Together, they explore the difficult questions surrounding Israel’s government, the global rise of antisemitism, and the growing tensions between Israel and Diaspora Jewry.

Spotify:

The post Tamar Ish Shalom in conversation with Rabbi Sharon Brous first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

Israelis are a nation of heroes. That might sound like a slogan, but every so often something happens that reminds us how true this is.

Of all the extraordinary stories to emerge from Wednesday’s flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv, the one that stands out is the courage of the passengers who realized something had gone terribly wrong, forced their way into the cockpit, and helped subdue the co-pilot, who had allegedly stabbed the captain and appeared to be trying to bring down the plane.

The aircraft plunged thousands of feet; there was chaos onboard, and the passengers had no way of knowing exactly what was happening or whether they had minutes, seconds, or no time at all.

And they acted. They didn’t wait for someone to rescue them or see if everything would resolve itself on its own. They took the initiative and saved lives: not only of the passengers on board, but whatever else the plane could have taken down with it.

When we remember aircraft that have been hijacked or crashed over the years, it is difficult not to appreciate what happened aboard this flight and how there is something deeply Israeli about it. It is part of this country’s culture: not to stand by and watch events unfold, but to run headfirst into the fire, battle, or the storm and do whatever can be done to save lives.

We have now heard some testimony from passengers aboard the flight. It is frightening and disturbing, particularly as investigators are still trying to understand what exactly happened and what the co-pilot’s motive was. But there is also something heartwarming in hearing how people responded in those terrifying moments.

They literally took charge, and, when we think about it, it is a characteristic we know all too well. Next week, Israel will mark three years since October 7. That terrible day will be seared into our collective memory as one of the greatest failures and tragedies in Israeli history. But, like with the airplane, it too was filled with stories of some of the greatest courage this country has ever seen.

There are many different kinds of heroism, and there is no need to rank them.

But it is impossible to forget the people who woke up that morning, heard that something incomprehensible was happening in the south, understood that people were in desperate need of help, and got into their cars. They took whatever weapons they had, if they had any, and drove straight into the battle.

They did not know what they would find. They did not know how many terrorists had crossed the border, where the army was, or whether they themselves would make it home. They just went. That, to a large extent, is the story of Israel: a small country whose people are repeatedly confronted with danger and who, when the moment comes, stand up, fight and lead the charge.

A nation prepared to fight

It is worth thinking about that now, just weeks before Israelis go to the polls on October 27.

This election will help determine the direction Israel takes after three extraordinarily difficult years. And whichever government ultimately emerges, it will inherit a country confronting a series of strategic challenges, almost none of which have truly been resolved.

Hamas still controls part of Gaza and retains weapons and military infrastructure. Hezbollah remains a threat to Israel’s north. And Iran remains locked in confrontation over its nuclear program and its wider regional capabilities. It is true that three years after October 7, Israel has achieved amazing accomplishments, but victory, as we know too well by now, is not measured only by what an army destroys – it is also measured by what a country builds in its place.

And that is where a striking discrepancy has emerged.

Israel’s leaders have been given an extraordinary gift: a population willing to fight, to endure difficult years, and send its children to war knowing the risks and knowing, painfully, that some will not return.

Consider the family of Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Yechiel Leiter. His son Neria was seriously wounded last week in a ramming attack on Route 443 while serving in the reserves. His brother, Moshe, was killed fighting in Gaza in 2023.

Neria had every reason not to continue serving: his brother had been killed, and his family had already sacrificed enough. He could have remained home with his wife and children. He could have spared his parents the anguish of once again worrying about a son fighting on the front.

But he did not. He continued putting on his uniform. He continued reporting for reserve duty. And he continued serving. Without people like that, Israel would not survive. But courage cannot only be demanded of soldiers and civilians; it must be demanded of politicians as well.

Political courage is different. It is not about charging a cockpit or running toward gunfire. It is about making difficult decisions, accepting risk, challenging traditional assumptions and, most importantly, telling the public where you actually want to take the country.

That is the question Israelis should be asking as they prepare to vote: What is the vision? Is the future being offered to us simply one of hunkering down, a kind of super-Sparta, stronger and better armed than everyone around us but condemned to fight one war after another?

Or is there another possibility, one that recognizes the threats Israel faces, takes them seriously, and preserves overwhelming military strength, but also searches for a path toward greater security, stability, and eventually something else?

Israel looking for brave leaders

Last week in New York, for example, the US-backed Board of Peace unveiled an ambitious plan for Gaza. Senior officials acknowledged the enormous obstacles standing in the way, including the unresolved dispute over how Hamas will disarm and how Israel will withdraw.

