Dear readers,

For more than a year, I have been working on a book about Zionism, the misconceptions surrounding it, and the stories of Zionists. I’m very happy to share it with you.

Readers of Sentinel Journal will recognize the questions that have guided this project: How do we understand Zionism through history? What gets lost in public debate? And what…

Read more

Subscribe now

Haviva Reik had already escaped the Europe that intended to destroy her.

In 1939, she left her native Slovakia and made aliyah to Mandatory Palestine. There, she joined the emerging Jewish national community, helped build a kibbutz, worked the land, and became a member of the Palmach.

She possessed what millions of European Jews desperately sought but could not obtain: a way out.

Yet in 1944, as Nazi Germany continued its destruction of European Jewry, Haviva chose to return.

She did not return as the vulnerable young Jewish woman she might have become under Nazi rule. She returned in British uniform, trained for a clandestine mission and carrying the resolve of the Jewish community being built in the Land of Israel.

Her destination was Slovakia—the country of her childhood, where Jews had been isolated, deported, and murdered.

Her mission combined military intelligence, resistance, rescue, and an intensely personal obligation to the Jewish people she had left behind.

Haviva Reik would not survive the war. But before her murder at the age of 30, she transformed Zionism from an aspiration into an act of responsibility.

Share

Before Haviva, There Was Marta

Haviva Reik was born Marta Reik in 1914 and grew up near Banská Bystrica in what was then Czechoslovakia.

Her childhood was not privileged. She learned responsibility early and began working at a young age. These experiences may have helped form the practical strength that later defined her leadership. She understood that ideals meant little unless she translated them into action.

As a young woman, she joined Hashomer Hatzair, the socialist Zionist youth movement.

Like other Zionist organizations of the period, Hashomer Hatzair offered young Jews more than a political position. It offered community, education, collective identity, and a vision of Jewish life beyond Europe's vulnerability.

Its members studied Hebrew, Jewish history, agriculture, socialism, and the possibility of building a new society in the Jewish ancestral homeland. They were encouraged to think of themselves not merely as individuals seeking personal security, but as participants in a shared Jewish future.

Marta adopted the Hebrew name Haviva, meaning “beloved.”

The change was more than symbolic. It reflected the new identity she was developing—one connected to Hebrew culture, Zionist purpose, and Jewish national renewal.

As antisemitism intensified and Europe moved toward war, the Zionist dream became increasingly urgent. Haviva helped Jewish refugees and supported efforts to immigrate to Mandatory Palestine.

In 1939, she made aliyah.

Share

Building a Jewish Future

In Mandatory Palestine, Haviva joined the group that established Kibbutz Ma’anit.

Kibbutz life required physical labor, discipline, and a willingness to place collective needs ahead of personal comfort. Haviva reportedly insisted on participating in demanding agricultural work. She labored in orchards, vineyards, and fields while becoming increasingly active in the life of the Yishuv—the organized Jewish community in Palestine.

This part of her story is essential.

Haviva did not arrive in Palestine merely to find safety. She came to help construct a Jewish society.

For Zionist pioneers of her generation, building a kibbutz was not separate from resistance. Cultivating land, creating Hebrew institutions, organizing communal defense, and establishing permanent Jewish communities were all expressions of the same refusal to remain powerless.

Europe had taught Jews that citizenship and assimilation could not always protect them. The Yishuv attempted to create something different: a society in which Jews would assume responsibility for their own security and future.

Haviva joined the Palmach, the elite strike force of the Haganah.

She trained, accepted military discipline, and prepared herself for dangers that would once have seemed unimaginable for a young Jewish woman from Slovakia.

But even as she helped build a new life, Europe remained with her.

The Jews she had left behind had not disappeared from her conscience.

The Call to Return

During the Second World War, British authorities and the Jewish Agency developed a program to send Jewish volunteers from Mandatory Palestine into Nazi-occupied Europe.

The British needed operatives who spoke local languages, understood the terrain, could assist Allied personnel, gather intelligence, and communicate with resistance movements.

The Jewish leadership in Palestine saw an additional purpose.

These volunteers might reach Jewish communities trapped behind enemy lines. They could bring information, encouragement, organization, and, wherever possible, practical assistance.

