"The purpose of the Hope Diaries project is to offer Jewish- and Arab-Israeli students an avenue of hope through the power of art,” says Deborah Feinstein, exhibit curator and chair of Hebrew College's Arts Initiative. Feinstein tapped Boston artist Shirah Rubin, who guided students from Boston-area Jewish schools through a collaborative art-making process. Inspired by the prompt, “What does hope look like for you?”, the students assembled collage covers for diaries which were distributed to students at the Yad B’Yad (“Hand in Hand”) School in Haifa, where Arab-Israeli and Jewish-Israeli youth learn together “hand-in-hand.”

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Two weeks before Pesach this year, those living in the Eastern United States will be able to look up into the sky and witness a total solar eclipse. Tens of thousands of Americans, known as eclipse-chasers, or by the scientific term, umbraphiles, will travel to the centerline of the eclipse to experience a few moments of complete darkness. This is an experience that they describe as full of deep mystery and spirituality. Eclipse-chaser Kate Russo writes that seeing an eclipse is “a reminder of how wonderful life is. It gives you life insights that you normally get only at times when you've experienced loss.” 

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In the face of tremendous challenges, the teens in Hebrew College's Jewish Teen Foundation of Greater Boston (JTFGB) have once again responded to the moment. “Each year the experience changes as a new focus is chosen. In the first three years, my board chose to focus on the areas of education inequity, adolescent mental health, and natural and humanitarian disaster,” JTFGB student Maya Rottenberg said. “Education inequality and adolescent mental health felt especially important with the world shutting down due to Covid-19, natural and humanitarian disaster felt important given the Russia-Ukraine war, and this year, the issue of housing felt particularly important because of the Israel-Hamas war and Israeli people losing their homes or needing to leave their homes in order to stay safe.”

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At this moment when the Hamas terror attacks and Israel’s subsequent response has unleashed diverse and complicated reactions in America, it is worth reflecting on a little-remembered period in American history when Massachusetts was at the forefront of the world Zionist movement...In the early part of the twentieth century, Massachusetts was a hotbed of Zionist activity. It was the home of the largest Zionist organization in the country, the Boston Zionist Association; it was the home of the most significant Zionist leader, Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice; and most significantly, it was home to the first state legislature in the country which went on record in support of the Zionist cause. 

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