I’m about to board a plane to travel to Israel to help reinaugurate #HartmanSummer, following the 2025 cancellation due to those memorable “global force majeure” events, whose ramifications – and denouement? – we are witnessing this week. For a few weeks, I’ve been telling people that yes, we are planning on being in Israel this summer, God-willing and Trump-permitting. Like them or not, those were probably the most significant forces making it possible for us to run our programs under (hopefully) clear skies, maybe combined a bit with our unrelenting, indefensible optimism that we could plan for all-systems-go.

I realized until today, when I was finally packing – I waited as long as I could before I fully committed to the bit – that I’ve been holding my breath for a long time. I vastly prefer going to Israel than talking about it, or arguing about it, the latter of which consumes too much of my time. This commitment to get to Israel regularly, even during trying times, runs deep and long for me. It includes living in Israel as a child (so not by choice) in the early days of the first intifada, studying in Israel before college during a wave of horrific terror attacks and the assassination of a prime minister, many summers and visits during the difficult years of the second intifada, and then consistently since I started at Hartman when it has seemed that a war has happened during our summer programs more often than not. I traveled to Israel 5 times during the year that followed 10/7, including arriving there on 10/14 to see the wreckage on the ground and on people’s faces…

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