Israel from the Inside, with Daniel Gordis: Recent Episodes
dgordis
Welcome to Israel from the Inside with Daniel Gordis. Israel from the Inside will attempt to break out of the echo chamber surfacing the wide array of often conflicting view points that make up the mosaic of Israeli life. The podcast will discuss issues related to Zionism, Israel, and the future of the Jewish state.
June 7 is the anniversary of Israel's attack on the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq, which inaugurated the "Begin doctrine," a position that said Israel will never allow one of its enemies to acquire a weapon of mass destruction. With Iran and the possible renewal of the JCPOA back in the news, we turned to Chuck Freilich, a noted author, scholar and former deputy national security adviser in Israel, to ask him about the threat.
Is the threat real? Is there anything Israel can do? Is there anything Israel should do? What he thinks Israel should do will surprise you.
Here is a brief excerpt from the conclusion of our conversation, not the part about Iraq, but where Freilich reflects on what Israel really is. The full conversation, for paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside, will post on June 8.
Why was Israel created? As simple as that question sounds, the answer is not as obvious as it might seem. Refuge? Sort of, but not really. Millions of Israelis don't live day by day, year by year so that one day, if there's a need, there will be a refuge for Jews who need it. We're pleased that the refuge is there, but it's not enough to justify the country. What, then, does explain the need for Israel? Part of what we need to ask is "what was Israel created to change?" What was Israel meant to do to and for the Jewish people?
On the eve of our celebration of the Festival of Freedom, some thoughts that I shared with two American Jewish communities a few months ago, right before Hanukkah. This is a brief excerpt ... the full episode will post last this week, for paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
In his newest book, A Complicated Jew: Selected Essays, the prolific, brilliant, creative and provocative essayist, Hillel Halkin, writes as follows:
A few years ago, I participated in a panel discussion about Israel and the Diaspora held in Washington, D.C. As I generally do on such occasions, I spoke my mind. When the time came for questions from the audience, a man rose and asked me:
“Even if you’re right about the inconsequentiality of Jewish life in the Diaspora compared with that in Israel, suppose, God forbid, that Israel should destroyed by a nuclear attack. Wouldn’t you be glad then that American Jewry existed, so that it wouldn’t be the end of the Jewish people?”
“To tell you the truth,” I answered spontaneously, “if Israel were destroyed, I hope it would be the end of the Jewish people.”
There was a shocked silence before another questioner was called on. When the evening was over, a fellow panelist turned to me and said, “I hope you didn’t mean that.” I thought for a moment.
“Yes,” I said. “I did.” If Israel should ever go under, I would not want there to be any more Jews in the world. What for?"
Ever since his book Letters to an American Jewish Friend, Halkin has been the Anglo voice speaking with prophetic urgency to American Jews. This essay struck me as even more pointed, so I reached out to discuss it with him, to ask him why he feels that without Israel, he hopes that Judaism would cease to exist. Here's our conversation, which I suspect could well be interesting fodder for your Seder table.
Alex emigrated with her parents from Ukraine in 1991 at the age of five. She soon realized that if she wanted to fit in she was going to have to stop being "Russian," and for 20 years she erased her Soviet identity and tried to become a "real Israeli." This meant volunteering with the school board as a student, becoming an officer in the IDF and graduating from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a B.A. in business and political science and an M.A. in public policy, as part of the Cadets for Public Service program. After graduation, she started working as an advisor to the Senior Deputy Director General in the Ministry of Economy.
Once she felt "Israeli" she realized something was missing: that "thing" was her. Alex started studying screenwriting in the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School, and noticed that she kept returning to the theme of immigration experiences. At the same time, she started initiating Russian cultural events for Hebrew speakers, as a way to share the Russian immigrant story through art.
Alex is CEO of the One Million Lobby, a lobby that represents the interests or the one million Israelis from the Soviet Union and FSU. She spoke with us about the challenges that many of those immigrants faced, and what she and her colleagues are doing to ensure that new immigrants have a very different experience.
The full episode with Alex will post on Thursday, for paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
If you haven’t read Dara Horn’s most recent book, People Love Dead Jews, you should. It’s beyond powerful, and exceptionally beautifully written.
With Purim just days away, here’s a quote from her book (page 12):
Gradowksi tells us how he escorted the thousands of women and young children into the disrobing room, marveling at how “these same women who now pulsed with life would lie in dirt and filth, their pure bodies smeared with human excrement.” He describes how the mothers kiss their children’s limbs, how sisters clutch each other, how one woman asks him “Say, brother, how long does it take to die? It is easy or hard?” Once the women are naked, Gradowksi and his fellow prisoners escort them through a gauntlet of SS officers who gathered for this special occasion- a night gassing arranged intentionally on the eve of Purim, the biblical festival celebrating the Jews’ narrow escape from a planned genocide.”
