The Canadian Jewish News is a national, English-language, digital-first media organization that serves Canada’s Jewish community. It has been a welcoming home for my more personal columns about my family and life in Israel.
April 14, 2026
Letter from Israel at wartime: This Holocaust Day, let’s remember the Jewish World War II veterans
Published in The Canadian Jewish News. The official name of Israel’s annual Holocaust Remembrance Day is Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day. It’s a nod toward not only the victims of the genocide but also the resistance fighters who valiantly fought…
March 27, 2026
Letter from Israel at wartime: Life between sirens
Published in The Canadian Jewish News Nearly a month into the war with Iran, it’s safe to say that much of what we have been experiencing in Israel has been unprecedented. It’s the first fully joint American Israeli military operation….
June 26, 2025
Canadian dispatches from Israel at wartime: Like father, like daughter
Published in The Canadian Jewish News. One of the defining memories of my youth is the 1990 Gulf War, and the subsequent Iraqi missile attacks against Israel early the next year. I was 14, and I distinctly remember the drama…
June 16, 2025
Canadian dispatches from Israel at wartime: Was I made for these times?
Published in The Canadian Jewish News. The start of the inevitable Iranian retaliation to Israel’s stunning series of airstrikes caught me in the shower Friday night. Upon hearing the familiar sound of wailing air raid sirens outside, I quickly grabbed…
November 22, 2024
Letter from Israel at wartime: A year of living under missile threat
Published in The Canadian Jewish News. With all the trauma and turmoil that has engulfed this country after more than a year of war, it seems almost trivial to describe the plight of daily life in central Israel under the…
April 17, 2024
Letter from Israel at wartime: Seeking escapism amid an Iranian attack
Published in The Canadian Jewish News. One would think that news of an impending, widescale attack from your nuclear threshold, sworn enemy nation would set off a panic. But that’s not what happened when I heard that Iran had finally…
November 10, 2023
Canadian dispatches from Israel at wartime: We will never be the same after Oct. 7
Published in The Canadian Jewish News. When the wailing air-raid sirens woke me in the early morning hours of Oct. 7 and sent me stumbling to the safe room of our apartment in central Israel, my initial instinct was rather…
November 11, 2021
As he turns 100, Mickey Heller still returns to World War II
Published in The Canadian Jewish News on Remembrance Day 2021 For most of his life, my grandfather, Mickey Heller, tried to put the memories of the Second World War behind him. After two years in Europe as a navigator in…
