Podcasts about ben gurion

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.comDouglas is a writer and commentator. He's an associate editor at The Spectator and a columnist for both the New York Post and The Sun, as well as a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His books include The Madness of Crowds and The War on the West, which we discussed on the Dishcast three years ago. His new book is On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization. We had a lively, sometimes contentious session — first on Trump, then on Israel's tactics in Gaza.This episode and a forthcoming one with Francis Collins were challenges. How to push back against someone who is your guest? I never wanted the Dishcast to be an interrogation, an Andrew Neil-style interview. But I also wanted it to air debate, so I try to play devil's advocate when appropriate. I'm sure you'll let me know how I'm doing after this one.For two clips of our convo — on Palestinians “endlessly rejecting peace,” and debating the Khalil case — pop over to our YouTube page.Other topics: the pros and cons of Trump 2.0 for Douglas; his time on the frontlines in Ukraine; the “horrifying” WH meeting with Zelensky; mineral reparations; North Korean conscripts; aggressing Greenland; Blame Canada; the Signal chat; Vance's disdain for Europe; the Houthis; MAGA isolationists; targeting law firms; race and sex discrimination under Biden; Trump defunding the Ivies; anti-Semitism on campus; the Columbia protests and criminality; the Alien Enemies Act and the 1952 law; the Ozturk case; the horrors of 10/7; Hezbollah's aborted invasion; the bombing of Gaza; human shields; dead children; hostages like Edan Alexander; Gazan protests against Hamas; the Israeli dentist who saved Sinwar's life; 9/11 and religious extremism; the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza; Ben-Gurion; Zionism; pogroms in the wake of 1948; audio clips of Hitchens and Bill Burr; the view that only Jews can protect Jews; Rushdie; the hearts and minds of Gazans; John Spencer; just war theory; Trump's Mar-a-Gaza; the West Bank settlements; ethnic cleansing; Smotrich; and the fate of a two-state solution after 10/7.Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Claire Lehmann on the success of Quillette, Evan Wolfson on the history of marriage equality, Francis Collins on faith and science and Covid, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee on Covid's political fallout, and Paul Elie on his book The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Am 14. März 1960 traf Israels Regierungschef David Ben-Gurion erstmals Bundeskanzler Konrad Adenauer – also einen Vertreter des Volkes, das den Holocaust zu verantworten hatte. Beide legten den Grundstein für die Aufnahme diplomatischer Beziehungen. Engelbrecht, Sebastian www.deutschlandfunk.de, Kalenderblatt

