Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Post Corona Has Arrived - And This Is What It Sounds Like

Episode Date: May 5, 2021

Social links:Amit Aronsohn on InstagramYonatan Sagiv on TwitterYaara Keydar on InstagramDanna Stern on Twitter

Last Thursday, 45 Israelis were killed and countless more injured in a tragic accident at Mount Moron in northern Israel, where thousands of Israelis had gathered to celebrate Lagba Omer. Every human life is precious, but a single event that takes the lives of 45 people from a population of only 9.3 million is catastrophic in the life of a nation. We had recorded a podcast episode while I was in Israel, which was before this tragedy. It's an episode that tries to capture life in post-corona Israel. We were scheduled to post it last Friday, but we held off given events. Elan and I spoke to family and friends in Israel in the past few days, and we decided to release the episode after

Israel's national day of mourning. So that's what we're doing. It's an episode on what we can learn from post-corona Israel about what's coming our way, based on conversations I had there around Israel's Independence Day. Welcome to Post-Corona, where we try to understand COVID-19's lasting impact on the economy, culture, and geopolitics. I'm Dan Siena. Today we're doing something different. After 15 months of avoiding business travel, last week I boarded a plane to attend meetings in Israel. When I landed, it felt more like I boarded a DeLorean and time traveled ahead to the era of post-corona, a land far, far away.

I arrived here on April 15th, the 73rd anniversary of Israel's declaration of independence. And the energy was electrifying. The streets were bustling, the restaurants packed, and the traffic insane. With 85% of Israelis, 16 and older, inoculated, and with fewer than 100 daily infections and hospitals emptying out, it was clear that as far as Israelis are concerned, the pandemic is just another chapter in history. Life in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem felt like a movie trailer for the

rest of the world coming soon to a theater near you. I wanted to capture this intangible energy and bring it to your ears. So I called up Tuli, a Tel Aviv sound engineer and a friend of ours who usually works on Israel's leading films and television shows. He joined me for an afternoon of conversations in the heart of Tel Aviv's bustling streets. I visited with Yonatan Sagiv, a Tel Aviv native, a PhD in literature, and a novelist who has written three popular Hebrew language detective novels. I then met with Yara Kedar, a fashion historian and curator who is now working on her doctorate at Hebrew University. I wrapped up the day with my old pal Donna Stern, who is managing director of Yes Studios. These conversations paint a picture of life in post-pandemic Israel, a picture that could be our reality in a few months. But we start with Amit Aronson, a well-known restaurant critic in Israel.

Amit's a television journalist, blogger, and writer. I usually check in with Amit when I'm in Israel. Always guaranteed a good meal, a great story, and a lesson in history. So we may begin. Okay, I'm rolling. This is Post Corona. Amit. What's up? I didn't recognize you with your mask off.

That's what people say here now. How are you? Cool, Sababa. I didn't wait for you by the table because you have to catch a line here. You have to queue. And you got a strike when there's an opening. Exactly. By the way, they told me I got here on Thursday. so I got here on Yom Ha'atzmaut.

People said that on Sunday there's going to be no more mask requirement. Outside. Right. Okay, so tell me where we are. We're at Hakosem. Yeah. Which... The area, what's the area?

It's really the heart of urban Tel Aviv. And a falafel place. But a falafel place really like no other. And this place... Like the cathedral of falafel place, but a falafel place really like no other. And this place... Like the Cathedral of Falafel. More than that. I always say, the Hakosem means the magician. Now I say that he's a magician because it's the only line in Israel that's actually a line and not a circle.

You can see people queuing for a falafel. And now it's not something that you have to, you know, it's not rare. There are on the street alone, there are maybe 10 falafel joints and now it's not something that you have to, you know, it's not rare. There are, on the street alone, there are maybe 10 falafel joints, and none of them has a line. Shalom! What are you having? You go first, you go first.

I need to think, this is stressful. There's too much I want here. I'll go for a, I'll take shawarma. Yeah. Bepita. Bepita? Shawarma, yeah, shawarma. Let's do, as I need to, I'll I take Sabich and he'll take shawarma.

See how many cooks, and that's the man with the plan. That's Ariel, Arik, the chef. How much did you miss this? I missed it a lot. I think it was a very, for me it was a very hard time spiritually. Not to see smiles, not to see people. When did you close?

In the 14th of March. It was Friday, four o'clock we closed the place. And you didn't reopen in the slot that was in the middle, right? Because there was a time in the middle around... In the first episode, like everybody, the first week I was in shock. And after I said, like everybody,

okay, we have vacation, once in a lifetime, let's go to the beach, let's surf. I did it. The second time, I started to understand it's okay. It was nice to have been two months in the beach, but we have to do something. And then we start, like everybody, to make small deliveries. We learned how to do it good.

It took time. We changed the delivery. You don't get it in a pita like now, so you can build it by yourself. But you have to understand, he's the exception in what he did, because many places started doing deliveries. So they would take the pita,

they would wrap it somehow, and they would send it to you, and you would get this sponge mixture of, you know, whatever you were supposed to eat initially. Arik, because he's the perfectionist that he is, decided he's not willing to do it because it doesn't live up to his standards and then he started developing you know how can I kind of uh I don't know to reenact the Hakosem experience at home. He has his own music playlist that you get on a piece of QR code and you get the music that you hear when you're here, you can listen to it at home.

I believe that food is not only about the ingredients, it's about a full experience. So I try to do as much as I can, also culinary, also in the way it's come to you, and the atmosphere, it's the bag and the music, we do a little bit of me, of us, also at home, so the bite will be tastier. So look here, you want to walk?