Approximately 250 people initially volunteered. A smaller number received specialized instruction, and only several dozen eventually entered occupied Europe.

The training was demanding. Volunteers learned parachuting, radio communications, intelligence work, clandestine movement, and methods of surviving behind enemy lines.

Haviva wanted to be sent to Slovakia.

She knew its language, culture, and geography. More importantly, she regarded the Jews there as her people and their suffering as her responsibility.

She had already reached safety. No one could reasonably have demanded that she return.

She volunteered anyway.

That decision stands at the center of her story.

What does a person owe those who remain trapped after she has escaped? Is survival a private possession, or can it create an obligation toward others?

Haviva answered through her actions.

The Jewish home being built in Palestine had protected her. Now she would carry something of its emerging strength back into Europe.

Read more

Wishing you joy, welcome, and moments of peace

Read more

Support My Independent Geopolitical Research

Independent geopolitical analysis requires extensive research, careful verification, and the freedom to examine difficult subjects without institutional pressure.

Your support helps me continue researching and writing about geopolitics, the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East, Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and overlooked stories of Jewish courage and resistance.

If you value my work and would like to help sustain it, please consider making a voluntary contribution through PayPal. Every contribution—large or small—supports my research, writing, interviews, publishing, and other related work as an independent geopolitical analyst.

Support my work through PayPal:
https://www.paypal.com/ncp/payment/ZBVMFKB45UXKW

Thank you for believing in thoughtful, independent analysis and for helping me continue this important work.

Please note: Contributions are voluntary support for my independent professional work and are not tax-deductible charitable donations.

Subscribe now

A young Jewish woman slipped beyond the walls of the Vilna Ghetto carrying a homemade explosive.

If they found her, there would be no mercy. Capture could mean interrogation, torture, and death—not only for her, but possibly for everyone connected to the underground.

Her name was Vitka Kempner.

Together with another resistance fighter, she helped sabotage a German military railway line near Vilna. It was one of the first significant operations undertaken by the Jewish underground in the city.

The physical damage caused by one explosive could never compare with the enormous power of Nazi Germany. Yet the attack's meaning extended beyond its military consequences.

The Nazis had attempted to reduce the Jews of Vilna to frightened prisoners awaiting deportation and death. Vitka’s act delivered a different message: Jewish life would not disappear without resistance.

The railway attack was only the beginning.

Vitka would smuggle weapons, help resistance fighters escape through the sewers, join Jewish partisans in the forest, and participate in sabotage against the German occupation. After the war, she would confront the painful boundary between justice and revenge before eventually reaching the Land of Israel.

Her story is not primarily one of martyrdom. Unlike Hannah Senesh and Tosia Altman, Vitka survived the war.

That survival makes her story no less sacrificial. It allows us to understand another dimension of Zionist resistance: the determination not only to fight evil, but also to remain alive long enough to rebuild what evil attempted to destroy.

Share

Before the Partisan

Vitka Kempner was born in Kalisz, a Polish city near the German border, into a Jewish family that was proud of both its Jewish and Polish identity.

As a young woman, she joined Zionist organizations. She initially joined Betar, the Revisionist Zionist youth movement, before joining Hashomer Hatzair, a socialist Zionist movement.

The political differences between those movements were substantial, but both rejected the idea that the Jewish people should remain permanently dependent upon the protection of others. Each, in its own way, cultivated Jewish identity, physical confidence, organization, and a sense of national responsibility.

Before the Holocaust, Zionist youth movements were not created as underground armies. Their members studied Jewish history, debated politics, learned Hebrew, organized communal activities, and prepared themselves for the possibility of building a life in the Land of Israel.

The catastrophe in Europe transformed these networks.

When governments failed, armies collapsed, and established Jewish institutions were destroyed, the relationships formed inside youth movements sometimes remained. Members already knew one another. They had learned to organize, communicate, and assume responsibility for a collective future.

Zionism did not automatically lead to armed resistance, nor were all Jewish resistance fighters Zionists. Nevertheless, Zionist movements supplied many young Jews with something essential: the conviction that they were participants in Jewish history rather than merely its victims.

