The Old Country

Musings of an Israeli in America

July 6, 2021

I just spent three weeks in the U.S. I have nine observations, covering everything from masks to pancakes. Plus one-hour weed delivery!

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What’s really happening on American college campuses today

January 4, 2020

What’s really happening for pro-Israel students on American college campuses today? I’m not there. So I asked Liel Zahavi-Asa, an Israel advocate.

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The price of memory

November 9, 2017

“We found Mom. She’s safe.” That was the text message I received from my brother in California. It came out of the blue.

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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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Israel: the new Jewish shtetl

January 23, 2017

Hebrew Union College Professor Steven M. Cohen published an essay last month with some startling conclusions about Jewish demography. Reviewing figures compiled by the Pew Research Center over the past half century, he writes in The Forward that the number of Orthodox Jews in America has quadrupled in just two generations – with 79,000 “grandparents” […]

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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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Why I’m voting for Donald Trump

April 1, 2016

Yes, you read that right. It’s taken a while, but I’ve finally come around. Republican presidential contender Donald Trump has won me over. And come November, if he’s still in the race (and if this election year has taught us anything, it’s that nothing is mandated from heaven), he’ll have my vote. He says he’s […]

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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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Co-opting intersectionality: how to beat BDS on campus

February 18, 2016

The drama continues at Oberlin College. Last month in The Jerusalem Post, I wrote about growing anti-Semitism and BDS support at my alma mater. Now, the Facebook group “Oberlin Students and Alumni Against Anti-Semitism” has published an open letter with more than 200 signatures describing the toxic climate on campus for pro-Israel students and calling […]

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