The Knesset Health Committee held a special debate on Monday to discuss the possibility Israel’s withdrawal from World Health Organization. Coalition MKs accused the WHO of antisemitism and discrimination against Israel, and noted that the UN agency has failed to condemn the use of hospitals and other medical facilities by Hamas during the Gaza war. Professor Dorit Nitzan, a representative of the Israel Medical Association and former WHO official, opposed Israel's withdrawal, arguing that leaving the organization could significantly harm national security, public health, and global cooperation. KAN's Mark Weiss spoke with Professor Nadav Davidovitch from Beersheva’s Ben Gurion university, chair of the Taub Center’s Health Policy program and an executive board member at ASPHER, the Association of Schools of Public Health in the European region. (Photo: Reuters)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The American Studies Association has boycotted Israeli academic institutions since 2013. The Association for the Advancement of Anthropology has refrained from formal collaborations with Israeli academic institutions. And just this past summer, the American Association of University Professors opened the door to academic boycotts against Israel.  Enter: two scientists at MIT who see firsthand the consequences of academic boycotts and the damage it can cause to scholarship and scientific progress. To ensure Israeli scholars and their American colleagues can collaborate freely, and foster research and innovation that benefits all of humanity, they formed The Kalaniyot Foundation (pronounced Ka-la-nee-yought), named after Israel's national flower.  Hear from Drs. Or Hen and Ernest Fraenkel, co-founders of this initiative, on the impact of anti-Israel boycotts on academic collaboration with Israeli scholars, and what they're doing to rehabilitate the reputation of Israeli researchers in the eyes of the world.  Listen – AJC Podcasts: The Forgotten Exodus: with Hen Mazzig, Einat Admony, and more. People of the Pod:  U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff on Gaza Reconstruction, Israeli Security, and the Future of Middle East Diplomacy Why Germany's Antisemitic Far-Right Party is Thriving Instead of Disappearing Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod You can reach us at: peopleofthepod@ajc.org If you've appreciated this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. __ Transcript of Conversation with Drs. Or Hen and Ernest Fraenkel: Manya Brachear Pashman:   Since the Hamas terror attacks of October 7, 2023 many university campuses have been riven by anti-Israel protests, demonstrations, often unfortunately fueled by disinformation and rife with rhetoric that too often crosses the line into antisemitism. But even before October 7, Israeli scholarship had become a target of the boycott divestment sanctions movement.  The American Studies Association has boycotted Israeli academic institutions since 2013. The Association for the Advancement of Anthropology has refrained from formal collaborations with Israeli academic institutions. Even study abroad programs that give students an opportunity to live and study in Israel have come under scrutiny. Enter: two scientists at MIT who see firsthand the consequences of academic boycotts and the damage it can cause to scholarship and scientific progress. To ensure Israeli scholars and their American colleagues can collaborate freely, foster research and innovation that benefits all of humanity, they formed The Kalaniyot Foundation, named after Israel's national flower. Dr. Or Hen and Ernest Fraenkel are with us now to discuss this initiative. Dr. Hen, Dr. Fraenkel, welcome to People of the Pod.  Ernest Fraenkel:   Thank you very much.  Manya Brachear Pashman:   So I want to work backward here a bit with a purpose. I want to start by sharing with our audience a little about your research. Dr Fraenkel, you work in health science, technology. What is the goal of your research and scholarship? Are there particular diseases you're trying to cure or treat? Ernest Fraenkel:   We are interested in the diseases that are the hardest to treat, ones like Alzheimer's, ALS, Parkinson's, where we don't really know the root cause, and we believe that by gathering many different kinds of data about genes and molecules, about RNA and also about people's lived experience of these diseases, and using computational models, we can identify new targets for drugs and hopefully better therapies. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Have you collaborated with Israeli scientists on this?  Ernest Fraenkel:   Yes, we collaborate with quite a few scientists all over the world, including top researchers in Israel. Manya Brachear Pashman:   And Dr. Hen, you are a nuclear physicist, and you study the strongest force in nature, right? What is the goal of your research?  Or Hen:   So my research is very much on the fundamental curiosity driven science side of things, I am trying to understand how the fundamental building blocks of matter come about. We're building a new particle collider in the US called the electron hand collider. It's a $3 billion project funded by the Department of Energy, where we will try to understand why the proton and from that nucleus and all of us have mass. Trying to understand how we get the proton to a specific spin, which is the reason that we can go into an MRI machine and image ourselves. And I also try to understand things like, how do protons and neutrons interact with each other at extremely short distances, which tell us about exotic phenomena in the universe, like neutron stars. So trying to understand, really, the fundamental building blocks of matter and how they come about. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Wow. And is there promising scholarship in this realm in Israel? Or Hen:   Yes, there's quite a few groups working in this area. I did my own training in Israel. I am a graduate of the Hebrew University for undergrad and Tel Aviv University for grad school. And actually, ever since I came to MIT, I've still been collaborating with colleagues from Technion, Tel Aviv, Hebrew University, Weizmann, Ben Gurion. I've always had a strong collaboration with Israel, actually. Manya Brachear Pashman:   So after October 7, or maybe even leading up to it, what were you seeing when it came to support of Israeli scholarship and collaboration in your institutions, in your fields, in academia in general? Ernest Fraenkel:   I think before October 7, we were living in a bit of a bubble, because MIT is a special place which is very deeply immersed in science and technology. Where really, quite honestly, before October 7, I had no hint that there were biases against Israel, Israelis or Jews. I know that was not the experience in many other areas, especially in other fields. But things really turned 180 degrees on October 7, and what we've seen since then has been deeply disturbing. That some of the boycotts that have been bubbling for years in the humanities suddenly burst forth into the sciences and the engineering fields in ways that are both global and also very local. Seeing bias against individual researchers inside laboratories, as well as these kind of blanket attempts to boycott Israel. Manya Brachear Pashman:   And Dr Hen, did you see the same?  Or Hen:   Yes, definitely. I work with a lot of international collaborations, actually, within collaborations, because there's structured bodies with bylaws and rules, It was very hard for anyone to object the presence of Israeli researchers. But what we have observed in many places is peer to peer collaborations dying down. We've seen a very significant social tax being applied to people who continue to collaborate with Israelis, and honestly, maybe in contrast a bit to what we know from academic boycotts in other areas, but are very much politically driven, within the STEM, within exact sciences, biosciences, etc, the social taxing is actually much stronger because we are people who usually instead, people keep a very clear separation between the politics and then, you know what they view from the work in the lab, which is very clear and data driven, and not a lot of room for opinions. It's very much exact.  But on the other hand, the second that walking within Israel, and you know collaborating with Israel, is start costing other corporations, other people will now not work, then you get a problem. And that's what people really avoid and that's how an academic boycott within the STEM areas is progressing. It's a very deeply bound social tax that is just running in the air of the institutions. Manya Brachear Pashman:   So what is the Kalaniyot Foundation doing to promote these collaborations? Can you give us some specific examples, or projects or partnerships? Or Hen:   Yeah, so one of the things that we really believe in is that, at the end of the day, actually, what we see, also data shows, is, well, there is existing strong collaboration, that peer to peer, that person to person connection, is so strong that it's very hard to break that. You can go into my department and you can talk to people about Israel. And they know Or, and they know the person, right? And they might have a positive opinion about, you know, negative opinion about me. But whatever that opinion is, right, it's stronger than anything.  They will try to protest and say, Okay, maybe there's a political issue. But you know, we know the researcher. We know the scientists. We know our colleagues. So the approach of Kalaniyot is to actually bring in more Israelis to campus, to bring in brilliant people who are excellent researchers that will come and enrich the academic environment, first and foremost, through this quality, and second, by the people that they are. Maybe Ernest, you want to continue with this? Ernest Fraenkel:   So it's really this dual mission. We think that if we bring more top notch Israeli scholars to us campuses, it will normalize interaction with Israelis, humanize the Israeli, but there's a problem, right? Because if you just bring Israelis into campus environments that are hostile, they won't thrive. Many of them won't want to come, right? And so the other piece of it that's necessary is to build community, and that's something that we've been doing since October 7 of last year, trying to figure out how to do that, and what we found is face to face interaction is really critical.  And so at MIT, we've been having weekly lunches of the Israelis, Jews, allies, everybody who felt isolated and left out of society by all the protests that were taking place. And the beautiful thing is that that started as a reaction, right, a sort of a safe place to retreat to, and it's actually become a wonderful, positive place. And still, now, you know, so far into this crisis, people are coming, and actually the numbers are even growing. And so on a typical week, we get more than 100 people in person. We, of course, feed them lunch, and it's just a wonderful place where you can make friendships, develop academic collaborations, and Israelis realize that there is a community here that appreciates them and welcomes them and it helps them thrive. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Because, of course, food is a vital currency, both on college campuses as well in Jewish as in Jewish life. Food heals all. But I am curious, do you? In addition to building these thriving communities, are you also so that people are surrounded and comfortable but are you also trying to build bridges with people who perhaps do tend to throw the word Israeli around in a negative capacity, but you need to actually have some face to face contact. Or is that really not the purpose of Kalaniyot. Or Hen:   I mean, it's a yes and a no. We certainly have done that, right. So if you think about how it all started very soon after October 7, basically after the first protest on campus at MIT. We went to talk to our president, three Jewish Israeli faculty, and we asked her. We said, Look, we hear from the students about what's happening in the dorms, what they're experiencing. It's really bad, and it's very hard to handle through the existing mechanisms.  Please actually give us the budget. We'll get kosher food. I'm a Mizrahi, that's what I know how to do, feed people. Let's put everybody together, and let's make sure everybody feel welcome. And we also said, you know, we'll be your bridge. We'll help the students communicate with administration through our guidance, right? We'll be able to filter, to guide them, but also to pick up on the important things that you need to know. But then we said something else. We said, Look, this is going to become very tough, also for the students who are protesting out there right now. It was before Israel responded, but we knew exactly what happened in the kibbutzim, and we knew this is not going to be just another round with Gaza. This is going to be something different.  So we actually suggested to the President that alongside starting our group, we will start a parallel group of peers who we might disagree with politically and have different perspectives on the Middle East, but we know that they are reasonable people that we can talk to, that we can collaborate with, that we can work with, despite or alongside disagreements. And so the idea was to start our lunch, to start a second lunch, and slowly, through the faculty leadership, bring the groups together. Some of it has worked. Some of it didn't work.  We used to meet once a week as the faculty and say, students tell us that this and this is happening. Can you maybe walk with your students to tone that down, and they would tell us what's bothering them, etc. Getting the students to come together, that was a bigger lift, a challenging one. And there was another initiative that came about called the Third Space Lunch, that maybe Ernest can elaborate more on. Ernest Fraenkel:   So just to add a little bit to that. So the faculty leads from the other group came to speak to our students. Were very respectful to them. The faculty listened quietly to the concerns of the Jewish students. And I think we did see an attempt by many of the faculty to bridge the gaps. Obviously, faculty are an extremely, you know, diverse group. We have extremists, we've got centrists, we've got moderates. And not everybody was trying to help, but many, many were, and I think that was very encouraging, and I've seen that continue throughout this. There are hidden allies. Probaby the average faculty member probably doesn't really want to know too much about Israel or Palestine. Doesn't want to have to understand the conflicts. They just want to go about their daily lives, teach what they love to teach, do the research they love to do, and they are natural allies in trying to bring order back to campus. And the more that we can engage them, the better off it is. Or Hen:   But I think in terms of the formal program for Kalaniyot - Kalaniyot is really meant to bring in researchers and make sure that they have a supporting environment. And if people want to take that extra step of building bridges and building, that's all great, but it's not kind of a mandatory part of the program. Manya Brachear Pashman:   I get it. You really just want to foster academic research and progress and innovation, right? Put political strife aside. You've named this foundation Kalaniyot after Israel's national flower. Can you describe for our listeners that flower and why you chose that name for this initiative? Ernest Fraenkel:   The Kalaniyah looks a lot like a poppy. It's a red poppy, and during good times, there actually was an annual festival where Israelis would flock to the south in the area right around Gaza to see the bloom of this flower that would cover the otherwise fairly barren, quite honestly, countryside. And it was called the South Red, Darom Adom, and people would rush there to see it. And it was a symbol, which actually takes place right around the time we're recording. People have been sending us photos from from Israel the last few weeks of these flowers, the more they hear about the program.  And it's a sign that the winter is going to end and spring is going to come, and everything will be renewed. And so it was the South in red, in a sense, that was all positive. And we think the same sort of thing is possible here, that while Israel is right now a touch point for conflict on campus, we want to see a time when Israel, this is something like, Oh, of course. You know, everybody wants to have some connection to Israel. That's where the best researchers are in every field.  I often tell the story, when I was first on the faculty here, one of my first assignees as an undergraduate advisee was somebody from Hawaii, and he told me, asked him what he was going to do this summer, and he said he's going to Israel. So no, really, what's, what's your connection to Israel? He said, Oh, I don't have any I thought, maybe he's a strong Christian. I asked him about that. Said, no, no, I don't have any particular faith. I just heard it's startup nation, and I want to go and experience it.  And I just think, how many students today is their first association with Israel, startup nation? Probably not that many anymore, but we can get back to that and realize that it's more than startups, right? It's basic science, it's the arts, it's culture. And so there's much that Israel has to offer the world, and we want to get back to the point where that's the first thing people think about Israel. Manya Brachear Pashman:   So this initiative did start at MIT, but it appears to be sprouting, to use a pun, it appears to be sprouting on other campuses. Dartmouth is developing a chapter and Penn, right, the University of Pennsylvania. Are they being led by fellow scientists who have seen the consequence of this scholastic snub, for lack of a better word? Ernest Fraenkel:   So at each university, and there are several others in the works that are still working their way through the administration at each university, and by the way, this is not a renegade effort. At each university, the faculty form a faculty board, we encourage them to find a diverse group. So it's not all the sciences on our board. And on those boards, there seem to be many members of humanities departments. Not all Jews, not all Israelis.  And these diverse faculty boards are people who are allied with the goals, and we have bylaws. This is a program entirely about positivity. It's not attempting to suppress anybody else's speech. It's not attempting to make any political points. It's a purely academic program that will help restore the image of Israel as a place of academic excellence and help the United States maintain its academic edge through those collaborations. Or Hen:   And I think you're hitting on a very unique point, right? And that is that this is entirely faculty led program. When you think about the role of faculty in universities, especially faculty from STEM fields, right, we don't lead a lot of things in the academic world that are not our research, right? Honestly, that's kind of, why am I here and not in Google, right? I would probably make a much bigger salary for Google these days.  I'm here because I really care about my research, those open questions I really want to explore, and that's what I'm doing. So I'm teaching my class, and I'm focusing on my research. And me is everybody else around me, that's what we do. So there is a very high activation energy to get the faculty to do something that is not their research, their own research, but once you do that, faculty is a force of nature at the university. That's kind of what we're here to stay, right? We'll tenure, we're going to be at the retirement. We run the place eventually.  So it's both to activate the people who can really make an impact from within in a very strong way. That's number one, who have these decades of connections, right? Well before the challenge, you know, I've had my 10 years of collaborations here at MIT, and this has a lifetime of more than 10 years of collaborations here, right? And many of us and people remember those connections, right? Remember how we teach together, how I lent them something from my lab, and stuff like that, right? We have these personal connections.  So it is really the first and uniquely faculty led program that is very helping to come back, see faculty do that. There's a lot of power, and that's also why it's such an academically focused program, because that's what we know how to do. There's many other who can combat antisemitism and can give antisemitism training and title six and all that. And we don't do it, not because it's not important, just because we are not the people who bring in unique expertise in those areas, but when it comes to research collaboration, connections with Israel around those things, we are the ones who can really promote it from within in a way that's unpowered and parallel to anyone else. And that's the, I think the strongest point of Kalaniyot, the faculty leadership.  Manya Brachear Pashman:   In other words, you're not activists, you're not advocates. That's not what you set out to do. You are researchers, scientists who just want to do research in science. Or Hen:   And when I see everybody around us do the best research and science possible, which means engaging with the brightest minds anywhere in the world, and that includes Israel.  And we don't want to see that door shut down. There's no hiding it – Ernest and I are Zionists, we're not going to shy away from that. And we think that an academic boycott in the STEM is a risk to Israel. Israel doesn't have oil, right? What Israel has is the Jewish mind, and that mind is the thing that helps Israel, and that mind is the thing that helps the world. And we can go on and on about inventions and discoveries that came out of Israel and Israelis and Jews for the benefit of mankind. So both for the benefit of Israel and all of humanity, we don't want to see the Israeli Academy get isolated. It's going to be bad for all of us. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Now I know that there is a program at Indiana University called Olamot, focusing on the humanities. Does this only apply to STEM fields, or do you also have partnerships and collaborations developing across multiple disciplines? Ernest Fraenkel:   Yes, absolutely, this is a program that's open to all academic fields, and each university will craft a slightly different program, we're sure. At MIT, because we're STEM dominated, our Kalaniyot program is dominated by STEM, but it's not exclusively STEM here, either. We do have deep involvement with several of our board members in the humanities. Many of the people who come to our programming are in humanities. We're hoping that some of the scholars whom we will select in our first cohort of post doctoral and sabbatical visitors will be in the humanities, but that's going to be much a bigger component of it at other universities such as Dartmouth and Penn, where they have huge humanities programs. Manya Brachear Pashman:   And are you getting mostly support, or are you getting any pushback from faculty members?  Ernest Fraenkel:   So this is really fascinating. Early on, when we first started formulating this program, we wrote a memo explaining, a letter, explaining why we were doing this for something called the faculty newsletter, which is usually a place where people write fairly anti-Israel things, and we kind of braced ourselves for the pushback. And nothing came back. There was no pushback. Because if you believe in academic values in the United States, unless you're a hardcore BDS person, there's really nothing objectionable here.  Our goal is to bring brilliant scholars to campus and encourage them to be able to work broadly, without regard to nationality, religion, anything else, any other protective category. And so we were very pleased. And initially, you know, the administration was curious. They were interested. They wanted to review exactly what we're doing. The MIT administration went through everything we're doing, and they gave us the thumbs up, and they've now been helping us make connections and behind the scenes, I believe, I understand that, you know, some provosts and presidents occasionally talk about this when they meet and they, you know, tell each other it's not a bad thing to have at your University. Or Hen:   I remember when we kind of got people to know the program, we met with a very high ranking individual at MIT. And that person said, Look, MIT stands on three legs: research, education, and entrepreneurship. Israel excels in all three. Of course, we want those connections. Of course we want those collaborations. And who in the right mind can say that this is anything political, right? Now I'm sure that some people will try at some point. But like Ernest said, we've worked very hard on the language and the messaging to make sure that the language and messaging reflects the way we really see it, as a very strong academic program. Manya Brachear Pashman:   So, Dr. Hen, I do want to ask you a personal question. I have read that as a child, you navigated some pretty significant learning disabilities stemming from dysgraphia. You have difficulty translating your thoughts into written form, but the assessment to determine those disabilities also determined that you had a unique gift for abstract comprehension, the ability to conceptually pare down complex ideas to their fundamental core. So I wanted to ask you, in your opinion, what is at the fundamental core of these academic boycotts? Or Hen:   Honestly, I do believe that the academic boycotts come from antisemitism. That's the core. I do believe that there are a lot of people who engage in that, not understanding that is what they're doing. I'd like to give people the benefit of the doubt. I think that a lot of people do see a difference between anti-Zionism, anti-Israel, antisemitism, right, which I personally do not share. And that's a different point of view, which is allowed. But I think at the end of the day, trying to isolate Israel, eventually is from a top level, and attempt to bring down the country, because that's the core. Core of Israel is its academics. That's really where it all starts. And if we don't have academia, if we're attacking the Israeli Academy, you're attacking Israel. And any person who takes the time to learn about the Israeli Academy, who listens to speeches by the head of Tel Aviv University about the judicial reform in Israel. Who listens to the head of the Israeli National Academy about how he sees democracy and what he sees about the war, situation, you would learn that the Israeli Academy is really the hallmark of independent academia that stands by itself, as an independent body that really promotes research and good for the world. And anyone who attacks that either doesn't know or doesn't care to know, and I'd like to hope that most people don't know, and once they'll know and appreciate the people, they will see different people. There is a core that doesn't want to know, and okay, we need to make sure that that call remains as small as possible. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Dr. Fraenkel, do you agree? Ernest Fraenkel:   I'm by nature, a centrist and not a political person, and I also have learned over time that it's very hard to understand other people's motivations. But I do think that one of the paths to it, to solving the problem, is to re-humanize Israel and Israelis in the minds of the people who are currently protesting. And I think we'll have good results if we do that. Manya Brachear Pashman:   I'm curious, we've been talking a lot about Israeli research and innovation. Can you kind of share a piece of Israeli innovation that you've heard about recently, that maybe our audience has not and should know about? Ernest Fraenkel:   I was just at a conference yesterday, and one of the best talks yesterday, this was at a conference on ALS, was given by a researcher from the Weitzman Institute, Eran Hornstein. And he spoke about an entirely new way to analyze what goes on inside cells in the course of disease. He calls it organellealomics, I think. It's kind of a mouthful, but it was completely innovative. No one has anything similar. It allows you to get a wonderful view of all the different processes that are going on in the cell at a very high level, in a way that is experimentally very accessible. And I think it's really going to transform a lot of how we research diseases, and may lead to some rapid advances in some of these tough cases. Or Hen:   Yeah, I can add to that, you know, from the more industry side of things, right? We all have technology in our pockets, in our homes, in our offices, developed in Israel. The most advanced processors by Intel are built on architecture that was developed in Haifa. Apple has engineering centers in Israel. Facebook has engineering centers in Israel, Nvidia. All of us use Israeli technology day in and day out. We either know it or we don't. But there's not a single person in the western world that does not rely on Israeli technology sometime, someplace, some point in his day. Manya Brachear Pashman:   And when you were at that conference, Dr. Fraenkel, or Dr. Hen, consider that, when you pull out your phone and consider the many ways in which we use Israeli technology, does that further validate, does it affirm that what you are doing is the right thing to do, and that this will only benefit humanity at large? Ernest Fraenkel:   In biology, we often do these experiments where we delete a gene, we make it stop working, and we see what happens to the cell or to the animal that we're studying, right? And just do the thought experiment. What would happen to American science if it didn't have these strong collaborations with Israel? And be weaker in consumer electronics, and be weaker in AI, we would be weaker in all the underpinnings of all the technology that we're all walking around with every day.  We'd be weaker in healthcare. Think about the contribution that Israel made to understanding what was going on during the COVID pandemic, right? It's just shocking how much we would lose from this small country not being there.  And absolutely, when we think about that, it just drives us even more to try to get this program to spread across all the best universities in the United States, and hopefully we'll make inroads in Europe as well and really bring Israel back to the forefront in everybody's mind as a place where positive things are happening. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Well, thank you both for joining us so much and for sharing about this program. Really do appreciate it. It's fascinating and refreshing to learn that academics are supporting academics. Ernest Fraenkel:   Thank you very much. Real pleasure to speak with you.

Vielseitig, schön, belastend: Mehr als ein Jahrzehnt war Peter Münch SZ-Korrespondent in Nahost. Ein Gespräch über Erlebnisse, Erfahrungen und Ernüchterungen.

