But if the intermingling of many different kinds of people is what gives Tel Aviv its pulse, it’s the clash of old and new that still gives this city its surprising and slightly uneven gait. On trendy Sheinkin Street, a store called SeXso Jeans is cheek-by-jowl with the Kabbalah store; on the edges of Neve Tzedek  the first neighborhood the Jews started when they left Jaffa in 1887, and now the loveliest and most villagelike part of town  a 44-story skyscraper looms like a gangly, unwanted bodyguard.

The modernist feeling you get from walking around what is the largest collection of Bauhaus buildings in the world is unmoored by the realization that you are just a mile or two away from the ancient port of Jaffa, from which Jonah sailed en route to his intimate encounter with a whale. Or consider Agenda, a restaurant devoted to the age-old practice of skewering meat. A sign hanging on its facade  “Agenda: The Shawarma”  sounds like a Tom Clancy book about some very, very dangerous pita.

Tel Aviv is “half Iran, half California; it’s a synagogue meets a sushi bar,” says the writer and lifelong Tel Aviv resident Etgar Keret, whose mordant and hilarious short stories in books like “The Nimrod Flipout” have often won him the encomium “the voice of young Israel.” The son of Holocaust survivors  his father saved his own life by living in a hole in Russia for two years  Mr. Keret is party to his own dichotomy: his brother is an extreme left-wing anarchist who is head of the Israel’s movement to legalize marijuana, and his sister is an ultra-Orthodox mother of 11 who formerly lived in a settlement.

“This is a country that on the one hand is so conservative that we don’t have public transportation on Saturdays, but on the other hand is so open that we sent a transsexual to the Eurovision Song Contest,” says Mr. Keret. “Israel is full of contradiction. In Jerusalem, this contradiction means separation. But it doesn’t in Tel Aviv.”

For Israelis, the 45 minutes that separate Jerusalem from Tel Aviv are a fitting metaphor for the cultural gulf they see between, on the one hand, the hidebound, pious cradle of world religion and, on the other, the libertine, nightclub-filled Mediterranean idyll. But for us visitors, the proximity of the two cities is a huge boon  it’s rare that you can pair a beach vacation with 5,000 years of history. And while the memories I developed during the course of my weeklong, first-ever trip to Tel Aviv are pleasant and strong, the ones I concurrently made during my eight-hour-long, first-ever trip to Jerusalem are permanently scarred into my brain.

You don’t have to be devout, or even a believer, to be moved to tears by a visit to Jesus’ Stations of the Cross or to the Holocaust Museum of Yad Vashem. At the latter, the Children’s Memorial is a single room in which five candles are reflected in 500 mirrors, creating the impression of an infinity of candles; meanwhile a voice slowly intones the individual names and nationalities of the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered by Nazis. The effect is bone-chilling.

Tel Avivans are quick to point out that their city is less suffused with history than Jerusalem, and that that is what makes their city so hospitable to newcomers and to people who don’t fit in elsewhere. Perhaps, like others in the Middle East, Tel Avivans must perforce set their gaze on the present.