Share

Flight to Vilna

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Kalisz quickly fell under Nazi control. Vitka fled eastward and eventually reached Vilna, now Vilnius, in Lithuania.

Before the Holocaust, Vilna was one of the great centers of Jewish civilization. It was celebrated for its synagogues, libraries, schools, publishing houses, intellectual traditions, political movements, and religious scholarship. Its importance earned it the name “the Jerusalem of Lithuania.”

For a brief period, the city appeared to offer refuge. Jewish youth activists and refugees gathered there, and some hoped to find a path from Europe to Mandatory Palestine.

That hope was shattered in June 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

German forces occupied Vilna. The Jewish population was subjected to persecution, forced labor, confinement, and mass murder. Thousands were taken to Ponary, a wooded area outside the city, where German units and local collaborators carried out repeated shootings.

At first, many people struggled to comprehend what was happening. Deportation had previously meant forced labor, resettlement, or imprisonment. The possibility that the Germans intended to murder entire Jewish communities was almost beyond imagination.

But testimony began to reach the ghetto. A small number of people escaped from Ponary and described the shootings. Their accounts revealed that the victims taken away from Vilna were not being resettled. They were being murdered.

Vitka and other young activists faced a terrible truth: obedience would not bring safety.

Share

The Birth of the FPO

On New Year’s Eve 1941, representatives of Zionist youth movements gathered in Vilna. Abba Kovner, a young poet and Hashomer Hatzair activist, presented a manifesto warning that the destruction at Ponary was part of a systematic plan.

Its most famous declaration called upon Jews not to go “like sheep to the slaughter.”

The phrase has sometimes been misunderstood and even misused. It should never be employed to condemn the millions of Jews who could not resist. Jewish families lived under starvation, collective punishment, misinformation, and overwhelming military force. Parents had to consider what an act of defiance might mean for their children. Weapons were scarce, escape routes were limited, and the surrounding population was often hostile.

The important historical question is not why every Jew did not fight.

It is how anyone found the means to fight at all.

In January 1942, activists established the Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye—the United Partisan Organization, commonly known as the FPO. It brought together young Jews from different ideological movements around a common objective: to prepare armed resistance against the Germans.

Vitka became an active member.

The underground obtained weapons, created hiding places, distributed information, trained fighters, and developed connections beyond the ghetto. Every task was dangerous. A single arrest could expose the entire organization.

Vitka’s ability to move beyond the ghetto made her particularly valuable. She served as a courier and operative, taking risks essential to the underground’s survival.

Share

The Explosion on the Railway

The FPO needed to become more than a secret organization that discussed resistance. It needed to demonstrate that action was possible.

Vitka helped investigate the movement of German military trains. Carrying a homemade explosive beyond the ghetto, she and another fighter placed it along a railway line used by the occupying forces.

The resulting explosion became one of the FPO’s earliest sabotage operations.

It did not liberate Vilna. It did not halt the machinery of the Holocaust. But its significance cannot be judged only by the amount of physical damage inflicted on the enemy.

The operation broke the psychological order the Nazis were attempting to impose.

A Jewish woman whom the regime had marked for humiliation, confinement, and death had chosen instead to attack the infrastructure of her persecutors. She had ceased to behave as the Nazis expected their victims to behave.

The Jewish partisan anthem “Shtil, di nakht iz oysgeshternt”—“Quiet, the Night Is Full of Stars”—written by Hirsh Glick, is associated with Vitka’s daring railway operation. Her resistance entered Jewish memory not as an abstract argument, but as the story of a young woman moving through the darkness with an explosive in her hand.

Her courage was not the absence of fear. It was the decision that fear would not have the final authority over her actions.

The remainder of this essay is for paid subscribers. Your subscription supports independent research and helps preserve the stories of Jewish courage, Zionism, resistance, and survival.

Read more

Support My Independent Research

If you are not ready to become a paid subscriber—or if you currently subscribe for free—you can still support my independent research and writing with a voluntary contribution.

Supporters who contribute US$15 or more will receive one month of complimentary paid access to Sentinel Journal, including this complete article and other subscriber-only content.