Let's walk and talk. Go to it, I will. You'll come back? Yes, in a few minutes, yes. I'm coming to you. So is this a typical day? This is slower than a typical day, actually. You're kidding me.

No, no, I'm not kidding you. Because if this were New York, people would think you're crazy. This many people, no masks, in one space. Oh, this. I was very strict, you know, going through COVID. I mean, I really barely met people. I canceled all my work meetings, everything.

But now there are really very, very little cases in Tel Aviv. And in general, I mean, the number of new cases in Israel yesterday was like less than a hundred. What struck me since I've been here is since the border is basically sealed to almost every non-israeli so so it's only Israelis here so it's a combination of no tourists so I hear very little very little English since I've been here. Which is strange in Tel Aviv. Especially this time of year, as you start April, May, June, you start to hear English everywhere, same in Jerusalem. So I'm hearing no English, and it seems that, because Israelis aren't really leaving, but

they're bursting at the seams to get out, because they've been locked up. You feel it everywhere. Israelis were, I mean, we were locked down for so long and you see it in traffic, you see it in the restaurants, you see it in the now that was you know Passover and Yom Ha'atzmanut and all that. All the parks were filled to the brim with people. Traffic jams were, there was a day where they said on the news it was the worst traffic jams in the history of Israel. Sunday? Something like that. Yeah, I was the worst traffic jam in the history of Israel. Sunday?

Something like that. Yeah, I was trying to get around Tel Aviv on Sunday. People did drives that usually take an hour and a half in five and a half hours. It's like driving from, I'd say, I mean if you drive, let's say from New York to Philly, usually takes you, I don't know, two hours. Two hours. Right? So think of that, that'll take you seven. I mean, so why? What's happening? Just, you know, think of the champagne

bottle that you shake for a long time and then you open it. That's what happened. We're very alive. We're always very alive. And when you put everybody in this pressure tank of not being able to meet one another, not being able to party, not being able to fly, not being able to eat at restaurants, and then instantly you kind of remove the cork, it just, you know, it sprays everywhere. I didn't think it would be so visible, you know, how much people missed everything.

I mean, try to get a table at a good restaurant in Tel Aviv now, it's a month ahead. It used to be a week, and now it's a month. Did this place get crazy, Arik? Did things start getting busy gradually, or was it like once you were open, it was instant? It was crazy. The line was until like one kilometer. When we opened, people not only were missing us, there was missing to go out. But it was instant. It wasn't gradual.

Tel Aviv became picnic city. It was amazing. You see, you know, Dizengoff Square? It was the best party in town. During the time when you could not sit inside at restaurants, but you could take food on delivery or on takeouts, people put milk boxes, milk cartons, or beer boxes all over the place as improvised tables. Everything was full, all the city was full. And the entire city, people sat on

benches and ate from cardboard boxes and with, you know, with the disposable utensils. The government said that we can't sit on the table so I ordered 200 beer boxes. So it just set them up right here? All over until over there. So that's like a couple of blocks away. Yes, yes. That's real innovation. That's Startup Nation. So you set up beer boxes and how many people did you have sitting at any given time? 200 people.. זה היה כל הסטרנט. גם אם היה רול לא לסייבת בצד. זה הלב. ביום שלאי, בקרוב, כשקלנו, המעיון של תל אביב, הם שימשו את המחלות. הם שימשו את המחלות של תל אביב

שאתם יכולים להראות. הם אמרו לך, אם אתה לא יצא בצד, אני אעשה לך טיקט. אבל אתה יכול לתת את המחלות שלנו. זה אוקיי. תשאלי לי אחת מהר If you were in the table, I would give you a ticket. But you can take our box. It's okay. Let me ask you one last question before you go. Does it feel to you that Israel, because right now the whole Western world is a few months behind Israel on reopening, reopening like this. This feels like another world to me. This is like getting in a time machine and going forward. Or do you just feel like we're getting back to life? Both. Both of them. You feel that you were lucky. You feel that you can say God was with us and he gave us to be only 9 million people that can close the gates and can maybe do

something. Israeli doctors, we are preparing for war. We are preparing for trauma. This is partly why Israeli entrepreneurs and startups are so successful. Israeli entrepreneurs and startups live in a constant state of chaos. So if you're trying to build a company, that's a pretty good mindset to have.

And I feel like the restaurant's got a taste of that. Yeah, right. I'm going to propose a few pizzas. Thank you for coming. Thank you. So is that the mood of all these guys running restaurants? There are not one and not five and not ten restaurateurs that I know that are actually better off now than they were before the crisis.

They won't tell you it. They won't tell it on record, but it is like that. They are better off? A little bit better off now than they were before the crisis. They won't tell you it, they won't tell it on record, but it is like that because... They are better off? A little bit better off, yes. I mean think of this place for example. This place which fed, let's say, I'm guessing around 1,200 people or 1,500 people on average on a day before. He still does that, but now he has about, I don't know, 500 extra deliveries going out every day. So the investment he had to put in building his delivery infrastructure was quite low. So let's say he added 30% to the number of people he feeds on a day.