The Nazis’ use of Jewish holidays to torment not just the bodies, but the minds, hearts and souls of the Jews, needs to be better known. They used Purim, but also Rosh HaShanah, Passover and more … all in ways that showed a diabolical understanding of the Jewish calendar, enabling them to use Jewish tradition to torture their Jewish victims' souls even before they destroyed their bodies.
To teach us more about this horrifying phenomenon, on the eve of Purim, we spoke with David Bernstein, Dean Emeritus of the Pardes Institute in Jerusalem, and one of the most thoughtful and engaging guides to Jewish Poland around. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation. The full podcast will follow, as always, on Thursday, for paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
This week, when our focus is once again on rescue, and particularly the Jewish world’s gearing up for a massive rescue, we share a conversation with Danna Harman, an Israeli journalist who, along with a few other Israelis, did extraordinary things to save Afghans who were left behind after the sudden American exit.
Her’s is a story of determination, grit, collaboration and true Israeli imaginativeness—all for the purpose of saving lives.
Danna Harman has lived in and reported stories from around the globe including Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Myanmar and the jungles of Papua New Guinea. She began her journalism career over 25 years ago with the Associated Press in Jerusalem and later became The Jerusalem Post’s diplomatic correspondent. Today, she is a staffer for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and her freelance work appears in various other outlets and magazines such as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and Elle and Porter. She is a frequent contributor to the podcast Israel Story.
Here’s a brief excerpt of our conversation. The full podcast, as always, will follow on Thursday, for paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
Every now and then, one reads a book so stunning in its insight and creativity that it’s a disappointment to finish it, and one is tempted to read it again, right then and right there. That’s how I felt about Amotz Asa-El’s book, The Jewish March of Folly, a fascinating rethinking of the lessons of Jewish history and the failure of Jewish leadership. (I was obviously not alone--the book became an instant best-seller in Israel.)
Asa-El’s book will hopefully eventually come out in English, but for the time being, it’s available only in Hebrew. So we sat down with him to hear him reflect on some of the basic themes of the book and his insights into longstanding trends, in Jewish history and how Israel may have ended some of them, all of which happens to be all the more compelling and urgent in light of what is now unfolding in the world.
Amotz Asa-El is a bestselling Israeli author, a former executive editor of The Jerusalem Post, a fellow at the Hartman Institute, The Jerusalem Post's senior commentator, and The Jerusalem Report's senior writer. Here is a brief excerpt of our conversation; the full podcast will be posted on Thursday, as always, for paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
AA few weeks ago, William Daroff, CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, wrote a very thoughtful column in which he suggested that Israel’s closing its skies to American Jews during Covid was an affront to a sacred relationship. I wasn’t sure that I completely agreed, but I admired his argument and his tone, and responded here. Daroff then responded to my response in this second Jerusalem Post column.
Defining the relationship between Israel and diaspora Jews has been a difficult and fraught mission ever since Israel was created. Diaspora Jews, after all, are clearly not citizens of the State of Israel. But then again, they’re not entirely “non-citizens” either. The Law of Return makes them “citizens in potentia,” and in many other ways, Israel calls on Diaspora Jews for support, time and again, in a way that it could call on no on else.
How, then, should we define this relationship? William Daroff and I sat for a conversation about that issue, in light of his thoughtful columns. Here’s a brief excerpt of our discussion. The full podcast will be posted on Thursday, as always, for paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
To most of us today, it seems patently obvious that there was something fundamentally obscene about the United States (among other countries) participating in the Berlin Olympics of 1936. The world knew of the horrors that were beginning to unfold (the mass killing of Jews hadn't yet started), but chose to turn a blind eye. We know where that got us.
So why are the United States (and Israel, for that matter), represented at the Chinese Olympics? Is there a parallel between the two Olympics? How should we think about this? About America's obligations, and lessons learned, or not? About Israel's obligations?
In a recent article entitled "Israel 'bombs Auschwitz'", Rafael Medoff, the founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, reflected on how Israel's continued strikes on Iran in Syrian territory must be seen in the light of Auschwitz. We reached out to Dr. Medoff for a conversation about that, and about much more--as he is one of the most productive scholars writing about the refusal of the Roosevelt administration to bomb Auschwitz and the role that American Jewish groups played (or did not play) in trying to change the administration's position. It was a far-reaching conversation, which left me thinking about many things... and I hope it will do the same for you.
Here's an excerpt of our conversation. The full podcast will be released on Thursday, as usual, for paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
Sadly, we can all “see” in our minds the scene of Israeli soldiers on the Gaza border aligned against Palestinian children, who are often forced to the front by Hamas. Especially with the Amnesty International assault on Israel much in the news this week, it felt apt to introduce many of our readers and listeners to an organization that is probably not as well known as it deserves to be.