In this episode, we sit down with Adar Weinreb, founder of Sulha, to explore the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and discuss alternative governance models beyond the nation-state. From the failures of partition to federal and confederal solutions like the Federation Plan, we delve into how decentralized frameworks could address the challenges of coexistence. Join us for a thought-provoking discussion on the obstacles, possibilities, and reimagined futures for peace in the region.SULHA - A platform where we have respectful conversations around contentious issues. We have a primary focus on Israel-Palestine but often branch out into other topics like antisemitism and other geopolitical issues:https://www.youtube.com/@SulhaDEBATE: Israel-Palestine w/ Noam Chomsky & Rudy Rochman:https://www.youtube.com/live/89GVWT-Dbys?si=NM8MWMDTzKhau9dQDEBATE: Israel-Palestine w/ Rafi Gassel & Emanuel Shahaf | The Great Debate #27:https://www.youtube.com/live/pNTASKy5JhI?si=rNFs_Fal1oTSpo9yThe Federation Plan: https://federation.org.il/index.php/en/the-federation-planDaniel Boyarin's The No-State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300251289/the-no-state-solution/Martin Buber's Paths in Utopia: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/martin-buber-paths-in-utopia-enDmitry Shumsky's Beyond the Nation-State: The Zionist Political Imagination from Pinsker to Ben-Gurion:https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300230130/beyond-the-nation-state/James Horrox's A Living Revolution: https://jameshorrox.com/a-living-revolution/UN Partition Plan of 1947 (Historical Background):https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-208958/DON'T FORGET TO LIKE, SUBSCRIBE, AND SHARE!Become a Patreon Patron:https://www.patreon.com/cyberdandySupport the show

After the first truce was called in Israel's War of Independence, the United States and Britain, acting through the United Nations, wished to secure a lasting peace in the region. The United Nations mediator was Count Foke Bernadotte, who unabashedly viewed himself as a soon-to-be Nobel Prize laureate and assumed many liberties that succeeded in making himself extremely unpopular to both sides of the conflict.  Bernadotte's scheme for achieving regional peace entailed amputating the Negev region from Israel and limiting Jewish immigration.  With pressure mounting upon Israel to make concessions that it could not afford, the prudent option Ben Gurion concluded was to take the Negev by force. Young and brilliant commander Yigal Allon was responsible for this campaign and employed some innovative techniques that would become the hallmark of Israeli military strategy. Audio Credits Audiology 1948- Arab-Israeli War Learn more at TellerFromJerusalem.com Don't forget to subscribe, like and share! Let all your friends know that that they too can have a new favorite podcast. © 2025 Media Education Trust llc

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.comAdam is a literary critic and poet. He's been a senior editor at The New Republic and a contributing editor for Tablet and Harvard Magazine, and he's currently an editor in the Wall Street Journal's Review section. The author of many books, his latest is On Settler Colonialism: Violence, Ideology and Justice. I've been fascinated by the concept — another product of critical theory, as it is now routinely applied to Israel. We hash it all out.For two clips of our convo — on the reasons why Europe explored the world, and the bastardization of “genocide” — pop over to our YouTube page.Other topics: Adam's roots in LA; coming from a long line of writers; the power of poetry; its current boom with Instagram and hip-hop; Larkin; the omnipresence of settler colonialism in human history; the Neanderthals; the Ulster colonists; the French in Algeria; replacement colonialism in Australia and North America; the viral catastrophe there; the 1619 Project; “decolonizing” a bookshelf; Marxism; Coates and fatalism toward the US; MLK's “promissory note”; Obama's “more perfect union”; migration under climate change; China the biggest polluter; More's Utopia; the Holocaust; the Killing Fields; Rwanda; mass migration of Muslims to Europe; “white genocide”; Pat Buchanan; the settler colonialism in Israel; ancient claims to Palestine; the Balfour Declaration; British limits on migrant Jews in WWII; the US turning away Holocaust refugees; the UN partition plan; the 1948 war; the Nakba; Ben-Gurion; Jabotinsky's “Iron Wall”; Clinton's despair after 2000; ethnic cleansing in the West Bank; the nihilism of October 7; civilian carnage and human shields in Gaza; Arab countries denying Palestinians; a two-state solution; the moral preening of Coates; and the economic and liberal triumphs of Israel.Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Andrew Neil on UK and US politics, John Gray on the state of liberal democracy, Jon Rauch on his new book on “Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy,” Sebastian Junger on near-death experiences, Evan Wolfson on the history of marriage equality, Yoni Appelbaum on the American Dream, Nick Denton on the evolution of new media, and Ross Douthat on how everyone should be religious. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Fluent Fiction - Hebrew: Stranded at Ben Gurion: A Hanukkah in the Terminal Find the full episode transcript, vocabulary words, and more:fluentfiction.com/he/episode/2024-12-24-23-34-02-he Story Transcript:He: בחורף הקר, כאשר שלג עוטף את העולם בחוץ, נמל התעופה בן גוריון היה מלא באנשים ממהרים ומוטרדים.En: In the cold winter, when snow envelops the world outside, Ben Gurion Airport was filled with people hurrying and distressed.He: כולם מביטים בלוחות הזמנים המתארכים, בעוד סופת חורף עזה מרחפת בשמים ומאיימת על הטיסות.En: Everyone was looking at the lengthening schedules, as a fierce winter storm hovered in the skies, threatening the flights.He: בין כל אלה היה אריאל, איש מקצוע מסור, שמיהר לחזור הביתה לערב חג החנוכה.En: Among them was Ariel, a dedicated professional, rushing to get home for the Hanukkah evening celebration.He: אריאל פוסע בנמל, מרגיש את כובד האשמה על כך שהוא עלול לפספס את ערב החג עם משפחתו.En: Ariel walked through the airport, feeling the weight of guilt that he might miss the holiday evening with his family.He: הוא חשב על אלטרנטיבות - אולי רכבת?En: He contemplated alternatives - maybe a train?He: אולי אפילו נסיעה ברכב שכור?En: Maybe even a rental car journey?He: הזמן הולך ואוזל, והוא לא רוצה לאכזב את אלה הקרובים לו.En: Time was running out, and he didn't want to disappoint those close to him.He: ליד בו, צעדה רבקה.En: Beside him walked Rivka.He: היא הייתה אוהבת הרפתקאות, וממהרת לתפוס טיסה נוספת כדי להצטרף לחגיגה עם חבריה בחו"ל.En: She was an adventure lover, hurrying to catch another flight to join the celebration with her friends abroad.He: אך הנה, גם היא תקועה בנמל התעופה.En: Yet here she was, also stuck at the airport.He: בינתיים, חופשה החנוכה ממלאת את האוויר בהרבה אנרגיה חיובית.En: Meanwhile, the Hanukkah holiday filled the air with a lot of positive energy.He: רבקה גילתה שיש אזורים תרבותיים מיוחדים בנמל.En: Rivka discovered there were special cultural areas in the airport.He: היא החליטה לנצל את ההזדמנות ולחקור אותם, להאיר את מסלולם של כל האנשים סביב כשהיא חולקת חיוכים ומשתפת חוויות קטנות.En: She decided to seize the opportunity and explore them, illuminating the paths of all the people around her as she shared smiles and small experiences.He: בערב של אותו יום, אריאל ורבקה נפגשו במקרה.En: That evening, Ariel and Rivka met by chance.He: בין הצחוק והשיחה, רבקה הציעה לאריאל להתמקד ברגע ולהצטרף אליה להדליק נרות חנוכה כאן ועכשיו.En: Amid the laughter and conversation, Rivka suggested to Ariel to focus on the moment and join her in lighting the Hanukkah candles here and now.He: גם בשדה תעופה אפשר לחוש את הרוח החגיגית.En: Even in an airport, one can feel the festive spirit.He: יחד הם מצאו פינה שקטה, והאירו את הנרות באורם.En: Together they found a quiet corner and lit the candles with their glow.He: עם שוך הסערה, כמה שעות לאחר מכן, הוכרז שכל הטיסות יתחדשו, כולל הטיסה של אריאל.En: With the storm subsiding, a few hours later, it was announced that all flights would resume, including Ariel's flight.He: הוא הרגיש סוג של הקלה ושמחה, לא רק על האפשרות להגיע הביתה, אלא גם על הלב המלא מהמסע הבלתי צפוי והחבר החדש שרכש.En: He felt a sense of relief and joy, not only for the possibility of getting home but also for the heart full from the unexpected journey and the new friend he made.He: רבקה, מצידה, לא התחרטה כלל על שהייתה צריכה לשהות במקום קצת יותר.En: Rivka, for her part, did not regret having to stay a bit longer.He: החג הזה, הם למדו שיותר חשוב להיות נוכחים ולמצוא שמחה ברגעים הקטנים.En: This holiday, they learned that it is more important to be present and find joy in the small moments.He: סופו של יום, גם החוויות הבלתי צפויות ביותר, יכולות להיות המתנה הטובה ביותר.En: At the end of the day, even the most unexpected experiences can be the best gift. Vocabulary Words:envelops: עוטףfierce: עזהstorm: סופהhovered: מרחפתthreatening: מאיימתcontemplated: חשבalternatives: אלטרנטיבותrental: שכורdisappoint: לאכזבadventure: הרפתקאותabroad: חו"לilluminating: להאירpaths: מסלולםunexpected: בלתי צפויjoy: שמחהpositive: חיוביתexperiences: חוויותopportunity: הזדמנותfestive: חגיגיתrelief: הקלהsubside: שוךresume: יתחדשוregret: לא התחרטהpresent: נוכחיםcelebration: חגיגהguilt: אשמהjourney: מסעgathering: התקהלותcultural: תרבותייםglow: אורםBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/fluent-fiction-hebrew--5818690/support.

Gerusalemme - La vittoria di Trump arriva il giorno dopo il licenziamento del ministro della Difesa israeliano Yoav Gallant da parte del premier Benjamin Netanyahu. I media locali e gli stessi israeliani sono pertanto ancora occupati a pensare al significato e all'impatto che può avere l'uscita di Gallant dal governo durante una guerra ancora in corso. La notizia della vittoria di Trump non è secondaria ma non pare essere nemmeno la notizia del giorno. Verso le ore 12 di ieri la prima notizia sul sito del quotidiano israeliano "Ynet" erano i missili con i quali gli Hezbollah dal Libano avevano fatto scattare l'allarme a Tel Aviv, creando danni anche vicino all'aeroporto "Ben Gurion". La vittoria di Trump era stata invece collocata in basso. Per adesso, infatti, la guerra è l'unica notizia.Gerusalemme - La vittoria di Trump arriva il giorno dopo il licenziamento del ministro della Difesa israeliano Yoav Gallant da parte del premier Benjamin Netanyahu. I media locali e gli stessi israeliani sono pertanto ancora occupati a pensare al significato e all'impatto che può avere l'uscita di Gallant dal governo durante una guerra ancora in corso. La notizia della vittoria di Trump non è secondaria ma non pare essere nemmeno la notizia del giorno. Verso le ore 12 di ieri la prima notizia sul sito del quotidiano israeliano "Ynet" erano i missili con i quali gli Hezbollah dal Libano avevano fatto scattare l'allarme a Tel Aviv, creando danni anche vicino all'aeroporto "Ben Gurion". La vittoria di Trump era stata invece collocata in basso. Per adesso, infatti, la guerra è l'unica notizia.

Donald Trump elected 47th president of the United States. Rocket lands near Ben Gurion airport in barrage from Lebanon. Opposition party leaders denounce prime minister's firing of defense ministerSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to The Times of Israel's Daily Briefing, your 20-minute audio update on what's happening in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world. Editor David Horovitz joins host Amanda Borschel-Dan in ToI's Jerusalem office for today's episode. Yesterday, prosecutors announced that seven Israeli citizens were arrested last month on suspicion of spying for Iran for as long as two years, carrying out hundreds of tasks at the behest of the Islamic Republic. This morning, another Iranian espionage case was announced in which seven East Jerusalem residents have been arrested on suspicion of planning attacks in Israel, including the assassination of an Israeli nuclear scientist and a mayor in central Israel. Horovitz discusses these incidents and other similar Iranian efforts. The IDFs on Monday declassified intelligence on the Hezbollah terror group's finance hub, including a bunker hidden underneath a hospital in south Beirut that it said contains hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and gold. We observe the way this cynical use of a hospital played out in international media. The Israel Aviation Authority briefly halted and then resumed takeoffs at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport yesterday around the time in which the IDF said that helicopters and fighter jets intercepted and shot down five drones over the Mediterranean Sea, before they entered Israeli airspace. Horovitz speaks about Israel's increased isolation during this time of war. Almost a week after the elimination of Hamas head Yahya Sinwar, Horovitz weighs in on leaders' predictions that this is a turning point in the war. For news updates, please check out The Times of Israel's ongoing live blog. Discussed articles include: Seven Jewish Israelis arrested for spying for Iran on security figures, IDF bases Air Force pounds Hezbollah's Beirut stronghold after civilians told to evacuate area IDF: Hezbollah hiding $500 million in gold, cash in bunker under Beirut hospital Ben Gurion briefly halts takeoffs as drones downed over sea; rocket lands near Tel Aviv British Airways suspends all Israel flights until March 2025 amid escalation fears Subscribe to The Times of Israel Daily Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was produced by the Pod-Waves. Illustrative image: Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei listens to a speaker in a meeting in Tehran, Iran, October 2, 2024. (Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader via AP)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week on The Learning Curve, co-hosts U-Arkansas Prof. Albert Cheng and Andrea Silbert interview Israeli historian, journalist, and author of A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion, Tom Segev. Dr. Segev delves into the life and legacy of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father. He shares insights into Ben-Gurion's early years in Poland, his involvement in Zionist politics, and immigration to Palestine […]

This week on The Learning Curve, co-hosts U-Arkansas Prof. Albert Cheng and Andrea Silbert interview Israeli historian, journalist, and author of A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion, Tom Segev. Dr. Segev delves into the life and legacy of David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding father. He shares insights into Ben-Gurion's early years in Poland, his involvement in Zionist politics, and immigration to Palestine in 1906, which set the stage for his leadership during pivotal moments in history. Segev covers Ben-Gurion's rise to prominence, his role in forming the Zionist Labor Federation, and the strategies he employed during the 1936-39 Arab revolt. Additionally, Segev examines Ben-Gurion's historic leadership in declaring Israel's independence in 1948, the unification of Jewish militias into the Israeli Defense Forces, and the implications of the Arab-Israeli War. He also highlights Ben-Gurion's efforts to establish state institutions, absorb Jewish immigrants, and his vision for the nation, while acknowledging the complicated aspects of his political leadership. Dr. Segev positions Ben-Gurion among the most significant leaders of the twentieth century, with a legacy that continues to influence Israeli society and its international relations today.