After contributing, please send me the email address connected to your Substack account so I can activate your access. I add complimentary access manually, and it will not renew or create a recurring charge.

Thank you for helping me continue researching and preserving these important stories.

Support My Independent Research

Before Tosia Altman became a fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, she was a young Zionist preparing for a different life.

She studied Hebrew. She joined Hashomer Hatzair, the socialist-Zionist youth movement. She trained for agricultural life and hoped to immigrate to Mandatory Palestine, where she could help build a Jewish homeland.

History offered her another path—escape from occupied Poland—and she came close to taking it.

Share

When the Second World War began, Altman reached Vilnius, where some Jewish activists still hoped to find a route out of Europe. She might have continued searching for her own passage to safety.

Instead, she returned to German-occupied Poland.

She understood that the young Jews who had looked to Hashomer Hatzair for instruction, community, and hope were now isolated inside ghettos. Their leaders had to decide whether Zionism was only a plan for a distant future or also a responsibility to Jews facing danger in the present.

Tosia Altman made her choice.

She went back.

Support My Independent Research

Read more

Subscribe now

On May 15, 1944, a Jewish man descended by parachute into northern Italy.

His name was Enzo Sereni. He was thirty-nine years old, a husband and father, an intellectual, an Italian patriot, a socialist Zionist, and one of the founders of a kibbutz in Mandatory Palestine.

He did not have to return to Europe.

Sereni had already escaped the continent on which fascism was tightening its grip. He helped build a Jewish community in his people's ancestral homeland. He had meaningful work, a family, and a future.

Yet while European Jews were being hunted, deported, and murdered, Sereni volunteered to go back.

His objective was to enter German-occupied Italy, make contact with Italian partisans, support the Allied war effort, and reach Jews trapped under Nazi rule. The mission placed him among a remarkable group of Jewish volunteers from Mandatory Palestine who parachuted into occupied Europe during the Holocaust.

Sereni was captured shortly after landing. Six months later, he was murdered at Dachau.

His life poses an unsettling question: What makes a person leave safety and deliberately enter a place from which thousands of others are desperately trying to escape?

The answer lies not only in Sereni’s courage, but also in his understanding of Zionism.

For him, Zionism was not simply the dream of finding refuge. It was the responsibility to build a Jewish society capable of acting—of rescuing, defending, creating, and accepting responsibility for Jews wherever they lived.

Share

An Italian Jew in the age of fascism

Enzo Sereni was born in Rome on April 17, 1905, into a distinguished and highly assimilated Italian Jewish family.

His father, Samuele Sereni, was a physician who served members of the Italian royal household. The family belonged to a Jewish community whose history in Italy extended back more than two thousand years.

Like many Italian Jews of his generation, Sereni inherited more than one identity. He was Jewish and Italian. He was raised in a prosperous European household, received an excellent education, and moved comfortably within Italian society.

Nothing about his childhood suggested he would one day exchange privilege for agricultural labor—or eventually parachute behind enemy lines.

Sereni encountered Zionism while still young. At eighteen, he attended the Thirteenth Zionist Congress in Carlsbad, then Czechoslovakia. The experience helped transform Zionism from an abstract idea into the organizing purpose of his life.

He did not understand Zionism merely as an escape from antisemitism. He saw it as a social and moral revolution.

The Jewish people, in Sereni’s view, needed more than physical protection. They needed the ability to shape their collective future. That required land, labor, political responsibility, cultural renewal, and a society in which Jews were not dependent upon the uncertain tolerance of rulers and majorities.

After earning a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Rome, Sereni married Ada Ascarelli. In 1927, the young couple and their infant daughter left Italy for Mandatory Palestine.

Sereni did not arrive as a wealthy European seeking comfort. He worked in the orange groves of Rehovot.

It was an extraordinary change. The son of a prominent Roman physician became an agricultural laborer under the Mediterranean sun. For Sereni, however, manual labor was not a fall in social standing. It represented participation in rebuilding Jewish national life.

In 1928, Enzo and Ada helped establish Kibbutz Givat Brenner.

The kibbutz became one of the country's largest communal settlements. It represented the Labor Zionist ideal that Jewish sovereignty had to be built through shared work, collective responsibility, and the creation of institutions—not simply through speeches or declarations.

