Although I was born in Israel and grew up in Haifa, I did not have a close Modern Orthodox friend until after I returned to Israel following almost ten years in the U.S.

In Haifa, on Mount Carmel (where Naftali Bennett also grew up), secular and religious children attended different schools and belonged to different youth movements. We knew the religious kids only informally, as neighbors, for example. It is important to remember that at that time (the 1960s and 1970s), religious boys and girls studied together, and that was also the case in the youth movements.

In the U.S., somehow the differences between secular and religious Jews were less noticeable than they were here, in a very Christian country that nevertheless officially maintains a separation between church........

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