Welcome to The Times of Israel's Daily Briefing, your 20-minute audio update on what's happening in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world. Times of Israel founding editor David Horovitz, US bureau chief Jacob Magid and military correspondent Emanuel Fabian join host Jessica Steinberg on today's episode. Horovitz, Magid and Fabian discuss Tuesday evening's Iranian attack on Israel, as Iran launched 181 missiles at Israel, sending millions of Israelis into sealed rooms and bomb shelters on the eve of the three-day Rosh Hashanah holiday. Israel's Air Force, along with the US and Jordan, intercepted most of the projectiles, showing close coordination and alliance, said Magid. The US also vowed severe consequences for Iran, stressing the US-Israel coordination, without efforts to hold back Israel. Fabian updates the latest in the front with Lebanon, including Tuesday's discovery that the IDF has been conducting small raids into Lebanon since last October, with special forces operating for a day or three to four days at a time, uncovering Hezbollah sites and tunnels, weapons depots, thwarting Hezbollah intentions to conduct another kind of October 7 attack. Fabian comments that now the IDF has an entire division operating in Lebanon for a much larger scale operation but with similar goals, including the army's intention to demolish Hezbollah tunnels. Horovitz remarks that Iran insisted on portraying the Tuesday night missile attack as a great success. He notes that Israel has changed course dramatically in the last two and a half weeks, beginning with the pager attack not yet officially claimed by Israel, and the elimination of Hezbollah leader Nasrallah and other leadership, all showing a different course by Israel and the expectation that Israel will hit back hard at Iran, with US support. For news updates, please check out The Times of Israel's ongoing live blog. Discussed articles include: Iran fires 181 missiles at Israel; PM: They made a ‘big mistake' and ‘will pay for it' Shrapnel from Iranian missile kills Palestinian man near Jericho US: We will help Israel exact ‘severe consequences' from Iran for missile attack Seven people killed in shooting, stabbing terror attack in Jaffa IDF: Hezbollah was ready to invade en masse after Oct. 7; we covertly raided 1,000 sites IDF says strike kills head of Hezbollah unit charged with smuggling arms from Iran Subscribe to The Times of Israel Daily Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was produced by the Podwaves. IMAGE: Israelis take cover inside a bomb shelter at Ben Gurion airport as a siren alert is sounded in Tel Aviv, October 1, 2024 (Photo by Dor Pazuelo/Flash90)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

