By Our Efforts Combined

Dear Hillel,

I am immensely grateful that Letters to an American Jewish Friend is being republished so that I can continue to recommend it to anyone who is willing and able to read it. You could never have included me in your composite image of your American Jewish interlocutor, “A.,” because I so fully share your convictions that Israel is the center of any meaningful Jewish history and the place where Jewish life can be lived most completely.

Indeed, my husband and I moved to Israel with our three children about the same time as you and Marcia, and we met you soon afterward at the home you were then renting from the poet Yehuda Amichai. Just as you left New York for good, so we, too, had left our jobs and sold our home with no intention of returning. Like you, we undertook aliyah out of mutual attraction: Israel needed us, and we needed to be in Israel.