Wherein Daphne Levy Nash shows the manner of addressing the uncertainties and deficiencies in education by strengthening sustained support for teachers. She argues that to meet the challenges our educational systems face, especially in Israel, instructional coaching must become part of everyday school life rather than an occasional intervention.

But first, let’s get to know the person behind the piece: Daphne Levy Nash

Daphne Levy Nash is an educational consultant, learning specialist, and a “teacher of teachers” with almost 20 years of foundational experience. She founded The Village Center – an organization dedicated to educational outreach, support and advocacy – and is originally from New York where she taught within prestigious, progressive NYC schools before transitioning her practice to Israel.

Daphne leverages her deep classroom background to partner with educators, students & families, offering strategic consulting that bridges theory & daily practice. Daphne holds an undergraduate degree in Child & Family Studies from Syracuse University & a Dual Master’s degree in General & Special Elementary Education from Bank Street Graduate School.

Her work is done at the intersection of child development, educational support, & intentional relationship-building, with a specialization in cultivating inclusive, pluralist educational environments. By focusing on emotional safety & treating a child’s choices through a developmental lens, she views the educational landscape not just as a vehicle for academics, but as the literal architectural starting point for a healthier, more collaborative society.

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Preventing the Destruction of Israeli Education

By Daphne Levy Nash

I once worked in an Israeli school where every morning, a first-grade student refused to come into school. He clung to his parents at the gate, begged them not to leave, and sometimes he would even try to sneak out of school and walk home. Like most elementary school students, his daily schedule shifted from day to day, and he could not cope with the inconsistency each morning. He would arrive already dysregulated, resistant to entering the room, and once inside he would act out in ways the teachers read as defiance. He wasn’t a student I taught directly, but in a small school you come to know almost every child. I knew this child and he was a good kid.

One morning, I overheard his classroom teacher, the special education staff, and the school social worker trying to solve the problem. They cared deeply about him and wanted him to succeed. Their conversation focused on what to do: perhaps his parents should bring him directly to the principal’s office, or perhaps he should wait with the social worker until class began. As I listened, I realized that no one was asking the question that mattered most: Why was this child struggling in the first place? Knowing the child, I wondered whether he wasn’t resisting school at all, but the uncertainty of how each day began. I suggested creating a simple visual schedule that he could check each morning before joining his classmates, giving him something he seemed to need: predictability. One teacher paused and said, “That’s so simple. Why didn’t we think of that?”

These teachers were not unkind. They were not indifferent. They were not bad at their jobs. They had simply never been given the tools to ask what a child’s behavior is communicating, and they had no one inside their school whose job it was to help them think that way. That conversation has stayed with me because it captures what I believe is one of the greatest challenges facing Israeli education today. While this is the story of one child, it is the story of a system that asks teachers to solve increasingly complex problems without giving them the ongoing support to understand the problems they are trying to solve.

I have been a teacher for almost two decades, first in New York, then in Israel. In New York, I worked as a learning specialist in schools that treated teacher support not as a periodic gift but as a structural obligation. My job was to go into classrooms, observe what was happening, model strategies, and then to return the following week to reflect together on what had worked and what still needed adjustment. My job was to build trusting relationships, relationships teachers could count on when they needed help. A teacher could text me on a difficult Tuesday and I would be there. Professional learning was not something that happened a few times a year. It was woven into the daily life of the school. That infrastructure for teacher support, assumed and unremarkable in New York, does not exist in Israel.

Given the changes to the very nature of education driven by digital technologies, Israel’s teachers need professional support to help them solve emergent challenges, now, more than ever.

For most of the twentieth century, the central function of a school was the transfer of information. Teachers taught things that students needed to know, and their central job was to impart that information. That model is now essentially outdated. A child with a phone can access more information in three minutes than a classroom can deliver in a week. Transferring information, the thing schools were built around, has been largely digitized.

What cannot be digitized is the other thing schools were always supposed to be doing, the things they rarely did well and are now doing worse. Teaching children how to be in a room with other people. How to disagree and stay in the conversation. How to work through a problem with someone they did not choose, who sees the world differently, and who will be sitting next to them again tomorrow. How to listen when it is uncomfortable. How to negotiate when a conflict comes up. How to trust. These are not soft skills at the margins of an education. They are the most important educational goals we can strive for, and never more so than now, when children are primarily interacting with one another through devices, playing games with friends who are in different houses and building relationships through screens. Children go through their little lives with less practice of genuine human encounter than any generation before them.

Technology has spent the past decade systematically eroding all of those capacities. Children today grow up practicing interaction through platforms designed to reward speed, reaction, and the path of least resistance. They learn to scroll past disagreement rather than grapple with it. They learn to manage their own feeds, their own circles, their own carefully curated versions of social life, while the actual work of face-to-face encounter is less and less applicable. When conflict arises in person, they have no practiced vocabulary for navigating it. These children lack the exposure to build the fundamental muscles that make collaborative learning possible, the muscles that make society possible.

Teachers in Israel are now being asked to address all of this, without training, without support, and within a system whose basic architecture has not changed in decades. The structure of most Israeli elementary schools looks the same everywhere: a principal managing budgets and ministry requirements at the top, classroom teachers managing students, curriculum and departments, but there is no one in between whose sole job is to focus on how the teaching is actually going.

There is a saying that the shoemaker’s child always goes barefoot, because the shoemaker is too close to his own work to notice what his child needs. Teachers in Israel are that child. They are too immersed in the overwhelming amount of daily demands in the classroom that stepping back to problem-solve, to troubleshoot, to ask what a student’s behavior is actually communicating. All these require space and expertise they are not provided. They need someone else to hold that space for them. The Ministry offers workshops. Principals can budget for outside organizations to visit. But when the facilitator leaves, the school is still there, and the teacher is back in the room the next morning with thirty students and whatever they managed to absorb from a session held two months ago.

Think about what it means to get advice without follow-up. A parenting coach suggests five strategies in a single session. You leave persuaded. You implement one, maybe two, pieces of their advice. But by Thursday, when your child is in crisis, the coach is not in the room. The strategy fades into distant memory. Now imagine that same coach present weekly, daily, inside your home, able to say: try this here, now, and I will be back next week to see how it went. That is the difference between a workshop and infrastructure. Israeli schools are running almost entirely on workshops, and wondering why nothing sticks.

Like all professionals, teachers learn best when they can apply new ideas in the context of their daily work, receive feedback, ask questions, and refine their practice over time. A single workshop cannot accomplish that. A supportive educational structure can. We would never expect students to master new learning after hearing about it once. We should not expect teachers to either. Teachers do not need more professional development. They need professional support.

Many educational systems around the world have built infrastructure to address this challenge. Their schools employ instructional coaches, learning specialists, and pedagogical leaders whose role is to strengthen teaching through ongoing partnership with educators. In Israel, those roles are still largely missing. Perhaps most striking is that their absence has become normalized. Teachers who have never experienced this kind of professional partnership often do not realize what is missing, not because they lack ambition or commitment, but because they have never been given the opportunity to work within a system that provides it.

Supporting teachers in this way is not an educational luxury. It is the basic infrastructure to build successful, fulfilled and happy teachers. It allows teachers to continue growing throughout their careers. And when teachers grow, students benefit.

The stakes of getting this wrong are bigger than they seem, since teachers are uniquely responsible for educating the next generation to be members of society that trust one another and can work together. In a country already fractured by political, religious, and cultural divisions, schools remain one of the few places where children from different backgrounds share physical space every single day. If that shared space stops teaching the actual practice of human relationship, people will retreat further into their own screens, their own families, their own sealed circles, less practiced with every passing year at the friction of genuine encounter. Israel is a small country that depends on people being able to work across their differences. It cannot afford that kind of isolation. We are already seeing the destruction that follows growing alienation and distrust.

That future is not inevitable. But preventing it requires understanding the roles teachers play in raising the next generation and what they need to be successful in their jobs.

The conversation about educational reform in Israel circles around salaries, class sizes, and physical infrastructure. These things matter. But the conversation almost never reaches the question of who is inside schools supporting teachers while they teach. What is most striking is that the silence itself goes unremarked. In New York, in-school pedagogical coaching is the ABCs of school design. The role of instructional coaches, learning specialists, and pedagogical leaders in New York schools is to strengthen teaching through ongoing partnership with educators, and so basic to how schools function that its absence would be considered a structural failure, not a budget decision. In Israel, these roles do not exists, and these functions are not covered. The conversation about their absences is missing from staff rooms, union demands, and ministerial reform proposals, because the idea that they should exist is unfamiliar. Teachers who have never worked in a system where this support exists do not know to ask for it. Instead, everyone is coping, unable to even imagine a solution that exists abroad and has been proven to work to improve the teacher’s experience and, through them, the education system as a whole.

In Israel, if you search for a director of teaching and learning or a director of student support (positions that are standard in American schools, for which hundreds of jobs are advertised at any given moment) you will find almost nothing. That is the structural deficit. The fact that this deficit is not discussed in Israeli public discourse is not a sign that it does not exist. It is a sign of how deep it goes.

Some Israeli schools have figured this out on their own, and the evidence of their success is impossible to ignore. I know a school that has placed social and emotional development at the center of its culture, and where leadership is committed to training teachers to build safe learning environments. The teachers there share tools and a common language. No child in that school is afraid to walk into the principal’s office. There is a waiting list to enroll. Families are moving their households to be near it. It is a standard state school (public school). It charges no special tuition. Someone there decided that teacher development was the work, and then built a culture around that decision. The school should not be exceptional for making this decision to support its teachers, but it is, and it shows.

The children sitting in classrooms today will be shaped by whatever we choose to build, or fail to build, while we still have the chance. Successful education is built entirely on relationships. It depends on a child trusting the adult in the room, and on that adult having the skills and the support to be worthy of that trust. What the past decade has been most effectively destroying, through screens and algorithms and the slow erosion of face-to-face life, is precisely our capacity for that kind of relationship. Schools remain one of the few places where children learn how to live alongside people who think differently from themselves. These are not secondary outcomes of education. They are among its most important purposes.

If we want children to develop these capacities in light of the changes to their world, we must first create schools where the adults are supported to develop their skills and educational approaches. And if we hope to build an Israel that is resilient, innovative, and able to thrive in an increasingly interconnected world, that work must begin by investing in the people who shape its future every day.

Every investment we make in teachers is an investment in the future of Israel which will be shaped by the children sitting in our classrooms today. Supporting teachers is not separate from supporting students. It is the foundation of supporting students. Teachers need teachers too.

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Are you clear on the future your organization is actually working toward—or are you operating under pressure without a defined direction? Prophecy helps mission-driven leaders step out of reactive mode and into a structured process of visioning, strategic clarity, and decision-making.

Through high-impact, future-oriented workshops—from 90-minute conversations to multi-day strategic sprints—we help teams align around shared values, explore plausible futures, and translate ambition into concrete priorities and next steps. If you’re ready to move from urgency to purpose, we’d welcome the opportunity to bring Prophecy to your organization. Contact: shalom@seekprophecy.com

But first, let’s get to know the person behind the piece: Sarah Bunin Benor

Sarah Bunin Benor is Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies at Hebrew Union College and Adjunct Professor in the University of Southern California Linguistics Department. She received her B.A. from Columbia University and her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Stanford University. Benor’s scholarship focuses on Jewish languages, sociolinguistics, names, Yiddish, Hebrew, Ladino, and American Jewish life, and she has published widely on these topics.

Benor is the author of Becoming Frum: How Newcomers Learn the Language and Culture of Orthodox Judaism and co-author of Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps. She founded and directs the HUC Jewish Language Project, which includes the Jewish Language Website, the Jewish English Lexicon, and the Heritage Words podcast. Her work seeks to document, interpret, and transmit the linguistic diversity of Jewish communities, drawing attention to both endangered Jewish languages and evolving forms of Jewish English.

Read Prophecy on Kindle or Paperback

(We’re taking one more moment of your time to make sure you know that Prophecy is an actual journal available in an actual physical book! You can order it in print in Israel through Bookpod and worldwide through Amazon — as well as any and all of the ebook stores (Kobo, Apple, Everand, Etc) as well as Kindle.)

Preventing the Loss of Jewish Traditions

By Sarah Bunin Benor

If you ask the most educated Jews how many languages the Jewish people have spoken throughout history, they will likely guess a handful. Hebrew, Yiddish; maybe Ladino. Perhaps they’ve heard of Judeo-Arabic.

But dozens of unique Jewish languages have developed over the last two thousand years. In Iran alone, the Jewish communities of Kashan, Esfahan, and Shiraz each maintained their own specific languages; I recall how I felt a mix of excitement and alarm when I learned about all this. So much Jewish linguistic diversity existed, yet it was all disappearing so quickly. We must document these languages, I thought, and we need to do it now. That insight led me to establish the Jewish Language Project at Hebrew Union College in 2020, with two goals in mind: raising awareness about Jewish linguistic diversity and documenting endangered languages before their last speakers die.

A language is considered endangered when it is no longer transmitted between generations; a language with 50,000 speakers is still endangered if every one of them is over the age of eighty. By that standard, nearly every longstanding Jewish language outside Hebrew (and Yiddish in Haredi communities) is now endangered. There has been a recent boom of interest in Ladino, Judeo-Spanish spoken among Sephardim for centuries, but transmission from parent to child has virtually ceased. Judeo-Arabic in its Iraqi, Syrian, Tunisian, Moroccan, and Yemenite dialects survives mainly among elderly immigrants; their children usually know only a few words or phrases. Judeo-Amazigh (spoken in the Atlas Mountains of North Africa) also survives in fragments. Bukharian, Juhuri, Judeo-Georgian, Jewish Neo-Aramaic, Jewish Malayalam (the Jewish languages of Central Asia, the Caucasus, Kurdistan, and South Asia) are in similar straits.

Even more stunning cases: in Ghardaia, Algeria, a community with a high incidence of hereditary deafness developed a distinct Jewish sign language over generations. Yet documentation of that language amounts to a single master’s thesis. Its last signers are alive today, but when they are gone, a form of human expression that existed nowhere else on earth will disappear. The scope of what will end when Jewish languages die out is so much bigger than most people imagine, and any opportunities to prevent it are rapidly dwindling in our world today.

The loss goes beyond the languages themselves. Language is a window into the very community that spoke it, like the rings of a tree that you can see only when you examine a cross-section. Speakers of Hulaula (Jewish Neo-Aramaic from Sanandaj, Iran) describe a pregnant woman as bakhta tre gyane, which means, “a woman with two souls,” which carries an influence from regional folklore. In Ladino, “Sunday” is al-had, “the first” (day). Sephardic Jews preferred this Arabic word over the Spanish domingo to avoid calling Sunday the “Lord’s” day. The German word for “bless,” segenen, also means to make the “sign” (the cross). To avoid this Christian connotation, Yiddish speakers kept a Judeo-Italian word some of them remembered from their grandparents who migrated from Italy to Germany: benedice. This word became bentsh, which to this day many Jews still use to describe reciting Birkat Hamazon after a meal.

Jewish languages reveal not only the delicate historical relations between Jews and non-Jews, but also the importance of holidays and texts in Jewish communities. In Judeo-Arabic, two people of strikingly different heights walking together are lulav we’etrog. In Judeo-Italian, mezuza refers not only to the sacred parchment on the doorpost but also to a “beautiful woman” because both are something a man might want to kiss. In the Papiamentu (a Caribbean creole) spoken in Curaçao, the phrase for giving charity is parti Purim, “share/give Purim,” referring to the obligation to give to the poor on Purim. In each case, religious customs are integrated into the idiom of daily life.

Steven Lowenstein distinguished between the Great Tradition (Torah, liturgy, the shared structures of Jewish practice) and the many Little Traditions, the texture of how communities lived within those structures. The Great Tradition has been documented extensively for centuries. But the Little Traditions are disappearing with little record: the music, the food, the proverbs. Despite being called “little,” these are massive losses to Jewish culture and society. They are windows into the history of the Jewish people, in all our commonality and diversity.

The loss of languages stems from centuries of acculturation, externally and internally motivated, plus migration and genocide. Most of the communities that spoke these languages were uprooted from their societies, and therefore Jewish populations are mostly concentrated in new regions like Israel and the United States. Immigrants tended to speak their ancestral languages at home, and in many cases their children became bilingual. But some children, and most grandchildren, shifted to the new local language and only retain heritage words (the phrases from the immigrant language that survived). The current is moving in one direction. We cannot reverse it, but we can adjust our sails.

If we do not act, what future is waiting for us? A Jewish world in fifty years will have preserved the “Great Tradition,” as it has for centuries, but it will lose the vast majority of its “Little Traditions.” We will have lost not only the languages, but also the sense of peoplehood that comes from knowing the full breadth of what Jewish life has been. That will be a loss for Jews whose traditions are erased. But it will also be a loss for the rest of us, who will be missing pieces in our mosaic of the Jewish past.

So what can we do to prevent the destruction of this great linguistic diversity?

1. Document first, and do it now. Linguists working with living elders can record, transcribe, and analyze these languages before the last speakers die. This is an emergency intervention available only within the next two decades. If we don’t record these speakers now, we will lose our opportunity forever.

2. Make resources accessible. Documentation that lives only within academic archives does not reach most people who might make use of them. Online materials, freely available, can. The infrastructure exists, but it needs more investment to extend it to dozens of languages not yet adequately covered. Dictionaries with audio recordings, subtitled videos, and other learning materials should be available to anyone who seeks out their grandparents’ language, or any language that piques their interest.

3. Celebrate heritage words. Most people will not put in the thousands of hours necessary to become fluent in Jewish Malayalam or Lishan Didan. But there are other ways to engage. Heritage words are a powerful entry point. In Juhuro communities from Azerbaijan and Dagestan, most people now speak Russian, Hebrew, or English, but they maintain words like qoqol, “matzah,” and soghboshi, “thank you.” In the Baghdadi Jewish diaspora, no matter what language they speak, they compliment the cook after a meal with Ashtidek, “long live your hands.” What did your dad call his grandfather? How did your grandmother tell a baby she was cute? Heritage words are linguistic heirlooms we can maintain if we choose to. Ask about them before you can’t. Add them to the Jewish English Lexicon. Share them with your communities and, especially, with your descendants.

4. Engage through the arts. The Jewish Language Project has commissioned artists to incorporate these languages into their creative work. Miléna Kartowski-Aïach recorded an elderly Moroccan immigrant in Israel singing in Judeo-Amazigh, a language almost no one alive still speaks, and produced a past-meets-present video. Galeet Dardashti recorded songs in Judeo-Hamedani and Judeo-Esfahani, languages her own ancestors spoke that she had never known. Ruben Shimanov brings his ancestral Bukharian into his Hebrew, Arabic, and Farsi calligraphy. Music, food, film, visual art: these are much more than acts of nostalgia. They are ways of keeping living material in the world, of engaging people who might have no other interest in Jewish community.

5. Bring languages into Jewish institutions. Our synagogues, schools, summer camps, and communal organizations can be enriched through heritage words, language-infused arts, and “language appreciation.” A Jewish day school in Los Angeles or New York whose students come from Iranian, Syrian, and Ashkenazi families has an opportunity to treat all those cultures equally, not as tokenized variations on a default, as equal inheritances within a shared people.

Over the past six years, the HUC Jewish Language Project has made progress on these five interventions, in collaboration with many scholars and organizations. But there is so much more to be done. With sufficient resources, we believe it will be possible to document all known Jewish language varieties by 2045. After that, it will be too late. We need partners across the Jewish philanthropic world willing to treat this as the urgent situation it is.

One might ask, who will appreciate these interventions? First, the native speakers and their descendants.

I think about Sabrina. She always spoke Farsi with her father. Then, he developed dementia and started speaking words she couldn’t understand. Soon, she realized he was reverting to his childhood language, Judeo-Kashani, the distinct language of the Jews of Kashan, Iran. One she had never heard. As he descended deeper into dementia, she took over 100 pages of notes. Now, Sabrina is working on the Jewish Language Project’s dictionary of Judeo-Kashani as a way of memorializing her father and the world his ancestors carried.

Documenting and engaging with Jewish languages also helps to address several crucial issues facing Jews today:

• Antisemitism. Engaging with Jewish languages dispels a common misconception that Jews are all from Europe. The Jewish Language Project’s social media is filled with comments like, “I had no idea Jews spoke [Arabic/Georgian/Malayalam...].” Many posts engender conversations among Jews and non-Jews who would not otherwise interact. A video about Judeo-Tuyserkani attracted Israelis, Iranian Muslims and Zoroastrians, and people of many countries in a rare, (mostly) non-political conversation. They debated the resemblance of Judeo-Tuyserkani to related languages, like Farsi, Zoroastrian Dari, and Kermanshahi Kurdish. They thanked us for expanding their understanding of Jews. As one commenter wrote, “We should be investing millions of dollars in work like this.” Highlighting Jewish diversity is a powerful defense against antisemitism.

• Peoplehood. When community leaders emphasize “Jewish peoplehood,” they often address only the America-Israel relationship. Peoplehood should mean the full range of Jewish experience. Historically, that includes Yemen, Ethiopia, and China. Today, India, Ukraine, Argentina, and anywhere Jewish life persists. Learning about Jewish languages past and present helps Jews feel more connected to and responsible for far-away Jewish communities.

• Engagement. Language is one of the doors through which people find their way into Jewish identity and community. On a Jewish linguistic and culinary walking tour in Brooklyn, I met a young woman from Baltimore. I asked her why she traveled so far. She said she was not interested in religious life, and she was tired of politics. She followed the Jewish Language Project on social media and wanted to meet others who shared her interest.

Young people contact us all the time: linguistics students, grandchildren trying to understand something an elder said, people finally discovering that their family’s way of being Jewish has a name. They all have a thirst for knowledge about who their people were and how they spoke. Through the Jewish Language Project, each of them has found something they could not access if no one had thought to preserve it.

Some of the last speakers of most of these languages are still alive today, but this window won’t stay open much longer. We must document Jewish linguistic diversity now, share widely, and make space in Jewish life for the full breadth of who we have been and who we are. This is how we prevent the destruction: not by stopping the current, but by making sure that what it carries does not disappear beneath it.

More Prophecy awaits! Get the full issue on your ebook reader or in paperback today:

Read all of Prophecy today

Can’t afford it? No worries! Articles from each issue, published quarterly, will be shared on a weekly basis for Substack subscribers. Subscribe to get at least one article per week, delivered to your inbox.

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Are you clear on the future your organization is actually working toward—or are you operating under pressure without a defined direction? Prophecy helps mission-driven leaders step out of reactive mode and into a structured process of visioning, strategic clarity, and decision-making.

Through high-impact, future-oriented workshops—from 90-minute conversations to multi-day strategic sprints—we help teams align around shared values, explore plausible futures, and translate ambition into concrete priorities and next steps. If you’re ready to move from urgency to purpose, we’d welcome the opportunity to bring Prophecy to your organization. Contact: shalom@seekprophecy.com

On the theoretical and practical work done by Iqbal Akhtar to heal the reciprocal wounds that have shattered Muslim-Jewish dialogue since October 7th. He proposes a new religious language based on mutual recognition, theological honesty, and sustained relationship amid profound disagreement.

But first, let’s get to know the person behind the piece: Iqbal Akhtar

Professor Iqbal S. Akhtar is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Politics & International Relations at Florida International University. His scholarship focuses on Muslim communities in the Western Indian Ocean world, Islam and philanthropy, Jain studies, and Muslim–Jewish relations. Akhtar completed his doctoral work at the University of Edinburgh on the Khoja community of Tanzania and is the author of The Khoja of Tanzania. He directs programs in Western Indian Ocean Studies at FIU and has held roles in applied and chaplaincy-related religious studies.

Akhtar is the co-founder of Miami Interfaith, a South Florida Jewish–Muslim dialogue network created to sustain interreligious relationship and civic trust, and the East-West Foundation. His recent work engages the concept of covenantal pluralism and questions of interfaith religious freedom, including the volume Covenantal Pluralism. Through academic research, public writing, and interfaith initiatives, Akhtar asks how religious communities can remain faithful to their own covenants while building durable structures of mutual recognition and shared responsibility.

Read Prophecy on Kindle or Paperback

(We’re taking one more moment of your time to make sure you know that Prophecy is an actual journal available in an actual physical book! You can order it in print in Israel through Bookpod and worldwide through Amazon — as well as any and all of the ebook stores (Kobo, Apple, Everand, Etc) as well as Kindle.)

Preventing the Destruction of Muslim-Jewish Relations

By Iqbal Akhtar

What disheartened me after the attacks of October 7th, 2023, was to see the hatred of Jews and Israel routinely expressed in some of my WhatsApp groups of Muslims. I grew up in Louisiana and went to a private school where there were no Black kids, which was not because there were none in the city. My closest friends were Black and Jewish Americans, who came to our aid after 11 September 2001. Those horrific attacks were the second time that America had been attacked after Pearl Harbor, and we thought Guantanamo would be our Manzanar. Jewish advocacy groups came to our collective aid as American Muslims and helped to secure our rights.

