Dear friend,
I’m writing to invite you to join the community we’re building on Substack, where I’ve been penning weekly columns and beginning to dive into live streaming under the Word on the Street brand.
My most recent piece shared personal reflections from my recent family trip to Austria, where my mother’s side of the family lived through 1938.
I hope you find reading it meaningful. You’ll find the beginning of the piece below and the rest on the Substack site.
I’m also really excited about the new livestream series, Heard on the Street, that I’ll be hosting on a weekly basis with my colleague Ilan Goldenberg, delving more deeply into current events. If you subscribe to Word on the Street, you’ll get invitations to the weekly livestream – and you can find prior episodes on my Substack homepage.
Speaking of Ilan, I also want to highlight his writings at Dialogue and Dissonance, where he shares valuable weekly insights. His latest post recaps his recent trip to Israel and the West Bank on a J Street delegation – and how what he witnessed led him to believe that a reckoning is coming for Israeli society.
Thank you, sincerely, for following along!
– Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street President
1938 Vienna, Antisemitism and Palestine
Word on the Street
I’m just back from a family vacation that ended with three days of ‘roots’ exploration in Vienna, where four generations on my mother’s side lived in the decades leading to 1938.
We visited the homes where family members grew up and then raised their own children.
We toured the synagogue where my grandparents were married – the only one in Vienna to survive the November 9, 1938 pogrom (a date, I learned, that Austrian Jews prefer not to call Kristallnacht, a name chosen by the Nazis to make it sound less horrific).
We found the schools my mother and grandparents attended. We even discovered that a great uncle built the house where Herzl lived on our family’s block!
Jews were integral to turn-of-the-century Vienna. They were composers, writers and builders. They were artists, and they were patrons of the arts. Sigmund Freud drank coffee here; over there, Leon Trotsky was playing chess and plotting.
What an amazing – and ultimately tragic – history.
Our first official Heard on the Street
A Reckoning is Coming in Israeli Society
Dialogue and Dissonance
I had the opportunity to spend 10 days in Israel and the Palestinian Territories recently as part of a J Street delegation – the first of what I expect will be many such trips. What was most striking was that in all of my years of visiting the region I had never seen Israeli society so unmoored and untethered. It was in many ways depressing but I also came away hopeful.
The first thing that struck me is how different this J Street trip was then one I participated in six years ago…
