Want to understand Israel like an Israeli? Our friend Noga Brenner Samia has a suggestion. Learn the Israeli Declaration of Independence. At Limmud Bay Area 2018 Festival she will walk us through the text and help us learn it as a secular text and contemplate what makes it sacred.
Noga was raised both in New York and Netanya, Israel. After serving as a sergeant in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), Noga attained a B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering and Management from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, an MBA at Washington University in St. Louis and an MA in Pluralistic Jewish Education from HUC/Hebrew University, Jerusalem. She worked in the military and the pharmaceutical industries in finance, sales and marketing. In 2005, Noga joined KolDor, a global network of young Jewish leaders promoting Jewish Peoplehood, as executive director. She is the founder of a Jewish renewal community in Tel-Mond, where she lives with her husband and three children. She is currently Deputy Director at BINA: The Jewish Movement for Social Change and a teacher at the Secular Yeshiva in Tel Aviv. She wrote in her BINA profile, “BINA means ‘Home for the Creation of a Nation’s Soul’…for me it just means ‘home’.”