I Didn’t Want to Be “the Jewish Leslie” Anymore, I Wanted to Blend In

Shai Kaplan said she traveled to India with a brain tumor and had already accepted her fate, but then yoga changed her life. The article uses her story as a personal entry point into a broader look at identity, belonging, and the tension between standing out and fitting into the majority.

It also points to the experience of Israelis in Boston, where some feel something is missing despite success in high-tech and elite institutions. A piece about the Bennett-Lapid political alliance is cited as exposing what the author describes as a bitter truth, that Israel's liberals are anything but liberal.

The roundup then moves to other opinion and culture items, including a report that the state is preventing about 1,000 pilots and flight attendants from voting, a warning that this will not pass quietly, and a story about centuries-old olive trees in Moshav Tzipori before a fire arrived. Another item asks how to choose the coffee one likes, in cooperation with Fresh Coffee.

Additional commentary covers Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who mapped the Middle East with Israel as the central threat, and an opinion by Tzvi Bar'el saying no world leader has been treated as disrespectfully by Donald Trump. The package also includes a recommendation from Niv Hadash about an album that is impossible to stop listening to, and a testimony from Ran Levy Talbi about genocide, saying they had to search for the bodies to prove it to the world. Talya Benon Tzur writes that it all began with her partner, who had an issue with his Russian girlfriends.