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The post Podcast: The United States Celebrates 250 Years of Independence first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

For nearly three years, I have lived in a state of suspended breath. My son has spent the last three months in southern Lebanon, defending our northern borders from Hezbollah. Last Shabbat, one of my students died of his wounds; a drone fragment took his life.

These are not statistics to me. They are the people I love, the people I teach, and the people whose absence leaves a void that can never be filled.

I am one mother and one educator among many who have been carrying the weight of this war on our shoulders. We – the public that serves in the military, drives the economy, and sustains our communities – know that the future of Israel rests on shared commitment. We are a shrinking share of the public, yet we continue to give until we have nothing left to give.

When this war began, there was a brief, powerful moment of unity. We believed that the existential threat would finally force a consensus: that every capable citizen must stand up and contribute to the defense of the state.

But as the war dragged on, it became agonizingly clear that too much of the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) political leadership has fought to preserve a reality separate from the one borne by the families who serve. Their political priority has not been the manpower crisis at the borders, but the preservation of an exemption system that allows one community to remain detached from the most fundamental civic and military duties, while still benefiting from public funding and state support.

Now, with the advancement of Basic Law: Torah Study, the government is attempting to give constitutional force to this detachment. The proposal would elevate Torah study as a form of national service, using lofty, sacred language to justify an exemption that feels like a slap in the face to those of us who bury our dead. This is not an argument against Torah study, nor against the haredi public. It is an argument against a political arrangement that uses Torah to absolve one part of Israeli society from obligations borne, in blood, by another.

As someone who has dedicated my life to the study and teaching of Torah, Jewish philosophy, and Zionist thought, I reject this legislation not despite my love of Torah but because of it. I teach students, secular and religious, men and women, that Torah study is meant to be a light that informs our actions in the world, not a shield to hide behind. I have never taught that Torah and civic duty are in conflict. They are meant to be the twin pillars of a functioning Jewish society.

Our Sages taught that derech eretz (social and ethical conduct) precedes the Torah. Our Sages warn us: “If there is no Torah, there is no derech eretz; and if there is no derech eretz, there is no Torah” (Ethics of the Fathers 3:17).

These are not two separate domains that can be uncoupled at the convenience of politicians. They are a single moral ecosystem. By pushing this law, the Knesset risks severing the two. It transforms the Torah into an empty vessel, a political tool used to evade the most basic obligation of a citizen: to share the burden of survival. How can Zionist parties, who ask our children to risk their lives on the front lines, support a law that so blatantly disregards the sacrifice of the serving public?

The advancement of this law is not a religious triumph. It is a profound moral abdication. By turning Torah learning into a legal exemption for civic evasion, our leaders are committing a violent divorce between the holiness of our tradition and the fundamental duty of derech eretz. They are signaling that, for some, the preservation of a separate civic arrangement outweighs shared responsibility for the survival of the Jewish state. For those of us on the front lines, burying our students and waiting for our children’s return, the message is clear: While we fight to ensure the state of Israel has a future, our government is dismantling the shared covenant that makes that future worth fighting for.

We are not only losing our youth to the battlefield. We are losing our moral language to a politics that dares to call exemption “service.”

Published in the Jerusalem Post

The post Derech eretz lost – Why the proposed Basic Law betrays our sacred covenant first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,” is an important contribution to the growing global debate about AI. By placing artificial intelligence in continuity with “Rerum Novarum,” the landmark 1891 encyclical that addressed the social consequences of industrialization, the Pope argues that AI is the defining technological challenge of our age. Like the factory system in the 19th century, AI is transforming work, education, knowledge and human relationships.

The Vatican’s tone is cautious. It warns that AI can concentrate power, weaken human responsibility and reduce people to data points and economic functions. These concerns deserve serious attention. AI is not morally neutral, and its impact will depend on the values of those who design, regulate and use it.

Yet for Jews, in Israel and across the Diaspora, the conversation should not stop with warnings. Another urgent question is what good AI can do for Judaism, Jewish learning, and Jewish peoplehood. At a moment when so much attention is devoted to apocalyptic predictions and distant scenarios, Jews should also ask how this technology might serve the texts, relationships and responsibilities that have long sustained Jewish life.

