Israel from the Inside with Daniel Gordis

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com “Is it really over?” That’s what Israelis are asking themselves. They hope the answer is yes. They hope the answer is no. “No,” because Hamas is rebuilding, Iran is running Hezbollah, and Iran … well. Things simply cannot be left this way. But “yes,” because people here are just exhausted. We need to breathe. E...

Melanie Phillips hardly needs an introduction to most readers of Israel from the Inside, though for those who would like a quick refresher on her extraordinary career, a brief bio can be found below. Melanie recently invited me to be in dialogue with her at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem on the occasion of her launching her most recent book, and today, we’re delighted to share the...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com Look at the map of the Middle East, zoomed way, way out. Yemen (bottom in the green) seems like a place that should have no interest in dealing with Israel. In many ways, it’s in an entirely different part of the world. As we hear today from Dr. Sarah Feuer, that map can be misleading. Yemen, and the Houthis wh...

The boos started almost immediately in Basel (the same city, ironically, where Herzl held the First Zionist Congress in 1897). As Yuval Raphael stepped onto the Eurovision stage last year, in May 2025, portions of the crowd made clear that she was not welcome. Flags waved. The room echoed with the jeers with which we’re all now familiar. The point of the protesters was clear — no one from Israel w...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com I noticed this week, at the Shabbat table in two different homes, and in a series of conversations at work and around the neighborhood cafés, that I keep hearing people use the phrase “the collapse of civilization.” As in, “what we’re witnessing — in Europe, the United States, and even in Israel to a degree — i...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com It’s hard to quantify (though I suppose that there are ways that sophisticated researchers could manage), but it’s clear that Israel’s press is much more engaged than ever before with the attitudes of American Jews — but also the attitudes of American voters writ large — to Israel. There’s a reason that the Isr...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com As The Forward (and others) reported over the last couple of weeks, Israeli President Isaac Herzog has been invited to the Commencement Speaker at JTS, the academic center of Conservative Judaism. Not surprisingly, given the times in which we live, some students (albeit a very small number) have publicly object...

The little clip above, about “If the USA and Iran were people,” is cute. Not hilarious, but still cute. And what it reflects is a deep-seated frustration that after yet another war, this one a really long one in which our kids and grandchildren took much of the brunt, Israel may or may not have accomplished much. So the guy in the elevator is obviously Trump, with all his bravado. And the guy who...

Jimmy Bitton, a Canadian professor whose podcast is called “Echoes of Jewish History”(available on Spotify here ) invited me to join him on his podcast, and then graciously granted us permission to share the episode with the Israel from the Inside community. My basic claim, in response to his question about why the West so detests Israel, is that Israel has implicitly issued to the West a sharp wa...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com When I reached out to Rabbi Dr. Natan Slifkin, asking him if he might share with us some of the provocative ideas that he writes about in his fascinating Substack, “Rationalist Judaism,” he kindly agreed, but he also suggested that I come see The Biblical Museum of Natural History which he founded and directs....

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com Just before Yom Ha-Atzma’ut, Israel Independence Day, Hagai Segal, a leading Israeli journalist, author and former Editor-in-Chief of the Makor Rishon newspaper, wrote a column in which he expressly said that by virtue of their not having moved here, American Jews are traitors. It was an incendiary word to choo...

There were days, days that almost of all of us remember, when photos like these were ubiquitous. On hostage posters on the news, on the internet. Everywhere. Then the living hostages returned home. The signs disappeared, but a few of the returning hostages offered a window into the horrors that they had endured. Some, Eli Sharabi hardly the only one among them, became very public figures. They tra...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com Almost as soon as Alex Sinclair posted on LinkedIn the story of how the police detained him because they didn’t like his kippah, and then destroyed the kippah before giving it back to him, the incident went viral. Alex has appeared twice on our podcast before, once about his book Perfect Enemy (the posted inter...

Imagine that someone asked you right now, “What would you guess are the main stories on the front pages of Israel’s papers?” What would you list? The elections and the merger of the Bennett and Lapid parties? The Strait of Hormuz? What else? As we’ll see below, while all the stories that appear on today’s front pages have made the international press, their place in the Israeli public’s mindset is...

The war will end, sooner or later, likely sooner. Israelis will limp out of the war — a war with many accomplishments, but also a war that is likely to fizzle out with Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime still intact. It’s not what most people here hoped for. When the war recedes into the rear-view mirror, election season will start to take over. A critical issue in these elections is going to...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com The protests against Israel’s present war have not been nearly as enormous as the protests against Judicial Reform, because — among other reasons — the war is still widely supported. But there are, of course, people opposed to the war, as they have every right to be, and some of them are protesting against the...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com

As we were cooking for Shabbat today, we were blaring one of those American music streaming services on all the speakers, playing the music we grew up with. Crosby, Still and Nash (and Young), Simon and Garfunkel, Cat Stevens (yes, I know…), the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac … if you know the genre, you know. Why in the world begin this post with that? Because the question of whether to stream an American...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 2023, it brought to a sudden and calamitous end a national crisis that had threatened to split the country. Ever since Yariv Levin, the Minister of Justice, had introduced his plan for Judicial Reform in January 2023 (after Benjamin Netanyahu had explicitly said—in his ca...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com Today is Yom Ha-Shoah, the first of the three “National Days,” which continue next week with Yom Ha-Zikaron (“Memorial Day for Fallen Israeli Soldiers and Victims of Terror”) and Yom Ha-Atzma’ut (Independence Day). This is always a powerful, painful and inspiring time in Israel, but of late, Yom Ha-Shoah has be...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com It’s the strangest thing, this mood in Israel now. On the one hand, immense relief that 40 hellish days are behind us. Kids are back in school. Small businesses can try to save what’s left. People can walk outside without worrying how far they’ve wandered from a shelter. We can turn off our phones at night, wit...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com With the Seder just hours away, some thoughts about the mood in this country, the toll on the kids, what all this might mean for the future of the relationship between Diaspora Jews and Israelis, and what — when we assume that there will be missile fire during the Seder — Israelis are wishing each other. Wishes...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com As I’ve mentioned several times over the past week or two, I’ve been fascinated by Alana Newhouse’s essay, “ Zionism for Everyone ” and the responses to it (I’ve mostly mentioned Irwin Kula’s piece ). I’m hardly the only Israeli interested in and perplexed by the discourse on Zionism and anti-Zionism in America...

This coming week, we will share an extended conversation with Rabbi Mishael Zion, whom I asked to reflect on the “discussion” between Alana Newhouse and Rabbi Irwin Kula in his response to her now viral piece, “ Zionism for Everyone .” As part of our discussion, Mishael spoke about Pesach and the Seder a few times, and one five-minute insight about what this year’s Seder should be about struck me...