Mount Hermon, the highest point in the country, has a ski area and a listening post tuned to Syria. Military barracks along the highways look like ramshackle prisons surrounded by rolling spirals of razor wire. Army checkpoints sprout up along major highways at the slightest rumor of trouble. It can be a harrowing place to live. This is real war, with real terrorists blowing themselves up in the midst of everyday life.
Words turn to rocks, rubber bullets to real ones.
After all, they aren't Holocaust survivors trying to carve out a homeland any longer. And there's Lebanon. Once, all Israel's wars were fought for the country's survival. Still, the questions tend to be short-lived, and the answers will come from a place in the heart, from the ties that bind families, no matter how much distance or circumstance separate them. It is these ties of the heart that Naomi Weiss considers in her search for what it means to be Jewish.