Tel Aviv, a city of just 360,000, is approaching the 100-year anniversary of its founding. It has always had what Sir Ronald Storrs, the first British governor of Jerusalem, described as a “pulsating energy,” even when it was much smaller than today. Hillel Halkin writing in Commentary on The First Hebrew City, as Tel Aviv was once known, explains why, as a visiting French friend once put it to him, “There’s more going on in Tel Aviv than in Paris.” [The article is for subscribers only, though much of it is excerpted here]. If that sounds like an exaggeration, Halkin notes that a partial summary of recent edition of Tel Aviv entertainment weekly The City Mouse includes listings for:
 

a week-long festival of Irish music; 18 movie houses showing 58 different films; 35 rock and pop performances; 36 jazz and blues concerts; 27 classical music concerts; 29 evenings of Israeli singing; 46 plays, including Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Antigone, and Death of a Salesman; nine dance concerts; 28 art-gallery exhibits; ten special museum exhibits; hundreds of places to eat and drink, among them nine newly opened pubs, thirteen newly opened restaurants, and six newly opened cafés; a lecture series on Tolstoy, Orhan Pamuk, Agnon, Flaubert, Bialik, and Walt Whitman; 34 stand-up comedy performances; 32 shows and story-telling performances for children; and over 100 workshops and courses in such subjects as wine connoisseurship, the martial arts, art appreciation, cooking and baking, body building, pregnancy, marital relationships, yoga, Judaism and Kabbalah, coaching, fashion, creative writing, music, acting

Many countries, Halkin notes, have rival cities—Florence and Siena, Moscow and St. Petersburg, Los Angeles and San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro and São Paolo, Tokyo and Kyoto. Halkin charts the reputational ups and downs of Israel’s two great competitors,, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Tel Aviv’s sense of itself as a “quintessentially synchronic” city that lives only in the present is, he argues, “no less `mythic’ than Jerusalem’s glorying in its ancient past, and its belief that it represents “secular, liberal, and enlightened Israel” is every bit as strong as religious Jerusalem’s conviction.

The fabric of Tel Aviv, he notes, “has not been badly damaged by those arch-enemies of contemporary cities: massive 'urban renewal,' dreary housing projects, cut-through highways, shopping malls, and chain stores. Tel Aviv is still a city of small shops and businesses in which little is standardized and surprises are frequent."

He concludes, “It is a great place, and it should not be tampered with too much.”