Considering everything that would have to happen for this plan to succeed, skepticism is more than understandable. Is it ambitious and hard to imagine? 100%. Three years after October 7, with the situation in Gaza still dire – both for its residents and for Israel’s security – this is a thoughtful plan that offers a real chance to change reality on the ground. Considering all the alternatives, isn’t it worth a shot?

But here is the catch: Israelis were not even in the room.

That is what this election campaign should be about. Instead, too much of Israeli politics remains focused on what candidates are against. This person will sit with that party; that person cannot be trusted; this bloc is dangerous, and that bloc is illegitimate. But what are these politicians for? Where do they want Israel to be in five years?

What is their plan for Gaza? For Lebanon? For the Palestinians? For Israel’s increasingly strained relationship with parts of the Western world? What does victory realistically look like?

Israelis have demonstrated time and again that they are prepared to take extraordinary risks for this country. The people who stormed the cockpit this week did not wait to be asked. Neither did the Israelis who drove south on October 7. They saw danger. They understood that someone had to act. And despite having no guarantee of what would happen next, they moved forward.

Israel’s political leaders do not need to storm a cockpit. But they do need to show some of the same courage. Instead of spending the next few weeks telling Israelis what they will never do, whom they will never sit with, and why everyone else is dangerous, they should tell us where they want to take this country.

The Israeli people have already shown that they are prepared to be brave. Now they deserve leaders brave enough to offer them a future.

Published in the Jerusalem Post

The post Israel is a nation of heroes – time for the gov’t to show courage too first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

Of all the fault lines dividing Israeli society, none is more dangerous – or more misleading – than the supposed divide between “Jews” and “Israelis”: the notion, aggressively promoted by some, that the Right represents the “Jews” who keep the flame alive, while anyone who is not on the Right is merely “Israeli” – estranged from Jewish tradition and in thrall to global “progressivism” and its values.

This is a distorted picture of Israeli society. Israeli identity itself embraces Jewish values and traditions; Jewish tradition and its values are foundational to Israeli-Zionist identity. The data, too, tell the opposite story. The overwhelming majority of Israelis are deeply Jewish – in identity, values, and practice.

The false narrative of “Jews” versus “Israelis” has antecedents at both ends of the political spectrum. Its intellectual roots reach back to the fringes of the Canaanite movement and later to the post-Zionist Left, both of which sought to sever Israeli statehood from its Jewish inheritance.

The narrative as a political weapon

But the Right turned the idea into a popular political weapon. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu whispered into Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri’s ear that “the Left has forgotten what it means to be Jewish,” he was articulating a strategy designed to brand the entire liberal public as “Israelis” hostile to Judaism and its expression in the Jewish state; to give the right-wing and haredi (ultra-Orthodox) bloc a monopoly on Judaism; and, above all, to bind it together as a cohesive “Jewish” bloc.

But anyone who looks squarely at reality can see this for the distortion it is. Data from recent years consistently tell a very different story. Jewish Israeli society is not split between “Jews” and “Israelis.” Most of it falls within what might be called “Israeli Judaism” or the “traditionalist sphere.”

In this broad middle – which encompasses most of Israeli society, including most of the political Center and part of the Left – the two identities do not compete; they reinforce each other, in self-understanding as well as in practice.

The Jewish identity of Israelis

Consider the numbers. Roughly 80% of secular Israelis say it is very important to them that their children grow up as Jews. The share of Israelis who attend a Passover Seder, light Hanukkah candles, affix a mezuzah at home, and circumcise their sons consistently exceeds 90%. Even on Yom Kippur, three out of four Israeli Jews fast either fully or partially, and almost all car owners refrain from driving. Two-thirds of Israeli Jews (67%) keep kosher fully or in part, and 70% do not eat hametz on Passover.

Israelis in the Center and on the Left, along with substantial segments of the Right, oppose religious coercion. Most support civil marriage, limited public transportation on Shabbat, and a more equal sharing of civic burdens.

They object to the politicization of religion, in part because they refuse to surrender their Judaism to the Chief Rabbinate – an ossified political institution focused on the sectoral and economic interests of its insiders. But opposition to the rabbinate’s monopoly is not opposition to Judaism.

The real debate in Israel is not between “Jews” who care deeply about tradition and “Israelis” who supposedly reject it and want to strip the state of its Jewish markers. The debate is over the Jewish character of the state.

Participants in that debate include people on the Left whose concern for the state’s Jewish character – and for the character of Judaism within it – is no less profound than that of the Jews on the Right. The attempt to portray the liberal camp as having lost its Jewishness is a dangerous political lie. It is time to root it out of our public discourse.

