Israel from the Inside with Daniel Gordis

When my family and I came to Israel in 1998, our daughter (who’s now closing in on forty) was just about to have her Bat Mitzvah. It was important to us that she read Torah in a “traditional” synagogue. In other words, what we wanted for her was an “egalitarian Orthodox” setting (for lack of a better term), where the service would be completely traditional, but where she could read Torah. Yet ther...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com Remember those opening days? Two hundred Israeli jets, in the largest Israeli air force operation in history, wiping out the Iranian leadership and dealing a death blow to their military? Remember the days when we were sure that the next day would bring about a popular uprising that would topple the regime? Rem...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com In the Atlantic , the Free Press and in numerous other publications, Matti Friedman has become one of the most important voices reflecting the soul of Israel and Israelis to the outside world. In his numerous bestselling books, he has brought his poetic prose to bear on some of the great mysteries and stories o...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com For today, I’ve gathered some thoughts that have been brewing for the past few days about the surreal way of life that’s slowly becoming routine. How many times can you go to sleep on the same night? Turns out, quite a few. Thursday night, when this screenshot was taken, was relentless. That was the worst we’d...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com A funny thing happened in the bomb shelter today. Seriously. We were hanging out in one of the safe rooms at Shalem College right after a siren had gone off, when a colleague of mine walked over and asked if I’d read Alana Newhouse’s now viral (and on the Free Press , too) “Zionism for Everyone” in Tablet Magaz...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com We’ve had Ariel Beery on our podcast in the past . Ariel Beery is the founding Editor and Publisher of Prophecy: A Journal for Tomorrow , and an active investor and advisor to initiatives dedicated to building a better future for Israel, the Jewish People, and humanity. His geopolitical writings can also be fou...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com Let’s talk about Zionism …. In the past few days, Israel’s political and military leadership have informed us that the war in Iran will continue for at least another three weeks, meaning that we’ll be at war throughout Pesach. We were also informed this morning that the fighting in Lebanon will continue at leas...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com Let’s talk about Zionism …. It might sound strange that Israel from the Inside would take on Zionism as a specific topic. After all, don’t Zionism and the questions surrounding it infuse everything we do? Yes, they do, but there are moments when it is still worth tackling the subject head-on. So this week (barr...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com Let me begin with a personal suggestion—at this year’s Seder, don’t talk about Israel. No one around the table knows anymore than you do, and we likely don’t know more than they do. If you spend the evening focusing on Israel, war or politics, the Seder will end with no one having learned anything or having had...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com As Michael Oren and I quipped during this conversation, the book that propelled him to international fame was his New York Times bestselling work on the Six Day War, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East . The book remains the finest treatment of that period in Israel’s history, a...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com This clip of Haviv Rettig Gur, who is one of this era’s most compelling voices about Israel and Zionism, went viral just a few weeks ago. I share it here because, though I’m not nearly as articulate as Haviv is, I agree with him. Completely. Still, life richly lived is also about encountering people and ideas t...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com One day, this war that we’re about to have (?) will be over. Or it won’t happen. Or it won’t happen for now. No matter how this plays out, though, there will come a time, probably not too long from now, when the war will no longer make it impossible to focus on anything else. And when that happens, and when Isr...

As you have likely gathered from the video above, one of the latest brouhahas in Israel (slowly beginning to pale next to what many people think is the increasing likelihood of war with Iran in the next week or two) has to do with whether or not there was a massacre on October 7th. Yes, you read that correctly. Some people are insisting that there was no massacre on October 7 — and chief among tho...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com Jewish anti-Zionists aren’t going away—how should Jewish communities respond? According to the JFNA (Jewish Federations of North America), some 32% of American Jews between the ages of 18 and 34 define themselves as “anti-Zionist.” Essentially, a third. That number may well grow. How should the “mainstream” Jew...

If you blinked during the first few seconds of the video above, which was posted by YNet on its Facebook Reels , you missed the important part. So watch it again … What you’ll see are two women wearing white shirts, being hurried away by police from a menacing crowd in Bnai Brak, a Haredi section of greater Tel Aviv. What’s with the white shirts? That’s what many women soldiers wear under their un...

A couple of months ago, I happened to be in New York over a Shabbat, and along with my brother and his family, got invited to a Friday evening dinner which was being hosted in honor of some participants in a program called GESHER, which means “Bridge” in Hebrew. As you’ll hear in our conversation with JJ Sussman today—which I invited him to have after he and I had both returned to Israel—GESHER wa...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com With Iran and Israel very much back in the news, a different look at the massive crisis in which the Ayatollahs find themselves. Their economy has collapsed and people cannot afford to live, but to make matters worse, in cities like Teheran, there is hardly any water. The country has largely dried up. What many...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com The Ayatollahs have been in control for so long, and Iran’s leadership has been determined to destroy Israel for so many decades, that it can be hard to remember that matters were once very different. El Al had regular non-stop flights to Teheran. What even fewer people know is that Iran’s present water crisis,...

Jeremy Ben-Ami and I have been friendly for many years. We don’t agree about very much when it come to Israel’s foreign policy or its conduct of the conflict with the Palestinians, but we are both grateful that over the years we’ve been able to be direct and honest with each other, while maintaining a deeply respectful tone to our dialogue. Jeremy recently reach out and asked me if I would be will...

The Israeli Hebrew press carried the news concerning the search for Ran Gvili in detail. In the non-Hebrew press, it could be challenging to get a sense of the scope of the operation—the massive intelligence efforts, a captured terrorist who gave critical information, the hundreds of soldiers, the gigantic digging equipment and the dozens of dentists who were brought in during the final days to go...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com “Our greatest generation,” Israelis are calling this generation of young people, “the new founding generation.” From those heroic hours in which people saved others , whom they often didn’t even know, from near certain death at the Nova, to the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who served in Gaza and in the Nor...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com This week, as we mentioned on Monday, we’re looking at democracy from two different perspectives, through the eyes of two different scholars. One is an Israeli, while one is an American who often teaches in Israel. One studies Israel, while the other studies Russia and the United States. But the cracks in democ...

This week, we’re going to look at democracy from two different perspectives, through the eyes of two different scholars. One is an Israeli, while one is an American who often teaches in Israel. One studies Israel, while the other studies Russia and the United States. But the cracks in democracy to which they each point are chillingly similar. We hope that by hearing them both in the same week, our...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com In the pages of Sapir , to my mind one of the finest Jewish journals now being published, Jordan Hirsch opens his recent essay on The Need for a Jewish Sovereign Wealth Fund as follows: The golden age of American Jewry is indeed ending — and the Jewish community can’t see past its fading reflection. The institu...

Someone wrote me from the States yesterday and asked me, “What’s the mood?” Truth is, there is no mood. Gaza might erupt as Trump pushes to Phase II, but then again, he might not, and Gaza might not. The IDF is insisting that Hezbollah never really disarmed, and that if the Lebanese Army won’t do it, we will. But we might not. The revolution in Iran is heating up, Trump is saber rattling (and afte...