Remember the movie “Schindler’s List”? Okay, that’s a dumb question; remember there’s a short scene portraying a wedding within the womens camp? That were Joseph Bau and his wife, Rebecca, who got married after Joseph dressed up as a woman and snuk into the women’s camp. This creative thinking, this humor, kept him alive. That, [...]

“Our goal is to have a robot soccer team beat a human team by 2050″, said the professor (Prof. Dr. Hans-Dieter Burkhard, Humboldt Uni) who was giving the lecture “Research and Fun: Robots play Soccer” at the last DAAD meeting (which was excellent – thank you very much!). The audience was laughing. After all, he [...]

How did Dracula find his (her) way into S.Y. Agnon’s short story, The Lady and the Peddler? Or lets start with: who is S.Y. Agnon? if I could chose only one picture to present this Israeli writer with, I would probably go with the one appearing on the Israeli 50 Shekels bill; this should demonstrate [...]

Yesterday my mother called me on Skype to let me know, that while my grandma was sitting herself down in her apartment to write me a letter, she stumbled on the chair, bumped her head against the wall and cut-open her forehead. When her son (my uncle) came over to her place, he said, and [...]

Some things can only be said in a group of two. I mean, of course you can say them also in a group of three, but only in a group of two do you know for sure, that what was said, was meant solely for you and if what you heard was disturbing, you can’t [...]

It is an odd experience, no doubt, listening to Arabic while reading the subtitles in German, realizing you can understand everything you are reading, when, in fact, you should be understanding this spoken language, the second spoken language of your homeland. No one could believe that an Israeli audience will stand in line to see [...]

Suicide is a taboo. As much forbidden to write about it as it is to act on it. An uninvited guest in any blog. Researching the Spielberg Holocaust Archives, home to some 52,000 survivors’ testimonies, doesn’t only put you face to face with their miraculous tales of survival of the Nazi beast, but also their [...]

52,000 video testimonies – where do I start researching? They say that it would take one man approximately 12 years to view them all, and I’ve already “wasted” about 30 of mine… The following story is an example for a research-method I use; I enter “cigarettes” in the Stichwort-katalog and a title comes up “The [...]

30.1.10 This is dedicated to Amir Kerten. Today I received a phone call from Israel; it was a friend of mine who had already called me once before during this week. I asked him what’s wrong and he said: if I’m calling you for the second time this week, what can it be? I guess [...]

First time I arrived in Berlin I went to visit the famous art-house Tacheles. I was especially taken with an exhibition titled “Global Warning”, but it’s not the exhibition itself I want to talk about here, but rather, the way it was portrayed in Tacheles; the massive drawings, which could have easily decorated the walls [...]