Israel is a Jewish and democratic state. It is also deeply Zionist and Israeli. At their best, these identities coexist, complement one another, and draw strength from one another. There is, of course, tension among the different values that constitute Israeli identity. The debate over their place in the public sphere and the institutions of government is real and has accompanied the country since its founding.

But at the deepest level of identity, most Israelis are also Jewish. The Jewishness of those on the Left and in the political Center is no less real than that of right-wing Jews. This narrative may serve the political extremes and the campaigns of cynical politicians, but it threatens Israeli society with yet another fault line – one built on a lie.

Published in the Jerusalem Post

The post The ‘Jews vs Israelis’ lie: Right does not own Judaism, and the Left has not abandoned it first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

Within a few days in late August, the world learned of the deaths of three giants of global culture: Dolly Parton, Péter Nádas, and Yayoi Kusama.

An American country singer, a Hungarian Jewish novelist, and a Japanese avant-garde artist. There is no obvious reason to place them together. They belonged to different generations, countries, artistic traditions, and cultural worlds. Yet the news of their deaths arriving within days of one another offers a reminder of something increasingly precious: culture can create common ground – and open a door into unfamiliar worlds – without requiring us to become alike.

I saw this quite literally at a Dolly Parton concert in Toronto in 2016. There were unmistakable groups: men in cowboy-style outfits, a visible Evangelical presence, and large numbers of gay and lesbian fans. Whatever else divided them – politics, religion, sexuality, social background – they all adored Dolly.

For a few hours, Parton created a community among people who might otherwise have had very little to say to one another. She did not resolve their disagreements. She did something more modest and perhaps more valuable: she gave them something they could love together. I am Jewish. I do not share Parton’s Christian faith. But I do not need to share it to understand the image at the heart of her music, that human beings need something that gives them wings and something that keeps their feet on the ground; faith and humility.

Péter Nádas represented a radically different cultural universe. By coincidence, I finished The End of a Family Story three days before his death. It is an uneasy book – difficult, claustrophobic, and unsettling. Nádas was Hungarian and Jewish, and the Jewishness of his writing is integral, not incidental.

In The End of a Family Story, family, faith, politics, and memory become entangled with the violent history of 20th-century Europe. People inherit worlds they did not choose and histories they cannot simply discard.

What Europe means for Jews

For Jews, and certainly for Israelis, Europe is rarely only a geographical place. It is also memory. Sometimes longing. Sometimes fear. Sometimes culture. Sometimes a family story whose beginning we no longer know and whose ending remains unfinished.

Then there is Yayoi Kusama. I first encountered her work in person on the Japanese island of Naoshima in 2017. I later attended her major retrospective at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

Again, the crowd was part of the experience. There were secular Israelis, families with children, and a large, visible group of Arab Israelis. Some had come to see the work of one of the most important artists of the past century. Others were drawn to the mirrors, dots, and pumpkins. Children seemed delighted by a universe that required no explanation before entering it. Kusama could speak to all of them for entirely different reasons.

That is what great culture can do. It does not require everyone standing before the same painting, reading the same novel, or listening to the same song to understand it in precisely the same way. It creates common ground without demanding uniformity.

That ability feels particularly valuable now. We are living through a period in which the boundary between culture and politics is becoming increasingly difficult to preserve.

Israelis experience this with particular intensity. They want to know what the singer said about Israel. Whether the writer signed a petition. Whether the artist supports a boycott. Whether the university severed relations with an Israeli institution. Whether the country voted for us or against us. These questions are not imaginary. Sometimes they matter enormously. Since the Hamas-led massacre on October 7, 2023, Israelis have learned that cultural, academic, and artistic institutions that appeared universal can suddenly become places where belonging feels highly conditional.

But allowing politics to become our only language for encountering other societies carries its own danger.

Jewish experience offers another possibility. For centuries, Jews wrote in Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Yiddish, Ladino, German, Hungarian, Russian, Polish, and English. They borrowed melodies, literary forms, philosophical ideas, and languages from the societies around them. They participated in surrounding cultures while stubbornly refusing to disappear inside them.

That tension between belonging and particularity became one of the great creative forces of Jewish life. Israel should understand this better than most. The Jewish state was not created so that Jews could stop encountering the world. It gave Jews a sovereign home from which to encounter it. That distinction matters today. Israel sometimes feels extraordinarily alone. Its relationship with parts of the cultural world has become strained. Israelis arrive at international encounters wondering whether they will be welcomed as individuals or judged first by the passport they carry.

