Israel from the Inside with Daniel Gordis

Like a diver gone a bit too deep and for a bit too long, now desperate to get to the surface to suck in some oxygen, Israelis reveled in the news of the rescue of the four hostages on Shabbat. It had been a long, long time since there had been any substantive good news around here, and though everyone understood that the rescue doesn’t in any way change the strategic quagmire in which Israel is st...

Before we get to today’s subject, the spreading international academic boycott of Israel, a quick look at two of todays’s papers, which almost seem to be in dialogue with each other—one asking the question on everyone’s mind, and the other suggesting what seems to the most obvious (but very problematic in numerous ways) answer. First, Yediot Ahronot (the headline in the yellow) and then, Makor Ris...

Ever since the brouhaha in Congress over the three university presidents who were called to testify before Congress on December 5th, Israel news has been consumed not only with the war on this side of the ocean, but with the waves of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in North America. Today, to give a sense of the kinds of conversations that Israelis are having on those issues, we’re sharing portions...

Today we mark the Memorial Day for the Israeli Ethiopian community who perished in the Ethiopian exodus to Israel in the 1980s and 90s. We do so with a conversation with Dr. Marva Shalev Marom, on whom you can read more below. Today’s focus on the Ethiopian community affords an opportunity to mention facts that deserve more attention than they’ve received. Though Ethiopian Jews represent a mere 1....

We begin with this chalkboard image, the origins of which I don’t know, as someone sent it to me. It’s a pithy way of capturing what many Israelis feel about this still-shrinking country: My great-grandfather told us that once, we could go traveling in Syria. My grandma told that once, we used to be able to travel in Lebanon. Mom tells me that once we could travel in the Galilee. While it’s always...

It’s been a rough few days. There was the tragic accident caused by Israeli ordnance yesterday near Rafah that claimed the lives of 35 Palestinians and, predictably, has unleashed even more international outrage and further demands that Israel end the Rafah operation. At the same time, Israeli tanks entered Rafah for the first time. On the international front, Spain and Ireland announced earlier t...

In honor of the celebration of Yom Ha-Aztma’ut this year, not simple for anyone but all the more impossible if you’re from one of the devastated communities of the Gaza envelope, an Israeli Reggae band, Hatikvah-6, wrote for Kibbutz Be’eri a very touching song. It speaks about them, about people from other towns who are sharing their Dead Sea area hotel with them, what they’re all doing now, and w...

Yesterday, the families of some of the female hostages who had been filmed during their capture and on the first day of their captivity, released to the public a video of their daughters they’d apparently gotten from Israeli authorities some time back. They’d edited out some of the most painful images, they said, but even what remained was more than sufficient to remind Israelis that we have, inde...

With the recovery over the weekend of the bodies of four of our hostages, including one who was not known to have been killed, the kidnapped captives are back in the center of Israel’s news. That is obviously what the hostages’ families and many others want, and what they sought to accomplish with the alternate Yom Ha-Atzma’ut ceremony that they ran, a ceremony that national TV ran alongside the t...

Not long ago, Rabbi Dani Passow, Senior Director of Public and Alumni Programs at Harvard Hillel, reached out to see if we could have a conversation at the close of the week of Yom Ha-Zikaron (Remembrance Day for Fallen Soldiers) and Yom Ha-Atzma’ut (Independence Day). He and I conducted that discussion yesterday, and today we’re delighted to share it with you. We’ve posted a few very brief excerp...

We have, on a number of occasions, linked to videos created by a project called Toldot Yisrael . Toldot Yisrael  is a Jerusalem based nonprofit dedicated to recording and sharing the firsthand testimonies of the men and women who helped found the State of Israel. Since 2007, Toldot Yisrael has been interviewing the members of Israel’s 1948 generation in order to capture and preserve the epic story...

A few weeks ago, I had occasion to hear two Shalem College students, one a graduate and one still in school, in conversation with some very thoughtful American Jews. One of the participants asked these two people whether they thought that the toxicity of what we call “October 6 discourse,” ie, Israeli public discourse before October 7, is likely to return. Noam, who had returned to school from bat...

