I only recently began driving over Fountaingrove Parkway again. It’s the easiest route to get to Highway 101 from my house in the Rincon Valley neighborhood of Santa Rosa. Since the fire, I’d been avoiding it, taking other, less direct roads, trying to avert my attention. I have several friends who lived up there. Their…
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Opinion
Editorial
Six months later, community shows resilience and resolve
Six months after fire swept across the North Bay, green shoots have begun to sprout and wildflowers are blooming. Winter rains have brought healing to the…
Israel at 70
Eyewitness to Yom Kippur War, Ethiopian aliyah and more
I became interested in Israel as a teenager. Lacking any serious knowledge or Zionist education, I remember during the Six-Day War betting an Arab…
Israel at 70
Acts of nonviolence can heal the world
This past summer, in the South Hebron Hills, a girl called down to me from the gnarled branches of a tree and knocked me in the head with a ripe, fuzzy…
Israel at 70
How I met my brother
When our tour guide Gadi rolled down the window and addressed the security guard as “achi” — “my brother” — I was surprised that he just happened to have…
Israel at 70
My joy and my heartache
On a beautiful fall day in 1966, finally fulfilling a longtime dream, I took a train from Amsterdam, then a boat from Genoa, Italy, to Haifa. It was a…
Israel at 70
Yom HaZikaron: ‘A time to mourn, and a time to dance’
I lived in Israel when I was 12 to 14 years old, and one memory that stands out to me from this two-year period is Yom HaZikaron and Yom HaAtzmaut. Yom…
Israel at 70
Take it from a foreign correspondent: Israelis are anything but ordinary.
To me, Israel means Israelis. Not the politicians interviewed on CBS or NPR, but ordinary Israelis. A CNN producer (my former journalism student) once…
Israel at 70
I joined the Zionist revolution in Russia
I am a fourth-generation San Francisco Jew. In an article on the Jews of San Francisco published in Moment magazine in the 1970s, I was described as “the…