The understandable response is to retreat. To stop listening. To divide everything between those who are with us and those who are against us. We should resist that temptation.

The cowboys, Evangelicals, gays, and lesbians in Toronto did not become one another when Parton walked onto the stage. The secular Israelis, Arab Israelis, and families with children in Tel Aviv did not need to experience Kusama in the same way. Nádas did not make the contradictions of Jewish and European history disappear; he turned them into literature.

Perhaps that is what these three artists, whose deaths entered the news so unexpectedly close together, have in common. Great culture does not erase the boundaries between people. Nor does it require agreement. It gives us permission to cross into unfamiliar territory, to become curious about lives unlike our own, and even to discover something of ourselves there.

Three artists. Three distinct worlds. And three reminders that sharing a culture does not require sharing politics, a religion, or a history.

Published in The Jerusalem Post

The post What three cultural giants can teach us about finding common ground first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

Amid a day of relentless headlines, one story stood out – and struck a nerve: the dismal state of Israeli students’ literacy, as revealed by the latest PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) test results. Israel ranked 43rd out of the 91 participating countries and economies and 33rd among the 38 OECD member states.

I doubt there is anyone in Israel who is not troubled by these findings. Everything that needs to be said about the state of our education system, the decades of neglect of our human capital, and the need for sweeping reform has already been said. There is little left to add. More importantly, saying it again will accomplish little. We can continue to lay all the blame on the system, the institutions, and the politicians. But sometimes we need to stop expecting others to do the work for us.

After all, these are our children’s grades. And that makes them our responsibility, too.

Perhaps we need to restate the obvious: Parents bear primary responsibility for their children’s education. It is their responsibility to raise children of good character, capable of distinguishing right from wrong and choosing what is right. Above all, parents are responsible for helping their children grow into independent, thinking individuals – happy and healthy in mind, body, and spirit.

Not the caregiver, the kindergarten teacher, the classroom teacher, the principal, and certainly not the sprawling behemoth known as the Ministry of Education. Of course, most of us cannot teach our children mathematics, English, or physics at the required level, nor are we expected to replace the school. But reading, writing, language, and curiosity are more than school subjects. They are part of our responsibility as parents and of the broader culture in which we raise our children.

If Israeli children rank so poorly in literacy among OECD countries, it is hard to argue that the education system alone is to blame. This is also a wider cultural problem, one that begins in our homes. The Jewish people, after all, are known as the “People of the Book.” The Jewish tradition of excellence in reading and scholarship did not arise from the quality of any formal education system. It grew out of a pervasive culture of learning, interpretation, curiosity, and intellectual inquiry – a culture nurtured in the home, the community, and the broader cultural environment.

Even today, in the age of artificial intelligence, reading remains fundamental to thought. We think in words and concepts. Our imagination draws on images, stories, and the richness of language. The ability to read a complex text, grasp an idea, identify an argument, and distinguish the essential from the incidental is integral to our capacity to think for ourselves. A world of screens can never fully replace reading, storytelling, and imagination.

The problem is enormous, but some of the remedies are remarkably simple. Get a public library card. Read the same book as your children and discuss it with them. Keep books within easy reach at home. Let your children see you reading for pleasure – on weekends, on Shabbat, and before bedtime. Set aside an occasional family reading hour: no screens, no chores, just everyone sitting together with something to read. (A sports magazine counts, too.)

The PISA results are a wake-up call for the education system. But they are also a wake-up call for us – the parents of the children of the “People of the Book.” That title is not an honorific we inherited. It is a cultural commitment that must be renewed in every generation, in every home.

The truly troubling question is not where Israel will rank on the next PISA test. It is what kind of people we will have raised by then.

Published in TOI

The post Their Grades, Our Responsibility first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

Recently, voices from across Israel’s political divide – from Bennett’s Beyachad party to the Movement for Quality Government – have proposed placing the Declaration of Independence at the opening of Israel’s future constitution, thereby elevating it to the apex of the country’s normative legal hierarchy. Former Supreme Court chief justices, Meir Shamgar and Aharon Barak, have expressed similar views. Is this appropriate?

The impulse is easy to understand, even compelling. The Declaration is an Israeli canonical text – without equal. For decades, Israelis have recognized the almost miraculous significance of the broad consensus reached by the leaders of the pre-state Yishuv. At the very moment the state was being born, with its survival still in doubt, they managed, through words, to give form to the Israeli spirit of a Jewish people renewing its life in its homeland.

