Grilled Shrimp and Rock Stars on a Bed of Nails

Beginning of article

After visiting Israel four times between 1974 and 1988, I had not been back for two full decades. What I saw during my two-week visit in late June and early July was, in aspects large and small, a different country than the one I remembered.

Tel Aviv has become a cosmopolitan city that is more Israeli than Jewish. No longer the neurotic little village I remembered from a semester in university there, it is a Hebrew-speaking European style-city with a Mediterranean accent. Sure, it has the assorted black hat walking around, and maybe a few of the restaurants are kosher, but I could not get a reservation at Goocha--a fish place with magnificent goose liver-wrapped grilled shrimps--on a Friday night.

The days when Israel was a culturally isolated, near-garrison state are over. However disappointingly it may have ended, a fruit of the …