Sarah Tuttle-Singer

Calev Ben-Dor and I have been friends and colleagues for years. 15 months after October 7, we traveled south together, through the communities along the Gaza border devastated in the attacks. We walked through places where the physical scars were still everywhere. We saw the memorials and monuments. I could still smell the ashes. Today, October 4, 2026, we met again. This time, it was to prepare for a conversation we’ll have in just a few days, on October 7 itself — three years to the day since everything changed. Calev has written a book, After the Dust and Ashes: October 7, the Book of Job, and Journeys of Grief and Hope, and on October 7 he’ll launch it at the Begin Center in Jerusalem. It is a book about grief, but also about what comes after grief — if anything can be said to come “after.” It reaches back to the Book of Job while looking closely at the people living through this particular moment in Israeli history: people searching for meaning, wrestling with faith, raising children, mourning the dead, waiting for the living, and somehow continuing with ordinary life. And maybe that last part is what struck me most as Calev and I talked today. Because while adults have spent three years trying to understand #October7, children have simply been growing up inside it. Calev writes about watching that happen in his own family. As his daughter Hadas learned to read, some of the first words she began sounding out in the world around her were the words printed across hostage posters: “B-R-ing. Them. Home.” And from there came the questions that no parent should have to answer.

Efrat Blum knew she wanted to become a doctor after watching Alan Alda play Hawkeye Pierce on M*A*S*H. There was something about the idea of medicine that captured her early: that she could save lives, certainly, but also offer comfort when people were frightened and hurting. So she dedicated herself to her studies, eventually beginning her internship at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem just before the Second Intifada. The violence in Jerusalem was beginning to intensify. Perhaps, she says, it had always been there beneath the surface, even during the quieter years. And then came a day she will never forget: There had been a terror attack. The terrorist survived, but was horrifically wounded, losing limbs in the explosion. An Israeli Jewish man caught in the attack was also gravely injured. Both were brought to Hadassah. They were taken into separate operating rooms, where medical teams worked to save their lives. Outside, in the waiting room, were their families. Blum remembers looking over and seeing something extraordinary. The family of the attacker and the family of the man he had tried to kill were sitting together. They shared food. They spoke. At one point, she remembers, they even embraced. Surely, at some point, the full reality of what had happened would hit hard. These were two families on opposite sides of a horrific act of violence, and nothing about that could simply disappear. One was a terrorist. The other just an innocent man who was on his way to buy groceries. But for those few hours in a hospital waiting room, while their sons were behind closed doors and surgeons fought to save them, those identities seemed to fall away. There were simply two terrified families waiting for news about their children. And for Blum, a young doctor who had entered medicine believing it could save lives and offer comfort, the image stayed with her: before politics, before anger, before all the things that divide us, there were two families in a Jerusalem hospital, sharing food and holding one another while they waited.

Fern Reiss has lived in Jerusalem for years, and somehow the city still manages to surprise her. One year, she went into Mea Shearim looking for decorations for her sukkah. Mea Shearim is one of Jerusalem’s most insular ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, a place where many residents don’t have televisions or use the internet, and where walking down certain streets can feel a little like stepping through a time machine into a Jewish world from a century ago. Fern was looking for the usual things: fairy lights, strings of pomegranates, little decorations to hang from the schach. And then she saw Santa Claus. Not an actual Santa Claus A whole table covered in strings of Christmas lights featuring tiny, glowing Santas. Behind the table stood the man selling them: long beard, black hat, traditional Haredi clothes. He looked like he had wandered straight out of the shul in Fiddler on the Roof. Fern stared at the Santa lights. Then at him. Then back at the Santa lights. Finally, she had to ask. “Why are you selling Santa Claus lights?” The man looked genuinely confused. “Who is Santa Claus?” Fern pointed to the little red-and-white figure dangling from the string of lights. “That’s Santa Claus.” He looked at her as though she were the one who didn’t understand. “That’s the Rebbe!”

#moadimlsimcha #chagsameach #sukkot #jewishjoy

The peoples of Israel are all welcome this #sukkot

If you’ve ever spotted a tour guide somewhere in Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda market wearing a wildly colorful Hawaiian shirt, surrounded by a group of people hanging on his every word, with a plate of something delicious being passed around, there’s a decent chance you’ve already seen Joel Haber. He is hard to miss. His friends and followers in Israel and around the world call him “Fun Joel.” That tracks: He’s charismatic, curious, deeply knowledgeable and, yes, genuinely fun — the kind of guide who can make history feel less like something trapped in a textbook and more like a story unfolding right where you’re standing.

