How to land your dream job in Israel: A guide

What exactly is professional networking, really?

In America, I always imagined it involved LinkedIn. Maybe a blazer. Certainly some degree of intentionality. You go to a conference, exchange business cards, send follow-up emails nobody reads, and slowly construct a guaranteed career through degrees, internships, credentials, and the kind of carefully curated professional relationships that are fairly transactional even when everyone is pretending otherwise.

In Israel, apparently, networking means accidentally changing the trajectory of your professional life while slightly tipsy at the Jerusalem Wine Festival.

A few weeks back, my husband and I went to the festival at The First Station, and I cannot recommend it enough. There was good wine, excellent wine, and wine I pretended to understand but mostly selected based on whether the label looked expensive. Little stands with kosher cheese and fancy chocolate. Every variety of person Jerusalem has to offer wandering around holding tasting glasses with the studied gravitas of serious connoisseurs. We left with three bottles, one of which is technically for my father, though I strongly suspect it will never reach him (I mostly needed to invent a responsible adult recipient to justify the price to myself).

But beyond being a genuinely wonderful evening (you even got to keep the tasting glasses, how exciting!), the festival became one of those quintessentially Israeli experiences where social, professional, and personal life collapse into each other in a way that would feel wildly inappropriate anywhere else, but which I am slowly learning to embrace.

At some point during the evening I ended up in conversation with a middle-aged man who had recently made aliyah. This is an extremely normal thing to happen in Israel. Israelis speak to strangers the way Americans speak to distant cousins they’ve been seated next to at a wedding: Comfortably, open as family, and with no discernible awareness of boundaries or privacy. 

Within twenty minutes, the conversation had expanded to cover aliyah, journalism, law, Jerusalem neighborhoods, professional opportunities, and several mutual acquaintances neither of us knew we shared. By the end of the night I had an invitation to Shabbat dinner, plans for a future wine night, and he had forwarded my contact information to a friend who wanted to hear about my experience as an olah for a possible interview or podcast.

This, I am increasingly convinced, is how professional advancement works in Israel. Not resumes. Not carefully optimized LinkedIn profiles or painstaking career ladders. Just aggressive social improv, sustained eye contact, and an apparently unlimited willingness to discuss your entire life with a total stranger.

The whole episode has stayed with me because it crystallized something I still find difficult to explain to Americans.

In the Modern Orthodox world I grew up in, there is a track. A very legible one. Good grades, the right college, one of approximately four acceptable majors, and then a steady, respectable career culminating in a nice house with a kitchen island. The path may be stressful, but it is at least navigable. It has very readable signage instructing you on what the next step is.

Israel feels almost defiantly non-linear by comparison. Degrees matter less than I expected. Titles matter less too. Nobody seems particularly interested in what your resume says you should be doing. Professional life here often resembles assembling a jigsaw puzzle of part-time jobs, army networks, side projects, freelance work, WhatsApp groups (how I got my current job, actually), and sheer accidental momentum.

People advance because someone knows someone, because they’re capable, because they showed up with initiative, or because they happened to be standing near the right person at a wine festival holding a giant cheese plate.

I’m still not entirely sure this system produces better outcomes. It’s chaotic. It can feel precarious in ways that make my very American nervous system flicker with anxiety. There is real comfort in structure, and sometimes I miss the clarity of a path that at least tells you where it’s going (even if you’re not yet sure you want to go there).

But there’s something great about living in a society less interested in your credentials than in whether you can actually do something. I don’t feel professionally calcified here the way I suspect I might already feel in America. I am adaptable. And the longer I’m here, the more I find I trust my own abilities, precisely because I’ve ended up where I am less through formal pedigree and more through capability, resourcefulness, and the generosity and kindness of connections made in improbable places.

I genuinely feel like I could wake up tomorrow and decide to become a jeweler instead of a journalist, and while it would be a non-sequitur of some magnitude, after a quick double-take, people would mostly react by saying: “Oh nice, my uncle knows someone in diamond dealing, I’ll connect you.”

Very few would think it impossible. And increasingly, neither would I.

Which is either personal growth or a side effect of my wine festival purchases. Possibly both.