Hadassah is the largest women’s Zionist organization in the US with 300,000 members and supporters. And I have Zionism flowing through my veins. You might say I got it with my mother’s milk.

My mother’s older brother, Shia went to live on a kibbutz in Palestine in the 30s, long before there was an Israel. He was an ardent Zionist and he got the whole family “infected.” All my mother’s friends were Zionists. They all studied Hebrew together and sang Zionist songs. Zionism permeated my mother’s whole life and she passed it on to me. My main foreign language in high school was Hebrew. I received a golden ע (ayin)–the first letter of  עִבְרִית, the Hebrew word for the Hebrew language–at graduation.

A kibbutz is loosely modeled on a kolchoz, a collective farm in the former Soviet Union, so the kibbutzniks were certainly not religious. Maybe it was their teenage rebellion. I remember the words to one of the songs my mother sang (in Yiddish): “No powder, no lipstick, just half a........

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