The Jerusalem Institute for Justice advocate for the State of Israel, for Israeli soldiers and for those young Palestinian children fighting the IDF at the border—all out of a deep commitment to the Jewish state and to the values of the Jewish tradition. How is that possible? How does JIJ do its work? We chatted with Uri Morad, Director of International Law & Public Diplomacy at the Jerusalem Institute for Justice.
Here is an excerpt of our conversation. The full conversation will be posted on Thursday, as always, for paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
David Ben-Moshe, a convert of African-American descent, made headlines recently when he began a hunger strike to bring attention to his demand that he be recognized as an Israeli citizen. He ended the protest when the Ministry of the Interior promised him that he would receive citizenship by January 2023.
While his tussle with the Ministry of the Interior is over, I was struck by his story as it was related in the press. He fell in love with Judaism, he’d said, in prison in the US. How did that happen, I wondered. And how does that journey lead to Israel and to marriage to an Israeli woman? It had to be an interesting story, I imagined, so I reached out to him to hear the story.
I found it very moving. Here’s an excerpt. The full conversation will be posted on Thursday, as always, for paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
David has also written some interesting columns, which you might want to look at:
I am a Black Ex-felon, and I have a message about cancel culture in Newsweek
Food for Felons: The Orange Card in Medium
On Liberty, Liberalism, and Freedom in the Jewish Journal
Micha Odenheimer is a rabbi, writer, journalist, social activist, as well as founder and director of Tevel b'Tzedek, about which we will hear in a different episode. Originally from Berkeley California, Micha made aliyah in 1989. Prior to that, in 1984, he was ordained as a Rabbi by Rabbi Moshe Feinstein. Micha was also a close student of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach.
In his role as a journalist, Micha has reported from Ethiopia, Haiti, Somalia, Nepal, India, Myanmar, Indonesia, Thailand, Bangladesh and Iraq, often during times of crisis. As a rabbi he has written dozens of essays on Judaism and social justice, and has reported on trends in Judaism and the Jewish world.
In 1994, Micha founded the Israel Association for Ethiopian Jews (IAEJ), a watchdog and advocacy organization that aimed to change the way the Israeli government and other institutions absorbed Ethiopian Jews, particularly in the field of education, housing and employment. The Israel Association changed its name to Association of Ethiopian Jews in 2016. Still a board member, Micha is one of the most knowledgeable people around about the plight of Ethiopian Jews, both before they come to Israel and once they arrive.
Not long ago, the subject of Ethiopian Jews was in the news once again, when the Knesset approved the immigration of thousands more Ethiopian Jews]. That raised several questions, of course: Who are these people? Why were they not admitted earlier? How are they viewed by the Ethiopian Jews who are already here in Israel?
We got together with Micha to learn about this; here is an excerpt of our conversation. The full episode will be posted on Thursday, for paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
Natalie Marcus is a highly acclaimed, award-winning, screenwriter and director based in Tel Aviv. For the past 10 years, Marcus has been a writer and show runner in Israel’s highest rated, comedy, satire, and drama series. Marcus is currently witting for the 4th season of Fauda (Netflix) and the 2nd season of Tehran (Apple TV).
Marcus is the creator and show runner of the acclaimed historically themed sketch show The Jews are Coming, winner of the Israeli Academy Award for the best entertainment show.
Marcus is the creator, director and show runner and of the show Cramped winner of the Israeli Academy Award for best kids comedy and best script in Kids TV show and winner of The Kid's Choice award for "Best Comedy".
Marcus teaches comedy writing and lectures about writing and Jewish history all around the world. She joins us this week to speak about Israeli TV and culture, and her role in this extraordinary slice of Israeli life.
An excerpt of our conversation is here. The full episode will be posted on Thursday for paid subscribers.
Founded in 2001 as a coalition of Israeli organizations working in disaster relief and international development, IsraAID has grown into an independent NGO and the largest humanitarian aid organization in Israel. From earthquakes and hurricanes to epidemics and forced displacement, IsraAID has been at the forefront of responding to major humanitarian crises worldwide. It has worked in more than 50 countries and at any one time has around 300 staff members worldwide.
How did this phenomenon of a tiny country reaching out to assist with disasters far away begin? What motivates the Israelis who are involved and so deeply committed? Here's an excerpt of our conversation with IsraAID's CEO, Yotam Polizer.
If you've not heard of Rabbi Yitzchak Feivish Ginsburgh, the American-born rabbi somewhat associated with Chabad but with a unique worldview all his own, you're not alone. Outside Israel, he's not terribly well known. Inside Israel, though, he has an enormous following, thanks to his charisma, his brilliance, his phenomenal skills as a teacher of Torah. All good. ...
