Israel from the Inside with Daniel Gordis

The phrase “from Zion shall go forth Torah” ( Isaiah 2:3 ) is well known but for many Jews, both in Israel and around the world, rings hollow in an era in which many of the religious voices coming from Israel do not inspire us, but rather, leave us saddened by what Judaism in the wrong hands can become. That is what makes Rabbi David Stav so exceptional—in all the meanings of that word. His vision...

Barring anything dramatic and unforeseen, here’s our plan for this week: MONDAY (today): We look at what’s brewing in the chock-full headlines, plus some glimpses of popular “culture” that give a sense of where Israelis are. TUESDAY: A recent lengthy Facebook post got a lot of attention, so much so that many responses to the post suggested to the author that he publish it as an article. Whether he...

Monday was a terrible day. The terror attack in Jerusalem that killed six and wounded many more, some very seriously, felt like a return to the “old days” of terror attacks on busses and at busy intersections. Not a good return, obviously. Horrible. Interestingly, and to their great credit, as the crowd was (understandably) fleeing the shooting, a Haredi soldier and another Haredi young man (armed...

Just walk through the front door of the Niv Nirel Center not far from the gorgeous beach in Michmoret (a bit north of Netanya), and you know you’re in a place that’s very special. It’s hard to explain how you know. Is it the limitless love and embrace that’s in the air? The care with which the new facility has been built and designed? The people’s faces? Of course, it’s a sad kind of special. The...

Barring anything radically unforeseen (Iran war, Part II, which many experts say is likely coming…), here’s what we have planned for this week: SUNDAY (today) : two videos of recovery that have gone viral in Israel, one receiving more than 2,000,000 views in a tiny country. MONDAY : While we were sitting in our safe rooms as Israel attacked Iran, for some, it was a moment in which new dreams were...

Across the West, battles rage over whether liberalism and liberal values (liberal in the sense of John Locke, not liberal in the sense of “left wing”) will continue to shape society and government. In the United States, Canada, the UK, France and Germany, to say nothing of Scandinavia, the tectonic plates are crashing and grinding, and in each, the shockwaves are being felt in numerous ways. In Is...

Due to the Labor Day Weekend in the United States, we didn’t post on Sunday or Monday. This week we’ll post The Week’s Essay on Wednesday, and the weekly podcast on Thursday. You want to escape, even if only for a few hours. It’s been that kind of summer, and it’s likely to be that kind of year. A break, even a short one, is so very tempting. You know you shouldn’t try to escape—because the famili...

The headline on Times of Israel above, which appears as of this writing, is pretty typical of what’s in the online Hebrew press as well. What is actually transpiring is hard to know, but the rumors are that Hamas may have proposed a partial deal that would involve some cease fire (end of war?) and a return of some hostages. Rumors are that (a) the government will not agree to end the war (a positi...

Ask people around these parts if they’re hopeful about Israel’s future, and most say, “absolutely.” Ask them why they harbor that optimism given the tsunami of depressing news, and almost invariably, they’ll respond, “the people.” Israel has more nonprofits per capita than any country in the world. That’s a reflection of the abundance of extraordinary people who live here, which, many of us deeply...

Reasonable minds can differ about whether or not to end the war. Reasonable minds can disagree about what we should do next to try to get the hostages back before they die of intentional starvation. Reasonable minds can differ as to whether Hamas can really be destroyed. About whether to permanently reoccupy parts of Gaza. About whether to build more settlements in Judea and Samaria. About whether...

Because Israel’s news cycle often mimics the lifespan of a mayfly (which lives for about one day, though some females apparently sometimes last only five minutes after reaching maturity and reproducing—at least so Chat GPT tells me), the changing-the-Attorney-General’s-locks stunt pulled by Justice Minister Yariv Levin last week now seems ancient history. But we overlook it—or chuckle at it—at our...

In September 1983, in response to a Soviet diplomat’s question about why the U.S. had to be the country in which the United Nations was situated, Charles M. Lichenstein, who was then serving as Deputy U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, responded that he would be more than happy to see the UN leave America’s shores: “The members of the U.S. mission… will be down at dockside waving you a fond fa...

