January: To be a Jew and an American, to be so egregious to say: when I left the United States and came to Israel, I left one diaspora and entered another. I am a diaspora Jew, a landless, people-of-the-book Jew. Homelands make me nervous. But here I am in Israel. Looking up the Hebrew word “galut,” meaning diaspora, in an English-Hebrew dictionary, I see that the adjective “galuti” is translated as “ghetto-like.” I suppose that’s how Israelis like to remember the diaspora.

Ari stopped his speech. His voice choked over a lump in his throat. He forgot his rehearsed denunciation and instead could only think of his sister, her curly hair, her peace pin. Everyone’s shocked eyes were still on Ari but he could not say anything. She was not here. She would never be here. Not at this meeting. Not at home or at the ice cream shop with a cone of that nasty bubble gum stuff. She was really truly gone.

By Jillian Slutzker
“They think there were more than twenty killed.” She heard her uncle say to no one in particular. Leila had managed to sneak away from her cousins and was standing in the doorway of the living room watching her uncle pacing with the phone receiver dangling in his hand. He turned to his wife. “Did Yousef come back yet?”
“He isn’t here. ” She answered, holding her head in her hands. Neither of them had noticed Leila in the doorway.
“There are …

By Jillian Slutzker
Not too far from the community center Leila was seeking, nineteen-year-old Ari Saksonov sat at his desk in his home staring blankly at the calendar. It was February 25. The grief counselor his parents had forced him to talk to told Ari that he would likely be in denial for some time. The counselor had peered at Ari over his black-rimmed glasses with a look of contrived sympathy and said that it might feel to Ari like his sister had gone on vacation and would return home shortly, …

I can’t remember when I became Jewish.

It could have happened when God’s divine handiwork gave my parents their third child. It technically happened when my dear foreskin was stolen from me just eight days into my existence. It even might have occurred when I stepped up to become a man, albeit a barely pubescent man, at my Bar Mitzvah when I was 13.

Growing up, the subject of my heritage seemed taboo and shameful. Not because being Palestinian is any of these things, but because the prevalent sense in the schoolyard was to belong, not to be different. People did not understand Palestine; where is that, why have I never heard of it?