That's 30% more money, you know? And COVID forced him to invest in that, in the delivery infrastructure, sooner than he would have. By the way, you're seeing that with a lot of retail in the U.S., which a lot of retail said, at some point we have to get to our e-commerce strategy, or at some point we have to get to a delivery strategy. And COVID happened, and lockdowns happened, and they instantly... Of course. I felt it. my wife works at Wix. So the number of places that opened retail, like e-commerce websites, it was ridiculous during this year. So there's a certain level of energy

that is through the roof, and you can see it here. Is this a burst, a spike in activity post-corona, or is this the new normal? It'll be interesting to come here in six months, I guess, to see after the summer what happens. I'm hoping that it will remain on this level because even if us, the Israelis, will kind of, you know, go back to our less energized mode, the tourists will come back. That's what I'm praying. I was here on, I landed here on Yom Hatzmuth. Someone said to me that Yom Ha'atzmuth, Israel's Independence Day, it felt a little bit like Israel's day, formal declaration of independence from COVID.

I agree. Why was that day so important? I think it was the first time that it was okay to party. Really, you didn't need to hide anymore. Because during the last year, there were, you know, underground parties going around and families getting together on holidays. You had people thinking, oh, I had friends over, but I won't post the picture on Instagram because then they'll see I had someone at my house.

And then on Yom Ha'atzmaut, Yom Ha'atzmaut is the biggest party of the year. Thank you, Amit. Pleasure. This was awesome. I got to run. Thank you for doing this. Thank you very much, man. Ari kept bringing the plates of shawarma, falafel, and sabich. He was not terribly interested in whether I was stuffed or that I had to get to my next meeting.

Thule and I walked a few blocks over to Habima, which is the pedestrian square and park around Tel Aviv's main live theater auditorium. We grabbed a park bench to sit down with novelist Yonatan Sagiv. Yonatan is a PhD in literature. He has written three popular Hebrew language detective novels. A Tel Aviv native, Yonatan had been living in the UK for the past decade, teaching modern Hebrew literature at the University of London. But he and his partner, whose tech job had originally brought them to the UK, uprooted their diaspora lives to move back to Israel during the pandemic. So how typical is this? Well, you know, a year and a half ago, I would say that this is extremely typical

because what we're seeing here, which is amazing, I think we're seeing faces, right? Like a lot of people walking around, talking and sitting and their faces are exposed. No masks. Yeah, no masks. I mean, the way that we're seeing people now, again, engaging and being in close contact, you know, it's only happening in the last few months since the vaccinations. So, and I think we're also feeling like very thrilled and very blessed that we can walk around like this. So where are we?

So we're at the square of the National Theater of Israel, Habima, which is this big, beautiful square with a garden and flowers and running water. And this has been kind of like one of the centers to hang around and be together during the COVID. Sitting down in outdoor spaces, taking takeouts and drinks. There's something so Israeli about that,

which is Israelis feel the constant need to be with other people. So it was like, we need to figure out, we have to be innovative in figuring out how we're going to be with each other. And if it's pulling out beer boxes and sitting in front of park benches to make a makeshift dinner table, we'll do it. Oh, definitely. Innovative and also in a way, informal and disobedient. Because I think, you know, for me, I mean, I've been living in London for the past 10 years. So when I came here after seven months of not seeing my family and, you know, living during the first lockdown in London, I was shocked to come to Israel. I mean, the mentality here with a pandemic was completely different from London, you know.

And I don't know if it's because of the culture or because of the way the pandemic progressed in the different countries. In London, the pandemic hit and hit hard. So when I came from London, it was very obvious to me that the corona is a serious threat. And also British people are more formal. They keep their distance. They're more obedient of rules and laws. And when I came here, it was a very, very different situation. Because Israelis, like you said, are a very physical culture, people were shocked that I'm not willing to hug.

I mean, we're talking June. The pandemic is all around the globe, you know. I mean, the graphs are going up. And people here are thinking that if I do not hug, I'm a crazy person who is hysterical. For our listeners, they may not understand this. When you meet an Israeli, within minutes, your arms around them, you're hugging, you're, you know, it's just a very physical. Yeah, it's a very physical touch andy-feely, and everybody is called honey or sweetie, and you hug and you kiss instantly.

And it was kind of like this throughout, in a way, the pandemic, even in the third wave. Even when Israel did experience, for the first time, I feel, with the variants, the real threat of COVID, people still like we said you know being affectionate and they could and they couldn't they couldn't comprehend how but i can't be affectionate i mean i'll comply with all your rules but i still need to be affectionate yeah yeah and and even i mean you comply with the rules but not exactly because you would still you would still come and visit your parents you would still be with them sometimes yeah in their own house because you would still come and visit your parents. You would still be with them sometimes in their own house, and you would still hug them and corona be damned, you know?

Right. So you were living in London, as you said. Yeah. So why did you move to London? So I have been away from Israel for the past almost 15 years. First, I was in New York living for six years doing my PhD in NYU in Jewish studies. Then I moved to London because my partner got a job. Why did you come back?

It sounds kitsch, and I wouldn't have said that two years ago. But I think what the corona highlighted for me and for a lot of people out there, I kind of call it now the return of the expats, is the need to be close. The need to be closer to culture. So all these Israelis, because in the tech world, there's often this criticism that with Israel you have all this brain drain. All these talented tech people leaving to take tech jobs in the West. And I always described it more as it's less of brain drain than brain circulation. That Israelis, they have, you know, wanderlust. They want to wander and go work in different

parts of the world. But they ultimately, most of them ultimately may take some longer than others, but they ultimately wind up back here. And by the way, when they do come back here, they bring with them a lot of experience and know-how and working in other companies and working in the West. But it seems that COVID has accelerated that for a lot of Israelis. There's a lot of Israelis scattered all over the world. And then there was like an ingathering of the exile. Yeah, I completely agree. I completely agree with your observation that first thing, it always happened.

