Israel in Depth
April 23, 2026 – ז׳ אִיָּיר תשפ”ו
In her recently released memoir, When We See You Again, published this week between Yom HaZikaron and Yom HaAtzmaut, Rachel Goldberg-Polin offers a searing and intimate account of the two years since October 7, 2023. On that day, her son Hersh was taken captive by Hamas terrorists from a migunit—a roadside bomb shelter—after a grenade blast took his forearm as he and others (including his best friend Aner Shapiro) tried to survive as they fled the attack on the Nova music festival.
Rachel has become a central voice in North American Jewish life, not because she sought it, but because she refused to remain silent. Her advocacy has never been only about her son, but about all the hostages, and about the kind of moral clarity and human urgency this moment demands.
I’ll have the privilege of being in conversation with her as part of our upcoming Israel in Depth afternoon of learning on May 17th. She will share her story, but also her perspective on Israeli society, education, and how we begin to make sense of a world that looks fundamentally different after October 7.
That last piece—the struggle to make sense of it all is where so many of us are feeling stuck.
Too often, our conversations about Israel have been flattened into slogans and soundbites. That’s not just an Israel problem—it’s a broader cultural one. We default to summaries, to “quick takes,” to content that can be consumed in the time it takes to scroll a reel. “TLDR” (“Too Long, Didn’t Read”) has become a tiresome preface to posts and pieces, while the speedy, snappy style of Instagram and Snapchat is shaping the way information is shared.
The impact is real. Narratives get narrowed. Complexity gets stripped away. Bullet points replace books. And instead of a deeper understanding, we’re left trying to counter one oversimplification with another.
I saw it firsthand the other night when my 10th-grade daughter showed me an Instagram post from a classmate that wildly distorted an Israeli policy. It wasn’t malicious—it was just… incomplete. Flattened. Reduced to something easy to share, but hard to recognize as truth.
And that’s exactly why this matters so much for congregational leaders and for parents.
Our teens and young adults are forming their views of Israel in this ecosystem—through fragments, feeds, and voices that are often loud but not always informed. If we’re not helping them build the skills to ask better questions, to seek out complexity and nuance, and to sit with competing narratives, then we shouldn’t be surprised when their understanding is shallow—or when they disengage altogether.
For rabbis, educators, and lay leaders, anyone interested in engaging and struggling with Israel, the challenge is just as urgent. We are being called upon to teach, guide, and hold space for conversations that are more emotionally charged and politically fraught than they’ve been in years. And many are doing so without the tools, knowledge, language, and confidence to navigate through the complexities that characterize modern Israel.
Many of us in this field are trying to push back against that trend of oversimplification —not by shouting louder, but by going deeper and broader.
That’s part of what led Orly Erez Likhovski and me to launch the Pluralist Podcast, and it’s at the heart of what we’re trying to build with Israel in Depth. The goal isn’t to provide easy answers. It’s to create space for serious learning, for layered conversation, and for grappling with real questions as fully as possible.
The program brings together a range of voices—Israeli leaders, educators, and Reform Movement practitioners—for an afternoon that includes not only plenary conversation but also hands-on workshops. Sessions will explore Israel education, Israeli-Palestinian relationships, Reform congregational partnerships, advocacy and organizing, and the evolving conversation about Zionism and Jewish Peoplehood.
It’s also about practice. How do we actually talk about Israel in our communities right now? How do we teach it? How do we lead conversations that don’t fall apart—or shut down—or alienate wide swaths of our community when things get hard, confusing, and emotionally laden?
One afternoon isn’t going to solve all of that. But it can be a meaningful start.
As we come away from marking Israel’s independence and bear the weight of Yom HaZikaron, I want to challenge us to resist the pull toward simplicity, to push past the headlines and hashtags, and sit a little longer with the discomfort, questions, and the contradictions, because if we want the next generation to have a deeper, more meaningful relationship with Israel, we have to model what that looks like.
That begins by going deeper ourselves.
Shabbat Shalom!