Muslims and Jews in America have been in dialogue for more than two decades since. Many of us had believed that something was genuinely changing. The Abraham Accords had shown that coexistence was achievable at the political level, that governments long defined by hostility could choose mutual benefit instead. Whatever their limitations and controversies, they reflected a recognition that Jewish and Muslim communities could build relationships of real value. For those of us working at the people-to-people level, they felt like permission – an argument, however imperfect, that the direction of travel could change.

At the community level, the openness was tangible. My organization, Miami Interfaith, hosted joint learning sessions where imams and rabbis studied texts together, and more and more young people from both faiths joined shared social-action projects. There was a palpable sense that a new generation was ready to move beyond old hostilities and build something new.

Then came October 7th.

Hamas’s attack on Israeli civilians reactivated centuries of accumulated memory: pogroms, expulsions, the systematic extermination of European Jewry. When parts of the Muslim world responded with celebration, equivocation, or an immediate pivot to Palestinian grievances, many Jews felt confirmed in their darkest fear: that they remain alone, and that the solidarity they had been promised was conditional. For years, Jewish communities had been told they were partners in a broad coalition against bigotry, that the movements opposing Islamophobia, racism, and xenophobia would stand against antisemitism too. When allies in those movements fell silent, equivocated, or recast the murder of Jewish civilians as justified resistance, the lesson many Jews drew was that such solidarity reaches them only until it carries a cost, only until standing with Jews requires saying something uncomfortable about Israel.

For Muslims, Israel’s military campaign in Gaza represented the culmination of decades of occupation and dispossession. Watching Jewish communities fundraise, rally, and resist any criticism of Israeli policy, many felt confirmed in their own fear: that Muslim and Arab lives simply matter less, and that Jewish commitment to universal human rights stops at a border.

Both perceptions contain truths that neither community wants to acknowledge about the other or about itself. Both are also distorted by trauma, filtered through media ecosystems designed to maximize outrage, and stripped of the context that might allow understanding without requiring agreement. The tragedy is that each community’s genuine pain has become invisible to the other, obscured by the very intensity of feeling that makes recognition so necessary.

Meanwhile, the infrastructure of our relationship – painstakingly built by rabbis and imams, academics and activists, ordinary people who believed coexistence was possible – has been devastated. Students who once studied together now avoid each other’s eyes. Colleagues who collaborated on grants refuse to share platforms. Interfaith programs built over decades have collapsed in weeks. The bridges they built are burning.

This is structural danger, and not confined to two communities, and I want to be clear about why I believe it goes beyond temporary dysfunction: The Jewish-Muslim relationship has become one of the central testing grounds for whether deep religious and cultural difference can be held without violence, and its collapse feeds a wider crisis of pluralism now visible across the democratic world. When this relationship breaks, it does not break in isolation. It confirms a story many people already want to believe: that difference is dangerous, that the only stable society is a homogeneous one, that the neighbor who is raised differently is a threat to be managed rather than a person to be known.

Part of what makes the present moment so combustible is that the conflict has stopped being only about Israelis and Palestinians, or even only about Jews and Muslims. It has become a vessel into which others pour grievances that have little to do with the Middle East. On campuses and in city councils far from Gaza, “Israel” and “Palestine” function as proxies in domestic arguments about power, race, history, and belonging. Specific Jews and specific Muslims – with their particular memories, fears, and obligations – vanish into these abstractions. A frightened Jewish student becomes a symbol of empire; a grieving Muslim becomes a symbol of extremism. Once people have been turned into symbols, they can no longer be encountered, only deployed.

This is precisely the failure that covenantal pluralism is meant to resist. By covenantal pluralism I do not mean the thin tolerance that asks each community to soften its convictions until all friction disappears, nor the relativism that treats every commitment as interchangeable. I mean a form of relationship that binds distinct parties which exists across traditions: the Jewish brit, the Medinan mīthāq, and, in the tradition I have learned the most from in this respect, the Jain discipline of anekāntavāda, the recognition that truth has many sides. Each of these traditions takes the covenantal relationship as a means to bind themselves to one another and to bind community to community across differences. Each of these forms of covenant share two components, two faces. One is a structure of law and institutional architecture that protects freedom of conscience from the top down; the other is a culture of relationship, built from the ground up, in which neighbors come to know and hold themselves accountable to one another.

What October 7th and its aftermath have damaged most is the second face, the lived culture of relationship, and without it the first cannot hold. The legal architecture of a pluralistic society can stand intact on paper but falls apart in practice if the human capacity that animates it dies. That is the danger I fear: not a bad season in interfaith relations, but the erosion of the very thing that makes pluralism possible at all. The permanent disappearance of the relational infrastructure that makes repair possible.

If that infrastructure collapses, our communities will lose the ability to see each other as complex human beings. The result will be a future marked by deeper isolation, sharper suspicion, and a diminished capacity to advocate for the shared values – justice, peace – that the world so badly needs.

The past offers an uncomfortable mirror. Fourteen centuries of Jewish-Muslim encounter – from the Prophet Muhammad’s mīthāq, the covenant with the Jewish tribes of Medina, through the intellectual flowering of the medieval period, to the complex negotiations of the Ottoman centuries – do not add up to a golden age of harmony. That narrative is sentimental and false. The relationship between Muslims and Jews was often contentious, always hierarchical, and shot through with structural inequality. The classical framework of dhimma (“protected” status for non-Muslims under Islamic rule) offered real protection and enabled genuine flourishing. It also imposed permanent second-class standing. That is the honest history.

And yet, within that complicated history, something remarkable happened: Judaism and Islam shaped each other. Maimonides – the towering figure of medieval Jewish thought, whose Guide for the Perplexed shaped Jewish philosophy for eight centuries – wrote in Judeo-Arabic, was trained in Islamic philosophy, and served as court physician to Saladin’s vizier. His synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy with rabbinic tradition was the product of sustained engagement with the Muslim intellectual world. He was not an exception. Virtually every major Jewish thinker of the medieval period – Saadia Gaon, Solomon ibn Gabirol, Judah Halevi – was formed by centuries of creative encounter with Islam. They were who they were because of that encounter, not in spite of it.

That history does not cancel the damage of the present; it illuminates what is being lost. When this relationship breaks down – really breaks down, structurally and institutionally – both traditions lose access to a conversation that made each of them more fully itself. The stakes are civilizational.

So what can still be done? I do not offer a program. I want to point instead to the places where agency still exists.

The first is the most obvious and the most resisted: Jews and Muslims need to remain in the same room. The goal is not agreement, and it is certainly not a false reconciliation that papers over genuine grief. It is simply to stay in physical proximity, to do the harder work of hearing each other’s pain without immediately converting it into evidence for a conviction already held. In the short term, Muslim institutions, Jewish organizations, and university administrators can take concrete steps to protect this relational infrastructure: funding and promoting the interfaith programs that already exist, creating protected spaces for difficult conversations on campus, and publicly affirming the value of Muslim-Jewish engagement even amid profound disagreement.

The second is theological, and I say this as someone who believes theology matters in practice. The classical Islamic framework for relating to Jews as dhimma, protection within hierarchy, cannot serve as the basis for contemporary engagement. Whatever its historical achievements, it assumed Muslim political sovereignty over non-Muslim populations, a situation that no longer holds in most of the world and that cannot model relations between minority communities in pluralistic democracies. Contemporary engagement must rest on equality and mutual recognition.

The Qur’an’s concept of taʿāruf (mutual recognition among peoples and nations) offers a framework of genuine partnership rather than tolerance handed down from above. Drawing on it, I have been developing what I call the Mīthāq al-Taʿāruf, the Covenant of Mutual Recognition. Modeled on the Catholic Church’s 1965 declaration Nostra Aetate, which transformed Catholic-Jewish relations, the Mīthāq proposes a fundamental reorientation of Islamic teaching about Judaism. It would affirm the ongoing validity of the Jewish covenant with God, repudiate antisemitism as incompatible with Islamic principles, acknowledge Muslim complicity in Jewish suffering, and call for a new relationship of equality and collaboration for the common good. This is a long-term project. It asks Muslim religious leadership to do what Catholic leadership did: reckon honestly with a history of harm. That reckoning has barely begun.

The third is addressed to Jewish communities, and it is harder to say. Islam has fourteen centuries of experience with political sovereignty, with all that entails: wrestling with the challenge of exercising state power in accordance with religious principle, the ethics of force, and the obligations of rulers to the ruled. Jewish tradition developed mainly under conditions of exile and minority status, and its resources for thinking about power are comparatively thin. The establishment of Israel in 1948 created an unprecedented situation: for the first time in two millennia, Jews wielded sovereign political power, including military force. The Islamic jurisprudence of governance and warfare, a sophisticated tradition addressing exactly these questions, offers resources that Israeli Jewish thought has barely begun to engage. An honest Jewish-Muslim engagement would include that conversation. At scale, it has not yet happened.

The Abraham Accords opened a door at the governmental and economic levels. What happens at the people-to-people level is decided elsewhere by rabbis and imams who choose whether to pick up the phone, by university administrators who choose whether to protect dialogue spaces or let them collapse, by parents who choose what to teach their children about the people across the boundary, and by ordinary Jews and Muslims who decide whether the other’s pain is real or merely political.

To prevent the destruction of Muslim-Jewish Relations, and of pluralism as a whole, we will need to decide that staying in a relationship is a religious obligation. Miami Interfaith has now brought more than 250 Jews and Muslims across South Florida into sustained dialogue even, and especially, when dialogue seemed impossible.

We are committed to remaining in the room. The question now is whether enough people, in enough rooms, are willing to do the same, and whether they will have the institutional support to keep doing it before the infrastructure of a workable relationship collapses beyond repair.

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Are you clear on the future your organization is actually working toward—or are you operating under pressure without a defined direction? Prophecy helps mission-driven leaders step out of reactive mode and into a structured process of visioning, strategic clarity, and decision-making.

Through high-impact, future-oriented workshops—from 90-minute conversations to multi-day strategic sprints—we help teams align around shared values, explore plausible futures, and translate ambition into concrete priorities and next steps. If you’re ready to move from urgency to purpose, we’d welcome the opportunity to bring Prophecy to your organization. Contact: shalom@seekprophecy.com

In that Chen Mandel-Edrei exposes how the language developed in intellectual circles has shifted our mindset into destructive deconstructive certainties as opposed to opening new opportunities for curious creative engagement. She urges the recovery of words capable of naming complexity and constructing a new world.

But first, let’s get to know the person behind the piece: Chen Mandel-Edrei

Dr. Chen Mandel-Edrei is a scholar of Jewish literature, cultural history, and modernity. She is a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in Israel, with appointments including the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and collaborations with institutes devoted to the study of Hasidism and modern Jewish culture. Mandel-Edrei earned her B.A. and M.A. in Hebrew Literature from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and her Ph.D. in Jewish Studies and Comparative Literature from the University of Maryland, where her dissertation analyzed 19th-century Hasidic hagiographic writing.

Her research focuses on nineteenth-century Yiddish popular literature, Hasidic storytelling, and the ways literary forms shape religious and political imagination in the modern period. Her forthcoming academic work, including Hagiography in the Age of Mass Publishing: Hasidic Writing and the Making of Jewish Modernity, examines how Hasidic authors engaged and adapted modern philosophical, aesthetic, and political ideas. In public and scholarly writing, Mandel-Edrei is particularly concerned with the responsibilities of intellectuals, the limits of critique, and the need for language capable of deconstruction as well as reconstruction.

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Preventing Destruction by Reclaiming Language

By Chen Mandel-Edrei

My son asked me a few weeks ago if he could go with some friends to work on a farm. He did not know many details, just that one of his friends wanted to spend a day out in the Shomron (Samaria), help with some agricultural work, and see some sheep. He mentioned it the way teenagers mention things: in passing, as if the only question were logistics.

I did not answer lightly. Neither my son nor the friend who invited him knew much about the farm or the broader phenomenon of which many such farms are part. But I knew enough to recognize that this was not simply a day of agricultural labor. Many of these projects exist within a reality shaped by settlement expansion, land disputes, and the gradual displacement of Palestinian communities. Not through the spectacular violence that makes headlines, but through quieter forms of domination: restricted movement, shrinking access to land, and mounting pressure on livelihoods.

My son did not know about these things. Not because anyone had deliberately concealed them, but because the culture around him had already provided a ready-made language for understanding that landscape: a language filled with phrases such as “working the land,” “Eretz Yisrael HaShleima (Complete Israel),” and “values.” A language that leaves little room for the human beings already living there, and, therefore, little room for responsibility toward them.

As an academic working in the discipline of Literature, what frightens me most is the gap between the language we use and the reality it is supposed to describe. Language does not simply reflect the world; it determines which parts of the world become visible to us and which remain outside our field of vision. A language that ignores, simplifies, or flattens the reality experienced by other human beings allows us to evade responsibility and accountability. It can become, from all sides, a precondition for violence.

The challenge, however, is not solved by simply rejecting inherited languages or exposing their failures. Critique is necessary. The ability to question the categories through which we understand the world is one of the great achievements of modern intellectual life. But critique alone cannot sustain a moral world. If all language is only a mechanism of power, if every category is only a hidden form of domination, then we lose the ability to name suffering, to recognize responsibility, and to build anything together. This is the tension that has occupied me since October 7th.

When the war broke out, I found myself unable to write. As an academic, that is unusual. I was afraid of speaking too quickly, of finding words that could not do justice to the complexity of what was happening. When my sister-in-law, whose husband (my brother) is a career officer, asked me how I could question the way we were attacking Gaza while people were risking their lives to protect us, she was right about something important: my freedom to sit and think depended on others’ willingness to act. I did not want to betray them. So I remained silent.

Others did not. A friend told me that when the hostages were brought up during a seminar he attended in Maryland, a professor responded: “Who is a hostage? What do we even mean by that word?” There is a place for that question. Categories are never neutral. Examining how terms are constructed and whose experiences they include or exclude is one of the important tasks of scholarship. But there are moments when the dissolution of meaning itself becomes a refusal of responsibility. While families were waiting for news of their loved ones taken on October 7th, the question of whether the word “hostage” could retain any stable meaning is a different kind of violence: the kind that treats the suspension of meaning as intellectual virtue and leaves the people who most need language to act stranded in silence.

This tendency appears on the other side as well. An Israeli colleague who shared my concern later sent me a call for papers on “the problems of deconstruction theory.” The framing remained entirely external: where critics of Israel had gone wrong, how deconstruction had failed. There was no question of what responsibility we, as practitioners of critique, might bear toward the realities our concepts engage. The discussion still operated within critique’s self-reflexive loop. It was not asking how to build anything beyond it.

We have developed highly sophisticated theoretical tools for taking things apart, but far fewer for putting things back together. The postmodern tradition rightly showed that perspectives are partial and that power shapes what is named or silenced. These are important insights. But in moments of moral urgency and collapse, this intellectual toolkit often leaves us without adequate resources for action.

The question, then, is not whether we should abandon critique. We should not. The question is what comes after critique.

Part of what sustains critique without construction is distance – not necessarily geographical, but distance from consequence. Distance is not itself a problem. It enables forms of critical reflection that proximity can obscure. The problem arises when distance becomes separation from responsibility, allowing concepts to eclipse the people they describe. It is easier to dissolve categories when one does not have to live with the consequences.

When scholars in Maryland or London or Berlin interrogate every category and assumption, the effects of those conceptual moves are often borne elsewhere, by people living the realities under discussion.

In Israel and Palestine, nothing is distant. The conflict is not an object of study; it is the medium through which many of us move through the world. That proximity is often treated as a liability, as if closeness to the wound disqualifies one from thinking clearly about it. I have come to believe the opposite. Proximity may not replace critical thinking, but it introduces a dimension that abstraction alone cannot provide: accountability. It reminds us that the categories we analyze are not merely intellectual objects. They are frameworks through which real people encounter one another.

This does not mean that those closest to a conflict automatically understand it better. Proximity can also produce blindness. But it does mean that proximity creates an obligation that cannot be postponed: to hold complexity together with responsibility for what our thinking enables or prevents.

This is something Israel knows how to do when it allows itself to. The ethos of the “Startup Nation” rests on a simple principle: begin with a clear vision of the future, then navigate the complexity required to reach it. Startups plant a flag: this is what the world looks like when this challenge has been addressed. They encounter obstacles, competing interests, and unexpected consequences; they revise their methods and sometimes abandon their initial assumptions. Yet complexity does not become a reason to abandon the destination itself. It becomes the material through which they navigate towards it.

This is precisely what our intellectual culture has increasingly struggled to do. We have learned to regard any fixed destination as suspicious, as if commitment itself were evidence of naïveté or domination. The critique is not wrong: every vision of the future contains assumptions, exclusions, and potential harms. But the answer cannot be the abandonment of vision itself. The alternative to dangerous certainty is not endless uncertainty.

The challenge is to develop the capacity to commit without becoming blind; to act without pretending to possess complete knowledge; to name values while remaining accountable to those who experience the consequences of those values differently.

In other words, the task is not to replace deconstruction with construction. It is to move from deconstruction toward responsible construction.

This is not a new historical problem. Milan Kundera traced a similar dynamic in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. The people who welcomed Soviet power in Czechoslovakia were the intellectuals, members of the cultural elite, people capable of sophisticated critiques of the societies around them. They knew, in precise and eloquent terms, what was wrong with the world they inhabited. What they could not do was articulate and protect what their imperfect world nevertheless defended: the right of individuals to disagree, to remain uncertain, and still retain dignity. The danger Kundera identifies is not that intellectuals think too much, but that they fail to recognize what their own critiques carry at their radical edge. When critique becomes detached from responsibility, it can destroy more than it reveals. The power vacuum does not remain empty; someone else fills it with their own ideas.

What frightens me is not revolution but the slower version: the normalization of simplified frameworks, the quiet shrinking of the space where moral complexity is still permissible. When people dismissed the protest movement with a single label (”Kaplanistim“), a term that often casts its subjects as outsider anarchists and enemies of the state, they flattened complexity: a diverse movement and its varied positions became a single category. Same with other labels, other words we use instead of naming people. Once a category replaces a person, conversation becomes impossible, and so does accountability to the human being behind the category.

It happens in social settings before it happens in institutions, and in institutions before it becomes the atmosphere we breathe, no longer distinguishable from reality itself.

The academy cannot watch this happen from a comfortable remove. If it offers only tools for critique and none for construction, others will fill the void. The danger is a future in which the language is overwhelmed by the simplifying slogans of populists and demagogues, and by the violence such simplifications can unleash. The signs of this future are already visible in the present: they emerge wherever intellectuals abandon the task of offering something meaningful to build toward. The ideas that shape public life do not remain in seminar rooms; they filter into teacher training, curricula, and the assumptions children absorb without noticing. When intellectuals fail to offer meaningful alternatives, people turn instead to ideologies that promise certainty by defining who does not belong.

The task, then, is not to abandon critique, but to move beyond it: toward forms of thought and practice that preserve complexity while still allowing commitment, responsibility, and a shared sense of purpose.

There are early signs of attempts to do this work emerging in public and intellectual life in Israel. The Smol HaEmuni (the Believing Left) and Bnei Avraham, among others, try to hold religious identity and democratic commitment together, to remain Zionist without turning that into a license for erasure. They point to the possibility of naming a direction without collapsing complexity or negating the experience of others. We in Israel, Palestine, and those of us immersed in its conflict from elsewhere, carry a responsibility to build up this way of thinking: a language that can hold complexity without using it as an alibi for inaction.

I have been largely silent for four years. But silence accumulates, and accumulation is one of the ways intellectual and moral foreclosure happens. I now understand that this absence is itself part of the crisis, and that responding to it is not someone else’s task.

My son did not go to the farm. We talked about it. He listened. I do not know how much of what I said he will carry forward. But the conversation was possible because there was trust, and because there was still space for disagreement that did not collapse into categories. Because we found the words. That is something. It is where responsibility begins.

More Prophecy awaits! Get the full issue on your ebook reader or in paperback today:

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Are you clear on the future your organization is actually working toward—or are you operating under pressure without a defined direction? Prophecy helps mission-driven leaders step out of reactive mode and into a structured process of visioning, strategic clarity, and decision-making.

Through high-impact, future-oriented workshops—from 90-minute conversations to multi-day strategic sprints—we help teams align around shared values, explore plausible futures, and translate ambition into concrete priorities and next steps. If you’re ready to move from urgency to purpose, we’d welcome the opportunity to bring Prophecy to your organization. Contact: shalom@seekprophecy.com

But first, let’s get to know the person behind the piece: Howard Lovy

Howard Lovy is a journalist, editor, author, and podcast producer with more than forty years of experience in publishing. He is a developmental editor specializing in Jewish and Israeli manuscripts and serves as nonfiction editor at Judith Magazine. Lovy also works as a podcast host and content producer for the Alliance of Independent Authors and has edited both fiction and nonfiction for a wide range of writers.

Lovy writes the Substack Emet-Truth, where he reflects on Jewish life, antisemitism, publishing, and the struggle to preserve truth in an era of distortion. He is the author of the novel Found and Lost: The Jake and Cait Story and is currently working on Emet: How Jews Can Reclaim Truth in an Era of Lies. His recent work is concerned with how Jewish voices are represented in the literary marketplace and with building independent institutions capable of sustaining serious conversations about Jewish identity and truth.

Read Prophecy on Kindle or Paperback

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Preventing the Dislocation of Jewish Voices

Notes from a conversation with Howard Lovy

Publishing has always been a rough business. Calls don’t get returned. Manuscripts sit on agents’ desks for months. That’s normal, and every author learns to live with it. But over the past few years, in my work as an editor at Judith Magazine and in conversations with authors for my book, Emet: How Jews Can Reclaim Truth in an Era of Lies, I’ve noticed a different pattern. Jewish manuscripts go to the slush pile with no explanation. Jewish book events get canceled. Agents who used to respond now go quiet. It’s a silence that repeats across enough writers in enough different situations that it stops looking like a rough market and starts looking like something else.

What I hear, over and over, is some version of the same sentence: This is not the right time for your voice. I’ve heard it said to established authors and to debut writers, to the political and the apolitical. It doesn’t matter what their background is, so long as they’re Jewish and not openly hostile to the Jewish State. The ones I feel for most are the young authors just trying to break in. They have no platform, no track record, no leverage to push back. They’re told that the publishing world is committed to diverse voices. It doesn’t take long to figure out that Jews are not the diversity they have in mind. But it doesn’t stop at manuscripts.

Earlier this year, Judith published Teme Ring and Susan Blumberg-Kason’s piece, “The Great Betrayal” about what’s happening at the local indie bookstore. The news is worse than I’d expected. Jewish authors who made it through the publishing process aren’t being promoted. Books that exist, that were published, that are sitting in warehouses, aren’t finding shelf space. The silencing happens throughout the supply chain.

Of course, there are the other Jews. The industry hides the silencing by pointing to the anti-Zionist Jewish writers, the Peter Beinarts of the world, and saying: see, we do publish Jews. It’s a form of editorial curation, a decision made at the institutional level about which Jewish voices count as the Jewish voices worth hearing. The message to the reading public is: here are the Jews you should listen to. The others, apparently, are the problem.

What’s driving this isn’t ignorance about what readers want. The evidence is right there. When We See You Again, Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin’s account of their son Hersh’s kidnapping and murder, hit the New York Times bestseller list. This is not a Holocaust memoir. It’s a story about right now. Former hostage Eli Sharabi’s memoir hit the best seller list too. People bought these books. It turns out that the reading public is a lot more willing to read Jewish and Israeli books than agents and acquisitions editors assumed. The marginalization of Jewish voices is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What’s driving it is fear of controversy. Publishers and booksellers don’t want protesters at the door. It’s easier to go along with the assumption that Jewish and Israeli voices are a liability than to take on the cost of publishing them. Is this antisemitism in any conscious sense? It doesn’t matter. It functions like antisemitism regardless of intent.

That’s what makes this different from a book ban. A ban is visible, and you can protest a ban. Absence is harder to see, harder to protest, and just as effective.

The conventional wisdom inside publishing, that nobody wants to hear from Jews or Israelis right now, becomes institutional policy. That policy decides what gets published, which decides what gets read, which over time decides what readers believe. A curated version of Jewish life replaces the real one, and Jewish memory, Jewish complexity, and Jewish moral seriousness disappear from the mainstream literary conversation.

The worst case is that this becomes the new normal. Jewish voices speaking honestly about Jewish life get treated as too controversial for the American literary marketplace, and over time that treatment hardens into a simple fact of how publishing works.

So where do we go from here? There are two paths forward, and we need to take both. Either one without the other won’t get us where we need to go.

