In January 2003 I came to Israel for ten days with a Taglit-birthright israel trip. It was my first time in the country in six years. In July 2003 I came for about 2 weeks and my eyes were opened to the possibilities of a life in Israel. In September 2003, on the eve of Rosh Hashana, I walked into the Jewish Agency's office in NY and picked up the necessary aliyah paperwork. Taking ten days to ponder my decision, I handed in the completed forms on the eve of Yom Kippur. December 22, 2003 I left my birthplace of New York City and flew to my people's homeland of Israel. At first I had a difficult time explaining my life-changing decision but slowly came to terms with its meaning and became more and more confident merely telling people I moved for Zionism.

Now, on the eve of my three year anniversary in Israel, my friend Paul (of Shlomo Aboutbul's Reluctant Rap and sometimestheless fame) and I took 2 days off from work to produce the video below, a tribute to Zionism and my aliyah. We clocked 1300 kilometers (800 miles) as we traveled around this magnificent, and surprisingly small, country. Documenting ourselves along the way, I couldn't just take any regular picture, so I did a little dance everywhere. I hope you enjoy the video and don't hesitate to share the Zionism with friends and family. Accompanying my making a fool out of myself at different spots around Israel is an original song Paul wrote that mixes together various famous lines from the birth of Israel. We were inspired to do this by Matt of www.WhereTheHellIsMatt.com fame (who danced around the world but never got to Israel).

The video is on YouTube here.
Or you can download it directly here.
Code to embed the video on a site, blog or profile:
<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/brNhUudPh2s"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/brNhUudPh2s" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object>

Places I danced: Tel Aviv, Caesarea, Haifa, Tiberias, Safed, Sea of Galilee, Herzliya, Eilat, Masada, The Dead Sea, Ein Gedi, and of course -- Jerusalem.

To make it even easier to share the video - and because I love it so much and I'm cheesy like that - I also made a whole site for it that you can refer people to: www.WhereinIsraelisJacob.com. Finally, if you like the song, you can download it from here.