This week, the Hill published my essay on the US government’s policy of omitting car safety tests with anatomically accurate female dummies. After a car crash that nearly killed me and my family, I learned that car safety bias kills 10,000 women a year. Because I was working adjacent to the Biden administration at the time, and had direct access to power, I assumed I could right this wrong.

I first wrote this piece as a longer essay for a bigger publication, but unfortunately they are going through some growing pains, and sat on the piece for 6 months. I’m sending the original piece out to subscribers, because everyone needs to understand the full picture. Unless you are the size and shape of the average man in the United States in the 1970s, you are not safe in your car. When I began researching this topic, 10,000 a women a year died because of bad design. Six years later, that number has risen to 12,000.

We are almost through the Jewish month of Elul, when Jews work to repair the broken parts of ourselves and our world, in preparation for the High Holidays. Please help me fix what is broken by reading and sharing my story.

In 2019, my family suffered a head-on collision with a wrong-way driver on a country road in Vermont. The crash left my husband and son with a few broken bones, while my daughter and I were gravely injured. Our seatbelts tore through our abdomens and into our internal organs, requiring emergency surgery. My head slammed into my airbag with enough force to cause a brain bleed and traumatic brain injury.

We were extremely unlucky to be on the receiving end of one man’s decision to pass a motorcycle going up a hill, resulting in his Ford F-150 truck smashing head-on into our compact SUV. Sometimes, I understood, bad things happen. What made less sense was that my son and husband had been protected by their seatbelts and airbags, while the very same safety devices almost killed me and my daughter. Was that also bad luck?

Soon after the car crash, my brother, who works in transportation policy, sent me a story from Consumer Reports that took my breath away and sent me on a journey to better understand what had happened to me and my family. As I put together the pieces,I began to comprehend that what at first seemed arbitrary in fact reflected a recognized pattern: while men are more likely to cause car crashes, women are 17% more likely to be killed and 73% more likely to be seriously injured.

At the time, I was working for a left-leaning think tank advocating the smart use of data and design to solve public problems, a practice we called “public interest technology.” It was my dream job because I was a true believer. Shortly before the accident, I’d signed a contract to write a book evangelizing my faith in government’s ability to use data and design. When I discovered that the airbags and seatbelts that protected men were failing women at a staggering rate, for the first time after the crash, I felt a spark of hope: maybe I could help save women’s lives.

Transportation is a male-dominated field; it seemed possible that no one had looked at car crash deaths and injuries by sex, or realized that the failure to take physiological differences into account when designing safety equipment had dire, frequently fatal consequences.

As someone who earned a living explaining that government was capable of solving hard problems, I assumed not only that the problem could be fixed, but that, given my connections in Washington, and my understanding of data and design, I could help make that happen. Especially because a well-engineered solution already existed.

After publishing an article about my accident, and the safety disparities that had almost killed me, the company Humanetics invited me to visit their factory outside of Detroit where they produce “bio-fidelic” crash test dummies. Humantics sells their latest model – the THOR-5F, which accurately represents 95% of the female population – to a handful of crash labs in the US who are interested in exceeding the mandated US crash test criteria. The company doesn’t publicize which manufacturers use the dummies, nor do most car companies, with the exception of Volvo, only adding to the opacity of car safety.

At the facility, I passed a display case illustrating how crash test dummies had evolved since they were first introduced in the 1950s. You could tell the earliest female dummy was female because it had pointy plastic breasts, a blonde wig and lipstick. Otherwise, the dummy was simply a scaled-down version of a male dummy. Not that it mattered what the female dummy looked like, because until 2011, there were no regulations in place requiring the use of any female dummy in crash tests. Even today, no American car manufacturer uses biofidelic female dummies because they can obtain a 5-star crash test rating without them, so why bother?

As the name implies, bio-fidelic dummies are designed with fidelity to the anatomical differences between men and women that matter in the design of car safety technology. Men have stronger neck musculature, which prevents their heads from slamming into air bags with enough force to cause a brain bleed. Because men tend to be taller and broader, they sit in the “correct” position for existing safety technologies, whereas women sit further forward, making them “out of position” drivers. In practice, this means seatbelts sit across men’ s hip bones, rather than sliding into the soft tissue of their bellies and slicing into their internal organs. Men’s necks are protected from whiplash because they reach headrests at the right spot. And the spacing of our spinal columns are different, which explained my multiple spinal fractures. I’d been incredibly lucky, multiple doctors told me. A millimeter to the left or the right and I’d have been paralyzed for life. Yes, I’d been lucky, but why should I have to rely on luck, while men drove around well-protected?

When I returned from Michigan, I got in touch with the Chief Data Officer (CDO) in the White House. We had worked together for years at the same think tank before she joined the Biden administration, where her job was advocating for the smart use of data in government. I thought she’d be shocked to hear about a data problem that was killing and injuring women, and pleased to know that a technological solution already existed. The bio-fidelic dummies I’d seen at Humanetics contain sensors capable of transmitting detailed crash data, which car designers can then use to test future safety technologies.

I had worked in Washington long enough to shed a fair number of romantic illusions about the way government works, but there is nothing like surviving a head-on collision to focus the mind. Unfortunately, my colleagues were not similarly focused on avoiding death by car, but adrift amidst a sea of ideological commitments – whether the elimination of fossil fuels or the denial of biological differences – that were baked into the administration, guided by political expediency, and pursued at the expense of common sense and public safety.

At the time, the CDO was heading the Biden administration’s doomed eclectic vehicle (EV) rollout. The administration was installing EV chargers around the country, as if the sole reason people weren’t buying EVs was due to a lack of charging stations, rather than their high cost and lack of range. Regardless, if the EV rollout ever got off the ground, it would mean more women would die on the road.

The lethality of a car crash depends upon the weight of the vehicles involved. If someone plows a 9000-pound EV Hummer into a 1500-pound Kia, the Kia passengers will be unlikely to survive the collision. As I explained to my former colleague, if the car industry didn’t address the car crash safety bias first, more EVs on the road would lead to more preventable female fatalities.

Given that President Biden had lost a wife and young daughter to a car crash, I thought surely this issue would grab the White House’s attention. What better person to save women’s and girls’ lives than someone whose life had been torn apart by two devastating road deaths?

Unfortunately, the White House didn’t see it that way. In my work at my think tank, which I knew the CDO was familiar with, I stressed the importance of solving underlying problems first when dealing with complex, interlocking processes. But, the CDO certainly wasn’t going to be the one to tell the President they had to halt the EV rollout to save women’s lives. First she’d save the environment, then she’d get to women. In the meantime, 44,000 women would die over the course of her term.

Next, I took my data to the Department of Transportation (DOT). Thanks to my connections in the Biden administration, I met with several high-ranking officials at DOT, including the Deputy Head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which is responsible for car safety.

NHTSA awards crash test safety ratings based on tests that have barely evolved since the 1970s. Not only does NHTSA not use biofidelic dummies in crash tests, but their dummies are modeled on the standard size American 1970s-era American male, along with a miniscule female dummy that represents just 5% of women. Anyone who deviates from that standard -- Americans who are taller, shorter, fatter, lighter, female or pregnant -- well, you’re on your own. Worse, NHTSA doesn’t mandate testing with a female dummy in the driver’s seat. Surely, I thought, this was an oversight. Because otherwise, the five star crash test safety rating was a baldfaced lie.

The officials at DOT listened patiently as I presented my data, and shared what I’d learned at Humanetics. Then I passed Zoom presenter control to the DOT, and they shared a presentation demonstrating that the status quo was perfectly fine. Women weren’t injured or killed at a rate higher than men if you looked at the data their way, using data that assumed men were “normal” drivers and women were an aberration. Weren’t we all better off sticking to their data, given that it was the data the government relied upon for crash tests?

“Why don’t you mandate tests with women in the drivers’ seat?” I asked.

We can’t mandate every test, the deputy administrator of NHTSA replied. And they were doing really great things now with automatic breaking, which was saving lives left and right. I ran my hand over the scar that bisects my torso, which automatic breaking had failed to prevent.

Anyway, biofidelic dummies were expensive! And a great thing about America is cheap cars. I wouldn’t want to raise car prices for Americans, would I? So, I should be grateful the seatbelt and airbag prevented me from flying through the windshield, in which case I’d be dead, rather than just maimed. Sure, the safety devices had done a better job of saving the lives of my son and husband, but I was still here, no? Success!

I understood from this meeting that DOT had no interest in admitting car crash safety had a blind spot when it came to women. How did they decide testing with women in the driver’s seat was too expensive, but investing in automatic breaking was the way forward? How did they decide who should live and who should die?

America’s roads have long been a crown jewel in the pantheon of American innovation. Once home to the safest roads in the world, US road deaths per 10,000 drivers now rank slightly below India, making US roads the most dangerous in the developed world. Drivers in Mexico or Sierra Leone are less likely to be injured or die on the road than drivers in Ohio. Car design that ignores 50% of the population, and crash test ratings that are a lie are only part of the problem.

In 1972, the US introduced the 55-mph speed limit for all highways. What followed were two innovations for drivers to break the law: radar detectors, and flashing your high beams like a good neighbor to alert fellow drivers to the presence of cops. The American population agreed that a blanket 55mph speed limit was ridiculous, turning otherwise law-abiding citizens into drivers who played cat-and-mouse games with the police.

When the 55mph limit was lifted in 1995, road deaths rose significantly. Americans had already learned the speed limit was only a suggestion. Now, speed limits were variable and all road regulations were negotiable. On a trip to the United Kingdom last year, I felt a perceptible difference on the roads. The UK has some of the safest roads in the world, thanks to drivers who adhere to road rules and behave like the road is a shared public space, rather than their private playground. Even better, like most of Europe and Asia, passenger trucks are illegal. Meanwhile, the US aggressively markets increasingly larger trucks to young men eager to compensate for other deficiencies via vehicle size.

And yet, movement on this issue continues. In November, the Trump Administration discovered the THOR-5F dummy. The DOT issued a press release advocating for their use, noting that biofidelic dummies mirror physiological differences between the sexes. The press release is unlikely to affect any change in NHTSA regulations, though NHTSA did finally admit the dummies would save women’s lives -- if the administration wanted to change the regulations, they’d have mandated the use of biofidelic dummies rather than simply acknowledging their existence -- though forward progress is possible.

Humanetics saw an uptick in THOR-5F orders after the DOT statement, indicating that some crash labs will begin experimenting with the dummy, which is the first step toward rethinking safety design. And, the She Drives Act, sponsored by eight Congresswomen and four Congressmen, has been introduced into the last two Congressional calendars, though it has never been brought up for a vote.

But when I read the language in the DOT’s press release, I rethought my experience with the Biden administration. Did the administration ignore gender differences in car safety because it conflicted with their gender ideology? Would the Trump administration now take up the battle because it aligned with their larger gender narrative regarding biological differences between the sexes?

Ages ago, when I lived in an apartment building with a shared stairway, a four year old who lived one apartment above fell down the stairs. At the bottom he howled, “That’s not supposed to happen!”

This is how I felt about my family’s car crash. In the United States, your family is not supposed to get hit by a wrong-way driver on a sunny day at noon. If you drive your truck into a young family, you’re not supposed to walk away with a few scratches and a brief license suspension. And when the government learns that thousands of women die each year because they’ve been looking at the data wrong, bureaucrats are supposed to say, Jimmy Stewart-like, “Golly, gee, thanks for bringing this to our attention -- we’ll get right on a solution.”

I don’t know if we ever lived in that world, but I wrote a book predicated on the belief that people in power are held accountable, they can solve problems ethically. I no longer believe that to be the case -- at least, not in the United States. Like many Americans, I no longer trust the government to act in my best interest, or to prioritize my health and wellbeing over other goals like empty bureaucratic victories or enriching the auto industry.

I’m no longer championing the US government’s ability to solve complex problems. I don’t believe bureaucrats are interested in ethical problem solving. Instead, they’re interested in checking off boxes at work, getting promoted, and adding hefty titles to their resumes. If, during their tenure, 44,000 women die as a result, so be it.

Here’s what we know now that we didn’t know then.

1. Language. I arrived having completed one level of Hebrew Ulpan, plus one semester of college Hebrew in 1992 and 6 weeks in Israel in 1989. Plus Hebrew school. (Shoutout to : איפו העיפרון and שקט בוקשה)

   By June we all expect to reach conversational fluency, which is fast for olim - it helps that it’s a third language for three of us. We treat language acquisition like a part-time job, which requires significant effort, but Hebrew is the key that unlocks the rest of our lives.

2. Outdoor space. We chose Tel Aviv as our landing spot, to  ease our transition from NYC, live close to friends and family, and because we loved the city.

   I still love TLV, but I also love space, quiet and being outside. And, my daughter had an hour-long commute to her school, which was the same as her commute in Brooklyn, but traveling around Israel is not as simple as traveling around New York City.

   This year we’ve upgraded to a bigger but cheaper apartment closer to our daughter’s school, north of Tel Aviv. She can walk to her friends’ houses, and we can walk to the beach. We’re also looking forward to developing a new community in Herzliyah, where there’s a big international population.

3. Local Knowledge

   When we arrived we didn’t know how to buy groceries. I spent two days looking for a non-memory foam pillow. I cried at the bank.

   Today, we return knowing a whole lot more about Israeli systems. We know how to order food in a restaurant and whole grain bread with pecans at the bakery. We know how to make doctors’ appointments.

   Most importantly, we understand how to make things happen in Israel. You have to know a guy. You have to appeal to someone’s sense of being all in it together. Saying, “what can you do?” or, “I’m new here and could use help,” goes a long way.

   Most Israelis were new once too, if not themselves, then their parents, grand-parents or great-grandparents. They know it’s hard, and they want you to know you’re not alone.

4. Community. We arrived knowing five people, three of whom were my relatives. I also had a massive spreadsheet of people to look up, that I’d compiled in the US.

   Some of these were for my work network, and some were possible friends. Israel being what it is, I now am collaborating on work projects, and have developed friendships, with people on both lists. We’re all connected on WhatsApp, obviously.

   A year later, I can’t even count on two hands the number of people I’d call friends, from other Obama White House exiles to the guy I met in Ulpan who made the mistake of doing a presentation on plants in class, and ended up taking care of my plants over the summer. He even texted me proof-of-life pics.

   I think it’s important to say that while I’m getting better at making friends, it’s never been my strong suit. I identified as a shy introvert most of my life, and still don’t like being too early to the party. Or even going to the party, really.

   But I’ve never found it easier to make friends than I have in Israel. For starters, everyone I meet agrees Israel not only has a right to exist, but is perhaps the best place in the world to be. We also all agree that being Jewish is important, as is our people’s continued existence, and that we are doing the most important thing one can possibly do in life: securing the Jewish future by building our homeland.

And we’re off … kadima … onward!

[P.S. Slight problem - the flight attendant is under the mistaken impression I speak Hebrew because he keeps addressing me in Hebrew and I keep understanding pls send help I need to switch this conversation to English before I run out of verbs!! Yalla bye.]

- Hana

Camp David is styled like your imaginary old-money friend’s ancestral family hunting lodge, with rustic individual cabins and a humble, inviting coziness. It is the most American of retreats, welcoming visitors to the calm of our nation’s inner beauty, all needs met by the US Army and the Secret Service, sensible wooden furniture, American flannels and plaids. Most people spent the day at the bar, but I dragged a younger friend to see the room where the Camp David Accords were signed.

“What’s that?” she asked. I felt old, irrelevant, and Jewish. I didn’t know I was seeing the tip of something much bigger and more sinister, so I pushed it aside.

Soon after, much of USDS exited into the corporate sector or quit. But I wanted to keep doing the work I’d been doing - projects that benefitted large portions of the American population, modernizing and improving government for future generations, shoring up democracy so refugees, immigrants and historically marginalized people — a group which I assumed included Jews — would continue to be safe in America. This work was too important to leave, no matter the cost. Because I understood something important about the United States that I hadn’t know before USDS.

Our institutions were frail. Our government was old and unresponsive. Most government agency goals were disconnected from what Americans actually needed in the 21st century. Building new anything in the public sector was like turning the Titanic and cost bajillions of largely squandered dollars. Trust in democracy was at an all time low. And as Jen Pahlka, the first CTO of the US and founder of Code for America has said in talks and at events: No one is coming to fix the government. It’s up to us.

I thought about that sentence a lot, and still do. It resonated deeply for me, because my family and cultural history taught me no one is ever coming to save the Jews. In the Mishnah (the oral laws that accompany the Torah) Rabbi Tarfon writes, “You are not obligated to finish the work; neither are you free to desist from it.” That is: it’s not all on your shoulders, but do what you can to repair the cracks you see in the world

.Now that I’d seen the cracks in government, I couldn’t look away. Billions of dollars spent keeping tech companies in business and government systems only semi-functional, with no one willing to stand up to Big Tech or try a new approach. Decision makers who barely understood how to use an iPhone let alone build a system with a possible user base of 18 Million Americans. An employee at an immigration processing center who printed out the same form and then scanned it back into her computer multiple times a day because she didn’t know how to save files as PDFs.

In the end, I received three offers. One from IBM, where the tatted-up VP making the offer described the work, then paused and said, “I just bought a weekend home in the Catskills.”

And two from non-profits where I would not get a weekend home, but could continue the work I felt called to do. One offer meant moving my family to Baltimore. The other meant I could stay in New York. After a year of commuting on Amtrak, I wanted to be with my family in our home.

So I took a remote Think Tank fellowship, along with a handful of other Obama alumni still reeling from Trump’s inauguration. The work we’d expected to continue into a Clinton administration had abruptly ended, landing us at this carpeted, modern office on 15th Street rather than the dingy rooms of the West Wing, or click-clacking through the cavernous halls of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

Part of my fellowship was to report stories for national outlets on how “the work” was continuing in unexpected locales. My aim was to show how local governments could solve hard problems, like blight or homelessness. The idea was that in government, complex processes were often hamstrung by small, sometimes ridiculous roadblocks, and a lack of tech-fluency. Once you recognized this, you could identify the roadblocks, remove them, use Google Sheets instead of buying some terrible overpriced system you didn’t need, and finally get people the help they needed.

Not long after I started, trouble arrived. I profiled three local government officials who were doing “the work” for a large business magazine. And, I’d found subjects who checked my personal boxes for both the change I wanted to see in the world, and the change I could squeeze into a magazine article. Two of the government leaders I profiled were women, one of whom was over 50. In addition to continuing to evangelize “the work,” I also hoped to demonstrate to Obama World how to tell wonky stories to regular people. So I shared the article with an email list of Obama alumni, expecting they’d be pleased to see “the work” in a big magazine.

Instead, my boss and I immediately received an email from a woman in the group who was disappointed — frankly, she was offended — that there were no people of color in the article. The offended woman was a Midwestern bright-formica-White, so American she was named after a Great Lake. She was addressing me as a fellow White woman. But my life had not been that of a White woman the way hers had. She probably grew up in a town named after a pioneering fore-bearer who arrived in a wagon. Her father owned the town lumberyard and served as county clerk. Her mother was president of the Make America Beautiful club. Their July 4th barbecue was legendary. As a Jew, I had none of that in my background, yet I didn’t count in Great Lakes’ accounting. I said nothing.

