"It's a great day for the democratic party!" That's what my Dad wrote in my card on my 18th birthday (along with a normal-ish message) in 2001. 

Our family has been proud democrats for generations. I was raised on a constant rhetoric of helping the less fortunate, of how lucky we were to be the ones helping, and not those who needed help. Paying taxes was part of our responsibility. Women's bodies belonged to the women themselves. Racism was bad.

I was the most loyal of soldiers. I took unpaid time off to volunteer for President Obama's first campaign, worked for Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, knocked doors and ran from dogs.

At our wedding, we hired only vendors who were LGBTQ friendly, and I started talking about how Black lives matter after a summer interning at the Children's Defense Fund in Washington, not when it hit the news.

I would say that other people followed sports teams, and I was a loyal fan of the democrats.

And here I sit in 2026, politically homeless. 

I am a traitor to the left, and to the right.

The left wants nothing to do with me, because I am a proud Jew. I believe that the Jews are not less than any other people, any less deserving of a state of our own. I am a Zionist, having referred to myself as "the last secular Zionist" since 2009, when I made aliyah. I lived in Israel, had my babies there, built a full life in the glorious bubble known as Tel Aviv.

I wish for a Jewish conspiracy like they imagine, because then we could probably at least agree on something. These days, the old "two Jews, three opinions" feels quaint, as it feels like every thoughtful person I know carries at least three opinions on their tired shoulders.

The right wants nothing to do with me, because I am deeply ashamed of the current Israeli government, because I deplore the innocent lives being taken in the West Bank, by people who also claim Zionism as theirs. My family protested Bibi's government for many months, every single week. I was out three days before giving birth, and not long after.

People who have never rushed their babies to a bomb shelter accuse me of not being enough, as if they know the fear of a baby at the breast as rockets fall. The Rashid Khalidi on my bookshelf is heresy, the Herzl and Gordis and Golda Meir count for nothing. So I speak Hebrew to my children. So what?

I started writing this weeks ago, and then stopped, without any idea how to end it. The truth is that there is no end. Since I started, the democratic party of Maine nominated Graham Platner for the senate, despite his Nazi tattoo. The bad news is endless, and the good news, hard to come by.

I feel gutted, torn, abandoned. So does everyone I know.

On Israel.

You do not simply move across the world at age 25 to a country with a foreign language you do not speak, whose bureaucracy is famous, and whose people are known to resemble a cactus that is sharp on the outside, and sweet only on the inside.

You do not simply force yourself to learn that language, answering over and over again in Hebrew even when people make it clear that their English is better than your Hebrew, sitting through professional meetings and coming out with a headache from the level of concentration needed.

You do not give birth three children in that country, figuring out not merely the maze of pregnancy, but of gestational diabetes and contractions and pain and epidurals, all in Hebrew.

You do not sit through years of ceremonies for fallen soldiers, sick to your stomach that you will one day cheer your children as they enter that same army, praying to a God you may or may not believe in that they will return home.

You do not bury your beloved father without your spouse and children, who are thousands of miles away, and fly 12 hours during a pandemic to get back to them, just days after you buried him.

You do not do these things.

You do not, unless you are mad. Madly in love, passionately enthralled, entirely overly optimistic.

My love affair with Israel is the longest one in my life, having begun in early childhood. I love Israel the way I love my children—beyond all reason, without logic, simply because it is mine. Israel is my home, the beat of my heart, the steps I take, and the glasses through which I see the world.

And just as if my children were to commit terrible crimes, I would take them to task, not with any less love, but because of that very love, so too do I criticize the state of Israel and its nightmarish government.

My Israel is an entirely different one than the one portrayed in the media today, and I worry that it is under deep threat. That specific level of fear and my love for my children are the only things that would move me from the place I love so deeply. The fact that I have left is a devastating loss I’m not sure I will ever fully recover from.

But none of that is the point.

The point is this: none of this matters if we become the terrorists.

October 7 was a horrifying day. It was a nightmare. I ran down two flights of stairs to the communal bomb shelter with my kids, baby at the breast, multiple times. We debated if we were safer downstairs in the safe room (potentially terrorists could get in?) or in our apartment (potentially rockets could get in?).

I panicked when I realized my host sister—an 18-year-old I had known since her first birthday—was living in Sderot. Videos of terrorists roaming the city left me short of breath. I waited, heart racing, for confirmation that she was safe.

I learned that my friends’s son had been murdered in his own home, and tried to figure out what on earth to whatsapp her.