The first is to build our own. We have a model for this. Ever wonder why the word “Jewish” appears in the names of so many American hospitals? In the early twentieth century, antisemitic barriers limited Jewish access to medical training, employment, and care. So Jewish communities built hospitals of their own. Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, founded in 1902 with funds raised by the Jewish community, was created to provide care to people of any religion or nationality. Many of these institutions eventually became respected and mainstream. What started as a response to exclusion became a contribution to American life.

The same logic applies now. I’m part of conversations about launching a serious Jewish-friendly publishing company with real editorial standards and real reach. Judith Magazine is already doing the Jewish part of this work. So is Prophecy. What I’ve learned from my years with the Alliance of Independent Authors is that the broader publishing architecture has changed in ways that make this kind of thing possible in a way it would not have been even a decade ago. Indie authors have built serious careers without waiting for permission from the old gatekeepers.

Print-on-demand means a new press doesn’t have to gamble everything on large print runs and the hope that bookstores will take a chance on Jewish books. Audiobooks, podcasts, Substacks, and direct-to-reader newsletters have given writers ways to find their audience that bypass the fear of controversy governing the traditional industry. The tools are here. What we need to do is take what we’ve learned from the indie revolution and put it to work for Jewish authors who can’t get a fair hearing through the usual channels.

The second is to build an ecosystem around what we’re publishing. A press without a network behind it is a press shouting into the wind. What I mean by ecosystem is a trusted network of Jewish and Jewish-friendly literary professionals and readers who know how to find each other: editors, agents, publicists, marketers, reviewers, booksellers, event organizers, librarians, donors, book clubs, and authors at every stage of the process.

Some of it already exists. The Never Alone Book Club, launched by Elissa Wald, is one example of Jewish readers and writers finding each other and refusing to wait for permission from the usual literary authorities. The Jewish writers on Substack are another. So are the podcasters and reviewers who still take Jewish books seriously, and the informal networks of editors, agents, and publicists who pass along names and warnings in private.

We need it to be connected. A Jewish manuscript should be able to find its way to a Jewish editor, who can hand it to a Jewish-friendly agent, who can place it with a publisher who won’t flinch, who can get it to a publicist who knows how to reach the readers who want it.

What carries us through this is emet. The word has no clean English translation. It isn’t just factual accuracy. It’s truth as a state of being, as integrity, as reliability, something foundational and unshakeable. We are outnumbered in this information war, and we always have been. But we still have emet. If we stay anchored in it, repeat it, and embody it, it will hold.

For Jewish writers, that means we write the book anyway. We build the institution anyway. We ask the hard question anyway. We stay in the conversation even when the conversation has decided we’re not joining it at the right time. Our job is to strengthen the hands of our authors and insist that their emet be given the chance to be heard.

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Are you clear on the future your organization is actually working toward—or are you operating under pressure without a defined direction? Prophecy helps mission-driven leaders step out of reactive mode and into a structured process of visioning, strategic clarity, and decision-making.

Through high-impact, future-oriented workshops—from 90-minute conversations to multi-day strategic sprints—we help teams align around shared values, explore plausible futures, and translate ambition into concrete priorities and next steps. If you’re ready to move from urgency to purpose, we’d welcome the opportunity to bring Prophecy to your organization. Contact: shalom@seekprophecy.com

But first, let’s get to know the person behind the piece: Maia Zelkha

Maia Zelkha is the editor-in-chief of Yad Mizrah, the first contemporary literary magazine devoted to Sephardic and Mizrahi creative work. Her writing and research focus on modern Jewish identity, diaspora, and cultural theory, and she is a fellow with the Z3 Institute, a Jewish think tank reimagining Jewish peoplehood for the twenty-first century.

Her forthcoming book, Muhammad’s Jewish Wife: The Tumultuous Journey of Safiyyah bint Huyayy and the Jews of Arabia, examines Safiyyah bint Huyayy as a Jewish figure at the heart of Islam’s founding story and how the clash of Jewish and Islamic civilization in the seventh century impacts relations today. Alongside her editorial work, Zelkha writes essays on history, culture, and politics on her substack, @TheFifthGeneration.

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Preventing Judaism from Wasting Away

By Maia Zelkha

Tisha b’Av is the most tragic day of the Jewish calendar, commemorating the destruction of both the First and Second Temples, leading to the Crusades, the expulsion from Spain, and a litany of other catastrophes that have been etched into the soul of the Jewish people. What caused the Second Temple’s destruction, and the misery that followed? The theological explanation that our Sages gave was that the Temple was destroyed not because Rome was powerful, or because the Jews were militarily outmatched, but because the Jewish people had become so consumed with the external world, with wealth and political faction and the performance of religiosity, that they were filled with Sinat Hinam, baseless hatred towards other Jews and therefore themselves. When the Jewish people were so distracted with the various, never-ending conflicts of the external world, it was only a matter of time before the internal spirituality that once united them in purpose and dignity began to wither and decay.

Today, many of us are similarly consumed by the external world, and for good reason: there exists a vast transnational ecosystem that is hostile to our very existence, devoted to producing and disseminating ideas about Jews and Israel that is part of a larger ideological framework of anti-imperialism, postcolonial theory, third worldism, and conspiracy. An enormous network of international institutions, legal campaigns, UN bodies, special rapporteurs, activist networks, hostile academic departments, state media, and propaganda campaigns have made us – a people whose population makes up roughly fifteen million globally – its biggest cipher for fantasy.

We are living the ecological concept called evolutionary arms race; two species continually adapt in response to one another, but in doing so, become trapped in a never ending cycle of escalation, each evolving extreme traits in the pursuit of survival. For instance, rough-skinned newts evolved to produce tetrodotoxin in order to avoid being eaten by garter snakes, but in response, garter snakes evolved a resistance to tetrodotoxin. The more resistant the snakes became, the more toxic the newts evolved.

Like the newt and the garter snake, the Jewish world, and especially the American Jewish world, has evolved an organizational infrastructure in parallel to the one that seeks to destroy us, all in an illusory attempt to resist it. The failures and excesses of each side sustain the fundraising appeals and institutional growth of its counterpart. Every adaptation generates a counter-adaptation. They need each other to evolve.

Enter the failed advocacy industry created in the Jewish world. This industry employs people, attracts donors, holds extravagant galas, produces annual reports, and altogether raises millions of dollars under the banner of solving the “urgent” problems facing the Jewish world today, no matter their colossal failures to actually improve the situation. Especially after October 7th, many of these organizations predominately define these “urgent” issues as misinformation about Israel, or antisemitism. They are deeply focused on engaging with the external world, perhaps out of a sense of obligation to counterbalance the enormity of the hostile transnational network for Palestinian political advocacy.

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I don’t doubt that all of these organizations exist out of good intentions, but I do believe that many of them are driven by an endless quest to be understood: if only the people who hate us knew the facts, then they would love us; if only they knew who we truly are, and everything we’ve been through, then they would be on our side; if only they knew how they’re being brainwashed by misinformation…These are the litany of bargains we tell ourselves that consume so much of our community’s time and resources. It’s all very elaborate theater – the reports, social media posts, fundraisers, and events – that supposedly engages with the external world, but in reality only exists for us. The Jewish world devours these efforts with great desperation and catharsis.

This is all more dangerous than any transnational propaganda network, because the Jewish world is under a fantasy that by engorging these useless organizations, they’re actually doing something productive to sustain and advocate for Jewish life.

For the sake of exemplifying the problem: there is a Jewish organization that exists that uses millions of dollars of funding to place giant, neon-colored billboards in major cities around the U.S. with abrasive and out-of-touch “funny” one-liners plastered across. They do this supposedly to “uplift” other Jews, but more importantly “fight antisemitism through humor.” Rather than conveying to the broader world the depth, dignity, complexity, and humanity of Jewish life, they reduce Jewish identity to a series of one-liner slogans and punchlines that at best are extremely awkward, and at worst extremely offensive. The organization has grown rapidly in recent years, expanding from roughly $600,000 in annual revenue in 2020 to more than $7.1 million in 2024, with nearly all its funding coming from private donors. The President of the organization makes more than $500,000 per year, with every other key employee also making six-figure salaries.

One would expect that in a nonprofit ecosystem so inundated with funding, our outcomes would be more successful. Outcomes, in this case, would mean an actual diminishment of antisemitism, actual institutional delegitimization of lawfare apparatuses, or growing support for Israel in the general public. But by those measures, the record is worse than ever. These problems haven’t diminished. They’ve metastasized. And yet the industry has grown. The endless media watchdogs, counter-narrative operations, antisemitism monitoring bodies, the institutional pressure organizations whose collective budgets run into the hundreds of millions – who all have cultivated donor bases that need to be kept alarmed and engaged and giving, who measure their success by their events held and statements issued, media appearances logged, number of views, reports published, and more. I question why dozens upon dozens of Jewish organizations need to simultaneously exist with the stated goal of “fighting antisemitism,” when so many more dire and existential threats face Jewish life, namely assimilation and financial accessibility to Jewish education.

The bigger question for me is, why do our philanthropic institutions, which have the potential to do so much for the Jewish world, put their money into these kinds of organizations that perpetuate this parasitic cycle in the first place? Our communities grow smaller and smaller; our spiritual health deteriorates; our children assimilate, because they lack real education and connection to our peoplehood (yet the cost of private Jewish education today in the United States is approximately $40,000 per year). We’re throwing money at the wrong things; we’re spending ourselves to death.

In the weeks after the October 7th massacre, the October 8th Jew emerged. Jews who had spent most of their lives barely thinking about their Jewishness, who had not been to a synagogue in a decade (who perhaps didn’t even know what Tisha b’Av was). Suddenly they found themselves awake at 3 a.m. reading about the horrors of October 7th. More than anything, they realized in the most primal and breathtaking way that they were a Jew.

How did this tragedy happen? How is it that so many people in the Jewish world had no connection to Jewish life, history, or spirituality until they were shocked into awareness by barbaric violence? To be clear, I don’t fault any of these people one bit. They couldn’t have known what they didn’t know. But the Sages did not blame Rome for the Temple’s destruction. They blamed themselves, because of how neglected the inner world and unity amongst Jews had become, because of how all their efforts were focused on the external, on Rome and politics and inter-factional divides. The “October 8th Jew” phenomenon is a testament to the consequences of decades of so much philanthropic capital and communal resources flowing outward and being wasted through obsessively responding to the external world, instead of being used to further develop our interior as a people.

When our inner world is neglected, and then catastrophe hits, the catastrophe itself becomes the framework for Jewish self-understanding: whatever “awakening” is created is still defined by the hostile world. We can’t keep relying on tragedies to shock people into remembering they’re Jewish. That is obviously not conducive to a thriving Jewish future: if we continue through this cycle, those who haven’t yet disappeared into assimilation will be confused and weakened, defined by their trauma and suffocated with fear and victimhood.

What then must be done? To start, accessibility to Jewish education must become the number one priority of every Jewish philanthropic institution in the United States. Every single American Jewish child having access to Jewish education will allow our children to develop an identity that is rich, engaging, and immerses them in their own Jewish history, texts, liturgy, art, culture, and literature, while also ensuring an excellent secular education. Can you imagine the brilliant, transformative, immediate outcome that would have on Jewish life, today and in the future? If done, it is highly possible that the most brilliant and vibrant Jewish leaders will be produced in the next generation and that a renaissance of Jewish culture and life will emerge from them, a fountain of youth and confidence.

Second, and inseparable from the above, is that our philanthropic institutions must prioritize Hebrew literacy to be cultivated seriously and from a young age. Modern Hebrew must be taught professionally K-12 by accredited language teachers, and Hebrew immersion programs must be integrated into Jewish schools. Every Jewish student who would go to one of these funded, accessible Jewish schools would graduate from 12th grade fluent in Hebrew. They would be able to travel to Israel with confidence and speak with Israelis, read Hebrew literature, follow Hebrew media, be integrated into Hebrew culture, and therefore navigate their Diaspora identity with more confidence than ever before. Imagine an entire generation of young American Jews who have all gone through Jewish education and are familiar with Jewish cultural, intellectual, and religious concepts, who can move fluidly between English and Hebrew, who know their history and understand that they are part of something ancient and extraordinary and alive, who travel to Israel at ease, and who walk through the world with confidence, their inner world having been nurtured and developed since they were children. Can you imagine how much that would strengthen our communities? Every Jew in this system would already have the tools to navigate whatever trouble they face with ease; each would possess an inner radiance that makes them impervious to attack, like armor.

When a Jew has sufficient confidence and inner nourishment to face the world fearlessly – not in a reactionary way, but from a place of deep self-understanding – then any hostility that exists simply loses its power to define them. For all the money spent fighting antisemitism, precious little has been invested in the cultivation of the Jewish future. It’s time to stop pouring our resources into the fight and start pouring them into the foundation.

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Are you clear on the future your organization is actually working toward—or are you operating under pressure without a defined direction? Prophecy helps mission-driven leaders step out of reactive mode and into a structured process of visioning, strategic clarity, and decision-making.

Through high-impact, future-oriented workshops—from 90-minute conversations to multi-day strategic sprints—we help teams align around shared values, explore plausible futures, and translate ambition into concrete priorities and next steps. If you’re ready to move from urgency to purpose, we’d welcome the opportunity to bring Prophecy to your organization. Contact: shalom@seekprophecy.com

Given what the People of Israel have been through in the past four years, and the tenor of the moment in which we’re marking the ninth day of Av this year, we believed that this powerful piece should be read on Tisha b’Av itself. Here is a brief description:

Treating Martin Herskovitz’s distinction between public memory that reduces the dead to symbols and humane memory that restores their many lives. He presents complexity and compassion as safeguards against the political misuse of tragedy.

But first, let’s get to know the person behind the piece: Martin Herskovitz

Martin Herskovitz is an Israeli poet, educator, and public scholar whose work centers on Holocaust memory, postmemory, grief, and intergenerational transmission. Born in the United States to Holocaust-survivor parents from Czechoslovakia, he immigrated to Israel in 1986 and lives in Rehovot. He is a Spiegel Fellow at the Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research at Bar-Ilan University and the founder of Creating Memory, an initiative that develops new approaches to Holocaust remembrance for a post-survivor era.

Herskovitz is the author of Son of the Shoah: Poems from a Second-Generation Holocaust Survivor and co-editor, with Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz, of Creating Holocaust Memory: Reworking Trauma for Future Generations. Through poetry, education, visual art, and performance, his work asks how Holocaust remembrance can remain personal, ethically serious, and emotionally resonant after the survivor generation. His writing and educational projects invite second and third generations to grapple with transmitted trauma, mourning, resilience, and the creation of sustaining narratives of memory.

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Preventing the Loss of Remembrance and Compassion

By Martin Herskovitz

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Names/Martin Herskovitz

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My mother’s father was named Mordechai Kleinbart.

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But perhaps, because he was the eldest son,

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his mother called him Tateleh,

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and his father probably called him Mordkhe,

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as my father once called me.

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His sisters and brothers may have called him Moti—

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except for the baby sister,

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who called him Momo

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even after she grew up.

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His wife’s cousins at the winery may have called him Kleiny.

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His children surely called him Tati,

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as did his wife—

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except, perhaps, late at night, alone in the bedroom,

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she might have called to him

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with soft Yiddish endearments,

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in a soft erotic lilt.

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Or perhaps not.

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Because Mordechai Kleinbart is the single name I possess.

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It alone is carved in stone

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and cast in bronze.

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All the other names exist only

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in memories long interred

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or on pages yet unwritten.

One Name or Many?

The poem “Names” appears simple. It sketches a grandfather remembered only through fragments. Yet, beneath its restraint, lies a profound meditation on memory, especially the kind of memory cultivated in Israeli public life.

At its heart is a tension between two modes of remembering.

Simplistic memory preserves a single name. It requires clarity. But personal memory unfolds differently. It exists in multiplicity—in nicknames, tones of voice, gestures, private intimacies. A human being is not a role, but a web of relationships.

National memory often simplifies. Human memory does not.

When we choose to adopt the simplistic collective memories, our memory loses some of its humanness.

Human beings are naturally drawn to simple stories. We prefer narratives with clear heroes and villains, obvious causes, and neat endings. Such stories are emotionally satisfying because they reduce confusion and relieve us of the burden of uncertainty. They tell us who to admire, who to blame, and what to think. In times of anxiety or rapid change, the attraction becomes even stronger. Complexity can feel exhausting; simplicity feels like control.

Yet this lure carries dangers. Simplistic narratives often depend on omission. They flatten contradictions, erase nuance, and silence inconvenient facts. What does not fit the story is ignored or dismissed. In public life, this tendency can become the foundation of populism and fake news.

The poem Names stands as a quiet rebuttal to this impulse. Rather than claiming certainty, it dwells in uncertainty: “perhaps,” “may have,” “or perhaps not.” Rather than reducing a person to a single official identity, it multiplies identities through relationships—son, brother, husband, father, worker, beloved. Rather than presenting one definitive story, it acknowledges fragments, absences, and the limits of inherited knowledge. “Mordechai Kleinbart” is the surviving official name, but the living man existed in many forms, each disclosed through different voices and affections. The poem resists the temptation to pretend otherwise.

This resistance has broader civic meaning. Democracies depend on citizens who can tolerate complexity: who understand that social problems have multiple causes, that opponents may have mixed motives, that evidence can be incomplete, and that certainty is not always possible. Populism thrives when people lose patience with such complexity and demand emotionally gratifying simplifications instead. Where fake news says, “Here is the whole hidden truth,” the poem says, “Here is one name, and beyond it many possibilities we cannot fully recover.”

To say maybe is to honor the limits of memory.

And perhaps also to resist the transformation of tragedy into rhetoric.

That is not weakness. It is intellectual maturity. The poem does not deny catastrophe, but refuses to let catastrophe have the final word. Instead of camps, transports, or death scenes, it offers family speech, domestic intimacy, workplace familiarity, and the many small social worlds through which a person became himself.

The danger of simplistic memory is not only emotional thinning; it also has moral and political consequences. When memory becomes formulaic, it can be instrumentalized. The Holocaust as an example can be invoked as a slogan, a generic warning, or a rhetorical weapon detached from the lived complexity of those who were murdered. Simplification can make memory easier to consume while instrumentalizing it.

All of us in Israel have been traumatized by the events of October 7th. The deaths, the abuse, the taking of the hostages, and their mistreatment all demand remembrance. They must be remembered. Traumatic memory however, often narrows perspective. Trauma fixes attention on the moment of destruction, the scene of violence, the catastrophe that shattered ordinary life. This concentration is understandable: horror demands witness. Yet when memory is organized entirely around trauma, the murdered can become known only through the manner of their death. Their identities collapse into the event that ended them. The poem Names avoids this narrowing by shifting attention away from the killing and back toward the life that preceded it.

The memory of October 7th is hardening us against complexity and making many of us incapable of recognizing the humanity of those with whom we disagree. Israeli society today often feels fragmented into competing tribes, each sustained by its own narrative of certainty, its television channel, its own newspaper, its own website. Our children learn in a specific school system, the textbooks grounded in a specific as opposed to collective narrative. The algorithm on our feed controls what posts we see, what responses we read. Public disagreement increasingly slides into mutual suspicion and hostility. We frequently speak as though the other side’s story is not merely mistaken but illegitimate. The words we use are meant to injure not to inform.

This is not an argument against remembering tragedy. It is an argument against allowing tragedy to become the entirety of memory. We cannot allow the memory of our collective tragedy to harden us and make us unable to see the other, listen to their opinions, see their suffering. Simplistic memory sows the seeds of our destruction - disunity, strife and binary thinking, transforming us into a society in disarray.

The contrasting approaches to commemorating October 7th provide a concrete example of the tension between simplistic, identity-affirming narratives and complex, pluralistic remembrance.

The government’s official commemorations have generally emphasized heroism, and the renewal of Israeli strength as a message that looks forward to recovery, solidarity, and national continuity. Yet it also risks compressing the complexity of the event into a unifying national story that leaves less room for unresolved questions, internal criticism, or competing experiences.

Many of the bereaved families, the families of hostages, and survivors have approached commemoration differently. Their ceremonies have often emphasized the unfinished nature of the tragedy: the failures of accountability, the diversity of victims’ lives, and the ongoing pain of those left behind. They insist that mourning cannot be separated from accountability, and that remembrance should preserve unanswered questions as well as expressions of grief.

Neither narrative is inherently illegitimate. Every society emerging from trauma needs symbols that bind people together. At the same time, authentic memory requires preserving the voices that resist being absorbed into a single national narrative. Holding this complexity may itself be the deepest act of remembrance.

A mature democratic society should be capable of honoring courage and resilience while also acknowledging failure and accountability; affirming national belonging while making room for dissenting voices; and remembering not only what unites its citizens but also the plurality of experiences that constitute the nation’s shared history.

The challenge is to create a culture of memory that is expansive enough to hold grief and hope, heroism and failure, unity and disagreement, without allowing any one narrative to erase the others. Such a culture does not weaken national resilience—it strengthens it by ensuring that remembrance remains truthful, humane, and open to moral growth.

As we saw during the Second Temple and as we see today, populism and extremism can unravel the fabric of society. It then leads to destruction. It may do so yet again unless we fight this tendency to simplify complex issues and allow human compassion to be compromised by the memories of our traumas.

The destruction of the Second Temple has long been associated with Sinat Hinam (baseless hatred). Whether understood historically or symbolically, the lesson remains relevant. Societies fracture when people lose the ability to recognize the humanity of those outside their own camp.

Israeli society has splintered into tribes and unity seems no longer possible. We have fragmented into so many shards that a single entity no longer exists. It is the Second Temple reality all over again. We must be allowed to disagree, but find a way to transform how this disagreement is being conducted as we work towards it being resolved.

The Jewish collective memory after this war must not only preserve the past, it must also widen our perspective and welcome the possibilities of alternative narratives. If we are to avoid the pitfalls of the divisive narratives, we must find a way to articulate a complex narrative that allows us to move beyond the trauma and makes us more open, tolerant and compassionate to others. It is for this reason that the Rabbis have said that the Messiah, the paradigm of unity and compassion, is to be born on Tisha b’Av, the day on which we remember our greatest traumas.

Holding complexity is not a failure to choose; it is the discipline of resisting explanations that are too simple for the world as it actually is. Israeli Society can cultivate complexity by supporting independent journalism, creating commemorations and educational systems that present multiple perspectives. The Education and Communication ministries have recently instituted policies and commemorations that are aimed at simplifying and politicizing narratives. These policies run counter to our need as a civil society for complex and robust narratives.

The task before us is to see Jewish memory not only as a reinforcement of our Jewish identity but also as part of our moral inquiry as Jews: not asking only “How does narrative reinforce our Jewish identity?” but also “How does this narrative enlarge our capacity for empathy, judgment, and responsibility?”

Tisha b’Av teaches us that the antidote to our tragedy begins with memory itself. Not memory that simplifies. Not memory that weaponizes trauma. Not memory that transforms victims into symbols. But memory that restores complexity, humility, and human connection.

My grandfather’s official name survived. The other names did not. Yet imagining those forgotten names reminds me that every human being exceeds the categories through which history remembers them.

To remember well is not merely to preserve the past. It is to expand our humaneness, our connection to the family of man. It is to enlarge our capacity for compassion in the present. It is to set the foundations of the Jewish future. Tisha b’Av is a day of remembrance. How we choose to remember on that day will sow either the seeds of our disunity and destruction or the seeds of our redemption.

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For a full overview to the issue and the articles therein, please see our introduction. Over the next few months we will share an article a week from the issue here on this Substack, and hope that if you find one interesting you give the rest a chance by subscribing, below, or buying the full issue in paperback or ebook.

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And now with no further delay, the article you’ve been waiting for:

Wherein Stephen Daniel Arnoff demonstrates that competing certainties threaten to impose an unsustainable future upon Jerusalem and the Jewish People. He calls for doubt to be reclaimed as a Jewish moral discipline essential to shared life.

But first, let’s get to know the person behind the piece: Stephen Arnoff

Dr. Stephen Daniel Arnoff is a Jerusalem-based writer, educator, musician, and cultural entrepreneur. He serves as Chief Executive Officer of the Fuchsberg Jerusalem Center and has held senior leadership roles at the 92nd Street Y, the 14th Street Y, Shalem College, and the JCC Association of North America. Arnoff is the founder of LABA, an international Jewish artist fellowship rooted in Jewish learning and creative practice, and Zamru, a network devoted to contemporary Jewish music and spiritual creativity. He holds a doctorate in Midrash and Scriptural Interpretation from the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he was a Wexner Graduate Fellow, and is the author of About Man and God and Law: The Spiritual Wisdom of Bob Dylan.

Arnoff writes and teaches widely on religion, culture, leadership, and the work of being human, including Marginal Prophet, a weekly Substack on memory, belonging, and moral imagination. His essays have appeared in outlets such as the Forward, the Jerusalem Post, and the Times of Israel, and his musical and communal projects explore the points at which Jewish tradition, popular culture, and public life meet.

