Jonny Gould's Jewish State

Today we focus on champions for our people in law and football. We talk to CEO of UK Lawyers for Israel, barrister Jonathan Turner and David Bolchover, author of a biography on Bela Guttmann, “The Greatest Comeback”. Jonathan describes the remarkable successes of his organisation despite limited manpower and resources and David recounts the ultimate Jewish football hero, Bela Guttmann, who survive...

Yaakov Peri has dedicated his life to public service. As director of Shin Bet, Israel's internal security, he was answerable only to the Prime Minister and oversaw the agency for nearly seven years. He was also in the opposition Yesh Atid party from 2013 including a spell as Minister for Science, Technology and Space. Yaakov tells me his hopes for peace with Palestine, the deeply problematic situa...

My two guests are MPs taking the fight to Jeremy Corbyn over antisemitism. While Ian Austin became the ninth MP to leave Labour since Corbyn became leader, John Mann MP says he'll "have to be thrown out". But both are united in their fight against his leadership. I share with Ian a deep respect and affection for the Black Country, where he's MP for Dudley North, and we discuss our shared heritage...

In this episode, I focus on an industry at which Israel leads the world, HealthTech. In a matter of years, Israel's digital health industry has evolved from a small group of innovative start-ups to a rich eco-system around Tel Aviv. In a partnership of private and public sector investment, Israel's HealthTech industry is training AI algorithms, using massive data based on twenty years of medical r...

"Seek the peace and prosperity of the city of your exile, pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper", Jeremiah 29:7, recited to me by the remarkable Trevor Horn. The Grammy, Brit and Ivor Novello Award winning record producer, coined "the man who invented the 80s", gives me a very personal interview about his current projects, (touring and a new album) plus a rundown of...

This episode goes some way to explaining the Jewish relationship with football, both today and in the twentieth century. My guests today are Ivor Baddiel, the comedy writer and biographer David Bolchover, who wrote "The Greatest Comeback", the amazing story of football's greatest Jewish hero, Bela Guttmann. If you've been to the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, you'll almost certainly have heard the wor...

My two guests today are from very different parts of British society - but united in opposing Jeremy Corbyn and the scandal of antisemitism sweeping Labour. Jassem Tamim (pictured hugging our own James Marlow at the 2021 Israel Solidarity Rally in Kensington, London) is a Sunni Muslim originally from Morocco, who considers his opposition to antisemitism as payback to Britain for the tolerance and...

Dov Forman and her great-grandmother Lily Ebert have co-written a book, “Lily’s Promise” about her Holocaust story. But 35 years before, I recorded the same idea with my own grandma. Grandma Olga’s recorded voice and when and where we recounted her life story will always be my most treasured episode. This is her eyewitness testimony of leaving Nazi-occupied Vienna for a new and as yet, uncharted h...

This is a very special episode for me. I rediscovered an old cassette I’d recorded of an interview with my late Grandma in 1984, when she was 77 - and I was 17. Thursday afternoons were always lunch at Grandma and I’d always wanted to record her voice for future Gould/Posaner generations. She narrates her own escape from Hitler's Vienna in 1938 and arrival in Birmingham. It’s her story of rebuildi...

Mark joins me to discuss moving to Israel with his fiancée, Mandy Blumenthal, what prompted their decision to leave the UK and the Israeli health system which promises him the world’s best treatment for Multiple Sclerosis, a condition he’s had since his twenties. He’s had a remarkable legal career, the highlight was when he represented more than 120 victims of phone-hacking and exposed the News of...

“We ought not deal in the soft bigotry of low expectations of the Palestinians” – Benjamin Anthony, CEO, MirYam Institute. This is the first podcast in a series on Jewish and Israeli issues - so let's start with the biggest of them all: peace with the Palestinians. Brigadier General Amir Avivi (ret.) and Sgt. Benjamin Anthony of The New State Solution were in London to meet Egyptian officials to d...