Sereni had begun turning Zionism from philosophy into practice.

Share

A Zionism larger than refuge

It would be easy to describe Sereni only as a pioneering Zionist. But his political thought was more complicated and more interesting than a simple heroic label suggests.

He was a socialist and an opponent of fascism. He believed in Jewish national renewal, yet he also supported cooperation and coexistence between Jews and Arabs.

He was known as a pacifist. During the Arab revolt of the 1930s, accounts of his life describe him performing guard duty without carrying a weapon.

That detail captures one of the contradictions at the center of Sereni’s life. He wanted peace, but he lived in an age that repeatedly demanded confrontation. He opposed violence, yet he eventually volunteered for an extraordinarily dangerous military mission.

This did not necessarily mean that Sereni abandoned his earlier principles. It meant that he recognized a difference between glorifying force and resisting a regime committed to conquest and genocide.

His Zionism was neither passive nor narrowly territorial. Establishing a Jewish home in Mandatory Palestine did not release him from responsibility toward Jews elsewhere. On the contrary, possessing a secure base created new obligations.

A Jewish community capable of organizing farms, unions, schools, and defense forces could also train emissaries, assist refugees, confront fascist propaganda, and send help into occupied Europe.

For Sereni, Jewish self-determination meant Jewish responsibility.

Share

Returning to a darkening Europe

During the early 1930s, Sereni returned to Europe as a Zionist emissary.

The continent he encountered was moving rapidly toward catastrophe. Adolf Hitler became German chancellor in January 1933. The Nazi regime began excluding Jews from professional, cultural, and public life while flooding German society with antisemitic propaganda.

Sereni worked with the Hechalutz movement, which trained young Jews for agricultural life in Mandatory Palestine. He helped prepare prospective immigrants and supported efforts to move Jewish people and resources out of Germany.

He was briefly detained by the Gestapo.

Sereni possessed something that many European Jews urgently needed: a destination and an organized movement capable of helping them reach it. The communities being built in Mandatory Palestine were no longer only a Zionist aspiration. They were becoming possible places of rescue.

This is one reason Sereni’s story matters to any serious discussion of Zionism and the Holocaust.

Zionism did not begin because of the Holocaust; the modern political movement had emerged decades earlier. But the Nazi rise to power demonstrated the deadly danger of permanent Jewish dependence on other governments.

Doors around the world were closing to refugees. Immigration restrictions prevented countless Jews from finding safety. Appeals to conscience were repeatedly subordinated to domestic politics, bureaucracy, and indifference.

Sereni understood that a people without control over immigration, defense, or national policy could plead for refuge but could not guarantee it.

That realization did not turn him away from Europe’s Jews. It drove him back toward them.

Share

Fascism reaches Italian Jews

Italian Fascism initially differed from Nazi racial ideology in significant ways, and Jews remained integrated into Italian public life during the regime’s early years. Some Italian Jews even joined the Fascist Party.

That history can obscure what followed.

Beginning in 1938, Benito Mussolini’s government imposed antisemitic racial laws. Jews were removed from public employment and education, excluded from the armed forces, subjected to restrictions on marriage, and pushed out of important areas of Italian life.

The laws announced that even deeply rooted, culturally integrated Italian Jews could be reclassified as outsiders.

In September 1943, Italy’s surrender to the Allies brought an even more dangerous transformation. German forces occupied northern and central Italy, rescued Mussolini, and installed him as head of the collaborationist Italian Social Republic.

Under German occupation, persecution escalated into arrest and deportation. Nazi authorities and their collaborators rounded up Jews in Rome, Milan, Florence, Genoa, Trieste, and other cities. Transit camps were established to imprison people before deporting them, principally to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The country of Sereni’s birth had become a battleground. Italian partisans fought the German occupation and Mussolini’s remaining forces. Jews went into hiding, joined resistance formations, sought escape routes, or depended upon neighbors and strangers willing to risk their own lives.

Sereni could not remain an observer.

Share

The Jewish parachutists

During the Second World War, Sereni joined the British Army and took part in antifascist activity in Egypt. He also worked in Iraq, where he supported Zionist organizing and clandestine Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine.

