Israel from the Inside with Daniel Gordis

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...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danielgordis.substack.com I was first in touch with Dalia Emanuelof, the mother of Dvir Emanuelof ז”ל, back in 2009. I actually heard about her from a man who was then my regular taxi driver to and from the airport. On one such trip, he said to me, “Danny, I have a story you’re not going to be believe,” and he shared with me the story—a...

Whenever people ask me whether the elections we’re scheduled to have in 2026 will be the ones that “finally turn the tide” and create change, I tell them I doubt it. That’s not because Israel doesn’t need change or because change will not come, but because it’s still too early. It’s useful here to recall 1973 and 1974 — the era after the disastrous Yom Kippur War. Though Golda Meir was at the helm...

What does an Israeli journalist in the United States, who’s responsible for covering the White House, actually do? Cover the White House and beyond, obviously, and share with Israeli audiences, in this case Channel 13, what is transpiring at the center of American power. But as we hear to from Neria Kraus, the role is actually much more complex and nuanced than that. Israeli journalists, we learn...

A few months ago, in mid-August, I read a Facebook post (see below) by Amanda Borschel-Dan, who is the Deputy Editor of the Times of Israel , and host of its many podcasts, including the Daily Briefing , What Matters Now , Friday Focus and The Reel Schmooze . I was deeply moved by Amanda’s post, her sentiments expressed to her brother, and the story of her journey towards embracing this country. I...

It’s a strange world when an airport hallway can take your breath away. When we’d left Israel a few weeks earlier, it was still lined with hostage posters on both sides of the walkway, in both directions, the one for people arriving and the one for passengers departing. When our son-in-law flew home from a work trip a few days before we returned, he took this shot of a few posters remaining. When...

About six months ago, I was speaking with a writer-friend who lives in DC, and she mentioned to me that she needed to finish a revision of her book before she flew out to Los Angeles, because then she wouldn’t be able to work on it. Why not, I asked. “It’s a week-long silent retreat,” she said. “You don’t speak, you don’t read, you don’t write.” That sounded as about as far from my comfort zone as...

This past Shabbat, I was honored to be asked to speak at the Jewish Center, on the West Side of New York. When I posted the publicity for the Shabbat morning event in this past week, a number or people wrote to ask if there would be a version available for those not in New York. It hadn’t occurred to me to do so, but it felt like a good idea. Attached here (above, at the very top of this post) is...

A brief focus on memory today. Three vignettes: ELEVEN YEARS Hadar Goldin z’l has been returned to Israel. More than eleven years after he was killed in the 2014 conflict with Hamas and his body was kidnapped into Gaza, his parents and his family have some sort of closure. Not the closure we wish they had, not the sort of closure we were blessed to celebrate with other families just a few weeks ag...

“Eliminate the Diaspora,” said Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of the great minds of early Zionism, “before it eliminates you.” Jabotinsky used that line, apparently, in a speech to Polish Jewry on Tisha B’av, 1938, when he also said: It is already three years that I am calling upon you, Polish Jewry... I continue to warn you incessantly that a catastrophe is coming closer... I see that you are not seein...

On October 6, 2023, if someone had mentioned to you the “Gaza Envelope”, would you have known what that even was? If the answer is “no,” you shouldn’t feel bad. A huge proportion of Israelis had never heard the term, either. Most had never visited, and almost no one had ever stayed there—because there was nowhere to stay. As Israel begins to look beyond the war and to undertake the enormous task o...

You do not want to be driving to or from Jerusalem today, or anywhere near the entrance to the city. With the government apparently pushing forward a bill that would continue the Haredi exemption from the draft (a bill the coalition needs to pass in order not to lose its Haredi factions, which would bring down the government and trigger elections), public furor surrounding the issue is brewing aga...

I begin today’s column with three photos of a falafel stand. Kind of innocuous, the sign that says “Falafel Oved” in the middle, the guy making the falafel on the right, and on the left, in the green box, a certification that the place is kosher, and below, in the red box, a note that they have a set of tefillin there for anyone who wants to use them. That’s the Jerusalem of old, stuck in the midd...

As more details come out about the ordeal that the just-freed hostages had to endure, it’s hard at times to fathom how anyone survived. A few were held captive entirely by themselves the entire time, some in chains. The psychological terror we’re learning about is mind boggling. The starvation. The beatings. And …. having no idea what was happening in the “real” world (though their world was all t...

As we’ll explore in greater detail tomorrow (October 7 is Yom Tov Sukkot, so we can’t post then), the confluence of October 7 this week and Simchat Torah next week, along with what may be happening on the hostage front, has many people very hopeful, but terrified of being disappointed, once again. Perhaps because we do not yet know what is going to happen, and whether, as Netanyahu has promised, t...

Every now and then, those reminders of how special this place is. I went to get my hair cut on Monday morning, a few hours before Rosh Hashanah. I love the woman who cuts my hair. She does a great job, but no less important and perhaps even more, she’s truly hilarious and — because she knows I appreciate it — readily shares her spicy insights on the (mostly) religious crowd she serves (she’s compl...

The point of today’s post is the video, below, of Israel’s national basketball team, “forced” to attend a “classical music concert” before departing for an international competition. Some people I know watch the players and thought that they were kind of into the music. I read it as their being polite. In any event, to understand the event in the video, we first need to know about this song, Al Ti...