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The email was the first nick in what, over the next five years, would come to feel like death by a thousand paper cuts. A few months later, I was asked by the Tank to find a solution to a problem of their own making. Many projects at the Tank culminated in a panel discussion where people shared their research findings. Following Black Lives Matter, the Tank banned all-White panels. It didn’t matter if they were all-female. We were past Me Too and onto Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Women were out, People of Color were in. I was on an upcoming panel featuring research I’d conducted with a white woman from Texas. If the panel only featured the two of us, it would be too many White people.

“Oh that’s ok,” I said, ready to out myself as a Jew at work for the first time in 28 years. Maybe times had changed. “I’m Jewish.”

For a few seconds, I felt a spark of hope that — for the first time ever — identifying myself as Jewish was going to result in something good.

“Unfortunately,” my boss said, “that counts as White.” She shifted uncomfortably as she explained my own identity to me.

“You know,” she added. “Because…” and then she trailed off.

..because Jews are doing just fine in the world? Because we control the banks and the media and are puppet masters orchestrating a new world order? A quarter of my family had been murdered specifically for not being White, so the news that I was now White was shocking.

“I’m not sure I really count as a person of color, to be honest,” she said, trying to laugh it off. My boss was a very fair-skinned Latina — if not for her name, I would have assumed she was White. Either way, she was quite obviously descended from Spanish Colonizers. But no one cared about that. She counted and I didn’t.

I absorbed the fact that my ethnicity had been decided for me in a way that felt, to use the parlance of DEI, marginalizing as fuck. I was White? I wondered which equity committee at work made that decision. Had there been any Jews on it? Probably Barry, the Boomer CFO, and now that I thought about it, one of a surprisingly small number of Jews at the Tank, given the number of Jews in the universe who are Tank-qualified. Don’t-make-a-fuss, nothing-to-see-here Barry probably said Jews were White. Obviously we’re White, because the people who hold the power in this country are White, and Jews hold all the power, because … you know.

I’d spent my entire life passing as White, because I had been raised to believe that being Jewish would be a hindrance, and Whiteness was required for success. But people were rethinking America, and along with it gender norms and race. But somehow, Jewish was still not the thing you wanted to be.

Of course, all identities were invited on this DEI march to the future, as long as Jews agreed they were White oppressors. Jews who identified as anything else were not welcome in the future.

The day after the 2016 election, when I told my then-friend about the Camp David Accords, I ignored the very obvious thing she was telling me about the future of my place in America.

“Funny story,” said my friend, as we read about the lasting peace established between Israel and Egypt in the very room where it happened. Before the US opened their doors to her family, my friend said, Israel welcome them with visas and jobs. They’d moved there from India for a few years and her sister was born in Israel, while awaiting American visas.

She’d never mentioned it, because Israel wasn’t something you brought up in polite society. I thought this was because Israel was complicated. I didn’t understand she’d saying that Israel helped her family before the United States did wouldn’t have been prudent for her career or friendships. Soon after I evacuated my son after 10/7, this woman shared pictures of herself and her toddler waving a Palestinian flag at a Free Gaza rally.

“So proud my daughter can see people standing up for the rights of brown people,” she wrote.

I was prepared by then, because other White House and Tank colleagues had already praised the attack, while I was monitoring Israeli airspace and scrambling to evacuate my son from his gap year in Tel Aviv to safety.

But we’re not there yet. First, we need to about how after Black Lives Matter, I watched Progressivism, and the Tank, rot from the inside.

I will be pausing publication through the end of the month as we head back to Israel for the year. Wishing everyone a peaceful end to your summer, may you find a shady spot to sit in and enjoy the view.

H

My senior year I worked in the Chicago press room of the Clinton campaign, where I called into radio shows playing an undecided voter who gradually became convinced to vote for Clinton. After graduation, I was accepted into a program that trained recent graduates to work on campaigns for the emerging progressive wing of the Democratic party.

At the time, progressive meant something different than it does now, because the Democratic party was different. In the 90s, Democrats could be moderate or conservative. Some were anti-abortion, pro-guns and “fiscally conservative.” Many were also working class — the real kind, not prep school kids slumming it. The progressive movement was, I thought then, about creating a modern progressive-style government — one that took care of Americans when they got knocked down, treated women and minorities fairly, and gave everyone access to the American Dream.

Ms Schank Goes to Washington

The program training took place on a small college campus in Washington, DC. For ten days, I learned, along with 20 recent graduates from around the country, how to organize and run a political campaign. Campaign strategists fresh off the ‘92 Clinton victory taught us to analyze the voter file to create a campaign strategy. Anita Dunn taught us to write press releases and run a press strategy.

But as the week progressed, the trainees and I also began to understand that in politics things were not always as they seemed. And, we got a taste of what proximity to power meant. At night in our dorm we speculated that our program was a covert operation to create a field team for Bill Bradley’s anticipated 2000 presidential run. Sen. Bradley was one of the chairs of the program, along with the recently ousted Governor of Ohio, Richard Celeste.

The last day of the program, we were sent into Senator Bradley’s office and told we could ask any question we wanted. Someone asked if it was more exciting to win a Senate race or two NBA championships with the New York Knicks. Without question, said Bradley, the NBA championships were the highlight of his life.

Our final night of the training we were treated to a private Bruce Hornsby concert. After playing a few songs, Hornsby asked if the audience had any requests. The trainees’ looked at each other wide-eyed with both the terror of requesting a song from a famous musician, and awe that we were in a position to do so.

Governor Celeste broke the silence by requesting Bennie and the Jets.

“Respectfully, Governor,” Hornsby replied. “No.”

The Governor tried again with Crocodile Rock, and was again rebuffed. I don’t remember what song they settled on, but I understood the message. Personal concerts by famous musicians, even if they vetoed your song requests, were the icing on the political cake.

For a year and a half I cranked out press releases, candidate statements and speeches on Congressional races across the country. I held signs at overpasses and blanketed neighborhoods with leaflets, organized volunteer door-knockers and gave talks at local DNC events. I lived on couches and spare rooms in southwestern Missouri, far-upstate New York, the south side of Chicago and exurban Virginia. I worked every single day without rest until election day, then slept for a month.

The hours and lifestyle were brutal. The pay was terrible. And once I moved beyond the traditional boundaries of Jewish America, I looked and felt like a foreigner in large parts of my own country. It was a terrible feeling — one I wasn’t ready to think about at 22. But the worst part was learning that politics was far more disgusting than I’d realized.

Of the four campaigns I worked on, I only believed one of the candidates deserved to be in Congress. The others were all hatable because they obviously wanted to be in Congress to prove they were humans of value, rather than to serve their constituents. Politics was the ultimate game, yes, but one with no actual winners. Because ultimately, American politics wasn’t about serving the American people. It was about winning.

The day of Yom Kippur eve, 1994 I was let go from my last campaign (last-hired-first -fired meant the press secretary got fired from a losing campaign first). As I sped up I-55, all of my belongings in the trunk of my Nissan Sentra, rushing to make it to my parents’ apartment in Chicago before sunset, I knew I was done with campaign work.

Use this One Weird Trick to Switch Careers

Around this time, the internet started to become a thing. Thanks to my father’s work in Computer Science, I’d had an email account since 1978, when I was 6 and emailed poems to my parents. I could code — poorly — in a few different languages. As press secretary I’d delighted my campaign managers by setting up Access databases and other 90s-era tools for managing massive amounts of data. So I went to work on the Internet.

For the next 15 years I built a career as a technologist, first in Chicago at Andersen Consulting, then in New York City where I launched early websites for CBS News, Perrier, Jaguar, IBM, and other big-name brands. Eventually, I ran my own user experience consultancy. But by 2013 I had to get out of tech. The exciting dot-com world of the ‘90s had given way to technology that treated the customer as the enemy. Clients asked me to design sites that lied to users, misdirected them, or made it impossible to cancel a subscription. I began looking around for my next career.

I was married with two young kids by then, and hadn’t paid much attention to political news since exiting the arena. But recently the news had wandered into my territory. The Obama White House had been going on for a while about this big Healthcare.gov launch, which even from my office in Manhattan sounded like an oncoming disaster.

The White House was hyping a red-letter day when Healthcare.gov would be turned on and everyone would enroll for healthcare and it would be beautiful. This struck me as odd. In tech you never, never, NEVER announce a giant launch date. In politics you do a giant launch date. In advertising you do a giant launch date. In tech, you do slow rollouts unless you want to ensure your site breaks into a million pieces when people use it. At that point in my career I’d worked on many projects where someone insisted on a big launch date, and not one, ever, hit the date. Zero.

But I kept thinking: the White House can’t be this stupid.

Predictably, the site failed spectacularly. Soon after, the White House put out a call for tech people to help the US government. I knew someone who’d been at a meeting at the White House about the tech problem, so I emailed asking if it was true she was at the White House. Indeed she was, she said, and encouraged me to join the team.

And that is how I ended up working in the Obama White House at the United States Digital Service (USDS) and for the Department of Homeland Security. At the time I thought maybe this was how life worked - you followed your interests, trying all directions, and in the end everything makes sense. I still think that is how life works, except for Jews in America the rules are different.

The United States Digital Service (USDS)

At USDS I was one of the older employees, because dropping everything you’re doing and moving to DC skews young. I’d worked out a deal with my 27-year-old boss where I spent four days in DC, which allowed me weekends home with my family in New York. A few other New Yorkers did the same commute, and we often saw each other on the train or at Penn or Union Station. Their career paths had been somewhat similar to mine, meandering through journalism or design, consulting, and advertising.

But the majority of USDS-ers were from Silicon Valley, which meant their corporate culture involved snacks, old t-shirts and letting their geek flag fly, while the New Yorkers were raised on sleek black clothing and the language of business. Many of the Silicon Valley USDS-ers were also extraordinarily wealthy, having been Amazon employee number 12, or an early part of Google, while the rest of the staff earned average creative class salaries.

The California people viewed working at USDS as something generous they were doing for the country which required a pay cut and living in a city they found archaic and silly. Meanwhile the DC and New York employees were not wealthy, not taking a pay cut — my USDS salary actually gave me a slight bump in earnings — and had a deeper understanding of how to behave and dress in the nation’s capitol. (I had one employee who got thrown out of a government building for wearing shorts.)

Like the tech field it drew from, USDS was also male-dominated and sexist as hell, while pretending to be the opposite. In tech, designers and researchers — who skew female — are paid less and don’t tend to get promoted to senior management roles. Meanwhile, engineers are overwhelmingly male, highly paid, and often move into leadership. It’s assumed that engineers can manage designers and researchers, but not the other way around. Is that because engineers are men and designers are women? Probably.

My first day at USDS, a male colleague who was also a parent asked how my kids were doing without their mom. At that point I’d been away from my kids for exactly one day.

“I could never do that,” he told me. “I feel like I’d miss so much.”

At USDS, I managed a small team of two engineers, two product managers and a designer. The (male) engineer complained to my boss that I wasn’t technical enough to manage him, which I figured meant my fallopian tubes get in the way of my understanding of cloud computing. Anyway, my 27-year-old male boss thought this was an appropriate criticism to pass along, because he was 27 years old.

Despite it all, I loved my job, and knew this was the work I would do for the rest of my life. The work was exhilarating in scale and enticingly challenging. For a year and a half, I served as a White House Digital Expert assigned to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). I worked on the immigration system, the use of facial recognition by Customs and Border Control, reducing lines at TSA, streamlining airport security, and creating a universal government login.

But at USDS, I was also reminded of everything I hated about politics. I hated the competition over power as demonstrated by badges. A blue badge meant you had access to the White House and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (EEOB). A green badge gave you access to the EEOB, but not the White House. Both badges were enviable. My badge got me into DHS Headquarters but not the White House or EEOB, so I had to contact someone with a Blue or Green badge to enter the White House grounds, and on and on, turtles all the way down.

Outside of New York, politics and government is also not very Jewish. USDS was no different. There was one other Jewish woman about my age who was also a parent — we bonded immediately as two Jewish women in a very not-Jewish field. There were a few crypto-Jews, people with Jewish names who practiced no Jewish rituals. But mostly at USDS I was reminded why I lived in New York, where I could swear in meetings, use Yiddish expressions and take Jewish holidays off without using up my vacation days. Accordingly, at USDS I came to be know as the New Yorker. I knew this was code for New York Jew, but I’d spent much of my life as the New York Jew in the room, so I just shrugged, took my holidays quietly and moved on.

In addition to being older, poorer, more semitic and more female than most of my colleagues, I was also not a political neophyte. Many of my coworkers were Obama acolytes the way I had been a Clinton stan in the ‘90s. Some worked on his election campaign. I hadn’t voted for Obama in the primary, and wasn’t necessarily fired up and ready to go. I still thought political campaigns and government were disgusting, while many of my colleagues seemed to think we lived in Candyland.

One woman frequently cursed the DHS team’s existence at staff meetings, because DHS housed ICE and ICE shouldn’t exist. Others were bothered by the creation of a digital team for the Defense department, because war is bad. In these moments I found myself wondering, where did people think we were?

The White House was a seat of government, and governments do uncomfortable and often terrible things. Were people not familiar with history? Had they not heard of Vietnam? Did they not know the United States government fomented revolution in Central America, ran a secret bombing campaign in Laos, changed immigration laws to prevent Jews from immigrating during World War 1 and opted not to take in Jewish refugees during the Holocaust?

And yet, should we not have an army? Should we not have borders? What a privilege to think government was all unicorns and free healthcare. Clearly no genocidal socialist fascist governments in their family histories!

Aside from the USDS-ers living in a fantasy role playing game, I found a lot of my coworkers to be smart, insightful, and caring. I loved the agency’s guiding ethos: any problem was solvable if you thought about it the right way and pushed the right levers. The way USDS prioritized projects made my heart sing: to effect the most change for the greatest number of people, with the greatest need.

After the surprise outcome of the 2016 election, I expected such a smart group of people would want to understand what had happened. Our jobs were about understanding the unexpected. Surely people would want to pick apart why the US electorate had just voted against their own interests to put a reality TV star in the White House over a woman who was perhaps the most qualified presidential candidate in recent history.

Instead, the Democrats concluded the electorate was an ignorant sexist piece of shit. I know this because right after the election, I went around DC trying to get funding for a “What the hell just happened?” project. I wanted to understand why people voted against their own interests, or didn’t vote at all, and how the Dems had so badly misunderstood the electorate. But no one wanted to fund a deep dive into what had gone wrong. The voters were assholes, that was what was wrong. They needed to be educated to vote correctly, and the best way to do that was to pretend the 2016 election had been a bizzare aberration rather than a harbinger of things to come.

Soon after the election, people began leaving USDS. My 27-year-old boss quit first, followed in rapid succession by a size-able portion of the organization. That is: the people who could afford to quit did. The rest of us, having left the private sector and spent a year working in government, struggled to find new jobs where we’d wait out the Trump Administration and then go back into government. I stayed through the Trump transition, hoping that good work was still possible. I applied for a leadership role at USDS and hired a schools consultant to help me figure out how to relocate my school-aged kids to Washington, DC.

After I found myself in a project planning meeting for the border wall, I began applying for jobs. It seemed unfair that USDS had lured us into government under the guise of doing one kind of work, only to abandon ship as soon as the leadership changed. But again, these were not people who deeply understood government or politics. They understood technology and imagined that when combined with government, you could create beautiful services for Americans. They trusted Obama implicitly. And their families had never been massacred by well-intentioned patriots led astray by an immoral government.

It couldn’t be that all these smart people were wrong, could it?

Coming Next: The insurrection, border security and Black Lives Matter — what the Democrats were actually doing during the Trump administration

Thanks to my writing, people from my past often find me and reach out. Especially if they come through Israel, which more and more people seem to be doing lately. Recently, someone from my past asked if I thought America was over, and also if I sometimes felt crazy.

The first thing that came to mind was a story I’d been pitching around during COVID. I spent the first few months of the pandemic learning all about past pandemics. I love to dip into the past to help understand what the future might look like — it’s one of my favorite parts of writing stories. Based on what I learned about how pandemics work, combined with how the US government and public were responding to the pandemic, I began pitching a story about why COVID would probably be with us for the next 20-50 years.

One editor replied that I was crazy - this thing was going to be over in a week. Needless to say, I turned out to not be crazy. But also, no one wanted my reported story of doom.

The same holds true today. Thanks to my jobs in the Obama White House and adjacent to the Biden transition team and the Biden Administration, I was privy to a number of facts about the current state of the US that, when taken together, look remarkably like the fall of an empire. To help provide context around these facts, I went deep in my reading about defunct empires. Like pandemics, empires have fallen before. I wondered if I could figure out where we were in history, and what that might tell me about where we were going next.

So, I read Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I read about the Iranian Revolution, the Orange revolution in Ukraine, and the end of the Ottoman Empire. I also read Eichmann in Jerusalem, because I’m a government nerd and I wanted to understand what the Nazi government looked like from the inside.

What I learned sent me searching for a new home for my family. My research into other nations led us to choose Israel. In my next few essays, I’ll walk through what I learned and show my receipts.

I’ll prove that America has not been a functioning democracy for a long time, and that both parties know it. The Democrats, who tell the public they are the pro-democracy party, not only know we no longer live in a democracy, but are happy to keep on keeping on if it means they can claw back power.

I’ll share the active racism and antisemitism I experienced behind the scenes of the Biden transition team, and at my own think tank. I’ll tell you what the signs of democratic backsliding are and why things in the US are much worse than you know. And, I’ll demonstrate that the Democratic party continues to inhabit a fantasy land where the full restoration of “democracy” is only an election away. I’ll explain why, if you are a Jew, the Democrats have not been your friends for a long time.

Along the way, I’ll report on the antisemitism that both parties have let fester and/or actively stoked. I’ll tell you what I know about my own family’s lives in 1930s Hungary, and how the parallels between my family’s stories and what was happening in Brooklyn in 2023 were too close to ignore.

Finally, I’ll explain how we ended choosing Israel. I didn’t grow up in the traditional Zionist American mold, and Israel was not the first place I thought of when I began to grasp that I needed to get my family out of America. Israel was the country where my Holocaust-surviving family lives because they couldn’t live in Hungary, Romania or Czechoslovakia. It was not an exciting celebration of Jewish rebirth — for my family, Israel was a consolation prize after their homes were destroyed. Tel Aviv was a city of refugee housing and people with numbers on their arm waiting for a bus. But then I visited Israel — and my family — for the first time in 30 years, and I understood that Israel is the future.

Most importantly: I now have hope, and want to give you hope too. These stories are going to be tough to read, but I have also given a lot of thought to what the solutions might be, and I’ll share those as well. I see a future where Israel and the US work together to counter democratic backsliding in their respective countries. I know that historically when Jews get together, great things happen, and right now I see those great things happening in Israel, not the United States. I envision a Middle East where multiple nations join the Abraham Accords, bringing peace, freedom from terror, and building a new economic center of gravity. Though it’s been an extraordinarily difficult few years, for me the future feels bright.

Thanks for coming with me on this research and reporting journey.

Hana

As he cleared our plates, the waiter asked if we wanted dessert. No, we said. We were exhausted and stuffed and hot, with miles to go before we slept. Coffee, then? A big lunch like that should end with coffee. No coffee, we said. Moments later the waiter brought us two Israeli espressos and a dish of malabi on the house. Israelis take Middle Eastern hospitality seriously.

America: Land of the Free Ice and Home of the Workers who Hate their Jobs

When we landed in Logan Airport the next day, needless to say, no one offered us free anything beyond a simmering rage. The man working the rental car counter greeted us with the platitudes and pseudo-formal language that has replaced human connection in America. The car we’d rented was not available, so we were sent to the parking lot to look for a monster-truck SUV with Grand Canyon-sized cup holders for Big Gulps.

