have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.” To me, that is what it means to be Jewish. It means to be a fellow traveler.
My dad has never been to Israel. When I ask him about it, he is evasive. He was born in 1947. He is older than the Jewish state. His sister, though, is deeply connected to Israel. She worked as the director of the Jewish Community Center in Washington DC, and while my dad lived in a small upstate New York town where you couldn’t get a decent bagel, she lived at the center of American Jewish life. Her daughter, my cousin, was born Johanna, but moved to Israel when she was in high school, and renamed herself in Hebrew, Yonina. She claimed Israeli citizenship, served in the IDF, married an Israeli. I wonder often about how my dad’s experience diverged from his sister’s—they had the same parents, attended the same reform temple, grew up in a similar time. I traveled to Israel in 2010, after my sophomore year of college. My roommate, her boyfriend, and our friend signed up together for Taglit, or Birthright—an organization that sponsors free trips to Israel for Americans with Jewish heritage. We spent two weeks on a guided bus tour, and two more on our own. I remember breakfast at the Kibbutz, feta, boiled eggs, yogurt, olives. I remember limestone hikes (slippery like soap) and
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