The New Yorker:

Nitzan Waisberg, a lecturer on design thinking at the Tel Aviv University business school, was born in Israel forty-four years ago, the daughter of a psychologist and a yoga instructor. She attended Jerusalem’s Bezalel School of Arts and Design and the Royal College of Art, in London; lived in Los Angeles, London, and Sydney; and consulted for companies like Procter & Gamble and Gallup. In 2012, she returned to Israel, leaving a teaching appointment at Stanford University. She was determined to bring “Bay Area optimism and Silicon Valley problem-solving,” she told me, to what she knew was a changing public life in Israel. (Her uncle is Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister.) She has four children—three of whom attend mamlachti, or secular, public schools in Tel Aviv—and she was naturally preoccupied with helping them adjust to their new life. “But I found I was living in an emotional bunker,” she said. “I came back to a country my grandparents founded, to raise my children. I didn’t recognize the place.”

Two years ago, Waisberg’s preschooler came home just before Rosh Hashanah, talking about a “big man” who had visited her class and talked about “dead animals.” A few days later, the teacher sent home a picture of an Orthodox rabbi blowing the shofar in class. “This was right at the beginning of the school year, just as my daughter was learning to trust her space, with no sense of who was in authority,” Waisberg said. “God knows what this guy said about Temple sacrifices.” Her second grader’s classes, meanwhile, were regularly interrupted to prepare for an extracurricular ceremony in which each child received a text of the Torah, girls got chocolate coins, and boys got yarmulkes. “They gave the children a paper with the word ‘Torah’ smeared with honey and invited them to lick it,” to indicate Torah study as sweet. She said that she doesn’t mind teaching children about traditions, but this was a custom from cheder—the Eastern European rabbinic schoolhouse from the Middle Ages—and, she said, “It was not presented as a history lesson.”

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