חיים אחרים

Channel 2 put a kippah on Oz Zehavi. The gossip was whether he could dance.

Keshet opened Hayim Acherim, A Different Life, on Channel 2 on October 14, 2010, two nights a week around 22:30. Oz Zehavi, still the machismo of Asfur's Itzik, played Yakir Herut, a 22-year-old hesder yeshiva student who leaves his fiancee and the religious periphery for a Tel Aviv dance studio. The plot is Billy Elliot with tzitzit, latestnetflix.com argues, and the Israeli press said so out loud. ,

Four months in a yeshiva, then a studio.

Zehavi told Mako he spent four months on research. He read a siddur and the Shulchan Aruch, sat in Yeshivat Or Mitzion in Rishon LeZion, and took classical and modern dance. "In the dance training it was very hard because I am simply not a dancer, and it is not a natural process for the body." He called himself traditionally secular. Asked if the role might send him back to religion, he said, "You can't know what the future holds. Right now I am completely secular." He also promised viewers would see him in "extremely extreme situations, like they have never seen me."

Yossi Madmoni, Tzafrir Kochanovsky, and Erez Ko-El created the series for TTV, with Avi Chai Foundation money. Arik Rothstein directed. Hebrew Wikipedia lists one season of 13 episodes, about 44 minutes each, shot in part at Havat HaNoar HaTzioni in Jerusalem. TMDB currently lists 12. The family around Yakir is the real engine. Yoram Hatav and Michaela Eshet play the parents. Yuval Scharf is Elia, the girlfriend who nurses him after a military knee injury, then walks when the dancing starts. Rami Heuberger is Rabbi Yair. Iris Erez, a dancer in her first screen role, is Sharon, the rehab coach who puts him in a mixed class. Shay-Li Hirsch plays sister Emunah. Angel Brown plays Moon, a Thai worker at the family tofu plant whose visa plot runs beside Yakir's exit from faith. ,

The choreographer who watched the premiere and shrugged.

Walla's review called the show bunker television. Efficient, familiar, built to keep Channel 2 from losing the mass audience that already wanted Zehavi, knitted-kippah anxiety, and a little modern dance. The critic compared it to Srugim, Touching Distance, and Billy Elliot, then said the difference was mostly branding.

Ronen Yitzhaki, who runs the Jerusalem school Kol Atzmotai Tomarna for religious men who dance, watched the festive premiere and smiled. "Whoever wrote the script of the series apparently did not do thorough research." On the show, a religious boy who wants to dance has to leave for frames that are not kosher. Yitzhaki's studio had spent a decade building the opposite, a contemporary dance language that stays inside Jewish practice. He found it funny that Yakir's only prior dancing, in the episode he saw, was at weddings. "That is amusing, but that is the truth."

Keshet still sold the pivot. Mako asked viewers which Zehavi they preferred, Itzik or the shy yeshiva boy. The series ran Thursday and Saturday into 2011, then stopped at one season. EDB later logged Haifa Festival 2010 nominations in television drama. The gossip that stuck is simpler than any award. Israel's then-hottest male lead spent four months learning to daven and plie. A working choreographer said the writers skipped the religious dancers already in Jerusalem. Channel 2 still got its Oz Zehavi show. , ,