He later helped organize a parachute unit created through cooperation between British authorities and the Jewish Agency.

Hundreds volunteered. More than one hundred reportedly received some degree of training, but only a small number were ultimately sent into occupied Europe.

Their assignment combined several objectives. They were expected to assist Allied intelligence and military operations, contact local resistance movements, and, where possible, reach endangered Jewish communities.

The two purposes did not always fit comfortably together.

Britain’s primary concern was winning the war. The Jewish volunteers were also driven by the desire to reach Jews facing annihilation. Military planners evaluated missions strategically; the volunteers carried a sense of national and personal obligation.

The group included several figures who would become symbols of Jewish resistance, including Hannah Senesh and Haviva Reik.

Sereni was older than many of the other volunteers. At thirty-nine, he had a wife, children, and significant responsibilities. He was not a young person searching for adventure. He understood both the mission's danger and the life he might lose.

Because he was a senior organizer, Sereni could have stayed behind. He could have argued that his experience made him more valuable as a planner, recruiter, or political representative.

Instead, he insisted on going.

His decision gave moral weight to the program he had helped create. Sereni would not ask younger volunteers to accept a danger that he was unwilling to face himself.

Read more

Subscribe now

As the sun sets on September 20, Jewish communities throughout Israel and around the world will enter Yom Kippur—the Day of Atonement and the holiest day of the Jewish year.

For approximately twenty-five hours, ordinary life gives way to fasting, prayer, and self-examination. In Israel, roads become quiet, businesses close, and the noise of daily life recedes. Families and congregations gather to ask forgiveness, reflect on their failures, and consider how they might live differently in the year ahead.

The silence of Yom Kippur is not empty. It asks a difficult question: Have we been honest with ourselves?

That question applies to individuals, but it can also apply to nations.

For Israel, Yom Kippur carries a second meaning tied to the events of October 6, 1973. On that day, as much of the country fasted and prayed, Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated surprise attack against Israeli forces in the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights.

Share

The sacred silence was broken by sirens and emergency mobilization orders. Synagogues became places where reservists were called by name and told to report to their units. Families watched husbands, sons, fathers and brothers leave without knowing when—or whether—they would return.

The Yom Kippur War was not only a military conflict. It was a national reckoning.

Fifty-three years later, its central lesson remains painfully relevant: a country can be militarily powerful, technologically advanced and supported by capable intelligence services—and still misunderstand the danger before it.

Israel ultimately recovered from its initial setbacks and changed the course of the war. Yet survival did not erase the failures that preceded it or the terrible price paid by its soldiers and their families.

On Yom Kippur 2026, remembrance should therefore mean more than commemorating the past. It should require us to consider what repentance means for a nation responsible for protecting its people's lives.

Read more

Subscribe now

In October 1944, Gisi Fleischmann sat in her office in Bratislava answering a request from a Jew in hiding.

German forces had occupied Slovakia. Jewish resistance networks were collapsing, deportations had resumed, and many of Fleischmann’s colleagues had already been arrested. She had been offered opportunities to escape, but she had repeatedly refused to leave while other Jews remained in danger.

Before she could finish her response, the SS arrived.

Fleischmann reportedly managed to write only a few final words: “Regrettably, I am at the lion’s mouth.”

She was arrested, interrogated, and taken to the Sered concentration camp. Two days later, she was placed aboard the last transport from Slovakia to Auschwitz.

Beside her name, SS officer Alois Brunner ordered the letters R.U. to be written—Rückkehr unerwünscht, or “return undesirable.”

Gisi Fleischmann was never meant to return.

Her life raises a haunting question: What does leadership mean when every available choice carries danger, uncertainty, and the possibility of failure?

The complete essay is reserved for paid subscribers. Your support makes it possible for me to continue producing independent writing on Jewish history, Zionism, antisemitism, and the people whose courage must not be forgotten.

Read more

When Hannah Senesh reached Mandatory Palestine in 1939, she had escaped the tightening circle of antisemitism in Europe. She was only eighteen, but she had already made a life-defining choice: she would leave her native Hungary and help build a Jewish future in her people's ancestral homeland.