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(Yes, Prophecy is an actual journal available in an actual physical book! You can order it in print in Israel through Bookpod and worldwide through Amazon — as well as any and all of the ebook stores (Kobo, Apple, Everand, Etc) as well as Kindle. Get it today and read on Tisha b’Av to help us prevent the destruction.)

Preventing the Destruction of Doubt

By Dr. Stephen Daniel Arnoff

I can see the future from my porch.

A wall separates my side of Jerusalem from the Palestinian territories, and beyond it, on a clear day, I can see hills rising toward Jordan. The wall is ugly as policy and art, but after October 7th, it is difficult for me to imagine life without it. The breaches have been too great to risk life without walls. For the foreseeable future, an impossibly deep dispute will be managed by drab concrete.

Of this I am sure.

From the window of my office, I have seen another flash of the future: streets filled with angry young men in kippot on Jerusalem Day. They sing of victory and blood. The air is thick with triumphalist chants. They are confident that our city belongs only to them. This too is a clear and certain vision of the future.

When I close my eyes, I see a different parade marching us into the years to come. Festive colors, clever placards, and the beat of drums. These are the demonstrations that consumed the streets of Jerusalem before the war, when thousands of Israelis marched because they feared their country’s future was being stolen. Then came October 7th. Then came the hostages and irrevocable losses amplified by a government of incompetence and cruelty. And then came exhaustion. But I am certain that these protests will return.

I am not a prophet, nor the son of a prophet; neither am I an optimist nor pessimist. But I have led and lived in this forever-reimagined city long enough to know that competing certainties are fracturing the very foundation stone of Jerusalem’s future.

What worries me most is not that I disagree with all of these seekers and leaders of certainty. Are they wrong? Are they evil? As a liberal Zionist in love with music, religion, community, and words, who has been drawn to prophetic visions for most of his life, and as a person making meaning on the margins of a city becoming evermore fundamentalist and binary, who am I to say what version of God’s will is truest and best? But the prophetic warning I share, “the words of the prophets that are written on the subway walls and tenement halls”(to paraphrase an old guitar-slinging rabbi in a baseball hat from Queens) is that if either I or these true believers remain too certain about what we think we know, we will all fail together. We will fall as one grand tragic mistake of biblical proportions. We will be the generation that will force a future upon Jerusalem that is utterly unsustainable.

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The politician building a wall, the ideologue talking smack about the bad choices of everyone else, the jingoist circling the wagons against the rest of the world, the partisan with an unbending point of view for which she or he will go to the mat, the cynic who has given up on everything, the idealist with her or his head in the stars while absconding from reality, and the fundamentalist who claims (using words that different guitar-slinging rabbi from Minnesota rejected long ago) that “God’s on his side” all say the same thing: We are sure we have solved the problem. And of this, all that is certain is that all of us are wrong.

Jewish tradition has always harbored a deep suspicion of certainty, and so do I. We almost always preserve the question, the frustration, the logic of the dissenter. We honor the minority opinion because we never know when doubts about what once seemed assured will reveal the next right thing to do.

The nineteenth-century Hasidic master Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izbitza taught in his commentary that before humanity ate from the Tree of Knowledge, reality was whole. Divine truth was obvious. There were no blurred lines between right and wrong. But after eating from the Tree of Knowledge, which he calls the Ilanah D’Sfeika, humanity entered what he terms the World of Doubt, Alma D’Sfeika.

And then the Izbitzer asks: Why introduce doubt into a world of perfection? Why interrupt the seamless flow of certainty? The answer, he teaches, is that if truth had remained perfectly obvious, there would be no struggle to make meaningful choices. And meaningful choices – seeking answers for what we doubt or do not know – are the essence of life.

The Izbitzer understood something many modern, self-assured ideologists and believers forget. Doubt is not a flaw in the human condition. It is one of the Divine’s central gifts.

Living with doubt about our most impassioned convictions is not easy. The Middle East in particular has rarely rewarded uncertainty. The monotheistic traditions born here have often spoken in absolutes: chosen peoples, final revelations, sacred lands, exclusive truths, triumphalism. And yet the future I fear most is not one in which one side defeats another. The supposedly powerless have a way of finding their path to revenge around here. The future I fear is one in which certainty wins. In which doubt is destroyed.

In that future, Jerusalem becomes less pluralistic, poorer, less beautiful, and increasingly unaffordable for those who sustain it. We become less and less curious about our neighbors, about differences, and about the rest of the country, region, and world. We will live out an ironic, tragic decline. One of the world’s great cities, which has served as a lighthouse in the wild ocean of history for millennia, will be submerged by its own small-thinking and small town delusions.

Diaspora ties will weaken because many Israelis and Jews and others outside of Jerusalem (not to mention hundreds of thousands of Jerusalemites whose basic rights will be stripped away) will no longer see anything worth saving behind Jerusalem’s walls. Retreating into tribes of self-assurance, our tribes will eat themselves alive. People like me will pay for it all. And the walls will grow taller and taller.

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In this future, we will survive, because survival is what we must do. But it is not a future worth wanting. It is not a future worth living for. Something essential and life-affirming will be destroyed.

It is already cliché to talk about the lessons of October 7th and the realities that emerged on October 8th. Unlike the current Israeli government, much of Israeli society has done its analysis and learned its lessons. One of those lessons is that walls matter. Security matters. Shelter matters. Protection matters.

But another lesson is that people need more than physical safety. Having been part of Jerusalem’s civic response to the worst day anyone in Israel has ever known, I watched families arrive from the South carrying little more than backpacks, exhaustion, and shock. For a while, the task was simple: give people walls, give people safety. But it quickly became clear that people also needed somewhere to put their fear and grief. Somewhere to put their anger. They needed somewhere to put their hope. Security protects the body, but meaning protects the soul.

In my world, meaning often comes from music and thoughtful cultural expression, real dialogue, rich pluralistic study, neighborly curiosity, and shared public life that create moments where doubt and distance are transformed into connection. And it is connection, through music or shared meals or public infrastructure that works for all who need it, that transforms the gaps we experience into sources of hope.

Hope has a strange way of traveling. It can pass through concrete walls. It can move through fear. It can remind people that they are more than their trauma, more than their politics, more than the certainties that divide them.

From my porch, I still see a wall every day. Some mornings it reassures me. Some mornings it breaks my heart. The future of Jerusalem will require walls as it always has. But the Alma D’Sfeika, the Age of Doubt, demands something harder than concrete. It requires the humility to live with doubt, the courage to remain in relationship despite difference, and the willingness to sing with people whose certainties are not our own.

We know how to build walls, sure as stone. The challenge of the coming generations of Jerusalem is learning how to build gates, prayers, and communities robust and safe enough to pass through them.

If, twenty years from now, standing on my porch with a cup of coffee, I see a gate in that wall and a high-speed train running from Jerusalem toward Amman and onward to the other capitals of the Middle East, I will not assume that we have solved every problem. The Middle East has never worked that way. But I will know that our willingness to live with doubt has saved us from the certainties that might otherwise have destroyed us.

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For many of us who grew up outside of Israel, or outside traditionally observant homes, Tisha b’Av – the 9th day of the Hebrew month of Av which commemorates the destruction of the Temples and Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel – was not part of the calendar.

We were taught about antisemitism mainly in its reflection in the Holocaust, and were conveyed a general sense that Jewish history involved a great deal of suffering. But the ritual practice of sitting on the floor to mourn the multiple destructions of our State, once by the Babylonians in 586 BCE and once again by the Romans in 70 CE, and then, following that lamentation, commit ourselves to returning, was not something our communities observed. Or if they did, we can hardly remember it.

Most of us first encountered this day of remembrance later, as adults. Perhaps some encountered it through a story about Napoleon that is often taught when discussing the yearning for Zion that set the stage for Zionism. The details of the story vary by telling, but the core of it is this: Napoleon was walking through a city – some say Paris, some say elsewhere – and heard weeping through a synagogue window. He asked what was happening inside. He was told that the Jews were mourning the destruction of their Temple in Jerusalem. Napoleon asked when the Temple had been destroyed. Nearly two thousand years ago, he was told. He paused. A people that can mourn for so long, he reportedly said, is a people that will surely rebuild.

That story, we believe, tells so much about us as a People, a stiff-necked nation unwilling to let our destroyers have the final word.

The more we dove into the day over the years, however, the more we understood the Napoleon story only reflects the superficial aspect of Tisha b’Av. Because when you read Eicha (the scroll of Lamentations traditionally read on the day) you learn that the day is, at its core, a day of taking responsibility; a day of internalization, of grappling with accountability, of remembering that even in moments of great terror and turmoil we Jews had agency.

Sure, our enemies were great empires stronger than we could ever imagine to become. Yes, the odds were stacked against us. Yet it was our own actions that tipped the scales towards our destruction. It was our behavior that made a bad situation worse, that led to the burning of our institutions and our exile from the Land.

Similarly, it is our actions in the present that can either prevent the next destruction or hasten our demise.

That is what inspired us to dedicate this issue, Prophecy’s 4th, to preventing the destruction, and to release it for Tisha b’Av.

Order Prophecy 4 Now in Paper or eBook

The years since October 7, 2023, have been among the most tumultuous in the modern history of the Jewish people. We suffered a catastrophic invasion. A brutal war. A fracturing of alliances that many of us thought were solid. A fracturing of identities that many of us thought were settled. A rise of an ancient hatred we thought vanquished. Internal divisions broke into open hostility. We are now caught between the narrow straits, and are faced with a choice: will we take responsibility and act to prevent the destruction, or will we consign ourselves to mourning on the floor to mark our third failed attempt at self-determination?

To answer that question, we reached out to activists and scholars, rabbis and researchers, journalists and artists, writing from Jerusalem and Zichron Yaakov, from Michigan and Miami. Each identified an element of our collective life that faces destruction, and each described how we can prevent it.

The issue opens with Dr. Stephen Daniel Arnoff, writing from his porch in Jerusalem from which the Temple Mount and the Jordanian hills are both visible, asking what it costs a city – and a people – to mistake certainty for strength. In remedy, he shares a little-known Hasidic teaching about the wisdom of living with uncertainty, and how we may cultivate comfort with complexity to navigate a complex world.

Chen Mandel-Edrei follows with her exposition on language and its centrality in shaping our world, and how the Academy has trained a generation to deconstruct language and critique power, trapping those who most need words to mobilize productive, creative action without any. Her call is for a shift from critique to responsible construction, a new language to unlock a positively uncertain future.

From that foundation, we move into the fractures of Jewish Peoplehood we feel growing more prominent every day.

Rabbi Noga Brenner Samia argues that Israeli legislation on conversion and prayer is turning the different communities of the Jews from Us into Them, and must be stopped. If we cannot agree on who the Jewish people are, she writes, we will lose the commitment and mutuality that made us who we are.

Geoff Winston identifies one of the reasons the Diaspora has distanced itself from Israel: since 2020, liberal youth groups have stopped sending delegations to Israel, and an entire generation has arrived onto American campuses with no firsthand memory of the country and no Israeli peer to complicate the ambient narrative. He recommends we fix this now by investing in more Birthright and RootOne trips, more Israeli emissaries in Diaspora communities, more opportunities for us to remember we are a People, one People.

Shoshanna Keats Jaskoll identifies the damage being done within Israeli communities by increasing Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) imposition, and makes the case that the threat to Judaism is coming from within: a political system that chains women to dead marriages, exempts tens of thousands from civic life, and calls the whole arrangement Torah when it is anything but. She reminds us that Judaism has always known how to adapt, and calls on us to urgently bring that capacity back into our national institutions.

The second cluster of articles focuses on how we are educating the next generation, and how that education shapes our future.

Maia Zelkha leads this section by following the money: Jewish philanthropy has poured hundreds of millions into fighting antisemitism and produced, by her accounting, essentially nothing. She makes the case for a wholesale reorientation toward Jewish education and Hebrew literacy, as a means of turning around the dislocation caused by decades investing outward instead of inward.

Sarah Bunin Benor provides us an example of what is being lost: dozens of distinct Jewish languages are disappearing, and with them the cultures developed by the Jews in their dispersion, each with their own treasures. She founded the Jewish Language Project at Hebrew Union College to race against the clock and protect this richness of diversity, and tells us what we can do about it.

Daphne Levy Nash asks what it would actually mean to prepare Israeli children for the world as it is, as it will be, a world that demands collaboration, empathy, and the ability to navigate complexity. Her conclusion is that to save Israel’s educational system, structural reform is critical: without a middle layer of instructional coaches to support teachers made available in each and every school, the weight of the required transformation falls on individual teachers already overwhelmed, and collapse is imminent.

The third cluster of articles addresses the looming danger of extremism fueling inter-ethnic conflict with our Abrahamic cousins in the region.

Jacob Ner-David writes the hardest piece in the issue, sharing a firsthand account of one night in January 2026 at Al Shakara, a Bedouin community near Duma, when masked Jewish terrorists attacked and gassed him and the seventy residents of the village. Drawing from the wisdom of biblical Yaakov’s rebuke of Shimon and Levi he tells us what has to happen if we are to prevent the destruction of Israel’s moral conscience: removal of illegal outposts, return of expelled communities, creation of a land registry, and a change of our administration.

Iqbal Akhtar, who has spent decades building Muslim-Jewish relations, writes from the Muslim perspective to chart a path towards saving our relationship, and confronting the legacy of Muslim treatment of Jews. He believes we can prevent the destruction of Muslim-Jewish relations by adopting a Mīthāq al-Taʿāruf, a Covenant of Mutual Recognition modeled on Nostra Aetate, the 1965 Catholic declaration that took twenty years of deliberation to produce and permanently transformed Catholic-Jewish relations.

In our last cluster of articles, we bring forward voices addressing the destruction of cultural venues and forums for interaction, and the importance of humanization.

Howard Lovy writes about how he witnessed the publishing industry quietly move Jewish manuscripts into the slush pile because of institutional risk-aversion after deciding that Jewish and Israeli voices are a liability. His prescription is the one Jews have reached for before when excluded: build our own infrastructure, just as Jews built hospitals when antisemitism barred them from medical training, and sustain it with emet: the obligation to pursue truth above all else.

Anan Sahadei spotlights the way an antizionist read of history does a disservice to us all in his review of Molly Crabapple’s book on the Jewish Bund. He argues that Crabapple’s book (and the fanfare with which it was received) should serve as a warning for Jewish progressives: when the Bund placed their survival bet on universalist solidarity, Poland had 3.3 million Jews before the war; 45,000 remained after. Solidarity did not save them. He calls on Jewish progressives to honestly reckon with the past and why the Bund failed in order to build a better future.

Ori Lenkinski writes about what happens when cultural institutions bar Israelis from participation. She tells how her show Birth Preparation Course was invited to Bergen Fringe Festival, then uninvited when the organizers discovered where she lived. She makes the argument for encounter, for art as the mechanism through which understanding becomes possible.

Martin Herskovitz closes with a poem built from a single name on a gravestone and all the names that live only in memory, followed by an exposition arguing that the rabbis were right: the Temple fell due to baseless hatred, and countering it requires us to put in the hard work of remembering the fullness of the human being. It is this form of commemoration that this moment most urgently needs.

Our last piece takes a broader view. Zev Farber and Ariel Beery write about new research in Nature projecting that the Mediterranean will rise approximately one meter by 2100, enough to inundate the coastal cities that serve as economic and cultural centers, such as Tel Aviv. Unlike Noah, they tell us, we have options other than building an ark. They propose a grand project to redirect the waters into ancient basins to keep sea levels as they are, a regional project that cannot wait.

Together, these pieces make up our contribution to Am Israel’s reader for this year’s Tisha b’Av. We hope it will help you commemorate it as a day of mourning and responsibility taking. A day where we take time to remember the destructions that were, the destructions that could be, and learn from our mistakes so as to prevent future pain and suffering whenever we can. We hope you will join us in preventing the destruction before it is too late.

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Prophecy goes beyond the journal:

Are you clear on the future your organization is actually working toward—or are you operating under pressure without a defined direction? Prophecy helps mission-driven leaders step out of reactive mode and into a structured process of visioning, strategic clarity, and decision-making.

Through high-impact, future-oriented workshops—from 90-minute conversations to multi-day strategic sprints—we help teams align around shared values, explore plausible futures, and translate ambition into concrete priorities and next steps. If you’re ready to move from urgency to purpose, we’d welcome the opportunity to bring Prophecy to your organization. Contact: shalom@seekprophecy.com

But first, let’s get to know the person behind the piece: Ariel Beery.

Ariel Beery, the editor and publisher of Prophecy, first emerged as a public figure through his campus activism at Columbia University (2003-2005), where he became a leading student voice on academic freedom and the experience of Jewish and Israeli students. As a co-founder of Columbians for Academic Freedom and a key organizer around the Columbia Unbecoming controversy, he pushed the university to take student concerns seriously. His columns and public interventions from that period consistently framed the debate as a test of whether universities could uphold both rigorous academic standards and a genuine culture of open inquiry.​

Clearly they did not.

Since October 7, 2023, Beery has renewed his writing about the role of the academy in global geopolitics and this piece reflects his current thinking on what could be a winning grand strategy for Israel, the Jewish People, and the Free World.

Read Prophecy on Kinde or Paperback

(And if you are in Israel, order Prophecy 3 in paperback here. Prophecy’s 4th issue, Preventing the Destruction, is scheduled to come out on July 17th so that you can read it on Tisha b’Av)

Rebel Against Elite Capture

By Ariel Beery

It’s hard to argue with the fact that the modern Academy is saturated with antizionism, and that the result is the acculturation of the global elite into an ideology that rejects the notion that Jews are a people deserving political self-determination. Opinion poll after opinion poll, study after study, all show youth under 35 worldwide are increasingly identifying not with aspirations for a Palestinian State but with Hamas and its calls to eradicate the Jewish State. It is hard to ignore the historical parallel to Weimar-era Germany, which went from having a Jewish Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, and Finance Minister to the willing executioner of European Jewry in less than two decades.

One can blame the media, especially social media, for supporting this trend, but I argue that it plays a supporting role to the Academy: when authority figures a young person is taught to learn from and emulate espouse a certain set of ideas, they prime their charges to find supporting evidence in the world around them.

Were university professors fierce Zionists advocating for Jewish claims for political independence, the incitement flooding the information space would lack its luster to these youth, or at least a majority of those who have been turned against us. Evidence of this can be seen in the relative failure of Soviet propaganda during the Cold War which crashed upon the cliffs of Western confidence in the Academy. If we are to turn the tide and ensure continued elite support for the Jewish People and their national project, we must free the Academy from antizionist capture.

Freeing the Academy from antizionism, however, is no easy task for a few reasons: first, because of how universitiesn and inter-academic institutions that determine hiring and promotion, function. Second, because our adversaries have a strong interest in maintaining their grip. And lastly, because doing so will require vast resources we only marshaled once before in our modern history when we built our State – resources we can marshal again if we understand this issue as an existential risk to that very State, but only if we share a vision for how to defeat that existential threat and secure the Jewish future.

Let’s start with the mechanics. Universities have historically been built to prevent outside influence, but changes in popular culture and funding mechanisms made them uniquely hackable. As faculty salary expectations rose and administrative services grew to serve an elite with greater expectations of creature comforts, universities became more reliant on financial support from philanthropists and corporate sponsors.

Motivated actors flush with money from Oil and Gas recognized the opportunity. While donations to universities from political actors espousing an antizionist ideology began on a low flame in the 1980s, they grew exponentially after September 11, 2001, when the Oil Kingdoms (some like Qatar producing mainly gas) sought to reclaim their access to elite circles. They funneled millions and then billions into the Academy, providing research grants, sponsoring academic chairs, and building new academic departments. They even found ways to sponsor ancillary income for professors: while I was the research assistant for the Middle East Institute at Columbia University, I personally sent thank you letters from the Institute’s head, Rashid Khalidi, to Saudi Aramco, among other front companies and bodies, thanking them for sponsoring a lecture series where Columbia faculty would be sponsored to lecture to public school teachers in New York on the Middle East.

Allying with sympathetic professors and university administrators, these Oil Kingdoms engaged in a well thought-out takeover operation. By strategically sponsoring university chairs (incremental positions in university departments), directing grant money and fellowships, and influencing academic journals within which academics must publish or perish from academic life, antizionist ideologues captured the majorities in most humanities departments at elite universities — the standard-bearers for their fields.

Because of how departments are structured and propagated – wherein new faculty can only be hired with the majority’s agreement – their capture became complete. It’s nearly impossible for a non-antizionist to be hired in most departments in the humanities in any of the elite institutions today, let alone find a PhD supervisor, or secure a fellowship. This will have reverberations for generations to come. We are already feeling them today.

Any effort to directly confront this dynamic will be fought tooth and nail by our adversaries, who have a deep and abiding interest in keeping the Academy focused on Israel as opposed to, say, the human rights abuses of autocratic regimes who use slave labor to maintain their fossil fuel-funded standard of living. We often forget that Israel is not the subject of their interest, but an object they can use to distract from their own affairs, especially from the pesky fact that climate change is accelerating due to humanity’s continued use of the very material that makes them rich. And despite the well-worn canard that Jews control the banks, the grand majority of global capital flows originate in an oil well or gas rig. We cannot outspend them.

Yet hope is not lost. Just as the Jewish State’s fledgling forces broke the Jerusalem blockade during the War for Independence by going around enemy fortifications to deliver food and aid, there’s a way to break the intellectual blockade on Israel and rescue elite society from its antizionist capture. It’s time to build a Burma Road into the Academy. For our sake and theirs, because before the Academy failed the Jewish People it failed humanity.

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The core idea is straightforward: to ensure tomorrow’s leaders value Israel, we must create conditions for them to learn, research, build, and form their worldviews in Israel. If Israel isn’t welcome on global campuses, we must turn Israel into the World’s Campus, where the best and brightest join with others dedicated to advancing humanity and freeing our planet from the binds imposed upon it by fossil fuels.

Learning from our adversaries, we should not start at the bottom but at the top. Influencing undergraduates is low-leverage. Instead, we need to start by attracting those people who teach undergraduates, who train the trainers. We need to start by attracting the best and brightest professors and help them set up their labs and research groups. Professors who are the go-tos for academic journals, who chair the key academic conferences, who any graduate student worth their salt knows they need to collaborate with in order to stand out from the crowd.

Unfortunately, it is not so simple as to offer these same world-class professors tenured positions in Israeli institutions because Israeli institutions are currently bound by who they can hire, how much they can pay, and what language their faculty need to teach in. So if we are to meet the current challenge we need to accept that it would be unwise to work through existing universities in Israel who, despite their excellence, are bureaucratically constrained.

Instead we should establish independent research institutes built around star talent, affiliated with universities and other public and private corporations offering advanced degrees of such quality, rigor, and relevance that the world’s most promising young scholars will choose to study there. These programs must be transdisciplinary, integrating sciences and humanities in ways the traditional university has failed to do. They must be aligned with global challenges, allowing graduates to stand at the cutting edge of fields that universities everywhere need to staff. And they must embed students within Israeli society so that their professional development is inseparable from their understanding of Israel’s complexity and contributions to humanity.

Once we do so we can attract the catalysts for the freeing of the academy: newly minted PhDs who seek a final fellowship before finding their place in the field (what colloquially is called the post-doc period). Establishing Israel as the center for excellence in postdoctoral training will be our strategic leverage point. Of the roughly 66,000 postdocs studying in the United States today, capturing even a quarter would dramatically shift the global academic pipeline. If Israel quintupled its postdoc capacity—something entirely feasible with new institutes built in partnership with government, industry, and philanthropy—it would position itself as an indispensable node in the global knowledge economy. Graduates entering academia would carry with them a direct understanding of Israel’s value. Graduates who enter industry would become partners, collaborators, and advocates in their own sectors. In both cases, they would be connected to an alumni network anchored in shared experience and excellence.

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While this approach won’t eliminate antizionism or solve antisemitism, and doesn’t relieve Israel’s political leadership of the need to make responsible decisions, it offers a strategic intervention into the system shaping the worldview of future global elites. If the problem is that the Academy has been captured, the solution is not to demand ideological reform but to create alternative, superior institutions that attract the world’s best minds. If the problem is the exponential spread of antizionist ideas through faculty networks, the solution is to build our own compounding dynamic: a new generation of scholars and researchers who value Israel because they’ve experienced its contributions firsthand.

The logic model for this intervention is simple: if we want students not to be taught that Israel is evil, then we need professors who understand Israel differently. If we want such professors, we must train them. If we want to train them, we must build world-leading programs that outcompete the institutions currently shaping them. If we build those programs, students will come, not out of ideological sympathy, but out of the desire to be excellent in fields that matter. Once they come, a new feedback loop begins: graduates who teach thousands, students who follow them, networks that grow, institutions that change. A new intellectual ecology, not dependent on the goodwill of current gatekeepers, but rooted in our own capacity to build.

