*Fauda | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | September 4, 2026*
This week I wrote on Facebook that my daughters did not start the school year on September 1. Instead, they will start a week later, and somewhere else - because over the summer we packed a few bags and traveled to an island in western Canada, an island that has 3,000 trees for each person who lives on it, and where for every 14 people there is a bear or a deer.
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I wrote on Facebook that we needed to be somewhere with nature and quiet - ever since the missile fell and hit our home. Almost two years have passed, but anyone who has lived through a missile strike knows that no matter how much time passes, the missile keeps falling inside you with every siren or boom or even talk on the news about tensions escalating in the region. That missile was cleared from the street very quickly, but it left terror inside us, terror that returned in full force with every siren. Until at some point it became clear that we needed to get away for a while in order to heal from it.
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I wrote on Facebook about how an American friend asked us, But why Canada? It’s the worst there! And he meant the worst for Jews. Canada recorded nearly 800 anti-Jewish incidents last year, 95 percent of Jewish students reported encountering antisemitism, and in the United States, just this week, Trump made headlines when he spoke about an official personal appeal he had received from Canadian Jews asking him to create an expedited immigration pathway for them.
Because of antisemitism.
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And still, I felt that at this moment I needed to be on this side of the world - in the place where my journey began on October 7, when I was teaching in California and encountered antisemitism for the first time. My time in the U.S. then diverted me from my usual path and has since led me to meet communities, students, conferences on antisemitism, delegations, IDF commanders, and other leadership bodies. To be interviewed on podcasts in the U.S., to write and publish articles in Israel and abroad, and of course my latest poetry collection, The Wandering Jewess, which won the President’s Wife Prize, is also a direct result of this journey.
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I felt that this was my time to do the work of being with the Jewish people, and that I needed to do that work here, with half of the Jewish people who live in these parts of the world, and whose world has been shaking for a long time now.
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So over the coming year I will be here, meeting communities all across North America and also taking part as a fellow in a Jewish leadership program, but I’ll write more about all of that another time. For now, I want to tell you about something small but enormous that happened to us this week after I published that post.
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And it has to do with the fact that despite all the statistics and stories about antisemitism in Canada, even on our remote island I still have no idea what to say when people ask where we’re from. How to figure out who is asking, and how dangerous it might be to tell the truth.
And this week we had a meeting at school.
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It was a meeting ahead of the start of the school year. They wanted to meet the new girl who had arrived. And I thought to myself, What will happen? What if they already have an opinion about us before we’ve even arrived? What if they look at us with hostility, or ask difficult questions, or ask nothing at all but hide what they really think? What will happen to my daughters?
And then we walked into the counselor’s office.
He didn’t even look up at me, and I immediately thought, That’s it, Maya, he can’t even look you in the eye.
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He asked my daughter what he could help her with, and my daughter asked to switch from one class on her schedule to another. The school has lots of electives, including yoga and creative writing and drama and stargazing. And my daughter asked to switch to woodworking. The counselor nodded and changed something on his computer. And all this time he still hadn’t looked at me even once, and I was shrinking further and further into my chair.
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But then he finished with the schedule and looked up and asked my daughter: Tell me, what was school like in Israel? What kind of schedule did you have? And she told him. And he asked, How many kids were there in your class? In your grade? And she told him. And how did you manage to study with all the tension of the past few years?
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At that, my daughter fell silent for a moment. And then, for the first time, he looked at me too.
And my daughter said that Tel Aviv is a city full of life and full of joy, but that the past few years had not been easy.
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She didn’t tell him about the missile in Israel, or the antisemitism we encountered in California, or the sirens and shelters, the buildings that collapsed in our neighborhood. She simply said, “The past few years have not been easy.”
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Then the counselor was quiet for a moment and said, I can absolutely imagine. I’m watching this series on Netflix called Fauda. I keep trying to explain to my friends that until you’ve actually been somewhere, you can’t have such definite opinions about it. I watch this show and I realize that we understand nothing. That we can’t even imagine what it looks like where you come from.
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And then the two of us fell silent too.
We were silent not only because we still haven’t seen Fauda.
But because after what he said, there was nothing for us to say. What else is there to say?
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Because after being so afraid of this meeting at this far edge of the world, we found ourselves sitting across from someone who is almost finished with the fifth season of Fauda. He asked my daughter, Do you know Arabic? And she said yes, everyone at school studied Arabic.
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And he slowly shook his head from side to side. He said, I haven’t finished the latest season yet. Then he added: If anyone says something to you, if you feel uncomfortable, or if someone asks you a question you don’t have an answer to, do one thing - come to me.
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And that was it.
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When we walked out, I had tears in my eyes. Partly from relief, because I really had been afraid beforehand. And partly because somehow, after all the advocacy and all the efforts online and all the writing everywhere, in the end one television series overtook all of it and did the best job of explaining. Someone watching Fauda on his television on an island with billions of trees and bears and deer told my daughter this week to come to him whenever she needs.
And my daughter smiled. And became optimistic. And went to buy herself things for school.
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And that’s the story.
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So if you have connections with Jewish communities or universities that you think it’s important for me to visit - I would be so happy if you wrote to me, and I hope we can do good and beautiful things together. And to everyone who was about to write or ask, I’ll answer in advance - we’ll come back to vote. That, too, is part of being with the Jewish people today.
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Wishing all of us Shabbat shalom,
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*Maya Tevet Dayan*