The chat I was having with the German journalist sitting next to me at dinner naturally got round to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s victory in the elections a week earlier [Sept. 23]. We were a group of Israelis that arrived in Berlin for the annual meeting with our German counterparts over the last days of Sukkot, on a program that began in 2000 to promote Israeli-German leadership.
Once we had said just about everything there was to say about Merkel, my colleague told me about his wife, who was, like him, in her forties. He told me that she has a challenging job, so I asked instinctively, “Who watches your children when you’re both at work?”