I think Israelis travel a lot. They work a lot abroad. And then for some, it will take five years. For some, it will take 10 years. At the end, they will come back. But I think, yeah, I think COVID and the corona really accelerated that process. And especially when I came back here in November, you know, there was all that talk about, right, so the city is dead, right, all around the world, cities are dead, people want to go back to the suburbs, they want greenery, and Airbnb is gonna, you know, become to dust. And I can tell you that when I came back to Tel Aviv in November, you couldn't find an apartment here. And Airbnb, the prices skyrocketed, rents skyrocketed because so many expats

returned to Israel. They wanted to be with their families. They wanted to come back to their homeland where they're feeling, you know, safe and intimate and they know the workings around. And it really accelerated the process. I don't know if it's here to stay. That's my question. I am struck, and this is anecdotal, by the number of tech entrepreneurs that I know who built businesses that required them to live abroad. So they started tech companies in Israel, and all the engineering know-how was in Israel.

They said, but if we want to go do sales and marketing, we've got to go set up an office in the U.S. If we want to go do business development, we've got to go do it in the U.S. And so they would set up operations in the U.S., keep a headquarters here, set up operations in the U.S., and then the CEO or the co-founders would move abroad to the U.S. or to London. And I'm struck by how many of them now are moving back, and they're saying they're moving back for good. Why? Because they said the pandemic, the lockdowns proved that it's easier to work virtually than we thought. And that's not going to change.

It's not to say we all want to permanently work virtually, but some kind of hybrid living where we're in person with the people we have to interact with in business around the world. And we also can do a lot of it virtually. It means it gives us more flexibility to live where we want to live, not where the business is. We can live where we want to live. And if we can live where we want to live, and we're raising families, we want to be living in a place that's more consistent with our values, where we feel more at home, where there's more communal connections,

more familial connections. And Israel is that for many of these Israeli entrepreneurs. So they said, look, I can run my tech company and be a global company from Tel Aviv or from Jerusalem and be connected globally in a way I never could have imagined because the pandemic showed me I could be connected globally even during a pandemic. And that'll continue.

And the tech tools are there to enable that. And I can raise my family here. Yeah. One thing that I see now in post-corona Israel is how quickly things bounce back. I mean, it's only been a few months since the vaccinations have started to happen. And, you know, people already are almost not talking about the corona. People are, again, coughing and not being hysterical. People are sitting in coffee shops, restaurants, going to clubs, going to concerts.

By the way, the day I got here, I was stunned. Downtown Tel Aviv, it's something I just haven't seen. I saw lines around the block of young people, like, you know, 18, 19, 20, lining up to get into clubs. Like the velvet rope line's back. I never, I'd forgotten about the velvet rope line during Corona. And then you see lines of people and they're packed together. I'm thinking, these people, what are they doing?

And they're lining up to get into a tiny place where they're going to be on top of each other. Yeah, yeah, they're packed. And that's why I'm saying this, because, you know, I read, I still read now, because, you know, the world is not like this. I read like articles in The Guardian and The New York Times. Will we ever go back to restaurants?

And I'm like, yes, trust me, you will. And the reason I'm saying this is because I think people immigrate and move around for different reasons. And some will decide to move again. we will also see of course like new generations of young people that just want to go out there to the world and explore so I think we'll we'll still see again a very globalized world with a lot of movement again I think I really do not know. You're a fiction writer.

Yeah. What kind of literature do you think will come out of this period? Not the period we're in this moment, but the COVID, the corona period, this 15, 16 months of lockdown, of human catastrophe globally, of shared experience in that I can't think of anything in my lifetime where there's something going on in the world that literally affected everyone, that almost everybody was waking up every day and at some point thinking about the same thing that everyone around the world was thinking about. How will that manifest itself in literature?

Yeah, it is so difficult to know because I think we all have this, in a way, double expectation. On the one hand, you kind of like, you want to have the vaccines and you want to get it over with. And then you don't want to write about it because you feel you've been submerged in it for so long that you kind of want to imagine that life will just bounce back and you will write your literature and your, I'm also writing for TV now. And you don't want to imagine writing again, like people with masks and people not shaking hands. You want to see your right fifth season of billions and you want to see them sitting down in the office and just talking about stocks. You don't want to see them talking in Zoom. But on the other hand, like you said, this is such an event with such huge magnitude,

such a break in our shared experience that I think we won't be able to pass it. So first I envision a really big wave of bad sci-fi and fantasy, speaking about maybe bad vaccinations that will lead to disease and mutations. Conspiracy of this conglomerate spreading viruses

or engineering human beings. I'm waiting for the series on the China versus US intelligence community race to a vaccine. Yes, exactly. We're going to have a lot of maybe... With thrillers.

Exactly. Netflix shows, documenting how it all was laid down. But then I think also, less jokingly, but I do think it will happen, I think we'll see a lot of literary works dealing with isolation, dealing with mental problems that arise from isolation. And I think the other spectrum of that would be a lot of narrative talking about reconnection and about coming home and coming back to your family and how we kind of like reestablishing these like familial and human bonds after such a break and after such an earthquake has happened to us. There's very little written about the Spanish flu period.