In the parking lot the man working the rental car booth side-eyed us, annoyed because we were disturbing either a game or a text conversation, and said, “What’s up?” as though we were annoying randos on a stroll through an airport parking garage.

After locating the car, we loaded in our suitcases and cat, then drove up to the exit gate. The gate didn’t go up. The attendant’s booth was empty. After ten minutes and much car horn honking a woman meandered over and shot us an identical look of annoyance as the man in the rental car booth. We were annoying for wanting to exit the parking lot. That’s when I remembered. Everyone in America hates their job and wants you to know it. Also, the unspoken class and racial tension is palpable.

On the other hand, not long after leaving the airport we pulled into a 7-11 for something America does better than anywhere else in the world: junk food. Sure, you can eat potato chips or Doritos in Israel, but they’re missing some … je ne sais quoi, which is probably the chemicals that trick your brain into eating an entire Family Bag pallet of junk food without noticing.

But even better than Smartfood, perfect potato chips and a thousand varieties of fried corn is what America gives away for free, unthinkingly: ice. I don’t mean ICE. I mean cold, glittering ice cubes. For free, and without even asking, because Americans believe that ice consumption is a God-given right, and that to deprive others of ice would be needlessly cruel. How I missed ice in my drinks, ice in the freezer, ice dispensers, as much ice as I want forever and ever. Is my drink not cold enough? Don’t worry, this is America and there is always more ice! You don’t even need to buy ice trays or an ice bucket or be annoyed when you open the freezer and see that once again, your family has left you ice-less. Because in America, our freezers magically fill with ice at the push of a button. We don’t even have to think about ice for there to be ice — that’s how much ice there is in America.

Supersize Me

The next day we went to the supermarket. As nearly-lifelong New Yorkers, all supermarkets outside the city seem gargantuan, but after a year in tiny Israel, the enormity of the United States seems absurd. The distances are vast, cars the size of small tanks, trees impossibly tall, coffee cups the size of buckets, food portions more than anyone could reasonably eat in one sitting, the waitress in the diner refilling my coffee until I begged her to stop. But nothing compares to the sheer bounty of an American supermarket.

As we passed through the sliding doors, my husband, daughter and I marveled at the sheer scale of the produce section, gasped when we saw the fish and meat options, and nearly burst into tears at the ludicrous number of pasta varieties. Did we want skinny pasta or slightly less skinny pasta? Did we want it cut into small pieces, and if so how small? Did we want pasta with gluten or without? Egg or not egg? Whole wheat or semolina? And which of the 8 brands was the right one? Buying pasta was like solving a logic problem on the GRE.

Next, we stared at the meat section like we’d just emerged from Soviet Russia. How was it possible to divide a cow or a pig into this many parts? Did the sea really have this many kinds of fish? How did one even begin to work through the wall of cold cuts?

But later, as we walked around town, we couldn’t help but notice that the people here look slightly green, as though they’ve been living on a steady diet of high fructose corn syrup and reality television. After a year in a nation with a largely vegetarian diet and weather that beckons you outside, where most people look healthy, toned, and alive, in a city where men take their shirts off to cross the street, the contrast with Maine was stark. A few days later, when we drove across Maine and New Hampshire to Vermont, we saw it wasn’t just Maine. Everyone in America looks a bit lifeless, and vaguely ill.

Rethink Giving Peace a Chance

Perhaps being united against a common enemy, regularly confronting the existential threat of being wiped off the map, and mandatory military service plus a sense of purpose (i.e. avoiding getting killed for being a Jew) really is the spice of life. It certainly explains why Israel consistently rates as one of the happiest nations, despite being a permanent war zone.

On the other hand, watching your country fall apart during a prolonged peacetime has not been good for Americans. Living in the United States has been a daily rollercoaster ride for at least the past ten years, and it shows. US deaths of despair — the combined rate of suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol-related deaths — rose from 28.6 per 100,000 in 1999 to nearly 72 per 100,000 in 2023. Life expectancy has dropped, while infant and maternal mortality have skyrocketed despite massive US healthcare spending. Americans are notoriously obese compared to the rest of the world, but even rates of disease like Alzheimers or conditions like autism are noticeably higher in the US than in Israel.

But it’s not just the political chaos, societal upheaval and lagging healthcare that are making Americans sick. After spending a year in a war zone, where listening to the news is a daily requirement for one’s safety, in contrast Americans seem checked out and complacent. Everyone is plugged into devices or in a loud-conversation-on-speakerphone bubble. People look defeated, pasty and unwell.

And hear me out, but it makes me think of Rome. In Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire1, Gibbon writes that a contributing factor to the demise of the Empire was, surprisingly, a long period of peace. Peace, when given a chance, turns out to be deadly for Empires.

The Romans were excellent at conquesting, colonizing and enslaving for 1400 years, but all good things must end. Gibbons points to three factors that led to the fall of Rome — see you if you can spot the America in them. First, Romans got fat, happy and complacent. As the Empire’s wealth grew, traditional Roman values and patriotism gave way to greed, sloth and corruption. Second, Romans got religion. After the state religion switched to Christianity, the center could not hold. Everyone had been aligned on how the world worked according to Roman theology (except the Jews, obvi), but now they’d switched, en masse, to an entirely different set of beliefs. Down went temples to gods, up went churches — it must have been very unsettling for y’all.

But the final nail in the coffin for Rome was their military. The Empire existed for as long as it did because they were the most powerful, the strongest, biggest, most lethal army in the world at that time. And part of the Roman' army’s secret was that people wanted to serve, because the army was what Rome was all about. Kids grew up excited to show their patriotism, courage, and civic pride. Most importantly: they believed Rome was worth fighting for.

I’ve seen a lot of data go by pointing to this sign of democratic decline or that indicator of why everything sucks right now. But to me the scariest number was the one showing how many Americans think American Democracy is worth dying for. Only 9% to 11% of young adults aged 16-24 say they are willing to serve in the military, which represents a significant decline over the past decade.

It gets worse. If the United States were invaded, less than half of Americans say they would stay and fight. Over a third say they’d leave the country. And this is a population that for the most part has absolutely no idea what it’s like to live in an active war zone.

A quarter of Israelis are currently threatening to leave the country as well, but they’re using it as leverage in the upcoming election. Also, they’re not threatening to leave if Israel is attacked, because Israelis all understand the deal they’ve made. Plus Israel is already being attacked, so if a third of the country left every time there was a war there would be no more Israel. We all know how that turns out for Jews.

While it has been lovely to have a missile-free summer, it’s strange to be in a place where no one appreciates the lack of missiles or imminent threat. My husband and I speak to our Hebrew teacher twice a week over Zoom, and she told us one day that she’d run around all day and just as she was getting into bed she thought, fuck, I forgot to check the news, so I don’t know if I need to sleep in my clothes or not.

Americans might benefit from some of this kind of thinking, perhaps an end-of-the-day checklist that includes: turn off lights, check stove is off, brush teeth, feed cat, see what’s up with the imminent threat of obliteration by neighboring country. My point is, Americans don’t remember what’s so special about America. They don’t know how it feels to breath free after months of checking where the closest shelters are and which lunatic said what insane thing last. Americans have never panicked because the entire country was out of a medication they needed due to war. Their kids’ teacher’s son didn’t die in a terrorist attack because that’s the cost of breathing free.

Instead, two women in my town organize every day outside the post office holding three signs, one about Israel being a terrorist state and two others that I assume are about tyrany and or some Kings bullshit. Sometimes a man sets up across from them with a speaker and a guitar playing what I can only assume he thinks are patriotic pro-America songs. Every time I pass them I think, good work, everyone. Three people who shout slogans they don’t understand at each other and then go home feeling patriotic is really giving Fall of Rome, my friends. Was that the message you intended to send, because if so 10-4 I have received it!

My husband and I have been watching a lot of Fauda in Maine, partially because we can get watch it with English subtitles here which really helps with our Hebrew. (If anyone needs to say copy, got it, he’s dead, where is ISIS or shut up you motherfucker let me know!). But also, as we wrap up season three and move onto season four, I think it’s because despite the war and the missiles and the cottage cheese shortage, we miss Israel.

I miss the tomatoes, the labne, the pillowy pitas and 27 choices of hummus. I miss feeling like whatever it is, we’re all in it together, me, you, those four shirtless men bouncing a soccer ball off their heads on the beach, the Wolt driver who almost ran me over a minute ago and that woman Agam who lived in the apartment upstairs and liked to throw loud parties. We may all literally be together in a bomb shelter, or just mentally united by our shared, conflicting desires to exist safely and be Jewish in the world today. As polarized as Israel is right now, it’s mine — it’s where my family is, my people are, and now, the place I get homesick for. I can’t say the same for America.

I’ve always felt out of place in Maine, the second Whitest state in America, which kicked Blacks, Jews and Catholics out of the state well into the 1930s. Our town puts on weekly free concerts featuring assorted country-blues-folk-easy-listening bands and every week I can’t help but look at everyone dancing or seated in those little camping chairs that for some reason always strike me as the epitome of goyishe kop and think: this is some hard core white people shit. It’s cute! It’s nice to see people being happy and outside and dancing. But it is also a tiny bit like watching aliens on Mars, or being a foreign exchange student in Finland.

Previously, I never minded feeling like an anthropologist in Maine, because I had a different part of America where I did feel like home: New York. Where the Jews are. Where my family was. Where the faint outline of my great-grandfather’s bead import business is still visible on the second floor window of 39 W. 38th Street. But I have no interest in visiting New York now, and no plans to do so in the future. And while it’s been nice to see friends and family, eat crispy bacon and enjoy all the free ice I can stuff in my drinks, I’m looking forward to going home. Thankfully, I know where I belong.

Part One of our plan was to sell our place in Brooklyn, shove our belonging into the attic of our house in Maine, fly to Tel Aviv with nine suitcases packed with a desktop computer, pots and steak knives, among other items, and unpack into a furnished rental in Tel Aviv. Part Two was to decide, after a year in Israel, what to do with our possessions in Maine.

But over the course of the year, something unexpected happened. While we delighted in the weightlessness of being free of possessions, we also missed specific items. How lovely it was to feel 22 again, back when I could fit everything I owned, including my stereo and a computer, in the trunk of my Nissan Sentra. But damn I wish I’d brought my brown teddy bear fleece, my journal from 2016 and that book about the Jews of   Pinsk.

At first it was wonderful to live, temporarily, with a capsule wardrobe, kitchen, library, and  office. I was content to pine over items I knew I’d be reunited with in time. But then I stopped missing specific items and began missing the totality of my possessions.

I missed the comfort of being surrounded by my accumulated belongings. Every item I own tells a story about who I was when I acquired it, used it, or loved it.  But in time, without these markers of personhood, in a country that was not yet my own, surrounded by someone else’s furniture and decor choices, I worried I was starting to lose my sense of self.

“I miss my stuff,” I found myself saying frequently. Which stuff specifically I could not always say, but I missed being a person who had much more stuff than could fit in the trunk of a Nissan Sentra.

Now, we are back in Maine executing Part Two of our plan: the final shlep (of our Aliyah not of all time, to be clear).

I am coming to you today having moved 15 boxes in Tel Aviv to a storage locker, then flown to Maine with nine empty suitcases. Now my husband and I are in the process of opening the boxes we threw into the attic last summer and deciding precisely which ones go into our container shipment to Israel.

It’s weird to see your stuff after a year‘s absence. First, I was shocked by the state we’d left things in. I opened boxes to find a random assortment of unrelated items - my journal from 6th grade, my great grandfather’s shofar, my father’s high school yearbook (Stuy ‘62) three notebooks from when I worked in the White House, and an archival box with my kids’ art through elementary school.

It was hard to shake the feeling that these boxes had been packed by people motivated by serious inherited fleeing-related trauma, while fleeing themselves — something about the haphazardness of the boxes, but also the assertion that the contents of each box were important to us, and we hoped to see each item again, after the fleeing was over, should we be so lucky.

Seeing all your possessions in boxes you packed a year ago, and being forced to unpack them, weed stuff out and then repack them is a specific form of torture.

First, there is the overwhelming feeling of owning too much shit. There is always another box to unpack, more pie plates and sweatshirts to unearth, an entire lifetime of mementos, and en endless supply of things that are simultaneously priceless and worthless.

Then there’s the window into who you are as a human through your possessions. The number of sweatshirts I own is baffling. I seem have claimed other people‘s sweatshirts at an alarming rate - stuff I took, and said, well, if you don’t wear it, I’ll wear it.

I have a sweatshirt from my son’s sleepaway camp, a size youth L from some child’s visit to Acadia, one from a work offsite at a place my husband no longer works, my son’s university of Colorado sweatshirt from when he thought he might go there, his sweatshirt from Gregory‘s bar mitzvah in 2016 which never fit well, my husband‘s old Brooklyn sweatshirt that he thought was too stretched out, my son’s sweatshirts from Brooklyn Tech and the Brooklyn Tech robotics team, a beautiful green hoodie I got for my daughter for Hanukkah that she never wore, plus my sweatshirt from when I worked at the United States Digital Service, where there was an argument that the 💪🏼 on the back was both too brown and not brown enough.

Finally, there is the question of what to do with family heirlooms.   My grandmother passed down to me the set of china, silver and Waterford crystal her mother bought her when she and my grandfather married, some of which was originally my great grandmother’s. All of it was purchased for life in New York, as envisioned in 1945 by a Jewish refugee from Hungary. But I also used it for every holiday I hosted in Brooklyn, which means to my husband, kids and me, it’s not really a holiday without Gammy’s table service.

Israel a long and unexpected journey for these and other heirlooms like my grandmother’s photo album documenting her life in 1933 Hungary, or the scrapbook her father kept with clippings that began as articles about the trade association he started for shmatte importers, and then segued into his efforts to organize a boycott of German and Czech goods, and other futile efforts to stop the destruction of his family. Or maybe Israel is the correct place for all of them. Maybe Israel is the obvious place they were going to end up all along.

To complicate matters, there’s the fact that we have lived without all the stuff in boxes for a year. If we don’t take them with us now, why bother keeping them? But at the same time, how do we know what we need?

I don’t need my heaviest fleece or snow boots in Israel, but what if we go somewhere snowy? And there’s simply no way I need this many sweaters in the Middle East. But what if we end up back in Maine for some period of time? What will I wear then? Should I put them back in the attic for a year in case for some reason we come to Maine at the worst time of year to be here?

So much of moving is anticipating who you will be in a new location, which is not something you can know. Two years ago if you told me I’d be working on becoming Israeli, I would have asked, why? What happened? Two years from now, I won’t even begin to hazard a guess as to where I will be. But I hope I need heels, because I just packed a few pairs

There are also unexpected sparks of pleasure in being reunited with items I love and forgot about. Or sometimes, unearthing messages from myself.

Today I pulled out a half-pound bag of organic cocoa powder that had carefully been taped shut. I imagined the conversation Old Me had in my head, standing in my kitchen in Brooklyn, knowing that packing cocoa powder is ridiculous, but also knowing it’s expensive, and something I use a lot in shakes. Why not make things a little easier?, Old Me thought, and gifted Future Me the present of not having to buy a new bag of cocoa powder. As I pulled out the bag today I thought - thank you, Old Me, for thinking and caring about Future Me.

So this is what goes into every box that gets loaded on a boat and sent across the Atlantic and into the Mediterranean: a statement about who we were in a past life and a decision about who we will be in the future, gifts for future us to make our lives a teeny bit easier, and sometimes — because I seem to have accumulated a large number of throws over my life and they make good packing material — a throw.

Happy summer, mishpacha. May all your boxes be light and your shipments prompt. Let me know if you need a throw or a sweatshirt. Hana

Today we are flying back to America for the summer. I’m looking forward to my big American washing machine, bacon, cheddar cheese and buying all the cheap vitamins and melatonin I want. I’m looking forward to the ease of daily transactions in my native language. I’m not looking forward to the daily assault of antisemitism that I know will accompany our visit to the US.

During the pandemic, my husband and I satisfied a long-held dream: we wanted to own an ancestral vacation home in some cute New England town, like real Americans. Ever the good third-generation Jews, my husband and I tested into fancy Prep schools, and grew up adjacent to kids whose parents had ancestral family homes in places we’d never visited, like Block Island and Maine. Some Jews had second homes in the Jew-friendly section of the Berkshires, where Jews were tolerated unlike the WASPier sections of the Northeast. A cousin of mine had a ski condo at Hunter, so I knew having a vacation home was achievable, I just wasn’t sure how.

Initially our fantasy was about owning a ski condo so we could teach our kids to ski. Like many Northeasterners, we’d both learned to ski as teenagers on school trips. But we saw how much better we could be at skiing if we learned it earlier in life like our non-Jewish friends. This was a gift we wanted to give our children: the ability to ski like a WASP.

For years we wasted Vermont realtors’ time hunting for an affordable house in Vermont. But after a head-on collision on a rural road during a summer vacation in Stowe, followed by a month in and out of Burlington Hospital, we no longer harbored any Vermont fantasies. We tried going to back to the state where we’d gotten married, and spent every summer and winter, but the trauma was too present.

The summer after the car crash, in 2020, the kids’ summer camps were cancelled and a vast stretch of un-scheduled time lay before us — a summer when we both had full time jobs and I was working through final edits on a book for my think tank. I asked the kids to each pick one thing they wanted to do that summer, and I would do my best to make it happen.

My son chose sailing and my daughter wanted to ride her bike, so I had those two criteria in mind as I looked for a summer rental to get us out of the Brooklyn heat. To my surprise, I located an affordable house rental in a town in Maine that had a bike path and a sailing camp. I’d always hated Maine. It was far, cold, and full of Mainers who didn’t know from Jews. Whenever I’d been to Maine before I couldn’t wait to leave. But this town in Maine looked charming. Maybe Maine was different now. It was certainly warmer.

When we pulled into town and saw a Pride flag hanging outside a cupcake store on the edge of town, we breathed a sigh of relief. If you could be gay in Maine you could probably also be Jewish there. The next year, with help from the car crash settlement, plus the newfound understanding that our time on earth was finite, we finally realized our dream of owning an ancestral property — one our kids could pass down through the generations.

We decorated the house as though it was an old American family home, but make it Jewish. I scoured Maine flea markets for items that looked Jewish, rescuing a Hanukkiah and candlesticks that would do the work of ushering in Shabbat. I framed my grandfather’s high school diploma. He’d been the valedictorian of Mountaindale High School in the Catskills, in 1923. His diploma had been signed by a Jewish principal and a Jewish Superintendent, back when the Catskills were filled with Russian and Polish Jews trying to coax the ground to grow something, anything.

I framed old photos from family albums to decorate the walls - one of my husband’s great grandfather wearing a fur hat in Kyiv, and another of my great grandparents in Paris, looking stylish and happy before the war.

And finally, I ordered a historic name plate from the local historical society. According to town records, the last known location of a set of spoons made by Paul Revere was our house. We laughed at the ridiculousness of two Jews finding Paul Revere’s spoons in their house. The historic marker went up right away. It took another two years for me to get up the courage to nail a mezuzah to the door frame.

This will be our sixth summer in Maine, but we no longer know if we will pass this home down to our children. Turns out, you can be a Jew in Maine, but only the right kind of Jew. Our town, which we loved for being welcoming, artsy and liberal, is now all in on sending a Nazi to represent them in Congress.

