Israel from the Inside with Daniel Gordis

In the minds of many, Jerusalem is the Israeli city where “the religious stuff” happens, while Tel Aviv is, if not “sin city,” then at least a much more secular, European metropolis. There is some truth to that, of course, but reality, not surprisingly, is more nuanced. There is plenty of culture in Jerusalem that is not religion-based, and a number of newly thriving religious communities in Tel A...

Today, we focus on the healing of Israel’s souls. We begin with the music video above by Udi Kagan. Udi is an actor and comedian. He’s been on a number of different TV shows, including Eretz Nehederet (Israel’s version of SNL) and Gav HaUma, a popular satire with Lior Schleien (we featured something about it here ). The music video below is not satirical. There is nothing funny about it. It highli...

A few months ago, in the early part of the summer, a friend who works with a massive American foundation called me to ask if I thought the war in Gaza would still be dragging on when the new American academic year started. I told him, obviously, that I had no idea and that I didn’t think anyone did, but if I had to bet money on it, then, yes, the war would still be going when US campuses returned...

“What is the purpose of Israel? What’s the reason for having a Jewish state?” The answer to that question is much less obvious than it might seem. Whenever I pose the question, the most common answer is that Israel is a refuge, a place to which Jews from around the world could run if things ever got bad enough where they are: London, Paris or Buenos Aires, for example. The answer isn’t wrong, of c...

Yesterday was a bit heavy, so for today, something a bit lighter, something that might even make some readers smile. IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi’s job was never going to be easy; heading Israel’s army is not a job for the faint of heart. Halevi, who assumed the Chief of Staff post in January 2023, has had an unimaginably horrible year. Thus, during the almost-year-long war, Israelis have gotte...

Barely a few weeks into this war, back at the end of October or the beginning of November, we had most of our kids around the Shabbat lunch table. Some have always lived here. Some didn’t then (but are returning soon) and they had chosen to return to Israel to rejoin their unit; some were visiting to check up on us to make sure that we, their parents, were doing OK. Given geography and the complic...

Before we get to the “right” and what it believes Israel needs most in these trying, often terrifying, turbulent times, we share the video above to give another glimpse from the Israeli street and the efforts of some of the families of the hostages and supporters to make the issue—no longer as front and center as it used to be—a national issue once again. (We’ve added subtitles as needed.) This vi...

This is supposed to be the moment that our souls heal. The period after Tisha B’Av is known as the sheva shabbatot nechemta , the Seven Weeks of Consolation. They are the seven weeks between Tisha B’Av and Rosh HaShannah, where the prophetic readings on Shabbat morning are meant to console, to bring hope, to prepare us for new beginnings with Rosh Hashanah. Yet we already know that Rosh Hashanah i...

The image above, which says שישה באב “Shisha B’Av,” or “The Sixth of Av,” went viral a year ago on Israeli social media, just three days before the Ninth of Av. That was the day that the Knesset, despite overwhelming public objection, passed the first of the changes to Israel’s judicial system—a plank called the “reasonability clause.” Many of us, myself included, had been certain that the Knesset...

There’s a seemingly strange story in the Talmud, which we’ll discuss tomorrow, in which during the siege on Jerusalem, a wealthy woman dies from stepping in dung. For all the years that I’ve read that story, much of which is harrowing, the part about her stepping in dung and dying has struck me as odd, as less profound than the rest of the story. After all, people don’t die from stepping in dung....

SOME READERS AND LISTENERS HAD DIFFICULTY ACCESSING THE RECORDING WE SENT OUT EARLIER TODAY. IT’S NOT CLEAR WHY, SO WE’RE SENDING THE ENTIRE POST AGAIN. Should you still encounter difficulties, you can listen to the recording here . The pace of events is such that writing these words in Los Angeles on Friday afternoon means that by the time this goes live on Sunday (when we hope to be in the air,...

The pace of events is such that writing these words in Los Angeles on Friday afternoon means that by the time this goes live on Sunday (when we hope to be in the air, returning home earlier than planned, trying to get back to Israel before the air space closes, which it might), the world could look very different. But perhaps it will not have changed, and we’ll still be waiting. If the report belo...

