Two years after settling in Israel with Lia, Moran Atias returned to the US; now writing a series based on her life, she talks about insecurity, fewer Hollywood offers as an Israeli and raising her daughter abroad without her parents nearby; still, she says, ‘I have a mission: to represent Israel to the world’A few nights ago, as Moran Atias was cuddling with her young daughter before bedtime, the 3.5-year-old suddenly said something that made her heart tighten.“She said, ‘I want a father,’” Atias recalls. “I took a breath and asked her, ‘Why do you want a father?’ She answered, ‘Because I want to play with him.’ I told her, ‘Okay, but you can play with Grandpa Mordy, with Uncle Stephen,’ and that was it. It ended there.”5 View gallery Moran with her daughter Lia (Photo: Michael Becker )Has she already asked why she does not have a father, or who her father is?
“Not yet, but I’m preparing myself for it,” Atias says. “I know I’ll want to choose the right words, because words have so much power. On the other hand, it doesn’t stress me out. Let’s put it this way: I’m not going to invent storks. It’s important to me that she understand that I chose her, and that I did everything to become her mother.”Atias has spoken often about her journey into single motherhood, which also became a central part of her widely discussed TED talk. But amid the story of her decision to have a child on her own, she also revealed something darker: the destructive relationship she had with herself for years, one that only recently, and especially since her daughter Lia was born, has begun to change.Atias says she went through harmful experiences both after arriving in Hollywood and in toxic relationships, “the kind where I would stand in front of my partner and be unable to answer him,” she says. “Silent as a fish.”Only through therapy, she says, did she understand that the little girl who had been hurt was still inside her, and that healing meant learning how to speak to that girl and tell her she was wonderful exactly as she was.As part of her effort to change unhealthy patterns, Atias has also deepened her practice of meditation this year.“I started 2026 at a Joe Dispenza retreat,” she says. “I saw pictures with a sunset and a beach and thought: wow, lying around, cocktails and a little meditation. In the end, I arrived at a marathon that starts at 5 a.m. and ends at 11 p.m. in a windowless hall. By the end of the fifth day, my body was convulsing. But it also released so many years of trauma, and then the questions came up: what do I want, and what am I asking for myself?”Last year, Atias checked off another item on her list when she acted for the first time alongside her younger sister Shani, who also moved to Los Angeles and built an acting career.It happened in Amazon Prime’s biblical series “Joseph of Egypt,” which, according to reports, is expected to air next year. Shani played Rachel, while Moran played her maidservant Bilhah. Beyond the joy of acting with her sister, Atias says she especially loved playing, for the first time in her Hollywood career, a Jewish character.5 View gallery (Photo: Michael Becker)Atias has always felt connected to Judaism and Israel, but since October 7, that connection has intensified. After years of not wearing Jewish symbols, she now wears a large chai necklace. She also speaks out and fights publicly for Israel, creates activist content for social media and hopes to continue playing Jewish characters.“There are very few roles like that in Hollywood today,” she says. “‘Boycott’ may be a hard word to use, but it is definitely close to reality. I feel my purpose is to bring Jewish characters and values to the screen, and that I am also the one who has to create that reality.”That is why, alongside other projects she is developing, she is now writing a series based on her own life, focusing on the period in which she decided to have a child on her own. She says her story has helped “hundreds of men and women, if not thousands, choose themselves,” and she hopes the series will continue to inspire others.“The first episode takes place around the Shabbat table,” she says. “I tell my father I want to have a child through sperm donation, and he says he needs to consult the rabbi.”Will it be a drama series?
