Lihi Lapid can pinpoint the exact moment she realized that her life had changed. It was a year ago, on the morning after the general elections in Israel. Her husband, Yair Lapid, a former television host, had just secured an upset victory, with his centrist Yesh Atid list becoming the second-largest party in the country. “It’s 7:07, and I need to send the kids to school,” Lihi Lapid recalled the other day, on a visit to New York. So, without thinking, she threw on a sweater over her pajamas and headed out the door—straight into an onslaught of paparazzi. That’s when she decided to change one thing about her new life: “I went and I bought a decent pajama.”
These days, Lapid, who is 46, cuts a striking figure, with long dark hair and steel blue eyes. Her husband is now Israel’s finance minister; she still writes a popular column in the the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot that mixes recipes with romantic and family-related anecdotes. She was in the U.S. to promote her newly translated book, Woman of Valor, a semi-autobiographical novel that details, among other things, the struggles she and her husband—who’s referred to in the book solely as “my man”—suffered when their young daughter was diagnosed with autism. Her tour included a talk at an apartment in SoHo hosted by a board member of the American Friends of Yesh Atid, a New Jersey-based nonprofit dedicated to help the nascent Israeli party “generate dialogue, unity and mutual respect among different Jewish groups.”
From Tablet Magazine
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