The Declaration tells our story at the singular turning point when the Jewish people returned to history as a people. It is a capsule of distilled Israeli DNA, implanted in our national bloodstream by the founding generation as a gift to those who followed. It would therefore seem only natural to give it pride of place at the head of our future constitution.

But we should not.

Anyone who wants to preserve the Declaration’s exalted status above Israel’s political disputes must recognize the distinction between two very different kinds of discourse: one of identity and one of rights. The Declaration belongs to the first. It should serve as an instrument for forging shared identity. It is Israeli identity’s home port – the place from which Israelis set sail into the riptides of disagreement and to which they return to recover a sense of common belonging. Its success in fulfilling this historic role depends on broad popular support, both emotional and intellectual.

That support, however, will not survive if the Declaration is transformed from an identity-defining national canon into a legal instrument for determining rights. Dragging it into the discourse of rights will damage it, because that discourse plays out through judicial rulings, with winners and losers. When one side seeks to defeat the other by invoking the Declaration, it pushes its opponent toward rejecting the Declaration itself – thereby diminishing its value as a shared identity asset.

That erosion of the Declaration’s symbolic, educational, and identity-building power has already begun. During the dramatic Supreme Court hearing on the “reasonableness standard,” the lawyer representing the government challenged the Declaration’s importance, arguing that it had been drafted by an unrepresentative group, written in haste, and is old and anachronistic. He later clarified and softened his remarks, but the damage had been done: the Declaration had been deeply scarred.

At the other extreme, a Supreme Court justice, in a supremely activist lone opinion in the case concerning the “Tiberias Law,” held that the Declaration is the fundamental norm on which the entire Israeli legal system rests. He thus set in motion an intellectual and legal project that seeks to turn the Declaration into a legal trump card – one that could serve as the basis for judicial review even of Basic Laws.

The justice reiterated this position in a ruling handed down last week on the law freezing the arrests of Haredi draft evaders. In his view, the law “was enacted outside the scope of the Knesset’s authority and is therefore void,” because it infringes the right to “full equality” enjoyed by all citizens by virtue of the operative legal force he attributes to the Declaration.

Those seeking to incorporate the Declaration into a future constitution are embracing this justice’s position – and taking it a step further. In doing so, they risk turning the Declaration from a cultural asset into a legal weapon. Their well-intentioned effort to elevate its status could end up, paradoxically, destroying the very value it holds for all of us.

We suffer from a toxic syndrome: the Israeli public conversation repeatedly gravitates toward the discourse of rights while neglecting the discourse of identity. We choose to shift the center of gravity of our cultural disputes away from the public arena – ideology, politics, and the marketplace of ideas – and into the judicial arena, where binding decisions are handed down. Those who cherish the Declaration must resist placing it in the legal arena. The debate over judicial review of ordinary laws and Basic Laws should not be decided by invoking the noble words of the Declaration of Independence.

We live on shifting sands. Precisely for that reason, we have an urgent – even existential – need for a fixed point of consensus capable of holding us together. The closest thing we have to such a fixed point – our one secular sacred text – is the Declaration of Independence.

We must not squander the founding generation’s gift.

Published in jns

The post Israel’s Declaration: A Secular Sacred Text, Not a Legal Weapon first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

It would be more fun to write a feel-good column on the promise of a much better year. But reality points the other way. A convergence of trends and events – some global, some local – threatens to turn 5787 into a “perfect storm”: several forces coming together, each likely to confront us with challenges even greater than those we have already endured.

At home: political instability, intensifying internal conflict, accelerating net emigration, and continuing security threats. Abroad: artificial intelligence; a climate spinning out of control; instability in the international system and intensifying great-power competition; and, as a result of all these, the continued rise of antisemitism, which, true to form, blames Jews for every ill.

I hope I turn out to be wrong. But I may not.

The problems facing Israel in the new year

Let’s start in Israel. Elections will be held shortly after the holidays. Months of polling, including surveys conducted in recent days, point to a political deadlock. Like two wrestlers in the ring, the political “blocs” have each other by the throat, with neither able to prevail. If that holds, we can expect a replay of the election years of 2020–2023 and prolonged instability. This time, however, the social reality is more extreme – most Israelis identify the social rift as the greatest risk facing Israel –despite the immense challenges of the security environment. As conditions deteriorate, more Israelis are leaving the country, including many who are part of the backbone of the economy.

The security and foreign-policy fronts are also unstable – and in some respects, worsening. Israel has failed to achieve a decisive victory on any front. The IDF is stretched to the limit in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank, while another “round” with Iran looms as a very real possibility. The security burden on military personnel and the Israeli economy is enormous – almost unprecedented.

