Beyond Division: The Resilient Lives of Thirty Diverse Israeli Women Leaders by Bilha Chesner Fish, M.D.; New York: Wicked Son Book, an Imprint of Post Hill Press; © 2025; ISBN 9798888-456668; 284 pages; $19.99.
SAN DIEGO – This book has 30 biographical sketches, which are divided into six sections: 4 Healers; 11 Leaders and Ambassadors; 4 academics; 2 artists; 5 innovators; and 4 philanthropists and entrepreneurs.
I chose to focus on four women whose stories were told in the Leaders and Ambassadors section: Varda Goldstein; Gadeer Kamal-Mreeh; Pnina Tamano-Shata; and Tal Ohana.
Varda Goldstein has long been associated with Sha’ar Hanegev, San Diego’s sister municipality known in English as the Gateway to the Negev. It is a collection of 10 kibbutzim and one moshav clustered near the border with Gaza. Goldstein’s kibbutz, Kfar Aza, was among the hardest hit by Hamas marauders on Oct. 7, 2023. Goldstein lost her son Nadav, 48, and granddaughter Yam, 20. Nadav’s wife Chen was taken hostage along with three children: Agam, 17; Tal, 11, and Gal, 9. They were released in a ceasefire deal after 51 days of captivity.
Goldstein and her husband, David, were vacationing in Bulgaria at the time; otherwise she, the granddaughter of Holocaust victims, might also have perished. As it was, 100 residents of Kfar Aza were murdered.
Like many Israeli families who immigrated to British Mandatory Palestine in the 1930s, the Golombs (Varda’s maiden name) were Ashkenazi Jews who lived and breathed hopeful Zionism. When Varda and David moved to Kfar Aza, it was an agricultural settlement, although the economy subsequently required some industrialization.
Despite all, Goldstein remains optimistic: “The Jewish nation is alive and will stay alive forever,” she declares.
Gadeer Kamal-Mreeh is a Druze woman from the town of Daliyat al-Karmel, near Haifa. She parlayed prime time spots anchoring Arabic-language and Hebrew-language television newscasts into her election as a Knesset member. She was subsequently chosen by the Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI) to be its envoy to the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington.
She has a bachelor’s degree in social science from Bar-Ilan University and a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Haifa.
Kamal-Mreeh told author Chesner Fish that “true leaders have to prioritize but not work in a narrow prism of serving just one specific sector, in order to highlight issues. We must see the macro perspective and be active through multiple layers. I cannot limit my work saying, ‘Okay, I’m Druze, so I am going to serve 150,000 Druze and that’s it.’ I am part of the Arab sector, which includes Circassians, Muslims, Bedouins, Christians – the non-Jewish sector in Israel. So, I represent and serve them proudly as well. When working at the national level, I serve the entire Israeli population, too, and beyond. As a human being, I am a citizen of the globe. There are global challenges in the twenty-first century for all of us, and we must see the entire picture and cooperate and work together as global leaders.”
Especially when speaking on American college campuses, she says, “My role is to highlight the beautiful faces of Israel, and to be able to talk about the less beautiful faces of Israel. Imperfection is part of managing countries. It’s intrinsic to the international arena. There isn’t one perfect country in the world, including modern Western liberal democracies. Each country is facing its set of domestic challenges and regional problems; and so are we. Israel is a young state and works hard to better itself. We made mistakes in the past and presently will make more. Our neighbors, too, made and are making mistakes – there is no simple dichotomy of black and white, wrong and right. We are living in a very complicated region with complicated struggles.”
Pnina Tamano-Shata was three years old when her family migrated to Israel from Ethiopia. They were airlifted to Israel in 1984’s Operation Moses from a clandestine refugee camp in Sudan. Thirty-six years later, as a member of the Knesset, she was appointed as Israel’s Minister of Immigrant Absorption—the first Ethiopian-born citizen to hold that office.
Her black skin caused her to be discriminated against. She wasn’t allowed into a swimming club, and when she shopped, she was eyed with suspicion by White store employees. During the AIDS crisis, Ethiopian blood donations were regularly and surreptitiously dumped in the belief that Africans carried the virus.
A television journalist for five years, she turned to politics and in 2013. She was the first Ethiopian-born Israeli to be elected to the Knesset as a member of the Yesh Atid (There is a future) party. As absorption minister, she navigated an influx of immigrants after the onset of the Russian-Ukraine War. She secured millions of Israeli shekels for housing, job training, education, and daily living expenses for 120,000 new immigrants from the war theatre and the rest of the world.
Tal Ohana, the Israeli-born daughter of Moroccan immigrants, today is the mayor of Yeruham, a multi-ethnic town in the Negev. It is located 15 kilometers from Dimona, seat of Israel’s nuclear industry.
Ohana served as director of the Young People’s Association, which focused on youth at risk, as well as on leadership programs. She also developed outreach programs to Jewish youth in Morocco, encouraging travel to Israel and fostering friendships between Muslims and Jews in Morocco.
Mayor Michal Biton appointed her, at age 26, to be deputy mayor of Yeruham, and later she served as acting mayor. She commented modestly, “I didn’t understand what he saw in me. But he believed in my potential and told me that I had a lot to give back to this community.” In that office, Ohana focused on early childhood concerns, health and welfare, culture, education and employment.
Elected mayor in her own right, she attracted national attention when she proposed that Yeruham become the leader in the medical cannabis industry and in computerized solutions for specialized problems. She has set a five-year goal of a thousand new jobs in Yeruham.
Goldstein, Kamal-Mreeh, Tamano-Shata, and Ohana are four women of diverse ethnic backgrounds. Respectively, their families hail from Eastern Europe, a Druze village, Ethiopia, and Morocco, yet they are united in being female pioneers with strong patriotic feelings for Israel.
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Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World