Welcome back to Israel Seminar! It’s been a long month without our boys (Dave, Paul, and Jeremy) but we’re back to business here at HUC. This week’s topic for Israel Seminar was “Gender and Sexual Identity in Israeli Society”, and here is Molly’s Top 5 for the day:

1. Anat Hoffman, Executive Director of the Israel Religious Action Center and former Jerusalem councilor started off the day. She won me over by using adorable phrases like “it was raining giraffes and hippopotami”…how does she know I have a weakness for giraffes?!

2. My favorite line from Anat Hoffman’s speech - “Israel is too important to leave to the Israelis.”

3. Visiting Jerusalem Open House, an organization that provides direct services to the LGBTQ community and advocates for social change.

4. Part 2 of the day - the changing representation of women in Israeli film. As always, I love a good film session with Jeremy Leigh.

5. Jeremy Leigh made reference to THIS blog in his lecture! The amazing thing was that he didn’t say “Molly and Bess’s blog”, but he referred to it as “THE blog” and everyone knew exactly which blog he was talking about!