“I never thought there's antisemitism. It's something from the past, for my grandparents, for my mom a little, but it's not something in my generation, or my kids' generation. It's done . . . apparently, not.” Einat Admony is a chef, cookbook author, comedian, and social media star who grew up in Bnei Brak, Israel. With parents from Iran and Yemen, Einat spent her childhood in the kitchens of Mizrahi, Sephardi, and Ashkenazi neighbors. Learn about her family's deep-rooted Jewish heritage in Iran and the broader Middle East. Along with her mother Ziona's journey from Iran to Israel in 1948, Einat discusses the antisemitism she's dealt with online and on the streets in the past year. Hear her stories of Jewish-Muslim coexistence in Iran and memories of spices and perfumes that inspire Einat's dishes. Her cookbooks Balaboosta and Shuk, along with her Manhattan restaurant Balaboosta, reflect a blend of tradition and innovation. “You could not have Judaism today, if it were not for the Jews of Iran,” says Houman Sarshar, an independent scholar and director of publications at the Center for Iranian Jewish Oral History in Los Angeles. Sarshar highlights the historical relationship between Iran and Israel, noting that Iran was the second Muslim-majority country to recognize Israel post-1948.  The conversation also touches on the challenges faced by Jews in Iran, their cultural integration, and the impact of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.  —- Show notes: How much do you know about Jewish history in the Middle East? Take our quiz. Sign up to receive podcast updates. Learn more about the series. Song credits:  Pond5:  “Desert Caravans”: Publisher: Pond5 Publishing Beta (BMI), Composer: Tiemur Zarobov (BMI), IPI#1098108837 “Suspense Middle East” Publisher: Victor Romanov, Composer: Victor Romanov; Item ID: 196056047 ___ Episode Transcript: EINAT ADMONY: I've been in Israel a few months ago. It's like you always feel loved, you always feel supported. It's still home. It's always going to be my home. MANYA BRACHEAR PASHMAN: The world has overlooked an important episode in modern history: the 800,000 Jews who left or were driven from their homes in the Middle East and North Africa in the mid-20th century. Welcome to the second season of The Forgotten Exodus, brought to you by American Jewish Committee. This series explores that pivotal moment in history and the little-known Jewish heritage of Iran and Arab nations. As Jews around the world confront violent antisemitism and Israelis face daily attacks by terrorists on multiple fronts, our second season explores how Jews have lived throughout the region for generations despite hardship, hostility, and hatred, then sought safety and new possibilities in their ancestral homeland. I'm your host, Manya Brachear Pashman. Join us as we explore untold family histories and personal stories of courage, perseverance, and resilience from this transformative and tumultuous period of history for the Jewish people and the Middle East.  The world has ignored these voices. We will not.  This is The Forgotten Exodus. Today's episode: Leaving Iran. MANYA: Whether she's deviling eggs soaked in beet juice, simmering Oxtail in shawarma spices, or sprinkling za'atar on pastry dough, chef Einat Admony is honoring her family's Middle Eastern heritage. Both the places where they have lived for generations, as well as the place they have and will always call home: Israel.   EINAT/Clip: Start with brushing the puff pastry with olive oil and za'atar. Have some feta all around and shredded mozzarella. Take the other sheet and just cut it to one inch strips. Now we're going to twist. Need to be careful. Now we're just gonna brush the top with the mix of oil and za'atar. Get it some shiny and glazy. This is ready for the oven. Bake at 400 until it's golden. That's it super easy, just sprinkle some za'atar and eat. MANYA: For the chef, author, reality TV star, and comedian, food reflects the Zionist roots that have been a constant for Einat, the self-made balaboosta, who is largely credited with introducing Israeli cuisine to the U.S. That love for Israel goes back generations, long before the modern state existed, when her maternal ancestors lived in the land, that until 1935 was known as Persia, but is now known as Iran. Her own mother Ziona, the third of seven siblings, was even named for the destination where Einat's grandparents aspired to one day raise their family. Returning home to the land of Zion from which Jews had been exiled centuries earlier was always the goal. When you ask her why, Einat laughs in disbelief.  EINAT: Why? Why? That's homeland. I think a lot of Jewish people for hundreds of years was, that's in every prayer, it's in every Shabbat dinner evening. MANYA: The hatred directed toward Israel by Iran's regime in the form of the deadly attacks on Israel by Iran-backed terrorist groups and the Islamic Republic of Iran itself make it hard to believe that Iran was once a place where Jews and the Zionist movement thrived. But in fact, Iran's history includes periods when the wide-open roads between Iran and Israel ran two ways and the countries not only lived in harmony but worked in close partnership.  Iran was the second Muslim-majority country after Turkey to recognize the modern state of Israel after its formation in 1948, and the two established diplomatic ties. Regular flights ran between Tehran's Mehrabad International Airport and Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport.  SARSHAR: We cannot overlook the fact that since October 29, 539 BCE the Jewish community of Iran remains to this day the largest community of Jews anywhere in the Middle East outside the state of Israel. To this day. You could not have Judaism today, if it were not for the Jews of Iran.  MANYA: Houman Sarshar is an independent scholar and director of publications at the Center for Iranian Jewish Oral History in Los Angeles. He has edited a number of books, including Esther's Children: A Portrait of Iranian Jews.  SARSHAR: The history of the Jews in Iran begins about 2,700 years ago, when the first community of known Jews was taken to Iran. They are commonly believed to be one of the 10 Lost Tribes. And then when we fast forward to when Nebuchadnezzar came and destroyed the temple in Jerusalem and took Jews into captivity. Some years after that at 539 BCE on October 29, 539 BCE, to be exact, Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid dynasty, liberated Babylon and gave Jews the permission to go back to Israel and rebuild the Second Temple. MANYA: Cyrus the Great – a Persian emperor particularly renowned among contemporary scholars for the respect he showed toward peoples' customs and religions in the lands that he conquered. According to the Book of Ezra in the Hebrew Bible, Cyrus even paid for the restoration of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. SARSHAR: This is known as the Second Temple period in Jewish history, and under the Achaemenid dynasty, Jews participated in every level of society. And a few centuries forward, around the 5th Century, we know the Jews continue to live with many freedoms, because that is the era when the Babylonian Talmud was originally produced in Iran by Rav Ashi. So, you know, there was a thriving rabbanut (rabbanite) in Iran who had the freedom and the luxury and the time to be able to produce such an important document as the Talmud, which has become the cornerstone of all jurisprudence that we know, Western law, and everything. MANYA: The advent and arrival of Islam in Iran in the 7th Century CE changed circumstances somewhat. As was the case across the Middle East, all non-Muslims became dhimmis – residents who paid a special tax and lived under certain restrictions. The situation for Jews worsened in the 16th Century when the Safavid dynasty made the Shiite creed the dominant form of Islam in Iran. Fatwas made life for all non-Shiites quite difficult. SARSHAR: And for reasons that are still open to discussion, all of these restrictions were most vehemently imposed on the Jews of Iran. And because of these restrictions, all non-Shiites were considered religiously impure. And this religious impurity, kind of like the concept of the untouchable sect in India, they were considered pollutive. MANYA: Jews could not look Muslims in the eye. They were placed in ghettos called mahaleh where they could not leave on rainy days for fear the water that splattered on them could contaminate the water supply. They wore yellow stars and special shoes to distinguish them from the rest of the population. They were not allowed to purchase property from Muslims or build homes with walls that were higher than those of their Muslim neighbors. SARSHAR: They could not, for example, participate in the trade of edible goods because, you know, fruits and vegetables and meats carried this pollution. So Muslims could no longer consume the foods that were touched by Jews. And as a result, this created a certain path forward in history for the Jews of Iran.  They went into antique trades. They went into carpet trades. They went into work of textiles. They became musicians. And for the following 500 years, these restrictions kind of guided the way the Jews of Iran lived in that country, even though they had been there for thousands of years previously. MANYA: Houman said the 1895 arrival of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, a Paris-based network of schools for Jewish children throughout the Middle East and North Africa, including within the mahalehs in Persia, was the first step in a series of improvements for Jews there. SARSHAR: Previous to that, Jews were not allowed to get any kind of an education whatsoever. The only teachers were the Muslim clergy, and they refused to teach anything to Jewish students. So this allowed for the Jewish community to finally start to get a Western-style education, which was very important at that time, given all of the dynamics that were going on in society with modernity. MANYA: As educational opportunities increased in the middle of the 19th Century, so did opportunities for the courtiers and elite to travel and see the Western world as it industrialized and modernized, expanding international trade and sharing wealth more widely. SARSHAR: Often they would be sent by their families to go and try to see if they can, you know, find a way to expand the family's businesses and lives as merchants, and they would come back shocked. I mean, Iran was a place where you know of mostly mud brick homes and dirt roads and people riding around on donkeys. And imagine this is all you've known. You never see women walking around the street. The only women you have ever seen with your own eyes in your life are your mom, your sister, your daughter or your wife, and occasionally, sex workers. And that's it. So all of a sudden, you know, you travel a couple of months by boat and train, and you get to Paris, and it's impossible to try to even conceive of the experience. It must have been something like the Hegelian experience of the sublime. What can the world look like? And where is it that I live in, and why isn't my country the same as this? MANYA: By the early 20th Century, the Persian people concluded the answer to that question was in the rule of law. The reason the European nations provided such opportunity for the community at-large had to do with the fact that the law of the land was not arbitrary or enforced by religion or royalty. It was embedded in a constitution – a set of laws that define the structure of a government and the rights of its citizens – a Western tenet that reduced the power of the clergy and created a parliament called the Majles. SARSHAR: They were starting to read travel journals. They were starting to understand the perspective that Westerners had on Iranians, and those perspectives were often awful. You know, the Western world believed, for example –the country was corrupt to the bone in every respect.  So all of these things gradually led to a call for a constitution, the major pivot of which was the establishment of a legislature of law that would start to create a community where everyone can feel like they're equal in the eyes of the law and have something to gain by trying to improve the country as a whole. Iran became the first constitutional monarchy in the Middle East in 1906 when that revolution happened, it was a momentous event. And really, things really, really did, in fact, start to change. MANYA: In 1925, Reza Shah Pahlavi – an arch nationalist who wanted to propel Iran forward into the industrial age – took over the crown of Iran. He welcomed any Iranian citizen to participate in that agenda. SARSHAR: By now, we had a good two generations of Jews who had been French-educated by the Allianz Society.  They had all gone to France at some point in their lives, so they were able to participate in this industrialization of the country, given the language skills that they had and some of the connections they had built in the Western world. MANYA: Both World Wars in Europe took a massive toll on Iran. Despite declaring neutrality, Iran was occupied by European nations that took over the nation's agriculture, treating Iran as a pantry to feed the armies. Droughts and disease worsened the toll. SARSHAR: One of the lesser-known factoids about history is that during World War I, the nation that lost the most individuals as a result of the war was Iran. Above and beyond all European nations who were at war, because of a famine that had started in Iran. The same dynamic started to happen in World War II. MANYA: With nationalist fever sweeping Europe and Iran, the Allies feared the arch-nationalist Shah would go the way of Franco in Spain, Mussolini in Italy, and Hitler in Germany. They also feared the Shah would collaborate with Hitler's Germany to provide oil for the German oil machine and cease being the pantry the Allies needed it to be. In 1941, the Western powers convinced him to abdicate the throne to his son Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. And when the war ended, Iran was able to enjoy the same economic benefits as the rest of the world at peace time. Most importantly, it was able to profit from its own oil reserves, significantly boosting Iran's national income. SARSHAR: In 1941, it was really the beginning of what is commonly referred to by the scholars of Jewish Iranian history as the Golden Age of Iranian Jewry. From 1941 until the revolution in 1978, the Jewish community of Iran saw a meteoric rise to power and social wealth. Industries such as pharmaceuticals, banking, insurance, real estate development, and other major industries, the aluminum plastics industries in Iran, all were either directly owned by the Jews of Iran or managed under their management.  And during this period, really, we can say that for the first time, after 2,500 years, the Jews of Iran really started to experience the kinds of freedoms that they had not seen since the Achaemenid dynasty. And it is during this time that, you know, we see, really, that life started to change for the Jews of Iran, even though some of the age-old social dynamics were still there.  The institutionalized antisemitism had not been completely wiped out. But for the most part, things had changed because Iranian society in general was also being Westernized, light speed. And many educated people had realized that antisemitism was really looked down upon, you know, that kind of prejudice was really no longer acceptable in the world at large. So many, many sections of the community really had shifted, genuinely shifted. And some, even though maybe their feelings had not changed, knew that their antisemitism was something that they needed to keep private. MANYA: At that time, Iran also became a refuge for Jews fleeing Europe and other parts of the Middle East. On June 1, 1941, a brutal pogrom in Iraq known as the Farhud, incited by Nazi propaganda, targeted Jews celebrating the holiday of Shavuot. Nearly 200 Jews were murdered in the streets. The violence became a turning point for Iraqi Jews. Thousands fled, many stopping in Iran, which became a way station for those headed to Palestine.  In 1942, thousands of Jewish refugees from Poland who had fled across the border into the Soviet Union during the German invasion traveled on trains and ships to Iran. Among the refugees – 1,000 orphaned children.  As Zionist leaders worked to negotiate the young Jews' immigration to Palestine, the Jewish Agency established the “Tehran Home for Jewish Children” – a complex of tents on the grounds of a former Iranian Air Force barracks outside Tehran. More than 800 orphans, escorted by adults, most of them also refugees, moved from Tehran to kibbutzim in Palestine the following year. Later, in 1948, when most Arab League states forbade the emigration of their Jews after the creation of Israel, the Zionist underground continued to smuggle Jews to Iran at about a rate of 1,000 a month, before they were flown to Israel. SARSHAR: The Zionist movement was fairly strong in Iran. It was a very lively movement. The Balfour Declaration was celebrated in all of the Allianz schools in Iran, and very soon thereafter, the first Zionist organization of Iran was established. And truly many of its founding fathers were some of the leading industrialists and intellectuals in Iranian society, in the Jewish Iranian community for the years to come. It was not unlike the kind of Zionism we see today in the United States, for example. You know, the wealthy families of the Jewish communities in New York and Los Angeles, all are very passionate about Israel, but you don't see very many of them selling their homes and packing up and moving to Israel because they just don't want to do it. They feel like they're very comfortable here. And what matters is that a state of Israel should exist, and they are political advocates of that state and of that policy and of its continued existence, but not necessarily diehard participants in the experiment itself. Iranians, after the establishment of the State of Israel, were being encouraged to move to Israel, and the Israeli government was having a lot of difficulty with that, because a lot of Iranians were seeing that life had become better for them, and they weren't as willing to leave, despite the fact that the Kourosh Project provided airplanes to get Jews out of Iran. My own great-grandmother was one of those passengers. She is buried in Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. She was one of the early citizens of Israel who went to live out the Zionist dream. MANYA: Both sides of Einat's family – her mother and father's ancestors – were among those early Israeli citizens. Einat's father was born in Tel Aviv. His parents and grandparents had come from Yemen in the late 19th Century. Einat's mother Ziona was 10 years old when in 1948, the family left Kerman, a city in southeastern Iran known for its carpet weaving and woolen shawls. They arrived in Israel with their suitcases ready to fulfill their dream. But living the dream in the new Jewish nation was not easy. After all, the day after Israel declared its independence, Arab nations attacked the Jewish state, launching the first of a series of Arab-Israeli Wars. EINAT: The story of my mom, it's a very interesting story. The family didn't have much money. There wasn't like, rich family that left, very different story. No, both of my parents come from very, I would say, very poor family. My grandpa was, like, dealing with textile. He was like, traveling from town to town with fabric. And that's what they did. They put them in what's called ma'aborot, which was like a very kind of small villages, tin houses. My mom always said there were seven kids, so all of them in one room. In the winter it's freezing; in the summer, it's super hot. But it was also close to the border, so the one window they have, they always had to cover it so at night, the enemy cannot see the light inside that room and shoot there. Also in the ma'aabarot, nobody speaks the same language. So, it was Moroccan and Iraqi and nobody speak the same dialect or the same language. So, they cannot even communicate quite yet. MANYA: Most of Ziona's six siblings did not go to school. To make it possible for Ziona, her parents placed her in a foster home with an Iraqi family in Ramat Gan, east of Tel Aviv. EINAT: My mom's family decided that for her, she should get education, because most of the siblings didn't went to school or anything, So they put her in a foster home. In an Iraqi home, and she didn't speak a word there. So my mom, as a 10 years old, became a kid for foster parents that live in a center in Ramat Gan, where I basically grew up. And she got education, which was great. She learned also Iraqi, which is Arabic. So she speaks fluent Arabic, but she had not an easy life in coming to Israel from a different country. MANYA: Ziona has shared many of these stories with her daughter in the kitchen and dining room as they prepare and enjoy dishes that remind them of home. When she visited her daughter at her home in upstate New York at the end of the summer, Einat collected as many stories as she could over cutting boards, steaming pots, and sizzling pans. EINAT: There's a lot of story coming up, some old story that I know, some new stories. And it's really nice, because my mom is 84, 85. So, it's really nice to capture all of it, all of it. There is a lot of interesting stuff that happened during the first 10 years when she came to Israel.  That's the main, I think, I always talk about, like, how I grew up and how much food was a very substantial part of our life, if not the biggest part. You know, it's like, family can fight and this, but when it's come to the dinner, it's just change everything, the dynamic. For us, it was a big, significant part of everything. So obviously, most of these stories and memories come in while we're cooking or eating. A lot of time she used to talk about, and still talking about the smells, the smells of the flowers, the smells of the zafar (perfume). She still have the nostalgia from that time and talking very highly about what Iran used to be, and how great, and the relationship between the Muslims and the Jews back then. My grandpa's best friend was crying when he left, and he said: ‘Please don't go. Stay with us.' And he said: ‘I want to go to homeland.' So, they have a really great relationship. She's always talking, actually, about how they come for Shabbat dinner, the friends if they put the cigarettes outside of the door in Shabbat because they were observant. So cigarettes, lighter, everything, they keep it outside, in the garden, not coming inside the house. So a lot of mutual respect for the religion to each other. And I love that stories. It just showed what's happened when people take it extreme. MANYA: Einat's cookbooks and restaurant menus are filled with recipes from her own childhood and her parents' upbringing. To satisfy the appetite of her father, a former Israeli athlete, her house always had hummus and every weekend, the family made a hilbeh sauce --  a traditional Yemenite fenugreek dip made with cardamom, caraway seeds and chili flakes. Other recipes reflect her mother's Persian roots. And then there are recipes that, at first blush, seem to come out of left field, but are inspired by the Iraqi Jewish foster family that raised her mother, and the Mizrahi, Sephardi, and Ashkenazi neighbors that passed through the dining room and kitchen where Einat was raised in Bnei Brak.  Now a Haredi town east of Tel Aviv, it was then a diverse population of Jews from, well, everywhere. Einat still remembers standing on a stool next to the Moroccan neighbor in her building learning how to roll couscous. EINAT: One neighbor that was my second mom, her name was Tova, and she was Moroccan, so it was like, I have another Moroccan mom. But all the building was all Holocaust survivors. None of them had kids, and they were all speaking in Yiddish, mostly. So I grew up with a lot of mix. I wouldn't say, you know, in my time, it's not like our neighborhood. I grew up in Bnei Brak, and our neighborhood was very, it was before Bnei Brak became so religious like today. It was still religious, if you go really in, but we're close to Ramat Gan, and I have to say that it's, I would say, I didn't grow up with, it's very mixed, very mixed.  Wouldn't say I grew up just with Moroccan or Mizrahi, I say that it's very, very mixed. And my mom same. I think a lot of her friend is like, It's my mom would speak some Yiddish. She would do Kugel on Shabbat next to the jachnun and all the Mizrahi food. You know, this is the multi-pot and one things I love in Israel. You can see in one table so many different cultures. And that's something that would have happened in my house a lot. MANYA: That amalgam of Jewish cultures is reflected in her cookbooks Balaboosta and Shuk. It also shows up in her menu at the brick-and-mortar Balaboosta, a quaint Middle Eastern trattoria on Mulberry Street in Manhattan.  The name Balaboosta is borrowed from Yiddish meaning “a perfect housewife” – a twist on ba'al habayit, Hebrew for master of the house, or boss. But Einat insists that the term is no longer exclusively Ashkenazi, nor does it refer exclusively to a woman's domestic role. EINAT: An old friend, chef, asked me when I went to open Balaboosta, and I said, ‘I don't have a name.' She said: ‘What do you call a badass woman in Hebrew?' I'm like, ‘balaboosta.' She said, ‘It's a perfect name. We done.' Took five minutes to find this name, and I love it. It's really connected because for me it's so so much different things. You know, I always talk about the 20th century balaboosta. The balaboosta that outside going to work, the balaboosta that asking a man for a date. The balaboosta that it's not just like she's the housewife and the homekeeper. It's much more than that. Today, she's a multitask badass.  It's much more spiritual than what it is. I think it's the one that can bond the people together and bring them together and make peace between two parties clashing. So for me, it's much more than somebody that can cook and clean. So, much, much more than that. MANYA: Einat's parents became more religious when she was 12, which of course had the opposite effect on their daughter: she rebelled. When her time came to do her mandatory service in the Israel Defense Force, she was determined not to serve in a role typically assigned to women. She requested a post as a firing instructor. But after reviewing the high school transcript shaped by her rebellious adolescence, the IDF assigned her to the Nevatim Air Base where she served as a chauffeur for fighter pilots. EINAT: Back then most women would be secretaries giving coffee to some assholes. I was trying not to do that, and somehow I got very lucky, and I was in the same division, I was in the Air Force. I had amazing time for two years. I start the military a very different person, and left a very different person. I used to hang with a lot of bad people before, really bad people. And when I get to the military, I was a driver of pilots, it's the top of the top of the top in the hierarchy in the military in all IDF. So now I'm hanging with people that have the biggest ambition ever, and I'm learning new stuff, and everything opened up, even my language changed completely. Everything. I was want to travel more than I ever want before, and I have like, crazy dreams. MANYA: To make sure the elite pilots were well-fed, the IDF bused in a group of Yemenite grandmothers to provide ochel bayit, or home-cooked meals. Einat befriended the kitchen staff and helped out from time to time. Then in January 1991, she was tapped to cook a meal that probably launched her career. The IDF chiefs of staff had convened at Nevatim base to discuss the U.S. plan to bomb Iraq during the Gulf War and what Israel would do if Saddam Hussein retaliated with an attack on the Jewish state. But they needed to plot that strategy on full stomachs. A couple of pilots served as her sous chefs. That night, the Israeli generals dined on Chinese chicken with garlic, honey, and soy. And a rice salad. EINAT: It was definitely the turning point, the military.  I would say there is some values of relationship and working ethics that I wouldn't see anywhere else, and that's coming, I think because the military. They're waking up in the morning, the friendship, they're no snitching or none of this. It's to stand up for each other. There is so many other values that I grabbed from that. So when I start my culinary career, and I was in a fine dining kitchen, it was very helpful, very helpful. MANYA: After spending five years in a van driving around Germany – an extended celebration of freedom after IDF service --  it was time to get serious about a career. A culinary career made as good a sense as any. Einat worked as a waitress in Eilat and enrolled in culinary school. At the end, she marched into the kitchen of Keren, one of the first restaurants in Israel to offer haute cuisine. She got an internship, then a job. The former restaurant, run by Israeli Chef and television host Haim Cohen, is credited for reinventing Israeli cuisine. Now, as a restaurant owner and TV personality herself, Einat is largely credited for introducing Israeli cuisine to the U.S. But before she became the self-made Balaboosta of fine Israeli dining, Einat was America's Falafel Queen, made famous by two victories on the Food Network's show Chopped and her first restaurant – now a fast food chain called Ta'im Falafel. But her fame and influence when it comes to Israeli cooking has exposed her to a fair bit of criticism. She has become a target on social media by those who accuse Israelis of appropriating Palestinian foods – an argument she calls petty and ridiculous. So ridiculous, she has found the best platform to address it is on the stage of her new hobby: stand-up comedy. Cooking has always been her Zen. But so is dark humor. EINAT: I like comedy more than anything, not more than food, but close enough. EINAT/Clip: Yeah, this year was great here on Instagram, lot of hate comments, though. A lot about food appropriation, me making Arabic dishes. So let me clarify something here. I check my DNA through ancestry.com and I am 97% Middle Eastern, so I fucking bleed hummus. EINAT: It's very petty. Food, supposed always to share. Food supposed to moving forward.  It's tiring and life is much more complex than to even argue and have a debate about stupid things. I'm done. OK, yes, we're indigenous.I have connection to the land. My parents, my grandparents and great grandparents have connection to that land. Okay, I get it. Now we need to solve what's going on, because there was Palestinian that lived there before, and how we can, for me, how we change the ideology, which I don't see how we can, but how we can change the ideology, convince them that they want peace. And they want…I don't know. MANYA: Needless to say, in the year that has followed the attacks of October 7, stand-up comedy has not been the balm it once was. The attacks that unfolded that day by Iran-backed terrorists that killed more than 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped more than 250 more was simply too devastating. EINAT: I was broken there, my husband was with me, I was every day on a bed crying, and then going to work, and it was like I couldn't hear music, because every music thinking about Nova and my friends and then I couldn't see babies with a mom. Everything was a trigger. It was bad. We had a disaster of October 7 and then October 8 to see the world reaction was another. It's not just enough that we going through so much grief and need to kind of contain all that emotion and crazy and anger and rage and now we need to see the world's. Like, ok. I never thought there is antisemitism. It's something from the past, for my grandparents, for my mom a little, but it's not something in my generation, or my kids' generation. It's done, apparently, not. MANYA: The lack of sympathy around the world and among her culinary peers only amplified Einat's grief. As a way to push for a cease-fire and end U.S. support for Israel, nearly 900 chefs, farmers and others in the food industry signed a pledge to boycott Israel-based food businesses and culinary events that promote Israel. EINAT: I felt very, very alone, very alone. The first few months, I felt like, wow, not one call from anyone to check on me. It was pretty sad. At the same time, I'm in the best company ever Jewish community. There is nothing like that, nothing. MANYA: Her team at Balaboosta also checked in on their Israeli boss. But they too were scared. Soon after she posted pictures of the hostages on the window of her restaurant, she confronted a group of teenagers who tried to tear them down. EINAT: I stand in front of them and I said, ‘You better move fast'. MANYA: It's no secret that Iran helped plan Oct. 7. What is not as well known is how many Jews still live and thrive in Iran. Before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, there were nearly 100,000 Jews in Iran. Today, Israeli sources say the population numbers less than 10,000, while the regime and Iran's Jewish leaders say it's closer to 20,000. Regardless, Iran's Jewish community remains the largest in the Middle East outside Israel.  To be sure, the constitution adopted in 1906 is still in place nominally, and it still includes Jews as a protected religious minority. Jews in Iran have synagogues, access to kosher meat, and permission to consume wine for Shabbat, despite a national ban on alcohol. There's also a Jewish representative in Iran's parliament or Majlis. But all women and girls regardless of religion are required to wear a veil, according to the Islamist dress code, and Jews are pressured to vote in elections at Jewish-specific ballot stations so the regime can monitor their participation. Zionism is punishable by death and after Oct. 7, the regime warned its Jewish citizens to sever contact with family and friends in Israel or risk arrest. They also can't leave. Iranian law forbids an entire Jewish nuclear family from traveling abroad at the same time. At least one family member, usually the father, must remain behind to prevent emigration. But Houman points out that many Iranian Jews, including himself, are deeply attached to Iranian culture. As a resident of Los Angeles, he reads Persian literature, cooks Persian herb stew for his children and speaks in Persian to his pets. He would return to Iran in an instant if given the opportunity to do so safely. For Jews living in Iran it may be no different. They've become accustomed to living under Islamist laws. They may not want to leave, even if they could. SARSHAR: The concept of living and thriving in Iran, for anyone who is not related to the ruling clergy and the Revolutionary Guard, is a dream that feels unattainable by anyone in Iran, let alone the Jews. In a world where there is really no fairness for anyone, the fact that you're treated even less fairly almost fades. MANYA: Scholars say since the Islamic Revolution, most Jews who have left Iran have landed in Los Angeles or Long Island, New York. Still, more Jews of Iranian descent live in Israel – possibly more than all other countries combined. The reason why? Because so many like Einat's family made aliyah–up until the mid-20th Century.  It's hard to say where another exodus might lead Iranian Jews to call home. Einat will be forever grateful that her family left when they still could and landed in a beautiful and beloved place. Though she lives in the U.S. now, she travels back to Israel at least twice a year. EINAT: It's a dream for every Jew, it's not just me. It's the safe zone for every Jew. It's the one place that, even if we have, it's not safe because there is people around us that want to kill us. It's still emotionally. You know, I've been in Israel a few months ago, it's like, you always feel loved, you always feel supported. It's incredible. And it's still home. It's always going to be my home. MANYA: Persian Jews are just one of the many Jewish communities who, in the last century, left Middle Eastern and North African countries to forge new lives for themselves and future generations.  Many thanks to Einat for sharing her family's story. You can enjoy some of her family's favorite recipes in her cookbooks Balaboosta and Shuk. Her memoir Taste of Love was recently released in  an audio and digital format.  Too many times during my reporting, I encountered children and grandchildren who didn't have the answers to my questions because they'd never asked. That's why one of the goals of this project is to encourage you to ask those questions. Find your stories. Atara Lakritz is our producer. T.K. Broderick is our sound engineer. Special thanks to Jon Schweitzer, Nicole Mazur, Sean Savage, and Madeleine Stern, and so many of our colleagues, too many to name really, for making this series possible. You can subscribe to The Forgotten Exodus on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and you can learn more at AJC.org/theforgottenexodus.  The views and opinions of our guests don't necessarily reflect the positions of AJC. You can reach us at theforgottenexodus@ajc.org. If you've enjoyed this episode, please be sure to spread the word, and hop onto Apple Podcasts or Spotify to rate us and write a review to help more listeners find us.