We’d been planning something different for today, sharing one of the many new songs that have appeared in recent months, celebrating our young generation and its courage, or mourning what we’ve lost. And on Wednesday, we’d planned to air a podcast episode about the Netzach Yehudah battalion, which Joe Biden has singled out for a possible arms embargo. Speaking of an arms embargo, it’s fascinating...

Even in the brief clip above, taken from a song that has appeared all over Twitter and Facebook in the past day or two (my thanks to Daniel G. for being the first one to bring it to my attention), you get a sense that this isn’t the Israeli music you’ve come to know. It sounds a lot more like Joan Baez or Pete Seeger protesting the Vietnam war. But, obviously, it is as Israeli as Israeli can be. I...

Almost since the war began, people have been writing me to ask, “Is it true that the army is actually not giving the soldiers the equipment they need? We hear of lots of people in the US helping to buy equipment, but we also hear the army reassuring everyone that there’s no shortage. What’s the story here?” Truth was, I didn’t know. Several very serious, strategic philanthropists I know have been...

If you’re a gadget person as I am, you might well end up decided by the end of this podcast that it’s time to remind your kids (as did I) of the date of your birthday, along with a link to the website of a company called AIR. What do they sell? A drone/airplane. It’s one that YOU can fly, with virtually no training. Think of it as the SmartCar equivalent of the airplane. Here’s a brief clip of a l...

On a week in which Israel was attacked by 300 missiles from Iran, it ironically seemed that the story that got most people talking was a series of images of Gazans having fun at the beach. (Iran also led to the hostages dropping off the agenda, to the horror of many of us.) Of course, there was the to-be-expected snark response to the beach photos— “they don’t look like they’re starving.” But most...

We’re going to come back to the video above shortly. It’s less than 40 seconds, but it has reignited the agony many Israelis still feel about these past six months, and contributed to a general sense of rage that was spreading even before the video was released. But first, TIME Magazine. Many of us heard yesterday that Rachel Goldberg-Polin was listed by TIME Magazine as one of the 100 most influe...

The restaurants and cafes were full on Sunday morning. During the night, we’d been hunkered down while Iranian weaponry exploded in the air above our homes, we then got very little sleep, and by morning, everything was back to normal. People were out for coffee, a danish, heading off to work (though schools were still closed). Frankly, the “morning after” was almost as extraordinary as the repelli...

By now, everyone has heard the obviously correct comment that the atrocities of October 7th were the most documented pogrom in Jewish history. But who is collecting the thousands upon thousands of video clips, still photos, and WhatsApp conversations between parents and their children about to die? And how does one even get those WhatsApps? And who should be able to hear them? Now? What about in t...

I’ve lost track of how many people have written me over the past few months to ask about volunteering opportunities. There are dozens of Israeli websites and WhatsApp groups where Israelis are sharing updates about what is needed and where, but for those who need English, options were much more limited. Then there are those who cannot be in fields for physical reasons, or lots of other factors peo...

Given the damage to Israel’s economy that was widely predicted during the judicial overhaul crisis and the ongoing war, the strength of the shekel is surprising many, both inside and outside of Israel. The headline in the screenshot above from Zman Yisrael , a Hebrew-language relative of Times of Israel, had this to say: Despite the situation in the country, the shekel is soaring ● The possible re...

I was going through security at Ben-Gurion airport on Saturday night, on my way to meeting with some people working on a mechanism to try to save Israeli democracy. A small group, fascinating people, and good for the soul to actually be trying to do something—regardless of what comes of it. (More on this meeting, perhaps, down the road.) So as one must do at TLV, I took my laptop and put it in a b...

If the video below by the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, and his vision for the world, doesn’t send chills down your spine, well … you’re in better shape than I am. As American students who are not Muslim and know virtually nothing about the Middle East now wear kaffiyehs all over campus (a member of the Harvard administration with whom I spoke this week estimated the number at 20% of the stude...

Israel from the Inside was always meant not to focus on war or politics, but instead, fo focus on the issues, challenges, people, culture, music and more that make up the mosaic of Israeli life—a mosaic that often doesn’t make it into the English press. Hamas, of course, has diverted this plans a bit, but now that we are five months into the war and war is becoming the “new normal,” we’re can fina...