never forget.

From HAARETZ:

Israel marks Holocaust Remembrance Day with siren, memorial services

By Haaretz

Israel marked Holocaust Remembrance Day on Monday with memorials at the Knesset and the Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority.

Names of Holocaust victims were read aloud at “Every Person Has a Name” memorials held at both locations.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert took part in the Knesset memorial by reading the names of his wife’s relatives who were killed in the Holocaust. Opposition Leader Benjamin Netanyahu also read aloud the names of his wife Sara’s relatives.

Vice Premier Shimon Peres told of his farewell from his grandfather, Rabbi Zvi Melzer, who instructed him “to be Jewish.”