Quân đội Israel đã tấn công vào trung tâm Beirut lần đầu tiên, kể từ khi cuộc xung đột bắt đầu cách đây gần một năm. Họ cũng đã tấn công Yemen, nhắm vào các thành trì của phiến quân Houthi ở Hodeidah và Ras Issa, để trả đũa cho một cuộc tấn công bằng tên lửa đạn đạo vào Sân bay Ben Gurion của Tel Aviv, nhắm vào Thủ tướng Israel Benjamin Netanyahu.

For review:(Episode mostly dedicated to the IDF strike that killed the Hezbollah Leader Hassan Nasrallah.)1. US Foreign Military Sales:- Australia: 100 x Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missiles-Extended Range and related equipment for an estimated cost of $405 million. - Egypt: 720 x Stinger Missiles for vehicle-based use on existing Avenger systems, and related elements of logistics and program support for an estimated cost of $740 million.- Bulgaria: 218 x Javelin FGM-148F missiles and 107 x Javelin Lightweight Command Launch Units (LWCLU). The estimated total cost is $114 million.2. Hezbollah Leader Hassan Nasrallah Confirmed Dead in Friday's Beirut Strike.3. Senior IRGC Officer killed in Friday Beirut strike.The deputy commander of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force, Abbas Nilforoushan, was killed in the strike.4. Iran's senior leadership undecided on actions in response to the IDF strike in Beirut that killed Hezbollah Chief and Senior IRGC Officer.While conservative Iranians want a strong response, including a direct attack on Israel, moderates are urging restraint.5. Reactions concerning Hassan Nasrallah's death by leaders from Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Russia, Houthi Rebels (Yemen), Hamas, Fatah, Cuba, and Venezuela.6 Time of Israel Report: Hashem Safieddine will replace Nasrallah as Hezbollah Chief. As head of the executive council, Safieddine oversees Hezbollah's political affairs. He also sits on the Jihad Council, which manages the group's military operations.7. IDF attacks Houthi targets at Yemeni ports in response to missile attack on Ben Gurion airport. The strikes targeted sites used by the Houthi regime for military purposes at the port city of Hodeidah and the nearby Ras Isa port in western Yemen, the IDF said.8. US strikes targets in Syria.US Central Command said it struck northwestern Syria on 24 Sep, targeting a senior terrorist from the al-Qaeda-linked Hurras al-Deen group and eight others.It also announced a strike from 16 Sep, in which it conducted a “large-scale airstrike” on an Islamic State training camp in a remote undisclosed location in central Syria. 9. NY Times Report: IDF (may be) conducting limited ground operations in Lebanon.

Walking past the posters of the captives in Ben Gurion airport, I could not help think about the simple way that we could have had our captives saved months ago!

