Israel from the Inside with Daniel Gordis

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...

We won, right? Or at least so we’re being told. But if we won, why is everyone here feeling so …. It’s very hard to describe what people are feeling. To be sure, there’s a deep sense of pride, even awe, at what the Air Force and Mossad accomplished (though there’s now a bit of a public pissing match between the Air Force and Mossad as to who really gets the credit—it can be exhausting to live in a...

For all intents and purposes, for the next short while, this war is a waiting game. Is Donald Trump going to do the right thing—not just for Israel, but for America as the leader of the Free World—or not? Does he have the stomach for the undeniable risks? Does he understand how he can cement his legacy, at least in terms of the world’s international order, if he strikes down evil? We shall see. Bu...

There’s a Facebook post that came out just yesterday (16 hours ago, as of this writing), that already has 10,000 responses, 2,500 shares, and 1,100 comments. It’s clearly touched something very deep here. It’s by someone named Ran Apelberg, whom I don’t know. Below is a screenshot of part of the post, and below the screenshot, an AI-generated translation of the rather long post. A few brief commen...

We close this brief week (shortened due to the holiday of Shavu’ot) with two glimpses of very different sorts of stories that describe the lives of IDF soldiers, stories that are a bit off the beaten path, but that Israelis hear and read about regularly. Headlines like the one below about a soldier seriously wounded are tragically not unusual in the Israeli press, either in Hebrew or any other lan...

Yesterday, we met a new, brewing political party called El Ha-Degel, “To the Flag,” and heard from one of its founders, David Sherez (additional links to El Ha-Degel are at the bottom of this post). Since we dove into the world of politics and political figures with yesterday’s post, it seemed appropriate today to share two quick videos that have made their way across Israeli social media—worth sh...

We posted this video, to which we’ve added subtitles for our readers and listeners, a few weeks ago. It’s an obvious evocation of Ben-Gurion, invited back to see the “country that sank.” These aren’t simple times in Israel. The war has turned into a slog, soldiers keep dying (yesterday morning we learned of three more) and it’s not entirely clear (at least to those of us not privy to inside conver...

Yair Golan, who now heads The Democrats, the Jewish political party that was forged out of a combination of the Labor Party and Meretz, has been much in the news for the foolish comment he made about Israel killing babies as a hobby, a comment we covered yesterday. Golan is a serious and accomplished person, and he knows that what he was said not true. Why he allowed himself to say something like...

“You’re the only reason that I’m here. You saved my life.” That’s what Edan Alexander said to Donald Trump in the video above, released by the White House. Edan, and particularly his mother, have taken a lot of heat on Israeli social media for thanking Donald Trump and not Benjamin Netanyahu. It might have been an oversight—but perhaps not. Either way, having a just-released hostage say to the Pre...

Over the hundreds of interviews that I’ve done for Israel from the Inside since we launched it in 2021, I’ve met fascinating people, been inspired by extraordinary stories and have learned an enormous amount. Still, though, until I interviewed Rabbi Hanan Schlessinger, I had never had the experience of interviewing someone, closing the interview, clicking on “Stop Recording” and then … just sittin...