When my daughter Bracha decided to sell her apartment in Modi’in, a small city between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and move to a spacious corner house in Elkana, one of the first settlements over the so-called Green Line, no ideology or nefarious government scheme played any part in her decision.
This July, thousands of Ethiopian Jews participated in sit-ins, blocking main roads all over Israel with burning tires. More than 100 police officers were injured and more than 136 demonstrators arrested.
For Israelis, bringing teenage sons and daughters barely out of high school to the army induction center to begin their compulsory military service is one of the most fraught and difficult realities of life. Underlying the cheerful, almost celebratory sendoff is the terrifying possibility of one day being forced to join the crowds at Mt. Herzl Military Cemetery, part of the growing “family” who have paid the ultimate price for living in the world’s only Jewish country.
Reactions to the embassy move to Jerusalem show how little they understand Israelis.
We need to bear witness to the Talmudic dictum, “The poor people living in your own city come first.”
Four flimsy and ridiculous scandals won’t bring Benjamin Netanyahu down.
The future of Europe’s dwindling Jewish communities is bleak.
The Israeli soldier who “neutralized” a terrorist is not the true villain.
“So, you’re probably not coming…” my daughter said with a mixture of fear and resignation…
Attacks may be a fact of life, but Israelis will never consider terrorism “normal.”
Not so long ago, American Jewish children learned from their parents to love the State of Israel. Even secular, assimilated American Jews gave their kids charity boxes to collect nickels and dimes to plant trees there, as the parents do in Woody Allen’s 1987 film Radio Days. But that was a time when Jews remembered the tragedy of the ship St. Louis, with its hundreds of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazis and not a single country willing to take them in.