Judaism has long been known as the tradition of the “People of the Book.” The study of texts is not a peripheral activity in Jewish life; it is one of its defining features. From the Bible and Talmud to medieval commentaries, responsa literature, philosophy and modern scholarship, Jewish identity has been shaped through reading, interpretation, debate and transmission. Learning is not simply an intellectual pursuit but a religious and cultural obligation, central to the formation of the Jewish person.

As Prof. Moshe Koppel has noted, AI can help scan and digitize old books, correct textual errors, identify citations, expand abbreviations, add punctuation and uncover connections across thousands of volumes of Jewish literature. Much of this work is already being pioneered through Dicta, the nonprofit research lab he founded, which develops digital tools for studying rabbinic texts. Tasks that once required years of specialized expertise may increasingly become available to students, educators and interested readers around the world.

The implications are significant. A student with a limited background could navigate complex rabbinic texts with greater confidence. Researchers could trace ideas across centuries of Jewish writing in seconds rather than months. Teachers could create customized educational materials adapted to different ages, languages and levels of knowledge. A student in Buenos Aires might read a Hebrew source sheet with explanations in Spanish; a rabbi in a small European community might prepare a class drawing on responsa literature that was previously difficult to access. AI has the potential not merely to preserve Jewish learning but to broaden access to it.

This is particularly important at a time when many Jews feel distant from traditional texts. AI may lower barriers that have long discouraged engagement. It can help translate difficult Hebrew and Aramaic passages, explain references and guide readers through unfamiliar intellectual terrain. Used wisely, it could bring more people into the world of Torah study. The goal should not be to make Torah study effortless. It should be to make the first steps less forbidding while preserving the discipline, patience and argument that meaningful Jewish learning requires.

AI also presents opportunities for strengthening Jewish peoplehood. Advances in translation technology may dramatically reduce barriers between Hebrew-speaking Israelis, English-speaking North Americans, European Jews, Latin American communities and others. AI could make Israeli scholarship, Hebrew-language educational resources and contemporary debates far more accessible to Jews around the world, while helping Israelis engage more deeply with the ideas and experiences of Diaspora communities. These tools could strengthen the sense that Jews everywhere are participating in a shared conversation despite differences of language and geography.

None of this means that Judaism should embrace AI uncritically. Translation can carry words across borders without necessarily carrying context, trust or the emotional weight that different Jewish communities bring to the same debate. In education, AI may encourage intellectual shortcuts, weaken the habits of close reading and sustained argument and tempt students to substitute generated answers for genuine learning. In Jewish study especially, there is a risk that the struggle with the ancient text – the very process through which understanding is formed – will be replaced by instant summaries and simplified conclusions.

Likewise, while AI can help connect Israel and the Diaspora, it can also make real connection harder to attain if technological mediation replaces personal encounter. Digital tools can translate texts, summarize debates and facilitate communication across distance, but they cannot substitute for the trust built through face-to-face conversation, shared study, visits, hospitality and sustained relationship.

The Vatican has offered an important warning about what AI may mean for humanity as a whole. Jews should take those concerns seriously. But our task is also more particular. A Jewish response to AI should begin neither with panic nor with technological enthusiasm, but with the question of whether this tool can help human beings become more responsible, more learned and more bound to one another.

Artificial intelligence may be the defining technology of our generation. The challenge is not only to prevent its harms. It is also to imagine what goods it should serve. Used wisely, AI could deepen Torah study, open inherited texts to new readers, bridge Hebrew and Diaspora conversations, and give educators new ways to serve their communities. But it will do so only if we remember that technology can assist learning, not replace it.

This is why the Jewish conversation about AI cannot remain abstract. Jewish communal institutions, universities, rabbinical schools, educational networks, philanthropies and research centers should begin convening this conversation now. We need working groups that bring together rabbis, educators, technologists, ethicists, scholars of Jewish thought and communal leaders to ask how AI should be used in schools, synagogues, yeshivot, Hillels, JCCs and Jewish learning platforms.

Encouragingly, some of this work is already underway. The Jewish People Policy Institute, for example, is developing a book project on the AI and broader technological revolution and the future of the Jewish people, bringing together scholars from different countries and disciplines to reflect on how emerging technologies may reshape Jewish education, identity, peoplehood, religious life and communal institutions. Just as importantly, such work asks how Jewish thought, values and practices might contribute to a more constructive understanding of the technological revolution itself.