Except, perhaps, for pesky little details like his endorsement of a book that legitimates the killing of Palestinian children (because they could one day group up to be our enemies) and perhaps even more worrisome, if that's possible, the fact that he believes--and says--that it's time for Israel not to be a democracy, but instead, to become a theocracy.
What's this all about?
In the first of two conversations, each dealing with a different rabbi representing streams largely unknown outside Israel, Mordy Miller, a doctoral candidate at Hebrew University who is expert in these streams of Israeli religious life, takes us through the life and thought of Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh.
This is a brief excerpt of our first conversation with Mordy ... the full episode will be posted on Thursday, as always, for paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
Growing up in an ultra-Orthodox community in Jerusalem, Penina Feufer sensed that she wanted broader horizons. Today, she has a BA in liberal arts and two masters degrees, and is one of the prime voices behind a movement known as "the New Haredim."
Who are these "new Haredim"? What is new about them? What's their attitude to secular education? Technology? The State? The army? What would they like to see change in the Haredi world, and what are the chances that that will happen?
Our conversation with Penina Feufer this week looks at those issues, and more. Here is a brief excerpt from our discussion. The full conversation will be posted on Thursday for paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
If this week's column, we noted that Israel's place on the world's "happiness scale" and its birthrate are testament to the sense of purpose and meaning at the heart of Israeli life. Earlier, we've looked at how music in Israel is also an expression of that, and now, we move on to the arts.
Andi Arnovitz (https://andiarnovitz.com/) is a Jerusalem-based artist who does stunning work. We spoke with her to hear how Jewishness and Israeliness merge and are reflected in her art.
The full episode will be available later this week for subscribers to Israel from the Inside; this excerpt is accessible to everyone.
Not that many years ago, the plight of African asylum seekers who had made their way into Israel was a topic of national and international discussion. Since Israel hermetically sealed the border with Egypt, the flow of asylum seekers into Israel has essentially stopped, but there are still tens of thousands of them already inside the country. What is their status? Is their discussion of how to proceed? How are they faring.
One of the people who has been most involved in this issue for years is Jean Marc Liling, who brings us up to date in this week’s podcast. Here’s a brief excerpt of our conversation.
Israel currently has two recognized systems of law operating side by side: civil and religious. Israeli religious courts possess the exclusive right to conduct and terminate marriages. There is no civil marriage or divorce in Israel, irrespective of one’s religious inclinations. All Muslims must marry and divorce in accordance with shariya laws, all Catholics in accordance with canon law, and all Jews in accordance with Torah law (halakha).
The interpretation and implementation of Torah law is in the hands of the Orthodox religious establishment, the only stream of Judaism that enjoys legal recognition in Israel. The rabbinic courts strenuously oppose any changes to this so-called status quo arrangement between religious and secular authorities. In fact, religious courts in Israel are currently pressing for expanded jurisdiction beyond personal status, stressing their importance to Israel’s growing religious community.
In our conversation, Susan Weiss explains how religious courts, based on centuries-old patriarchal law, undermine the full civil and human rights of Jewish women in Israel. The more we listen to her, the more we have to confront the question she often asks: Is Israel a democracy or a theocracy?
A few months ago, on a Shabbat afternoon, I was reading A. B. Yehoshua’s novel, The Tunnel. In the novel, Yehoshua mentions an organization called “Road to Recovery,” through which, he said, volunteers meet Palestinians who are entering Israel for medical care at checkpoints, drive them to the hospitals to which they need to get, and then another volunteer picks them up and drives them back to the checkpoint.
I’d never heard of “Road to Recovery,” and wasn’t entirely certain if it was real or a creation of Yehoshua’s fiction. So after Shabbat, I checked, and sure enough, it does exist. And what it does it truly astounding. In 2019 alone, “Road to Recovery” volunteers drove 1,260,000 km, encompassing 10,105 trips and catering to 20,000 patients, mostly children.
I met with two volunteers from the organization, Alona Abt and Myron Yehoshua (pictured below). Alona, secular, is among the leaders of the organization, while Myron, religious and a resident of a “settlement” south of Jerusalem, is a volunteer driver. I found them fascinating and inspiring, and hope you will, too.
Here’s an excerpt of our conversation; the full episode will be uploaded to Israel from the Inside for subscribers on Thursday.
If Judaism were to be refashioned for Israeli life, in a manner that brought together religious and secular, Ashkenazim and Mizrachim, young and old, and people of all political inclinations, what would it look like? Kehilat Zion, which is led by Rabbi Tamar Elad-Appelbaum may well be it.
Rabbi Elad-Appelbaum is co-founder of the Beit Midrash for Israeli Rabbis, and is also the founder of Kehilat Zion: an Eretz Yisraeli Community in Jerusalem. Her work spans and links tradition and innovation, working toward Jewish spiritual and ethical renaissance. She devotes much of her energy to the renewal of community life in Israel and the struggle for human rights.
