The Promised Podcast

With some of the cast in shelters, and most living the high-life in the capitals of Western debauchery, we present a collection of “vatacountry” segments, in which each of us describe something that surprised and amazed us, delighted and amused us, in our day-to-day lives in Israel. As if to say, “Times were better once, and they’ll be better again soon.” Dancing the Ethiopian shoulder shake on Si...

Ilene, Noah and special guest, The Times of Israel's Miriam Herschlag, ask: 'We have met the enemy and he is us' When a pack of Jewish teens lynches a Palestinian kid, is it time for soul-searching? Is there still a moral high-ground and do we occupy it? Life interrupted: Can we plot peace from our bomb shelters? The irony of Haaretz's Conference on Peace being interrupted by sirens escaped no one...

Is it time for Lapid and Livni to quit Netanyahu’s government? Tzipi Livni, and to a lesser extent Yair Lapid, joined Netanyahu's government to run the 'Peace Show.' Now there is no Show, should they answer the Leader of the Opposition's call to resign? Letters to a kid contemplating conscientious objection What do we tell a 17-year-old considering whether he should serve in the IDF? Given the tou...

Is it time to revive Israel's vicious political debate? The solidarity engendered in Israeli society by the West Bank kidnappings is genuinely moving, but is it preventing us from holding our leaders to account? Is the great summer exodus a search for 'normality'? More and more Israelis are fleeing the country for trips abroad. What are they trying to escape? Do they want to see what life is like...

This episode of the Promised Podcast doesn't deal with the recent West Bank teen kidnappings straight-up; it's already been instrumentalized by too many, based on too few facts. We adhere to Ludwig Wittgenstein's dictum: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Allison, Don & Noah discuss: Have we lost patience with settlers? Is mainstream Israel losing patience with settlers, as fo...

Allison, Don & Noah discuss: Rubi Rivlin: A man of contradictions What to make of Israel’s newly elected President, Rubi Rivlin, a mensch (good guy) who also opposes a two-state solution? Oy, the dissonance! A pro-Palestinian settler leader? The startling NY Times op-ed by a settler leader who insists that Israel must hatch a “bold plan to improve every aspect of day-to-day life for Palestinians”:...

Hamas-Fatah reconciliation: Just suck it up? How the hell should we react to the reunification of Hamas and Fatah in the Palestinian Authority? The right to remain unremembered Do Israelis need “the right to be forgotten” on the internet? Where did evolution go? Why did it take 66 years for evolution to make it into Israeli schools? Music: All songs by the awe-inspiring Balkan Beat Box Move It War...

Allison, Don, Noah and special guest star, author Ayelet Waldman discuss: The thinnest of lines — between 'Jewish' and 'Democratic' How do Jews around the world think Israel ought to balance its “democratic” and “Jewish” values? The Jewish People Policy Institute's new report, “Jewish and Democratic: Perspectives from World Jewry,” shows that diaspora Jews view Jewish values as essentially democra...

Allison, Eilon, and Noah discuss: Why one MK has complained that “we have become a country of idiots that does not respect the Torah,” in response to the wild celebrations following Maccabi Tel Aviv's victory in the European basketball championship; why a famous Hebrew University historian asserts that the victory is “the biggest proof that Zionism has failed when it comes to sports;” Whether the...

 Allison, Don, and Noah discuss: “iNakba,” an iPhone app that aims to put the dispossession of Palestinian homes and villages into your pocket; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pledge to “legally define the Talmud as the basis of the Israeli legal system” and to make the Jewish calendar the official calendar of the state; and whether Israel, like the rest of the west, is experiencing a “crisis...

Allison, Don and Noah discuss (1) Why the Conference of Presidents decided to keep J-Street out of their nifty club, and what’ll happen as a result, and (2) Why the proliferating “alternative” ceremonies for Memorial Day and Independence day piss off so many. Plus (3) Our First Annual Promised Podcast State of the State Addresses (or, for you commonwealth times, our First Annual Speech from the Th...

Show Summary – Allison, Don, Eilon and Noah discuss (1) Whether we are cheapening the memory of the Holocaust by applying it to our present-day politics, (2) Whether the amateur Abbasologists filing newspaper opinion columns have a clue about what motivates Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and (3) Whether or not the remodeling of Israeli schools into cubical habitats to prepare kids for office...

Allison, Don and Noah discuss: Mahmoud Abbas’ two “Hail Mary” plays, either dismantling the Palestinian Authority or joining up with Hamas The new 83 year-old head of the Council of Torah Sages, who gave a crowd-pleasin’ inaugural address calling all those who are not ultra-orthodox “ignoramuses” who “pursue nonsense” The mind-blowing new report of the OECD that finds that Israel is “the land of l...