Just yesterday, I drove north for conversation with a psychiatrist whose military unit does psychiatric PTSD interventions on the battlefield, just behind the front lines. We’ll post that interview about the treatment center of which he is a part soon. But he said something to me yesterday that put into words why I so wanted to have today’s conversation with Ilana Saks. This doctor said to me that...

Recently released videos of two hostages have reminded Israelis that time is simply running out. Time may also be running out for thousands of Gazans, who (and let’s leave blame entirely aside) are out of food. Negotiations with Hamas, which does not appear to be feeling any pressure from Israel, are at a standstill. Israel’s pariah status gets worse by the day. So, what is the agenda for today’s...

Israel from the Inside first introduced Desert Stars to our readers and listeners almost three years ago, when we hosted Matan Yaffe , who founded the program. As listeners may recall from our more recent conversation with Matan , in which he described his suing Harvard University and then his moving to a leadership role in the new political party El Ha-Degel , the idea for Desert Stars began when...

At the end of this post, a few truly uplifting moments from Israeli social media, moments which we all deeply need. But first, the bigger story that is blanketing Israel in ways that the non-Hebrew press cannot fully capture. I got home late from the office last night, shortly after 8:30, so the evening news was almost done. But I was tired and figured that rather than do something that required f...

I don’t typically bring traditional Jewish sources into these columns. Every now and then, though, something pops up in the world of Jewish tradition which echoes so loudly in our own time that some mention of it seems more than appropriate. The Daf Yomi cycle (in which one studies one page of Talmud a day and finishes the entire corpus in about seven and a half years—we have about two years to go...

Some time ago, I had the privilege of hosting Rabbi Meir Azari of the Daniel Centers for Progressive Judaism on my podcast here on Israel from the Inside . The occasion for that conversation was the publication in Hebrew, of Rabbi Azari’s newest book, on Jewish leadership in this era. Our conversation, which you’re welcome to listen to in full, was called "From Zion Shall Go Forth Torah" — but of...

The week before last, we shared with our readers and listeners an invitation to join me, along with Rabbi Meir Azari of Tel Aviv, in a far-reaching conversation about Israel, Israeli society, American Jews and Israel, and much more. Several hundred of our readers did sign up, but of course there were many for whom the time wasn’t good. So later this week, we’ll be sharing the recording of that vid...

We got together with friends last night, just to cap off a long, stressful week. We ordered in burgers and made gin and tonics at home, and sat down to eat. It didn’t take long for someone to mention something from the news, at which point someone else at the table said, “When was it, exactly, that we stopped believing anything at all that we’re being told?” The moment is hard to pinpoint — for it...

One of our grandchildren turns four this week, so his parents threw him a birthday party last Friday. It was family from “both sides,” aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents and so forth. Over the course of Friday morning bagels and munchies, I got to talking with someone (a former F-15 pilot back in his army days) I see mostly at these family events. First we caught up on life, travel, kid...

Dr. Einat Wilf is a leading thinker on Israel, Zionism, foreign policy and education. She was a member of the Israeli Parliament from 2010 to 2013, where she served as Chair of the Education Committee and Member of the influential Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. Born and raised in Israel, Dr. Wilf served as an Intelligence Officer in the Israel Defense Forces, Foreign Policy Advisor to Vice...

The clip above is a very short portion of a lecture delivered recently at Shalem College by Einat Wilf, who to my mind is one of the most creative and serious thinkers about Zionism on the scene today. Later this week, we will post the entire lecture, and since most of our readers and listeners could not be present at the lecture in Jerusalem, we’ll give our (paid) subscribers an opportunity to po...

We’ve had Matan Yaffe on the podcast before, to speak about the school for Bedouin kids that he established in the Negev after some Bedouin teenagers tried to rob him. As we’ll hear in today’s conversation once again, when they threatened him, he pulled out a gun, but instead of shooting them, decided to give them a future. Hence, “Stars of the Desert.” I was in touch with Matan about El Ha-Degel,...

For decades, Yossi Klein Halevi has been one of the preeminent diagnosticians of the Israeli soul. From his hundreds of columns for the New Republic among other publications, his regular podcast with Donniel Hartman of the Shalom Hartman Institute and his now classic book, Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation, he has helped generations un...