Israel’s existing universities have an important role to play in this process as affiliates and partners, much like Harvard and MIT collaborate with the Broad Institute. But they cannot be the primary vehicles for this transformation; their mandates, bureaucratic structures, and resource constraints make that impossible. By affiliating they will benefit from the system-wide effects of new institutes: increased global status, expanded research funding, and the ability to train Israelis in the skills required to sustain a growing applied R&D sector.

Critics might say that our adversaries could simply replicate this strategy, building their own applied R&D institutes. In fact, they are already trying, in Jeddah, Doha, Abu Dhabi. But Israel (so far) remains a liberal democracy with unmatched innovation capacity per capita, deep private-sector partnerships, and genuine intellectual freedom. Israel is already a world-class center for applied research and development in fields where humanity faces its most acute challenges—arid agriculture, water management, cyber security, digital identity, and health sciences. Those advantages aren’t easily copied. They are, however, easily squandered. The window is closing, and we must act before others solidify their gains.

What we need now is a coalition to marshal public and private resources, coordinate between government, academia, and industry, and build the infrastructure for Israel to become the must-attend training ground for the world’s elite. Like Herzl’s Congress and the World Zionist Organization, it would convene stakeholders with different ideological positions and interests but a shared desired outcome who are willing to set their differences aside for the common good.

We cannot afford incremental responses. While I understand why Diaspora communities have responded to growing Jew hatred on campus by pulling students out of hostile campuses or reducing philanthropy, both will only deepen the systemic problem.

The forces arrayed against Israel have nearly unlimited wealth, experience, and patience. If we don’t meet their long-term strategy with a long-term strategy of our own, the intellectual battlefield will continue to tilt against us.

Israel already has what it needs to become the World’s Campus: excellence, diversity, creativity, and a national story anchored in its contributions to the world. By investing in the institutional capacities that allow these strengths to shape the next generation of leaders, we can build a future where Israel is understood through lived experience rather than propaganda, through collaboration rather than caricature. The result would be a generation of scholars who carry into their classrooms and laboratories the knowledge that Israel is an enduring source of value for humanity, a living embodiment of what our ancestors once called Am Olam.

The Academy may be controlled by antizionist forces today, but it is not beyond the reach of renewal. If not for our sake, for humanity’s. We can build the institutions that will shape tomorrow. If we do, we will do more than return Israel to its rightful place as a global citizen. We will shift back to the path laid by our founders who envisioned Israel as a vehicle for the betterment of humanity.

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More Prophecy awaits! Get the full issue on your ebook reader or in paperback today:

Read all of Prophecy today

Can’t afford it? No worries! Articles from each issue, published quarterly, will be shared on a weekly basis for Substack subscribers. Subscribe to get at least one article per week, delivered to your inbox.

Are you clear on the future your organization is actually working toward—or are you operating under pressure without a defined direction? Prophecy helps mission-driven leaders step out of reactive mode and into a structured process of visioning, strategic clarity, and decision-making. Through high-impact, future-oriented workshops—from 90-minute conversations to multi-day strategic sprints—we help teams align around shared values, explore plausible futures, and translate ambition into concrete priorities and next steps. If you’re ready to move from urgency to purpose, we’d welcome the opportunity to bring Prophecy to your organization. Contact: shalom@seekprophecy.com

But first, let’s get to know the person behind the piece: Sarah Vanunu

Sarah Vanunu currently serves as the JNF Jerusalem Emissary to Australia, and previously served as the Director of Public Relations at MyHeritage, a global platform in family history and DNA testing with over 100 million users.

Hailing from Sydney, a Moriah alum with a BA in Media and Communications from the University of New South Wales, Sarah made Aliyah 15 years ago. Beyond her professional achievements, she made history as the first woman to represent Israel at the World Life Saving Championships.

Read Prophecy on Kindle or Paperback

(And if you are in Israel, order Prophecy 3 in paperback here.)

The Road Back to Australia

By Sarah Vanunu

Picture this: children walking out of the gates of their school in Sydney with their backpacks still on. One has a Magen David around her neck. Another has a Hebrew emblem stitched onto his blazer from his Jewish day school. No one asks them to tuck it in. No one tells them to cover it. There are no cement bollards outside the school. No security guards. The childrens’ parents are waiting on the pavement, talking about the weekend, about the weather, about whether they’ll go down to the beach. It is ordinary. That is the point. They are Australians and they are Jews and they are not hiding either part.

That is my vision for the future of Australia, much like it was in the distant past: I want Jews to be proud Jews. Not scared to wear a Magen David, as they are now. Not calculating which necklace to put on before getting on the train, as they do today. I have friends who took down the mezuzot from their homes in Sydney in 2025 because they were worried their houses would be targets. That kind of thing belongs in stories about Europe in the 1930s. We are a hundred years removed from that time. The future I am fighting for is one where that fear is gone, where Jews live openly as both Australians and Jews, where the antidote to antisemitism is not caution but pride. Louder, stronger Jewish identity. Not in a religious sense necessarily, but in the sense of not hiding who you are. That is the Promised Land I have in mind. Not far. Not mythological. Just ordinary.

To understand why that future feels distant, you need to know what Australia was, and what it became.

Australia has been a remarkable country for minorities. Jews have been here since the First Fleet. When the British ships arrived from England, there were Jews on board. From the very beginning Jews were part of this country’s story. Our first Governor-General was Jewish. Sir John Monash, who helped bring the First World War to its end, was Jewish. We were here from day dot — not like the Aborigines who were here for forty thousand years, but when white men came, Jews were part of it. For most of the two hundred years that followed, that mattered. Australia was a democratic, peace-loving country that on the whole treated minorities well. I never sensed antisemitism here, and neither did the friends around me.

Something changed after October 7, and it was not one thing but several things at once, arriving together in a way that made each one worse.

There was the national broadcaster. The ABC runs a children’s news program called Behind The News (BTN), shown in primary schools across the country. Teachers put it on in classrooms. In the years after October 7, it was teaching those children that Israel was withholding baby formula from babies in Gaza, cutting off electricity, that Israel is simply the baddies, full stop. All responsibility on a terrorist organization was removed. And because most Jews support Zionist ideals and the existence of the state of Israel, it followed, in the logic of what was being broadcast, that all Jews must be horrible people. Australian children were learning this from a young age, sitting in Australian classrooms, watching something their Australian teachers put on, paid for by their Australian parents’ taxes. After the terrorist attack on Jews at Bondi Beach on December 14, an interviewee sat across from an ABC journalist and asked directly: are you willing to take responsibility for what has happened? Because your news agency let this fester for two years, and this is the fruit of that. We were warning our government, crying out for help, but we don’t look like victims to people who have only ever been told one side of the story.

And there was radicalization. Not only the imported kind, though there was that too. A group of Jewish creatives and academics were doxxed. Jewish businesses firebombed. A daycare next to a synagogue. A synagogue burnt down. Kosher restaurants targeted. Jewish homes. Cars graffitied. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) confirmed that IRGC operatives had paid the perpetrators. Iran was financing attacks on Jewish targets on Australian soil.

But the harder thing, the thing I keep coming back to, is that the young man who carried out the attack at Bondi Beach was born in Australia. He was not a Gazan. He was not a Syrian. He did not arrive and import his violence from somewhere else. He grew up in Australian schools, in an Australian neighborhood, with Australian friends. He had a job. He had family here. He and his father flew to the Philippines three months before the attack and filmed themselves training with weapons. He came back and walked to Bondi Beach on the first night of Hanukkah, on the first weekend of the summer school holidays, on a 28°C day. Despite our Jewish security group warning the authorities that a large, open, public Hanukkah event on Australia’s most famous beach carried a very high risk of attack, there were three police officers on shift. Fifteen dead. Twelve Jews, including Holocaust survivors, rabbis and children. Three non-Jews. The worst massacre in Australian history.

The feeling in the Jewish community afterwards was not of surprise. It was confirmation. The writing had been on the wall and everyone had turned a blind eye.

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And yet, fifty meters away from the shooting inside the bar mitzvah venue where my son was celebrating that very same evening, something else was also happening. Strangers ran in off the beach – some without shoes, some carrying children, some barely dressed because they had been swimming. A Muslim family in hijabs ran in along with everyone else. We closed the doors and waited. For two hours we were in lockdown. Inside that room were Jews, Muslims, Christians – Australians. We had food (kosher) laid out for the celebration, falafel and hummus and pita. My Israeli husband told the Muslim family “marhaba,” you are welcome to eat while we wait. We put on my son’s bar mitzvah slideshow to give people something to look at. A desperate distraction. Later people asked me why I had let Muslims into the bar mitzvah. My answer was simple: they are Australians. Everyone running in that door was in the same danger. We were simply people hiding from the same threat.

That is a seed for the future we can aspire to. The door that stayed open.

There is another one, older. A hundred years ago, an Australian cavalry charge at Beersheva helped bring the First World War to its end in the land of Israel. You can still see the statues on the shores of the Kinneret: the Israeli flag and the Australian flag together. Australians traveled far from their homes to protect values they held dear, and they won. The connection between Australia and Israel runs deeper than the news cycle. It is in the record, in the history that Australians are still proud of. These are not proof of arrival. They are glimpses of what has not been destroyed, and of what the work is working toward.

The road back to Australia runs through education, through media accountability, through a government willing to name what is happening rather than explain it away. None of this is simple, and none of it is beyond a country that has managed harder things.

Start with numbers. There are a hundred and twenty thousand Jews in a country of twenty-two million, concentrated in Sydney and Melbourne. Your average Australian has never met a Jew in their life. That gap in lived experience is where misinformation fills in. People read things and accept them as fact, things that would not survive a single afternoon in a Jewish home. We punch well above our weight in this country — but we cannot punch our way out of an information war on our own. The squeaky hinge gets the oil. The voices making noise are the ones that get heard. When antisemitism shows itself, it needs to be nipped in the bud. Everything that happens, you speak up, you report, you make a noise, you make a scene. Silence is one puzzle piece that allowed the writing to appear on the wall, and we cannot afford to wait for it again.

Holocaust education needs to be taught in every Australian school, not reserved for Jewish ones — and not a version that has been flattened into a general argument against the use of force. The real meaning of never again, and then how history repeats. The ABC’s children’s programming needs to be held to account. Governments must take warnings seriously. When communities raise alarms about rising antisemitism or radicalization, those alarms cannot be filed away.

Immigration is not the issue. Australia has always been a country of immigrants, and refugees deserve refuge. The concern is radicalization. It is the imam mourning the death of the Ayatollah of Iran from a Sydney pulpit. It is the community within a community that never has to reckon with Australian values, never has to meet a Jew, and is shaped instead by voices that have no interest in Australia’s future. You can see what happens in Europe when that goes on for two and three generations, passport holders who have no relationship to the country whose passport they carry. Australia is not there yet. But the attacker at Bondi Beach was born here, raised here, radicalized here. That is Australia’s to answer for, not to suppress and not to explain away as a lone wolf.

The current Australian government has not shown the will to do that work. That is a fact, not a complaint, and it will not always be true.

What we need is this: policy that takes radicalization seriously, education that tells the truth, a press that can be held to account, social media that is legislated, institutions that can be pressured, and a Jewish community that speaks up early and loud because inaction is more dangerous than action, and we learned that the hard way. We won’t get back to the Australia we loved at once. We won’t achieve it without resistance. But we cannot stop until the mezuzah can go back on the doorpost. Until a child can wear the Magen David on the train and no one looks twice. The distance between here and there is significant, and the responsibility for crossing it belongs to everyone who knows what is at stake.

More Prophecy awaits! Get the full issue on your ebook reader or in paperback today:

Read all of Prophecy today

Can’t afford it? No worries! Articles from each issue, published quarterly, will be shared on a weekly basis for Substack subscribers. Subscribe to get at least one article per week, delivered to your inbox.

Subscribe now

Are you clear on the future your organization is actually working toward—or are you operating under pressure without a defined direction? Prophecy helps mission-driven leaders step out of reactive mode and into a structured process of visioning, strategic clarity, and decision-making. Through high-impact, future-oriented workshops—from 90-minute conversations to multi-day strategic sprints—we help teams align around shared values, explore plausible futures, and translate ambition into concrete priorities and next steps. If you’re ready to move from urgency to purpose, we’d welcome the opportunity to bring Prophecy to your organization. Contact: shalom@seekprophecy.com

But first, let’s get to know the person behind the piece: Michael Freedman

Michael was born and raised in London, and now lives between Buenos Aires, Tel Aviv and Athens. He is a seasoned investor in Israel and abroad, a constant traveller, linguist and epicurean, and a regular writer and podcaster on current affairs at transported.media. Unsurprisingly, his Zionist role model is Nahum Goldmann.

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The Road Back to Britain

By Michael Freedman

Imagine if you will, a meeting some thirty-odd years into the future. The senior leadership of the British Jewish community are planning the 2060-2070 “Decade of Anglo-Jewish Celebration,” to commemorate the forthcoming 300th anniversary of the origin of the Board of Deputies, and the 200th anniversary of the birth of the United Synagogue.

There are two plausible scenarios in which this meeting takes place, based on what happens at a fork in the road we are almost at, here and now.

In the first, we have experienced what historian David Starkey calls a “restoration.” The UK has reverted to a more Victorian liberal, laissez-faire culture and economy, with the Jews and their institutions firmly at its heart, part of the engine of this change, through their influence on business, politics and public discourse. The community is thriving in an atmosphere of bipartisan affection, in the context of a confident Britain which remains a steadfast ally of Israel.

Relations with the Muslim community have never been better - they have become highly integrated into British society with the Jews as their role model, and separated themselves from an unhealthy alliance with the hard left, which has faded back to the fringes of society, and an obsession with Palestine as a primary cause. The whole country looks forward to participating in the forthcoming events, a celebration of a cherished and very British minority.

In the second, it is likely no longer the United Kingdom or even Great Britain, as its component nations go their separate ways. England has become more of a welfare state, comparable to southern Europe in GDP per capita, whilst the demographic trends that started at the beginning of the century have continued to the extent that the “English” are a minority in most urban areas.

By now the Jewish community has dwindled to under half its former size, and largely polarised into ultra-orthodox and secular. Sitting governments are quick to show support for them as a small minority, because this is the mantra of a multi-cultural society. Britain has a lukewarm relationship with Israel, which dovetails with the dispassionate views on Zionism held by most remaining Jews.

Relations with the Muslim community have never been better - they have become a dominant force in British politics and culture, with the more religious elements of the Jewish community finding much common ground in their way of life, and assimilated Jews allied to the Muslim bloc. The whole country looks forward to participating in the forthcoming events, a celebration of a cherished and very small British minority.

Now let us go back in time to where it all began in earnest, and see how we got to the crossroads.

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In 1760, a group of sephardic Jews living in London sent representatives of their community, “deputados,” to pay homage to George III. This was the origin of the organisation which we know today as the Board of Deputies at the heart of the British State.

At the height of Victorian Britain, presided over by luminaries including the Jewish-born Benjamin Disraeli, the Jews were fully emancipated and the United Synagogue was created through an Act of Parliament to put Jews on an equal footing, enshrining a role for their religious institutions to parallel that of the Church, complete with a Chief Rabbi to mimic the position of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

In other words, Jews and Judaism have been connected to, and protected by, the British Establishment for so long that being a British Jew seems natural, a single identity that has not needed to be hyphenated. For many of us, all of that came to a juddering halt on October 7th, but the reality is that the brakes were being slowly applied for quite some time.

Brexit was perhaps the first touch on the brake pedal, but the Jewish community largely did not notice; what did that have to do with us? Yet Brexit was a symptom of a shift against the Establishment itself, the very thing that had been protecting us. A decade later, and the early symptoms have revealed a serious and contagious illness. We need to ask: as the Establishment topples and is replaced by something else, whither the Jews?

The far-left attacks us for our particularism, embodied in a modern Jewish nation-state and the way in which the community sticks together and discourages assimilation. They voice it through anti-Zionism, the acceptable face of modern antisemitism, in increasingly strident ways.

The far-right despise us for our universalism, seeing Jews at the forefront of every movement from feminism to environmentalism to civil rights, and blaming us collectively for the extremes within them.

And then there is the threat from extremists within the Muslim community that have been evidenced repeatedly, not least in blood on the streets of Manchester, or in the saga of Birmingham banning Israeli football fans.

To see working examples of this triple threat, look no further than the recent firebombing of four Hatzolah ambulances in Golders Green. Many on the left justified this by making it about Israel, comparing it to IDF strikes on ambulances in Gaza, and criticising why there are “particular” Jewish ambulances anyway. Many on the right reached for the usual accusations of false flag operations to garner sympathy by joining the ranks of the “oppressed,” despite a radical Muslim group openly taking responsibility for the attack.

The reaction of most British Jewish institutions to this triple threat appears to be to double down on the relations and structures we have, under the illusion that the system – and therefore the community – will ride out the moment we are in. As the leadership dithers, individual Jews are seeing the writing on the wall and planning accordingly. It does not take a loss of 10% or 20% of the community for the sheer weight of numbers to make this a crisis; it takes a loss of a critical 1% or 2%, and that is already happening.

Consider a Jewish state school in North London. It is a religious Jewish school that receives state funding but still has additional costs because running a Jewish school involves things the State does not cover. Parents are asked to make voluntary contributions of a few thousand pounds each year. Some people cannot afford to pay anything. Some pay more than they are asked. Each year the school runs a fundraiser to raise roughly a million pounds to cover the gap between what the state provides and what it actually costs to operate the school.

Most of that money comes from four generous families. All four of those families have either left Britain, are leaving, or are seriously considering it. If those families disappear, the school will likely have to close because there is simply no way to replace that money.

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You cannot have a British Jewish dinner party conversation anymore where the question of leaving does not come up. Most of my parents’ friends are actively beginning to think about where they might go. As retirees, they are more mobile and financially able. What some are talking about, instead of Israel, is Cyprus.

Cyprus is forty minutes from Israel, it feels culturally British, and it offers something like a halfway house for people who are not quite ready to move to Israel but want somewhere else to go if they need to. There is now an entire neighborhood being built in Cyprus aimed specifically at Jews from northwest London. When it opens, it will sell out almost immediately. The very concept of such a development is a commercial response in the absence of a communal one.

That brings us to the question of what the Jewish community should actually do.

The first thing to recognise is that Jews are a tiny part of the British electorate. We are not going to determine the outcome of elections. What we can do is decide how we position ourselves in relation to the political forces that are emerging.

For me, the single most important step is for the Jewish community to engage politically with the right. That does not mean endorsing them. It means learning who they are, understanding what their issues are with Jews and Israel, and presenting ourselves in the right way. Right now, Jewish institutions often refuse even to be seen engaging with parties like Reform because the old centrist mentality treats anything to the right of the Conservatives as morally unacceptable. But that is precisely the job of communal institutions: to engage across the political spectrum.

Ironically the Jewish community itself is already moving in that direction. Many Jewish voters are drifting to the right because of the cultural environment around them. The institutions simply have not caught up with that reality. In many cases they are six months too late to every political conversation.

You can see this very clearly in public debates over halal and kosher slaughter. Rupert Lowe, a rising political figure with a new party, Restore Britain, proposes banning it. By the time Jewish institutions reacted the debate was already polarised. At that point the only strategy left was confrontation, which rarely works. Earlier engagement might have allowed quiet political maneuvering, finding the small technical differences between kosher and halal slaughter and keeping ourselves on the right side of the debate. But once positions harden, those options disappear.

It appears we want to have our cake and eat it. We would like to return to the Britain of the 1980s and early 1990s, when the country protected its Jews and the Jewish community occupied a comfortable place in the centre of national life. But we are not prepared to accept the political realities that might actually recreate those conditions, let alone advocate for them.

If Britain becomes a country that strongly protects itself, maintains clear borders, and insists on a shared civic identity, the Jewish community could probably thrive again. The difficulty is that the parties currently advocating that direction are not ones with which the Jewish community feels comfortable associating.

That is the conundrum we face. Yet there is a path forward.

The Jewish community needs to recognise the political reality that is emerging, engage with the forces that are likely to shape the “New Establishment,” and make the case that Jews are the best example Britain has of a community that integrated successfully and contributed to the country’s civic identity. That if Britain wishes to return to and preserve the post-war consensus model, it should preserve the Jews.

And if it does not, then the Jewish community must at least have the clarity to recognise it has ended, be ready to adapt to a very different model, and ensure it is robust enough to survive the almighty social, cultural, economic and political struggle the UK is about to go through to determine which model emerges victorious.

The worst outcome of all would be to pretend that the country has not changed and will not change, while the ground continues to shift beneath our feet.

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Next week on Prophecy: Sarah Vanunu argues that the answer to rising antisemitism and the erosion of communal safety is not caution but its opposite: louder, prouder Jewish identity: the mezuzah back on the doorpost, the Magen David worn without calculation.

More Prophecy awaits! Get the full issue on your ebook reader or in paperback today:

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Are you clear on the future your organization is actually working toward—or are you operating under pressure without a defined direction? Prophecy helps mission-driven leaders step out of reactive mode and into a structured process of visioning, strategic clarity, and decision-making. Through high-impact, future-oriented workshops—from 90-minute conversations to multi-day strategic sprints—we help teams align around shared values, explore plausible futures, and translate ambition into concrete priorities and next steps. If you’re ready to move from urgency to purpose, we’d welcome the opportunity to bring Prophecy to your organization. Contact: shalom@seekprophecy.com

But first, let’s get to know the person behind the piece: Jordan Chandler Hirsch

Jordan Chandler Hirsch is a senior counselor at Palantir and a Senior Fellow in the Technology, Security, and Global Affairs Program at the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law. Previously, he practiced law at Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C. There, he advised clients in matters such as high-stakes cybersecurity incidents, national security-related investigations, surveillance and law enforcement compliance and litigation, regulatory and legal challenges involving supply chain security and information and communications technologies, and challenges confronting the aerospace and defense sector.

Jordan was also a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University and a Next Generation National Security Fellow at the Center for a New American Security. Jordan began his career in journalism, serving as a Robert L. Bartley Fellow at the Wall Street Journal and an editor at Foreign Affairs.

He writes frequently on foreign policy and national security for publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, and Sapir. His recent work has focused on the institutional future of American Jewry — a question he cares much about as a father.

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The Road Back to America

On Thursday, March 19, 2026, we had the pleasure of speaking with Jordan Chandler Hirsch about his thoughts on the future of American Jewry. We’re pleased to share with you our notes from the call.

American Jewry should work toward a future not of survival but of reignition. Forty years from now, I hope for an American Jewish community that stands tall in the public square — reinvigorated and confident in the contribution it makes to American civic life. Not a community that has retreated behind gates and security cameras. Not a European-style residue, half-tolerated and self-enclosed. A community that has looked honestly at this present moment of crisis and decided to build through it. This vision is still achievable. Not because the conditions are favorable, but because the alternative is unacceptable.

The operating logic of postwar Jewish life was integration. By any measure, it worked. In the professions, in the universities, in the culture, in politics, we earned our place in the American story at a speed that would have astonished our ancestors. As I wrote about in my piece in the journal Sapir, The Need for a Jewish Sovereign Wealth Fund, the price of that speed was sublimation. Jewish power could not be named directly, only enjoyed quietly, or on an individual rather than communal basis. Jewish philanthropy poured outward, with roughly 89 percent of major Jewish giving flowing to non-Jewish causes, while communal institutions went chronically underfunded. Culturally, what entered the American vernacular as “Jewish” was the Larry David version: self-deprecating, warm, slightly ridiculous. Lox and bagels. The slapstick of a community that understood, at some level, that it was permitted to be charming but not to be formidable.

That is not all we are.

Jewish distinctiveness is not a challenge to the American project. It is a blueprint for it. What makes America extraordinary — genuinely, historically extraordinary — is its capaciousness: its ability to hold many distinctive identities inside a shared attachment to this particular country: its land, its inheritance, its ideals. That is unheard of in human history, unprecedented in the West, much less anywhere else. The only way to sustain it is to protect what makes it possible, which is the particularity of the communities inside it. America’s founding wager was that one could be fully Jewish and fully American, fully Irish and fully American, fully Japanese and fully American — and that the conjunction was not a compromise but a source of national strength.

The operating word is conjunction. Not assimilation, which dissolves the particular into the general. Not separatism, which walls it off. The United States derives its dynamism from communities that maintain their distinctiveness while channeling it into the shared project. Flattening the differences flattens the thing itself. The result is not a richer unity but a blander, ultimately more fragile one. This paradox lies at the heart of the American experiment: it is precisely the distinctiveness of its communities that gives American civic life its depth. Americans’ attachment to their homeland comes from their ability to weave their particular stories into a larger tapestry — neither hiding them away in the home nor using them to dominate the public sphere, but carrying them proudly into a shared national life, grateful for the ability to do so.

