What Matters Now

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring key issues currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, with host Amanda Borschel-Dan speaking with The Times of Israel's senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur . The body of the final hostage, Master Sgt. Ran Gvili, was recovered from the Gaza Strip this week and buried on Wednesday in his hometown of Meitar. Rettig Gur delves into the deep Jewis...

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring key issues currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, with host deputy editor Amanda Borschel-Dan speaking with Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib , the head of Realign For Palestine, an Atlantic Council project that challenges entrenched narratives in the Israel and Palestine discourse. This week, we dive into the 12-member National Committee for the...

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring key issues currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, with host deputy editor Amanda Borschel-Dan speaking with Israel Story producer Mitch Ginsburg. On February 20, 1979, the last 33 Israelis returned from Tehran upon the forced closure of the Israeli embassy. After the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khoumeini's new regime, the Israeli trade...

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring key issues currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, with host deputy editor Amanda Borschel-Dan speaking with stand-up comedian Liz Glazer, who is coming soon to Israel as part of the annual Comedy for Koby tour. On stage and off, the former law prof -- a graduate of New York's stalwart Modern Orthodox Ramaz high school -- is loudly and...

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring key issues currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, with host deputy editor Amanda Borschel-Dan speaking with Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib , the head of Realign For Palestine, an Atlantic Council project that challenges entrenched narratives in the Israel and Palestine discourse. This week, we dive into the five likely scenarios that could play...

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring key issues currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, with host Jessica Steinberg speaking with cookbook author Adeena Sussman. In this conversation with the bestselling author of "Sababa" and "Shabbat," Sussman discusses the intersection of cooking, culture, and personal experiences as she continues melding her American Jewish background...

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring key issues currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, with host Amanda Borschel-Dan speaking with James Pasch , the Anti-Defamation League's vice president of litigation. Pasch, is currently in Israel to meet with the plaintiffs in a massive lawsuit the ADL initiated against Iran, North Korea, Syria and Hamas, for their part in the Octobe...

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring key issues currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, with host  Amanda Borschel-Dan speaking with Dr. Gilad Malach, a research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute. Malach's research focuses on public policy related to Israel's ultra-Orthodox community, including issues critical to its integration into Israel's economy and socie...

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring key issues currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, with host Amanda Borschel-Dan speaking with Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib , the head of Realign For Palestine, an Atlantic Council project that challenges entrenched narratives in the Israel and Palestine discourse. This summer, Alkhatib flew over Gaza as part of the last days of the United Ara...

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring key issues currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, with host Amanda Borschel-Dan speaking with the past president of The Hebrew University, Prof. Asher Cohen. During the eight years Cohen served as university president, Israel encountered numerous challenges, including the coronavirus epidemic from February 2020, the uproar over the Ju...

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring key issues currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, with host Amanda Borschel-Dan speaking with The Times of Israel's senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur . BBC director-general Tim Davie and Deborah Turness, the chief executive of BBC News, stepped down this week after being in the firing line for months over allegations of bias — inc...

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring key issues currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, with host Amanda Borschel-Dan speaking with ToI film reviewer Jordan Hoffman . The duo beta-tests their soon-to-be-launched podcast series — so new it does not yet have a name — in which they will deliver entertainment news from a Jewish angle (aka Jangle) and review one ne...

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring key issues currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, with host Jessica Steinberg speaking with former hostage Eli Sharabi. Sharabi, whose bestselling book, "Hostage," was recently translated into English, spoke to What Matters Now a few days before burying his brother, Yossi Sharabi, whose body was recently released home to Israel after...

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring key issues currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, with host Jessica Steinberg speaking with Orna and Ronen Neutra, parents of Omer Neutra, a tank platoon commander who was killed on October 7, 2023, his body taken hostage by Hamas terrorists. The Neutras, Israeli-born Americans who have been living in the US for the last 20 years, tal...

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring key issues currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, with host Amanda Borschel-Dan speaking with author and public intellectual Micah Goodman. Looking to the French for historical framing, Goodman proposes that Israel is on the brink of a new epoch -- the third Israeli republic. The author of influential works such as “Catch-67&rdq...

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring key issues currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, with host Amanda Borschel-Dan speaking with The Times of Israel's senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur, marking two years since the October 7, 2023, Hamas onslaught on southern Israel. To gain a sense of the Israeli public sentiment after two years of war, Rettig Gur analyzes a new survey c...

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring key issues currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, with host Jessica Steinberg speaking with Rachel Goldberg-Polin, mother of murdered hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin. Goldberg-Polin, who has become a well-known voice in the Jewish and Israeli world since October 7, 2023, when Hersh was taken captive by Hamas terrorists, speaks about the...

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring key issues currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, with host deputy editor Amanda Borschel-Dan speaking with Yossi Klein Halevi . This week, we speak with Hartman Institute senior fellow, author and thinker Yossi Klein Halevi from his Jerusalem home overlooking the back of the Mount Herzl National Military Cemetery.  With that bac...

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring key issues currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, with host deputy editor Amanda Borschel-Dan speaking with Daniel Gordis . Gordis, an author, scholar, rabbi, activist and sometime Times of Israel blogger, is the creator of the popular Substack blog and podcast, "Israel from the Inside." He recounts how he began the blog in 2021 to pu...

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring key issues currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, with host deputy editor Amanda Borschel-Dan speaking with senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur. There are still lots of questions and not a lot of answers after a bold Israeli airstrike targeted a meeting of Hamas’s top leaders in Qatar’s capital, Doha, on Tuesday. According to...

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring key issues currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, with host Jessica Steinberg speaking with Australians Tamar Paluch and Deborah Conway, the editor and a contributor to "Ruptured, Jewish Women in Australia Reflect on Life Post-October 7," a book of essays. Paluch, who edited the book with Lee Kofman, discusses how the idea came f...

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring key issues currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, with host deputy editor Amanda Borschel-Dan speaking with legal expert on genocide Menachem Rosensaft. Rosensaft is an adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School and lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School, where he teaches the law of genocide -- since 2008 at Cornell and since 2011...

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring key issues currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, with host deputy editor Amanda Borschel-Dan speaking with former US negotiator, adviser and ambassador Dennis Ross. Today, Ross, an author and the counselor and William Davidson Distinguished Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, also teaches at Georgetown University...

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring key issues currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, with host Amanda Borschel-Dan speaking with Prof. Dan Turner, the head of a pediatric gastroenterology unit at one of Israel’s most respected hospitals located in Jerusalem and Deputy Dean of the School of Medicine at the Hebrew University. Turner, alongside his work as a physici...

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring key issues currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, with host Amanda Borschel-Dan speaking with ToI's senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur. During the Tisha B'Av fast on Sunday, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir again made headlines for going up to the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. There were two big differences this ti...