In this week’s podcast, we speak with Rabbi Elad-Appelbaum. In our conversation, she shares her fascinating beginnings as a young girl in an Orthodox family of North African and French descent, her path to becoming an internationally recognized religious leader in Israel, and her vision of what religious life in Israel could be.
Here is an excerpt of our conversation. The full conversation will be posted in a few days for subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
In our ongoing series of interviews highlighting extraordinary work that people in Israel are doing to make Israeli society more decent, more moral, more worthy of the devotion of our children’s generation, we highlight this week the work of the Task Force on Human Trafficking and Prostitution.
As Noa Rodman -- who is both a lawyer and a social worker -- explains in our interview, for a long time, women from the Former Soviet Union either came to Israel or were sent to Israel and ended up being trafficked. How did that happen? What was the Israeli government’s response? Is the situation getting better or worse? And what are the next steps in the battle?
This is an excerpt of our conversation. The full discussion will be available later this week for subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
Dr. Dalia Fadila, an Israeli-Arab woman, recently caught the attention of Forbes Magazine. Here is part of what Forbes had to say:
Many people are working to improve life for the Arab citizens of Israel and advance Arab society. One of them is Dalia Fadila — an Arab Israeli of Palestinian heritage, a mother, founder of her own set of schools, and the first female dean of an Islamic college in Israel. ...
At least ten generations of Fadila's family lived in Tira, part of the "Arab triangle." After Israel became a country in 1948, her family stayed, and Tira became an Arab Israeli town.
"My father and my mother never told us stories of anger and loss. Instead, they told us stories of change and growth," Fadila said, "They told us stories of Tira changing over the last 70 years from a small farmer's village into a city."
Fadila said her family and her husband's family, who are also from Tira and stayed post-1948, focused on preserving and remaining on their land and in their homes — which they were allowed to do. Soon after the country was established, Fadila said her family enjoyed what she calls the benefits of being part of Israel that included social security, national security, social insurance, and economic stability.
"It led the Arab community inside Israel from a place of struggle, from trying to survive daily under the British Mandate and from being fearful for what you have, because, during the 30s, they lived in a state of chaos. But after the establishment of Israel, especially towards the 70s and 80s, the Arab community in Israel started to enjoy the privileges. They enjoyed the advantages of becoming a citizen of the State of Israel," Fadila said.
"No place is perfect, and no state around the world is perfect. And even the U.S., which is the torch of freedom and democracy, had its hard times, to put it as an understatement. But there has definitely been growth here for the Arab community."
We recently spoke with Fadila, and heard her describe not only her extraordinary new project, Atidna, but her vision for Arab life in Israel. Here is a brief excerpt of our conversation; the full podcast is available to subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
Rabbi Avidan Freedman, an Orthodox rabbi and educator, raised in Canada and now living in Israel, teaches high school by day. But he has, in recent years, become active on an issue he considers to be "Israel's greatest moral stain". What is that stain? It's not Israel's conduct of its conflicts, or any of the issues most of us commonly think about.
Here's an excerpt of our conversation with Rabbi Freedman - the full episode will be available laster this week to paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
Deborah Harris, the founder and CEO of Jerusalem's Deborah Harris Literary Agency, is without doubt the premier literary agent representing Israeli authors in the international marketplace. In this conversation, Deborah regales us with the story of how she launched her career by following Ehud Yaari into Lebanon in the middle of the war in 1982, desperate to get him to write a book, but instead got herself arrested by the Israelis (she also got the book).
More seriously, she reflects on the meteoric rise in popularity of Israeli authors like Amoz Oz, David Grossman, A B Yehoshua and Meir Shalev, and shares her frustrations that the list of premier Israeli authors contains so few women. And perhaps most ominously, she describes the changes now unfolding for Israeli authors, who are recognizing that their days of having a market and an audience in America are likely behind them.
This excerpt of our conversation is being made available to everyone. The full conversation will be available shortly to paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
Last month, Israel and Poland came close to the precipice in their diplomatic relations when Israel's Yair Lapid reacted strongly to a new Polish law. The law sets a 30-year limit on legal challenges to property confiscations that had taken place decades ago.
While the law affects Polish, Jewish and other contested property claims, many people felt the law was particularly unfair to Jews, especially since Jews were often late in filing petitions for property after the war, given how dislocated they'd been. The World Jewish Restitution Organization, for example, said that the law marked “a sad day for justice and the rule of law.”
Given the vociferousness of Israel's response to the law, it might seem that its anti-Jewish nature is beyond debate. That's not the case, however. In this conversation with David Bernstein, one of the truly great guides of Israelis and others to Poland, we hear much about the complexity of that law, and about the relationship of Jews to the Polish story in general.
