It never should have surprised me that today’s Tel Aviv would feel like a nonstop party, said Raphael Kadushin in National Geographic Traveler. If Jerusalem is Israel’s “venerable heirloom,” the nation’s financial capital and second-largest city is “the visionary, open-minded experiment,” a place that looks always to the future and defies every threat of a rocket attack with a live-for-the-moment attitude that’s almost a communal creed. I spent two years in Tel Aviv when I was a boy, storing up lasting memories of bright sunshine, kinetic schoolmates, and pillowy pitas overstuffed with crispy falafel and dripping tahini. This time, my wake-up was a bartender in a lively restaurant who passed around shots of bourbon and lit a sage sprig on fire in front of us. “L’chaim!” we all shouted. To life—while we’ve got it.
The city’s entire population seemed to be soaking in the sun when I arrived one bright afternoon. “A briny perfume” was blowing off the Mediterranean, and café tables were filled. In recent years, Tel Aviv’s amazing array of Bauhaus-style buildings have been polished and restored, and their “bowed contours and boomerang-shaped balconies” suggest a city always moving forward. And it is: From leafy Neve Tzedek, a boho neighborhood for decades, I wandered into Noga, a newer gallery district where an innovative boutique might share a street with a shop selling T-shirts that wryly mock terrorism. In Jaffa, a historically Arab seaside neighborhood, something even more amazing is happening: Thanks to an influx of “young, arty Israelis,” Jews and Arabs are living side by side, learning from each other.
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