I functioned like some sort of zombie that day, and in the ones that followed. How could such things happen? How could the world be silent, as our babies were murdered, families butchered in their own homes? HOW COULD THEY?

When just a week later, we left Israel on literally eight hours’ notice, arriving at the airport with no idea where we were going, only that we were on a flight, with four suitcases total, I continued on. What choice was there?

And in the weeks that followed, as we debated and wanted to be wrong to have come to the US, and decided to stay, my heart broke, and broke, and broke.

Leaving my home. Leaving my friends. Leaving Itzik, the man who stands outside his shop and we pass on the way to school every day. Leaving the scones at La Maison, perfectly fluffy and served with a different dose of friends walking by each time. Leaving the place where everyone raises each other’s children, where the air is ripe with shabbat on Friday afternoons, where I feel at home.

I tell you this only because I need you to understand the depths of my love for Israel.

Because what I am going to say is more painful to me than you can possibly imagine, and I need you to know that this pain only comes from love.

We are becoming the ones we hate.

Hamas is torturing the Palestinians, and we are their partner.

Before I go further, a reminder of my credentials: I have an MA in Government, specialization in counter-terrorism and homeland security, from Reichman University in Israel. I studied abroad in South Africa, learning about apartheid, restorative justice, and how communities break, and heal. I have written about the international laws of war, and studied criminology, finally understanding that different people and cultures respond in varying ways to crime. With a degree in philosophy, I can talk utilitarianism versus deontology until I’m blue in the face.

And I lived 14 years in Israel. I worked in the non-profit sector, with friends who were ultra-orthodox wig wearers, and proud Ethiopian Jews. My friends with tattoos outnumbered those who kept shabbat but when I sat shiva for my father for one day, and more than 80 friends came to visit, they were wearing and not wearing kippot, skirts, tattoos. They had voted for the left wing, and the right. They came from the West Bank, and from Haifa, and from Jerusalem. I was proud of how many friends I disagreed with. I still am.

We are becoming the ones we hate.

October 7th mattered to me because Jewish lives are important. But Jewish lives, as much as they matter, aren’t the only ones that do.

The Israeli government is currently taking actions against Palestinian people that undermine both Israel and the Palestinians. They are illegal, and they are disgusting. They are stupid.

After October 7th, the violence in the West Bank reached new heights. If you haven’t listened to this episode (link in comment) of This American Life, do that now. It will make you sick. Do it anyway.

After October 7th, when we were full of rage and righteous anger, we could have built an alternative. We could have imagined and built a secure future, for ourselves and our children. Of course we had to take down Hamas. Of course not all Palestinians are Hamas. Israel should have built up the Palestinians who oppose Hamas—and let’s be real, when Hamas was elected in 2005, the majority of today’s Gazans were not yet born.

And the government did the opposite: the NY Times published a scrupulously researched, devastating takedown (link in comments) of Israel’s massive governmental failures and the way the extreme right has come to power.

Between the podcast and that article, you will learn of children regularly stoned by settlers on their way to school, of masked settlers attacking Palestinians at home in the middle of the day, of murders of Palestinians and destructions of their home with absolutely no consequences for the masked Jewish terrorists perpetrating them, hiding their faces like the criminals they know they are.

Being Jewish does not make you incapable of being a terrorist.

Murders of innocents in broad daylight. Brutality against children. Unprovoked terror. October 7th, or the West Bank on a Tuesday? Writing that question makes me want to throw up.

None of this is even getting in to Gaza, and the absolute and sheer Hell being lived by millions of people. When they tried to rise up, when they protested the government elected before they were born?

Look at Odai Al-Rubai. At 22, he protested 18 years of Hamas’ rule in the Gaza Strip. He should have been hoisted on the shoulders of all who want a safe Israel, for wanting better. Instead, “In retaliation, Al-Rubai’s family says, he was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by members of Hamas’s Qassam Brigades. Then his body was dumped in front of the family home.” (Source in comments)

Hamas is kidnapping, torturing, and murdering. Both Jews, and those Palestinians who want something better.

People in Gaza are starving. I don’t care if your definition of starving matches the UN definition or anyone else’s. There’s very clearly not enough food, and I don’t care whose fault it is. If Israel decided tomorrow to get food into the hands of everyone in Gaza, it would be done. Why aren’t we doing it? Why are we letting children starve?

When the state of Israel was created, the Jewish people were the weak ones. After the horrors of the Shoah, Jews desperately needed a place to call home, and our ancient homeland was chosen. We made the desert bloom. We did that. I will never forget the pride of my husband’s grandparents. He barely survived Auschwitz, and they married in a DP camp, coming to Israel with less than nothing and building a beautiful family and life.

