Kristen Bloom knows what it’s like to start over. In the 20 years her husband has served in the Air Force, the couple has moved 10 times. Their first assignment took them to Okinawa, Japan. Bloom, now 42, is originally from a small town in Massachusetts, and quickly realized how different life there was from […]

Charmaine Rice was a bright-eyed, recent Wright State University graduate when she realized helping others along their professional trajectory would be a fitting career path for herself. “I was sitting in a six-week management training course at Ohio Savings Bank, and there was this woman who was facilitating that training,” Rice recalled. “We were not […]

A high incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is unfortunately one of the tolls that Israel’s wars have taken on both its military and civilian population. There are different types of PTSD, and each has to be addressed differently. Understanding that vital need, Yuval Limon, 67, and Nir Lahav, 62, began to build a place […]

The waves were a bit strong and the breeze still chilly, on the official opening day of the Shirat HaYam gender-segregated beach in Bat Yam, Israel, last week as Waves of Hope began the first lesson of its therapeutic surfing course for a new group of at-risk girls from the Haredi community. Exhilarated from her […]

Nearly every week for a decade, Iri Kassel picked up sick Palestinian children at Israel’s Erez border crossing with Gaza and drove them with their guardians to Israeli hospitals for treatment. But on Oct. 7, the crossing was raided by Palestinian militants who blasted the passport control booths and magnetic scanners as they stormed into […]

Yael Noy doesn’t wear military fatigues, but she describes herself as being in battle right now, after the Hamas assault on 7 October. “I’m fighting to be good,” she tells me. “I’m fighting to stay moral when both sides are in such terrible pain. I’m fighting to be the same person I was before.” Yael […]

Note: The following essay contains descriptions of sexual assault and abuse. They sent me off to be raped, with a party and a tube of K-Y Jelly. The lubricant was to reduce the intense physical pain they explained I would endure while being penetrated by a stranger-turned-husband, without foreplay, without consent. Every month. Until death […]

Fifteen years ago, Max Levitt was a freshman at Syracuse University who chose to major in sports management for one reason: It had the word “sports” in it. Students were told that the key to getting a post-college job in the sports industry was to work wherever they could in the sports industry. Levitt became […]

A few months ago, on a family trip to Israel, we drove deep into the green hills of the Galilee Valley to visit a sustainable farm called Kaima Hukuk. The reason for our trip was educational; my younger brother is studying sustainable agriculture at Cornell, where he spends his school days climbing trees and growing […]