The international outlook is no brighter. On the eve of the new year, Britain – once a close Israeli ally – imposed unprecedented sanctions on Israel. Eleven other European countries have followed suit, including major EU members. Israel’s standing in the United States is deteriorating as well. On both sides of the political divide, rhetoric toward Israel and Jews is becoming more extreme. Israel has already become a major issue in the midterm elections – not to its advantage – and as the 2028 presidential race heats up, the situation is likely to worsen. Public support for Israel is at a historic low. Then there is antisemitism. In Europe, this is old news – and the situation is bad. But over the past year, antisemitism in the United States, together with denial of Israel’s right to exist, has also surged and gained legitimacy, with such views now openly voiced by influencers and politicians. Antisemitism and rejection of Israel have become intertwined, threatening Jewish life in the Diaspora and becoming a national-security challenge for Israel itself.

Added to these are global challenges that will significantly affect Israel. The first is artificial intelligence. Many experts now expect AI to advance faster than previously thought – and to reshape our lives sooner than expected. There will be benefits, but the labor market and global economy also face the real prospect of a severe crisis – one that could last until economies and governments adapt to this new environment. Israel, whose economy is driven by its technology sector, is especially exposed.

Over all of this hangs the climate crisis. On its own, it might not drastically alter the international system. Combined with other pressures, however, it could become a major factor. Together, these trends intensify instability in the international system and sharpen great-power competition – both with consequences for Israel.

Some of these trends are beyond our control, and Israel has little influence over them. That does not exempt Israel from confronting them and preparing for their effects. Others – those directly involving Israel – are much more within our power to shape. Some result from government policy; others from external forces. But in both cases, we can do more to address them. The challenges awaiting us in 5787 could coalesce into a perfect storm. But this outcome is not inevitable; the choices we make can soften the blow. Despite it all – happy new year!

Published in the Jerusalem Post

The post The Perfect Storm: Why this Rosh Hashanah May Start Israel’s Most Challenging Year Yet first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

Last week, I found myself walking through Vienna in the footsteps of two women whose disappearance had transfixed the Israeli public.

Mali Yahalomi and her daughter Liel disappeared during a trip to Europe. Their relatives were desperate for news. Israeli officials became involved, the embassy appealed for help, and people kept asking a seemingly obvious question: How can two women simply disappear in the middle of Vienna in 2026?

I happened to be in the city shortly afterward. By then, the two had been found. I was not searching for them. Instead, I looked at the environment they had moved through.

What struck me was the ubiquity of surveillance. At Vienna’s main railway station alone, dozens of security cameras were plainly visible. Cameras were also visible in shops and public spaces. Like virtually every major European capital, Vienna is a city in which movement through transportation hubs leaves digital traces.

That made me reconsider the Israeli reaction.

Many had wondered why the Austrian Federal Police could not locate the two women more quickly. With cameras, mobile phones, digital payments and transportation records, how difficult could it be to reconstruct the movements of two people?

Walking through Vienna, however, I began to wonder whether this was the wrong question. Perhaps the more interesting issue was not what a modern state can discover but what a liberal democracy is entitled to do with information about adults who may be acting voluntarily.

Important limits remain to what can be said about this investigation, and parts of the case remain subject to legal restrictions. It would be wrong to speculate about what the Austrian police knew, when they knew it, or which tools they used. Public reporting suggests circumstances more complicated than a simple case of two people seeking privacy. The case should not be forced into a neat philosophical parable.

But the questions it raises remain.

For many Israelis, the assumption was straightforward. A mother and daughter had vanished. Their relatives were terrified.

The two had failed to return home as expected. Surely the police should find them and say where they were. There is something recognizably Israeli in that assumption.

Israel is an intensely familial society. Parents remain involved in the lives of adult children. Children assume responsibility for aging parents. Extended families mobilize during crises. When someone disappears, this can rapidly become a family emergency, a community emergency, and sometimes a national one.

Israel’s security culture reinforces that instinct. Israelis routinely accept intrusions into privacy in the name of safety that many Europeans might find uncomfortable. We open our bags at entrances, answer questions at airports, and encounter security checks in everyday life. In an emergency, we expect the state to use the tools at its disposal. When someone goes missing, our instinct is simple: find them.

European law and political culture often act from a different premise.

Privacy and data protection occupy an unusually prominent place in European law and political culture. European political systems remain deeply conscious of the dangers created when governments possess extensive information about individuals with too few restraints on how it can be used.

The distinction matters. A city can possess extensive surveillance capabilities without assuming that the resulting information belongs to relatives, the press, or the public. The ability to determine where someone is does not automatically entitle others to know.