And now our people, “light unto the nations” that we are supposed to be, is sanctioning the economic, social, financial ruin of a people. We are not listening to our own army, (link in comments) whose soldiers are increasingly refusing to fight a war that’s become indefensible.

Our soldiers are literally dying by suicide in record numbers (link in comments). The war is starving them, and poisoning us.

We are hitting a point of no return.

I don’t have a catchy end to this. I don’t know what the solution is. I’d truly love to be proven wrong on anything I’ve written here. There are people who know so much more about all of this than I do.

But I know that my heart is aching, and that is why I speak up and out. Not because I do not love Israel, but because my love for Israel demands my voice.

Holding all the Truths at the Same Time

It's been two years since November 27, 2021--the day my Dad took his last breaths and left us. My world changed that day.

And it's been almost two months since October 7, 2023--the day so many took their last breaths and left us.

I feel...numb? I miss my Dad all the time. I miss him like crazy. I missed him today when I went to Costco, and I even missed him when the raspberries fell out of the car, spilling all over the floor, and I know he would have been as upset as I was. I miss him when I eat soup. He loved soup. And when I try to figure out what to do with our lives, knowing his advice would have been both wise and kind. I miss him when I go for walks, and when I read an interesting article. I miss him when my kids are hilarious and he would have smiled so big. He was my Dad. And also, my buddy. I liked him as much as I adored him. I loved being with him, talking, not talking, doing, or not doing anything. I just loved him, so, so much.

He was also 73--not nearly old enough, and not tragically young. And we knew he was dying. And we got to say goodbye. And, and, and. So many blessings in his end. So much love. So many blessings others were denied when they were murdered.

I feel like I am juggling fire. My soul is screaming WHERE ARE THE REDHEADED BABIES WHO LOOK LIKE MY BABIES and at the same time I MISS MY DAD and it's hard to swallow both of those thoughts. 

It doesn't hurt anyone for me to miss my Dad, but some part of me feels guilt for it. Because our babies are missing, and there are nearly 200 hostages and as he always used to say "there but for fortune..." my babies and I would have been among them. 

I know how lucky I am. And I know how sad I am. And today, those are the truths I guess I am trying to hold.

Somehow, a Month

It's been a month since October 7th. One month, and 100 years. So many people have asked how we are. I'm so grateful. 

Here's the truth: we are so very, very lucky, and so very, very Not Ok.

It feels absurd to complain. 

We are incredibly lucky--that's all it is, to be sure. Luck. 

Our kids are alive, and healthy, and don't know what happened a month ago, beyond "there were rockets and there is a war". We had a safe place to go, and a loving school for them to attend. Their camp counselors are the same ones who greet them after school each day. My son raked leaves with his uncle this weekend. When my daughter got a double ear infection, we got the care she needed. We are lucky. Beyond lucky, really.

And we are Not Ok. 

If it weren't for those wonderful children, we would never have left our home. I've never in my life felt so Israeli, so foreign, in the city where I, my Dad, my grandparents, even my great-grandparents were born. The world goes on. I take my kids to trick-or-treat, all too aware that monsters are real, skeletons, far too present.

I cannot listen to the news in English, or even my favorite music in English. My heart beats in Hebrew. I change diapers, shuttle my kids around, make dinner again and again, but my mind is elsewhere. 

Every time I bring my daughter to my breast and she eats, I think of them. The babies, trapped in Gaza. My friend's son, murdered in his home--the same friend who taught me to breastfeed my babies. 

I think of the babies who were burned alive, who were murdered in ways too gruesome to consider. The mothers who were taken, who don't know where their babies are. The mothers of Gaza, held like prisoners by a terror organization that cares nothing for their lives.

I cannot cry, because I fear that if I do, I will never be able to stop. 

I feel the way I did the day after my Dad died--like I barely know how to breathe, to walk, to do the never-ending laundry of a family of five. I am--we are--in mourning. The world shifted under us. 

And none of this is ok.

The Post I Never Thought I'd Write

I've never dreamed the classic American Dream. I don't want the house in the suburbs, with a private yard. I don't crave a second car, even though it would have fancy features my trusty 2012 Honda lacks. I don't really want to live in America, much as I love my family and friends there.

I picked up a beautiful life and left the US in 2009 for Israel because I craved a country that would be mine in a way the US never was--where the air feels different on Friday afternoons, where my kids dreadful "spirit week" comes not before Halloween but before Purim--where they wouldn't hear "Jew girl" snarled at them as I did in fifth grade, when I was only two years older than my sweet son.

