There's a longstanding joke in Israel. It goes like this.

Q: Why don't people have sex on the street in Tel Aviv?

A: Because if they did, everyone would stop to butt in with their own opinion. "Why are you licking her there? If you bite her right below it, she'll really love it!" "Nu, what's wrong with you trying that position? Are you not even trying?" "Slap her ass like this (slap) and she'll really love you for it!"

Like most jokes, there is some truth to it. Without a doubt, Israelis are the nosiest, most intrusive people on earth.

It started a few weeks after I moved to Israel. The owner of the local grocery store was a hyperactive, gregarious middle-aged Moroccan. His English is a mess; my Hebrew is minimal. But once I learned some vocabulary from work and figured out how to speak with the past and future tense, we were able to converse. Within three days of me having a 10-minute conversation with him, I was invited to his family's home for Shabbat and asked if I wanted to go on a date with his daughter. He wanted to know how come I ate pork and why all American Jews - at least in his opinion - were of Polish ancestry. I came over for Shabbat dinner, but the daughter and me didn't click. Next time, he asked if I was interested in dating his niece.

Meanwhile, while learning Hebrew, I was practicing my verbs at a cafe. The owner slammed his fist on the table in a friendly way and asked me why I was butchering his language. Then for the next 15 minutes, he sat down with me and my ulpan classmates to show us his proper, Holon arsim-style pronunciations. Meanwhile, the four patrons who came in for coffee during those 15 minutes were told to buzz off by the owner because "the Americans didn't know what they were saying."

Another time, I went out into Tel Aviv to take photographs. About halfway through, a middle-aged guy grabs me by the shoulders in the street. He starts shouting at me that I'm using the wrong kind of camera for landscape shots and that I'm wasting my time with a lens that is only good for indoor use. In-between the rapid fire Hebrew bursts, I make out enough to understand that he runs a camera store. At the end of it, the guy hands me his business card.

The next day, I'm puzzling over the encounter with a few Israeli friends. We both agree that the camera guy was probably insane. However, they don't understand why I was so upset. The insane Israeli camera salesman was just trying to help. Those Israelis. Always trying to help.

 It finally makes sense. After months of traveling in the East with an Israeli and being witness to the very low social boundaries Israelis have with one another, it finally makes sense.

No matter where they are or whether they know each other, Israelis greet one another as old friends and break into full conversation within minutes about whatever is relevant. If we happened to be in Vietnam, the conversation would be about which guest house was the best and least expensive. If we were in Australia, perhaps advice would be dispensed about which caravan park had the nicest kitchen or which company offered the best dives. As an American in these dialogues, I smiled, tried to understand the conversation, and then usually zoned out. I was always aware, though, that Israelis claim ownership to something English speakers and people from most other languages do not; because Hebrew is spoken by so few in the world, when you happen upon a Hebrew speaker outside of Israel, brotherhood is immediate and unquestioning.

On a particularly hot day in November in Cairns (northeastern Australia), Oded and I decided to check out the public lagoon in the center of the city. Upon arriving in Cairns, we couldn't help but notice the lagoon, a large swimming pool type arrangement adjacent to the shore. It was open to the public and free, a perfect way for two poor travelers to waste the day. We made our way from the sandy concrete to the center of the lagoon, only waist deep in water. We swam, relaxed, floated, and inevitably heard Hebrew. Oded swam closer and with nothing more than an, "Alan, ma koreh?" we had a new friend and were cooking dinner and drinking beers in Uzi's guest house hours later. We spent a few days with Uzi and his friends before moving on north and west. More than a month later, we walked into a backpacker in Sydney, and there sat Uzi. The reunion was that of old friends, replete with hugs, kisses and stories of where we had all been the last weeks. If Oded and Uzi were replaced in this scenario with two Americans, say Mark and Greg, this meeting would look very different or not at all. They would most likely never approach each other, and for good reasons. First, most Americans never take a trip like this and therefore would never even be in this situation. Next, English is not a rare commodity and does not serve to connect its speakers. Most importantly and the reason for this examination, is why Americans, and I venture most other nationalities, do not create the same connections as Israelis. 

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I wish I didn't have to tell you that our landlord was a six-foot-ten Israeli with a glass eye. But he was, so I do. Avi Sosna came to real estate in a classic Lower East Side manner, through the clothing business. With his posture, a mix of stoop and crouch, his cottony hair in two bulky wings combed aerodynamically backward, his overstarched shirts and comically wide suspenders, he cultivated the appearance of a prewar tailor-a shmatte man. He had never, strictly speaking, been one: Avi had come to New York in the seventies and worked his way up from clerk to manager to owner at a shop specializing in cut-rate leather, denim, and polyester. The shop, Leventhal's Fine Fashion and Denim, was part of the barely functional tailor row that clung to the ground floors of Orchard Street tenements between Delancey and East Houston. Bad socks, three pairs for a dollar, lay stacked like apples on sidewalk tables; raincoats hung from the bottom rungs of fire escapes. When Avi's ascent began, it was still possible to get a decent bespoke suit made, or at least copied, in the back of some of these places. I don't think Sosna himself had taken a needle to fabric even once. As for the eye, it was lost back in Israel, to an insurgent army of single-celled parasites.