I fear that in Maine, we will return to something like the state of near-hysteria we lived with in Brooklyn, when every day we woke up not knowing who was going to out themselves as a Jew hater, or worse, someone who sat in complicit silence. Would it be a nanny pushing a stroller while wearing a keffiyah calling for Jewish annihilation? A beloved musician demanding Jews stop starving Gaza? Our city councilor celebrating October 7th, then walking around Brooklyn in a watermelon jumpsuit calling for Intifada?

I’ve already been kicked out of the local Maine Facebook group for pointing out that what was happening in Gaza might be terrible, but it wasn’t Israel’s choice, could be ended as soon as Hamas returned the hostages, and was under no definition a genocide. Or maybe they kicked me out for saying that Zionism wasn’t an evil ideology, but the right to self determination for one of the most persecuted minorities on earth. It doesn’t really matter.

What matters is what I encounter on a daily basis in town that sends a spike of rage through my system. Will it be six people who show up to the Thursday free concert series on the town Green wearing watermelon sweatshirts? Will it be the local bookstore, where last summer I was invited to give a book talk, now kitted out with a display of Gazaology? Will it be the local coop, where organic wild blueberries come with a side of righteous Jew hatred? The town vote to divest from Israel while the homeless population grows and the local food pantry is shuttered? Graffiti calling to decolonize Maine from Zionists? Campaign signs plunged into our neighbors’ lawns, heralding the exciting possibility of electing a misogynist with a Nazi tattoo?

I saw where things went in Brooklyn, and I see where they’re going in Maine, which is gearing up for a clash of the Far Right and the Far Left. Fun local twist: everyone in Maine is armed. As a Jew, I know when the political landscape is this polarized, there’s only one place both sides will find common ground: blaming the Jews.

The US has been on an economic decline for a long time, and federal cuts have hit Maine hard. A sizeable population in the state lives at the poverty line. The Section 8 housing units down the block have fallen into decay. Shockingly, the Section 8 residents could care less about the faux-working class Hotchikiss grad running for Senate, with the food back shuttered and unemployment numbers climbing. Most Mainers live off the land, but the lobsters are moving north due to warming waters. There’s a homeless encampment in the woods behind the supermarket. But instead of helping the community, the townsfolk who go to the polls have chosen to take a stand on a conflict they don’t understand in a place they’ll never visit, and can’t locate on a map.

I hope we have a beautiful summer filled with blueberry ale and lobster pasta, kayaking the Passagassawakeag, stargazing, and the electric shock of plunging into the dark, frigid waters of the Gulf of Maine on a hot day.

But a year is a long time to be gone, and I fear our town will not have changed for the better. I’m afraid of what I might find, and what is yet to come. But most of all, I can’t stop thinking about the old saying about elections: as Maine goes, so goes the nation.

The first time I understood that Jewish safety in America did not receive the same treatment as, say, Black safety or Asian safety, was when I accidentally replied-all to an Obama alumni list. People on the list were discussing ways the Democrats could take back the White House. This was three months after Trump was re-elected and six months after Hamas kidnapped and killed over 1200 people, including 46 American citizens.

No one on the list uttered a word about the American deaths, because the American citizens were Jews. When other groups were marginalized or victimized, the list sprang into action. Did the police shoot a Black man? All organizations immediately released statements declaring the shooting of Black men to be wrong, launched DEI initiatives to teach white people how to be less racist, and promoted Black members of the list to leadership positions regardless of qualifications.

Were there a incidents of anti-Asian hate during Covid, when Trump called it the China disease? Not to worry — my think tank immediately launched a project to combat Asian hate, which I led. I was proud to tell people what I was working on because it meant my organization listened when marginalized people spoke, and stood for truth, justice and the American way.

But when American Jews were slaughtered by Hamas, the list said nothing, because everyone knew the Jews deserved it. That’s what you got for going to a concert in a genocidal apartheid state, even if it was also home to the members of your extended family who’d survived the Holocaust. Anyway, Jews were not considered marginalized, because they were perfectly safe in America and around the world. Everyone had learned in their DEI sessions that Jews were White people, so who cared if White people were slaughtered. Some of the murdered or kidnapped were not technically White, in that they were Jewish, Arab, Asian or Black, but that was nuance and no one cared about nuance.

I’d largely kept quiet about the lack of response from a list of people who responded to absolutely everything. Hurricane in Texas? Here’s a spreadsheet. Earthquake in Puerto Rico? Ten people were on the phone with Google Maps building a map layer for locating shelters, water and food. Jews raped to death, women’s vaginas shot full of nails, men’s genitalia mutilated and stuffed in their mouths, and babies beheaded? Meh, what’s for dinner?

But when one person on the list proposed taking back the White House by using Mark Cuban’s money and Scott Galloway’s platform to promote an AOC- Bernie Sanders candidacy, my brain blew a fuse. How could this email list of people who thought they were the smartest people in the room be so stupid?

I forwarded the email to a friend, writing, I’ll eat my hat the day Zio Galloway does an event with that bigoted moron AOC. Then I changed into workout clothes and tried to Peloton my rage away. When I finished my workout and looked at my phone, my email was full of responses to the Obama list. I had not forwarded the email to my friend. I had, for the first time in a very long career of correctly using email, hit reply all.

Immediately, a woman I’d been forced to take to HR at my think tank for her poor behavior jumped in to defend me. We loathed each other, but we were both Jews, and I appreciated her sticking up for me.

In the same way many people feel harmed by politicians’ speech on the right, there are also people who feel harmed by politicians speech on the left. If you had a child you had to evacuate from Israel on October 7th, you might feel similarly. If you had a child, as I do, who you drop off at a Jewish daycare in a red state (or a blue state, for that matter)… you might feel similarly!

I quickly responded to the list with an apology, noting that obviously the email was not intended for the list. Then I addressed the elephant in the room: the group’s astonishing ability to ignore threats to Jewish safety.

Jews have been living a horror show that has gone unrecognized, to the extent that I am not comfortable allowing my daughter to finish school in bright blue Park Slope Brooklyn. We are gearing up for a nightmarish NYC mayoral primary, and as someone who has been deeply immersed in Jewish history, a weak Left is when it’s time for my family to GTFO. We are moving to Israel, where I can continue my work without having to defend my ethnicity on an hourly basis. I never thought I would be an immigrant, and have been appalled by the willful ignorance of many in this community.

Three other Jews immediately chimed in echoing my sentiments. A woman wrote, “there’s no question antisemitism is real, and coming from both the left and the right. I personally don’t know anyone in the Jewish community who would disagree.”

Oh, well hold on there, Jews who feel scared in America, because there’s always an As-a-Jew waiting in the wings to tell you your feelings don’t count. Just like when Asians said they were scared, other Asians chided them for their feelings. Or when Black people stood up and said, I don’t know anyone who has been shot by the police or experienced racism, so therefore these things are not happening. I jest. Those things never happened, because those communities aren’t divided about racism the way American Jews are. Anyway, if a Black person wrote they’d never experienced racism in America, a thousand white people would club them to death via email for that opinion.

Instead, a certain Mr. Zuckerman felt the need to tell the list he felt extremely safe in America. Perhaps, he posited, we were confusing anti-Israel sentiment, which he wholeheartedly endorsed, with antisemitism. Because Jews be like that. Always confusing a country in the Middle East with cultural and religious practices largely done at home.

I’d worked with Zuckerman. I almost fired him off a project because though his work was solid, I found him so infused with moral superiority that he was impossible to work with. But I also knew he was steeped in the problem-solving process we’d used at the Obama White House. The process said: listen to people. Hear what they need. Look at the data, and understand the pain points. Here I was expressing pain, and rather than taking an interest, this man negated my experience. I was just confused! People didn’t hate me, they just hated the only Jewish state in the world for totally legit reasons like non-existent apartheid or the world’s least-effective genocide.

Because I knew Zuckerman, I also knew what his life looked like. He didn’t belong to a synagogue, where he would have walked through a metal detector past armed guards to observe the new year. Thus, he didn’t volunteer at synagogue on the high holidays, which would have required him to attend security training. He didn’t have children, so no one was telling his 14-year-old she was a genocidal baby killer, or excommunicating his 18-year-old because he didn’t agree that from the river to the sea Palestine should be Arab. He didn’t go to Jewish events, like the talk I’d attended by Henri Bernard-Levi at an undisclosed location, which required us to submit our IDs in advance for security screening. He’d never sat in an auditorium in midtown Manhattan staffed by Mossad or FBI agents with earpieces and guns, while listening to an author talk about a book.

Zuckerman had Jewish first and last names, but he did not live the life of a practicing Jew passing their heritage to the next generation. He lived as a white American. Who cared what he thought about Jewish safety?

Why Americans Are Confused About Jews

Jewish American history dates back to George Washington’s welcome letter to Jews fleeing certain death, but most American Jews did not arrive in America until around 1900. Reform Jews from Germany began immigrating in the 1850s for largely economic conditions. The massive wave of Jewish immigration from which most American Jews descend started in the late 1800s — a reaction to state-sanctioned violence on top of laws restricting Jewish life, forcing the migration of 2 million Jews from Eastern Europe.

The bulk of American Jews have been American for at least 120 years. (Persian, Russian, Syrian Jews and others arrived in smaller concentrations over the last 50 years.) In that time, we’ve spread out from the East Coast cities where ships deposited our ancestors, jettisoned Jewish traditions that kept us from holding jobs (like refusing to work after sundown on Fridays), shed clothing that marked us as Jews, and convinced ourselves that Jews are regular Americans.

In some cases, we also married non-Jews and raised children with Jewish names but no understanding of what it means to be Jewish. Or, we raised Jewish children who hate being Jewish, because to be Jewish in America is to be different, and who wants that?

In previous eras, if Jews wanted to stop being Jewish, or marry a non-Jew, they had to convert to Christianity. This gave Jews, at least, a clear dividing line. The Nazis and the Spanish — genocidal antisemites looking to erase Jews from the map — didn’t care if you converted or not. Many modern Jews have taken this disregard of conversion to heart. Today, because most churches will marry anyone, you can get married in a Catholic church and still claim to be Jewish.

Sometimes even Israel fails to understand America’s assimilated non-Jewish Jews. Over a decade ago, I attended a wedding in a Catholic church between a Catholic man and his half-Jewish wife. Their kids do not observe any Jewish traditions, were not bar-mitzvah-ed, and have nothing to do with Judaism. But at the ANU Museum in Tel Aviv, when the elevator doors open on the 4th floor, a full-length portrait of this family greets you. Someone told the ANU the family was Jewish because the wife was half-Jewish, and the Museum believed them, because who was the ANU to question someone’s claim on Judaism?

Being Jewish in America Takes Work & Resources

To keep our family Jewish, my husband and I paid for Jewish summer camp, Hebrew School, a synagogue membership, bar and bat mitzvah tutoring and parties, and a Jewish Teen choir. We both held senior positions at work that allowed us to take off three days of work on the High Holidays, and two days plus travel time for Passover. We were organized enough to host five family gatherings a year across the the major Jewish holidays, complete with hard-to-find ritual foods and either a home-made round challah or a week’s worth of flour-free meals.

All of these activities identified us as Jews, and by placing us in Jewish spaces like a synagogue or a kosher supermarket, put us at risk. Because unless we’re wearing identifiably Jewish garments, Jews can pass as a range of ethnicities. My mother often passed as Latina or Native American. Black people used to give my father knowing looks, because they thought he was a light-skinned Black man. My brother and I are often asked where we are from — me because of my light hair, eyes and pale but olive skin and other obviously Jewish features, and him because of his strong Middle Eastern vibes (read: dark skin for a white guy).

At first I dismissed Zuckerman as a one-off. Someone who was part of the brainwashed Left, who needed Jews to be safe in America so he could continue feeling like a privileged white person and not have to worry about Jews being forced out of progressive spaces. But then it happened again. Twice more, in fact.

First, I ended up in a group of far Left Jews, under the mistaken impression I might find community there. When I wrote that my family had decided to move to Israel to escape the daily cudgel of antisemitism in New York, a man quickly responded that he felt perfectly safe in New York and would never leave the United States. Obviously, I was being hysterical and Islamophobic.

Then, a half-Jewish man with an Italian last name harassed me on Facebook. I’d written that, based on the latest data set from the NYPD, Jews are attacked every day in New York City. I literally wrote a book about data, so it is a topic I know well. As a woman in tech, I’m used to being dismissed, but this was next level. First the man insisted the data showed Jews to be safe. Then he wrote about how much safer he felt with Mamdani as mayor. Finally, he stated that Zionist Jews like me were the problem.

How did this man think Jewish safety worked? And, what made him qualified to opine on Jewish safety? His mother had been Jewish, but he didn’t have a bar mitzvah, his wife wasn’t Jewish, his kids weren’t Jewish, they celebrated Christmas, and for all intents and purposes walked through life as white Americans. Yet he was under the mistaken impression that having a Jewish mother, from who he inherited no cultural or religious Judaism, qualified him to discuss Jewish safety.

Today, Judaism is not necessarily passed down by name or bloodline. In public, no one will know these men are Jews without seeing identification and a family tree. Historically, antisemites don’t ask these details before firebombing a mall, gunning down your family, blowing up your kids’ preschool or burning down your home.

For most of the past 2000 years, staying Jewish in the Diaspora wasn’t an issue because Jews weren’t allowed to assimilate. We lived in areas designated for Jews, governed by Jewish law, and were educated by Jews. Technically you could convert, but as with most indigenous communities, conversion often meant excommunication and exile. Obviously, forced conversions happened to Jews all the time. Italian Jews were legally required to spend Shabbat listening to priests tell them they were going to Hell. Spain converted Jews, and then a century later killed the converts anyway.

When they weren’t being forced to convert, Jews lived in Jewish ghettos and villages, dressed like Jews, kept kosher, and observed rituals as they’d done for thousands of years. Adherence to Jewish law was part of being in the Jewish community, sometimes to the community’s detriment. When the Russian army conscripted Jewish boys as young as 9 into the army to serve as cannon fodder, they didn’t provide kosher food or permit Jewish clothing or rituals. If the conscripts survived to return home after living as a non-Jew for years, the community often shunned them. Jewish mothers often sent their boys to hide in the woods to avoid conscription. Many Jewish boys froze to death while hiding, but that outcome was preferable to living as a pariah.

Sholem Aleichem’s story “The Yom Kippur Scandal” captures this prioritization of Jewish law above all else. In the story, a large sum of money goes missing on Yom Kippur, so everyone at synagogue is asked to turn out their pockets. One man refuses, leading everyone to believe he’s the thief. Finally, he does turn out his pockets and the congregation discovers what he’s been hiding: chicken bones. Yom Kippur is a day of fasting, but the man ate chicken in shul. In the uproar over the chicken bones, everyone forgets all about the missing money. But no one will ever forget the Yom Kippur when Shmuel Goldblattsteinman-whatever-ski ate a piece of chicken.

Why the De-churching of America is Bad for the Jews

Today, Christianity has dimmed as an organizing principle in America. Over 40 million Americans have left churches in the past 25 years, a phenomenon called de-churching. Fifty years ago, most marriages involved a religious ceremony, and 81% of marriages were between partners who shared a religion. Today, less than half of Americans are married in a religious setting or by a religious leader. Over a third of Americans marry in secular ceremonies. Todays American Jews, now more ideologically and geographically dispersed than ever before in American history, have not been immune to this trend.

In a previous era, marrying outside the Jewish religion would have been unthinkable. When my great-uncle Harold introduced his future wife to his mother, Eva’s first response was, “You’re marrying a shiksa?” Eva thought leaving Czarist Russia meant her sons wouldn’t freeze to death, be conscripted into the Russian army or bludgeoned during a pogrom. She didn’t know it meant her children might find new ways to discard their culture and ethnicity.

“I didn’t know you had to do anything to stay Jewish,” my aunt confessed to me recently. “You were just Jewish, and so was everyone else.”

She grew up in Brooklyn surrounded by Jews. Her parents observed no Jewish holidays and didn’t keep kosher. But they had a mezuzah on the door, a macrame’d wall hanging of the Western Wall, and my grandfather wore a thick gold chain with a chai around his neck. Also they were briefly communists, which was basically the other option for American Jews — religion or workers rights, pick one.

But what my grandparents never did was go to synagogue. They never lit Shabbat candles. They didn’t observe Passover. Of their six grandchildren, only two chose to raise Jewish children. When you live in a country with a dominant religion, it’s much easier to slip into the mainstream than go against the grain.

That’s fine if people don’t want to maintain or pass on their Judaism. Like many Holocaust families, mine is marked by individuals who suffered terribly at the hands of the Nazis, and then made a range of decisions about Judaism. My cousins include Reform, Conservative and Orthodox American Jews; Orthodox, Hassidic and secular Kibbutznik Israelis; Evangelical Christians of at least three different flavors including a first cousin who identifies as a Jesus Nerd; and secular French and Americans who erect Christmas trees in their homes. If the United States decides to institute Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws, all of us will be on the hit list. Until then, only some of us are qualified to discuss Jewish safety.

Use this One Weird Trick to Find the Jews

After being told multiple times that my opinion on Jewish safety was hysterical and a lie, I have instituted a rule to determine if someone lives as a Jew. What, I ask, was the last Jewish thing you did? Eating a bagel or speaking out about Gaza do not count.

This Jewish thing doesn’t have to be religious — maybe you read a book about Jews. Maybe you went to a lecture on antisemitism. Maybe you argued about God or Jewish ethics or whether a two-state solution is still possible. Maybe you turned off your phone, set the lights on a timer , lit candles and went to Shabbat services. Maybe you danced the Hora at a wedding and didn’t feel silly doing it.

But in the Diaspora, being Jewish happens only with intention. I often think about my ex-Obama colleague, Mollie, who never discussed Judaism with me. Based on her name I guessed she had at least one Jewish parent, but she never signaled her Judaism the way other Obama Jews did, with invites to Shabbat or knowing nods about taking vacation days in September.

The December after 10/7, while Hamas still held hostages in Gaza, as the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry claimed 18,000 Gazan women and children had died (due to Hamas’s utter lack of interest in protecting their own citizens, refusal to release the hostages, and the good PR they were getting from increasing the death rate), Mollie outed herself as an As-A-Jew.

So grateful to be doing something, anything, was this woman who apparently had loads of free time while observing no Jewish holidays or customs. Mollie, whose partner is a non-Jew, has no children, and believes Jews are immune from threats to our safety, decided the time was ripe to let the world know she, too, was a Jew. Not a Jew who supports the existence of a Jewish state, obviously. The good kind of Jew. One who would prefer Israel not respond at all to the massacre of 1200 Israelis. A Jew against all forms of violence, except anti-Jewish violence, in which case the Jews deserved it.

After I confronted Mollie about her post, writing that she had deeply internalized antisemitism that needed excavating, she responded with another post. She was not an antisemite. In fact, spreading blood libel and advocating for Hamas was the most Jewish thing she’d ever done!

In that moment, I felt awash in pity for this women, even though she seemed to be actively working toward Jewish extermination. Imagine being so removed from an actual Jewish practice that you believe stoking antisemitism is the most Jewish thing you can do. Imagine only gathering with other Jews to berate yourselves for being dirty, conniving, blood-thirsty Jews. Imagine being a Jew who has no idea what it means to be Jewish or how electric and inspiring it feels to be part of something larger than yourself.

