Our Exultant Parade

Children Of Israel Are Never Alone

Jun 04, 2026

Hey, beloved tribe.

I’m so happy to be back with you after my week in New York and my son’s graduation from high school, which was Tuesday night. I needed the time in NYC more than I can explain and — to put it mildly — it did not fail to give me what I came for.

I feel inexpressibly fortunate to have Jewish community nearly everywhere I go, but there’s nowhere like New York. Every precious day I spent there was a candle burnt at both ends, and stacked morning to night with Jewish events and encounters, each of which was inexpressibly life-giving.

Every single Jew I met or sat down with gave me strength to fight another day.

So much happened that I feel overwhelmed when considering how to share it all, but I want to start at the end with the overarching reason I went, which was the Israeli Day parade.

I never marched in the parade before, but this year, something said I had to go. And I think the reason is encapsulated by a story I heard from Dara Horn, about a fraught relationship between her college-aged daughter and one of her Jewish friends. This friend was part of a group that slept at Dara’s house before embarking on some trip together.

“It was very clear to me that my daughter and this girl disagreed about basically everything,” Dara recalled. “And I said to my daughter: ‘It’s very clear that you and she part ways on all these different issues. Are you two actually friends?’ And my daughter said something that was very revealing. She said: ‘You know, Mom, for Jews my age, there’s only one thing that matters. And it’s not about how religious you are — that’s irrelevant — and it’s not about who you vote for — also irrelevant. Only one thing matters: are you in or are you out?’”

Well, as everyone here knows, who you vote for is not irrelevant to me, and I have a separate story from this past week on that topic. I’ll very briefly tell it here:

My first two days in NYC were taken by the Recharging Reform Judaism conference, which was just fantastic. Adam Louis Klein was there and after several in-depth conversations with him online, I finally got to meet him in person.

My eternal heroine Rabbi Angela Buchdahl was there, and though we’ve met several times before, it’s never not a joy to be in her physical presence (sorry the photo is so blurry!).

Dara Horn was there, conducting workshops through her visionary non-profit The Tell Institute (much more about that later).

But I digress — the story I wanted to tell is this:

I was sitting in one of the plenary sessions when I caught a woman staring at me. I looked over at her and I know I’ll never be able to describe the expression on her face. It was at once lit with recognition, and hopeful, and guarded, and I realized to my shock it was my former friend K.

K. and I were close friends for decades. We met in college and we didn’t see each other often after that because we were in opposite corners of the country, but whenever we did, it was the most intimate, no-holds-barred friendship imaginable. We were part of group of four women who formed a kind of Sex-In-The-City-esque quartet. We all lived far from each other but we used to convene once a year and spend several wonderful days together in places like Breitenbush or Joshua Tree.

In any event, K. was very left-leaning all her life, but the left began to drive her crazy years ago and she began drifting rightward, saying what I perceived as very alarming things.

And then, around two years ago, she confessed to me that she voted for Trump.

I cut her off then. Unfriended her, left her on read, believed I would never speak to her again.

And yet as our eyes met in this room, I felt myself rising from my seat as if my body had a will of its own. We moved toward each other and clung to each other for several long moments and I started to cry.

We resolved to get together the following Saturday and talk.

And then neither of us made a single move toward making that happen.

The week unfolded, the day came and went, without another word exchanged between us.

And even if we’d met, which obviously neither of us wanted to do all that much, I can’t imagine our friendship would ever be the same. That we could ever re-achieve the level of intimacy we once had.

But my visceral reaction was what it was.

And that isn’t nothing.

My visceral reaction was what it was because she’s in and I’m in, and on some level, there’s some transcendental redemption within that truth.

So although it does matter to me — very much — who my own friends vote for, Dara’s underlying point struck a chord of deep recognition in me and I recognized myself in it.

A lot of Jews chose not to march in the parade because Bezalel Smotrich was in it. And believe me, I understand that decision. But I didn’t share it. Smotrich was just one of 60,000 people who came out that day for Am Yisrael — the highest turnout ever recorded — and I’ll be damned if I let him be the face of the Jewish nation while I sit at home.

As everyone here knows, I hate Netanyahu. I hate Smotrich. I hate Ben Gvir. I hate the current Israeli government.

And.

I’m in. I’m IN. I’m in in in. I will never make a decision not to stand with my people.

Everyone who heard I was planning to march asked the same question: “Aren’t you afraid of a violent event happening there?”

Yes, of course I was afraid of that and I’m sure that was true of every single one of the 60,000 people who came out to walk -- the highest attendance ever.

I’m sure we were all afraid.

And we were also utterly, thrillingly, euphorically FEARLESS.

The feeling in the air was electric.

It was thrilling and healing to be surrounded by some many Jews of every age, ethnicity, color, background and degree of religious observance: young and old, Ashkenazi and Separdi and Mizrahi, black-hatted and skimpily dressed, from every point on the political spectrum.

I screamed with exhilaration all day.

I will say much more about my week very soon, but for now, I want to leave you with some of the most uplifting media from the parade.

The first is this heartwarming clip featuring New York Attorney General Letitia James:

And I also wanted to share some of my favorite photos from the event, which I took myself along the way. The first is of myself with a friend I’d only known online, and the rest were shots I collected during the march itself.