Israeli ‘Start-Up’ Magnet for American Non-Jews

Israel’s reputation as an incubator for Start-Ups has attracted non-Jewish Americans who have settled into successful careers, The Christian Science Monitor reported.

The new immigrants have a downside because some of the non-Jewish entrepreneurs have married Israeli girls. Although their children are Jewish according to Jewish law, the chances of their growing up in a Jewish tradition is low.

The Monitor related the story of Port Huron, Michigan native Cameron Peron, who “left the US in 2005, feeling it had largely lost its entrepreneurial spark.”

Armed with a degree in international business and marketing from the University of Arizona, he met an Israeli girl in San Diego and moved with her to Tel Aviv. They are married, and he is the vice president of marketing at Newvem, a cloud-optimization and analytics firm that works with Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure.

The main reason I’ve chosen to stay here is because of the start-up scene,” he told the Monitor. “There’s a special kind of approach to business, creating something out of nothing. The drive to build something, to make it happen against all odds … I didn’t see that in the US.”