Don, Eilon, and Noah discuss: the growing trend in the army to rely on donations by well-wishers for basic supplies like boots and socks why the peace process seems to be gasping its last gasp whether or not it should bug us that the average CEO in Israel makes 76 times what the average rest-of-us make Music: All Songs by The Hazelnuts (האחיות לוז) Single Ladies (with a tip of the hat to Beyonce)...

Don, Noah, and Miriam Herschlag (Ops & Blogs editor of the Times of Israel) discuss: a new report finding that almost a million Israelis go to bed hungry whether Israeli leaders ain’t what they used to be, and why whether or not stores in Jewish neighborhoods should sell leavened bread on Passover. Music: All Songs by “(Amit Erez and) The Secret Sea” Afterlife Not About Us Slow Burning Light Killi...

Allison, Don and Noah discuss (1) whether Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s proposal to exchange blocs of population is sincere or mere smartassery, (2) How do we solve a problem like corruption? (With apologies to Rogers and Hammerstein), and (3) Why Israeli parents let their kids play with fire and rusty nails, and take candy from strangers? All this, and the music of Vitarti on the week of t...

Show Summary – Allison, Don, Eilon and Noah discuss (1) whether there is (as journalist Yossi Klein Halevi recently wrote) a slowly surfacing, stealthful, steadily swelling, and subtly subversive moderate Center in Israeli politics, (2) why so many ex-pols are becoming rich through influence peddling, and what can be done about it, and (3) whether a proposed new law that would ban free daily newsp...

Don, Eilon and Noah discuss (1) Whether, now that the head of the ultraorthodox Shas party has endorsed Labor Party leader Yitzhak Herzog for Prime Minister, the time has come for the Labor Party to pal up to the haredim, (2) Why Evangelical support for Israel is waning, and whether we should lose sleep over it, and (3) How our own political views have changed over the years. Plus music from the r...

Former Ambassador Michael Oren’s “Plan B” for unilateral withdrawal – what could go wrong?!? Why MK Adi Kol is being crucified on Facebook for declaring undying love for her party chief, Yair Lapid Why “Good Deeds Day” inspires and nauseates in equal measure. Plus the first annual listener Purim Quiz ! Playlist: All songs by Danny Sanderson & Friends (Danny Sanderson, Kavah Baht-Israel, Eleshevah...

Allison, Eilon and Noah (Or, Travoltafied, Alexis Keezy, Erin Stonz and Niall Edbrards) discuss: Outsourcing our political activism to entrepreneurs and captains of Industry, who claim that they anyway know best what’s best for the country; Whether it is time to stick a fork in AIPAC, and if it is, what then?; and Does our Judaism need professional coordinators, as the Ministry for Religious Affai...

Allison, Don and Noah discuss: Whether PM Netanyahu ought to leave his opponents in the Likud behind and start a new party, à la Arik Sharon; A Knesset committee’s vote to force Haredim into the army (well, maybe); and Whether keeping foreign produce off local shelves is screwing the poor or helping farmers.    Playlist: Music by a crazy-hip female punk foursome, “Not on Tour” I Wanna Be Like You!...

Allison, Don and Noah discuss: Whether the Israeli press is hobbled or hackneyed The roles academics and intellectuals play in Israeli politics, and The ambivalent comforts of holding two passports   Playlist: A tribute to Israeli tributes to the Beatles, in honor of the 50th the Ed Sullivan Show.   When I’m 64 - Jericho Jones I Will - Hipushiot Ha-Kfar Dear Prudence - Adam Ben Ezra Tamid - Gidi G...

Allison, Don, Eilon and Noah discuss: Settlers who say they’ll stay put, even if Israel withdraws and they find themselves in Palestine; Whether “medical tourism” is a way to stave off the collapse of Israel's medical system; and How the hell we’re supposed to feel while watching video from Iran showing drones laying waste to Tel Aviv. All this, and music from “Kids from Nowhere”! (http://kidsfrom...

Allison, Don, Eilon and Noah discuss: whether polygamy is rampant and unimpeded among the Bedouin of the Negev; the recent finding that the half-life of ethnic neighborhoods in Israel is shorter than almost anywhere else on earth; and the deep distress of the post office, and whether it should be bailed-out or privatized. All this, and punk by ShittyCT (sound it out)!   Music: ShittyCT Erev Tov Le...

Allison, Don, Eilon and Noah discuss: Rights, civil and human — as Shulamit Aloni’s death leaves us to wonder about the fate of the discourse of “rights” that she did so much to advance Whether there is really no connection between the occupation and the rise of world-wide anti-Semitism, as Minister Naftali Bennett insisted this week The putative death of the Israeli center.   All that and authent...