Listen to Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu (right) speak, and he sounds distinctly... well, American. There's actually a good reason for that, which is that he spent a good part of his teenage years in Philadelphia.
While Netanyahu doesn't exactly keep his Philadelphia years a secret, he doesn't really talk too much about them, either... which, to be fair, is how a lot of people deal with their high school years. He and his brother, Yonathan, moved to the city when their father started teaching college at what's now the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, and a letter his brother wrote shows just how out-of-place they felt. Yonathan described their school as having "about 1,500 students who don't know what they're doing here," and while he said the school, their neighborhood, and their home were very nice, he added that it was an "empty, meaningless life."
The Washington Post tracked down some of his old classmates, who gave some insight into what he was like. Deborah Lefco described him as being firmly opposed to the counter-counterculture, saying, "It was the Vietnam era and we were all against the war in Vietnam because we were kids. He was the lone voice in the wilderness in support of the conservative line in those days." Others remembered him as friendly but serious, a member of the chess club and soccer team, and emotionally much older and much more cynical than his years.
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