Israel from the Inside with Daniel Gordis

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...

In early December, YNet reported (in an article Google-translated below) on a meeting of the National Security Committee to which Itamar Ben Gvir and the other members of the Jewish Power political party arrived wearing yellow pins, clearly meant to evoke the image of the yellow ribbon for hostages that Ben Gvir had ignored, now refashioned to look like a noose. Ben Gvir, YNet noted, was not commi...

Before we get to today’s introduction to tomorrow’s podcast, one of those “only in Israel” moments. This one probably merits the “Toto, I've a feeling we're not on the New Jersey Turnpike anymore” award. We were on the road to Tel Aviv yesterday, and traffic was massively backed up. This guy clearly wasn’t going to make it to his destination in time to recite shacharit by the latest time permitted...

It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence of the Israeli TV program, Uvdah (which in Hebrew means “fact”). Uvdah (which is sometimes compared to “60 Minutes” due to its prestige) is not only Israel’s longest-running investigative journalism and current affairs program, but in a voraciously news-consuming society, also its most influential. Since its debut in 1993, it has become a staple of...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com I don’t know how many people noticed the story that JTA carried on December 18 (and that was subsequently picked up numerous outlets), Judaism’s Conservative movement apologizes for decades of discouraging intermarriage . I’ll confess to having been stunned by the story. Not that the Conservative movement embra...

The video above is part of a much larger social and cultural issue in Israel—the efforts of an immigrant group to explain its traditions to an Israeli society either not terribly interested in them (at best), or outright opposed (in many cases). When does an immigrant become an Israeli? When they have a perfect Israeli accent? When their Hebrew is every bit as good as their “mother tongue”? When t...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com When Arthur Hertzberg first published his magnus opus , The Zionist Idea , in 1959, all it took was a quick glance at the Table of Contents to get a sense of how varied, profound and extensive had been the exchange of ideas in Zionist circles. In the decades that have followed his book, a great deal has been wr...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com In the conversation that we’re posting today, as we wrap up four conversations devoted to different themes of Hanukkah, Shalom Lamm said something that in retrospect seems obvious, but that I’d never thought of before we sat down to speak about Operation Benjamin. When a family chooses to have their fallen IDF...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com A headline on yesterday’s Times of Israel might have made you blink. In the midst of everything going on in Israel, the Knesset is pursuing legislation that would criminalize “interference” with “Orthodox religious practices”? What constitutes “interference”? Which public practices? And most importantly, why? W...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com When I was a freshman at Columbia, a long time ago, we read—as Columbia students have for a century—the Iliad and the Odyssey in our very first semester. I was an eighteen year old kid from a nice, quiet, suburban neighborhood. I made my way through the books and more or less understood them—or so I thought—but...