Worst of all, imagine having to sit through a Seder of ablation, which uses this Haggadah and this completely batshit Seder plate. Imagine taking the story of Jewish liberation — a journey from darkness into great light, the founding moment of the Jewish nation — and thinking what it really needs is a little Hiroshima. Imagine thinking every ethnicity on earth deserves the right to self-determination … except the Jews. I don’t think I can envision a worse existence.

So tell me, dear readers, what’s the last Jewish thing you did? As for me, I’m off to learn more of the language Jews have maintained for thousands of years, a language so old that letters are also numbers and pictures. After that, I’m going to walk around being Jewish in the only place in the world where I get to do so as part of the dominant culture. And it’s going to be fabulous. Jewish, hot, sunny, and perfect.

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Also, it had been a while since I’d felt proud of the Israeli government, so it seemed best to just avoid the whole thing altogether.

But after 10/7, the parade was not a celebration, but a call to release the hostages being held in Gaza by Hamas. My kids wanted to go. Our synagogue was marching in the parade and giving out Brooklyn B’yachad shirts (Brooklyn Together). So we went.

When I worked at the Department of Homeland Security, I became familiar with the different levels of security in America. To meet the President you need to submit your social security number and wait for clearance. To walk into DHS headquarters you need an appointment and a DHS ID with the appropriate security clearance. To board a plane you need a government ID, a plane ticket, a beep-free walk through a magnetometer and clearance from the no-fly list.

When we marched or the hostages in midtown Manhattan we did not need to submit our names or social security numbers, because verifying everyone’s ID before the march would have been an enormous task. It probably wouldn’t have identified people who could pos a threat anyway. Instead, we spent 2 hours in a holding pen on a hot spring day, making occasional runs for water or into bathrooms.

We all passed through magnetometers to get in and out of the holding pen. As we began our walk down 5th Avenue, I saw the entire street had been closed — not just blocked off to cars, but stores were shuttered and the sidewalks were clear of pedestrians. To watch the march, you had to wait in line for an hour and pass through a magnetometer. Tiffany’s was closed. On a Sunday afternoon.

The march itself was a little sad and a lot of fun - we waved to friends and sang along loudly to Hebrew songs, waving Israeli flags as we marched. But what the police had to do to enable a bunch of Jews to safely walk a mile on Fifth Avenue was unlike any parade I’d ever been to in New York. The level of security was horrifying. The worst part was, we were being protected from other New Yorkers who wanted to do us harm.

Somewhere around East 70th Street, I decided I didn’t want to live in a city where walking around Jewishly required Pentagon-level protection.

Thankfully, NYPD police commissioner Jessica Tisch is able to stand up and be a big Jew in Mamdani’s New York, because she’s part of the wealthy Tisch family, so if she gets fired tomorrow she’ll be okay. Mamdani is the first New York City mayor in history to shun the parade, thereby inviting other New Yorkers to also pretend that Israel isn’t a country full of people who have a family history of persecution by governments, but rather a pariah state that is evil incarnate.

I am trying to imagine the reaction by New Yorkers if the Mayor shunned Lunar New Year celebrations over China’s human rights record, or didn’t turn out for the India Day parade because over their treatment of non-Hindus. Italy could poison half its population and the Mayor would walk in the Columbus Day parade.

Today, my thoughts are with the brave souls who are willing to walk through Manhattan as Big Jews, even if it means hours in a holding pen and no observers. I will always be sad that this is what has become of the most Jewish city in America — a city whose Jews have given so much to America, only to be met with a blind eye and even incitement to violence on the part of New York’s mayor.

Please be safe, be loud and proud, and know that we in Israel are holding space for your joy, your pain, and everything in between.

Am Israel Chai, mishpacha.

Hana

I wanted to bear witness to the decline and erasure of American Jewish life. I first experienced the erasure of Jews as a people via my colleagues in the Obama and Biden White Houses. After 10/7, the antisemitic erasure and distortion from those colleagues turned into outright hatred of Jews. The hatred paired nicely with denials or accusations of hysteria from friends, family, my elected officials, and my Brooklyn neighbors.

At the time was researching a book - my 5th - centered on my great-grandmother. Eva Lutsky Schank came to New York from Belarus alone at age 16, ran a Jewish hotel in the Catskills and later Lakewood, NJ, and loved to smoke, drink, laugh, discuss JFK’s hotness, and go to the racetrack. My plan was to set Eva’s story against the policies and unspoken “gentlemen’s agreements” that restricted her life.

Funny story, though. While every other culture was lauded for telling similar stories — Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Stay True by Hua Hsu — no agent wanted to touch a Jewish story, despite the fact that my last book had been recommended by President Obama.

“I think the time is right for a White memoir,” said my former co-author at my think tank, incomprehensibly, while pushing me out the door of the Tank. I didn’t bother telling her a swath of my family had been massacred specifically for not being White, so if I was now White it was news to me.

Truthfully, even White people were getting to tell their stories, as long as they were the non-Jewish kind of White people. A woman I knew from graduate school published a memoir about being poor and White in Kansas, a book so popular with her fellow Kansans that she was approached to run for Senate. (I unfortunately had to unfollow her soon after 10/7, when she posted a story about the IDF training rape dogs, which are not a thing that exist or are even anatomically capable of existing, no matter how much the New York Times wishes it were thus.)

Another colleague from grad school sold a book about her White grandmother’s death from a failed abortion attempt. She balanced out the blinding Whiteness of the book by including a story about a person of color from the same era in each chapter. My think tank awarded her a writing fellowship for this book, on my recommendation.

When I applied for the same fellowship the next year for my own book, the Muslim woman who ran the program didn’t even bother inviting me for an interview, despite my six years at the tank and a recommendation from the CEO. Meanwhile, my non-Jewish agent read the first 100 pages of my memoir and told me I needed a Jewish agent.

I felt embarrassed. This was why I’d kept by Jewishness under wraps for the first 50 years of my life. No one wanted to publish a story by a big Jew. Heard it! Lower East Side, Yiddish, overbearing parents, New Jersey, university quotas, bagels, the toxicity of post-Holocaust Judaism, rye bread, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, intellectuals, Woody Allen. Tell me something I don’t know. Tell me about literally any other ethnicity than Jews, because I’m not interested. It’s also possible she found my use of the term “goyim” insulting, and didn’t like hearing that Christmas could be marginalizing rather than a joyous season for people of all faiths.

White Americans were already being made to feel bad about their treatment of Native Americans, Black Americans, Asian Americans, Queer Americans and Indian Americans. Thankfully, Me,Too was over so no one needed to feel bad about sexism any more. But Americans would be damned if Jews were going to make them feel bad. Jews were doing just fine in America, as evidenced by the fact that they control the banks and the media, hard pass.

Today, thanks in part to having this supportive space to work out my ideas, I am a different person with a different life. As our world in Brooklyn became smaller and darker, my husband and I started looking for a new home for our family. This was not the life we wanted for our children, whose friends ostracized them for being baby killers, who were excluded from universities and clubs because they recognized that Israel was country and not the physical embodiment of the worlds’ evils. We didn’t want to live in a city of fading glory, with angry neighbors certain Jews were whiny White people whose complaints were stupid at best and racist at worst, and where more people every day decided the solution was to wear clothing calling for the extermination of 10M Israelis.1 After the second Rage Play Date in Park Slope, we knew it was time to go.

Today, my family and I are living the Zionist dream in Tel Aviv, across the street from the sand dune where the city was founded in 1909. My book has been through as many transformations as I have, and is now about how I went from working on immigration in the White House to becoming an immigrant myself. I’ve been hard at work on a new section, and am reporting a few paid stories, so have been unusually quiet on here.

What Comes Next

Going forward, I plan to explore many of the book-adjacent topics I’ve been thinking about as I turn a Jewish lens to my past life in America, and an American lens to the new life my family and I are building in Israel.

I’ll to write about what it means to be Jewish in modern America, why the de-churching of America has been dangerous for Jews, and what Jewish safety looks like in New York under Mamdani. At the same time, here in Israel I am fortunate to have a window into the stories shaping the future of the Jewish state, so I expect I’ll be writing about some of the fields I know from America — technology, defense, immigration, the economic divide, and how policy affects people’s lives. I will of course continue to write about life in Israel as an olah, or new immigrant, as I know many readers are considering making aliyah themselves, or at least dreaming about it.

I will try to include as many Jewish movie, TV and theater references as I can.

Thanks for being with me on this journey, and I just want to say, good luck, we’re all counting on you, and don’t call me Shirley.

Hana

My husband and I were watching Top Secret, written by the creators of Airplane!, when one line had us on the floor laughing.Top Secret stars the extremely not-Jewish Val Kilmer as a rock star caught in a spy ring. A scientist tells Kilmer that an evil plot is set to go down on Sunday.

“Sunday?” replies Kilmer. “That’s Simchas Torah!”

The joke works on many layers, but to really get it, you have to:

1. Know the Jewish calendar is overflowing with holidays

2. Be Jewish enough to know there are minor holidays and major holidays

3. Be secular enough to not really know what Simchas Torah is about

4. Be American enough to find it hilarious when Val Kilmer, the visual equivalent of a human Yule log, correctly pronounces “Simchas Torah,” guttural Hebrew ch and all.

The Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams came of age in America when they could be out as Jews without fear of active reprisal. The restrictions that limited their parents’ lives had eased (poverty, university quotas, restricted towns, companies that didn’t hire Jews, people who asked to see their horns), and as third-generation Americans, they were assimilated enough – and far enough removed from the religious observance of the shtetl – to poke fun at their Jewishness.

Their movies were filled with Jewish humor and a Jewish way of viewing the world. Who other than Jews would have enough distance from the dominant culture to know that making the mom from Leave It to Beaver fluent in Jive would be hilarious? Or to poke fun at Hare Krishnas, a guitar-playing nun, and almost murder a sick child with a gospel song? These are all Airplane! references, and if you’d like to hear the movie performed verbatim, you’re welcome to join my family for Shabbat dinner.

Reading through the lines

When I was a kid, my family had a few movies my father taped on VHS from television – Fiddler on the Roof, Airplane!, The Music Man, West Side Story, and Casablanca – which we watched on repeat, in the days before cable television, Blockbuster or Netflix. Each of these movies were written and produced by Jews, seamed with Jewish humor, and occasionally threw a wink and nod to the Jews in the audience. These movies saw us, if you could read through the lines. In other words, they were unspokenly Jewish.

Is The Music Man actually about a New York Jew working out how to assimilate into Marching-Band America? Sure reads that way to me.

West Side Story, a musical romp through the conflict between poor White people and poor Puerto Rican immigrants, was first conceived as a conflict between Jews and Catholics. When no one went for that, the four Jews shopping around the musical – Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, Jerome Robbins and Steven Sondheim – swapped out Jews for Puerto Ricans, and suddenly they had a hit.

Who but a Jewish immigrant would write a song with the lyrics I like to be in America/ okay by me in America / everything free in America / for a small fee in America? That is a Jewish perspective, grafted onto Puerto Ricans to make it more palatable for America.

Moving back in time, the erasure of Jews from Casablanca reflected American attitudes toward World War 2, in that no one in the US wanted to go to war to save a bunch of Jews. In fact, the US had done everything possible to solve their Jewish Question. They’d barred Jewish immigration in 1924, after the immigration laws accidentally admitted over 2M Jews at the turn of the century.

During the Holocaust, the Secretary of State – famed antisemite Breckenridge Long – instituted quotas and slowed immigration processing, even after receiving verified reports that millions of Polish and German Jews had been exterminated by the Nazis. Ultimately, the United States sold Americans on the war as “saving Europe,” no mention of Jews. In keeping with the cultural ethos of the day, Casablanca works to gain sympathy from Americans around entering the war, no Jews needed.

Thus, you get a movie about the Holocaust which never mentions the Holocaust, and where the only Concentration Camp survivor in the cast is a political prisoner with a … possibly Jewish name? Toward the end of the movie an obviously Jewish couple – the woman is wearing a ridiculous hat, so you know she’s a Jew – practice their English.

Ever the good Jews, the couple is bursting with excitement at the freedom their new home will bring. For them, like my great-grandparents, America is the promised land.

Even as a kid I understood, like all American Jews, that to be Jewish in America was to largely keep your Jewishness under wraps. As my father often said, who needs to know? It’s none of their business. Be Jewish, but leave it unsaid.

But nothing served to hammer this point home as strongly as Seinfeld – a show written by Jews, starring only Jews, about Jewish life in New York, that goes out of its way to downplay the Jewishness of it all. In some scenes Elaine wears a cross. George is Italian because no one in America wants to watch a show about four Jews. Kramer has a Jewish last name but is mostly the oddball neighbor.

Some Seinfeld episodes include conversations about Christmas, where the unspoken Jewishness is basically the plot. The Festivus episode is the most unspoken Jewish thing I’ve ever seen on TV. Some people just don’t like Christmas, that’s all.

The second-most Jewish episode is about a marble rye, a Jewish bread sold in kosher bakeries to Jews. When George brings the very Jewish marble rye to his WASP-y future in-laws, they drink heavily through the meal and don’t serve the bread, so George’s parents take the bread back and hilarity ensues. On Seinfeld, the Jewishness always plays as subtext. Nothing to see here, just regular old Americans scheming about a load of bread that Jews happen to enjoy.

Unintended consequences

After 10/7, when antisemitism exploded and I got cancelled by my think tank for being the wrong kind of Jew, I began to understand the harm unspoken Jewishness had done to American Jews. First, it came from the person who was my best friend before she opted for a pro-Hamas position immediately after Hamas murdered thousands of Israelis. My friend was half Asian and half Texas-white-person. Her wife described herself as “low-WASP.” They, and we, spent a lot of time at her parents’ house in a formerly-restricted town on the New Jersey shore.

Along with our kids, the eight of us took many family trips together, where we got along well until it was time to watch a movie. Their tastes ran toward Disney, the least Jewish movie studio in Hollywood. Our kids wanted to share films we’d introduced them to like Blazing Saddles, Spaceballs, Airplane!, and Little Shop of Horrors. You see where this is going. Halfway through Little Shop of Horrors, during the sadistic dentist scene, my friend’s wife said she couldn’t watch one more minute of this disgusting, terrible movie.

The dentist scene in Little Shop works because many American Jews, and an entire side of my family, are dentists. Some of my cousins run a New Jersey orthodontia practice that’s just been handed down to the third generation. Another cousin ran an oral surgery practice on the site of the defunct Jewish hotel my great-grandparents owned. Thus, dentists are a particularly type of funny if you’re a Jew.

I was disappointed by her reaction, which my friend did not disavow, because Little Shop was important to me. I saw the original production in the early 80s, at an off-Broadway theater in the semi-abandoned, enticingly dangerous East Village. I played the cast recording in my room incessantly, belting out Suddenly Seymour with a thick New York accent. But, I shrugged it off. Friends don’t have to align on everything. My friend was also reading White Fragility, a book I wouldn’t pick up if you paid me. So we found different media entertaining. So what?

A few years later, Little Shop of Horrors came to Broadway. Now, suddenly, my friend was interested in the production. One day she messaged me that a trans friend of hers loved Little Shop, because he saw it as a metaphor for trans life.

“Little Shop is about JEWS,” I texted back furiously. “It’s about assimilation into a culture that isn’t yours. It’s written by Jews, produced by Jews, and it stars Jews. It has Yiddish in it!” What I didn’t say was, Little Shop is not about an identity that didn’t exist when Jews wrote the script.

“Well,” said my friend. “It’s interesting how people interpret things differently.”

I raged silently. This wasn’t a different interpretation. This was purposeful erasure. I suddenly wished Little Shop had been more explicitly Jewish. But of course, then it wouldn’t have made it to the stage, because no one wants to pay money to see a show about the perils of Jewish assimilation.

Fiddler on the Roof, fine. Jews doing Jewish things, being confronted with the modern world, and ultimately choosing America, great. There’s one space for that story, Fiddler tells it, and there’s no reason to belabor the point. No one needed a darker, more complex story about Jews in America. Thus Little Shop is about a human-eating plant.

Is Anne Frank Jewish?

Jews in America understood the deal. Perform Americana for everyone, and maybe they won’t notice you’re a Jew. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I mean, it’s not like anyone had to make Anne Frank less Jewish in order to get her story told. Just kidding – that’s exactly what happened.

Anne Frank’s father, an assimilated, secular German Jew performed Deutschlandlied for the first 44 years of his life, served in the German military during World War One, and knew how to keep his Yiddishkeit concealed. After the war, Otto Frank worked tirelessly to bring his daughter’s story to life, as only a grieving parent can. He was already well-versed in the need to make everything less Jewish, including the Holocaust.

Per Cynthia Ozick: “Otto Frank grew up with a social need to please his environment and not to offend it; that was the condition of entering the mainstream, a bargain German Jews negotiated with themselves. [...] Far better, then, in facing the larger postwar world that the diary had opened to him, to speak of goodness rather than destruction: so much of that larger world had participated in the urge to rage.”

Frank removed references to Jewish holidays, any expressions of Jewish faith, and Anne’s descriptions of Germans seizing Jews in Amsterdam. Why were they hiding in an attic? Well not because they were Jews, that’s for sure. Probably because they just wanted to experience the thrill of attic life.

No surprise, then, that almost 80 years after the diary’s publication, the Governor of Minnesota told an audience that somewhere in the United States, a girl was hiding in an attic from ICE, despite the fact that Anne Frank was a German citizen whose circumstances in no way matched those of ICE targets.

Immigrants to the US aren’t sewing special badges onto their clothing, watching their businesses burn, or attending special immigrant-only schools. No one is forcing immigrants into locked ghettos or systematically starving them. American citizens aren’t beating immigrants in the streets, humiliating them for fun, or turning them into ICE. When ICE agents arrest immigrants, they don’t then pack them into cattle cars headed to death camps. Crucially, most immigrants have the unpleasant, but available option to avoid ICE entirely by return to their own nations. During the Holocaust, Jews had nowhere to go, because they already were in the nations of their birth. Is ICE testing the limits of authoritarianism and treating people terribly? Yes, but all suffering is not the Holocaust. Only the Holocaust is the Holocaust.

By the time The Diary of Anne Frank hit Broadway, Anne’s story was about the enduring spark of the human spirit. The Jewish writer who’d championed turning the book into a play was replaced by the two non-Jewish playwrights who also authored It’s a Wonderful Life, which from a Jewish perspective might as well be two hours of the baby Jesus eating a ham steak.

To make sure they hammered home the universalist message, the playwrights added a line that wasn’t in Anne’s diary: “We’re not the only people that’ve had to suffer... sometimes one race, sometimes another.”

Judaism: Mostly about noses

I should have been expecting what came next, but nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. In this case, nobody expected the movie Maestro, which is a Jewish story about a Jewish man’s struggle to assimilate into American life while also making great music and being gay. The movie was written by and starring Val Kilmer. I mean Bradley Cooper. Does it matter?

To make himself look more Jewish, Cooper glued a prosthetic nose to his face, because that’s really the main thing about Jews – noses. Entirely absent from this film are the things that actually make a person Jewish: discussion of Jewish topics, observance of Jewish holidays or customs, mentions of refugee parents who fled pogroms in Russia, or even a side note that Jews in Europe were being murdered simply for being Jews. There’s no mezuzah on Bernstein’s door, and no shabbat candlesticks on the mantle. This, despite the fact that Bernstein’s first wife was Jewish, and that Judaism was an important part of his music. Because again, the main thing about Jews is noses.