Ralph welcomes former TV writer turned grass roots organizer, Jason Berlin, who explains how his group, Field Team 6, uses the latest data and analytics to identify and reach out to potential Democratic voters in order to register them to vote and how that could turn the tide in purple, flippable states.Jason Berlin is a former TV writer and co-founder of Field Team 6, a national voter-registration project that organizes voter drives to register Democrats in the most flippable states across the country.The fact is you can't get out the vote if those voters don't exist to begin with. It's like no one had a talk with people about where a voter comes from. So we concentrate on that first half of the equation—getting people over that biggest hurdle, getting them registered, generating this river of new Democrats and Independents who can then get into the system and be targeted by the massive get-out-the-vote machinery.Jason BerlinThe Democratic Party over the years has exhibited serious symptoms of masochism. It's like they've written off half the country, where they don't even compete.Ralph NaderIn Case You Haven't Heard with Francesco DeSantisNews 9/4/241. On August 28th, the Israeli Defense Forces targeted United Nations World Food Programme vehicles with “repeated gunfire,” per CNN. According to the agency, “Despite being clearly marked and receiving multiple clearances by Israeli authorities to approach, the vehicle was directly struck by gunfire as it was moving toward an…IDF…checkpoint.” Photos show at least ten bullet holes in the vehicle windows. As this piece highlights, “ongoing airstrikes and repeated evacuation orders by Israeli forces have forced many of the agency's food warehouses and community kitchens to shutter…The IDF-designated ‘humanitarian zone' in Gaza is also steadily shrinking; in the past month alone, the IDF has reduced this zone by 38%.” This incident is reminiscent of the Israeli strike on World Central Kitchen workers in April, when the IDF killed three Britons, a Palestinian, a US-Canadian dual citizen, an Australian, and a Pole via multiple airstrikes. Two days after the World Food Programme incident, CNN reported that the IDF killed four in a humanitarian aid vehicle affiliated with the American Near East Refugee Aid organization.2. On Monday, the Israeli labor federation, Histradrut, called a general strike in order to “pressure Netanyahu's government into changing its approach to cease-fire negotiations,” per NPR. This action was taken in response to the death of six hostages who would have been released had Israel agreed to the ceasefire proposed in early July. According to NPR, “Many schools and government buildings were shut…[and]…Ben Gurion airport…paused flights for several hours.” Yet, Israel's Labor Court quickly ordered the strike to end and the union obeyed; the action lasted less than one business day. This incident illustrates the deep discontent with the Netanyahu government's handling of the hostage negotiations, but also the impotence of Israeli civil society to change course.3. In more positive news related to labor and Israel, Democracy Now! reports Jimmy Williams Jr. president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, says his union is “directing its massive international pension fund to divest from the Gaza genocide.” According to left-wing British outlet Skwakbox, the Painter's Union receives $330 million dollars in new contributions from union members each year.4. The Middle East Monitor reports “Ray Youssef, CEO of the Bitcoin marketplace platform, Noonesapp…[alleges that cryptocurrency giant Binance] ‘has seized all funds from all Palestinians as per the request of the IDF. They refuse to return the funds. All appeals denied.'” Responding to this allegation, a Binance spokesperson claimed that this seizure of assets only covers a limited number of accounts linked to “illicut funds,” though “Binance did not specify the extent or value of the ‘illicit funds' involved.” Boosters of cryptocurrency, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have framed it in terms of “transactional freedom,” per Axios. Not so for the Palestinians, it seems.5. Jeremy Corbyn, former leader of the U.K. Labour Party, has united with four other independent, pro-Gaza MPs to form the Independent Alliance, per the BBC. This new parliamentary bloc will “use their…platform to campaign for scrapping the two-child benefit limit and against arms sales to Israel.” With five MPs in this alliance, it already outnumbers the Green Party and is equal to Reform UK, the far-right party formed by Brexit champion Nigel Farage. In their first move since forming the Independent Alliance, the MPs issued a statement in response to Foreign Minister David Lammy's announcement that the U.K. will suspend a small number of arms export licenses to Israel. This statement reads “For months, we have called for an immediate and full suspension of arms sales to Israel. The government has finally admitted there is a clear risk of weapons being used to commit violations of international law…This announcement must be the first step in ending all arms…used by the Israeli military to commit genocide in Gaza.”6. According to the ACLU of Indiana, “[Indiana University] has approved a new policy that prohibits all expressive activity if it takes place between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m., even if the activity is not at all disruptive, such as standing silently, holding a sign, wearing a t-shirt with a communicative message, or discussing current events with friends.” This policy, which “carries harsh punishments, including suspension or expulsion for students, and suspension or termination of staff,” was adopted in response to campus pro-Palestine demonstrations last year. The ACLU of Indiana has already filed a lawsuit to overturn this chilling policy. And at New York University, Palestine Legal reports “In a dangerous escalation of repression, [NYU] announced new student conduct policies last week that appear to prohibit criticism of Zionism. If implemented, these policies risk creating a hostile environment for Palestinian and anti-Zionist Jewish students and severely curtail…free expression.” This statement notes that NYU does not afford protected status to any other political ideology and that this decision “opens the door for other ethno-nationalist ideologies to claim protection from criticism. With Zionism enshrined as a protected class, there's no reason why Hindu nationalism, Christian nationalism, white nationalism or similar ideologies wouldn't be afforded the same.” Palestine Legal has vowed that it will “continue to monitor and combat institutional attempts to punish and censor students organizing for Palestinian rights.”7. In a major escalation of tensions, the United States seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro's plane in the Dominican Republic and transferred it to Florida, per the BBC. According to this report, “US officials said the plane was seized for suspected violations of US export control and sanctions laws,” while Venezuelan officials have denounced this move as an act of “piracy,” and “reserves the right to take any legal action to repair this damage to the nation.” Foreign Minister Yván Gil said the US had justified itself “with the coercive measures that they unilaterally and illegally impose around the world.” This is just the latest case of western governments seizing Venezuelan state assets; in 2018, the Bank of England seized nearly $2 billion worth of Venezuelan gold and has refused to return those assets despite urging from the United Nations special rapporteur on sanctions, per Declassified UK.8. The Miami Herald is out with a stunning new report on the dubious “Havana Syndrome” which finds that patients were “coerced” to join an NIH study on the supposed illness. According to this piece, “An internal review board at the National Institutes of Health…decided to shut down a long-term study of Havana Syndrome patients that found no signs of brain injuries, after several participants complained of mishandled medical data, bias and pressures to join the research. [Jennifer George] A spokeswoman for NIH said the internal review found that ‘informed consent' policies to join the study ‘were not met due to coercion.” Though George insists the coercion was not on the part of the NIH, she declined to identify who coerced the patients.9. Daniel Nichanian of Bolts Magazine reports “[Arizona Democratic Senate nominee Ruben] Gallego, fresh off of a police union endorsement, just penned a letter to the US [Department of Justice] asking them to stand down in its investigations against the Phoenix police and its effort to bring the department under a consent decree.” The proposed consent decree in question stems from a DOJ investigation that found “[Phoenix PD] uses excessive force, including unjustified deadly force… unlawfully detain, cite, and arrest people experiencing homelessness and unlawfully dispose of their belongings…discriminates against Black, Hispanic, and Native American people when enforcing the law…violates the rights of people engaged in protected speech and expression…[and] discriminate against people with behavioral health disabilities when dispatching calls for assistance and responding to people in crisis.”10. Finally, in more positive Senate-related news, a new Split Ticket poll shows populist Independent candidate Dan Osborn running neck-and-neck with incumbent Republican Senator Deb Fischer in Nebraska. While Donald Trump leads Kamala Harris 54 to 37, the same poll shows Senator Fischer leading by only 1 point – 39% to Osborn's 38%, with 23% undecided. Osborn, a union leader who organized the 2021 Kellogg strike, has been favorably profiled by the American Prospect. There is no Democrat running for this seat.This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven't Heard. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Israel destroys thousands of Hizbullah rocket launching pads in pre-emptive pre dawn strike. Hizbullah launches  210 rockets and 20 drones. Disruption at Ben Gurion airport. . See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The October 7 Hamas attack severely affected Israel's Ben-Gurion University (BGU) and its surrounding community. The university lost over 110 people, several students were taken hostage, including Noa Argamani, and thousands of students were called up for reserve duty. Doug Seserman, CEO of Americans for Ben-Gurion University, joins us to discuss the impact of the October 7 Hamas massacre on BGU and Israel's Negev region. Hear about the university's emergency response and volunteer efforts, highlighting the region's resilience and the university's innovation in sustainability, water conservation, and energy solutions.  *The views and opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect the views or position of AJC.  Episode Lineup:  (0:40) Doug Seserman Show Notes: Listen – People of the Pod: The 2024 U.S. Presidential Election: What Does it Mean For Israel? Seven Months In: What Israelis Think About the War Against Hamas, Campus Antisemitism in America, and More What Does it Mean to be a Jewish American Hero? A Jewish American Heritage Month Conversation with AJC CEO Ted Deutch Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod You can reach us at: peopleofthepod@ajc.org If you've appreciated this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. Transcript of Interview with Doug Seserman: Manya Brachear Pashman:   The Negev, the vast desert region that covers 60% of Israel's territory is home to only 10% of its population. It's also home to Ben-Gurion University and many of the communities attacked by Hamas terrorists on October 7.  Doug Seserman is the CEO of Americans for Ben-Gurion University. In that role, he has worked to highlight the innovations and technology know-how that Israel can offer America and the world when it comes to sustainability, water conservation, energy solutions and ecology. But since October 7 BGU's efforts have shifted from sustaining lives across Israel's south to rebuilding them. Doug Seserman is with us now to discuss those efforts. Doug, welcome to People of the Pod. Doug Seserman:  Thank you so much for inviting me. Manya Brachear Pashman:   So compared to other Israeli universities, the BGU community was disproportionately impacted by the October 7 massacre, correct? Can you give our listeners some perspective on the scope of loss? Doug Seserman:   Sure. So as the crow flies our main campus in Beer-Sheva is only about 22 miles from Gaza. We had a number of students at the Nova music festival site, and a number of our employees and their families live in the western Negev or Gaza Envelope area. So as a university today, we have 111 dead. That includes those murdered on October 7, as well as fallen soldiers. We've had close to 6,600 of our students, faculty, employees, administration, called up to milu'im, reserve duty, and not all of them have come back. Some 2000 are still fighting. So that was a direct and disproportional impact. Now everybody in Israel has experienced this war. Every family knows somebody, but for us, it's definitely disproportional. Literally every colleague's kids are fighting. Every younger woman who's a colleague in her 30s, their husbands are fighting. People are on their WhatsApp just trying to hear what's going to happen next. It's a very surreal situation. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Four hostages were rescued by the IDF earlier this month.  Were there any faculty, staff, or students from Ben-Gurion taken hostage?  Doug Seserman:   Noa Argamani, you may recall her name. She was at the music festival and forcibly separated from her boyfriend Avinatan Or, who's a BGU alum. But Noa is a 26-year-old information systems student of ours. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Yes, thank you. Of course, Noa was one of those hostages recently rescued. We are so thankful that Noa is now home. 124 hostages are still being held in Gaza. We are praying and advocating for the safe return home of all hostages, and will highlight those that are part of the BGU family: Sasha (Alexander) Trufanov, Avinatan Or, Alex Dancyg, and Segev Kalfon And Doug, how many at BGU were called up for reserve duty? Doug Seserman:   That's about a third of the student body. Classes, obviously, they were supposed to start on October 15, and they didn't resume until December 31. The president of the University, Professor Daniel Chamovitz, did his best to have no student be left behind. But at some point, we had to resume classes. And so today, when you go to the campus, it's, I don't want to say it's thriving, but it's functioning. There's a normalcy about life in Israel and also on campus. But there's nothing normal about this new normal.  Many of our reservists are back and they're in the classroom, but even going from being in Gaza, in conflict, to then studying for a test, you know, writing papers and things. People are traumatized, and the university has done an amazing job providing psychological support and counseling for the students and the faculty and the families who've been directly impacted. But still, it's a very difficult situation. Manya Brachear Pashman:   In addition to those called up for reserve duty immediately after October 7, was there a sizable volunteer effort? Or was the community just too shell-shocked? Doug Seserman:   Thank you for asking. Today when you go to campus, it's happening and it's alive and doing as well as it can. On October 7, that immediately pivoted from a university that was closing – had to close because of the war – to almost a hub for activity to support not only the faculty and students, but also the community – a logistics center, if you will. We were housing, in our dorms, evacuated families and also medical professionals from the center of the country that needed help. Soroka, which is the main hospital of the Negev and also the teaching hospital for our two medical schools. Very close relationship with Soroka Medical Center. Our medical students immediately became ER triage doctors. They learn by doing.  If you talk with some of them today, they'll tell you in this strange way that October 7 may have really accelerated their knowledge in terms of their career, etc. And then we just started doing what we could. Students mobilized, as Israelis do, to create care packages and provide clothing and anything that was necessary for these evacuated families. We had, I want to say close to 1500 members of our community that were evacuated. Manya Brachear Pashman:   You know, I imagine it's even more than medical students getting this, you know, on the ground experience. I happened to be in journalism school in New York when 9/11 happened. I remember places in New York City all of a sudden transforming into emergency centers, like what you're describing, and I think a lot of my classmates got a crash course, right, in journalism from covering that. Doug Seserman:   Absolutely. Even our social work and psychology students became kind of caseworkers. I mean, everybody was doing what they could and, in a way, we should feel really good about it. It's hard to say there are silver linings from October 7. But the resilience that the country has demonstrated in the university, in particular, is incredible and quite inspiring.  One thing about Ben-Gurion University that's unique is, yes, we are an educational and research institution and one of the leading universities in Israel, and we're quite proud of those accomplishments. But we have a particular and very unique mandate to develop the Negev region. And it's almost in what we call the Ben Gurion DNA, to activate the social justice aspect of being a Jew, honestly. But it's particularly manifest at the University and we're proud of it. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Well, you know, let's talk a little bit more about that innovative spirit that I hear a lot about, that characterizes Israel and, obviously, BGU. And I mentioned earlier how BGU has introduced, you know, all of these technologies, innovative solutions for environmental concerns.  I think David Ben Gurion said “making the desert bloom” – that was his goal and what the university aims for – but has the aftermath of October 7 highlighted other faculty, other fields? You talked about psychology and social work. Can you talk a little bit about how this kind of innovative spirit has been applied and has really shown itself since October 7? Doug Seserman:   Yeah, absolutely. I'm happy to do that.  And it's important to note also that Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, it was important on October 6. When you visit the Beer-Sheva campus, it's, in a way, it's startup nation on steroids. You have Ben-Gurion University and Soroka hospital, the advanced technology park that has 3000 employees and 70 multinational companies, right across the high speed train station to get you to Tel Aviv in just over an hour.  And you have the IDF moving south and their IT and computing base literally adjacent to the university. It's an amazing place. I actually feel like a lot of people visit Israel, and they don't really go south. And the truth is, you haven't seen the future of Israel until you spend time in the Negev. And you don't really understand the Negev until you've spent time at the University.  But in terms of areas that the University excels at, that are important in the aftermath. I mean, it's everything. But some of the things I would highlight is our strength in engineering, computer sciences, IT, cybersecurity. The cyber capital of Israel is actually Beer-Sheva. This IDF base that's adjacent to us, I call them 22nd century defense systems, remote sensing satellite defense technology. Hatzerim Air Force base is in the Negev, that's where all members of the Israeli Air Force get their wings, but they actually get their degree, their educational degree, from Ben-Gurion University. So when we think about the future, listen, it takes a village. And you can never do wrong by doing right. So I'd encourage your listeners to just get involved in something in Israel that's consistent with their values.  Manya Brachear Pashman:   I know the South has supplied much of Israel's kind of homegrown food, vegetable crops, barley, wheat, dairy, but obviously, I mean, many of the Palestinian and Thai workers who tended those fields, they're not returning anytime soon, neither are the residents of those kibbutzim. Has BGU played a role in filling that gap? Doug Seserman:   The answer is yes, and doing our best and not enough. And very proud of all the volunteers and that you're seeing, especially also from the diaspora coming to Israel to help pick fruit and etc. We had faculty that basically stop because they weren't teaching and they had time, they just started going into the fields and helping the farmers, both with their hands and their heart.  At the end of the day, there's a very close relationship and literally hundreds of our students and faculty and administration has been involved in volunteer efforts. At the end of our board of governors meeting last week, we had a whole afternoon dedicated for volunteers who came from around the world to volunteer as well. Manya Brachear Pashman:   I want to go back to campus real quick and talk a little bit more about the students. I know that BGSU has a really robust diversity and inclusion effort that covers Druze, other Arabs, women, disabilities, Ethiopian immigrants, ultra-Orthodox Jews – it's a very diverse campus. And I'm curious how this diverse student population views the scenes from some American university campuses. I mean, has there been vigorous debate on BGU's campus about how Israel is fighting this war? And does it look any different? Doug Seserman:   Now that's a big question. I can say this: we're extremely proud of the diversity on campus and sometimes what we call a shared society. We have Sarab Abu-Rabia-Queder, who's the Vice President of Diversity and Equity and Inclusion in Israel. That DEI term has become controversial, in the United States, but in Israel, you know, in our campus, it's a thriving concept.  We have approximately 20,000 students. Most of them are Israeli. We have about 1000 international students that study in English, mostly from China and India, but also from North America. And then we have about 2000 Arab-Israelis. So of the Arab-Israeli, a number of them are Bedouin. We're by far the largest university for Bedouin students in Israel. So we have robust discussions underneath that framework of the diversity, VP of diversity, to try to bring students together. Sometimes there have been, before October 7, protests, peaceful protests, with Arab students protesting and Jewish students also there. And we've never had issues.  You know, there's a way to have civil discourse, and free speech and academic freedom is critical. I mean, it's a hallmark to a just society. So you know, you have to be able to have peaceful protests. Now going back to what's happening on American campuses. You know, I'm personally embarrassed. I wrote an op-ed recently in The Times of Israel about what do you do when your alma mater no longer reflects your values?  I'm a proud Wildcat from Northwestern University. And we had a terrible situation on campus. And then our president Michael Schill, who's a smart guy, and also a Jew, negotiated with the encampment leaders and created a precedent almost like, it's not negotiating with terrorists, but it's compromising and rewarding, enabling bad behavior and creating a precedent that the way to make change is to be lawless and create hate speech.  So something's happened in the US that on college campuses, that's absolutely out of control. But at the same time, freedom of speech, and especially in academic institutions, must be protected, but it has to be safe. We teach chemistry on university campuses all across the country, perhaps we should be teaching morality. And maybe that should be a required course.  Now, I don't even know what that looks like. But I think people have lost a sense for the difference between proper behavior and improper behavior. And they sometimes use free speech to do hateful and wrongful things. And that's, that's not appropriate. Manya Brachear Pashman:   In other words, you're suggesting social chemistry lessons? How do we get along? How do relationships work? Doug Seserman:   I love that. I think what's happened is we all are talking in echo chambers. We've no longer figured out how to understand the narrative of the other, and how to find some sort of central place to move forward where people can agree to disagree, but you can move forward in some kind of democratic and civil way. Manya Brachear Pashman:   So I don't want to lose sight of the fact that you head Americans for BGU, right, the arm of the university that works to garner American support? Has October 7 presented some unexpected challenges in that realm? Doug Seserman:   You know the answer, to that is yes. And also, unfortunately, opportunities at the same time. There's been an October, I call it October 8 awakening, some people are calling it October 8 Jews – people in this country and in the diaspora are waking up, that something is happening out there with antisemitism, and the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. And as an American diaspora Jew, you have sort of like three options.  You can do nothing, and no miracles are going to come from that. Or you can kind of wait and see and no miracles are gonna come from that. Or you can kind of double down your efforts and get involved with institutions that matter, can make a difference. And that's what we're encouraging. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Well, Doug, thank you so much for joining us and for giving us a snapshot of what people are trying to do to rebuild Israel's south and help it recover after October 7. Thank you so much. Doug Seserman:   Thank you so much for having me.

