Tel Aviv: ‘The San Francisco in the Middle East’
“Tel Aviv is the total flipside of Jerusalem, a modern Sin City on the sea rather than an ancient Holy City on a hill.”
In its 2011 list of the world’s top 10 cities, Lonely Planet, the world’s largest travel guidebook series, has pinpointed what many tourists to Israel knew already. Israel has a dichotomous tourism industry: Jerusalem for the religious and spiritual, Tel Aviv for, well, the opposite.
Noted by Lonely Planet as a “greenhouse for Israel’s growing art, film and music scenes” and relentless party atmosphere, Tel Aviv ranked third behind New York and Tangier, Morocco and ahead of some surprising choices, like Iquitos, Peru and Ghent, Belgium. The list was released on Sunday.
Lonely Planet recognized the Mediterranean city for its thriving gay community, calling it “a kind of San Francisco in the Middle East.”
“Hedonism is the one religion that unites its inhabitants,” the guidebook said of Tel Aviv. “There are more bars than synagogues, God is a DJ and everyone’s body is a temple.”
Tel Aviv’s place on the list can only leverage Israel’s appeal as a popular tourist destination. Earlier this month, the Tourism Ministry announced a record-breaking number of visitors — almost 2.5 million — since January.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