I grew up on Leonard Bernstein’s music – specifically Young People’s Concerts, for which I was the target demographic. Unmentioned in Maestro is that when Bernstein wasn’t sleeping with men, which for some reason is the focus of this movie, he created a hit series for PBS with significant influence on generations of young people.

At the very least, I figured the movie would be full of music, so I looked forward to closing my eyes and enjoying recordings I hadn’t heard before. But the movie barely used his music. Also, it was hard to hear the music over the sound of rage pulsing through my ears.

The worst part is Jews are complicit in hiding their Jewishness. My great-grandparents didn’t try to hide their Jewishness because such a thing wasn’t possible – their thick accents and orthodox ways told the truth. My grandparents lived in entirely Jewish communities and barely interacted with non-Jews, except in the US Army and occasionally at work, where they insisted they weren’t kosher, they just didn’t happen to like ham, bacon or shellfish. Though my grandparents lived in Brooklyn, my father was born in a Manhattan hospital so he wouldn’t have to say he was from Brooklyn, which would have given up the game immediately. My grandmother understood how America worked.

The wicked son

I can give some grace to older generations who were just trying to feed their families and not get murdered. But I didn’t understand just how complicit Jews had become in our own erasure until I read Naomi Klein’s book Doppleganger, in which Klein discusses the other Naomi she often gets confused with – Naomi Wolf.

The premise of the book is that Wolf has lost her mind and become a Right-wing nut job, while Klein is a sane person on the Left. Klein is certain that her way of being Jewish is the best – she’s a secular Jew with no attachment to Israel or the Jewish religion — while Wolf remains a Jew in the traditional mold.

But I would argue that Klein is, in fact, a byproduct of assimilation. She bought the story Jews were selling: hey guys, we’re just like White people, but with extra sparkle! After four generations, it’s not surprising that some Jews began to believe their own bullshit. But the unspoken Jewishness of Doppleganger is so overwhelming I found it unreadable.

Naomi Wolf, whom my Yale-professor father referred to as “that Jewish girl from Yale,” was one of my heroes. Following the publication of The Beauty Myth, I heard Wolf speak on my college campus and knew I wanted to do what she was doing. And, I knew that avenue was open to me because here was an ambitious Jewish woman demonstrating the path forward. That sudden fame destroys people, especially women, is not new. Wolf went through a series of extremely unfortunate events that, combined with young fame, could have certainly pushed her to the verge.

That said, is it possible that the Right could be … correct in some cases? Or, is it possible that something began to go very wrong on the Left, which pushed Wolf to the Right? Not according to Klein, who takes a critical eye to everyone but herself and her own flawed interpretation of Judaism. Jews have a long history of other Jews developing exciting new ways to be Jewish. Klein’s American Judaism is just the latest iteration of a thesis that goes back to Jesus and runs straight through the modern Reform movement: what if, the thinking goes, Jews could be a little less Jewish … then would people stop killing us?

No surprise that Klein has been out in front of the anti-Zionist, anti-Jewish Left. There, she has plenty of company with other assimilated self-hating Jews who refuse to acknowledge the Unspoken Jewishness of It All. The most recent example is Here Where We Live Is Our Country, in which Molly Crabapple claims Jews have nothing to do with Israel, and explains that the most Jewish thing you can do right now is center Palestinian “liberation” despite the fact that Jews are currently being assaulted and murdered at a rate not seen since the 1930s. Obviously, this is the moment to get back to our Jewish Bund roots – a movement that ended in the mass murder of Polish Jews. Even my communist grandparents, whose families came from highly Bundist Lithuania and who frequently ranted about workers’ rights (unlike Klein and Crabapple they were workers) thought Bundists were nuts.

Bring on the insanity

But today, nuts is in. Ahistorical literature and films are in. The erasure of Jews from the American tapestry is in. You couldn’t make a movie like Top Secret today, or if you did the line about Simchas Torah would surely be cut. In our current era, the only acceptable form of Judaism is the performative tikkun-olam type that centers Palestinians and erases 3000 years of history. I’m not sure a more self-hating movement has ever existed.

I feel sorry for these people when I’m not trying to outrun the harm they’re doing to me and my family. But I mostly feel sorry for their ancestors, who worked so hard to preserve and pass down traditions for thousands of years, only for their descendants to throw them away like last year’s pants from Forever21.

Klein, Crabapple and their ilk are only Jews because their ancestors survived the Babylonian exile, the Greeks, the Romans, the Spanish Inquisition, the Catholic Church, Russian pogroms, the Iraqi Farhood, the Nazis, the expulsion of Jews from Muslim lands, and so much more. Their ancestors were willing to face death rather than relinquish indigenous ancestral practices, because they knew that a life without meaning, ritual and spirituality isn’t worth living.

Recently, someone I knew in high school came after me on Facebook after I wrote that, based on data from the NYPD, Jews faced more hate crimes in New York than all other groups combined.

“I feel very safe,“ he wrote before telling me I was a liar. (That Jews lie is a common antisemitic trope.) This man, with an Italian last name and kids who celebrate Christmas, who has never stepped inside a synagogue or lit a Hannukah menorah, believed he could speak for all Jews on matters of Jewish safety because his grandmother was president of a chapter of Hadassah. Then he went on to say Israel — a country he’d never visited — was a genocidal apartheid state and that Zionist Jews like me were the problem.

As I blocked him, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for his grandmother, who worked so hard to stay Jewish, and who understood the urgency of building a Jewish state. How sad for Jewish grandmothers everywhere, who didn’t know how very dangerous American Judaism would become. They did the best they could with the knowledge they had. Today, I know more than they ever could, and I hope to do better.

This week was my first Yom HaShoah in Israel. I’d seen videos — the entire nation standing stock still for two minutes, cars and trains stopped, pedestrians rooted to the ground — and knew it was something I wanted to be a part of someday. Experiencing it in person was the shared outpouring of grief I didn’t know I needed.

Growing up, I thought of my family as untouched by the Holocaust. My grandparents were all born in the United States. My paternal grandparents and many family members served in World War 2, but were never stationed abroad. Of course, I had relatives who had “been through the war,” as Jews euphemistically put it, though I had no idea what that meant.

My grandmother’s first cousin Klara worked in the stockroom of the family wholesale bead business. She had an accent, which meant she’d been through the war. Her son, a doctor in Boston, also had an accent, which meant he too had been through the war. Which war? I wasn’t sure. What happened to people in the war? It was impolite to ask.

As a teenager, I spent a week living in Paris with my grandmother’s first cousin Nicolas. He spoke French with a Hungarian accent, which meant he too had been through the war. I tried to scan his forearms for a tattoo, but he wore only long-sleeved shirts, even though it was summer. One day we found ourselves at an exhibit on France’s role in the Holocaust. Did he take me there on purpose? I don’t know. But he pointed to a map of concentration camps and displaced persons camps, and said to me, “I was in that one.”

He was? I didn’t ask him to elaborate. You were never supposed to ask survivors about their trauma. It was considered rude. Best to let them forget about it (really, this is what the thinking was) and move on.

At Hebrew School, I was stuffed to bursting with Holocaust stories. Jews who thought they were safe, only to find themselves shoved into cattle cars with everyone else. Stories of Jews being hidden, surviving through acts of pure happenstance and luck, or Jews waiting for God to save them.

“And did God save them?” someone asked in my Hebrew School class.

“Of course not,” snapped the teacher. She had an Israeli accent and dressed only in suits, as though we were in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and not suburban Connecticut. “No one was saved at Auschwitz.”

At home, my parents made sure I knew about the Holocaust. The first really big book I read was A Bag of Marbles, a memoir of two French Jewish boys who survived the Nazis, which my father handed to me one day saying, “I think you’re ready for this.” I thought he meant my reading was good enough for a really big book. I didn’t know he meant I was ready to learn about the Holocaust.

On my own, I obsessively read Staring Sally J Freeman As Herself. Like all ‘70s kids, I loved Judy Blume, and found the idea that Hitler might be living in hiding in South Florida too tempting to put down. After my family visited Auschwitz one summer (fun for the whole family!) and I later visited Yad Vashem on a teenaged trip to Israel, I decided I’d had enough Holocaust. It was so horrifying, and there was nothing I could do about, so I was done. I came out of Yad Vashem with tears streaming down my face, feeling like I might throw up. As I dried my face in the hot Jerusalem sun, I pledged: no more Holocaust for me.

I still thought of our family as lucky and untouched. Sure, most of our holidays were a shitshow of hysteria with an undercurrent of sadness I didn’t understand, but maybe that’s just what it meant to be Jewish.

Three years ago, I began researching a new book. It was to be a policy book, contrasting my family’s immigration story with a family’s immigration story from the 1980s. I wanted to show what had enabled Jews to succeed in America, what the barriers had been for us, and what was the same or different today. My think tank was knee-deep in the systemic racism pool, so I figured why not demonstrate the racism Jews had faced?

Over the course of my research, my book changed to focus solely on my family’s story. I wanted to center the women in the family, so began researching my grandfather’s mother’s story. She’d come to New York from what is now Belarus in 1901. I hired a researcher in Belarus to help track down family records. I didn’t realize my story was going to include the Holocaust. My great-grandmother left behind two sisters and a brother in Czarist Russia. They’d been executed in 1941 by the Einzatzgruppen. As a writer, I needed details. So I read up on the Einzatzgruppen, a term I’d never before encountered.

The Einzatzgruppen were mobile Nazi execution squads. My great-grandmother’s sisters and brother dug their own graves, stripped naked, and were shot in the head. The Nazis tried to line up peoples heads to save on bullets. Then they were buried in an unmarked mass grave on the edge of town.

As for my grandfather’s father’s family, the details found me. I now have accounts on multiple genealogy websites thanks to my book research. As a result, family members sometimes reach out. Someone named Guillermo emailed me from Uruguay. He’d been trying to find the American branch of the Schenkolowski family, he explained, and here I was.

His great-grandmother and my great-grandfather were siblings, born in Poland in the late 1800s. My great-grandfather came to New York with two brothers, leaving behind Guillermo’s great-grandmother, Brucha, and their parents. After their parents died, Brucha married and emigrated to Uruguay, which is how Guillermo’s family ended up becoming Uruguayan Jews. But she hated it and returned to Poland, where, Guillermo told me, she’d died in the Lodz ghetto. Someone who knew her in the ghetto reported back to the surviving family that Brucha said she regretted leaving Uruguay.

Meanwhile, my son started a gap year in Israel, where he was working for a robotics company and reconnecting with more of my grandmother’s cousins. I knew they, too, had been through the war. I had no idea what the details were. It would have been rude to ask. I’d met my grandmother’s cousin Ava once, and seen the number on her arm. She had no children, which is the only reason I knew she’d been tortured by Mengele in Bergen Belsen. It was sad, her lack of children, and my family wanted to make clear that it wasn’t her fault. It was the Nazis.

Ava was no longer alive, but the cousins who were my parents’ generation were now full Israelis. They still ate Hungarian and Czech food some nights, but their children and their children’s children now spoke Hebrew. One cousin was born after the war, in a DP camp in Prague. But his older brother pre-dated the war. How he’d survived, and how his parents had survived, I had no idea.

“If you meet Menachem,” I told my son. “Don’t ask about the war.” It would have been rude to ask. I later learned the family survived Theresienstadt because Menachem’s father was a skilled carpenter.

That year, after Hamas attacked Israel, I was working to evacuate my son from Tel Aviv. As flights appeared and then disappeared, I began looking for my French cousins, Googling my cousin Nicolas’s name. He’d be in his 90s, but he could still be alive. The first result under my cousin’s name was the 500-page book he’d written about surviving Auschwitz at age 16.

“Where are my parents?” he asked someone soon after arriving at the death camp.

“Do you see that chimney?” came the response. “Your parents are in that smoke.”

Nicolas was no longer alive, but I soon connected with his son Stephane on Facebook. Through Stephane, I entered a vast web of family members flung across the globe during the war. A cousin in Canada whose family had survived by hiding in Hungary, then emigrated to Chile, eventually making their way to Toronto. Another cousin in Canada who’d survived by wedging herself under a slat in the train, then hiding in the woods.

And yet another Hungarian cousin, this one a retired physicist in Florida, who authored a 600-page book on surviving the Holocaust. He and 12 members of his family volunteered to be on the first train out of the crowded Jewish ghetto in Debrecen, Hungary. The train was supposed to go to Auschwitz, but was accidentally routed to a work camp. Eventually the mistake got sorted out, and the family boarded another train for Auschwitz. At the same time, the Russian army attacked the train lines. A bomb landed next to their car and failed to detonate. The entire family survived, returning to Hungary after the war.

I began describing my family as Holocaust-adjacent. But in Israel, someone said to me, “I don’t think you’re Holocaust adjacent. You are a Holocaust family.”

We were? But my grandparents didn’t have numbers on their arms. We were Americans. Lucky, lucky us. And yet, from my book research, I knew that my grandparents frequently went back and forth between the Old Country and the United States. When they left Europe, they didn’t plan on leaving forever and never seeing their relatives again. They thought the Old Country would always be there.

In 1992, after the Berlin Wall came down, my family travelled to Hungary to see where our ancestors had lived. We spent a week walking through graveyards with smashed headstones, depressing towns devoid of Jews, grateful that we’d gotten out. We, the Americans, with our pristine lives, how lucky we were.

My cousin Imre — another of my grandmother’s first cousins — led the tour. He’d been sent to a Hungarian labor camp, and survived until the Nazis invaded Hungary. Instead of turning up at the train station when the Nazis told him to, Imre hid his mother and two sisters, then joined the Hungarian Resistance. Someone who survived Auschwitz reported hearing the Nazis call Imre’s name.

“Thank God Imre isn’t here,” said someone else in line.

A neighbor turned in his mother and sisters, who were sent to Bergen Belsen. Imre’s surviving sister was Ava, the childless woman I would meet later in Israel.

At the decision point in Auschwitz, Ava was sent to live, but her younger sister was sent to die. Every night since, said Imre, Ava dreamt about that moment, wishing she’d lied about her sister’s age, thereby possibly sparing her life. Imre told this story in 1992, at which point Ava had been reliving this moment every single day for 50 years.

“Did your parents lose anyone in the Holocaust?” I asked my grandfather on the trip.

“You know,” he said after a pause. “I think they did. They never talked about it.”

Long after my grandfather died, I learned the truth about his parents’ siblings, murdered in the Lodz ghetto and shot by the Einzatzgruppen.

I had no outlet for the accumulated grief of these stories. I was 50 years old and just learning that we were not untouched by the Holocaust. In fact, we were engulfed by it. Which explained why the Jewish holidays I grew up with were so fraught, anxious, and screamy.

This week, for the first time in my life, my grief was publicly acknowledged — this previously untapped well of sadness at the family I could have had, the holidays we might have shared, and the fact that 80 years later, I still live with the inherited trauma.

No one in America wanted to hear about the Holocaust, which happened a long time ago in another land to people who weren’t us. It was shameful to be a part of it. My family had been hated so much they’d been tortured and killed just for being themselves. And, according to the think tank where I worked, nothing was worse than systemic racism. Not even the Holocaust, which Jews should just get over already. Slavery, meanwhile, was something no one could get over. In a work meeting someone introduced himself as descended from enslaved people. I made a quick decision to not introduce myself as descended from 2000 years of persecution, or survivors of the Holocaust.

When I heard the two-minute siren this week, I thought about the events that brought me and my family to Israel. For two minutes, I felt deeply sad about all my family has lost over the years. But in my grief, it was electric to look around and see everyone else feeling deeply sad, too. Shared public grief isn’t a thing in America. In the United States, everyone is supposed to be happy all the time. But here, in Israel, it is safe to be sad.

For the first time in my life, I mourned collectively with people whose families shared my story. Those two minutes were like a very brief, outdoor shiva. And then it was over. Yet I know the entire country felt the resonance of the siren at a time like this, when once again, they are rising up against us. Sometimes it is desperately sad to be Jewish. But it is also a gift to be born into a community that shares both its joy and its pain. What my family went through really did happen, and it was awful. So awful, that I am still writing and thinking about it 80 years after the fact.

Sometimes, it’s just nice to be heard. I didn’t know that’s what I needed. Now I do.

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I was asked to deliver a short “vort” at tonight’s Seder — something that connects the Passover story with the present moment. This is a version of what I’ll be saying. A few people asked me to share it, so I figured I might as well publish it here.

- Chag Sameach, and L’Shana Habaa b’Yerushalaim (Happy holiday, and next year in Jerusalem)

There is a famous quote everyone learns in America, from Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” The American idea is that over time, everything will become better for everyone, and eventually we will all live in a morally just society.

But Judaism teaches us something different. Judaism teaches that we live in a cycle – the same things happen time and again over the course of history, and our responsibility is to know how to act when these events inevitably happen. For thousands of years, we have lived in this cycle, as told through the passover story: in each and every generation, they will rise up against us, but the Holy one, blessed be He, saves us from their hands. We read these stories not for fun, but as an instruction manual – so we will understand where we are in this cycle, and how to act.

In the Passover story, we don’t hear much about how the Israelites decided to leave Egypt – we just know that things were so bad … they were slaves in Egypt and they cried bitter tears … that they needed to leave. But to me, this is as important as the rest of the story, and I think it is one of the reasons we retell it every year. Because for a long time, the Israelites had it pretty good in Egypt. They held roles in government, they had businesses and they lived safe and open Jewish lives.

The Israelites were happy in Egypt, until a new Pharaoh came to power who “did not know them,” and then things got bad very quickly. They may have been living in Mitzrahim1, but it didn’t feel like Mitzrahim. It felt like home. The Passover story reminds us that even when we think we are living in the promised land, we are still in Mitzrahim.

My husband and I descend from Jews who believed that America was the promised land. In the late 1950s, after one of my Israeli cousins finished his military service, he came to Brooklyn to stay with my great grandparents. My great grandfather tried to convince him to stay in America, because my great grandfather believed, as did all of our great grandparents, that they’d left mizrahim when they left Europe and Russia, and were living in the promised land.

Just like the Israelites did in Egypt, our families worked hard to build America for over 120 years. They were farmers, teachers, and business owners. They founded synagogues, hospitals, trade and union organizations, they were scientists and lawyers and doctors, writers, artists and musicians.

But after October 7th, we learned that like Pharaoh, our leaders in government did not know us. They didn’t know our story, what drove our families to America, and how much we’d given to the country. Slowly, we came to understand that America was not the promised land. We were still living in Mitzrahim. In each and every generation they will rise up against us, but you never think it’s going to be in your generation, in your homeland.

Understanding that you are living in Mitzrahim is hard – perhaps one of the hardest things I’ve ever done – because it requires recognizing that this place you thought was your home is not your home. That the culture you thought you were a part of is not your culture. Or worse, the culture turns against you because you’re a Jew.

So the first important thing the Passover story tells us is to recognize when we are living in Mitzrahim. But the second, equally important thing it tells us is that leaving will not be easy. Even after the Israelites decide to leave, they can’t. Here they’ve made this impossible decision, to leave behind their lives for some mythical promised land, but Pharoah refuses to let them go. So we know from the story that leaving the place your family has called home for generations will be really, really hard.

Leaving is so hard for the Israelites, that even after they cross the Red Sea, the story still isn’t over. Because it’s not like you get to walk out of Mitzrahim straight into the promised land. First, you have to wander for 40 years in the desert. This is where I feel our family is right now. We left

Mitzrahim to come home, but before we can really be at home, we have to wander around lost for a while.

