Israeli Judaism is far from a monolith, and that's largely thanks to American immigrants ...

Israel from the Inside with Daniel Gordis · Mar 26, 2026 · 49m

When my family and I came to Israel in 1998, our daughter (who’s now closing in on forty) was just about to have her Bat Mitzvah. It was important to us that she read Torah in a “traditional” synagogue. In other words, what we wanted for her was an “egalitarian Orthodox” setting (for lack of a better term), where the service would be completely traditional, but where she could read Torah.

Yet there were essentially no options. So we rented a space, set up our own minyan and did things exactly as we wanted them to be.

On the morning after the Bat Mitzvah, someone at my work who had attended…