Why I Left Jerusalem
After 50-something years, and to the astonishment of our children and grandchildren, at the end of June my husband and I packed up our things and left Jerusalem, moving halfway across the country to settle in Zichron Yaakov, […]
Aliyah: What I Hadn’t Expected; What I Hadn’t Dreamed
Leaving America Behind Snow covered the wings of the plane I boarded at JFK in January 1971, my first flight ever. My husband and I shivered as we boarded the flight to Israel. We had burned our bridges […]
An Observant Wife
My new book, An Observant Wife, which is a sequel to An Unorthodox Match will be published on September 14th. Here’s a comment by an early reader: “Long before Shtisel and Unorthodox reached television screens, Naomi Ragen had […]
Never Again? Really?
It is not every day that a woman wakes up to find that her children and grandchildren have spent the night in a bomb shelter, bombarded by missiles launched by a vicious, anti-Semitic terrorist organization dedicated to murdering […]
A Daycare Tragedy Opens My Eyes
Sometimes a single truth, belatedly discovered, can change one’s world view with surprising swiftness. The article that changed mine was published in Ha’aretz—a newspaper I never read, considering it, like most Israelis, to be far left of the […]
Goodbye 2020. Welcome 2021!
Dear 2020, Here we are at the eve of your departure. I have to admit that I’m thrilled to see you go. But I wouldn’t want you to fade into oblivion before reminding us both of the remarkable […]
An Unorthodox Match now in Paperback
Just a note to let you know that the paperback edition of An Unorthodox Match is officially coming out today, November 24. I’ve also just finished the sequel, An Observant Wife, which takes the love story of Yaakov and […]
COVID is Ripping Israel Apart
When COVID-19 reached Israel last March, I was not unduly worried. Fifty years of firsthand experience with Israeli resilience and mutual cooperation, through wars, recessions, exploding buses and deep political turmoil, made me believe we would sail through […]
Here I Zoom!!
I was actually wondering how this was going to work with COVID-19, giving author lectures, that is. I was dubious if it would be possible to face my readers and give them the kind of experience they’d have […]