The Sunny Side of the Wall

-By Cliff Keller- “Step out of your comfort zone! Muster the courage to approach people! You’ll be surprised by how many new friends you can make.” So advises a relatively recent and popular YouTube video, 10 Tips to Meeting Friends in your Area. But it’s not at all...

There Goes the Neighborhood – By Cliff Keller – Ir Ganim’s community multi-year archaeology project was about much more than finding artifacts. One morning not too long ago, for what seemed like the thousandth time, I glanced out a rear window of our Jerusalem home in...

Prophecy, Vintners and Aliyah - Part Two - By Cliff Keller - “Wait while my husband puts on his shoes…” Ramot Naftali is an agricultural moshav in the Upper Galilee lying two miles southeast of Israel’s border with Lebanon. Upon a breezy hilltop overlooking the Hula...

- By Cliff Keller - Wholly unique yet not unlike othersJerusalem’s Jaffa Gate was built in 1898 by Ottoman governors to allow German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, to enter the city in a triumphal procession. The Kaiser had come to Jerusalem for the inauguration of...

Prophecy, Vintners and Aliyah - Part One - By Cliff Keller -  Bring my sons and daughters… Every soul who has left home to live in modern Israel has a story, often fascinating, always a bit mysterious. But the inevitable mysteries embedded in each account—a...

Savlanut and the Jewish heart - By: Cliff Keller -  The collective Israeli psyche, if such a thing exists, is ambiguous, capricious, mysterious and odd. Israelis often demand “savlanut” (sahv lah NOOT), or patience, from others, for example, while most of them...

Why another blog about Israel? - By:  Cliff Keller -  In about one quarter of a second, a web search will currently return an astounding 191 million links in response to the query, “Israel blogs.” It would take nearly seven years to check them all if one...