I loved the Israel I discovered on my year here after college, and in the years that followed. I loved spending most of my time with secular Israelis, and I loved volunteering in a pediatric oncology ward that treated both Palestinian and Jewish children entirely equally. 

I savored making friends who identified themselves as Haredi and spending a weekend in a Catholic Arab village. 

I saw what this land could be, and made it mine. I worked for an organization whose employees included all kinds of Israelis, and for one fighting for justice for Ethiopian-Israelis. I didn't have rose colored glasses, but I was never an Israeli with a plan to go back. I married a man who felt the same way--we were here for good. 

And now? Today?

Today, I feel disgusted by what is happening in the country I chose. Last night, in response to two Jewish boys--brothers--being murdered, my fellow Jewish Israelis launched a literal pogrom in the village of Huwara. They burned houses with people still in them. And the government is backing them. The head of the National Security Committee endorsed these despicable acts.  

There is a judicial shift underway that will essentially destroy our court system, leaving it to the whims of the government to decide if Israel's Basic Laws stay intact, with no checks or balances. In a government supporting the destruction of a Palestinian village, it isn't rocket science to think what that will mean for the 25% of Israelis who aren't Jewish.

Our Finance Minister committed financial crimes. Our Security Minister committed security crimes. Our Prime Minister? Also a criminal. It reads like a bad movie script. 

And we live in a bubble--a beautiful bubble. Here, on election day, the right wing criminals now in power didn't even show up to canvas for votes--they know that we live in a city where they won't get them. Of course, we are not a bloc--no city is--but by and large our disagreements with neighbors and classmates are about superficial matters, not core ones. 

For now, that is enough. For now, I can keep my children from the news, and teach them how to say "thank you" in Arabic and that we share this country with others. They have neighbors who are religious, who are secular, who are gay and straight. There are friends with skin as pale as theirs, and those whose families come from other places.

But I wonder how long it will be enough. I wonder if I should start thinking about where we would go. I never thought I would ask these questions--and I'm not the only one. Israeli friends, one after the other, tell me in Hebrew that they're asking these questions, too. That they're scared for their future--for their kids and their families. I get it. I'm scared, too.

I don't have a happy ending, though if you care, I implore you to read this piece by some of Israel's fiercest advocates, immigrants like myself. Take their suggestions to heart. Do what they ask. The future of this country literally depends on it.

What We're Losing: Ruminations on Reopening, or Not

The thing about sourdough starter--what you use to make the bread--is that you constantly throw away most of it. Every few hours, you toss the majority of what you've made, and add new materials (flour, water), so that eventually you will have something worth baking with. To move forward, you have to get rid of most of what you have.

Maybe that's the reason sourdough is so popular right now (mine is cooling on the counter). It feels like we are tossing out most of what we've got in this world. My question is if what we're left with will be worth keeping, or not.

The other day, I took my kids out for a walk within the bounds allowed by law. We wound up seeing one of my older kid's classmates--she's not someone he's especially close to, though he likes her and pretty much everyone. After just a few minutes of talking with her  and climbing a homemade fort the way five year-olds do, he was GLOWING.

As we walked away, he said to me "what a great day, Mom!" because he got to play with a kid his age. She's a lovely kid, but not one of his closest friends. And no more than five minutes with her absolutely made his day. 

He's a happy kid, he's been mostly ok throughout this period, but it broke my heart that he was so desperate for time with kids his own age.

All he wants is to play with his friends. And he's 5. I should be able to give him that.

He will only get to be in kindergarten once, and he is losing that, day by day. 

For weeks after this started, my three year-old would ask "is there preschool today?" and we'd have to tell him there wasn't. I'm not sure what was worse--hearing the question, or hearing him simply stop asking.

I know kids are resilient and they will be ok, but this feels like a lot to ask them to recover from.

In the debate about when and what and how to try to maybe reopen our society, there seem to be two extremes: OPEN NOW and KEEP CLOSED. The thing is, no one is actually at the extreme. None of us think we should shut everything down and go to military lockdown for months (or years) until we have a vaccine. What kind of society would that protect? What would it do to us, and to our children?

So it's a question of how we reopen. And none of us think we should just go back to the way things were, because we can't bear the consequences. We need only read what has happened in Spain, Italy, or New York to know that we must avoid that, too. Movie theaters aren't an option right now, for even the most optimistic (or ignorant?).