The origin of Avi's wealth, as reconstructed by me from his own gnomic utterances, a community-paper profile, and Bertha's ceaseless chitchat, made for a tale either inspirational or cautionary. By 1982, Sosna had saved up enough to pry a 70 percent stake in the shop from the owner, Bernie Leventhal. He began his reign by sprucing up the storefront with a new sign. When Bernie, whose family had held the shop since 1911, saw it, he made a small noise and had to sit down right on the sidewalk. Sosna had excised nthal from Leventhal's Fine Fashion and Denim. The name of the shop was now Leve's Jeans, with the apostrophe brazenly mounting the skinny second e to create, for a casual glancer, an illusion of an i. The window displays ran blue with no-name denim.

The only impact the ruse had on the business was to induce Bernie to cash in his remaining stake and huff off. Less than a month after assuming full control of Leve's Jeans, however, Sosna lost interest in denim. He noticed a trend his Orchard Street colleagues at best ignored and, at worst, consciously fought: a steady trickle of African American clientele from far uptown, interested almost exclusively in track suits. There seemed to be no explanation for this. Avi didn't like to ask around, lest he give away a potential gold mine. He preferred to make his own observations, for which his one eye served him perfectly well. So he hopped on the A train and made his way to Harlem. Soon, the gangling, stooping Sosna, who still favored a Moshe Dayan-style eye patch back then, was hovering over a group of kids watching their fellows contort themselves on the asphalt to a busy boom-box beat. Periodically, a boy would jump into the circle in front of the dancers and recite a quatrain or two of boastful doggerel, apparently made up on the spot. The small crowd reacted with laughter and short, piercing hoots.

"Man, what's with your eye?" asked a kid chewing on a toothpick.

"Amoebas ate it," said Avi. "Shhh."

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Nagla Al-Imam, an Egyptian lawyer, recently gave vent on Al-Arabiya TV to the idea that one form of "resistance" for Arabs to pursue against Israelis is sexual harassment:

Most Arab countries... With the exception of three or four Arab countries, which I don’t think allow Israeli women to enter anyway, most Arab countries do not have sexual harassment laws. Therefore, if [Arab women] are fair game for Arab men, there is nothing wrong with Israeli women being fair game as well.

[...]

Sexual harassment... In my view, the [Israeli women] do not have any right to respond. The resistance fighters would not initiate such a thing, because their moral values are much loftier than that. However if such a thing did happen to them, the [Israeli women] have no right to make any demands, because this would put us on equal terms – leave the land so we won't rape you. These two things are equal.

You can watch the video of the charming Ms. Al-Imam here.

Amazing story in the Atonement Forum:

A long time ago, when I was in the seventh grade at a Hebrew Day School, there was a new kid in our class from Israel. I'll call him Shuki. Shuki was only in the States for one or two years because his father was getting his PhD at one of the local universities. Because, even then, I was interested in the world, travel and meeting people from other countries, I befriended Shuki, who was a bit of a loner due to his short stature, natural shyness, limited command of English and his very strong Israeli accent.

I remember that I was one of the few in the class who attended his bar mitzvah and how his mother took my mother aside at the time to tell her how happy she was that Shuki had such a good friend in me because the move to the States had been so hard for him. Such was my relationship with Shuki.

One day, for no particular reason other than to be funny, I called up one of the girls in the class and, doing my best Israeli accent, I pretended to be Shuki...

Latin Love: Go get someAn international survey shows Israelis have more sex than the global average. However they are neither the most satisfied nor the most functional. The global average of women and men totally satisfied with their sex lives is 42 and 43 percent respectively. Here are the percentages around the globe of those completely satisfied with their sex lives:

Women:

• Mexican: 71 percent
• Spanish: 60 percent
• Brazilian: 58 percent
• American: 57 percent
• Israeli: 51 percent
  

Men:

• Mexican: 78 percent
• Brazilian: 71 percent
• Israeli: 43 percent

Perhaps Israeli men are less satisfied due to higher rates of sexual dysfunction: 52 percent suffer in Israel as opposed to the global average of 48 percent. This probably also explains why they have sex more since one would assume they'd have to try more to make it happen.

These stats only fuel my prejudice that Latin lovers are the ones to lay. I can't speak for men, but ladies, do yourself a favor and go out, get one (or two... or three), then come back and comment about your newfound sweet Spanish heaven.

Related:

• Dating Blogger Amy: Dating Internationally
• Dating Blogger Amy: "To the Left, to the Left"
• Is God the Solution to your Lame Sex Life?
• Does Adult Circumcision Hurt?