Jewish distinctiveness, then, is not merely a feature of American pluralism. It is an argument for it. And yet it is under siege.

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Our project to reignite American Jewry must begin with the community coming to terms with October 7th. Israelis fought a war – are still fighting a war – and were forced to rebuild, to find their forward momentum even in grief. American Jews watched from the outside, much as Americans beyond New York experienced September 11th: with a horror that had nowhere to go, no rubble to clear. Indeed, we discovered that a generation of young Americans has been educated, on campuses and through social media, to view Jews as a malign force in history. In response, we naturally hunkered down. We spend somewhere above $750 million a year on fences and cameras and guards. That spending is necessary, but the message it sends is devastating: a community defined by the threats it faces.

The churning since October 7th — the cascade of essays in Sapir and Tablet and this journal, the speeches, the arguments, the arguments about the arguments — is a sign of a community attempting to grapple with this new epoch. It’s a community that has arrived at the same broad conclusions from a variety of angles: the institutional architecture of American Jewish life was built for a different era, and it’s not meeting the moment. That we need to build something new.

The challenge now is to determine what we will build.

The good news is that the American Jewish community has made this shift before, during the movement to rescue Soviet Jewry. By the early 1960s, millions of Jews were trapped behind the Iron Curtain, facing severe discrimination, denied the right to practice their religion, and barred from emigrating. The American Jewish establishment favored quiet diplomacy — backchannel conversations, careful appeals through official channels, deference to diplomats. A group of students in New York rejected this approach and launched a public advocacy campaign that was loud, public, and confrontational. That movement gained so much prominence within the Jewish community by the early 1970s that the establishment organizations had no choice but to join with them. That convergence produced American legislation tying Soviet trade privileges to emigration rights, and then, fourteen years later, 250,000 people on the Mall in Washington demanding freedom for Soviet Jews.

Today, the disparate enclaves challenging the establishment come from its outskirts as well: the tech community is one, and Sephardic/Mizrahi American Jewry, another. The tech community has seeded initiatives with a rhetorical clarity and higher risk tolerance than the traditional philanthropic establishment.Sephardic Jews, as Mijal Bitton recently wrote about in Sapir, are leading a renaissance in places like Miami, where there is a flowering of Jewish ideas, pride, and institutions. Their posture – present, proud, unembarrassed – is not bravado. It is the natural bearing of a community unaccustomed to sublimation.

In each their own ways, neither group agonizes over the tension between Jewish identity and American belonging. Both represent compelling models of conjunction. And they come at a time when Day school applications are up, and summer camp enrollment is rising, proof of grassroots commitment to Jewish life in America.

There are, however, risks lurking in this nascent energy. The first is that we exchange sublimation for sectarianism, that in rediscovering the “Jewish” side of the conjunction, we lose the “American” side. American Jews need a self-conscious pride anchored in civic participation, one that holds up its Jewishness and its Americanness simultaneously. A community that cannot engage the public square cannot shape it, and a community that cannot shape the public square will eventually discover that the public square can easily forget it.

The second risk is that this energy does not break through to the establishment. Potential new entrants, from donors to day school parents, move on. The Sephardic renaissance stays local. Existing institutions dampen the activist spirit.

To overcome these risks, the task of this moment is to produce undeniable proof points: to scale these efforts to a level where their success forces the wider community to converge around them.

What could such a shift look like now? As I wrote in Sapir, American Jews should begin by investing in America with a Jewish name on it. There is no shortage of Jewish capital in this country; there is, however, a shortage of Jewish capital deployed in our name. Back a pharmaceutical plant in Pennsylvania, a vocational training program in Indiana, an electrician’s apprenticeship — and declare plainly that the Jewish community is doing this because it believes in this country. We should also invest in ourselves. We should seize the momentum behind camps and schools and take a far more aggressive approach to investing in new players and new ideas.

Investing in consciously Jewish projects, from a wealth fund to continuity initiatives, may seem counterintuitive to throwing ourselves into the American project. But self-reliance is a precondition for contribution. We cannot be partners if we are supplicants. Investing through these new methods does not represent a withdrawal from the United States but a vote for it, through methods called upon in the 21^st century. The old model was integration through enmeshment: embed ourselves in public institutions and hope they hold. The new model is participation through sovereignty: build our own foundation, and from that foundation, contribute to the country we love.

Too many believe that the fight is already lost, that at best we delay the inevitable, that the right response is retreat, dissolution, or departure. These impulses are natural. But they reflect a failure of historical imagination – and a failure of conjunction. Retreat isolates the community from the public square, reducing Jewish life to a walled garden. Dissolution trades particularity for the comfort of an undifferentiated belonging. And departure signals defeat.

A Jewish community that stands tall in the public square, that invests in America with its own name on it, that produces citizens who are formidable precisely because they are rooted — that community does not merely benefit from American pluralism, it sustains the architecture of pluralism itself. We must try to sustain it. When Jews retreat, it is not only a Jewish loss. It is an American one.

The American project, imperfect and strained as it is, remains what Lincoln called the last best hope of earth. There is no replacement for it. There is something else, and Jewish history gives us an idea of what that something else looks like. The world-historical consequences of losing this treasure are vast — not just for Jews, not just for Israel, but for everyone who depends on this republic to hold. By investing in America, and in ourselves, we embody conjunction: a community that knows what it is, says so unflinchingly, and proves itself indispensable to the country it calls home.

Next week on Prophecy: Michael Freedman’s case that the old Establishment that long protected British Jews is eroding — and that comfortable centrism, once a reasonable posture, is no longer equal to the moment.

More Prophecy awaits! Get the full issue on your ebook reader or in paperback today:

Read all of Prophecy today

Can’t afford it? No worries! Articles from each issue, published quarterly, will be shared on a weekly basis for Substack subscribers. Subscribe to get at least one article per week, delivered to your inbox.

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Are you clear on the future your organization is actually working toward—or are you operating under pressure without a defined direction? Prophecy helps mission-driven leaders step out of reactive mode and into a structured process of visioning, strategic clarity, and decision-making. Through high-impact, future-oriented workshops—from 90-minute conversations to multi-day strategic sprints—we help teams align around shared values, explore plausible futures, and translate ambition into concrete priorities and next steps. If you’re ready to move from urgency to purpose, we’d welcome the opportunity to bring Prophecy to your organization. Contact: shalom@seekprophecy.com

But first, let’s get to know the person behind the piece: Ben Koan

Ben Koan is a writer and editor whose work explores politics and ideas through the lens of long-term history. He is the author of The Thousand-Year View, a Substack newsletter that examines contemporary events within the arc of historical change, asking how the forces shaping the present may look from a wider perspective. His essays frequently address questions regarding the past and future of Israel and the Jewish people.

Born and raised in Ontario, Canada, Koan has spent much of his career working at the intersection of publishing, education, and technology. He currently serves as Editorial Director at an educational technology company and has extensive experience in publishing and e-learning. He lives in the Boston area with his wife and two young children.

The Road to Normal

By Ben Koan

Forty years from now, when my kids are old enough to have kids of their own, I want them to be able to tell a story about a period that is behind them. I want them to explain to their kids that Israel, which is in that future seen as any other normal state, was once thought of as abnormal, and isn’t that strange?

If you read the early Zionists, that was a motif: Israel becoming a nation like other nations. Israel’s Declaration of Independence refers to “the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.” In a general sense, the idea is that Israel should be seen as a normal country. A normal country is not one whose existence is constantly questioned, where twenty-five-plus countries don’t recognize its existence formally, where large constituencies in countries that do recognize it also consider it illegitimate. The vision I support is normalization, which in Israel’s case, geopolitically means integration – integration into the region it’s in, which is a majority Muslim, majority Arab neighborhood.

We can sometimes get trapped in thinking in Jewish terms, which is why I find analogy useful. There’s a large Armenian community nearby where I live. It strikes me as kind of absurd to think that you’d need to apply a special label for Armenians who support the existence of Armenia. Obviously they do – it’s their homeland. It’s normal for an Armenian to care about Armenia, especially after the Armenian genocide. Isaiah Berlin, writing around the time Israel was created, saw the creation of the state as normalizing Diaspora Jews in a certain sense – Italian Americans have Italy, Irish Americans have Ireland, Jewish Americans have Israel. It’s normal to have a country with which you’re ancestrally associated.

That’s how it is for every people. George Washington understood this. His 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, stated plainly that the new republic would “give to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” The children of Abraham were to be welcomed as what they were: a people with a particular history and a particular attachment to a particular land. Nothing unusual. Nothing requiring apology.

So what I hope is that forty years from now, this will be a period my kids describe to their own children as the worst of it – a wilderness they passed through. A period when to be Jewish, to be associated with Israel, was to be seen as abnormal. When every post on social media about anything Jewish would bring a torrent of comments – and “free Palestine” is the best you’d expect, and then it just gets darker from there. When kids felt like they had to whisper that they were Jewish in certain contexts. That’s what I’m hoping this period becomes: something they look back on as a formative difficulty that is, by then, behind them.

But I can’t promise that. And I think that distinction matters. The sociologist Philip Rieff wrote that “Prophesying is utterly different from prediction. It is in itself an effort to induce a right decision, or correct a wrong one.” To prophesy is to warn: if things continue the way they are, this is what’s going to happen. You can’t know what’s going to happen. But if you give up, if you don’t do anything about it, then that’s how it’s going to continue.

Taking the long view means not giving in to despair, and Jewish history is the ultimate case study in that, covering everything universally human in a particular way. Despite how terrible the past few years have been.we didn’t just go through the Holocaust. The State of Israel has not been destroyed. Iran has not dropped a nuclear bomb on Tel Aviv. You can imagine all kinds of apocalyptic scenarios, and we’re not living through the apocalypse. Even in terms of anti-Semitic attitudes: sure, it’s quite bad, but older generations experienced much worse. The institutional discrimination that existed within living memory in North America – in universities, in professions, in neighborhoods – is gone. Social norms are shifting in ways that feel alarming, but the shift hasn’t fully reached the mainstream, and there are reasons to think it won’t.

If we can keep that perspective and look at the present with that longer view in mind, we can see the seeds of the future already in it. Even during the war in Gaza, which has understandably inflamed public opinion around the world, the Abraham Accords did not shatter. When Iran launched missiles at Israel, Jordan helped in that defense. Those ties held through what we hope is the worst of it. The opportunity for lasting peace exists. Even in Iran today, among protesters against the government, there is substantial pro-Israel sentiment. In 1967, the Arab League summit adopted the Three Noes: no peace with Israel, no negotiation with Israel, no recognition of Israel. Since then, six Arab League members have established ties with Israel. The trend line, measured over decades, points toward the normalization that political Zionism always sought.

That trend matters for Jews around the world, too, because normalization of Israel and normalization of Jews are not separable questions. There will never be a clean separation between the two, even if you wanted there to be. Antisemites are going to put them together – and it’s not even just antisemites. There is something almost pre-political about it: roughly half of the world’s Jews live in Israel. That is why headlines about Israel affect Jews around the world and affect attitudes toward Jews, whether you think that’s right or wrong.

Sure, an Islamist attack on a synagogue in Britain because of what happened in Gaza is absurd, and yes, in the West, Russian Orthodox churches haven’t faced comparable attacks because of the war in Ukraine. And yet that’s the reality. Which means that as Israel is gradually normalized – and the trend is in that direction – so too, in time, will be the Jews.

October 7th was, for me, a moment of clarity about all of this. I was at home with my kids. I remember the reports coming in and, while the full scale of it was not immediately clear, I was doing a lot of doom-scrolling, reading headlines, seeing what people were saying. What I found there was disturbing, but clarifying in a particular way. I saw something like it before: when 9/11 happened, there were people in my high school who were happy it happened, who felt that America had it coming. That was formative for me. A kind of clarity: there are people like that out there. We can’t assume everyone has the same outraged reaction to evil.

October 7th was like that, except amplified, because there is social media now and because America has many more sympathizers than Israel. I scrolled through tweets saying it deserved to happen; voices on the left with no compunction about celebrating a massacre. As much as seeing that reaction is painful, the clarifying aspect is knowing who showed humanity and who didn’t. When bonds are most severely tested, you find out who people really are. It’s painful clarity. But it’s clarity.

The aftermath of October 7th also disabused me of the distortion that doom-scrolling creates. The same event that revealed rot in certain parts of academia and beyond – the settler-colonial framework, the oppressor-oppressed binary applied without reflection – also spurred a local politician to speak at a memorial service for the victims. It led a non-Jewish friend to call me and express his horror. The internet makes it feel like the entire world is against you. It isn’t.

And October 7th prompted in me, more than anything, the urge to read. I was already interested in Jewish and Israeli history, but this pushed me further. To challenge myself. To recognize that Israel has done certain things one may not approve of. The War of Independence, for example, was an often ugly battle for survival, not a simple story of good and evil. Confronting that is important because one should understand the best arguments on both sides of any issue and be capable of engaging with them. It reminded me that people who are critical of Israel are not grasping at straws – there are realities they can grasp at. Acknowledging this, engaging with their objections seriously, makes one’s conclusions more convincing, and advocacy more effective.

I have come to conclude that for us to advance the cause of the normalization of Israel we need to frame our advocacy in the North American context in the language of universalism – but of a particular kind. The universalism that acknowledges that the way the Jews connect to the State of Israel is not abnormal – it is analogous to how many other peoples relate to their homelands. The acknowledgement that classical liberal thinking places religious liberty and national self-determination at its center. That claiming these rights for the Jews is not special or unique. It is the application of principles that the tradition already holds.

My kids are four and two. They will grow up in whatever world we make of this moment. What I want for them – what I think is actually achievable, if we do the work – is to live in a world where Jews are ordinary. I want them to be able to say, without lowering their voice, that they are Jewish, that their people have a country, that the country is in the Middle East and is called Israel, and that none of this is unusual. The way it is not unusual for a Diaspora Armenian to care about Armenia, or for an Irish American to feel something when Ireland is mentioned, or for an Italian American to have a flag on their wall. Normal. Just normal.

That’s a future I believe worth working towards: not triumph, not vindication, just the unremarkable status of a people among peoples, a nation among nations, as the Declaration said, like all other nations. If my grandchildren can hear the story of this period the way we hear stories of other darknesses that passed then the work will have been worth it. And if we don’t try, we already know how the story ends.

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More Prophecy awaits! Get the full issue on your ebook reader or in paperback today:

Read all of Prophecy today

Can’t afford it? No worries! Articles from each issue, published quarterly, will be shared on a weekly basis for Substack subscribers. Subscribe to get at least one article per week, delivered to your inbox.

Next week: Jordan Chandler Hirsch argues that the postwar logic of American Jewish life — power enjoyed quietly, identity managed carefully — has run its course, and that what the community needs now is reignition: treating its distinctiveness not as a liability but as a gift to American pluralism.

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Are you clear on the future your organization is actually working toward—or are you operating under pressure without a defined direction? Prophecy helps mission-driven leaders step out of reactive mode and into a structured process of visioning, strategic clarity, and decision-making. Through high-impact, future-oriented workshops—from 90-minute conversations to multi-day strategic sprints—we help teams align around shared values, explore plausible futures, and translate ambition into concrete priorities and next steps. If you’re ready to move from urgency to purpose, we’d welcome the opportunity to bring Prophecy to your organization. Contact: shalom@seekprophecy.com

But first, let’s get to know the person behind the piece: Khaled Hassan

Khaled Hassan is a convert to Judaism and Egyptian-British national security and foreign policy researcher holding an MA in Intelligence and Security from Leicester University. With over 14 years of experience specialising in extremism, propaganda, and Middle Eastern geopolitics. His work focuses on digital threats, antisemitism in the Arab world, radicalization, and disinformation, particularly in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

A recognized voice in global Jewish advocacy, Khaled serves as a Council Member in the inaugural cohort of Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s Voice of the People initiative, uniting 150 Jewish leaders to represent 15 million Jewish voices worldwide. As part of the working group on Jewish and non-Jewish relations, he spearheads efforts to advance regional normalisation and the expansion of the Abraham Accords.

Khaled served as a member of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s first presidential campaign in the wake of Mohammed Morsi’s ouster, and has also advised on President Trump’s plan for Gaza, leveraging his expertise in Middle Eastern security dynamics to inform high-level policy discussions. His unique perspective bridges Arab-world insights with Western policymaking, making him a critical analyst on extremism, interfaith dialogue, and geopolitical strategy.

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The Road to Regional Respect

By Khaled Hassan

Forty years from now, if we get this right, Israel will not merely be tolerated in the Middle East. It will be feared, respected, and admired in equal measure, simultaneously. I want to be precise about these words, because they are not synonyms and they are not interchangeable. They are a formula. And the Arab world understands this formula far better than Israel currently does. Fear without respect breeds conspiracy. Admiration without fear breeds contempt. The Gulf states today fear Israel. They respect Israel’s military reach. But admiration – the recognition of Israel as a legitimate, permanent, culturally rooted civilizational force in this region – that does not yet exist. And until it does, Israel has not won. Not in the sense that matters for the next generation.

I want to be honest about something else upfront. The best case scenario in forty years is not a Middle East without war. Our region will continue to be shaped by conflict. We are not going to become Europe. The idea of open borders, of an Egyptian strolling into Tel Aviv for the weekend, is not where we are headed, at least not in any foreseeable timeframe. I started reading Golda Meir’s memoir after October 7th, and it was clarifying in a way I had not expected – not because her answers still apply, but because the questions she was wrestling with have not gone away. Since 1948, war has been a permanent feature of Israeli life, not something that comes and goes. The bones of this conflict run deep.

But “no European peace” is not the same as “no progress.” The best case scenario is a Middle East in which the potential for direct confrontation is systematically minimized – where a coalition anchored by the UAE, with regional partners including Greece, Somaliland, and Ethiopia, has built the architecture of de-escalation. Where the Saudi question has finally been answered. Where Egypt has made a choice. And most importantly, where Israel has done what it has never yet done: built a coherent, long-term strategy for how it is perceived across the Arab world. Not just feared. Feared, respected, and admired. That is a different Israel than the one that exists today. And the question worth sitting with is whether that future is fantasy, or whether, buried inside the current disorder, there are already signs pointing toward it.

There are. But you have to know where to look.

The Gulf has already moved, and that is not speculation – it is happening. The Gulf states have done something genuinely remarkable in recent years: they have built a civic and national identity that is distinct from the old Arab nationalist consensus. The UAE is not Egypt. It does not need Israel as an internal enemy to bind its population together. Its identity is rooted in achievement, in modernity, in economic ambition. For the first time in the modern history of Arab-Israeli relations, there is a major Arab political entity for which making peace with Israel is not a betrayal of identity but an expression of it. That is a structural shift, not a tactical one. The Gulf’s move is not merely a diplomatic transaction. It is an identity shift. And identity shifts, once they take root, propagate – not quickly, not without resistance, but they propagate.

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The war with Iran has accelerated this. When Israel demonstrated – across multiple fronts, over several years – that it is a serious military power that cannot be dismissed, the Gulf took note in the only language that matters in statecraft: interest. The Gulf fears Iran. The Gulf respects Israel’s capacity to contain Iran. That convergence of interests is the foundation upon which something more durable can be built. It is not admiration yet. But it is the precondition for it. And it is more than most people give it credit for, because it represents something that did not exist even fifteen years ago: an Arab world in which at least some of the major players have a concrete, material reason to want Israel to succeed.

Even Egypt, which I regard as one of the most difficult cases, is not entirely static. Egypt’s Westernized, educated elites (as opposed to the Generals-turned-Politicians) understand things that Egypt’s public discourse cannot yet say. Egyptian leadership knows that war with Israel is not in Egypt’s interest. The economy, not the army, is Egypt’s real national emergency. That understanding – that the posture of perpetual hostility toward Israel is a luxury Egypt can no longer afford – is beginning to circulate at the elite level. Not openly, not loudly, but it is circulating. I have seen it. The gap between what Egypt’s leadership privately understands and what Egypt’s media publicly broadcasts remains vast. But the fact that it exists at all is significant. Gaps like that have a way of widening over time, given the right pressure and the right opportunities.

The problem is that Israel does not know how to receive any of this.

I am one of the most critical voices when it comes to how Israel and mainstream Jewish organizations engage the Arab world. I say this not as an outsider but as someone who has sat with senior Israeli leadership and watched, up close, how the apparatus actually works – or rather, how it fails to work. Israel is one of the most bureaucratic countries I have ever encountered when it comes to serious diplomacy. I say this not as a casual observation, but as the verdict of someone who has submitted proposals, attended meetings, and watched promising initiatives die in committee. There is no coherent strategy for the Arab world. Not for Egypt, not for the Gulf, not for public opinion, not for elite opinion. There is no ten-year plan and no institutional mandate. There is a gap where a strategy should be, and it is filled with improvisation and good intentions and, occasionally, catastrophic miscalculation.

I will give you one example that captures the problem entirely. Put an Arabic-speaking Israeli in a televised debate with an Egyptian commentator. The Egyptian is loud, aggressive, accusatory. “You kill children. You are liars. You are colonialists.” The Israeli responds calmly, patiently, earnestly: “We want peace. We respect your culture. We would love to shake your hand.” This, Israel believes, is the right approach. Measured. Moral. Civilized. It is a disaster. In the Egyptian cultural register – and across much of the Arab world – that calm response does not signal confidence. It signals weakness. It signals guilt. If someone is shouting at me and I do not shout back louder, then in the eyes of the room I am either being dishonest or I am scared because I know I am wrong. That is how it reads. And it feeds directly into every existing conspiracy theory about who Jews are and what Israel is doing. The Israeli thinks he is winning the argument. He is losing the room.

Yair Lapid made the same mistake at a far higher level. He sat down with a well-known Egyptian broadcaster in the UAE and blamed Benjamin Netanyahu for October 7th – on camera, in front of an Arab audience. Lapid believed, I assume, that this demonstrated Israeli democratic openness. What he actually did was hand the Arab world a gift. He gave the narrative that October 7th was an Israeli conspiracy, caused by Israeli dysfunction, a veneer of credibility from within Israel itself. The Egyptian broadcaster almost certainly received talking points from his country’s intelligence service before that interview. He knew what he was doing. Lapid walked in with no such preparation and left having undermined his own country. In my view, that is not democracy in action. It is a failure of strategic literacy. And it is the kind of failure that repeats itself, because no one in the Israeli system has built the institutional capacity to prevent it.

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This is what I mean when I say that the stakes of getting this wrong are not merely diplomatic. Consider what getting it right would actually mean for Israel. If Israel builds the standing in the Arab world that I am describing – if it graduates from merely feared to genuinely respected and admired – its GDP would double within a generation as its technology, already among the most sophisticated in the world, is freed to flow across a region of hundreds of millions of people who are hungry for exactly what Israel builds. Israel’s global relations, battered and strained after years of conflict and controversy, could be rebuilt on the foundation of a new regional reality. The upside is enormous. The cost of failing to pursue it is not just a missed opportunity, it is a deepening of the current exhaustion, the endless cycle of escalation, the slow attrition of a country that has to spend a disproportionate share of its energy and resources just to hold its ground. Fear, taken alone, may be a strategy for survival, but it is not a strategy for flourishing.

To reach this better future, Israel must change its mindset. Israeli institutions and Israeli society need to recognize that not everything can be solved with an overwhelming show of force. Force is necessary. I am not arguing for its abandonment. But force alone does not produce respect, and it does not produce admiration. It produces exactly what we are seeing: a region that registers Israel’s power and immediately moves to interpret it through the lens of conspiracy and threat. Israelis need to realize that they cannot bomb their way to legitimacy. They will need to earn legitimacy through the long, patient, culturally literate work of building relationships, demonstrating presence, and refusing to be treated as less than an equal.

If I were to design the architecture of change – and I have argued for versions of this in various rooms – it would rest on three things:

The first is institutional reform. Israel needs a structure with real authority and a real mandate, dedicated to its long-term standing in the Arab world. Not a PR department. Not a rotating cast of spokespeople. A serious, funded, empowered institution that develops strategy the way Egypt develops its media strategy – with coordination, with intelligence input, with consistency across years and governments. When President Sisi called Israel an enemy, no one in the Israeli establishment responded. That silence was not restraint. It was absence. Respect is not built through absence. It is built through presence, through the kind of sustained, deliberate engagement that makes clear that Israel is watching, is serious, and will not be dismissed.

