“We’re doing the Disney World version of Israel,” Dave Barry says as he sits down in an overstuffed chair in the lobby of Jerusalem’s Inbal Hotel.His blog has some funny stuff, including how phallic the YMCA building in Jerusalem looks.
Speaking with The Jerusalem Post on the final evening of his first trip to the region, the Pulitzer Prize-winning humor columnist and best-selling author says that he is “loving” his time in the Middle East.
The son of a Presbyterian minister, Barry cheerfully admits that while he is “not a Jew myself,” he has had been called to the Torah several times in the Reform congregation to which he belongs, adding with a laugh that he is working his way up to performing a circumcision.
“My wife is [Jewish],” he explains, noting that their trip, organized through Temple Judea of Coral Gables, Florida, is in honor of his daughter, who recently had her bat mitzva.
Upon landing in Tel Aviv, he was immediately struck by the fact that the city is “a lot like Miami, right down to the fact that nobody is speaking English.”
“This is going to sound like a very stupid thing to say,” he cautions, “but [Israel is] more Middle Eastern than I expected.
"All the Jews I know, they are all from New York and New Jersey and I thought it would be kind of like that, except over here with guns and there are actually a lot of Jews over here that are not from New York or New Jersey.”
“Apparently, there is another source of Jews that no one had told me about,” he jests.
After receiving briefings on the political situation in Israel and the various regional tensions, Barry says that he “ came out of it more firmly convinced than ever that there will never ever be” peace.
“There will never be peace in this hotel in Jerusalem, let alone the Middle East,” he states.
“Since we’ve been here,” he says, his synagogue trip has run into “a group here from up the coast, like Boca, and there is already tension. It’s building; there could be fighting. There could be rioting in the Inbal.”
(h/t Gidon)