Our version of wandering in the desert has been relatively easy. We are incredibly fortunate to wander through the desert from a doorman building, with a view of the sea. We get to wander while our daughter goes to a great school, and we take nice vacations. We get to wander with a mamad (safe room).

Since we’ve arrived in Israel, we’ve mostly wandered alone, as we have been learning the language and getting to experience the holidays here and to understand what it’s like to live in a place where everyone else is like us in important ways.

It wasn’t until the war started that I began to feel that we are not wandering alone. Now, I feel like we are wandering in the desert with the nation of Israel. It’s been a very hard month, but I think it has helped guide us toward becoming Israeli in an important way.

The Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years because the generation who were slaves in Egypt had to die before they could enter the promised land. Similarly, we need to replace many of the American parts of ourselves – including a lot of American ways of thinking, like that the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice – in order to prepare ourselves for life in Eretz Yisrael.

This month has been exhausting and sad and hard, but it’s okay, because it is our time wandering in the desert. We need to go through something really hard, together with the nation of Israel, in order to get to the promised land.

Anyone can be here when it’s easy, and go snorkeling in Eilat and walk on the boardwalk in Tel Aviv or have a meaningful experience at the Western Wall, but being here when it’s hard is the important part. Being here when it’s hard has made us feel a part of something bigger than ourselves.

So my hope, for our family and for all of Eretz Yisrael, is that after this war ends we will have done our 40 years of wandering in the desert. We’ll have been through a very hard time, but it’s part of the price we have to pay to be able to enter the promised land.

Just before my 40th birthday, I destroyed my ACL on a ski slope. The doctor reviewing the MRI looked at me quizzically and said, “Usually there are some intact strands of the ACL, or at least something to look at. But you’ve got nothing left. It’s like your ACL never existed.”

Restoring function to my leg required surgery to attach a cadaver graft, plus a year of rehab. I spent a lot of time lying on the couch feeling sorry for myself.

My three-year old daughter spoke for my whole family when she said, “Mama, I’m sick of your knee.” We were all sick of my knee. To pass the time, my husband bought me knitting needles, two skeins of lilac yarn (my favorite color), a scarf pattern and a book on knitting.

One year and many scarves later, I completed my first sweater. For years I knit compulsively, churning out hats with my kids’ names on them, a series of ill-fitting sweaters for my husband, stuffed animals, blankets, and knitted vests for the whole family.

After I suffered a traumatic brain injury in 2019 followed by a broken wrist two years later(thanks to Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, a genetic condition which makes me really good at yoga and also highly breakable) my knitting came to a long pause.

I used to knit in the car, but after our car crash I no longer felt safe without my eyes on the road, even as a passenger. I also used to knit while half-watching TV, but my brain injury made it hard to divide my attention that way. My son suggested I try crocheting.

I’d taught him to knit when he was young, during my manic knitting phase, and he’d in turn taught his inclusive alternative Brooklyn Scouting troop to knit. (Back then, Brooklyn was inclusive and not endlessly divisive and anti-Jewish.) Sometime later, he taught himself to crochet, before segueing into building electronic things that moved. Crocheting was easier than knitting, he said. Perhaps it would be a better fit for my slightly altered physical state.

In August of 2023, he flew to Israel to begin a gap year internship at a robotics company, and I bought a crochet pattern, a needle and yarn. Now that my husband and I were halfway to being empty nesters, I figured I’d have more time on my hands. Why not crochet a simple sleeveless sweater during my newfound bounty of space and time?

We were fostering kittens at the time, which I’d somehow gotten roped into during Covid couldn’t bring myself to say no to. This particular set of kittens thought my crochet project was a toy. They loved nothing more than stalking me as I crocheted, then making off with a ball of yarn. I picked up my crocheting needle several times only to have a kitten bat it halfway across the kitchen floor, then roll down the stairs tangled in a ball yarn.

I thought the kittens were my biggest crocheting problem. But six weeks after my son left for Israel, he returned, exhausted and terrified. Terrorists had invaded Israel and massacred thousands of civilians. He’d watched missiles explode in the sky. He knew dead people. I set my crochet project aside.

That year, I managed our son’s Israel gap year which was now occurring in New York, Maine, and eventually Paris. At the same time, the think tank where I’d worked for six years abruptly cancelled my contract, saying they no longer needed my expertise. I understood that what they didn’t need was my perceived Whiteness. They already had too many White people on staff, and they definitely had too many White directors. I didn’t identify as White, but how I identified wasn’t up to me.

I still did not identify as crochet-capable. My crochet needle, yarn and the sweater pattern went into the closet, waiting for me to have the time and patience to teach myself a new craft. Meanwhile, I applied for an avalanche of fellowships, grants and jobs, of which I was invited to interviews by exactly two. These interviews would amount to zero offers. No one wanted what I was selling, which was no different from what I’d been selling a year or two ago, when I’d fended off multiple offers, but now the world was upside down and I was no longer at the top of anyone’s list.

My best friend, with whom I’d texted every say for years, told me it was important to understand Hamas’s side of the attack. She also said I needed to stop saying I wasn’t White. I still didn’t know how to crochet.

A year passed, and I still didn’t have either a job or a crocheted sweater. Instead, I had stacks of cardboard boxes in my house, as we packed up 15 years of life in Brooklyn to put into storage. I put a single handmade sweater vest into a suitcase bound for Israel. My other knitwear went into boxes. The first sweater I’d ever knit - a black and white striped angora-like beauty - had accidentally found its way into a dryer and shrunk to an unwearable size. I gifted the shrunken sweater to my best friend, who was also the size of a teenager thanks to a lifetime of functional anorexia…. I mean clean eating. The sweater was my parting gift, after I speculated that if the time came, she wouldn’t hide me. She told me I was being hysterical. I gave her the sweater knowing we would never speak again. Maybe she wore it to cast her vote for Mayor Mamdani.

When we arrived in Israel in July, it was too hot to think about yarn. After the weather cooled down, I tried again to crochet my sleeveless sweater, and rapidly determined that I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing.

A month later I spoke with an artist cousin of mine who is a bit like an ersatz older brother. He suggested I forget about the sweater and start with a scarf. That month I turned the sweater into a lumpy, poorly stitched scarf I would never wear.

Then, in December, I visited a knitting store in Tel Aviv. Most knitting stores are populated by knitters just hanging out knitting things. This store was no different, except it was populated by a handful of Jewish mothers who each had an opinion on my crochet project. I was grateful — I needed opinions. Get cotton yarn or it will be too hot, said one. Do not buy the beige color, said another, it’ll wash you out. A third suggested a blue-green color to match my eyes. When I got home I threw the bag in a corner, too exhausted from the interaction to even look at my purchase.

Last month, I pulled the bag out, unwound a skein of yarn, cast on, crocheted several lumpy rows, and ripped them out. After a few more tries, I started to get the hang of the craft. I understood the stitches now, and how to keep them even in size and spacing. A week later, Israel attacked Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. Now I was living in an active war zone. I moved my crochet project into the mamad, picking it up for 15 minutes at a time, day or night, as missiles fell around the country. Maybe by the time I finished the sweater the war would be over

But the bombing has been so intense that my sweater came out ahead of schedule. Today, I wore my sweater to my Hebrew language class. Since the class began two weeks ago, I’ve been talking about my sweater because “I am making a sweater,” is a good answer to “What did you do this weekend/yesterday,” especially when mostly what you did yesterday was go in and out of shelters. Also, the Hebrew word for sweater is svetter, which is easy to remember.

Now, we are three weeks into the war. I wore my sweater to class today, where the other students expressed an adequate amount of astonishment that I was wearing something made with my own hands. The sweater is finished but the war is not. The women in the yarn store were right. Beige would have washed me out. Cotton yarn is perfect for the early spring weather.

This sweater took three years, the decline of Western civilization and a war to come to life. Part of me hoped that by finishing it I could somehow prompt the war to end. The symmetry would have been nice, but it was not to be. Passover is approaching. I’m crocheting kippot with the leftover yarn.

Last night, we got 8 hours of sleep, uninterrupted by sirens. When I woke I asked my husband if the war was over. The war is not over. This morning, when headed to language class, the doorman gave us a huge smile.

“We had a good sleep last night,” he beamed.

By “we” he meant all of Tel Aviv, which experienced a significant lack of missiles after midnight. He didn’t mention my sweater, but I like to think it had a little something to do with bringing us a night of peace. Now, if I can just finish these kippot, maybe the war will end

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For six years, from junior high through high school, I played right field, though “played” is probably an overstatement. In mediocre-level softball, right field is where the softball team sticks you when you’re the worst fielder on the team, because the ball rarely makes an appearance all the way out there. Occasionally, the first base player would miss a low fly and I’d have to run and scoop it up, which was hard because that required paying attention, and my favorite thing to do during a softball game was daydream and mash dandelions under my cleats.

On the occasion that someone actually hit a fly ball toward right field, the whole team would scream “Hana, heads up!” to alert me to the fact that I was currently playing in a softball game, whereupon I would make a mad dash toward the ball, cradle my glove, and pray I didn’t catch anything. When I was younger, I’d caught a fly ball to the face, and as a result was terrified of fly balls. If you’re wondering why they kept me on the team, it’s because I batted third or fourth in the lineup.

Today, I think of those softball games as a yawning span of boredom, interrupted by moments of terror. Exactly what this war has been like. Mostly, the war is boring. It’s boring to sit at home, it’s boring not to be able to do fun things without being close to a bomb shelter, it’s boring reading about missile shrapnel and bombs all day long. But every few hours, a siren pierces the air.

2. War is quiet

When the wail of missile siren dies down, and after the explosions end, when we finally get the all clear, the city is as quiet as Yom Kippur. There’s almost no commercial traffic out of the airport, so the skies are quiet. Everyone is sticking close to home so the streets are quiet and there’s very little traffic. Buses are running, but not frequently, there’s no music coming from restaurants, and all the clubs are closed. The silence feels extra silent because at any moment it might be shattered by a missile alert. When there isn’t terror, there’s an odd kind of peace.

3. War is a collective experience

Covid felt like a war. We monitored the news, schools closed, public gatherings were cancelled, people died. But with Covid, we learned to fear our friends and neighbors.

If you saw someone walking unmasked down the street in Brooklyn, the protocol was to cross the street, lest they infect you. We feared people who were unvaccinated, unboosted or unmasked. But in this war, I need people. If I’m alone in my mamad, I worry the building will be hit by a missile and I’ll be trapped alone. If I’m walking down an empty street, I worry there will be an alert and I won’t be able to find a shelter.

Running into friends feels like a gift. Yesterday, I ran into a past Hebrew teacher in a public shelter - we embraced and chatted like sisters, checking in on each others’ well-being, enjoying the warmth and camaraderie of huddling six meters (about 20 feet, if you measure in bald eagles and hamburgers) below ground with a bunch of strangers. When the all-clear came, we walked up together and parted on the street, content with the knowledge that we were experiencing similar things at similar times, even if we weren’t together.

4. War is personal

In my language class, after we learned the word “angry,” much of the class was taken up with discussions of how angry we are at Iran. When there is a war we are angry with Iran. When there are sirens at 2AM we are angry with Iran. When Iran sends cluster missiles to population centers, which is a war crime, we get very, very angry Iran — the angriest you can be. We aren’t angry with the Iranian people, to be clear. But we hate the regime with a burning passion, because it is actively trying to kill us just for being Jewish.

Iran let us sleep for nine interrupted hours the other night. When I woke, my first thought was, thank you Iran.

5. War is exhausting

I am fortunate to have a mamad, which means I only have to walk down the hall to a different bedroom, rather than downstairs, out of the building and across the street to a public shelter. But it’s been over a week of sleepless nights and days interrupted by trips to shelters. There no flow to the day — it’s just waiting for the next alert, listening for the explosions, and then hearing for the all-clear. Living in a permanent state of tension, unable to focus or concentrate for long without your brain being pierced by the shriek of a siren, is grueling.

6. War is Weird

Being hunted by other humans is a really weird feeling.

7. War is bad for my skin

The first few days I ate a lot of chocolate. Then I ate a lot of cheese. I’m also probably a bit stressed out. All of which made my face break out like I’m a teenager experiencing a second adolescence. I bought a face mask at the pharmacy, but I think what my skin really needs is for this war to end.

8. War is a good time to think

Despite the fatigue, the stress and the monotony, war gives you a lot of time in places with no cell service or WiFi. I can only spend so much time talking to other people in a small enclosed space. Then, my mind cranks itself up and whirs for a while. Sometimes I’m so engrossed in deep thoughts about life and death and Jews and the world order that I forget it’s time to exit the safe room. It’s kind of nice having time to really work stuff out.

9. War makes you feel alive

My grandparents met in the army during World War Two. For them, it was the best of times and the worst of times. An ocean away, their families were being murdered or surviving in the most gruesome ways possible, with psychic and physical scars I would come to know as a child. But for my grandparents, the children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, it was their peak moment of American belonging.

They loved being a part of something bigger, having a purpose, flying around the country to different air bases, eating weird foods they’d never encountered in their Jewish homes (ham steak?), practicing weird American customs (what’s an Easter bonnet?), and meeting other Americans who asked to see their horns (true story!).

My point is, our Passover Seders always concluded with a round of WW2 drinking songs, including one penned by my grandfather and set to the tune of the Columbia University fight song. The Passover before my husband and I married, his parents came to my family’s Seder - an event that would never repeat. At the Seder, halfway through the war songs, my father explained to my future father-in-law why we were all suddenly acting like we were at an Officers’ Club.

My father in law nodded, then looked at my grandparents smiling as they relived this high point from their youth.

“It was a fun war,” he commented.

War might not be fun, but it sure shows you what you have (life) and what can so easily and randomly be taken from you (your home, along with every single thing you own, your street, your coffee shop, your market, your loved ones, your country).

10. War makes the ordinary extraordinary

Today I went to language class, stopped in a shelter, came home, wrote, and did my homework and let me tell you: I feel like superwoman. It’s like that tween-age game where you add “in bed” to the end of every sentence to radically alter the meaning. Today I want to language class DURING A WAR. Then I rested between sirens, BECAUSE ITS A WAR. Then I did my homework, DURING A WAR. I am a hero just for existing. Are other people more heroic? For sure, but we all do our part. And my part, in this war, is keeping Hebrew teachers employed, the house clean, the family connected, and sharing my experience via barely edited essays.

11. War is a civics lesson

I am fortunate to live in a nation that has invested in keeping its citizens safe. Instead of building underground terror complexes or funding a massive nuclear program and a staff of morality police, Israel built public bomb shelters; mandated that new buildings have a war-proof concrete core; moved hospitals deep underground; and designed a system that detects incoming missiles, alerts people on the ground who are in range via an app, and then shoots down the missile. If I could pick one country to live in during a war, it’s absolutely this one. And because of the communal aspect or the war, plus Israelis’ natural inclination to behave as if everyone is a relative, I have never felt safer or more cared for by a government entity. Not even when I worked for the US government. Especially then.

12. War is inconsistent

Sometimes I forget there’s a war. Those are the best times.

13. War is ridiculous

Sometimes I forget that this is a ridiculous way to live, that war is an insane way to solve conflicts, and that other people all over the world don’t have to live in a permanent war zone. But of all the war zones in all the countries of the world, I choose this one.

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Back when I worked at The Tank, the CEO was known for her rigid reading schedule: nonfiction in the morning, fiction in the evening. She often shared what she was reading in a staff email, and other people responded with what they were reading. I loved being surrounded by so many other readers, though they’re probably now happily ensconced with a pile of libelous antisemitic stories.

At The Tank, where the pace of work was slower than it had been in government and the private sector, I had time to sink into multiple books simultaneously, which is how I like to read. I usually have an audiobook or two going, interspersed with a book on my Kindle and a hardcover. I tend to veer heavily into nonfiction, but have found that I need a good murder mystery or light novel to prevent me from overloading my synapses and sinking into despair.

I’ve had the good fortune to discover some brilliant books lately, and figured I might as well share them in between missile sirens, in case you’d like to better understand the current war.

The Gates of Gaza, Amor Tibon

I went to Tibon’s reading at Bookhaus, Tel Aviv’s new English language bookstore, because someone had extra tickets and I wasn’t doing anything that night. But this is the book I didn’t know I needed. I’ve been trying to learn as much as I can about the history of Gaza and Israeli policy. My knowledge drops off around 1995, when I, like a lot of American Jews, basically checked out of Israeli politics after Rabin’s assassination.

Gates of Gaza weaves the author’s experience as his border kibbutz was invaded by Hamas on October 7th, with the history of Gaza policy. If I’d survived a Hamas attack at my kibbutz, this is the book I’d want to have written.

This book does a great job of explaining the policy goals of different Israeli PMs, the PLO, Palestinian Authority and Hamas, and showing how those policies affected the lives of people who were essentially farmers and agricultural workers in border communities. It’s a stark reminder of how both Israel and the West has always underestimated radical Islam, resulting in horror for Jews and worsening existences for Palestinians and others living under Islamic regimes. It’s also a page turner, and a vivid account of what it’s like to live in a nation with an active civillian army.

At the book event, an audience member commented that the big villain in this book is Netanyahu. The author countered that he thought the big villain was Hamas, but I’m nearly done with the book and the question isn’t wrong — from a policy perspective, Netanyahyu has Israeli blood on his hands.

King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution, Scott Anderson

I started reading this in December, because I wanted to better understand the details of the Iranian revolution. I knew there had been a strange partnership between left wing students and far right Islamists, in which the Left thought they were going to overthrow the Shah and get … something else, while the Mullahs always intended to create a theocracy, but didn’t fully know the details.

What this book made clear for me was not only that the Left always underestimates Islamic fanaticism, but the complicity of the Carter administration in the Shah’s ouster, and how the bureaucratic failures of the CIA led to suffering for over a generation of Iranians. This book also demonstrates that one of the worst things that can happen to a society is the discovery of oil under its feet.

Altenuland, Theodore Hertzl

Did you know the founder of the Zionist movement wrote fiction? It’s not the greatest of literary works, but I found this book fascinating as an encapsulation of what the Jewish dream of self determination in our homeland looked like to a German Jew in the 1890s.

Hertzl wrote this novel to try to sell his Zionist vision to the German Jews of 1902, whose circles were tightening, but who felt they were true Germans, and had no interest in abandoning the place their families had lived for hundreds of years for some malarial spot in the desert. But, Germany was increasingly poverty-stricken, and Jews were increasingly persecuted — shunned by society, barred from jobs in academia, law and medicine, relegated to poverty and the most menial of jobs. Yet compared to the Jews confined of Russia’s Pale of Settlement (the swampy, frozen part of Russia where Jews were required to live) they were living the high life.

It’s astonishing to read Herzl and realize all that had not yet happened in Europe, or to European Jews. World War One, the Russian Revolution, increasingly violent pogroms in Eastern Europe, and of course the Holocaust — all of this was in the future when he wrote Altneuland. The author was able to imagine technological innovations that were just emerging (refrigeration, railroads, streetcars, electrification, phonographs) but had absolutely no imagination as to how bad things were going to get for Jews. He thought things had already reached a nadir.

What’s fascinating about this book is less what Hertzl envisioned for a future Jewish state, but what he failed to anticipate. We get the delight of Jews holding all sort of jobs, from dockworkers to bureaucrats, the weird but obvious desire at the time to see Jews bringing a bit of European flair to their new home (challah schnitzel anyone?), the possible borders of a Jewish State, the desire to implement socialism to establish a more equal society, the ability of Jews to thrive once they threw off the yoke of antisemitism, all of which came to pass.