These are anonymous confessions and regrets shared by people from across the Peoples of Israel as Yom Kippur approaches. A collective vidui — the places where we believe we ourselves have fallen short, and where we hope to do

THE PEOPLES OF ISRAEL HOPE FOR A BETTER YEAR… “WAIT AND SEE, WAIT AND SEE JUST HOW GOOD IT CAN BE IN THE COMING YEAR.”

The Ten Types of Peoples of Israel You’ll Meet During the High Holy Days

Ever wonder what it’s like to live in the Old City of Jerusalem?

My friend Nilly Kaplan is a writer and a storyteller. We met at HaTaklit in Jerusalem, the pub I like to call the pub at the end of the universe. She with her wine, me with my whisky. Nilly is a real Israeli, born and raised, and I’m an American who has made Israel home. But one of the things we share is a love of language: the strange little ways words carry meaning, the things that get lost in translation, and the things that somehow become even better along the way. Every so often, she’ll ask me about an English word she doesn’t know. And every so often, one of those words opens up an entire story.

On this week’s Peoples of Israel, we meet a documentary filmmaker whose day job is to explain Israel – while still trying to figure it out. In 2003, Joshua Faudem was filming “Blues by the Beach,” a documentary about Mike’s Place, a bar on the Tel Aviv beachfront, when a suicide bomber struck the popular nightspot, killing three civilians and wounding over 50. What began as a film about a bar and the people who gathered there became something else: a record of grief, survival, and what happens to ordinary lives when history suddenly crashes through the door. More than two decades later, Faudem, now 51, is still pointing his camera at Israelis caught in moments of change. But this time, as Israel approaches another election and wrestles with questions about what kind of country it will become, the story has turned unexpectedly toward him. Read more on The Times of Israel.

There is something monstrous happening in plain sight, and watching the response to @pink has crystallized it for me. We are watching celebrities post about dead children. Softly. Earnestly. Beautiful graphics. Overalls and headbands, IYKYK. Hearts. Flowers. All the visual shorthand of goodness. Think of the children. And we unequivocally should. I think about Palestinian children buried under rubble. Children who are hungry. Children who have lost parents and siblings and homes. Children who should be worrying about homework and who gets the Spider-Man cup and whether there is ice cream after dinner instead of whether they will survive the night. But if we dare say: Our children too, then suddenly we become the monsters in a sick morality play. ETA To be clear: I’m saying the dehumanization of Jewish and Israeli people and the gaslighting = Qatari money.

Erev Rosh Hashanah in Israel is not a day. It is a competitive sport. By 9 a.m., the supermarkets have descended into anarchy, every bakery is running low on the correct honey cake, and someone’s mother is furious because apparently you were supposed to know she needed twelve pomegranates. So, in honor of the Jewish New Year, here are the 10 people you will absolutely meet before sundown:

#PeoplesofIsrael is about the folks who make this place what it is, and sometimes that story begins with something as simple, and as improbable, as a kosher bacon cheeseburger. I’ll explain: Rachel Oppenheim @mamasababa is a friend of mine, and someone I deeply admire. She and her husband, James, have been married for 33 years. Rachel grew up in Houston, James in New York, and together they moved to Israel, made #Jerusalem their home, raised nine children, and built a life that is very much their own. They’re also the family behind @getbodega, a #kosher fast-casual burger restaurant in #TelAviv, built around a wonderfully audacious idea: bringing the classic American bacon cheeseburger to Israel and making it kosher. But this isn’t really a story about burgers. It’s a story about the person behind the idea, told by the person who knows him best. It’s about building things, taking risks, raising a family, and what happens when the American kid you once were meets the Israeli life you chose.

On this week's Peoples of Israel, we meet Jason Watson, a man who came to see that his Native American indigenous story is reflected in Israel's struggle for existence. Jason arrived in Israel ready to despise it, but the Chickasaw citizen from North Texas began to recognize something unexpected in the Jewish story: echoes of his own indigenous history. Find more on The Times of Israel.

Chelsea Levron told me her Peoples of Israel love story begins with a funeral.… #peoplesofisrael @timesofisrael @timesofisraelvoices

There are places in #Israel where, for ten minutes, a random collection of strangers becomes a family. One time, it happened in a pharmacy. ETA: the graphic was made using AI — but the text is all mine