Very little. I keep thinking about that. Do you have a theory on why? Maybe that's the reason why we all forgot in a way about the spanish flu you know i think maybe there is a chance that we will kind of view this if the vaccinations will work hopefully and if as in israel and as i think in a few other countries are happening now we will look back back at it as sort of this crazy period of a limbo that we were all suspended for a year and a half, but then life kind of like returned. Maybe we will actually, there is a chance that we will try to avoid it in our literary works and in our creative

work and just like plunge back into the world, rushing back to us. Do you think there's something unique? You say everyone here is physically affectionate. Do you also think there's something very communal about the place? People want to be not just physically, you know, hugging, but just it's a place that people are out and about, you know, with each other. I think there's so many reasons for that. You know, I think I think Jewish society, even before Israel, I mean, Jewish diaspora has always been organized in in small communities and with the emphasis of of charity and community.

So people really huddled together in a way. There were also, of course, historical and societal reasons for it, like anti-Semitism and ghettos. So I think we're talking from the beginning about a community that really puts an emphasis about togetherness and being close to one another. And then it's a small country that feels that it's always at war with its outside enemies. So Israel, for good reasons and for bad reasons, it's sort of like a pressure cooker.

So everybody's together, everybody's really close to one another, and it translates to the physical atmosphere and also to the mental perception of it. So yeah, people are not willing to abandon closeness. And then when they've been told they can't be close to one another, and then they're told, now it's okay to be close to one another. It's like shaking up a Coke can and cranking it open. That's what I see around here. Everywhere I look, it's like just people. I was at a restaurant the other night in Tel Aviv in Carmel Market, M25.

And I was watching people and they just kept hugging each other throughout the night. Like it's one thing they hug each other when they arrived. Oh, it's so great to see. And they hug again and they hug and they're just. That is a great metaphor. And I think it's exactly like that. So people are, I mean, Tel Aviv is exploding right now. You can feel the vibrations in the air and people are hugging constantly.

People are traveling throughout the country. You can't get a booking in a restaurant. You can't get a booking in a hotel. I mean, and the city in the streets, it's packed. And I think this is a very special moment because you still remember kind of like the trauma of the past few months and of not being able to do that fully in the way you wanted. And so you're still literally embracing the possibility of embracing. And that's why I think Tel Aviv and Israel in general now is in such a close contact with its people. All right. This is great. Thank you for doing this. Thank you so much for having me.

It was starting to get pretty hot, typical for a late April afternoon in Tel Aviv. Thule and I wandered over to the Montefiore Hotel, a boutique-y spot just west of Allenby Street, to meet fashion historian and curator Yara Kedar. Yara is now working on her doctorate at Hebrew University. She moved her family back to Israel right before the pandemic. So Ya'ara. Yes. Ya'ara.

Where are we? We are at Hotel Montefiore. And it's beautiful. I think it's actually my favorite place in Tel Aviv. Why? I love the palm trees and the leather sofas. It's always busy, no matter what time you come here. Yeah. There are always people sitting there and drinking,

no matter what time of day it is. The fashionable crowd would be here, businessmen and women, but also people that are celebrating because it's like a fancy place. Okay, so you live in Tel Aviv? Yes. But you lived in New York? Yes, I lived in New York until December 2019. We spent eight magnificent years there. Where in New York?

The Lower East Side. So you were in New York. New York's a fabulous place to be. It is. You spent eight years there. What brought you back here? In New York, I started curating exhibitions, both in New York and in Israel. And after a while, I started also lecturing on fashion and art. I started traveling back and forth all the time. And I was away from home. I was away from my family. Your family, which was in New York. Yes.

No matter where I was, I was away from my family. And when I was there, I was far from my family here in Israel. And when I was in Israel, I was with my child and my husband. And it started to take a toll and it became increasingly harder to do. And initially we just said, we're gonna take a year off, go to Israel, spend the year there and then decide what's gonna happen. But our initial plan was to go back to New York after a year

and it was December, 2019. And then, you know, the world changed. Yeah. Little did you know at that point what was going on in Wuhan. And in terms of the fashion industry, what changed during the pandemic? There's a thing in Zoom that you start staring at yourself. You start looking at yourself and you start noticing things, how your hair looks, your glasses, things that you've never seen before, earrings, nail polish.

All these things became really important. In terms of personal engagement with people, I mean, it feels to me it was the end of small talk. Hopefully we're going to resume to small talk, but it was the end of small talk. Hopefully we're going to resume to small talk. But it was the end of small talk. Because when I think of how much small talk there is around the water cooler, no less, or just in the hallway at the office. Or when you start a meeting and you walk into a meeting with five people and you're waiting for everyone to get there. And there's chit chat.

You know, wow, you talk to this person, you talk to this person before the meeting commences. And Zoom work life was just too efficient. Because it was just like the meeting starts at 4, screens go on, 4, we're on. There's no small talk. There's no, oh, what train did you take to get here for this meeting? Oh, what's the weather supposed to be? Oh, did you see this film? It's just you go right in it.

It's going to be weird for there to be a resumption of small talk. That's a really interesting question. I have to say that I think Israel in general, there's this culture of going back really quickly to the way everything was. And I feel that it's... And talking to friends from New York, for example, I think it's a unique thing that's going here. And maybe it has a lot to do with our history of, you know, needing to endure and move on and just forget everything that just happened.

Give me examples in history. That's a really interesting point. I remember growing up as a teenager in Tel Aviv and there were bombings and we used to go out after every bombing like so so what years just during the second time the end of the 90s like the Sparrow bombing in Jerusalem the Dolphin you tell me like coffee shops and bars and buses being bombed it's okay so during during a wave of yeah I would say 96 7 7, 8, even later than that. And then I was no longer a teenager. I was like 19, 20.

