You can't come to Israel right now, but Touring Israel is bringing Israel to You!

The entire travel industry, world wide, is on its knees. We know that. My good friends at Touring Israel, who specialise in organising bespoke tours of Israel for small groups, have started up a YouTube Channel and are interviewing some of the guides and personalities they work with in Israel.

The video I'm posting here isn't their most directly travel related but it features Matti Friedman who is something I've known here in Israel since he first rose to prominence. How he came to be better well known is spoken at the start of the video after he blew the whistle on how the Associated Press (AP) covered Israel: he used to be a reporter at the Jerusalem bureau of the AP.

Beyond that experience, he's gone on to write some truly fascinating books that speak to both what Israel is today and its complex mixture of jews from Arab lands mixing and contrasting with the more European forms of Judaism. This interplay is very poorly understood abroad and Matti's work really can open eyes.

I've also read his book "The Aleppo Codex" which is discussed in the video too and is a fascinating read. Matti is great at giving some really fascinating background on Israel and his books are a jumping off point into understanding the much more complex nature of Israel today than the cartoonish version painted in the media.

I would encourage anyone with a deeper interest in Israel to subscribe to Touring Israel's YouTube channel and take a look at some of their other videos. When Israel does re-open and we get past this Covid19 nightmare, and if you want to visit Israel, these guys can put together an amazing trip and I'm sure they'll be happy to hear from you.

And I'm going to see if I can't get Jono (who produced this video) and Touring Israel to come and get active on Hive soon.

View this post on TravelFeed for the best experience.