Travel and accommodation will be paid by Israel

Top Music blogs - Free trip to Israel‏

I stumbled upon your blog while searching the web for top music blogs!

I am contacting you on behalf of an organization called Kinetis. Kinetis is a grassroots organization established to promote the recognition of Israel at home and abroad as a vibrant and inspirational source of creativity and innovation. By educating about and exposing the creative energy of the Israeli environment and people, we seek to enhance global appreciation for Israel's unique contribution, and to revitalize national pride.

The "Vibe Israel" project, which I manage, is an all-expenses paid 7-day tour of Israel we offer to online opinion makers and leaders who write about areas in which Israel has an offering of global relevance. We recently invited a group of Mommy Bloggers to show them the family life, parenting and children aspects of Israeli life, and the response was great (we hosted 3 leading bloggers from the UK and 2 from Spain) and Design bloggers to show them the design scene here.

We are now looking into creating a tour for music bloggers (no specific genres, a taste of different genres) and are doing some basic research to ascertain exposure and relevance of this subject online. Please find attached some more info and a sample itinerary.

If you are interested in coming, please advise the following..

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Adi Kaplan Senior Projects Manager
That email arrived yesterday. The last self-financed visit I made to Israel with my family was informative and enjoyable and hopefully over the years On An Overgrown Path has helped promote the creativity of Israel and the Jewish diaspora - the header photo shows senior Israeli composer Paul Ben-Haim whose Kabbalat Shabbat was given a very rare broadcast by me in a Jewish Voices programme on Future Radio in 2010. There certainly is creative energy in Israel and abroad, but there is also most definitely considerable room for improvement. I wish Kinetis luck with its project but will not be taking part. This article may help explain why.

Also on Facebook and Twitter. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Comments

Philip Amos said…
Bob, I wish most of all here to congratulate on this post, as also on posts past to which you provide links. My suspicion on first reading the post was that Kinetis is just another element in the massive Israeli lobby which certainly exerts frightening power in the U.S. And at the front of the Kinetis site, I read in an intro by the founder that the story of the Israeli people "..is one of global relevance and appeal and powerful enough to change perceptions towards Israel."

The 'Vibe Israel' project is but a component of this, as also the 'Mommy Bloggers' and whatever other odd projects there may or will be. Often these days I thank my lucky stars that my paternal grandfather was Jewish, for though that does not make me Jewish, it is a little protection I can raise when I misjudge my company and have the temerity to suggest that Israel's policies toward the Palestinians (one US Republican hopeful candidate for President jus declared that the Palestinian people were "invented") may be wrong, to keep it simple, for the charge of anti-semitism is always on the tips of tongues.

Mention of my grandfather can't protect me very much, of course, for the charge can be made anyway and then there is always the accusation of being a 'self-hating Jew' which is customarily thrown at prominent Jewish academics, writers, musicians et al. who similarly take issue with any Israeli policy.

Having enlisted even the Fundamentalist Christian Right in the U.S., there is not much more the Israeli lobby can do in the States, except keep the money coming in, Congress under control, and bashing away with projects to sway voters. This present exercise in lobbying and PR, the manager of which "stumbled" upon your blog, as Kinetis as a whole, I suspect is aimed wholly or chiefly at the European sphere, where the success met with in the U.S. has eluded them in large measure.

It takes courage these days to stand up and speak truth to power, and there is very great power behind all this.
Pliable said…
Thanks Philip. I was reminded of the Congress for Cultural Freedom which worked with a number of classical musicians in the 1950s and 60s including Elliott Carter and Noah Greenberg.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_for_Cultural_Freedom

and most interestingly

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/95unclass/Warner.html
Pliable said…
https://twitter.com/#!/VibeIsrael
Philip Amos said…
That's an interesting association you have made, Bob. I do know something about this business, and in a moment I'll mention something that has always amused and bemused me. First, though, may I say that I was taken aback at the inadequacy of the Wiki page. That needs to be redone in full scholarly fashion. Unhappily, the CIA document I could not summon up for some reason.

Also, I thank you for mentioning it because now that I am retired I can look at the history of the initial congress and the incarnations that followed in greater depth, and I shall.

The business I allude to above is what happened at the initial Congress in Berlin and what the CIA thought it was doing. About 150 delegates were invited to the meeting, and the Wiki page does provide a sampling sufficient to raise eyebrows, for it suggests, and accurately, that the large majority of delegates were of the Left or most staunchly liberal in their politics. Of the conservatives, many were so far to the Right that one Australian delegate commented after a rabble-rousing speech by Franz Borkenau that he supposed it was time to replace Dr. Adenauer with Otto Strasser.

I think the biggest mistake was holding the Congress in Berlin, for Hugh Trevor-Roper and others suspected that the result, displayed in the reactions of audience, was an unholy alliance, as HTR called it, between right-wing ex-communists and anti-Russian German nationalists.

The crunch came when those of left and liberal persuasion read in the final Manifesto this: "Totalitarian ideologies which deny intellectual freedom have no right of citizenship in the republic of the spirit." Trevor-Roper and Freddie Ayer led the battle to get that, and similar stuff that smacked of the witchhunt, out of the Manifesto, and to ensure that Encounter, the Association's English publication was open to all political persuasions.

And so it was that starting in the later 60s and through most of the 70s, which is to say when I went up to university, I and others of liberal view looked forward to the monthly Encounter greatly, even for a while after its financial backing was known. Stephen Spender, until he finally got fed up with Melvin Lasky, was co-editor for some years.

Those of the Left happily contributed, and my thought is that whatever the CIA was after it was certainly not what came out of the Congress in Berlin. In that context, the participation of Carter and Greenberg may take a different hue, thought I must modify that by saying that I don't know the nature of that participation.
Pliable said…
Philip, thanks for that. I looked for informative links when I added the comment about the Congress for Cultural Freedom and, like you, I was surprised at the poor quality of the online resources.

Yes, there is an opportunity for someone to add some value there.

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