The question becomes particularly uncomfortable when an adult disappears voluntarily. If someone has been kidnapped, attacked, or coerced, the responsibility to intervene is clear. But what if an adult chooses to leave and does not want to be found? Does her family have a right to know where she is? Does the public? Does the press? At what point does the obligation to search end and personal autonomy begin?

Such questions can sound almost offensive in an Israeli context when frightened relatives are involved. Our instinct is that their anguish should outweigh almost every competing consideration.

If the police have information, tell them. If technology can locate someone, use it. The idea that an adult might possess something approaching a right to disappear can clash with a culture built around unusually strong bonds of family and collective responsibility.

Yet on one crucial point, I think the European instinct is correct.

An adult who is competent, safe, and acting freely does not lose her privacy because those who love her desperately want information. Even the strongest bonds do not give us an unconditional claim to another adult’s whereabouts or reasons for leaving. In this sense, the right to disappear is not the right to obstruct a lawful investigation; it is the right to go against the notion of automatic disclosure.

But privacy should not require cruelty.

Once police establish that a missing adult is alive, safe, and acting voluntarily, there is a strong case for telling loved ones precisely that, so long as doing so creates no further safety risk. Police need not reveal the person’s location or other information she wishes to keep private. The family deserves reassurance, not necessarily disclosure.

That distinction offers a way to reconcile two values that need not be absolute rivals: the understandable need to know that someone we love is safe and the individual’s claim to autonomy.

None of this means that Europeans care less about family or that Israelis care nothing about privacy. The difference emerges when legitimate values collide.

Israeli’s collective reponsability

Israel gives exceptional weight to family solidarity and collective responsibility, reinforced by a security culture in which protecting life can justify intrusions into personal autonomy. European institutions and political culture often give greater formal weight to privacy, individual choice, and restraints on state power.

This is what stayed with me as I walked through Vienna. Israelis had looked at the disappearance primarily as a practical problem: Where are they, and why have the police not found them? I began to see a harder question beneath it: How much are we entitled to know about an adult who does not want to be found?

Israelis and Europeans frequently speak of their shared democratic values. But sharing values does not mean ranking them in the same order. Both value security, privacy, family, freedom, and human dignity. Their differences emerge most clearly when those values collide.

Here, I believe the balance should be clear. The state should establish that a missing adult is safe. The family deserves to know that much.

After that, the right to disappear may indeed be a right.

Published in the Jerusalem Post

The post The right to disappear: What Israel can learn from Europe about privacy first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

AI may not change what it means to be Jewish. But it could profoundly change the institutions through which Jewish life has been transmitted from one generation to another.

At a recent Deloitte event, “The AI Bottom Line,” Ilan Birnfeld, chairman and CEO of Deloitte Israel, made an observation that stayed with me. “Artificial intelligence (AI),” he argued, “will not change us as human beings. But it will completely change our companies.”

As I listened, I wondered what would happen if we replaced “company” with “the Jewish people.” AI may not change what it means to be Jewish. But it could profoundly change the institutions through which Jewish life has been transmitted from one generation to another. And once those institutions change, can the people they sustain really remain unchanged?

Birnfeld’s point about companies is more radical than the familiar argument about efficiency. If AI allows an employee to complete in 10 minutes something that previously took three hours, the important question is not simply how much time has been saved. It is why the company should continue organizing itself around a task that once required three hours. AI therefore forces organizations to reconsider not simply how people work, but what particular jobs, hierarchies, and institutions are for.

THE JEWISH world should begin asking the same question.

How AI can impact Jewish life

Take Jewish education. For centuries, meaningful access to Jewish knowledge depended heavily on access to people. You needed a teacher to learn Hebrew, a rabbi to guide you through religious texts, a scholar to explain Jewish history. Geography mattered enormously. So did language, money, and the accident of being born into a community large enough to provide those resources.

AI is beginning to lower those barriers. A Jewish child in a small community without a Hebrew teacher can have a private AI tutor available every day. Someone who has never studied Aramaic can ask for an explanation of a passage of Talmud, compare interpretations, and then ask follow-up questions. A secular Israeli curious about Maimonides can enter that intellectual world without entering a yeshiva. Jewish texts that were once accessible mainly to specialists can increasingly be approached by almost anyone.

This does not make the teacher or rabbi obsolete. It does something more interesting: it changes what we need them for.

If information and explanation become abundant, the value of the teacher increasingly lies elsewhere: judgment, interpretation, intellectual discipline, example, and human relationship. Abundance, after all, does not guarantee reliability. The question shifts from “Who has the knowledge?” to “Whose judgment do I trust?”