We're talking about our jobs, and the economy. Those things are important--critical. We need to be able to pay rent and buy food. But the thing is that in all of this, we are losing some calculation of the other things that matter, too--the soft things that make us live, rather than merely exist.

Five year-olds playing tag and running in the park with their friends. Three year-olds singing songs with their friends. Family dinners beyond the nuclear family. Nights sharing cocktails with friends. The long weekend I was supposed to have with my Dad, across an ocean. Are we tossing too much of the world that we've built--accidentally throwing out too much of the sourdough?

I don't know what the right way is to do any of this. No one does. But our kids--even the happy, well-adjusted ones with two loving parents and enough of everything--even they are starting to be Not Ok. And at some point soon, even for the science-lovers among us, that might just outweigh the fear.

Purses, Parties, Conferences: On Mourning the Little Things During a Pandemic

There's a purse I ordered about three months ago; it fits easily over a suitcase, it's nice-looking, and it came recommended. In the first year in my job, I flew abroad for work seven times. The bag was my reward for a job well-done. It was functional, without being too much. An indulgent gift, at just the right level.

My beautiful (I imagine) bag sits in my parents' home, untouched. I wish I could have it, even though I don't really need a work bag these days.

Yesterday was my son's best pal's birthday. He turned six. It should have been a really fun day, with a party to look forward to, and even the little brother excited. Instead, we took a quick video of my boy wishing him a happy birthday, and that this corona passes soon, so they can play together once again. I wish they could play together, now.

I was supposed to go to Austin in March, and my (wonderful) manager offered for us to check out some SXSW events. It would have been a great opportunity to grow, personally? Professionally? I'll never know. The trip, where I would have picked up my bag, was canceled. I also missed the (canceled) wedding of a dear friend. I wish I had been at the wedding, wish I could have picked which SXSW sessions to attend.

None of these losses are huge. My job is safe, for now at least, and we have enough resources. No one in our family has so far suffered major loss from this plague.

But somehow, every time I hear someone expressing pain about a loss--it is always cast as "not worthy". 

What I want to say, with absolutely no authority, is this: pain is valid. It doesn't have to be the worst pain in the world to be valid. You are allowed to mourn the little things, even now, when a global pandemic rages. 

It is ok to miss the trip you couldn't take, the meal you couldn't go out for despite making reservations. I give you, and me, permission to miss the little things as much as we miss the big ones. We as humans don't just mourn the big losses, even when we've experienced them. I can wish I could have my bag, even though I've been through things one million times harder. You can hold multiple truths at the same time. We all contain multitudes.

I leave you with this observation from the brilliant Meg Keene, commenting on a question someone sent in on her wedding advice website (her writing is worth reading, whatever the topic). The letter writer's husband had almost died at their wedding, and while she was glad he was alive, she was also sad she missed her wedding, a relatively "small thing":

"We actually had a big conversation in our office about the terrible-ness of the suffering olympics when this question came in. When my dad fell WALKING HIS DOG, and got a terrible brain injury, and I had to drop everything to care for him (while caring for two kids and running a business) for three months, and then he suddenly died anyway from hospital mismanagement I kept like I needed to say like, "Well it could have been worse."

WELL LIKE YEAH. EVERYTHING COULD BE WORSE. That's what survivor's guilt is. Even people who survive the worst atrocities known to human kind are like "it could have been worse, because I survived and other people didn't."

And I feel like we're in this place in liberal feminist culture where we feel EXTRA responsibility to disclaim all of the reasons that things could be worse and we have privilege at every moment. And those things are true. And we know those things. And in big picture political conversations we should really consider them. My dad had insurance. I want everyone to have insurance. California has paid family leave. I want everyone to have paid family leave. I can go on and on.

But there is a time to put that aside I think, too. It's call grief, and grieving, and we're all human and we all deserve to have it in it's pure rawness. My dad DIED and he should be alive right now playing with his grandkids and talking politics with me and he's NOT. The LW's husband almost DIED and it was horrific and traumatic (I've been in those asthma attack car rides with my son, and they are trauma that will live in my soul forever.) And she should have had a WEDDING and she didn't.

So fuck all the mitigating circumstances right now, fuck the "who has it worse", fuck the "I'm so privileged that I even have this problem." FUCK ALL OF IT. Something terrible happened when you should have been experiencing one of your greatest joys, and I am SO SORRY, and we see you, and please just let yourself feel whatever you need to feel, and not pick yourself back up till you're ready and then do LITERALLY WHATEVER you and your partner want to do.

I'm sorry sister. The world is a hard damn place, and I'm sorry this happened to you, and I see you."