That is the kind of effort we need more of. The question is not whether Jewish communities will use AI; they already are. The question is whether we will adopt these tools passively, or shape them deliberately according to Jewish values, Jewish learning and Jewish responsibility.

Published in the Jewish Journal

The post What Can AI Do for Us? first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

Last week, we celebrated Shavuot, the festival commemorating the giving of the Torah. The Sages called it the “elixir of life.”

But an honest assessment of the Israeli reality shows that it is becoming, in some hands, an elixir of violence and death, of exploiting others and shirking responsibility. Yeshiva heads and TikTok rabbis are leading large groups of believers down a path that heads in the opposite direction from the Torah path.

The festival of Shavuot, and these days in particular, are an opportunity to recalibrate our moral compass and steer those who seek to receive the Torah toward better places – out of responsibility for a country whose Jewish identity and values should be a moral beacon to the world. The data increasingly shows that young Israelis, and Israelis in general, want more Judaism. The Jewish People Policy Institute’s Israeli Society Index, for example, found that 35% of young people say their belief in God has strengthened because of the war; 33% report observing more Jewish practices; 38% pray more; and 27% read the Bible more.

Among traditional and religious young people, the numbers are even higher. These findings join a long line of social and demographic indicators. Israel was, and remains, a Western and secular state. However, the religious turn among many Israelis is felt everywhere: Jewish-traditional symbols, rituals, and language are becoming a more natural and accepted part of the identity of many Israelis. But what kind of Judaism do these “strengthening” secular and traditional Israelis consume? A scroll through the “Judaism feed” of Israeli TikTok yields depressing conclusions. The language of many of the rabbinic “preachers,” who command large audiences of believer-followers and rack up millions of views, is often violent and crude.

Alongside the glorification of mitzvah observance, many of these videos negate the other – the secular Jew, and certainly the non-Jew – and, here and there, implicit calls for violence against anyone who does not fall into line with this religious “theology.” The most extreme result, but one that lays bare the distortion of Jewish values, is the horrific footage from the Independence Day murder scene of Yemanu Binyamin Zelka, the 21-year-old Ethiopian Israeli. Videos from outside the pizza shop, where Zelka worked, show a pack of bloodthirsty youths, tzitzit fluttering from beneath their shirts, beating Zelka and ultimately murdering him in cold blood.

Another grave result – also a growing phenomenon – is violent attacks on businesses that operate on Shabbat. Jewish terrorists in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) pose a different kind of challenge in the name of Torah. The images are familiar and harsh: hilltop youths with oversized kippot and wild sidelocks (peyot) lynching Palestinians or committing “price-tag” attacks in their villages, leaving trails of smoke and destruction behind them.

Here, too, a dangerous brew of false doctrine and racist nationalism – concocted by the young but nourished by their rabbis – leads to disastrous outcomes far removed from the Torah of Sinai, its commandments, and any semblance of Jewish values. And finally, there is the distorted Torah of many haredim (ultra-Orthodox): a Torah whose spokesmen are “the great sages of the generation,” but which should make any Jewish heart shudder. In this Torah, the commandment “Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor” has been erased, allowing many to carry on with their lives while their non-haredi brethren buckle under the burden of war and sacrifice, defending them.

That directs their young people, and their vast broader community, to disavow any responsibility for the whole of Israeli society and any share in carrying its burden. In the name of heaven, it often teaches them to treat the State of Israel like a feudal lord whom one may, and even must, cheat and steal from. The Torah of Sinai and the Jewish values it espouses are the very heart of our national heritage. The Torah we received at Sinai has 70 faces. The task of every generation is to interpret it and adapt it to its time and place. Our generation has been given a historic mission and responsibility.

Judaism the moral foundation for Israel

Judaism, expressed also through the Torah, is no longer the private affair of the believer or of the community in the ghetto. It is the central moral foundation for renewed Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel. Therefore, we are obliged to reveal its luminous and ethical face: the face grounded in the commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself” – even when the other does not share our values or belong to our people. We must not turn it into an elixir of death.