This excerpt is available to everyone; the entire conversation will be available to paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside shortly.
What if you know that you want to make Shabbat a meaningful part of your life when you eventually get married and start a family, but also know that the Shabbat that you grew up with in your parents' home isn't for you? How do you learn about what the options might be?
Tifferet Oriyah, 25 years old now, put out a FaceBook posting a few years ago, inviting herself over to people's homes to witness their Shabbatot. She was invited to hundreds, went to 15 ... from Haredi to hypersecular, she saw the full mosaic of Shabbat as its celebrated and honored throughout Israeli society. It as a journey of searching for Shabbat, and for home.
(Israel, by the way, is still a country in which a young woman can invite herself over to the homes of people she doesn't know and about whom she often knows nothing -- without worry.)
In this conversation, Tifferet shares with us some of what she saw and what she learned about Israeli society through her explorations -- and a bit about the book she's written in light of those experiences. This excerpt is available to all ... the full conversation will be posted on Thursday (delayed by a day due to the holiday of Sukkot) for subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
In one scene from Matti Friedman’s fascinating three-part documentary series on the Lebanon War that he did for Kan TV, he shows a jeep full of young soldiers. At this point in the series, it is already obvious that the Lebanon War is an unfolding disaster, that the brass is lying to the government, that the government is lying to the people and that Israel is hopelessly mired.
But the soldiers in this jeep are undeterred. Brimming with optimism, one of them says, with unbounded passion, that they are in Lebanon to protect the State of Israel, and will do what they are told to do, endure what they must.
His face is unmistakable. That young soldier is Naftali Bennett; that Friedman found that clip is astounding. As Matti makes clear in our discussion, Naftali Bennett is a first in many ways – the first religious Prime Minister (no, Menachem Begin was not), the first to have been elected on the strength of an Arab party in the coalition, and, often overlooked, the first Prime Minister who came of age not in Israel’s earlier conventional wars, but in the failed Lebanon War. That, suggests Friedman, has enormous implications for how Bennett and his generation see Israel and our region.
In his fascinating comments in this episode, Friedman reflects on the Lebanon War, his service in it, his book Pumpkin Flowers which is based on that service, and then reflects on his next book, about a concert that Leonard Cohen performed for Israeli soldiers during the Yom Kippur War … and what the concert meant – and didn’t mean – to Cohen, the soldiers and the country.
We’re making an excerpt of that conversation available to everyone here, and tomorrow, we’ll post the entire podcast for subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
Matti Friedman is one of the Jewish world's most talented and creative journalists, authors and film-makers. The author of The Aleppo Codex: In Pursuit of One of the World's Most Coveted, Sacred, and Mysterious Books; Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier's Story of a Forgotten War - an account of the Lebanon War through the eyes of his own service there; and Spies of No Country: Israel's Secret Agents at the Birth of the Mossad, has has also created a superb three-part docu-series on the Lebanon War for Kan, one of Israel's leading TV outlets.
Friedman recently published a fascinating article in the Atlantic titled Israel’s Problems Are Not Like America’s, in which he argued that Americans (Jewish and not) tend to see and understand Israel through the prism of America’s challenges, like that of race, etc. That, says Friedman, inevitably leads to a misunderstanding of Israel, and it is to that mistake that he traces some of the negativity with which Israel is portrayed in the press and in the US.
We spoke with Friedman about his Atlantic article, and tied his thoughts to Rosh Hashanah, in this period of introspection and framing our hopes and prayers for the future. We’re making this excerpt of our conversation available here to everyone. The entire podcast, which will be available to subscribers to Israel from the Inside, will be posted shortly.
The events unfolding in Afghanistan, which are a chilling reminder of why those Zionists leaders of the late nineteenth century were convinced that the Jews needed a state of their own, is an apt moment to consider some of the steps Israel has taken to preserve the Jewishness of the Jewish state.
One of the more controversial steps in recent years—particularly alarming to and unpopular with American Jews—was the Nation-State Law that Israel passed a few years ago. Israel from the Inside is about breaking out of our echo-chamber, exposing ourselves to people and ideas with whom we might not agree, but who can make us think.
We recently had a conversation with Dr. Moshe Koppel, a computer scientist, Jewish scholar, and political activist. Through a series of unexpected circumstances, Koppel, professor of computer science at Bar-Ilan University and the author of over 100 articles in leading academic journals and proceedings in mathematics, computer science, linguistics, law, economics, political science and other disciplines, found himself playing a critical role in the writing of the Nation-State law. In our conversation, he explained why he believes that the law is both just, and necessary.
Listen for yourself. I found myself thinking about the issue in ways that I hadn’t before. We’re making excerpt available today. Our full conversation will be posted later this week and will be available to subscribers to "Israel from the Inside."
