YouTube sensation GloZell gives Israel a glowing review

GloZell Green is a very unlikely ambassador for Israel. The Internet phenom has nearly 2 million subscribers to her YouTube channel and is better known for antics like attempting the Cinnamon Challenge (swallowing a heaping spoonful of ground cinnamon in under a minute — it’s harder than it sounds) and parsing pop music lyrics than she is for politics or global travel. She is unabashedly average and lovably lowbrow, with no particular focus or theme to her videos other than raw humor and self-humiliation.

Some of Green’s videos, most of which are simply the off-kilter documentation of a life lived on the Internet, have more than 30 million views. She is the digital age’s answer to the graceless girl next door, and if there is any string weaving together her Internet challenges, booty dances and “Ask GloZell” series (“Should I be a gay rapper?” “Am I fat or am I fine?”), it is a light heart and a lack of seriousness.

Yet here she is in our complicated country, hanging out in the lobby of a beachfront Tel Aviv hotel and gushing about how surprisingly good she has found kosher food to be.

“You get a good chef back there, and you’re not gonna miss it at all,” she says of pork, shellfish and the combination of milk and meat. “I’m gonna go home and I’m gonna stay kosher!”

Most of Green’s videos are silly and some of them are downright gross. All of them show a woman who is completely unafraid to make herself vulnerable on camera, and who has capitalized on the Internet’s ability to propel average citizens with a clever mind and a hunger for fame into full-fledged stars.

Lovably ditsy and unpretentious, the Florida native admits she knew very little about the Holy Land before arriving here earlier this month to attend the wedding of a friend’s son. She and her fiancé/manager Kevin Simon, who is better known to GloZell fans as SK, turned their visit into a full-fledged vacation, heading first to Egypt after the wedding and returning to Israel this week for several days of sightseeing with Globus travel. At every turn, in every awkward situation or cultural conundrum, GloZell has been there with her tiny Canon Powershot camera, making dozens of videos that she can’t wait to upload to her YouTube channel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYF9bImkOL4&feature=c4-overview&playnext=1&list=TLIIYyxBWhGPA

“I’m way taller than everybody, and I’m wearing weird clothes, especially here,” she says. “People are just like, ‘What is going on?’ I don’t know if they’re used to seeing black people.”

When we meet, GloZell is dressed in her trademark lime green, including a heavy lashing of bright-green lipstick. She is warm and animated, waving at kids in the hotel lobby and cooing over a bride who passes through. I tell her that there are actually a lot of black people in Tel Aviv, some of them Jews and some of them migrant workers, with their roots in Africa.

“Yeah, they’re looking at us too, like, ‘Hey, cousin,’ ” she says, laughing. “I don’t speak their language.”

She admits that she didn’t know much about the region before arriving, an oversight that actually caused a minor scare for her and her fiancé when they traveled to Cairo and found their path to a museum blocked by sporadic gunfire, remnants of that nation’s still-unfolding revolution. Arriving back in Israel, this week, “I felt a serious sense of relief,” she says. “I don’t know what I thought [before arriving] but hello! It is so beautiful here. I don’t know why everybody isn’t trying to come here! You need to get on a plane and get here.”

Green has made about 30 videos so far of her time here, which slow Wi-Fi connections have kept her from uploading. She says her fans should be prepared for a slew of clips documenting her travels and her surprising new love of the region and Israel in particular.

“It’d be nice if people consider me somewhat of an ambassador,” she says about her feelings for Israel. “Because the land is so beautiful. It’s gorgeous and everyone’s been so nice. Outside of the staring. But I’m used to that, because I look weird in California, too.”

Green and Simon’s tour group plans to take them to Bethlehem, Nazareth and the standard holy sites of Jerusalem on their trip, and Green says she knows that, after visiting some Arab cities, she will have a broader perspective on the conflict that persists in this region. Her current reading of the situation is on the simplistic side, but, well, that’s standard GloZell Green charm.

“It’s a serious conflict but I’ve been asking people and I’ve asked my friend who is a professor. And it’s so confusing, I still don’t get it,” she says. “I don’t understand if it was like Palestinians were here then it was called Israel and that’s the problem, or they never had their land. Everyone just goes back and forth. So it seems like everyone can just have a piece … call the whole thing something else.”

Green is a comedienne, not a political authority, and she knows that. But when it comes to the media’s role in portraying Israel internationally, she becomes surprisingly serious.

“I get it that the media is going to show the worst part, because that’s the part that people want to see,” she says. “But they have not represented Israel or Palestine, however people want to call it, they haven’t represented it well at all. Go to the beach! You won’t know this place from California. And it’s a melting pot where you can find people from everywhere. And did I mention the food?”

And with that, she pulls out her trusty camera, and before I know it she is making yet another video, twisting her face for the camera and offering her trademark tagline, “Is you good? Is you okay? Cause I wanna know!”

In Israel, it seems, Green is feeling very good.