Published in the Jerusalem Post

The post Israeli society must reclaim the Torah’s moral core first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

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The post Tamar Ish Shalom in conversation with Shmuel Rosner first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

Abe Foxman, a legendary Jewish leader, and the head of the Anti-Defamation League from 1987 to 2015, passed a few days ago, aged 86. It’s been a while since we last spoke, but speaking with him had always been one of the more enjoyable perks for a person writing about U.S. Jewish life. In the introduction to the book about the U.S. community I wrote about a decade and a half ago, a little story about Foxman appeared, which I thought was appropriate as a farewell to this man and to an era. Reading through it reveals just a little of what made Foxman endearing in many ways, and it also reveals, by being so offhand, almost naïve, how much America changed in such a short time.

So here is one little story, about antisemitism, basketball, humor and Foxman. RIP.

American and Israeli basketball fans with long memories will recognize the name Michael Ray Richardson, a player who was linked to the Israeli team Hapoel Ramat Gan 15 years ago after being banished from the NBA due to drug use. Richardson, who died about a year ago, had a long history of brief scandals; in 2007, another was added to the list when he was fired from coaching the “Albany Patroons.” One of the reasons: antisemitic remarks.

This was an incident that taught me a lesson about the state of American Jewry far more than it taught me about Richardson, who never quite excelled at choosing his words. “I’ve got big-time lawyers. I’ve got big-time Jew lawyers,” he said in response to a question regarding his contract renewal. When told that some might be offended by his words, he responded: “Are you kidding me? They’ve got the best security system in the world. Have you ever been to the airport in Tel Aviv? They’re real crafty. Listen, they are hated all over the world, so they have to be crafty.” He said about us – Jews – that we’ve got a lot of power in the world, “you know what I mean?” He said “I think that’s great.” He didn’t think there’s anything wrong with that. If you look at professional sports, he said, Jews run it. If you look at most successful companies and such, most businesses, Jews run them.

In America, compliments must be given with caution. Richardson ultimately just wanted to say something nice about Jews. That didn’t prevent his suspension, nor did it stop the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) from complaining about the “pain his words caused to many people” (to be precise: an anti-gay remark was also among the reasons for his dismissal for the Patroons). In principle, the claim made by the head of the ADL, Abraham Foxman, was correct: Richardson’s description of Jews bore too much resemblance to antisemitic stereotypes.

However, as author Ze’ev Chafets noted in an op-ed published in The Los Angeles Times: “Jews, as a people, are indeed smart. And they are proud of it, too.” Indeed, around the same time, a long-form article by Charles Murray appeared in the Jewish-American magazine Commentary. Murray – one of the controversial authors of “The Bell Curve,” which caused an uproar by claiming (and this would be a highly simplistic description) that Black Americans were less intelligent than Whites and Asians – argued that the roots of “Jewish genius” lie in processes that began even before the Jews went into exile. No one accused him of antisemitism. It was a sensitive and yet an interesting article.

Reading it reaffirmed the need for a redefined, updated definition of the verbal “danger zone”: in the 21st century, given the influence and visibility of Jews in America, one shouldn’t jump at every use of a stereotype as if it were a racist event deserving of condemnation. Not every generalization justifies punishment.

The Richardson case was a minor event, worth lingering over because it masked a persistent fear of majority prejudice. It served as a reminder that this large, powerful community – the U.S. Jewish community – possesses a minority consciousness that seemingly cannot disappear. But as is the way with fears, they sometimes paralyze – paralyzing judgment, clarity of thought and the ability to put events into proper perspective.

After Richardson was suspended, I wrote in the newspaper that “merciful Jews” – another controversial generalization about our people – should call for his reinstatement. For the cancellation of Richardson’s suspension. David Stern, the commissioner of the NBA and one of the Jews who “runs professional sports,” came to Richardson’s defense and stated that he “is not an antisemite.” Abe Foxman, who initially welcomed the suspension, admitted to me in a conversation that “perhaps it really is too harsh a punishment.” He agreed that we must be careful lest, on the rocky road to eliminating antisemitism, Jews lose another beloved stereotype: that they have an excellent sense of humor.

Published in Jewish Journal

The post Remembering the Inimitable Abe Foxman first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

The post Christianity Under Pressure? Israel’s Interfaith Crisis first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

In Israel today, educators are grieving students. Yet we do not have the language to describe what that grief means. After every round of war, we count the fallen. We speak of families, of parents, of siblings—and rightly so.