She had reached safety.

Yet less than five years later, Senesh willingly returned to a Europe in which Jews were being deported and murdered. Trained as a paratrooper, she crossed enemy lines as part of a dangerous wartime mission. She knew that capture could mean torture and death. Still, she went.

Why would someone who had escaped return?

That question lies at the heart of Hannah Senesh’s remarkable life. Her story is not only one of wartime bravery. It is a story about Jewish responsibility, Zionism, poetry, sacrifice, and the moral meaning of courage during the Holocaust.

The complete essay below is reserved for subscribers. Thank you for supporting independent writing devoted to Jewish history, memory, and the struggle against antisemitism.

Read more

Subscribe now

Twenty-five years after the attacks, remembrance must be more than a ritual. It must be a commitment to truth, courage, and defending human dignity.

Every year, September 11 asks us to stop.

I write these words as a Japanese citizen from across the Pacific. September 11 is not part of my national history in the same way that it is for Americans, and I wou…

Read more

Subscribe now

Dear Subscribers

As Jewish communities in Israel and around the world prepare to observe Rosh Hashanah, I extend my warmest wishes to everyone celebrating.

May the New Year bring you and your loved ones peace, good health, renewed strength, and many moments of sweetness. To those carrying grief, uncertainty, or worry, may the coming year offer comfort and…

Read more

In a world often dominated by conflict and uncertainty, Shabbat reminds us to pause, reflect, and appreciate the blessings that remain around us. May this sacred time bring comfort and renewed strength to you and your loved ones.

Read more

Share

As Rosh Hashanah draws near, Elul invites my Jewish friends to reflect on what it means to live openly in Jewish time—and to pray for Israel, for life, and for peace.

Shabbat Shalom.

There is something different about this Shabbat.

People have entered Elul, the final month of the Jewish year. Rosh Hashanah is approaching, and with it comes that familiar sense that time itself is asking something of us.

Elul is not simply a countdown to the High Holy Days. It is an invitation.

An invitation to remember.

An invitation to examine oneself.

An invitation to return.

And perhaps, especially now, an invitation to consider what we are grateful for.

Living in Jewish Time

For generations, Jews observed Shabbat wherever history carried them.

They welcomed Shabbat in Jerusalem and Baghdad, Warsaw and Casablanca, London and New York. They lit candles in safety and in danger. They whispered prayers when speaking them aloud was difficult. They passed traditions from parent to child even when the surrounding world told them that those traditions did not belong.

The Jewish calendar survived because Jewish people refused to forget it.

And today, something extraordinary exists.

A country exists where Friday afternoon changes the rhythm of an entire society.

There is a country where Rosh Hashanah is not merely a religious observance tucked quietly into someone else’s calendar, but part of the calendar of the nation itself.

There is a country where Hebrew—the language of ancient Jewish prayer, scripture and memory—is spoken in supermarkets, universities, hospitals, cafés and homes.

That country is Israel.

For all its imperfections, arguments, divisions and political struggles, the existence of a Jewish state means that Jewish time can once again be lived not only privately, but nationally.

There is nothing shameful about that.

Share

Israel Has the Right to Exist

This should not be a radical statement:

Israel has the right to exist.

A nation in which Jewish holidays are observed is not committing a sin simply by existing.

A Jewish child should not have to apologize for growing up in a country where Rosh Hashanah is a national holiday. A Jewish family should not have to justify why Shabbat belongs naturally to the rhythm of its society. And Jewish people should not be asked to regard their own national existence as an offense that requires perpetual explanation.

None of this means that Israel is beyond criticism.

No country is.

Supporting Israel’s right to exist does not require believing that every Israeli government decision is correct. Nor does affirming Jewish self-determination require indifference to the dignity or suffering of other peoples.

We should be able to hold moral convictions without surrendering our humanity.

Indeed, Elul demands something more difficult than choosing between conviction and compassion.

It asks us to carry both.

Read more

The ceasefire is over, shattered by the very hands that signed it. President Trump confirmed its demise from the sidelines of the NATO summit in Ankara, and within hours, American strikes backed those words with devastating precision: over eighty targets across Iran were hit, extending to the perimeter of the Bushehr nuclear facility and the Kharg Island oil terminal—the lifeblood of ninety percent of Iran’s crude exports. For three weeks, the region indulged in the illusion of peace. But that illusion required ignoring a fundamental reality: Tehran never intended to keep it.

