Fulbright and Family: Israel Lit Up Our Lives
Over a period of two years on a Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship in Israel, I befriended engineers working at local and global startups in Haifa, attended an Arab Christian wedding in Nazareth, drank wine in the Upper Galilee with an Iraqi Jew, and left the country with three young children, each of whom thought they were Jewish and Israeli. In June 2023, when I broke the news to them that we had to return to the United States, two of the three girls cried and asked why we could not stay, why they were not Jewish, and why they could not be Israeli. They loved it there as much as my wife and me.
In the weeks after October 7, it was not uncommon to hear friends comment that we were “lucky to get out of there just in time.” But the opposite was true. My wife and I desperately wanted to return to see our friends and neighbors. But until recently, I have been uncomfortably embarrassed to admit that I experienced the devastating communal trauma so many Israelis felt in the wake of those tragic events. For weeks and months, I struggled to unstick myself from the news, crawl out of bed, and figure out how to work.
But just in the past weeks, a Jewish friend expressed to me how much she appreciated my feelings and validated my experience post-October 7 as a non-Jewish, non-citizen visitor to Israel. And you know what? She is right.
Only now do I realize that I also felt Israeli while living there. Only now do I realize what my kids felt when finding out we had to return to the United States. I understood their grief of leaving friends behind. After all, I left Israel with three young children who learned Hebrew, ate sufganiyot, called our near-retired neighbors saba and savta, played Ima Shabbat in school, and sang “Sevivon, sov, sov, sov,” the dreidel song, during Hanukkah.
Hanukkah holds a special place for my family. My friend Omer once jokingly told me after our families finished a last Hanukkah song one evening, “This is what we do. We sing songs of suffering, and then we eat.” That stuck with me and was one of the first things I thought upon hearing news of October 7. His words were a foreshadowing of what was to come. But it was not without hope. Every Hanukkah, the candles of the hanukkiyyah one of my children made is a witness not of a Jewish heritage to which we have no claim, but to the enduring power of the light of Israel and the Jewish people to shine in dark times. The candles continue to burn in our home, as a lamp to our feet in our support of Israel.
We still sing every year while spinning a dreidel and lighting a candle each Hanukkah night, but only after reading a story from Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Power of Light, a treasured book that Omer mailed to me in the first weeks of our return home. He knew how much I loved it.
That’s how I left Israel. That’s how I keep it with me. I honor the traditions we learned as memories for our children to grasp tightly. The traditions are a light to my family’s steps, one always burning, even amidst immense difficulties these last years. That light gives us the moral courage to say yes to Israel. It gives us the discerning empathy to stand up for our friends.
Today, I proudly continue my support for Israel and its people as President of the Fulbright Israel Interest Group—a diverse group of Fulbright alumni working to build deeper relationships around our cultural and academic experiences in Israel. Even better than the academic programming we host are the monthly stories I hear from Fulbright scholars with experiences just like mine.