We heard on Monday from Dekel Shalev about the harrowing experience her family had to endure on October 7th. The hours in the safe room, with no food, no water, no air conditioning, three children and a their parents—and the sense of abandonment they felt and feel at the country’s failure to protect and rescue them. What’s next? Where does on go to heal? What does one to do try to give one’s kids...

Many Israelis have put this symbol on their social media as a “temporary photo”. The Hebrew says “Our heart is with Majdal Shams.” That, of course, is the northern village/city in Israel, largely Druze, where Hezbollah murdered 12 children. We’ll have more to say about that tomorrow, but in the meantime, even as today’s focus is on the horror of one Jewish family from Be’eri, it seemed critically...

THURSDAY (7/18): It’s been some six weeks since the heroic rescue of the four hostages—and the tragic death of Arnon Zemora in that battle. In classic Israeli fashion, people are rallying to support his wife and are sharing a unique project she’d begun long before the war. We’ll share the project, along with the window into Israeli life that it provides. Noa Sorek is poet laureate of the Minister...

Small Israeli businesses are struggling, and not always making it. When just a few people from a small business get called up to reserves and are gone for months, it can spell the end of a business. Koret Israel Economic Development Fund (KIEDF) was established in 1994 with the aim of promoting employment and economic mobility, through access to credit, guidance and support for small and micro bus...

While President Biden’s disastrous debate and the attempt on Donald Trump’s life last night have captured all the Israeli news about America’s upcoming election, this was an election that Israelis were watching closely even before these developments. The election has huge potential implications for the future of our war, for the future of the relationship between Israel and the United States and—b...

For today, we had planned to post something about what I thought was a fascinating exhibit at the Tel Aviv Museum, on alternative visions of Zionism. It’s a truly interesting exhibit, made all the more worth seeing because as the curators describe the works in most of the current exhibits, all the art is about the war. When I looked at the art, it was clear to me that much of it was not about the...

Just as Shabbat was about to begin on Friday, as we were powering everything down, getting ready to light candles and head off to synagogue, our devices started pinging. “Hamas has informed Hezbollah that it has accepted the terms of the cease fire proposal,” they add said. As bad as Gaza is, Lebanon would be much worse. Everyone here knows that. But Hezbollah says it will not stop firing on the n...

Wishes to our readers in the United States for a happy and safe 4th of July. The video above, a tragic and heartbreaking list of names, is not how most graduations you may have attended this spring opened. Shalem College , though growing rapidly, is still small; one might have thought that with just a few hundred students and less than a hundred faculty, we’d have been able to steer clear of the h...

Israel has long taken great pride in its having the highest birth rate—even among secular Jewish women—of any country in the OECD. We take great pride that this country of some 9,000,000 people started out with 600,000 Jews in 1948. As great as this achievement has been—and it has been truly extraordinary, like everything in life, “it’s complicated.” There are concerns about the long-term sustaina...

We’ll come back to hope and today’s podcast—which we’re making available to everyone—just below. First, a correction. We posted about Israel’s new unofficial anthem, a song by Eyal Golan, and we shared a video of it . When we posted the video, we wrote that "Eyal Golan’s team did the video and the English translation.", because, well, that’s what we thought. But a reader wrote to say that it was a...

We focus today on Israeli social solidarity. It was during the Judicial Reform “process,” of course, that the deep divisions in Israeli society became headline news. Many, including President Herzog, warned that Israel was heading to civil war. Ari Shavit, a leading Israeli journalist whom we’ve featured on our podcast, warned in his columns during that period that the social divisions in Israel w...

As the war drags on (some are beginning to call this Israel’s Second War of Attrition), sentiments about the north range from deep worry to anguish . A bit more on that, first. Then, memory. In this year of mourning and constant funerals (I know several people who went to three different funerals yesterday), Israelis are focusing on memory—through both informal, popular means, as well as more form...

We begin with the video above, which exploded across Israeli social media yesterday. At first people weren’t sure if it was real, or a spoof. Israel is catapulting fire over a wall, in a war that is being fought with F-35s, AI drone swarms, hypersonic missiles and like? Really? What the h***? Well, it seems that it’s real. Someone who has served in the north explained to me that Israel is trying t...