Introducing Jerusalem Journal

A new platform for insights, analysis, and conversation about Israel, the Middle East, and the Jewish world.

I remember bolting upright in bed.

It was a Saturday morning, Shabbat in Jerusalem. I had neglected to set my alarm for Simchat Torah services at my local synagogue and was enjoying a few more minutes of sleep when I was awakened by the unmistakable wail of an air raid siren.

I jumped out of bed and ran to wake up my younger sister, who was spending the holiday weekend with me and was still asleep on the pull-out sofa in the next room. We huddled in a corner of the apartment that I calculated was furthest from any windows, lest a rocket explode outside my building and send shards of glass flying our way.

Then the siren died down and the worst day of our lives began.

October 7, 2023, changed everything — about Israel, the Middle East, and the Jewish world. It plunged the country into the longest war in its history, a multifront conflagration that has mobilized an entire society and reshaped the regional landscape. It opened the floodgates to a tidal wave of antisemitism that continues to course through Jewish communities across the globe. It strained traditional alliances and forged new ones. It united Israelis and drove them further apart. It forced urgent conversations about national priorities, about morality and ethics, about core Jewish values, about the future of the Jewish state and the Jewish people. It gave young Israelis an awareness of the fragility of our national existence, driving them to come to their country’s defense, and it sparked a reawakening of identity and belonging among young Jews around the world — even as some have turned away.

It often seems as though the world has been moving faster over the past 18 months than ever before, and it can be difficult to cut through the noise.

Let’s try to make sense of it all.

Today I am launching Jerusalem Journal, a new platform for insights, analysis, and conversation about Israel, the Middle East, and the Jewish world.

Over the past year, I’ve traveled throughout Israel and across the world, meeting with decision makers, senior officials, community leaders, policy experts, and thousands of young people. Though often invited to speak, I’ve spent much of my time listening. I’ve heard novel takes on familiar challenges, innovative solutions to seemingly insoluble problems, and new approaches to identifying and seizing opportunities that could change the course of history. These ideas have shaped my own understanding of our current reality and my thinking on how we might chart a course forward.

Now I’d like to share them with you.

In the weeks and months ahead, my voice will be joined by others — some better-known, others less so — and the written content will be complemented by other forms of media. We won’t flood your inbox; you can look forward to one to two thoughtful and compelling pieces per week. And the basic content will always be free.

This platform is going live at the height of the national holiday period here in Israel, days before the country’s 77th Independence Day, at a moment that may also be termed “between the sirens.” On Thursday morning, the country came to a standstill as a nationwide air raid siren called us to remember the victims of the Holocaust on Yom HaShoah, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. Tomorrow evening, and then again on Wednesday morning, we will stand silently once again as sirens sound throughout the land in observance of Yom HaZikaron, the country’s Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terror.

In Israel’s national life, sirens play a dual, contradictory role. On days of remembrance, they call on us to stand silently and reflect, to bow our heads in memory of those who are no longer with us. At other times — as on that terrible morning, and all too often over the past year-and-a-half — they compel us to act, warning us of impending danger and driving us to seek shelter as swiftly as we can. They alternately draw us back to the past and convey the urgency of the present.

But it is in the lulls between the sirens — in those periods when a sense of normalcy can be reclaimed, when our heartbeats ease, when life starts to resemble life once again — that we can look to the future. That is where we can start writing the next chapter of our collective story, the next 77 years of our national journey.

And that is the space in which Jerusalem Journal will foster a new conversation.

Join us.

Avi Mayer
Founder
Jerusalem Journal

P.S. I value your feedback. Please share your thoughts with me via email. And if you know anyone who might be interested in Jerusalem Journal, please feel free to share this note with them and encourage them to subscribe. Thank you.