Standing in the background, almost without words, are hundreds of teachers, mentors and educators. People who loved, guided and helped shape the lives that were lost. Are they bereaved? In a documentary by Noam Damsky, Rabbi Yaakov Medan resists this term. The language of bereavement, he says, belongs to parents. When educators use the word, they risk taking something that does not belong to them.

There is moral clarity in this refusal. And yet, it leaves a gap, because educators do experience a profound sense of loss, one that remains unnamed and is therefore insufficiently understood. I am a teacher who has lost students in this war: Ilay Graphinkel, Yuval Shoham, Nevo Fisher and Shahar Buzaglo. Their deaths have forced me to confront not just grief, but the meaning of education itself.

What, after all, is a teacher’s role in a society where students are also soldiers? What does it mean to educate toward a future that some of your students will not live to see? At its core, education rests on three commitments: to human beings, to knowledge and to a vision of the future.

First, there is a commitment to the student as a person. Teaching begins with attention, with care, with a willingness to enter into a meaningful relationship with someone in the midst of becoming. This is not parental love, but it is real and formative. It is what allows a teacher to see not only who a student is, but who they might become.

Second, there is a commitment to knowledge. Teaching is driven by the belief that ideas matter, that wisdom, culture and intellectual traditions should not remain private possessions; they are meant to be shared and transmitted. Each educator is a link in a chain, passing something forward. Third, there is a commitment to the future. Education is geared to what does not yet exist. It is grounded in the belief that the world can be better, and that the next generation will help bring that future into being.

These three commitments: relationship, knowledge, and future, are what give education its meaning. War fractures each of them. When a teacher loses a student, the natural order is reversed, and the world is shaken. The relationship is cut short. The act of teaching, once oriented toward growth and continuity, is interrupted. And the eye to the future, which gave meaning to the entire endeavor, is suddenly diminished.

This is why the loss of students is not only personal. It is structural. It touches the very foundations of what education is. In Israel, this reality is not theoretical. It is lived. Teachers are asked, implicitly, to prepare young people for a future that includes the possibility of war, and at times, the reality of death. At the same time, they are asked to cultivate hope, moral responsibility and a vision of life worth living.

This is not a paradox that can be resolved. It is a tension that must be carried. How do educators continue? There is no single answer. But acknowledging the nature of this loss is a necessary beginning.

First, we must recognize that the relationship between teacher and student matters in ways that extend beyond the classroom. It shapes identity, values and choices. When a student is lost, something real is lost for the educator as well. Next, we must reaffirm the role of knowledge and learning, not as an escape from reality, but as a framework that gives it meaning. Education connects individuals to something larger than themselves: tradition, wisdom, a shared human story. Finally, we must hold on to the future, even when it is wounded. The students we have lost were part of the future we believed in. Their absence changes that future. But it does not eliminate the responsibility to continue working toward it.

In a society shaped by conflict, education cannot remain untouched by loss.

But it mustn’t surrender to it. To teach, even now, is to insist, quietly but firmly, that the future still matters.

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The post What does it mean for a teacher to lose a student? first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

As fragile ceasefires strain on the Iran, Gaza and Lebanon fronts, Israel remains in a state its citizens know all too well: not quite at war, not quite at peace, suspended between possible escalation and temporary stability. And yet, in the midst of this uncertainty, many Israelis are already looking ahead to the next Eurovision Song Contest. For a few hours, it offers something rare: the feeling of normal life restored. Not strategy or survival—just songs, votes and the simple hope of winning.

From the outside, especially across much of Europe, Israelis are often portrayed as a people shaped by conflict, perhaps even suited to it. The assumption runs deep: that years of confrontation have made war part of Israeli identity, that resilience has curdled into appetite.

That reading is wrong.

After more than two years of war, Israelis are not rallying around conflict. The word “ceasefire” has taken on an ironic edge, a technical term that rarely translates into actual quiet. This is not abstract geopolitics. In northern Israel, sirens interrupt the night. Work schedules dissolve into reserve duty. Parents instinctively calculate the distance from the classroom to the nearest shelter. The uncertainty is structural, woven into the week even when violence is not.

Beneath the headlines, a quieter truth accumulates: Israelis are not longing for escalation; they are longing for boredom. Ask ordinary people what they want right now, and the answers are strikingly mundane. A full night of sleep. A workweek that unfolds as planned. Children at school without the background hum of risk assessment. Even traffic has acquired a strange emotional value: gridlock means that the city is functioning and nobody is running for cover.