But when there were terror attacks, we would go out. We would go out to like... So there'd be news of a terror attack and the country would be frozen. And yet there was a quick... The mindset was, we've got to get back to life. We've got to get back to our routine. Let's get out. Go dance. Go do something that has nothing to do with it.

Otherwise, you're going to sink in the situation and fear, I would say. And this was, at least for me, it was a major part of growing up in Israel. You were scared of being attacked. So I think escapism is a major part of living here and being able to absorb everything around you, but then being able to cut and then switch to a completely different setting, a completely different atmosphere, a completely different atmosphere, being somewhere else.

So you think that's a uniquely Israeli cultural mindset? I suspect so. Given the frequency and volume of instability that you just quickly have to, in the wake of all the stability, get some stability. Exactly. And going back as quickly as possible to what was familiar, what felt like normalcy before,

we went to the movies this week and it was packed. You were next to human beings? Yes. Wow, bold. We were crying and laughing. What movie? It was To Take a Wife with Ronit El-Kabetz.

Ronit El-Kabetz was a cultural heroine of Israel. And she passed away five years ago. And her brother arranged a special screening of one of their films that she directed. And she is the protagonist of the film. And we went to see a movie in the theater. It was amazing. And then I texted a friend from New York that we are in the movies.

And he said, you know, it's going to take a while for New Yorkers to do that. I agree. And he said, we're not like you. So for, I think, Americans watching what's happening here, it's, you know, I felt like I was getting in a DeLorean and going forward in time. And I'm going to come back to New York and try to tell people what's waiting for us. I went five months ahead, guys, and now I'm back. Let me tell you what it's like.

What would you, what do you tell people? I think predicting the future became almost impossible. And we always relied on being able to say, you know, this will pass, this will, you know, this will fade. And now we really don't know. It was such a surprising turn of events that I think everyone are more cautious about making plans for the future. I do think that it's easier for Israelis who don't like to make long-term plans anyway. For Israelis, I think it feels more natural to... Why don't Israelis like to make long-term plans? Because you never know what's coming.

A friend of mine, the other day, his daughter just got engaged. And I said, oh, when's the wedding? Is it next year? He says, I was thinking six weeks. And I was like, or two months, whatever it was. And I said, what? He says, first of all, Israelis do short engagements anyways to begin with. And then COVID shrunk them even more for this exact reason.

Because we just don't know if there's going to be another variant. We just don't know. So we're loose now. We're free. We've had our Independence Day, literally and figuratively. We're free of corona. If my daughter wants to get married, get married now. It's true. I think the idea of celebrating like there's no tomorrow is literally

the idea behind many of the celebrations here. All right, well, thank you for doing this. This was great. My pleasure. It's about 5 p.m., and the tree-lined pedestrian and bike lane strip in the middle of Rothschild Avenue, in the heart of Tel Aviv's tech and art scene, is jammed. I met TV and film executive Donna Stern there for coffee in front of one of the kiosks in the middle of it all. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Donna has a knack for turning hyper-local shows like Fauda, On the Spectrum, and Shtiso into international hits. Earlier in life, Donna lived everywhere from the U.S. and London to Singapore. In Israel, I feel like I hopped into a DeLorean and time-traveled to post-corona.

I talk about what post-corona may look like. I feel like I've traveled to it. I am actually describing, it's funny you should use the Back to the Future reference because I literally use that. Remember that scene where Marty McFly finds the almanac? Yes. And then he kind of goes,

okay, this is the way to make some money off this, right? It's kind of like that. So everybody I speak to, I kind of tell them, I can give you a glimpse into the future. We've never been able

to do that before. So I feel like that's me right now. I'm here. And I'm like, so I want this episode to just be talking to some people who live here in Tel Aviv who can describe what is hopefully, God willing, coming our way, just like five or six months behind you guys. So first of all, where are we right now? So we're in the epicenter, I think, right?

If you have to describe Tel Aviv of today. So we're on Rothschild, right in the center. I mean, we can see the National Theater from here. Yeah, I was there earlier today. Yeah, and then if we kind of just continue down on Rothschild, straight, straight, straight, heading west, we'll just reach the beach. So it doesn't get more Tel Aviv than that. Okay, so this is a pretty eclectic group of people.

This is rush hour. So we have young people going back and forth to work. We've got children on skateboards and scooters. We've got electric scooters everywhere, traffic at a standstill, people running red lights all over the place. Right. But at any moment, there's someone whizzing by an electric scooter, which is terrifying.

And we're sitting here on seats and a milk crate. Okay, so do you think this is like a thing now? The street, like, vibe? Like, look at it. There's blankets all over the place. It's like picnics everywhere.

Everybody just wants to get outside. Okay. So you said the other night when I saw you, it's like when you're listening to a podcast and you increase the speed of the podcast to 1.5 or 2x. That's what life is like in Tel Aviv now.

Everybody's living rapidly. It really is. It just feels like that, that everything is going at warp speed. It's like faster than it ever was. And if I had to describe it, you know, we press pause for a year and then we press play. But it was play at times, you know, one and a half. It's just everybody feels like

they need to cram everything that they missed out on immediately. And we have no patience anyway here. We've always been kind of fast and, you know, and loose. But now it's just like we feel like we deserve it. You know, we've spent a year locked

indoors, spent no money thinking this was the end. And look, it's not, you know, the sun's still shining. Sky has not fallen. And, you know, let's make up for lost time and let's do it quick. So, so you said to me that the, like Yom Ha'atzmaut, Independence Day felt like the, the day. Like independence, not only celebrating Israel's independence, but like independence from COVID. That's really when the masks came on. Oh my.