The same disruption may reach one of the foundations of Jewish identity: memory.

Jewish civilization has placed memory close to the center of collective existence. “Zakhor,” remember, is not simply an instruction to preserve information. Jewish civilization repeatedly transforms memory into obligation.

Now imagine a Jewish teenager 20 years from now conversing with an AI system built around a verified archive of thousands of hours of Holocaust survivor testimony. She does not simply watch a recorded interview. She asks questions. The system answers on the basis of the words, experiences, and historical record left behind by those who are no longer alive. There is enormous educational potential here. But there must also be a clear boundary.

AI should help us interrogate testimony; it should never be permitted to manufacture testimony. The distinction is fundamental. A survivor’s recorded words belong to history. A plausible sentence generated by an algorithm but never spoken by that survivor does not. The temptation to make memory more vivid could inadvertently make it less truthful.

For the Jewish people, that danger is particularly acute. We have spent generations documenting the past precisely because historical truth matters. AI should make archives more accessible, searchable, and conversational. It should not turn the dead into fictional characters capable of saying things they never said. In the age of AI, “Zakhor” will therefore require something additional: remember honestly.

This may be where Birnfeld’s corporate analogy becomes uncomfortable.

When AI can perform functions that once justified particular jobs, companies must ask what those jobs are actually for. Jewish institutions will increasingly face the same test. If knowledge, translation, and even sophisticated interpretation become instantly available, what exactly are the institutions that once provided them for?

Consider relations between Israel and Jewish communities in Europe. Language remains one barrier separating Jewish worlds. Israelis inhabit a Hebrew political and cultural universe that many Diaspora Jews encounter only indirectly, while Jewish communities across Europe conduct debates that most Israelis rarely hear.

Increasingly seamless translation can lower that barrier dramatically. A Jew in Berlin may be able to follow an Israeli television debate naturally in German; an Israeli may listen to a Dutch Jewish communal discussion in Hebrew. “But translation solves access, not shared experience.”

An Israeli and an Italian Jew can understand every word the other says and still experience October 7, antisemitism, Gaza, religion, democracy, or Jewish security in profoundly different ways. AI can remove the linguistic wall. It cannot determine which questions Jews consider important, much less make them agree on the answers.

And then there is the institution AI may find hardest to disrupt: the Jewish community itself. A synagogue distributes knowledge, but that is not why a synagogue exists. Jewish communities teach, organize, and communicate, but those functions do not exhaust their purpose.

Their deeper purpose is belonging. An AI can explain the laws of shiva, but it cannot sit beside a mourner. It can teach the prayers, but it cannot make a minyan. It can generate a sophisticated interpretation of the weekly Torah portion, but it cannot accept responsibility for another human being. It can describe Jewish solidarity perfectly. It cannot practice it.

AND HERE the question of trust returns.

Trust is not simply deciding which source provides the most accurate answer. Jewish trust is relational. It is built by showing up, sharing obligations, arguing, remembering, and accepting responsibility for one another. That is a question of relationship, not information.

If a Jewish school understands its purpose principally as transmitting information, AI will challenge it. If a rabbi’s authority depends primarily on possessing knowledge unavailable to others, AI will challenge it. If a Jewish organization exists mainly to transmit information between distant communities, AI will challenge it too.

Perhaps that is not something to fear. Perhaps AI’s greatest contribution to Jewish life will be forcing Jewish institutions to identify what cannot be automated. And the answer may be surprisingly traditional: presence, responsibility, obligation, and belonging.

For much of Jewish history, Jewish institutions helped solve a problem of scarcity. Books and teachers were scarce. Knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic was scarce. Communication across continents was difficult. Access to Jewish knowledge depended heavily on where one lived and whom one knew.

We are moving toward the opposite world: one of extraordinary abundance. The great Jewish question of the AI age may therefore change. For generations, we asked: How do we give Jews access to Jewish knowledge?

Soon, the harder question may be: Why should they want it?

AI may make it easier than at any previous moment in history to study Judaism, encounter Jewish history, and communicate across the Jewish world. But access is not belonging, information is not memory, and intelligence is not responsibility.

Those still require other human beings. Perhaps this is the real lesson of Birnfeld’s observation. AI will force companies to reconsider the value of human contribution. It may force Jewish institutions to do something even more consequential: rediscover what Jewish community is for.

And the answer to that question, more than the technology itself, may shape the next chapter of the Jewish people.

Published in the Jerusalem Post

The post AI will not change the Jews – or will it? first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.