Only in Israel

Under fire: a student in Sderot

September 3, 2018

My daughter Merav is a proud Zionist. But even Zionists get scared sometimes. And living in Sderot, there’s been a lot to be frightened of.

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Secrets of the Startup Nation

February 5, 2018

How did Israel become the Startup Nation? Here are five new reasons.

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Why live in Israel?

April 30, 2017

Why do Jews live in Israel? That was the question Jerusalem Post editor Yaakov Katz asked in his Friday column two weeks ago. With Yom Ha’atzmaut just around the corner, it’s a question we should all be asking ourselves. Katz sets up – and then deconstructs – two answers popular in recent years with Israeli […]

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Is “Foreign Language Learning Disability” real?

April 6, 2017

Fluent in English but can’t seem to master a second language? You may have Foreign Language Learning Disability. That’s my experience with Hebrew

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Lowest common denominator

November 6, 2016

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu buckled under haredi pressure in September and canceled 20 long standing Israel Railways permits to do regularly scheduled repair work on Shabbat (leading to the cancelation of train service the following Sunday morning that inconvenienced tens of thousands of commuters and soldiers), he probably wasn’t thinking it would reignite Israel’s […]

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“Trading down” – must aliyah always mean a career decline?

June 21, 2016

As I was researching The aliyah premium – how much more does it really cost to live in Israel?, I quickly realized that the only fair way to deal with the wide variances in individual earnings and tax rates was to stick with official and presumably impartial government sources like the Israeli Central Bureau of […]

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The “aliyah premium” – how much more does it really cost to live in Israel?

May 23, 2016

It’s no secret that immigrants to Israel from North America take a financial hit. But as I finished up my U.S. taxes last month (as an Israeli with dual citizenship, I am required to file in both countries), I stopped for a moment to ponder exactly how big that hit has been. What is the […]

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Rebranding Zionism (Zionism = Calendarism)

March 21, 2016

I interview people for a living. Many of the articles I write are for publications outside of Israel. For those conversations, I don’t usually identify myself as living in Jerusalem – I want the person I’m speaking with to be the focus of the article, not me. I have a U.S. phone number, so there’s […]

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Rekindling the romance in a love-lost marriage

February 2, 2016

I’m not sure when it happened or even when I realized it. But something had shifted. After 20 years, we both had changed so much. Everyone and everything does of course. Why would I expect that we’d be exactly the same as when we first got together? We evolve, we grow; hopefully together. But in […]

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Re-entry syndrome and the five stages of aliyah

September 27, 2015

“It’s called re-entry syndrome,” my therapist friend Nomi explained to me as I was describing the difficulty I was having returning to Israel after our recent vacation abroad. “It happens to everyone.” It’s especially acute, she added, when you’ve just come from an especially polite country such as Norway, where we’d just spent two weeks […]

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