It was crazy. I mean, independence, I've never seen anything like it. And usually, you know, the next day we'll have a barbecue. So kind of like 4th of July, right? Usually we get invited to one, maybe two, one early. And that's the thing here, right? On Independence Day, that's what people do. They go to barbecues.

Yeah. So during the day, we go to barbecues. The night before, we party party. And it's a really interesting transition regardless between our Memorial Day, which is a real somber event. It's a real, you know, and the few hours kind of in between the two holidays is one of the unique times that you spend. And everything stops and people get very serious and somber and kind of locked up. And then as soon as, you know, that hour between eight and nine, where there's like an official ceremony and at 930, the fireworks go off. This year, it was just like people went off, but it was just party, party, party. I had

to drive one of my daughter's friends home. It was 3.20 in the morning. I could not move my car through the streets. And they didn't close the streets off. I would have been fine if they were just like, all right, whatever, a night of no traffic kind of thing. It was just people, you know, drunk, happy, just walking in the middle of the street. You could not move. And this was 3.20 in the morning.

It just went on and on and on. And yet, since I've been here, I hear very little English. Well, there was none. So you were, if you don't mind me telling this, I've been telling this since I saw you. You're my curiosity. You're like my one friend who made it over. Citizen, visitor number one.

Tourist number one. Tourist number one. And at the restaurant the other night, I keep telling people, like, I'm so proud of the fact that you made it here. But how the fact that they didn't have an English menu for you. And this is a restaurant. It's a market restaurant. It is in the market.

So the kind of produce. Yeah, the Carmel market. The Carmel market. And usually they have a revolving menu, right? It changes every day depending on what's fresh. And they just print it out. And you were sitting there. And the waitress goes over and says

English we don't have an English menu anymore And this is a place where you would only you know You're English and French in the background and she called over some of the other guys and said look at him He's like he said he's a tourist. Oh, we've got a tourist. We've got a tourist. You're the first So yeah, and and so and that's because I wait just Oh, by the way, just going back to the barbecue thing. So usually we'll have one or two. I think we had four invites. I mean, that's the double speed, right?

People are just trying to find reasons to party, party. And do you think, because in the U.S., it feels that even as we gradually open, reopen, it's going to feel very incremental. This feels, there's nothing incremental about this. As you said, it's like double speed. So is that an Israeli thing? It went from zero to 100 in like, let's see if I can.

Right. Is that an Israeli thing? I don't know. I don't know. We'll have to see because I think we are kind of the first. And some of the countries are actually going backwards versus going forward. And certainly Europe is stuck right now. U.S. seems to be the better of a lot. And I thought when we kind of, you know, and we had to doing what I do and producing and developing,

you're always producing and developing for future. And we were writing things in like social distancing and shows. So you were actually integrating into shows. Future shows that will be shot after COVID. And we thought, you know, people would still be, so they wouldn't hug, they wouldn't kiss. They'd be like socially distant. You'd have to factor that in.

That all went through the window. People are like hugging each other like they've never hugged before. Double kissing, triple kissing or whatever. But you say people have been saving money. Yeah. So I'm actually, and that's why I'm saying because I'm seeing people now just spend like there's no tomorrow. And to your question, you know, will this continue? It depends on if the economy holds up.

And right now, people feel like they've been pent up. They've certainly not spent money. They've had nothing to spend it on. They feel like they deserve it. You know, they really suffered in the last year. Like, people just want to spend themselves. They want to splurge and indulge. I mean, you can't get a table in this city. Someone said to me earlier that it was interesting

that throughout Israeli history, there's this bounce back from tragedy. You know, after a terrorist attack, people go out. Not only do they go out, but the place that was hit, the coffee shop or the bar, they try to reopen it as soon as possible. You want a firm life. I. You want a firm life. I think we want a firm life.

I think we want to make sure, you know, we're still living. I actually think it comes a lot from our history, like way back when, you know, after the Holocaust. And you saw that it displaced persons camp. I mean, that's the first example you kind of have of that, you know, after the Holocaust, when the Jews had nowhere to go and were kind of stuck. And I think it's this history that we have of going through, you know, tremendous tragedy, but coming out on the other side and affirming life. And this boom that you're seeing, to your point, after every tragedy, war, terror attack, is one where, you know, we don't get quiet and mournful. We actually celebrate what we do have. Right.

You've been traveling around the country. Yeah, for the first time in my life. Pretty much since school. So basically, you're a traveler. You are always traveling the globe. Suddenly, you can't travel the globe. So you're like, I'm going to see parts of this tiny little country that I've never seen before. To give you context, I was probably traveling twice a month on average overseas.

Before the pandemic. Before the pandemic. For work, usually. But half work, you know, a little play. Right. In the past year, I've gone abroad twice. And I'm probably one of the few people that even managed to do that. So to me, it's been getting a little cabin fever.

So places you went, you went to... I went to Dubai, because you got to. So you went to Dubai, and you went to go see Gal Gadot in Wonder Woman with your kids in a movie theater in Dubai. The day it opened. And she was on the Burj Khalifa when we were there, you know, with a big advert. Like, in Dubai, on the tallest building in the world, you're seeing an Israeli actress play Wonder Woman. It was just, it was mind-blowing.