It is time to look honestly at what the Islamabad memorandum actually was. Signed in June with a grand ceremony at the Palace of Versailles, it was treated by the West as a stepping stone toward stability. For Iran, however, it was merely a tactical intermission. Tehran used the sixty-day window not to negotiate in good faith, but to protect the very elements driving this conflict. Its ballistic missile program went untouched. Its financing of regional proxy networks went untouched. The nuclear file was deferred, not resolved. By treating the memorandum as a shield to preserve its aggressive capabilities rather than a bridge to peace, Iran made the resumption of hostilities inevitable.

Read more

If you’ve read this far, you already know this space isn’t about chasing numbers or churning out content on a schedule. It’s about thinking things through honestly, even when that means going quiet for a while.

I want to keep it that way. But I also want to be upfront about something: the work behind Sentinel Journal doesn’t stop at writing. A lot of what I care about — [describe your humanitarian cause / work here] — takes real time, resources, and support to move forward.

That’s why I’m opening up founding memberships.

Subscribe now

Becoming a founding member isn’t just a subscription — it’s a direct vote of confidence in the kind of work I’m trying to do, both here and beyond the page. It helps me spend less time worrying about sustainability and more time doing the work that actually matters: [one or two concrete examples of what support enables — research, travel, direct aid, time freed up, etc.]

In return, founding members will get [list any perks: early posts, behind-the-scenes notes, direct access, name in an acknowledgments page, etc. — or say “my gratitude, plainly and sincerely” if you’d rather keep it perk-free].

This isn’t a hard sell. I know not everyone is in a position to contribute financially, and reading, sharing, and simply being here matters too. But if you’ve been thinking about it, or if what I do here — or the causes behind it — means something to you, this is the moment I’d ask you to consider it.

Thank you, genuinely, for being here.

Subscribe now

It’s been a while since I’ve written here, and I want to start with that instead of pretending otherwise.

The last stretch has been full — full in the way that doesn’t leave much room for anything else. Life has a way of asking for your full attention sometimes, and when it does, the writing is usually the first thing to go quiet. Not because it stopped mattering, but because there wasn’t space left to give it.

I didn’t want to force something out just to maintain the appearance of consistency. Sentinel Journal has always felt like a place for honest thinking, not obligation, so I let it sit.

Read more

Dear Readers,

I am thrilled to share a very special behind-the-scenes update with the community here at Hannah Klein’s Time: Indo-Pacific Dispatch.

Recently, a wonderful connection on X (formerly Twitter) led to an incredible opportunity: I have formally extended an invitation to U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee for an exclusive 30-minute interview…

Read more

Subscribe now

Airing This Wednesday at:

• 🇯🇵 9:00 PM Tokyo

• 🇮🇱 3:00 PM Jerusalem

• 🇺🇸 8:00 AM EDT

  Share

Get ready for an incredibly deep, eye-opening conversation dropping tomorrow. This Wednesday, we are airing an exclusive, pre-recorded interview with successful entrepreneur Sagi Simchon.

Sagi brings a truly unique perspective to the microphone. Beyond his business acumen an…

Read more

There is a profound, rotten disconnect between the elegant rhetoric of Western diplomacy and the cold reality of its execution on the ground. I experienced this gap firsthand today…

Read more

Sheikh Bader(left) with the Prime Minister of India.

Subscribe now

I am incredibly honored to announce that Sheikh Bader will be joining the podcast this coming Wednesday, June 17th.

In this episode, we dive deep into our ongoing crowdfunding project—a mission driven entirely by our shared humanity and the urgent need to support those caught in crisis. Sheikh Bader bri…

Read more

If you spend enough time on social media platforms like X, TikTok, or Instagram, you have likely encountered short clips of vintage world cinema stripped of context and repackaged for quick algorithms. Often, the captions are not just slightly inaccurate—they are completely fabricated, rewriting the entire political or cultural narrative of the source m…

Read more