Israel faces numerous problems; that much, we all know. What we sometimes aren’t as aware of is all the extraordinary people, in both the Jewish and Arab communities, who are working to make things not just better, but much better. In this week’s podcast, I speak with Dani Elazar and Reem Yunis, who work together in an organization called Hand in Hand — a network of Jewish-Arab schools that’s also anchor to a larger social network of parents, graduates and more.
Dani Elazar, formerly of the tech world, is the CEO; Reem Yunis, a very accomplished scientist/businesswoman, an Israel Palestinian, is on the Board. I met with them both in Nazareth a few weeks ago, and today, we’re making an excerpt of our conversation available. Our full conversation will be posted later this week and will be available to subscribers to "Israel from the Inside."
It's rather fortuitous that we interviewed Rabbi Aaron Leibowitz, who heads the organization Chuppot, even before Artem Dolgopyat won Israel's first gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics, sparking a renewed debate about Israel's rabbinate, immigrants from the FSU and rabbinate's refusal to allow many of them to get married.
“Chuppot” is part of “Hashgacha Pratit”, an organization that challenges the monopoly of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel through the provision of private religious services. The organization was established in Jerusalem in 2012 by Rabbi Aaron Leibowitz, and successfully led the struggle to open the kosher food market in Israel to competition. And now it's pushing for major change in the world of weddings and marriage in Israel.
Our full conversation with Rabbi Leibowitz will be posted later this week and will be available to subscribers to "Israel from the Inside." We're making this brief excerpt of our conversation available to everyone.
Like many of the people we interview on the podcast segments of “Israel from the Inside,” Alissa Symon has a fascinating—and unexpected—background. She was raised in Gilo, a Jewish neighborhood on the very southern edge of Jerusalem, commonly called a “settlement” in the international media, in a very religious home. But as she explains, her home wasn’t standard. Her parents were very religious, her school was exceedingly strict, but her mother, a piano teacher, also taught Palestinian students. Alissa was bound to grow up to break preconceptions. Today, having done her BA at Shalem College in Jerusalem and an MPhil at the University of Cambridge, she is pursuing a PhD in sociology at the University of Oxford.
While herself still Orthodox and married to an Orthodox rabbi, Alissa has long been active in liberal Israeli politics, liberal particularly when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the recent years of living in England have shifted her thinking on a number of issues, which she explains to us in our discussion. Much of her research has focused on the relationship between progressive American Jews and progressive Israelis; she began her inquiry puzzled by the fact that while both are “progressives,” there is very little relationship between the two.
She explains that, and more, in this conversation, an excerpt of which we’re making available here. The full podcast will be available to subscribers to “Israel from the Inside.”
In the middle of June, Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy published an article in Tablet Magazine entitled "The Un-Jews." They coined the term "un-Jews" to refer to Jews who are relentless critics of Israel, "because they believe the only way to fulfill the Jewish mission of saving the world with Jewish values is toundothe ways most actual Jews do Jewishness. They are not ex-Jews or non-Jews, because many of them are and remain deeply involved Jewishly, despite their harsh dissent. Many un-Jews are active in forms of Jewish leadership, running Jewish studies departments, speaking from rabbinic pulpits, hosting Shabbat dinners. For many of these un-Jews, the public and communal staging of their anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist beliefs appears to be the badge of a superior form of Judaism, stripped of its unsavory and unethical “ethnocentric” and “colonialist” baggage."
The column evoked passionate responses from all sides, so we invited Gil Troy to explain in great depth what he and Sharansky were saying about the Jewish world. Here is an excerpt of our conversation--in which Troy discusses the "de-Zionization" of non-Orthodox rabbinical schools such as the Jewish Theological Seminary and Hebrew Union College.
The full conversation is available to subscribers to "Israel from the Inside."
In preceding episodes, we posted interviews with two women who live in Lod and who experienced the horrible events of May 2021, as Arab residents of the city unleashed violence at their Jewish neighbors. There was, sadly, another dimension of those days--Arabs who lived in fear of Jewish violence, most particularly in East Jerusalem.
In this episode, I'm in conversation with Iyman Ansari, a colleague who lives in East Jerusalem, and who had a harrowing story to tell. This, too, is a part of what unfolded in those harrowing days that needs to be heard.
Here is an excerpt of our conversation. The full conversation will be posted and available to subscribers to Israel from the Inside (https://danielgordis.substack.com/) in the next few days.
Jerusalem’s area code is 02. The city has a single area code, but three very different populations who call it home. There are Israeli religious and secular Jews, Israeli Haredim (ultra-Orthodox Jews) and East Jerusalem Arabs. There are also Arabs in West Jerusalem, some Jews in East Jerusalem, some people who fall into none of the above categories … all sharing not only an area code, but an ancient, contested, bustling city.