This is not a society that celebrates war. It is a society that endures it while fighting to preserve the texture of ordinary life.

The gap between this reality and the European perception reflects a deeper disagreement about security itself. Israelis evaluate threats by proximity and consequence. The actors involved are not distant abstractions, and their capabilities are not theoretical. Many Israelis look at Europe and see a continent that underestimates these dangers and places too much faith in diplomacy alone. The critique can turn sharp. Some Israelis view Europe as politically naive, overly confident in institutional solutions and insufficiently attentive to long-term risk. They also point to what they see as contradictions: a continent that struggles with antisemitism in certain quarters while wrestling, uneasily, with tensions around Islam and immigration.

Yet this criticism coexists with something European observers rarely account for: a powerful and genuine affinity for Europe. Israelis travel there in large numbers. They follow its culture, music and sports with real devotion. European soccer clubs are household names from Haifa to Beersheva. And then there is Eurovision. Eurovision in Israel is not background noise. It is a national event, something close to a civic ritual. Victories are commemorated. Losses are dissected. The contest offers what the news cycle seldom does: a sense of uncomplicated participation in European life, where the rules are clear, the outcome is finite, and the stakes are not entangled with survival.

Israel has won Eurovision four times. Each victory landed as more than a musical achievement. It was recognition. It was the continent’s viewers and juries saying, however briefly and however improbably, you are one of us.

That hunger to compete, to be seen through creativity rather than conflict, to stand on a European stage for reasons that have nothing to do with war, speaks to something the security discourse consistently obscures. Israelis do not want to be defined by their enemies. They want to be known for something else entirely. In this sense, Eurovision, which begins this week, is not an escape from Israeli reality. It is a statement about what that reality should look like.

This dual relationship with Europe—admiration and frustration, connection and criticism, the feeling of being simultaneously misjudged and drawn in—is central to understanding Israeli society. Israelis can question European foreign policy in the morning and spend the evening arguing about whether the Finnish entry deserved more points.

These things are not contradictory. They reflect the same impulse: the desire to belong to a shared world and the frustration of feeling misread within it.

Political differences sharpen this divide. While much of Europe views U.S. President Donald Trump with skepticism, many Israelis judge him through a different lens shaped by regional security. The result can feel like parallel conversations about the same events. Yet beneath all of it lies a shared foundation. Like Europeans, Israelis have built lives around routine. They work, raise families, follow sports, plan vacations and argue about things that do not involve survival.

Israel has won Eurovision four times. Each victory landed as more than a musical achievement. It was recognition. It was the continent’s viewers and juries saying, however briefly and however improbably, you are one of us. That hunger to compete, to be seen through creativity rather than conflict, to stand on a European stage for reasons that have nothing to do with war, speaks to something the security discourse consistently obscures. Israelis do not want to be defined by their enemies. They want to be known for something else entirely.

In this sense, Eurovision, which begins this week, is not an escape from Israeli reality. It is a statement about what that reality should look like.

This dual relationship with Europe—admiration and frustration, connection and criticism, the feeling of being simultaneously misjudged and drawn in—is central to understanding Israeli society. Israelis can question European foreign policy in the morning and spend the evening arguing about whether the Finnish entry deserved more points. These things are not contradictory. They reflect the same impulse: the desire to belong to a shared world and the frustration of feeling misread within it.

Political differences sharpen this divide. While much of Europe views U.S. President Donald Trump with skepticism, many Israelis judge him through a different lens shaped by regional security. The result can feel like parallel conversations about the same events. Yet beneath all of it lies a shared foundation. Like Europeans, Israelis have built lives around routine. They work, raise families, follow sports, plan vacations and argue about things that do not involve survival.

War is not an identity. It is an interruption.

The longer this suspended condition persists, the more the fatigue shows. Not dramatic, not declarative, but steady and accumulating. It appears in conversations about sleep, in the relief when a night passes without sirens and alarms, in the shrinking capacity to plan beyond the near future.

Given the choice, Israelis would not choose war. They would choose to gather around a television, argue about songs and hope that when the votes are counted, Israel’s name sits at the top of the scoreboard.

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The post Israelis don’t want war; they want to win Eurovision first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.