With Laura Ben-David’s new exhibit, the world comes into focus

Friendship with Laura Ben-David feels a little like stepping into one of her photographs — unfiltered, intimate, and full of unexpected light.

We’ve shared hotel rooms and highway rides singing Sheena is a Punk Rocker.

We’ve edited each other’s work on The Times of Israel Ops and Blogs.

We’ve hustled through New York on too little sleep, juggling speaking gigs and family dramas.

We’ve slipped down alleyways in the shuk long after moonrise, and climbed rooftops in the Old City before the muezzin or the birds had stirred.

We once dove into the Dead Sea in the middle of the night, salt stinging everything, stars overhead, because it felt like the only sane response to a world on fire. And yeah — there was that night at the Waldorf. Sequins, single malt, and a delicious sense of the absurd.

We also got matching nose rings.

And through it all, Laura had her camera.

She doesn’t just take photos. She listens with her lens. She notices the overlooked and the in-between. The tired eyes of a new immigrant stepping off a plane. The quiet pride of a grandmother at a Shabbat table. The soul of a street in Jerusalem, just before the morning stirs it awake.

Laura made Aliyah in 2002 and wrote about the experience in Moving Up: An Aliyah Journal. She helped shape the voice of Nefesh B’Nefesh and later worked with Shavei Israel, reconnecting hidden Jewish communities with their heritage. Her photos have appeared widely—featured in the Jewish Life Photo Bank and beyond—but her work isn’t just about image. It’s about story, connection, essence. She’s a mother of six, a grandmother, and together with her husband Ray, she’s rooted herself in Jerusalem—while somehow always remaining in motion.

What I love most about Laura’s photography is that it refuses to look away. It doesn’t clean things up or stage them. Instead, it reveals: how light hits stone, how joy shows up in unexpected places, how a land as complicated as Israel can still be utterly beautiful without being simple.

Her new collection is a window into that way of seeing.

There are places that live in our hearts long before we ever set foot upon them. For many, Israel is such a place—a land of contradictions and clarity, of memory and momentum. A place where the ancient and the modern aren’t in tension—they’re in conversation.

Laura Ben-David sees this Israel. Not just in the golden light spilling over the Judean Hills or the play of children in Jerusalem’s backstreets, but in the overlooked corners—the quiet, the complex, the very human. Her photography doesn’t freeze time; it deepens it. Her images make us slow down, look again, and feel something we didn’t expect.

In a world where Israel is often flattened into headlines, Laura’s work insists on nuance. On soul. On beauty that comes with texture.

This collection invites you to step in closer. To witness. To feel. To remember what’s worth holding onto.

I hope I see you there.

Nefesh B’Nefesh Entrance Hall

Tuesday-Thursday, March 25-27, 2025

Monday-Tuesday, March 31-April 1, 2025

17:00-21:00

10 Sderot Yitshak Rabin

Through Cinema City