The second is getting the right people into the room. I will say something I do not often say publicly, because Israel’s enemies try to weaponize it: Israel needs to elevate Mizrahi Jews – specifically Arabic-speaking Mizrahis – into positions of real influence in its Arab-world diplomacy. There was a generation of Mizrahi Jews with lived experience in Arab countries who understood the cultural grammar of this region in ways that cannot be taught in a briefing document. That knowledge is still there, still available. It is not being used. The majority of Israeli diplomats and strategists I have encountered in this domain are Ashkenazim who, through no fault of their own, bring a completely different cultural operating system to the table. This is not a critique of individuals. It is a structural observation, and it demands a structural response. Israel needs to build a pipeline of leaders who carry, in their bones, an understanding of how the Arab world actually thinks, argues, negotiates, and decides.

The third, and the most difficult, is strategic discipline across Israeli society itself. Israel is a democracy. I understand that. But Israeli politicians, journalists, and public figures need to understand that when they publicly condemn their own government to Arab audiences, they are not demonstrating democratic virtue. They are loading a weapon and handing it to people who want to see Israel dismantled. In the Arab world, even people in the political opposition do not bash their government in front of their enemies. The concept is almost visceral: you do not walk into your enemy’s house and criticize your father. It is not loyalty to a leader – it is loyalty to a family, to a house. Israel’s internal divisions, when broadcast to hostile audiences, are not humanizing. They are destabilizing. This needs to be taught – in schools, in military service, wherever Israelis are being prepared to engage with a world that does not operate by the same rules.

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I will not pretend that even these three steps will fully solve the problem. The identity problem in Egypt and across much of the Arab world is generational. For decades, “Israel” has functioned as an internal organizing principle, the external enemy that papers over internal failure. This is not an accident. It is a managed narrative, and managed narratives do not dissolve because someone writes a good position paper. Egypt’s public has been told one story for fifty years. The gap between elite understanding and public narrative is where every reform initiative goes to die, and Israel’s opponents know this and exploit it skillfully. Saudi Arabia, which I was once cautiously optimistic about, remains complicated. The framework is not there yet. Within Israel itself, the political dysfunction and the inability to think in decades rather than election cycles are not small obstacles. They are structural. Changing them requires a kind of institutional will that I have not yet seen from the Israeli system.

But I have seen something else. I have seen individuals who understand this. I have seen the beginning of conversations – in private rooms, in corridor exchanges, in the long aftermath of a war that shocked everyone – where the right people are starting to ask the right questions. The Gulf’s pragmatism is a real opening. The weakening of the Iranian axis is a real opening. The slow, painful awakening in parts of the Arab world to the cost of this conflict is real. These are not illusions. They are seeds.

Forty years from now, if we do this work – if Israel builds the institutions, develops the leaders, achieves the strategic discipline, and earns the standing it has not yet earned – Israel will be feared, respected, and admired across the Arab world. Feared, because the Arab world will have no doubt about Israel’s capacity or its will to use it. Respected, because Israel will have demonstrated, through consistent and culturally literate engagement, that it is a serious actor operating by rules the region understands. Admired, because a new generation of Arabs will have grown up seeing an Israel that does not apologize for existing, that speaks the languages of the region, both literally and figuratively, and that has built real relationships at every level of Arab society. We may not arrive at utopia, or at the end of conflict, but we can achieve something more durable than a peace treaty signed in Washington: legitimacy, earned in the only currency the region accepts.

We are not there yet. We are far from it. But the path exists. And the longer Israel waits to walk it, the harder the walk will become.

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More Prophecy awaits! Get the full issue on your ebook reader or in paperback today:

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Up next week: Ben Koan makes the case that the Promised Land is not triumph or vindication but something quieter: a Jewish State whose existence is no longer a question, and a people whose connection to their homeland requires no apology.

And finally: unlock Prophecy for your Organization:

Are you clear on the future your organization is actually working toward—or are you operating under pressure without a defined direction? Prophecy helps mission-driven leaders step out of reactive mode and into a structured process of visioning, strategic clarity, and decision-making.

Through high-impact, future-oriented workshops—from 90-minute conversations to multi-day strategic sprints—we help teams align around shared values, explore plausible futures, and translate ambition into concrete priorities and next steps.

If you’re ready to move from urgency to purpose, we’d welcome the opportunity to bring Prophecy to your organization. Contact: shalom@seekprophecy.com

But first, let’s get to know the person behind the piece: Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib leads Realign For Palestine, an Atlantic Council project that challenges entrenched narratives in the Israel and Palestine discourse and develops a new policy framework for rejuvenated pro-Palestine advocacy. Realign For Palestine aims to cultivate a new generation of Palestinian voices committed to a two-nation solution, nonviolence, and radical pragmatism.

Alkhatib serves as a resident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs, where he writes extensively on Gaza’s political and humanitarian affairs, is an outspoken critic of Hamas, and promotes a radically pragmatic approach to peace and Palestinian statehood as the only path forward between Palestinians and Israelis. His writing and opinions have been published and featured across the US, Israeli, and international press, and his views are prominently featured across social media platforms. Alkhatib holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration and a master’s degree in intelligence and national security studies. He grew up in Gaza City and left Gaza in 2005. Much of Ahmed’s experience is influenced by having grown up in Gaza during the Oslo peace process — and during the difficulties resulting from Oslo’s failure — and the rise of Hamas and Islamism in Gaza.

Since the October 7 massacre, Alkhatib’s life has been deeply impacted by the loss of thirty-three of his immediate and extended family members, who were killed by three different Israeli airstrikes. Still, he aims to play a part in breaking the cycle of dehumanization and defying the cycle of hatred, incitement, violence, and revenge.

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The Road to Gaza

By Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib

When I think about Gaza forty years from now, I think about it as a place that works. I think about it as a coastal city that is open, connected, and confident enough to function as part of the world rather than sealed off from it. I think about Gaza having an airport and a seaport, because connectivity matters, and because Gaza has been largely closed off for roughly thirty-five years. That closure shaped everything. It shaped how people imagined their lives, how they imagined their futures, how they imagined what was possible. When movement is restricted, ambition shrinks. When horizons narrow, expectations narrow with them.

In that future, Gaza exists under the umbrella of a Palestinian state, and it also operates as a semi-independent metropolis. I believe Gaza will have its own peace treaty with the State of Israel. I believe it will arise out of an alignment of interests, from stability, from recognition, and from a society that has internalized the cost of perpetual conflict. The future Gaza I envision is a point of pride for Palestinians. It is a role model for Palestinian success, an example of how a horrendous war and a horrendous situation led to long-lasting transformation.

I do not want Gaza simply rebuilt. Rebuilding alone repeats old patterns. Gaza needs to be rejuvenated. It needs to be reconstituted. It needs to be transformed. It needs a renaissance that touches infrastructure, social norms, governance, education, and public life. It needs to become a cosmopolitan city that accepts difference and functions with institutions that people trust, institutions that actually do the work of governance.

I am under no illusions about how difficult that is. The barrier to transformation in Gaza is extraordinarily high. People have lived for decades under fear, repression, and deeply ingrained narratives. Antisemitism became the default. Narratives took hold that denied Jewish belonging entirely, that framed Jews as temporary intruders, that flattened history into slogans repeated for generations. These stories were reinforced through education, media, and political culture. Challenging them carried real risk. Speaking out carried consequences. The barrier to entry for social transformation is higher in Gaza than in almost any other modern context I can think of.

When I say all this, I am also saying that within the imbalance of power between Israel and the Palestinians there exists space for Palestinian agency, responsibility, and accountability. Saying that is not about blaming victims. It is about empowerment. Without agency, there is no transformation. Without the taking of responsibility, there is no future that will hold.

To understand how Gaza arrived at this point, you have to look at the layers of external interference that were stacked on top of internal fragmentation.

Historically, Palestinians passed from Ottoman rule to British rule, then into Arab intervention that prevented Palestinian statehood between 1948 and 1967. That was followed by secular nationalism under the PLO, then Marxist and Soviet-backed movements, and later Islamist governance under Hamas, with backing from Iran, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood. At no point did Palestinians develop fully organic political narratives or institutions without outside forces shaping outcomes.

Even the Palestinian Authority, which was meant to move Palestinians toward statehood, reinforced separation and misunderstanding. One example that stays with me is language. Hebrew used to be taught in Palestinian schools. That stopped. Linguistic proximity disappeared. Cultural familiarity disappeared with it. Separation became structural. Suspicion followed. These decisions accumulated over time and shaped how people understood one another.

Inside Gaza, these dynamics hardened into social structures that continue to shape daily life. Gaza has a caste system that is codified socially, legally, and geopolitically. Two-thirds of Gazans are classified as refugees. One-third are considered natives. These categories are not abstract. They shape access to aid, clinics, schools, and leadership. They shape daily interactions. When two Gazans meet, one of the first questions is not which neighborhood they live in now, but where their family comes from in historic Palestine. These distinctions generate stereotypes and resentment. They influence who is seen as legitimate and who is not. They even shape political power.

UNRWA plays a central role in this structure. I am not saying this to demonize UNRWA per se, but to recognize that its framework codified refugee status in a way that became socially and politically determinative. Refugees could access schools, clinics, and services that natives could not, even when natives were equally poor. This reinforced division. It entrenched identity as destiny. Over time, refugee status became a political category rather than a transitional one. That mattered. A functioning Gaza cannot emerge while inherited classification defines civic life.

Gaza received more aid per capita than almost anywhere else in the world. Aid layered on top of aid while governance hollowed out. Responsibility was outsourced: Hamas, which controlled the government in Gaza, taxed people while receiving external funding to invest in its own systems, its own tunnels, its own infrastructure, leaving civilian life to international actors. Before October 7th, around seventy percent of Gazans relied on aid. That dependence was structured and stacked: UNRWA, NGOs, USAID, the Palestinian Authority, international donors, all overlapping. Hamas stood back and allowed others to run civilian life while it focused on power and violence – both internally and externally.

A future Gaza will still require aid, but the structure has to change. Aid should support transition rather than permanence. It must support responsibility rather than abdication. Without that shift, nothing will change.

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We also need to address the way religion became entangled with governance in ways that distorted both. Islam is deeply present in Gaza. Families are religious. Communities are religious. My own family is religious. Over time, a political version of Islam took hold that framed itself as divinely sanctioned and placed ideology above accountability. Religious language justified control over aid, mosques, women’s lives, and public space. Faith became a mechanism of domination, hollowing out moral authority and replacing it with fear. That has to be confronted honestly if society is to recover.

What sustains me is what I see happening now: something fundamental has broken open. Many people in Gaza register how disastrous the last two decades have been for their lives, viewing the present through the prism of Hamas’s governance, not only through the prism of the current war. I speak to people inside Gaza constantly. I listen carefully. I track social media sentiment. I compare public language with private conversations. I have never seen this level of disillusionment with the governing logic that dominated Gaza for so long.

The awakening is not gentle. It is born of daily reality. It comes from dirty, overcrowded tents that leak when it rains, from the long lines for food, from waiting for basic coupons to receive daily rations. It comes from filthy bathrooms that people are forced to use, from the humiliation of standing in queues for hours for the bare minimum. It comes from exhaustion, from watching children grow up surrounded by instability and fear. It comes from seeing leaders disappear underground while ordinary people endure the consequences.

People see how aid was stolen. They see how money was raised and diverted. They see how Hamas behaved during the war, how suffering was managed rather than resolved. They see how external movements spoke loudly while the people of Gaza lived quietly in misery. They understand all this through their lived experience, their loss. They understand it through watching how power was exercised and how responsibility was avoided. That awareness does not automatically turn into political action, but it creates the beginning of a journey. These realizations accumulate. They weaken certainty. They open questions that were once unaskable.

This does not instantly produce peace or consensus; being opposed to Hamas does not automatically translate into support for peace or coexistence with Israel. But it does create space. It enables an opening, allowing for a movement away from armed resistance narratives towards nation-building narratives over time. That process is sequential. It is how de-radicalization actually works, bringing a society along gradually.

The first and most critical step is accurate diagnosis. People need to identify the challenges clearly, but they also need to identify the opportunities. These have to become things that everybody talks about, not just one person. Different people can have different diagnoses, they can disagree about emphasis, they can debate sequencing. That is fine. What matters is that the conversation remains grounded in reality and not in slogans.

I believe that out of this awakening, however harsh, Gaza can move onto a path that will lead it somewhere different over the course of decades. That path will not be quick. It will not be clean. It will require responsibility from Palestinians, seriousness from Israelis, and discipline from the international community. There is no shortcut from devastation to dignity. There is only the work of teasing out the threads, aligning them, and staying with the process long enough for something new to take hold.

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Up next week: Khaled Hassan delivers a verdict Israel has not wanted to hear: that it will not be accepted in the Arab world when it is merely liked, but only when it is feared, respected, and admired — three things that are not the same. Israel yet to earn all three.

But first, let’s get to know the person behind the piece: Nofar Simpson

Nofar is a community builder, spiritual guide, cultural entrepreneur, and yoga teacher. Specializing in life-cycle rituals, she accompanies and marries dozens of couples annually. Formerly the founder and director of the BINA Secular Yeshiva in Haifa, Nofar is currently a fellow at the Israeli-Rabbinic Program and serves as an Educational Rabbi for the HeChalutz movement (HaMidrasha at Oranim). For the last three years, she has been the driving force behind a new Hebrew community in Haifa, facilitating Israeli holiday events, study programs, and emotional processing circles during times of war.

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The Road to a Jewish State

By Nofar Simpson

When I imagine myself as a grandmother, I am standing somewhere in Israel forty years from now watching a wedding under a chuppah. A woman is leading the ceremony. The couple wrote parts of it themselves. The families carry traditions from different places – Yemen, Russia, Ethiopia, Morocco, somewhere in Europe – and all of them have a place inside that same moment.

My grandchildren are there. They do not find any of this unusual.

They know which community they belong to. They know what it means for them to practice Judaism – not only the holidays, but as a whole way of being in the world. Some of their friends pray every day. Some study texts. Some make rituals through music or art or gathering for Shabbat in four different languages. Women are spiritual leaders in many of these places, teaching, guiding, deciding questions of Jewish law and Jewish life. People move between traditions with curiosity.

When my grandchildren ask me about the past, they are surprised to learn that there was once an institution in Israel that decided who counted as Jewish, who could marry, and which forms of Judaism were permitted in public life.

They cannot imagine standing in a government office and being asked to prove who you are.

The present is different.

Today, one version of Judaism is claiming the entire public square. When I moved to Haifa, I noticed Chabad menorahs placed in neighborhoods where Jews are the minority. Meanwhile, Christmas trees appear only in neighborhoods with Christian residents. That asymmetry is not innocent. It is a claim about who this country belongs to and that there is only one way to belong. Even for a Jew, such a display of ownership affects you. It enters your body. Even when you celebrate Hanukkah and love the holiday, you can feel the difference between your holiday and their occupation of your holiday.

The rabbinate has been doing a version of this for decades. When my husband and I wanted to marry, a friend told us we should first check whether the rabbinate would accept his Jewishness. He had immigrated from the former Soviet Union with the large wave of Russian-speaking immigration in the 1990s. He was a career soldier at the time we got married. He had lived a Jewish life. We found ourselves standing at the rabbinate, and he had to prove it.

Fifteen years have passed since that day. My ears still turn red when I talk about it. The sheer arrogance of the institution, deciding who is and who is not Jewish for me. For him.

The rabbinate has built a hierarchy of Jewish validity. The Chief Rabbinate of Israel sets the standard for who is a Jew and what constitutes the dominant Jewish tradition, often doing so by flattening the rich traditional diversity that has arrived in Israel over the years. Thousands of years of magnificent culture, ceremonies done differently, prayers in different registers – gone from the fabric of Israeli Jewish life. Not by violence. By deciding what counts.

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The rabbinate decides who can marry, who can be buried in a Jewish cemetery, which conversions it will honor. A change in personnel can retroactively un-Jewish an entire community. That is a kind of power with no precedent in Jewish history.

I am not against Orthodoxy. I wish to honor every kind of belief and way of life. My argument is against a model that asks everyone to adopt one way of life as the standard, and punishes those who don’t. I insist on fighting for the principle that the Torah has seventy faces, a principle as old as the Oral tradition itself, the Jewish commitment to amplify more diverse and varied voices and engage them in conversation as equals.

Something has been shifting since October 7th. The ground opened in this country. When the ground opens, people look for roots.

I work with many couples preparing for weddings. Most of them are secular. Since October 7th, far more are asking for Jewish weddings – not rabbinic weddings, but Jewish weddings. They want a chuppah. They want blessings. They want symbols that link them to something that came before them. Many of them ask to stand under a tallit. I ask them when they last wore one. They laugh. Then they explain. One man tells me his father wore a tallit under the chuppah in the family wedding album. He saw it as a child and wants the same thing. A groom says he got his tallit from his grandfather, for his Bar-Mitzvah, and his grandfather is gone. Now he wants to bring him into the ceremony by draping it on himself. Sometimes the answer is simply: this is what Jewish weddings look like.

I used to hear these answers and think they were superficial. I no longer think that at all. These are answers about belonging. They are asking: who are my people? Where do I fit in this chain? The tallit under the chuppah is a string running back through generations of weddings. That is not a small thing. That is actually the thing.

October 7th sent people in different directions. Some soldiers went to staging areas outside Gaza and put on tefillin for the first time. Some people started reading Psalms every morning. Some women began separating challah dough. The rupture found each person differently. They felt the ground shift, and they are looking for something to hold onto and they are finding solace and stability in age-old Jewish practices.

Yet many of them were not given this at home, and are not at home in the Judaism currently on offer by Israel’s institutions. It is our responsibility to make different types of Judaism available to them so they may find what many feel was withheld from them: the beauty in Jewish culture, the ancient happiness that connects you to the depth of the human spirit.

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I have seen what happens when a pluralist Jewish presence exists in a community.

In 2017, I founded and ran the secular yeshiva of BINA in Haifa. When a pluralist Jewish presence existed in that neighborhood, questions could be asked that would otherwise go unasked. How do you celebrate Sigd (the Ethiopian Jewish holiday) in a neighborhood without Ethiopian residents? How do you hold a Kabbalat Shabbat when the community speaks four different languages? Working through those questions produced new forms of Jewish culture. It gave people a Jewish address that was neither the state-sanctioned synagogue nor the Chabad emissary.

What I also found is that pluralist Jewish presence creates something beyond culture. It gives people a spine. When people find their Jewish voice, it straightens something in them. I watch it happen – in the couples who decide they want a woman to officiate their wedding, in the students who start asking whether their fight for reservists’ rights has a Jewish justification. When the search for Jewish identity is free and uncoerced, it leads people back into public life. It gives them a reason to stand somewhere. It gives them a sense of belonging.

I teach in pre-military and service-year programs, one semester a year, ten or twelve sessions. In those meetings I have watched something happen. Young people arrive confused. Some have never sat at a Shabbat dinner. By the end of our sessions, a shared language exists in the group. not conclusions, but curiosity. Courage to do things themselves, the courage to engage directly with matters of Jewish identity and Israeli tradition. A few weeks after the semester ends, they write to ask if I have texts they could learn together in their apartment or if I can consult them on how to celebrate Kabbalat Shabbat. That is a seed. And the last three years have shown me how quickly seeds find soil when the ground has been opened.

In the ceremonies themselves – weddings, memorial gatherings, study evenings – there are moments where everyone present becomes, briefly, a temporary community. Someone says amen. Someone repeats the words of Kaddish. They might not recognize each other on the street the next day, but something happened. They were part of something together. That experience is itself a form of spiritual activism. And people are hungry for it in ways they weren’t before October 7th.

If we want to expand this throughout Israel, the pluralist public has a problem it needs to honestly face: we are better at saying what we oppose than at saying what we believe. We know how to say no to the rabbinate. We have a harder time saying what we affirm. Can we say what is in our hearts? What is our Jewish yes?

A society cannot live only on rejection. You have to be able to say what your values are. What you are asking your children to carry.

If we as parents only resist the rabbinate, only push back, we are vacating the Jewish identity space for our children. We are leaving it empty. And something will fill it. Israeliness is temporary. It is a civic identity, and civic identities shift. What has allowed Jewish culture to survive for thousands of years are the stories, rituals, and traditions they passed on. We are those parents now.

What needs to happen between now and the future I imagine is not complicated: we need more pluralist, plurally-trained Jewish presences in communities – people who hold a Jewish address in a neighborhood, who open questions rather than close them. Not authorities. Partners. Chevruta. There are organizations, NGOs, a variety of pluralistic Batei Midrash that are building and placing more of these figures in communities, in schools, in public life. It is the right work. It needs to reach more places and more people. We need to support them.

We also need different Jewish leadership. In forty years, I want my grandchildren to see women in spiritual leadership everywhere – as rabbis, as halachic decisors, in rabbinical courts, in government, in every public role where Jewish presence matters. I want this to be unremarkable. Women standing in those places is not a concession. It is a Jewish obligation.

And we need to invest in education to produce Jews who know enough to choose. We need to see a different Judaism to have a different Judaism. The last three years have shown us that people want it. The question is whether the pluralist world will be present and organized enough when they come looking.

I believe we will be. I think we are becoming a large enough group, and committed enough, that at some point there will be no other choice but to build a state no longer under the monopoly of one rabbinate. The ground that opened since October 7th will not close again.

A few weeks ago, someone interviewed me for her doctoral research, and in the middle of the conversation I started to cry. I’ve learned that when I can express my voice, and it is received, my self-worth rises. That is what we need to build for Jewish identity in Israel. If we show people a Judaism that reflects them, they will find in it an echo for what they already carry inside. They will find their voice, and realize that their voice is part of the larger voice of the Jewish People.

That is what I want for my grandchildren. Not that they will look like me, or practice like me. That they have the courage to speak their truth as Jews, and feel that their voice is heard inside Israeli public life as Jews. That they feel their roots in the healed ground and are able to flourish in their own right.

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But first, let’s get to know the person behind the piece: Yotam Hod

Dr. Yotam Hod is the President of the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS) and an Associate Professor at the University of Haifa, where he serves as the Head of the School of Learning Sciences and Educational Leadership. He is a leading voice in the Learning Sciences—a premier scientific field dedicated to education, which integrates research from cognitive science, sociocultural studies, and design to understand how people learn and how to engineer environments that foster deep understanding.

Yotam’s work focuses on the intersection of collaborative technologies, person-centered pedagogies, and educational innovations like maker education. His research is dedicated to bridging the gap between the rigid structures of formal schooling and the organic, collaborative ways human beings naturally learn. By prioritizing agency and community, he seeks to build classrooms where students don’t just consume information but actively produce meaning.

A resident of Zikhron Ya’akov, Yotam is deeply committed to the idea that education is the bedrock of a resilient and democratic society. When not reimagining the future of the Israeli classroom, he can be found playing guitar or playing in one of Zikhron’s parks with his children.

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The Road to Human-Centered Education

By Yotam Hod

Imagine your grandchild’s school forty years from now. She doesn’t go there just to sit and listen; she goes to dive into a day of project-based work that she deeply cares about. She uses an AI partner to support her thinking, helping her reach new heights and understand complex ideas in ways that weren’t possible before. Because she isn’t working in isolation, she is constantly engaged in collaborative learning, co-creating solutions with her peers and discovering that the best ideas often emerge from the collective mind of a group.

Unlike in the factory model of schooling from past generations, her day isn’t dictated by the jarring interruption of bells; instead, the schedule is organized into longer time frames that allow for ideas to deepen and projects to evolve. Teachers move through the learning space as mentors, thinking together with her to find a direction, providing feedback, and challenging her to think more deeply, while helping her build rich human connections and the emotional resilience to keep going when things get tough. When she heads home, she isn’t wiped out; she’s energized because everything she does is deeply connected to her own life and community. She’s spent the day debating ideas, changing her mind, and figuring things out for herself – doing the real, human work of truly learning.

For those of you with children in Israel’s classrooms today, I know this sounds like a utopian dream. But it isn’t. I know it’s possible because I have lived it. I’ve seen it with my own eyes and studied it for two decades. This alternative isn’t a fantasy; it is a reality backed by generations of research. It is simply a choice Israeli society hasn’t made yet.

Yet while I know such a future is possible, I have to make a confession that is perhaps unbecoming of a professor of education: I am deeply pessimistic. I spend my days researching in the Learning Sciences, the field dedicated to understanding how people learn and designing the very environments I just described – and yet, when I look at the political and social machinery of Israel today, I doubt we have the collective will to change. We are a nation gripped by an existential security threat, defined by scorched-earth politics and a restless impatience. In such a climate, the slow, purposeful cultivation required to nurture a child’s mind feels far removed from our reality.

And yet, because I am a parent and a scholar living in and loving Israel, I cannot stop explaining to people how this can be done.

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Nearly twenty years ago, before I moved here, I worked in a public high school in New York City. We were not an elite private enclave; we were a standard school with a standard budget. Yet, educators from all over the world – Israelis among them – visited us to witness a successful school. We were taking students from underserved areas like Harlem and the South Bronx, many of whom entered the ninth grade with a third-grade reading level, and helping them become sophisticated thinkers. This is no exaggeration. When I first arrived in Israel, I taught a class of gifted students whose raw intellectual abilities were beyond doubt. Yet, I found that the students from that New York City school often outperformed them in the essential practices of scholarship: the ability to listen deeply, to collaborate, and to articulately defend and present their work.