This was December. It was my first time in a theater. So, and you, tell me where you've gone in the country where you've traveled. So, in the time, you know, we were kind of getting a little cabin fever. And now that there's you can hotels have opened, restaurants have opened. The roads have obviously opened. So that's the one unfortunate part of it. The traffic's back.

You can't travel with your kids because they're not vaccinated. A lot of the countries won't have us back. So we're trying to kind of revisit our own countries. So I've been taking these weekends with the kids to various places in the countries, which ironically they've never been to. You know, they've probably been to New York like five times, but they've never been to Nazareth, which is an hour and a half away. So we've been kind of using that, you know, to reacquaint ourselves.

By the way, we're not the only people doing it. Like everybody. I talk to people, they're like, everyone's going away. I mean... I have a friend who is a tour guide. She speaks Italian and she takes, you know, usually Christians on pilgrimages and poor thing. You know, she hasn't worked in a year.

And suddenly she's back working. And I said to her, like, what are you working on? She's like, I'm taking all these Israelis on Christian pilgrimage tours. They've never given at the time of day. You know, she's never had an Israeli on any of her tours. And suddenly, you know, she's taking him to Jordan River and telling him the history of Israel from a Christian perspective, because that's the tour she knows. So. So one, just tell me a little bit about your TV and film life, producing television during the pandemic. She's the first series we actually started and ended production entirely during COVID. So we had a few shows that had stopped because during the first lockdown back

in March, everything stopped. Nobody had any idea how to deal with it as far as a production level. And plus that was the law. And we were just like, you know, trying to find ourselves. So it all stopped. So we had a couple of series that went back just for extra days that they had to pick up. But that went back, I want to say very early July. It was scary. It was scary for everyone.

You know, part of our cast is a little elderly. And they were very fearful about, you know, catching COVID. Ironically, I think I can share this because he's been very vocal, but Shulem Dovaliglikman was the number one hypochondriac that we had, and he wouldn't travel with anyone, you know, in the car, and he had his own room, and he didn't want anyone on set. Like, he was very particular. He was sure he was going to get COVID

from one of the younger actors. Thankfully, nobody got sick at all during the shoot. Then he went off. He did this film for HBO. I believe it's in the Czech Republic. He took a private plane. It's called Oslo. It's based on the play.

It's for HBO. I think Steven Spielberg is, like, producing it. Did he? Did he, too? He did, too. He got sick on a shoot for an HBO film in the Czech Republic. Had nothing to do with Stiesel. And everybody else is like, -"See? We told you." -"You okay?"

So, is... Did you have... How did you do it on the set? Did you have everyone in a bubble? Yeah, so we asked people to be in a bubble. So we can't afford to put people up like in hotels and really sequester them from their families and friends and plus they would never do it like if you ask an israeli not to go back home for shabbat where he's just down road shooting uh-uh they're gonna go so especially because like israeli soldiers come home yeah everybody goes home on shabbat. Right, you're not, you can't do that. So we basically had pods.

And for the season, I think you can tell, too, if you kind of watch it closely, you can really tell there's like very two distinct, very storylines that never really cross over. So you minimize to the extent that you could. Minimize the context between the actors and different pods. They all had, you know, separate rooms in which to rest. Usually they just have like one crew room. I mean, we're not fancy like all had, you know, separate rooms in which to rest. Usually they just have, like, one crew room.

I mean, we're not fancy like they are, you know, in other countries where everybody gets their own caravan and their own restroom and staff. Usually they're just

huddled together, but this time we've had to. So it costs a lot more. And plus they got a lot of testing. And this is back, you know, when testing wasn't as readily available.

Do you have a lot of Israeli friends who are living abroad who are now thinking about moving back here? Yeah, or have already moved back. Why are they moving back? I think initially they moved back because it felt the world, from being very global, was suddenly becoming very nationalistic. And countries were closing the borders and changing the rules and making rules separately for their own nationals versus visitors versus tourists, certainly. And I think it kind of makes you feel like a second or third class citizen.

And that suddenly feels a little uncomfortable when that starts to happen. Plus medical care. I mean, and anything that happens, you want to be home. You want to be close to your parents, to your siblings. If you have your friends, even if you can't see them, you kind of know they're there. And also we do have great medical care but how much of it also is like i'm seeing this in the u.s if you're a tech engineer at a big tech company in silicon valley suddenly you realize like that editor you're like you're like

wait a minute i can do my job from anywhere and i I'd rather raise my kids in Asheville, North Carolina, and I can still work for one of the big tech companies in Silicon Valley, and I get the best of both worlds. It doesn't affect my career, and I get to live in a community that's aligned with my values, where I want to raise my kids. And I think there's a lot of Israelis globally, I've seen this in the tech space, who've said, oh, wait, I get to do this cool job and move back to Israel?

I get to move back here and raise my kids here and enjoy the lifestyle that I have here, be close to my parents, my friends. And there's a lot of that. We do really see each other. We do see each other as a family. Like you will not go a week without seeing your parents. I mean, it's just not happening no matter where they live and where you live in the country. It's not like we go back home on Thanksgiving and for New Year's. No, no, no. In Israel, every weekend is Thanksgiving. Yeah. Okay. This is good. That's our show for today. I hope you enjoyed our on-location podcast recording. And most importantly, I hope this episode will help you look forward to our own return to post-corona life. If you want to follow Amit, Yonatan, Ya'ara,

or Dana, we'll post their social links in the episode notes. Be sure to check those out. And if you have questions or ideas for future episodes, tweet at me, Dan Senor. Today's episode is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor. Today's episode is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.