In this podcast, we speak with Shira Laurence and Noy Mordekovich, who, respectively, founded and now head “0202”, a non-profit that translates social media posts from Arabic into Hebrew, and from Hebrew into Arabic—so that residents of the city can know what their fellow Jerusalemites are thinking, feeling, wishing for.
Here's a conversation with two people who have starting translating their vision for a better Jerusalem into reality.
This is a brief excerpt of our longer conversation. The full podcast is available to subscribers at danielgordis.substack.com.
We’re all exposed to the image of the Israeli soldier that many like to celebrate: tough, brave, victorious. But as Israeli society was forced to recognize earlier this year when a veteran set himself afire outside the Ministry of Defense in protest of his post-combat trauma not being sufficiently recognized, there’s an underbelly to military service and its trauma here, too.
Dr. Danny Brom, founder of Metiv: Herzog Israel Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma, is a world-renowned innovator in the research and treatment of the wide-ranging effects of trauma and discusses the impact of Israelis’ brains being “wired” for combat and how that shapes Israeli society.
Despite the cycles of violence in Israeli history, the common response from fellow mental health professionals when Dr. Brom began working in Israel was “but we don’t see trauma here.” Thanks in part to the work of Metiv, there is a burgeoning awareness in Israel of the communal and personal effects and costs of trauma. In this conversation, Brom explores with us both the positive and challenging dynamics of Israeli society being so deeply rooted in trauma.
This is a brief excerpt of our longer conversation. The full podcast is available to subscribers at danielgordis.substack.com.
Sapir Ganz Eldar is a student at Shalem College, where I work. She comes from a settlement over the green line, is Orthodox, went to an all-girls religious high school, her father was opposed to her serving in the army (he wanted her to do National Service).... So we think we get the picture, right?
Yet we don't, because the picture is always more complicated. Sapir did join the army, over her parents' objections, and once an officer, created a program to assist Israeli Arab soldiers.
"Israeli Arab soldiers"? That, too, might sound surprising. Here's a brief excerpt of my conversation with Sapir.
Here's an excerpt. The full conversation is available to subscribers at danielgordis.substack.com.
There are few organizations in Israeli life more controversial than "Breaking the Silence," which serves as a platform for Israeli soldiers to discuss incidences in their military service that they felt were morally problematic, or worse. BtS has been accused of undermining Israel, of publicizing stories that are not true, of taking money from anti-Israel organizations ... the list goes on. On the right, BtS is seen as doing great damage to Israel. On the left, BtS is opposed because it is not against military service, is not a human rights organization and for a host of other reasons.
Michael Menkin, with whom I speak in this episode, was one of the founders of BtS, and its Executive Director for a number of years. He's Orthodox, a passionate Zionist, not a pacifist ... and he is also profoundly thoughtful and exceedingly articulate. Israel from the Inside is about breaking out of the echo chamber, hearing views that might be different from our own. This conversation with Michael Menkin will, I'm betting, leave you thinking for quite some time.
Here's an excerpt. The full conversation is available to subscribers at danielgordis.substack.com.
In a previous episode, we spoke with Tahel Harris, who lives in the Ramat Eshkol neighborhood of Lod, and who experienced the violent disturbances first hand. If you heard that episode, you heard Tahel wonder aloud whether she and her family could stay in Lod after all they experienced.
In this episode, we speak with Dena Halsband, also a married mother of two young children. Dena’s neighborhood was not engulfed in the violence, but listening to her, we learn how the fear reached even neighborhoods that were a distance away — and most ominously, we hear her wondering whether she and her family can responsibly continue to live in Lod.
It’s worth thinking about this: in a number of cities in Israel, there are Jews wondering whether they can stay. To many, it feels like the fear that was Europe has come to Israel, the one place where we were supposed to live without that.
To get a better “on the ground” sense of what happened in the violence between Jews and Arabs in a variety of cities, we will be posting interviews with several people, Jews and Arabs, who lived through those terrible days. For the first such conversation, I went to Lod, where I met with Tahel Harris, a young married mother of two, who lives in the Ramat Eshkol neighborhood of Lod, which was the epicenter of the violence in that city.
Yotam Ben-Hillel has devoted his career to human rights in Israel and the Palestinian territories including the residency rights of Palestinians . I asked Yotam to explain the legal dimension of the battle unfolding with regards to the evictions in Sheikh Jarrah. Yotam takes us through the history and the law. We're making an excerpt of the conversation available to the public.
[Due to a technical snafu, there was an issue with recording levels in this episode. We apologize.]
Dr. Sarah J. Feuer is a research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies, and an associate fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. I sat with Sarah on May 26, 2021, to hear her thoughts on what Hamas was trying to accomplish by launching this latest round of violence with Israel. We’re making our conversation available to subscribers to “Israel from the Inside.” Here's a brief excerpt for the wider public.