Tel Aviv Museum of Art
Founded almost as soon as the city itself was born, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art is by nature a celebration of the modern and contemporary. Exhibitions, permanent and temporary, range from emerging Israeli artists to 20th-century big-hitters from Peggy Guggenheim’s collection, shored up by workshops, screenings and concerts. The building itself is a work of art, since a striking wing was added a decade ago, lofty galleries pierced by a central shaft of light.
Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 27 Shaul HaMelech Blvd; tamuseum.org.il/en
Beit Bialik
The grand old man of Hebrew poetry, Chaim Nachman Bialik, moved to Tel Aviv from Berlin in 1924 and had Bialik House (“Beit” means house in Hebrew) built on a patch of sand. For a decade, his splendid home was a salon for the new city’s intelligentsia, and the place Bialik wrote until he died. You can visit his exuberantly painted, decorated and tiled house; ask for a tour in English.
Bialik House, 22 Bialik Street
Jerusalem
For a flip-side view of Israel, Jerusalem is everything Tel Aviv is not – heavy with history and disagreement, grandly beautiful with antiquity, sites of great importance to different faiths, a place for praying, not playing. A whole world away, but only a 45-minute drive.
