This week’s travel dream: The melting pot of today’s Tel Aviv

There’s nowhere else in Israel—or in the entire Middle East—quite like Tel Aviv, said Adam LeBor in Condé Nast Traveler. Founded on the sands by Zionist pioneers in 1909, Tel Aviv is “more than a city—it’s an idea made manifest in bricks and concrete.” Stretching along Israel’s Mediterranean coast, Tel Aviv has “grown from nothing to a sophisticated metropolis” of about 390,000 people. Today, the second largest city in Israel “crackles with energy 24 hours a day” and has world-class restaurants, a pulsing arts and media scene, an internationally respected university, and an electric nightlife that lasts until dawn.

Not only is Tel Aviv Israel’s cultural capital, it has also become known as its “most easygoing” city. Tel Aviv stands as the “world’s first Hebrew city since the Jews’ Roman exile” and remains the center of modern Israeli culture, yet it is “extremely internationally minded.” You won’t find another city in Israel with a more “tolerant mentality” or a more “hedonistic lifestyle.” On the Tayelet—the waterfront promenade built atop an ancient port—“the cool sea breeze carries conversations in Hebrew and Russian, Amharic and English.” Most of the city’s residents see their home as a melting pot, “a place where cultures meet and evolve.”

Within Israel, Tel Aviv’s nickname—“half ironic jest, half jealous sneer”—is ha-Buah, or the Bubble. Less than 40 miles inland, Israelis and Palestinians carry on bitter battles. But in Jaffa, the Arab village that birthed Tel Aviv and is now a suburb of the city, a thriving artists’ quarter bustles with shops selling books in Hebrew, Arabic, and English. Watering holes like Yafa Café—“a tiny place with a big mission: to bring Jewish and Arab Israelis together to talk”—make you think, for a moment, that Tel Aviv could be a model for the rest of Israel. “If the modern Hebrew city can enjoy a balanced relationship with an ancient Arab port, then perhaps Jews and Arabs can find a model for living in peace in this much-contested land.”

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Contact: Tel-aviv.gov.il/English