But, Herzl assumes Jews will continue the land purchases that began under the Ottoman Empire, not foreseeing the end of the Ottoman Empire itself. He assumes a reasonable agreement can be worked out with the Ottomans, and that naturally Arab Palestinians will be happy to participate in the region’s thriving new economy. Because he’s envisioning a smooth transfer of power, he doesn’t imagine a Jewish State that requires an army or defense force. There’s no Irgun, Mossad, Haganah or IDF in this book. Instead, there are endless details about how elections work and all the imagined wonders socialism would bring forth. There’s a long discussion about apprenticeships and how great the local theater and opera scene will be. It is assumed everyone in the book speaks German. Or at least, no one is studying Hebrew in Herzl’s Jewish state.

At the same time, Herzl is sitting atop a giant pile of internalized antisemitism and self hatred. The Jewish state, he believes will alleviate antisemitism in the United States by attracting Jews from New York City, thereby reducing the number of Jews in NYC, which will make us less hatable. Our numbers, Herzl thinks, are the cause of the hatred. There are just SO MANY Jews in NYC, you can understand why they hate us. (You can?) This is also the problem for German Jews. Too many of us, in too many high ranking and high status positions. If only we were a little less obvious and a little less populous, there would be no antisemitism.

I have reached a new understanding of antisemitism over the course of the last few years. Jews love to argue about out ways to reduce the hatred that has plagued us for thousands of years, in the following ways:

Reduce the number of Jews! There are at most 150 Jews in Iceland, but the theme of their pride parade last year was, as paraphrased by a friend who was there, equality for all, except the Zionist entity, who should die.

Stick to ourselves! But then people wonder what those weird Jews are up to.

Assimilate! But as Haman explains in the Purim story, assimilated Jews are also weird and creepy and worth annihilating. “There is a certain people, scattered and dispersed among the other peoples in all the provinces of your realm, whose laws are different from those of any other people and who do not obey the king’s laws; and it is not in Your Majesty’s interest to tolerate them,” he tells the King, who crafts a decree to kill all the Jews in the Kingdom.

Educate! This was the ADL’s innovative strategy, coming out of the Holocaust. But it requires a society that values education and knowledge, which is not the society most of the developed world inhabits today.

Antisemitism is a virus that acts like a social contagion. It mutates every generation, casting Jews as whatever the current thing you don’t want to be is. Capitalists, Communists, too poor, too rich, too secretive, too assimilated, and now, too White, despite the fact that the Nazis murdered us for being Not White, and too colonial, despite the fact that Israel is not a colonial entity but an indigenous reclamation project.

Once antisemitism infects a person, there is no cure, with some very few exceptions. I watched it spread across my former colleagues in exactly this way. Many people in the Obama White House arrived infected with the virus, but kept it contained for the most part. Black Lives Matter (BLM) introduced the virus to a larger segment of the population, where it metastasized within the Democratic party. After October 7th, the people in my feed who were most involved in BLM were the first to post images celebrating the massacre of Jews.

As they posted, others began to wonder if they should be posting. I watched people who knew better begin to capitulate to the virus, posting messages along the lines of, “OK, everyone keeps asking, so I’ve started a GoFundMe for Hamas.” Someone in my feed messaged me a few months into the war, telling me “literally every other person I know has expressed their grief about Gaza except you.” I spent some time trying to save this man — who has a PhD in Computer Science, worked with me in the White House and at the Tank, and in theory is a smart person — from the virus, before realizing there is no cure.

After it took down the most vulnerable (those who identify as People of Color and whose sole information about Israel comes from Hamas via BLM, and White people who feel guilty about systemic racism, who are also uninformed about Jews and Israel), I watched the virus silence people who claimed to be standing with me. Friends who tried limply to listen eventually stopped returning my calls or texts, as they came to understand aligning with me meant taking an unpopular position. If standing up for Jews meant losing their social circles and work networks … no thanks!

If Altneuland convinces you of nothing else, the immediacy of the antisemitism Herzl is writing in reaction to, and how relevant it feels to today, should convince you there is no correct right way counter the world’s oldest hatred. Instead, it seems we just have to wait it out, and hope too many of us don’t get murdered in the process.

Finally, a writer friend turned me on to Tess Gerritsen a few years ago, and when I desperately need something fun and captivating, where I won’t be annoyed by the writing or distracted by badly-drawn characters, Gerritsen always delivers. The Spy Coast is my favorite, but they’re all page-turners about topics that have absolutely no bearing on my life.

Continuing to wish everyone an easy war,

-Hana

That’s so Israel

Our family has a running joke about a tv sitcom called “That’s So Grandma”, where the punchline for every joke is .. womp womp, that’s so grandma! I’m reusing an in-joke here for the title because I’m exhausted from waking every two hours to air raid sirens. This war is a little like having a newborn who wakes you every two hours by shrieking, except the newborn also wants to kill you.

My husband and I were sitting in a flower filled ditch by the side of the road, watching the Iron Dome explode missiles overhead.

As the air raid siren died down, a car pulled off the road to join us. A man got out, a silver pendant the shape of Israel twinkling in the sunlight. He heard us speaking English and asked where we were from.

“New York,” we said. “But we live in Tel Aviv now.”

He shook his head, and asked what it was really like in Mamdani’s New York.

“Jews get attacked every day,” we said. “There’s antisemitism in the schools and it’s getting worse.”

“It’s good you’re here,” he said. “You’ll be much safer.”

Another missile exploded over our heads.

“I have to go work,” said the man. Like everyone else in Israel, he’d been called up for reserve duty. He’s a mechanic.

“Without me, nothing will go,” he explained, heading towards his car. As he walked away, his phone rang.

“Hi Dad,” I heard him say — I smiled, knowing that parents across the nation were all currently checking on their kids.

“Have a good day,” called the man. “Enjoy the sunshine!”

Moments later, our kids, who are out of the country right now, called to check on us. All is well, we assured them. Just another day in Israel.

Bomb shelters we visited on our drive home from the north, ranked.

1. Shelter that is also a hammam - First shelter of the day, at the hotel. Warm, a bit humid, felt very secure, full of orthodox French people.

2. Roadside ditch - Beautiful location, right next to the Sea of Galilee, surrounded by flowers. Watched missiles explode with a guy on his way to reserve duty. Not the safest, but 10/10 for company and endtimes vibe.

3. Gas station storage room. Pretty tight- atmosphere was NYC subway meets crowded elevator - but nice combination of kids in Pjs and armed soldiers. It’s giving “war is stupid but we’re all gonna be ok.”

4. Highway underpass - Cold because I left my jacket in the car, nods between people but not much chatter, easy bathroom access but not recommended.

5. Public shelter - Stood in the shelter until some other people showed up and said we just needed to be NEAR the shelter, not in it yet. Smelled like urine, full of garbage, old Times Square subway station vibes, though without any visible human feces. 0 stars.

In other news, I am finding my way to new media outlets after learning my usual places like the New York Times and Washington Post wouldn’t publish any writing that doesn’t conform to their very narrow and biased viewpoints on Israel.

Here’s my first for the Jewish News Syndicate, which sounds like a global conspiracy theory but is actually just a Jewish news site.

https://www.jns.org/graffiti-group-how-a-bunch-of-brooklynites-took-matters-into-their-own-hands/

I started this Substack over a year ago, after being shut out of both my writing and civic tech networks for being the wrong kind of Jew. I lost friends, family, my work identity, and my writing outlets.

For my readers who have been with me from the start, thank you for coming with me on this journey as I worked out how to exist in the new space I’d suddenly been forced into. Thanks for sticking with me as I figured out what to do with this Substack, how to live my life, and what it looks like to live as a proud, but safe, Jewish woman.

On Yom Kippur, Jews wish each other an easy fast, because no one has a good or fun fast. To that end, I wish everyone an easy war — may it be over quickly, may there be no more loss of life, and may we all be safer for it.

-Hana

As we were planning our move to Israel, we kept hearing the same thing from Israelis: beware of the bureaucracy.

To which my husband and I could only turn to each other and ask, “I wonder what they mean by that?”

We understood the technical definition of bureaucracy, obviously. And as someone who worked for the federal government, I’d been privy to a full frontal view of American bureaucracy, checks, balances, antiquated laws, unethical bureaucrats and all.

After six months in Israel, I’m happy to report that yes, Israeli bureaucracy can be maddening. But, in large part that’s because the Israeli state provides so much to so many. And, thus far, I’ve mostly encountered bureaucrats with a sympathetic ear, happy to help me navigate complex circular systems so I can get to the good stuff, like free or low cost health services, new immigrant benefits, or in some cases, a driver’s license.

In the US, we don’t have as much government bureaucracy to contend with simply because our government doesn’t offer much in the way of help. When my family and I were hit head on by a wrong way driver, the government didn’t care.

As we were leaving the hospital two weeks after the crash, a hospital nurse eyed us - me with my walker and back brace, my husband in a wheelchair, our young daughter in a back brace and our son with his arm in a sling - and asked, “Are you guys going to be okay?”

I didn’t think we were going to be okay. In fact, I had no idea how we were going to cook dinner once we got home. But I also knew that if I asked for help, we’d be thrown into a child welfare doom spiral. In most developed countries we’d have been provided a home nurse. Would it have required us to complete 18 forms and get triple authorizations? Maybe. But then at least we’d have a nurse. Instead, we had no one.

Worse, once we got home we spent our time fighting with insurance companies trying to not deliver the money and services we were rightful owed, rather than a government agency trying to help us.

We were billed for the ambulance ride from the crash scene to the hospital, even though my husband and I were both unconscious, because the ambulance was out of network. After my husband’s reconstructive leg surgery went badly, the insurance company refused to cover his second, corrective surgery, which they deemed medically unnecessary.

So, our move was purposely designed to ensure we lived somewhere with a functional social safety net. I was looking forward to feeling cared for by the state, rather than ignored. And, I was looking forward to participating in a society whose priorities align with my own: keeping my Jewish family safe and healthy.

Government in Israel is ever-present in ways we don’t experience in the US. When I worked in government, we often talked about how most people’s experiences with the US government were limited to renewing passports, paying taxes and mailing things, all of which are horrible experiences.

In Israel, interacting with the government can be a near-daily occurrence. As immigrants, we both pay into the state and receive benefits, all of which is done through a web portal and our bank. When we go to the beach, we pay the city for beach chairs through an app. And every time I visit a doctor or pick up a prescription, I interact with the government via the health care system.

I like all these government touch-points, because I know how it feels to be left alone. I feel safe when I walk out my front door, secure in the knowledge that if I get hit by a bus I won’t spend the rest of my life in insurance hell.

That said, there have been hiccups. The biggest was a computer error in the IDF’s enlistment database. Somehow, my 16-year-old daughter got flagged in the “mandatory enlistment now” database, even though she’s allowed a grace period as a new immigrant, and has been legally blind since birth. We found out about the error after we received a letter informing us that this was the third letter the IDF had sent (it was the first) and that if my daughter failed to show up yesterday (really, it was dated the day before the letter was sent) she’d be deported.

After several phone calls, we determined the best course of action was to go to the enlistment office with all of her paperwork and explain the issue. This process took five hours, several medical evaluations and many tears and threats of deportation. Finally, I asked my daughter to put me on the phone with someone. Anyone. (Parents are not allowed inside the recruitment center.)

“She is LEGALLY BLIND,” I said firmly to the woman on the other end of the phone. Ten minutes later they discharged my daughter.

And this is allegedly one of the most effective militaries in the world.

But, perhaps the silliest bureaucratic hurdle was getting a drivers license. We changed our US residence from New York to Maine before our move, which meant our licenses have only been valid for six months. In order to get an Israeli license, we needed to demonstrate five years of driving history. None of this was explained on any website, so it took two trips to the Ministry of Transportation (MOT) before we’d assembled all the relevant paperwork.

And because all appointments in Tel Aviv are always taken, we’d driven an hour south to an MOT office in Ashkelon. Once we arrived, we were seen fairly quickly, compared with the 2-3 hour waits we were used to at Department of Motor Vehicles offices in the US.

But, there was one final problem. The person entering our information had never heard of the state of Maine. She wasn’t sure it was really a state. New York, California, Florida, those are states. But Maine? Well, she’d have to check.

“Check what?” my husband and I asked. “How are you going to check if Maine is a state?”

This was met with the usual Israeli, “How will we check? We’ll check, that’s how. Then we’ll let you know.”

Two days later we got the good news. Maine was a state! We’d have to go to a third location (bureaucracy) to pick up the licenses.

Overall, I’ve found the recipe for countering bureaucracy in Israel to be the same as Woody Allen’s advice for success: just show up.

When I couldn’t make a dentist appointment online, I showed up at a dentist office. A week later, I returned for my appointment. When I couldn’t get a car sharing app to approve my registration, I went to their office in a high rise. An hour later, I was approved in the app. And when I needed a flu shot, I drove an hour outside Tel Aviv to an office, waited 20 minutes, and learned I was in an ultrasound clinic. With no flu shots. Sometimes, the combination of bureaucracy, poor language skills and a lack of understanding of how things function leaves me stranded. But ultimately, once I figure out how to work the system, everything functions beautifully.

My two favorite experiences with the government here have both been medical, perhaps unsurprisingly. In the US, the only way to get treatment for the traumatic brain injury I suffered in our car crash was to fly to Chicago to see a specialist who didn’t take insurance. Every visit, including cab fare, plane tickets, new contact lenses and a hotel room, cost thousands upon thousands of dollars. In Israel, I visited a world-class neurovisual-ophthalmologist in Jerusalem for free. My travel costs — I took public transportation the whole way including buses, a high speed train and a light rail — ran to less than $20.

My other favorite experience is what I think of as government acupuncture. To boost my immune system, I’m entitled to a series of eight acupuncture sessions a year, for which I paid $80 in total. I check into the acupuncture place with my health insurance card, as though it’s a doctor’s office, but when I enter the treatment room I’m suddenly in a spa. A government-run spa playing the greatest hits of New Age music over a tinny speaker, but still a spa.

Best of all, I don’t have to argue with a greedy insurance company to take care of my health. The government is happy to pay for treatments that will keep me healthy, including preventative acupuncture and cutting-edge neuro-visual treatments. So if this is what bureaucracy looks like, bring it on. Thus far, bureaucracy means a caring society that works together to keep itself healthy, safe, and affordable. Obviously there are at least 99 problems in Israel, but for me, the bureaucracy ain’t one.

This is just to say: the fashion in Israel is batshit.

Over a two-decades-long career in New York, I built up a basic New Yorker wardrobe - lots of black, sharp lines, and pointy or straight toed boots depending on whatever people were wearing that year.

When I began working in the White House, I found my entire wardrobe to be too New York. Too black, too fashion forward, too creative class, not enough DC power player.

Over my DC tenure I gradually replaced my work wardrobe, adding blazers in colors that were not black, neutral-colored blouses and collared shirts, and chunkier jewelry.

Once, I ran into a friend as I lugged my suitcase and backpack up the subway stairs, returning from a week in the nation’s capitol.

“I just came from DC,” I said, explaining my slightly frazzled state.

She looked me up and down, taking in my red trench coat and heels.

“I can tell,” she said. “You’re looking very DC.”

I’d transformed from a DC power player to a dowdy out of towner in the span of an Amtrak ride.

Over the summer, as I packed my bags for Israel, I kept my clothes to a minimum. Israel is a lot more casual, and a lot hotter, than either New York or DC.  I knew that eventually I’d need to buy a new wardrobe for my new life.

As our flight neared, I whittled down my sweaters, jeans, and jackets, unpacking and repacking  my bags repeatedly, attempting to pack perfectly for a climate I’d never lived in.

When we landed in July, I discovered all my clothing was too hot. The fabrics were wrong, nothing breathed, and what I really wanted to wear was a bathing suit.

Not coincidentally, a popular fashion for Israeli women under 40 is an article of clothing advertised as the bralette, paired with teeny tiny bike shorts.

My husband and I often wonder aloud to each other, are we old or is everyone here basically naked?

This being Israel, I’ll often see women clad only in what - to my eye - appears to be underwear, next to women who are fully covered in Hasidic or Muslim attire. It’s hard to discern the fashion vibe when you’ve got a woman sitting on the light rail in a floor length skirt, arms and head covered, next to a woman who hasn’t covered her midriff since 2015, with an armed soldier in fatigues wedged between them.

Over the course of several months I worked out how to dress for the heat, and then it got cold. Sort of. It might be chilly in the morning, t-shirt and shorts weather at noon, then cold again after the sun sets.

When I look out the window to gauge the temperature in the mornings, it seems like all of Tel Aviv is massively confused about how to dress for the day.  People are pairing shorts with boots and giant fake fur coats with sandals. Is it hot today? Is it cold? Yes. It is both hot and cold. Now get dressed.

In Tel Aviv, I’m newly conscious of what a slave to fashion I was in both New York and DC, and how much I used my clothing to signal who I was as a human.

Here, from what I can discern, everyone seems to make their own fashion. I’ve seen Israelis dressed in thigh high boots paired with a mini skirt and chunky sweaters, and men in prom dresses. There are punks, emo teens, modestly dressed modern orthodox in business casual, traditional orthodox, including Ethiopian Jews, with giant head scarves, and always someone in shorts, t-shirt and sandals no matter the weather. When the temperature  drops below 65F, everyone pulls out their puffer jackets.

When I lived in New York I knew what was on trend each season because everyone in the subway was wearing the same teddy bear coat/ Kate Spade bag/ North Face jacket. I don’t yet know where Israeli fashionistas take their cues from. This summer, all women were wearing a cute sleeveless vest. Now, everyone’s got chunky boots. Why? I don’t know.

And, because Israel is such a small country, there aren’t many brands available. So not only were all women this summer wearing a sleeveless vest, they were wearing the exact same sleeveless vest from one of four stores.

After an initial shopping binge on clothing that didn’t drench me in sweat, followed by the purchase of some necessary winter wear (got my puffer jacket!), I’ve hit pause on buying new clothes. I’m not sure who I am yet here, so I don’t know how to dress.

Am I a Birkenstocks all the time person? Am I a boots in 65 degrees lady? Is my super New Yorky black leather jacket too New York or is it perfect? Is 53 too old to wear my workout tights as street wear? Should I invest in a bralette?

I love clothing and fashion, but I’m still finding my inner Israeli fashion sense. If I’m with my orthodox family or attending synagogue, I try to dress more modestly - shoulders covered, nothing too form fitting. But if I’m meeting friends for dinner in the shuk, I want something a little more fun and weird. And for a recent work meeting, I hauled out the one blazer I packed, and was pleased to discover the woman I was meeting with was sporting her own blazer. Do I need more blazers? Maybe, though I should probably get a job first and worry about blazers second.

In Tel Aviv, the overall vibe is: you do you, and no one cares how weird it is. Underwear on the outside? Awesome. Have a seat next to the Hasidic guy in a long black coat and too-warm hat.

Caftan and sandals because it’s a million degrees? Perfect. Stand right next to the lady wearing a sweater and riding boots because it might be warm out, but it’s also January, and those clothes aren’t going to wear themselves.

Maybe, when you’re expecting missiles from Iran, it just doesn’t matter all that much how you’re dressed. Layers are good. Shoes you can walk in. There might be a deluge followed by sunshine, so wear whatever works for that. But ya know, make it stylish. Because if we all end up together in the bomb shelter later, at least we can all talk about your clothing.