An arts and culture blog provides a glimpse into a different side of Israel.
By SCOTT KRANEAyelet Dekel 521(photo credit: Scott Krane)
“However, I never wanted to be a blogger in that sense. From the start, Midnight East was a vision for a magazine. The idea was to find a WordPress template that would appear like a magazine. I wanted readers to be able to search by topic. Also, I started at the time of the stock-market crash. Not the time to start a huge venture. But now you can do the same thing for free [in the blogosphere].”
Jewish culture has always been steeped in creativity. Today, Israel is known for being at the forefront of the global and virtual art worlds. Israel’s painters, sculptors, musicians, writers and dancers are universally celebrated.Ayelet Dekel has a distinct space in the Israeli art world. Dekel, a Harvard University graduate, was born in Israel but lived and worked throughout the United States before deciding to settle down in her native country. Her latest project is the blog MidnightEast.com, a collective of Israeli writers and critics who review various happenings in the Israeli art world.From cinema to music, from fine arts to dance and more, Midnight East presents short prose pieces and beautiful photography that make the reader feel as if they had attended the event or conducted the interviews themselves. It also connects readers to what’s going on across the country.According to Dekel, a blog like Midnight East, with its focus on art in Israel, has an important role to play in representing the country, which is often portrayed in a negative light by the mainstream media.She explains that she’s “not trying to portray a particular view, but [rather to] show what it [Israel] looks like from the inside... When you look at any country from the outside you might [only] see one huge homogeneous block.“Midnight East comes from a perspective of involvement. We want to keep outsiders informed – just as I am curious about other places in the world, others are curious about Israel,” she says, adding that “Israel is in the news often because we have a lot of big issues here. But the news does not give you a sense of what it is like to be here. Say you just read something about Israel in the news, what if you want to know more about what is going on here than what’s portrayed in the headlines?” At first, Dekel first envisioned Midnight East more as a magazine than a blog. “I enjoy the arts. Whether mainstream or fringe, there is so much in the way of art [here]. I have a lot of friends in the States and I enjoy telling them about this. I have an impulse to share my experiences,” she says.While Dekel insisted that she has no competitors, the blog does quite impressively, receiving some 10,000 hits per month. When asked whether or not she maintains standards for the writers she employs, Dekel replied: “People writing for Midnight East are good writers. I don’t want writers to just say ‘I liked it’ or ‘I didn’t like it.’ I want writers to give a perspective on what they liked....”“I want a writer to be awake and alert to his or her surroundings, to be able to describe it to the best of their abilities. I think if the writer isn’t having fun, the reader isn’t having fun.”Dekel added that Midnight East is always interested in hiring new writers.“Midnight East writers are engaging in a dialogue with Israeli culture,” she says, “And we are having that conversation out in the open, and everyone can join in.”
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