The path to that success was surprisingly practical and achievable. If I had to summarize it in a single term, it is that we adopted a Learning Community approach. I use that phrase cautiously, however, because I see it thrown around loosely here in Israel. I am speaking of a learning community in the deepest sense of the word, one that goes far beyond the superficial labels often adopted by schools that claim the title but refuse to make the structural changes necessary to truly enact it.

When I moved to Israel at age thirty, my first role – before I transitioned to the university to affect change at a systemic level – was as a middle and high school teacher. I was placed in what was considered an excellent school, but one that was entirely ordinary in its traditional teaching practices. In most classrooms, I saw great kids, truly the best, who were being lectured to the point of exhaustion. Because of their strong demographic background, they excelled in their Bagrut (matriculation) exams, but the pedagogy itself was uninspired. In the many classrooms I visited, the primary atmosphere was one of disengagement. Students were focused solely on the tachless, demanding that teachers simply prepare them for the test. Between the constant cancellations and the out-of-classroom activities that regularly drained the room of half its students, classroom learning felt fragmented at best.

I, of course, couldn’t simply fall in line. After seeing how the Learning Community model had opened doors for students from some of the most challenging environments of the South Bronx, I felt a moral weight to give these Israeli students the same opportunity, too. How can you un-see something that works so well? The response was immediate and overwhelming. A buzz began to surround my teaching; I received letters from parents and students alike expressing a sense of genuine gratitude. The kids weren’t just showing up for a grade – they were actually engaged, excited, and awake to the process of learning.

You might think there was something uniquely charismatic about my teaching that created this buzz. And while I like to think I’m a capable educator, I have seen many who are far better. It wasn’t a sharp wit or a legendary sense of humor (my wife and children would be the first to disabuse you of that notion). The secret lay not in my personality, but in the organization of the entire learning environment: the curriculum, the activities, the way we used the technology and space given to us, and the way students were assessed. It is not a magic trick; it is a practical, implementable solution. I know this because, as an Assistant Principal in New York, I was the one responsible for the master schedule. Such administrative and pedagogical components are the hidden engines of the entire operation. When you build the structure correctly, everything falls into place.

It is a beautiful thing to witness because human beings are biologically wired for this. We don’t learn our mother tongue by reading a manual; we learn it by being immersed in a world of sound and meaning. We don’t learn to play soccer by listening to a lecture on physics; we get on the field, we trip, we adjust, and we find our position.

This is the heart of the Learning Community approach. It is about creating environments where students engage in real projects that honor their identities and interests, where not everyone must learn the exact same thing at the exact same time. Traditional education rests on the foolish assumption that we can standardize the human mind, ignoring everything we know about how people actually learn. Instead, in a true community, students are constantly teaching one another as a natural part of their exploration, and learning occurs as a byproduct of that shared discovery. In this model, feedback is constant and formative, designed to help a student achieve more rather than simply slapping a grade on a paper and moving to the next topic. It is the choice to go a mile deep on what matters, rather than a mile wide and an inch deep on what doesn’t.

Today, when I walk into a typical Israeli classroom, I see a study in missed opportunities. It is often a painful sight, a frantic battle of interruptions where teachers struggle to deliver disconnected content to children who have mentally checked out. I have witnessed this in countless classrooms through years of research and observation, but I see the tragedy most clearly in my own children. They entered nursery school in Zikhron Ya’akov vibrant and wide-eyed, but with every passing grade, I have watched that spark dim. They hate school, and I cannot blame them. I would hate it, too, if I were told to sit and listen all day – denied the chance to demonstrate my unique understanding or the freedom to direct my own work, to plan, and to bring my own projects or conceptions to fruition. The sad truth is that we are schooling our children for recall and the hidden transcript of obedience. It is less an educational space and more a factory, one that fails to prepare students for the complex, unpredictable, and deeply collaborative world that awaits them.

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This failure is evident not just in how we teach, but in what we teach. Our curriculum is a ghost of another era. Why are our teenagers still reading Bernard Malamud’s A Summer’s Reading in a vacuum? It is a fine piece of literature, but it is not enough. They should be grappling with the tectonic shifts of Israeli democracy or the vital, complex writings on Arab-Jewish relations that define the very ground they stand on. They need texts that are relevant to the lives they are actually living. If education is void of context, it is not education; it is a rehearsal for a test that life doesn’t give.

I know the counter-arguments, and I do not mean to suggest that there aren’t extraordinary teachers and schools in Israel. But the problem is that these are the exceptions, not the rule. I have tremendous respect for our educators. They are underpaid and overworked. I would like to see anyone who criticizes education try to manage, day in and day out, a class of thirty or more Israeli students. It is a tough, exhausting reality, and it is no surprise that so few last, including many who leave lucrative careers in high-tech with the noble intention of teaching, only to find the classroom environment unsustainable.

The truth is, there is no long line of talented people waiting outside the door to enter the profession. We have made the role so undesirable that the well is running dry. Even when teachers are strong enough to innovate, the sheer weight of the institution often crushes their efforts. Individual excellence is no match for a structural environment designed for the status quo; eventually, the gravity of the old system pulls everyone back down.

We cannot fix education through isolated islands of success built on teacher burnout. True change requires reimagining the entire architecture of the institution, from how we assess progress and support our educators to how we design our buildings and the schedules that define the rhythm of the day.

What, then, was the architecture behind that school in New York? How do we even begin to enact such a change here? While I have my own answers to these questions, I know that any significant shift will require the hard, long-term work of situating these ideas within our own Israeli reality. You cannot simply copy and paste one country’s system into another. The goal is not to import specific solutions, but to spark the type of thinking that made those solutions possible. I believe we have the potential to do for education what we have already done for technology: to become a Start-Up Nation for the classroom. There is no shortage of forward-thinking minds in this country, including at the highest levels of our educational leadership. The seeds of a different future are already here.

However, moving the wheels of a massive, complex social and political institution requires a critical mass of coordinated effort that I do not yet see. It is difficult to spark a national conversation about pedagogy when we are living under the shadow of nuclear threats, missiles, and the trauma of October 7th. In a state of constant emergency, the long-term becomes a luxury. And yet, I still believe it is possible. I believe it because I know this country is capable of greatness, and I know these ideas are right. I have seen, time and again, that when people witness this model in action, their skepticism evaporates. They realize this isn’t pie-in-the-sky; it is a practical, doable reality where everyone wins. Students rediscover their curiosity, and teachers are finally liberated from an outdated enterprise that stifles their professional soul.

So, while I remain a skeptic, I am also a believer. Perhaps the time will soon come when we finally align our political will with our human potential. When it does, this tiny, resilient country will have something beautiful to offer—not only to its own children, but to the world.

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But first, let’s get to know the person behind the piece: Calanit Valfer

Calanit Valfer is Founder and Chair of Lakoom, a public-private initiative advancing rehabilitation innovation in Israel, and Founding and Managing Partner of the Elah Fund, an Israeli investment firm focused on growth-stage companies. A leading impact investor and social entrepreneur, she was previously Founding Partner at Nexus Israel, a strategic advisory firm, and served as Chief of Staff to the Chairman of Bank Hapoalim, Israel’s leading bank. Earlier in her career she founded Nisan Young Women Leaders, a nationally recognized program dedicated to the advancement of Jewish and Arab girls. In 2024, Forbes named her to its “50 Over 50” list of EMEA women leaders.

Calanit serves on the Board of the Friends of Loewenstein Medical Center, and during the Iron Swords War spearheaded a multi-million dollar fundraising effort to strengthen the institution and enhance the rehabilitation of wounded soldiers. She holds a BA in Arabic and Middle East Studies, an MIA in International Human Rights Law, and an MBA in Finance, all from Columbia University.

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The Road to Rehabilitation

By Calanit Valfer

Picture a man in his late thirties in a planning meeting at a Tel Aviv tech company. He has a prosthetic leg. No one in the room thinks anything of it. The building was designed from the ground up to be fully accessible - not because regulation required it, but because that is simply how things are done.

At lunch, he takes the elevator down to the street – wide, smooth, easy to navigate – and meets a friend who was treated for PTSD with an Israeli technological innovation and is stronger for it. Their conversation is not about their injuries. Those injuries are part of their history, but do not define their identity or limit their potential. They are in the workforce. Their parents are not bankrupt, their siblings are thriving, and they have built families of their own. The country did not discard them; society embraced them.

That is the Israel we must become. A place where rehabilitation – of the body, the soul, and the fractured social contract – becomes the foundation upon which everything else is rebuilt.

It is also the Israel we cannot afford not to become.

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Like rehabilitation itself, our path ahead will be long and painful and unglamorous. Progress is rarely a straight line, and we will never return to the place we were before. But it is the only path to emerging from hardship with a power we could not have built any other way.

Israel needs to become the Rehabilitation Nation: the society that understands, at both a structural and cultural level, that the measure of its character is how it brings its wounded back to full inclusion. The country that recognizes this work not as a burden but as a national engine. The nation that rises from its lowest place and, in doing so, pulls everyone up with it.

The scale of what has happened to our country in these years of war has yet to be fully absorbed. There are 20,000 wounded under the care of the Defense Ministry’s rehabilitation department and another 80,000 under the auspices of the National Insurance Institute. The vast majority of them are young. The rehabilitation department projects that the number will rise further, driven largely by people whose psychological wounds deepen over time as the adrenaline of wartime recedes and the weight of loss settles in, and as diagnoses become more precise.

Behind each of those people is a family, a caretaker, an entire web of lives that has also been diverted. And this crisis did not arrive in a vacuum: hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been living with disabilities and have long deserved a society built around their full inclusion.

Economists studying the situation warn that if rehabilitation is not prioritized, Israel risks losing roughly one percent of its workforce. That figure captures only the directly injured and their immediate caretakers. It does not account for the drag on an economy carrying a large, unsupported population of wounded, nor for the long-term cost of untreated traumatic injuries that can resurface years later as Parkinson’s, epilepsy, or other debilitating conditions. Those problems will become catastrophic, medically and economically, if intervention is delayed or ignored.

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I was recruited into the world of rehabilitation after October 7 through volunteer work and philanthropy. I came in knowing nothing about rehabilitation and, truthfully, afraid of what I would find. What I found was the opposite of what I feared.

First, I found remarkable people.

In rehabilitation wards, I have yet to meet a cynic. Every physiotherapist, every doctor, every family member sitting beside a bed, every volunteer, every recovered patient who came back to support their peers, all of them are there for a single reason: to help. There is no other angle. In a world increasingly defined by people seeking to extract value, being among people whose entire identity is built around giving is a clarifying experience. It restores faith. It recalibrates what you believe is possible. It reminds you that rehabilitation is never only a clinical event – it is a social one, and everyone in the circle around a wounded person is, in their own way, a rehabilitator.

I found optimism I could see with my own eyes.

Rehabilitation turns the unimaginable into the possible. I spent many days at Loewenstein Medical Center and met many soldiers at the start of their long arc of recovery. The worst injuries arrived in hospital beds. But faster than I could have imagined, those patients were navigating the hallways in wheelchairs. Not long after that, crutches. Then, after months of hard work – by the soldiers themselves, by their therapists and doctors, by their families and communities – they walked out of the hospital on their own, some on prosthetic legs, cheered on by everyone who had shared the journey and claimed the achievement together.

This is what rehabilitation does: it turns the unimaginable into the possible.

Within all of the dedication and progress, I found something else: unrealized potential which, when connected and channeled, could propel everything already being achieved toward a transformation of the nation itself.

Inside the hospitals, remarkable people are achieving remarkable things but too often in silos. Therapists labor for months on problems that engineers might have cracked in weeks. Donors fund needs that other organizations were already addressing, without knowing it. Israel’s world-leading innovation ecosystem has barely a footprint in rehabilitation.

What would become possible if that changed?

That question extends beyond the hospital. The moment a soldier walks out, the longest and hardest part of recovery begins. Rehabilitation is not an inpatient story. It is a life story. What would ensure that excellent care and innovation followed him or her into a full and productive life?

Those questions are what led me to found Lakoom. Lakoom means “to rise” in Hebrew, and our model is this: identify the clinical needs that innovation could address, build the scaffolding to connect clinicians, technologists, government, and community around those needs, and fund the early stages that the market will not.

The problems are not unsolvable. How do you treat traumatic brain injuries more effectively in the acute stage? How do you address PTSD in a population this large? How do you keep a twenty-year-old amputee engaged in rehabilitation for the next eighty-plus years of his or her life? These are difficult questions. But they are answerable ones if the right people are around the table working together.

My professional life is in venture capital, so my first instinct was to apply that model: invest in startups and let the market scale the best solutions. Research quickly revealed the flaw in this assumption. Rehabilitation technology markets can be relatively small. Development cycles can be long. Regulatory pathways are complex. The venture capital model, almost by design, leaves this space underfunded at the early stage – not because the problems are unsolvable, but because the path from idea to product is different than in most other high-tech sectors. What is needed is catalytic capital, funding that reaches where the market cannot, and unlocks what it finds there.

But funding is only part of it. Rehabilitation cannot remain a separate conversation, a charity sector, or a collection of well-meaning groups working in parallel. It must be woven into every major institution: healthcare, education, the military, housing policy, and workforce development. It also must recognize the family as a clinical actor: the caretaker who leaves a job to sit beside a hospital bed, the parent who becomes a de facto physiotherapist at home, the spouse navigating a marriage reshaped by injury. If we want the circle around a wounded person to hold, we must treat everyone in that circle as someone the system is responsible for.

And we must understand that the commitment has no end date. A soldier injured at nineteen will live with the consequences of that injury for the rest of a long life. His or her needs will evolve with age; a twenty-year-old body is not a forty-year-old body. The country’s responsibility – our responsibility – does not end at discharge. This is not a reason to despair. It is the motivation to build something durable rather than reactive.

Decades ago, Israel ran a public campaign asking people not to pick wildflowers. Today, almost no one does. The message became so deeply embedded that it became culture. Invisible, instinctive, simply how things are. Rehabilitation can follow the same path: from emergency response to policy, from policy to habit, until supporting the wounded becomes part of how the country understands itself. A society where it is assumed that those injured in this war will be fully supported. Where accessibility is built into every new structure. Where rehabilitation is a permanent line in national budgets. Where a veteran with a prosthetic leg is an ordinary, productive member of the economy. As it should be.

Veterans are where this begins - but not where it ends. Every investment in infrastructure, in accessible design, in mental health treatment, and assistive technology will reach Israelis living with disability – people who have long deserved full inclusion in society and have not received it. The wounded of this war are that catalyst.

Unlike regional peace or political stability, rehabilitation is not subject to forces beyond our control. It depends on logistics, budgets, and applied innovation. It is within reach. If Israel builds this ecosystem well, it will transform the lives of our wounded. And, in this arena at least, it will fulfill that oldest promise: to be a light unto the nations.

That decision has not yet been fully made.

The seeds are already in the ground, in the wards, in the people who chose this work, in the soldiers who walk out of the rehabilitation centers into the rest of their lives. What will grow out of them depends on whether the rest of us recognize that this is now our responsibility too, and stay with it long enough for it to become, like the wildflowers, simply how things are.

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But first, let’s get to know the person behind the piece: David Shlachter

Dave Shlachter is a Harvard graduate with a background in international development and entrepreneurship. In his early 20s, he lived and worked in New Delhi on a U.S. Department of State grant helping to build South Asia’s first mediation center under the auspices of the Supreme Court of India, an experience that cemented his belief that progress starts with deeply understanding people’s lived experiences and interests.

In graduate school, Dave wrote an award-winning master’s thesis on electrifying Rwanda’s bus fleet, based on extensive field interviews with stakeholders ranging from bus drivers to government ministers. That work sharpened his ability to connect across differences and uncover the values and pressures that shape decision-making—skills he now applies to long-form, portrait-driven storytelling that brings nuance and humanity to places often reduced to headlines.

His book, Hinenu, a portrait of Israel at ten million, can be ordered on Amazon, in Israel through Gefen. Learn more at hinenubook.com

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Road to a Shared Promised Land

By David Shlachter

Over the last year, moving through Israel and the West Bank and talking to people from very different backgrounds, I kept running into what felt like small versions of a Promised Land. Of the future we could have here, if we get through the troubles of the present. They weren’t theories or plans. They were things I saw and heard directly, and I would like to share with you four of them. Three were in Judea and Samaria. One was in Tel Aviv. All showed me what this place could look like if we learned to share our Promised Land.

The first came early on, when I was just starting to work on Hinenu, the book I published telling the stories of Israel on the eve of the most recent census marking ten million inhabitants. It was then that I went into the West Bank to interview Hadassah Froman.

Hadassah told me a story from when she and her husband, Rabbi Menachem Froman, an Orthodox rabbi and religious peacemaker who worked towards reconciliation between Jews and Palestinians through their shared love of the land, first arrived there to establish a settlement. They saw a small home with a sticker on the door that said, “’The land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel,’” she told me, and continued: “That was a very common way of thinking at the time. This is our land. We control it. Menachem started laughing. He pulled the sticker off, ripped it up, and rearranged the words so that it read, ‘The people of Israel belong to the land of Israel.’”

Hadassah explained that if you think in legal terms or military terms, land is something you buy, own, and control. You decide what happens on it and who’s allowed to be there. She spoke directly to me as a real estate investor and said that from a financial perspective, it may make sense. From a spiritual perspective, however, it’s completely backwards. Land isn’t something we dominate. It’s the source of our life. Adam and adamah (the Hebrew words for “human” and “land”) come from the same root because they’re the same essence. If land is the mother and people are the children, then what makes a mother happiest is seeing her children care for each other, show sustained interest in each other’s well-being, and actually work toward it. That’s what makes a mother sing. That’s how the land sings.

She talked about how deeply connected she feels to this place and said she doesn’t experience that connection as a zero-sum game, where her presence means someone else can’t be here. She said she feels we’re here to cohabitate, to coexist, and to engage with one another. When I interviewed her, it was important to her to be photographed wearing a headscarf that had been given to her by a Palestinian friend who lives nearby. After October 7th, that friend came to her to show solidarity and to say that every time someone from their village had been accused of something they didn’t do, Hadassah was the first to show up and defend them. She told her, there’s no conflict between us. The conflict is between extremists. We’re with you. That, for me, was one very small, very specific picture of what a Promised Land can look like.

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Another glimpse of the Promised Land came from a man named Eliaz Cohen. He told me he was seven or eight years old when his family moved to the Shomron, where his parents helped to re-establish a kibbutz that was destroyed in the 1948 war. When they arrived, the Palestinian village next door ran electrical lines over to help them build. In exchange for electricity, they provided things to the Palestinians. The Jewish families learned Arabic and wanted to be good neighbors. People got along.

Then there was a terrorist attack in the area, and then another one. Where there had been no protective fences before, the adults decided to build one. Eliaz told me the kids wanted nothing to do with it. They almost immediately stole a pair of clippers and cut a small hole in a corner of the fence that no adults knew about. During the summer, they’d eat breakfast at home and disappear all day. Their parents thought they were just roaming around. What they were actually doing was crawling through that hole and meeting their Arab friends out in the fields, basically running a secret summer camp together.

When Eliaz talks about the future, he doesn’t describe it as some impossible utopic vision. He says that it already happened. The model had been proven. For him, the question is how to steer things back in that direction. He knows there are people who benefit from chaos and violence, but he sees them as a very small group with an outsized ability to drive fear and separation. Separation cuts off encounter, and without encounter, fear and hatred grow. In his mind, the Promised Land isn’t imaginary. It’s something we moved away from.

Another story that stayed with me came from Ari Abramovitz. He was born in Texas, made aliyah around nineteen or twenty, and served in the military in the Golani Brigade. After his service, he worked in the media and lived in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and shared with me that he felt somewhat out of alignment with his life. Then he got a call asking if he wanted to help develop a barren hilltop on the edge of the Judean frontier. There were plans for agriculture, tourism, vineyards, and families living there. He said yes immediately.

He worked the land with a tractor, built a home, and brought friends to build alongside him. Later he met his wife, and she moved in. They struggled to conceive, and he told me he decided to expand the house, saying that if he made more room, God would fill it with light. After the expansion, his wife conceived, and then conceived again and again. They now have three children. He described it as a revolution – not in the political sense, but in the literal sense of going all the way around and ending up where you started. He said, I was born in Texas, but that’s not where I’m from. I’m from here. A Jew from Judea.

One day, a small group of Germans arrived and asked who was in charge. They told him they were children and grandchildren of senior Nazi officers, they were Christian, and they felt deep responsibility for what their families had done and wanted to make teshuva (repentance). They were master stoneworkers and offered to stay for a year and build whatever the community wanted. Together with Palestinian workers and Jewish residents, they built a stone-domed synagogue. Out of all the buildings I saw during my research, it was the most striking. It was like the earth rose up to make a space for prayer. Ari told me he sat back and watched Jews, Palestinians, and Germans working together on a shared project. They all had reasons to hold resentment. They set that aside and built something together. Maybe that’s what the Promised Land looks like.

The last example is much smaller. It’s my gym in Tel Aviv. It’s tiny. The owner is a gay Bedouin Muslim in a long-term relationship with a Jew. One trainer is a German gentile, in a relationship with a Jewish Israeli woman, who moved here, became fluent in Hebrew, and fully integrated into Israeli culture. Another trainer lost her brother to a terrorist sniper. Everyone there has reasons to retreat into trauma or suspicion. But that’s not what happens. The dominant feeling in that room is joy. People joke, train, listen to music, and share a simple goal. Every week I look around and see evidence that the Promised Land already exists here in little pockets.

The elusive answer is how to get there at scale. Most people I’ve met just want dignity, respect, and a fair shake. The problem is how easily fear takes over. Trust takes decades to build. One attack can undo it in a day.

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I saw this clearly in the Gaza Envelope. Many people there spent years helping Gazan families access healthcare and employment, and believed deeply in coexistence. After October 7th, one local Israeli woman told me that when she looks west now, she just wants to see the sea. That shift came from a single event. It showed me how acts of violence have the power to reshape what people imagine for the future.

People who spent hundreds of days in Miluim (reserve duty) are coming back more politically awake, less willing to assume the political class is acting in their interest. I sense a new generation of leadership forming, shaped by service and loss, people who want to fix things rather than accumulate power. That process will take time. So will the education needed to help people separate inherited trauma from present identity and a vision for the future. But neither of those things happens at all if we keep handing extremists the dysfunctional result they planned for.

I keep thinking about that woman in the Gaza Envelope and how her decades of work can be unwound in a single day. The people who launched that attack knew it. They were counting on it. The terror isn’t only in the act itself. It’s in what the act does to the people who spent their lives trying to prove a different future was possible.

We need new social muscles. Not the muscles of war, which Israelis have had no choice but to develop with extraordinary precision. The muscles of collective refusal. The ones that say: we see what you’re trying to do, and we won’t give it to you. The ones that let a Jewish Israeli and an Arab Israeli stand together the morning after an attack and insist, in one voice, that the horror belongs to the extremists – not to the relationship between us.

We know how to mourn together. We have thousands of years of practice. The shiva, the kaddish, the whole ancient architecture of communal grief, it’s encoded in us. What we haven’t encoded is the shared refusal that comes after the mourning. The morning when the Palestinian woman from the village shows up with a headscarf and says not us, and the response isn’t surprise but recognition. Of course. We knew that. Of course you’re here.

That refusal, made reflexive, is what will shorten the distance between catastrophe and recovery. It won’t stop the next attack. Nothing will. But it will stop the attack from doing its intentional work – the work of making enemies out of people who are trying to be neighbors.

I walked into a lot of buildings this past year. I talked to hundreds of people. Settlers and Bedouin. Kibbutzniks and Orthodox rabbis. Reservists who spent four hundred days in Miluim and women who drove sick Gazan children to Israeli hospitals. And I came out convinced that the Promised Land is not some hypothetical future. It’s a set of choices available to us right now. We just have to decide we’re done playing the parts the extremists wrote for us. The strength to refuse to hate might be the most important thing we ever achieve here.

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And we have our first book! Prophecy has begun seeking out books that share a vision or visions for Israel’s future. Our first publication is by Prophecy’s founding editor & publisher, Ariel Beery: Being Israeli After the Destruction of Gaza.

As a response to Peter Beinart’s book of a similar name, Being Israel shares the October 7th stories of liberal, democratic Israelis, grapples with the implications of the destruction of Gaza Israel carried out in response, and explores the values and vision guiding leaders and activists working to make Israel the country our children deserve. Find out why Dorothy Kushner calls it “hard and wonderful: a workout for my soul.” Order today.