Welcome!

People - friends, Twitter followers, my husband - have been telling me to start a Substack for a while now, and I always resisted.

Who has the time? I have two kids under the age of six, a full-time job in journalism, as the Diplomatic Correspondent and Senior Contributing Editor for The Jerusalem Post, and a side gig as a speaker about Israel (message me if you’re interested). Plus, though I have a specific beat, JPost gives me a lot of freedom to write what I want, so it’s not that often that there’s something I’m itching to say that I can’t in JPost.

So, what changed my mind?

In a month or so, I’m going to have a baby (tfu tfu) and take significant time off from work. In Israel, the government provides four months of paid maternity leave, and I’m open to taking more than that, depending on how the baby is doing and what childcare options I find.

That being said…I have found maternity leave to be pretty mind-numbing. I’m not going to be fake and say it’s a magical time. Of course, I loved my kids from the moment they were born. I have succumbed to the same hormones as any other mother and literally cried in the early months over how much I love this little person who came out of me. But overall, the feed-diaper-soothe-nap cycle with a baby who, for most of those months, is too small to really respond is not very stimulating and I get bored.

That’s where this Substack comes in. I hope to use it to scratch my writing itch while I’m legally not allowed to write for The Jerusalem Post.

I don’t stop following the news just because I had a baby. I genuinely like my job and find the topic I cover interesting, as well as others that show up in my tweets - my former area of news coverage, Israeli domestic politics, plus religion and state issues in Israel, the Jewish Diaspora, antisemitism, etc.

I might also write about some of the topics that I find interesting but don’t have an outlet for these days, like motherhood, pop culture, maybe even share a recipe or two. We’ll see how the muse strikes.

In the meantime, I’m hoping for an easy delivery and recovery and a healthy baby. See you on the other side!