Playboy Magazine comes to Israel

There’s an interview with former Shin Bet Director Avi Dichter on page 78 and an article about Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman on page 72. On page 81, readers can look at shots from the world’s most beautiful train rides.

And on the cover, a topless model named Natalie Dadon, wearing skimpy boy shorts, smiles with her eyes closed and her back to the camera.

This is the inaugural issue of Playboy Israel. And that’s how its editor-in-chief, Neta Jakobovitz-Keider, wants you to look at the magazine.

“The shots are a small part of it,” she told JTA at the magazine’s launch this morning in Tel Aviv. She came to Playboy, she said, because of the magazine’s “high standards and quality content.”

Playboy Israel, says CEO Daniel Pomerantz, aims to emulate the best of the American magazine: high-profile interviews, orginial columns – and spreads of nude models – what Pomerantz calls “beauty.”

It’s a magazine, he told JTA, about “everything that men love: arguing about politics, sports, gadgets, women. It’s for the fully well-rounded man.”

Advance copies of the first issue, set to hit newsstands tomorrow, were distributed in paper bags featuring the famous bunny-with-a-bowtie logo and including a bottle of cologne and an ad for a swanky bar.

The launch wasn’t at a smoke-filled mansion, but it did feature a video greeting from the man in a red smoking jacket, Hugh Hefner. A Playboy bunny in the famous black outfit posed with Pomerantz – who opted for a suit and pink tie – in front of a blown-up cover of a Playboy from 1970 showing “the girls of Israel.” Also at the event was Marin Teremets, this issue’s centerfold and playmate of the month. She compared her photos in the magazine to those of “a flower, or a building.”

Pomerantz, an American lawyer who moved to Israel in 2011, said the idea for an Israeli Playboy – one of thirty editions worldwide – came to him when he was working at a firm in Chicago and visited the Playboy mansion. He doesn’t have plans to open a mansion in Israel just yet, but hopes to bring the “Playboy culture” to the Jewish state with parties and other events. 

“Israel is a complex country with many different influences – traditional and modern, serious and fun,” he said. “A magazine as beautiful and complex as Playboy perfectly fits Israel.”

Playboy Israel CEO Daniel Pomerantz poses with a Playboy bunny at the launch of the magazine's Israel edition on Tuesday.