In questo podcast – secondo episodio della docuserie “Il Mossad. Successi e fallimenti del più grande e temuto servizio segreto al mondo” – l'analista strategico Gianluca Ansalone (Docente di Geopolitica al Campus Biomedico di Roma-Università di Roma Tor Vergata) racconta l'Operazione Damocle.  Nel luglio 1962, il presidente egiziano Gamal Abdel Nasser annunciò il successo di quattro test di missili in grado di colpire qualsiasi punto di Israele. L'annuncio dell'Egitto fu una sorpresa e Israele apprese in seguito che Nasser aveva reclutato scienziati tedeschi che avevano sviluppato i razzi V1 e V2 lanciati dai nazisti contro la Gran Bretagna durante la guerra per costruire missili per lui. Secondo Otto Joklik, uno scienziato austriaco coinvolto nel progetto, che aveva sede in una struttura segreta nel deserto nota come Fabbrica 333, i razzi in fase di sviluppo erano programmati per utilizzare una scoria radioattiva. Il Primo Ministro David Ben-Gurion incaricò il Mossad di impedire all'Egitto di produrre i missili. Il Mossad iniziò quindi l'Operazione Damocle per spaventare e, se necessario, eliminare gli scienziati che aiutavano gli egiziani. Nel settembre 1962, Heinz Krug, capo di una società di comodo della Factory 333 chiamata Intra, scomparve a Monaco. Il Mossad organizzò un'operazione che coinvolgeva un ex ufficiale delle SS ed eroe di guerra di nome Otto Skorzeny, che Krug credeva avrebbe aiutato a tenere al sicuro lui e gli altri scienziati. Invece, Skorzeny uccise Krug e una squadra di agenti israeliani versò dell'acido sul suo corpo e seppellì i suoi resti nella foresta fuori Monaco. Il capo della squadra del Mossad era Yitzhak Shamir, capo dell'unità per le operazioni speciali e in seguito primo ministro. A novembre, due pacchi bomba arrivarono nell'ufficio del direttore del progetto missilistico, Wolfgang Pilz, mutilando la sua segretaria e uccidendo cinque lavoratori egiziani. Nel febbraio 1963, un altro scienziato, Hans Kleinwachter, sfuggì a un'imboscata in Svizzera. In aprile, due agenti del Mossad a Basilea minacciarono di uccidere il direttore del progetto Paul Goerke e sua figlia. Un colpo di pistola fu sparato contro un professore della Germania occidentale che stava effettuando ricerche elettroniche per l'Egitto nella città di Lörrach. Due agenti del Mossad, Joseph Ben-Gal, israeliano, e Otto Joklik, austriaco, furono arrestati in Svizzera per aver minacciato la figlia di Goerke. La pubblicità che ne seguì provocò uno scandalo e minacciò lo sforzo diplomatico in corso per migliorare le relazioni tra Israele e la Germania occidentale. Secondo Ronen Bergman, gli israeliani dissero al governo della Germania Ovest della Factory 333 e i tedeschi offrirono agli scienziati un lavoro in Germania. “Quasi tutti gli scienziati accettarono, forse temendo per la loro vita, e l'Egitto abbandonò il suo piano”. Ben-Gurion fermò l'operazione e il direttore del Mossad Isser Harel si dimise. Il suo sostituto, Meir Amit, sostenne che Harel aveva sopravvalutato il pericolo per Israele rappresentato dal programma missilistico egiziano. A cura di Francesco De Leo. Montaggio di Silvio Farina. https://storiainpodcast.focus.it - Canale Eventi e luoghi ------------ Storia in Podcast di Focus si può ascoltare anche su Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/293C5TZniMOgqHdBLSTaRc ed Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/it/podcast/la-voce-della-storia/id1511551427. Siamo in tutte le edicole... ma anche qui: - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FocusStoria/ - Gruppo Facebook Focus Storia Wars: https://www.facebook.com/groups/FocuStoriaWars/ (per appassionati di storia militare) - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/focusitvideo - Twitter: https://twitter.com/focusstoria - Sito: https://www.focus.it/cultura Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ben Gurion airport reopened Terminal One this week for low-cost carriers. However, Mark Feldman , CEO of Ziontours, told KAN's Mark Weiss that the move will not lead to cheaper flights in the foreseeable future. (Photo:Flash90)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an excellent question and a full-fledged mystery that will not be fully answered in this episode. Teller From Jerusalem continues to explore the various steps that occurred in the evolution of the Soviet support for nascent Israel. It was beneficial to Israel that the Soviets arrested the work of Count Folke Bernadotte, the Swedish aristocrat that was appointed by the United Nations Secretary General to hammer out a temporary truce between Israel and her neighbors.  Bernadotte sought to achieve far more than just a temporary truce. He foisted terms upon Israel, when she was already winning the war, which would have deprived her of much of what she had achieved at the very greatest sacrifice. This was going to cost him his life at the hands of Israel's underground and embroil Israel in international censure resulting in Ben Gurion declaring war upon any defense force that was not part of the Haganah. Learn more at TellerFromJerusalem.com Don't forget to subscribe, like and share! Let all your friends know that that they too can have a new favorite podcast. © 2024 Media Education Trust llc

El 14 de mayo de 1948, David Ben Gurión proclamó el nacimiento del estado de Israel. Nos lo cuenta Nieves Concostrina.Ya puedes escuchar Polvo eres, exclusivo en Podimo: https://go.podimo.com/es/polvoeres

El 14 de mayo de 1948, David Ben Gurión proclamó el nacimiento del estado de Israel. Nos lo cuenta Nieves Concostrina.Ya puedes escuchar Polvo eres, exclusivo en Podimo: https://go.podimo.com/es/polvoeres

El 14 de mayo de 1948, David Ben Gurión proclamó el nacimiento del estado de Israel. Nos lo cuenta Nieves Concostrina.Ya puedes escuchar Polvo eres, exclusivo en Podimo: https://go.podimo.com/es/polvoeres

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.comEli is a journalist and friend. He's a former senior national security correspondent for The Daily Beast and Newsweek, and a former columnist for the Bloomberg View. He's now a reporter for The Free Press, a contributing editor at Commentary Magazine, and the host of his own podcast, The Re-Education. I thought I should have a strong Israel supporter to come on and challenge my recent columns.For two clips of our convo — on the West Bank settlements, and Trump's record on Israel — pop over to our YouTube page. Other topics: Eli raised as a latchkey kid in Philly; his leftwing Jewish parents; turning neocon in college during the ‘90s PC wars; Milton Friedman's Free to Choose a formative book; Eli's love of rap from an early age; Tribe Called Quest and the Native Tongue movement of “rap hippies”; Black Nationalism; David Samuels' story on white kids driving hip-hop; Kanye's genius and grappling with his anti-Semitism; the bigotry of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot; Nietzsche's madness; the persistence of Jew hatred across history and cultures; dissidents in the Catholic Church; Augustine; Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah; the faux sophistication of conspiracy theorists; Bob Dole as a Gen Xer; envy and resentment over Israel's success; the First Intifada; Labor Zionism; Ben-Gurion and Arab resistance; Menachem Begin; Netanyahu's dad; the IRA bombing British leaders; Arafat walking away from Camp David; the Second Intifada; 9/11 and Islamofascism; the Iraq War and Abu Ghraib; the settler movement and Judeo-fascists; Jared Kushner; the Abraham Accords; Arabs serving in the Knesset; Israel withdrawing from Gaza and southern Lebanon; the evil of Hamas; Yossi Klein Halevi; the IDF's AI program; the tunnels and 2,000-lb bombs; Dresden; John Spencer's Understanding Urban Warfare; Rafah; Trump's vanity; Soleimani and the Damascus embassy; and the US supplying weapons to Israel.Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Next up: Kara Swisher on Silicon Valley. After that: Adam Moss on the artistic process, George Will on Trump and conservatism, Johann Hari on weight-loss drugs, Noah Smith on the economy, Nellie Bowles on the woke revolution, Bill Maher on everything, and the great Van Jones! Send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

On today's podcast, Stephanie and Tara give an update on recent events in the Israel / Hamas war and how the escalating conflict may affect changes in our foreign policy. Your hosts discuss their viewpoints on Israeli attacks against civilians and aid workers in Gaza and the realities of war when it comes to civilian casualties, the Biden Admin's hypocritical response in providing aid to both Israel and Iran, the possible U.S. objective of ousting Netanyahu, the differences in the way we are responding to Israel vs Ukraine, and an interesting "conspiracy theory" about the  port of Gaza and the possible creation of the Ben Gurion canal.  Read the blog and connect with Tara and Stephanie on TikTok, YouTube, Rumble, Facebook, and IG. https://msha.ke/unapologeticallyoutspoken/ Want to support the podcast and join the conversation? Head over to our Etsy store and grab a UO Podcast sticker! https://www.etsy.com/shop/UOPatriotChicks  

J.J. and Dr. Neil Rogachevsky skip down the winding (theoretical) road towards Israeli independence, and tell the story of the drafting of Ben Gurion's declaration of independence. Send any complaints or compliments to podcasts@torahinmotion.orgFor more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcastsNeil Rogachevsky is assistant professor and associate director at the Straus Center of Yeshiva University, where he teaches Israel studies and political thought. His commentary and essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Tablet, The Atlantic, Mosaic, Commentary, Jewish Review of Books, American Affairs, Ha'aretz and other publications. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge.

Daily U.S. news. Daily world news. Today's news topics are: American-Isreli IDF soldier has been confirmed to have died on October 7th. A U.S. intelligence report show that Netanyahu is not going to be around for the long run. A fourth attack has happened to Palestinians trying to get humanitarian aid. Cyprus sends a ship to Gaza filled with humanitarian aid. Israel denies humanitarian aid due to medical child scissors.  Ramadan has begun and Al-Aqsa mosque is turning away many younger men. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq has attacked Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv was a drone. The IDF and a Children's organization moved orphans out of Gaza and into the West Bank. Several progressive organizations are combining forces against AIPAC. Boeing whistleblower has taken his own life. More legislation this week in DC to get rid of TikTok.

Daily U.S. news. Daily world news. Today's news topics are: American-Isreli IDF soldier has been confirmed to have died on October 7th. A U.S. intelligence report show that Netanyahu is not going to be around for the long run. A fourth attack has happened to Palestinians trying to get humanitarian aid. Cyprus sends a ship to Gaza filled with humanitarian aid. Israel denies humanitarian aid due to medical child scissors.  Ramadan has begun and Al-Aqsa mosque is turning away many younger men. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq has attacked Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv was a drone. The IDF and a Children's organization moved orphans out of Gaza and into the West Bank. Several progressive organizations are combining forces against AIPAC. Boeing whistleblower has taken his own life. More legislation this week in DC to get rid of TikTok.

A few weeks ago, a team of Free Press producers and reporters arrived at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. The energy was somber and still, almost like the country and its people were frozen in time. As one mother of a hostage told us, “Every single second of our lives is trauma.” And as the journalist Gadi Taub told us, “People don't even begin to understand the extent of this earthquake and how it will change Israel.” Since the earliest hours of October 7, we've been reporting on the war in Israel. We've published no fewer than seventy articles about it, and more than ten Honestly episodes. In other words: when we arrived in Israel, we thought we already knew all about what happened that day. But there is a difference between knowing something intellectually, and actually standing in a killing field.  The events of October 7—and the ongoing war between Israel, Hamas, and other Iranian proxies—isn't just about another war in another faraway place. This is about the difference between democracy and tyranny, between freedom and unfreedom—in a world that seems to have lost the ability to make a distinction between the two.  As one reservist told us, “We're doing this for the world. Hamas is an idea. It looks at you in L.A. as the enemy, not just us in Israel. We just happen to be their neighbors.”  So over the next few episodes, we're going to bring you The FP in Israel: a special limited series about our time reporting on the ground. We hope you listen. And for more of our content from Israel, subscribe to The Free Press at thefp.com, and check out our YouTube channel, where you will find additional videos and documentaries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The differences between two political figures define Israel's early years.

This is the first episode of our new weekly podcast.The Common Denominator seeks to fill in the gaps of theory and reality; to demystify not only the lived reality of the Jews and the Jewish state, but also the broader threat all we face worldwide with leaderships who continuously seek to centralize their power - and the reality of the human fallibilities that aid them.There is nothing else like it around and we want you involved.Today's program will address the Tik Tok curriculum roaming the internet which cite a decades old project as the “reason” behind the raging war in Israel and Gaza. Come find out the facts. We'll meet you there.Shows will air on Substack ( IlanaRachelDaniel120 )Wednesdays 18:00 Jerusalem time. 11:00 ET. Get full access to Ilana Rachel Daniel at ilanaracheldaniel120.substack.com/subscribe

Egypt has played a key mediation role in previous rounds between Israel and Hamas. This time Cairo is concerned that hundreds of thousands of Gazans displaced by the fighting will seek refuge in Egypt. KAN's Mark Weiss spoke with Prof Yoram Meital , a Middle East affairs expert from Ben-Gurion university, about the Egyptian role in the war.  (Courtesy:Reuters)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

https://annvandersteel.comhttps://annvandersteel.substack.comhttps://RightNow.NewsHARD HITTING TRUTH AND PERSONAL IMPACT STORIES THAT MAKE A DIFFERENCESPECIAL GUEST:COL JOHN MILLS (RET)https://gettr.com/user/ColonelRETJohnhttps://substack.com/@colonelretjohnhttps://www.amazon.com/Against-Deep-State-John-Mills/dp/B0CK3H51Y2/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1694490414&sr=8-1SHOW DESCRIPTION:The war against the deep state is daily. From elections, to media, to health, military, surveillance, law, courts and Hollywood. The people continue to fight back, but against who? How do we win?Colonel Mills delivers significant experience in Department of Defense (DoD) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) cybersecurity, technology, and critical infrastructure programs. He has worked extensively in train and equip efforts using Foreign Military Sales (FMS), foreign military financing, ITAR, and international military education and training, and builds public-private defense and technology industrial base partnerships, including helping establish the DoD's Development Innovation Unit (DIU) in Silicon Valley.Prior to joining The SPECTRUM Group (TSG), Colonel Mills served as the Director for Cybersecurity Policy, Strategy, and International Affairs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. His work included creating and implementing the first DoD and intelligence community (IC) scorecarding initiative, boosting whole-of government cybersecurity and multidomain responses to threat actor and nation hostile actions.Colonel Mills' 33-year U.S. Army and Army Reserves career culminated in his serving as a senior liaison between DHS and DoD for complex homeland security operations. Earlier, he helped establish and advise foreign national military and security forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Bosnia, South Korea, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. His roles spanned joint and inter-agency operations, psychological operations (PSYOP), intelligence activities, special operations, strategic planning, and public affairs.In addition to his work at TSG, Colonel Mills serves as an adjunct assistant professor for the Cybersecurity Law and Policy program at the University of Maryland, Global Campus.KEY WORDS: ANN VANDERSTEEL, JOHN MILLS, DEEP STATE, INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY, JOHN BRENNAN, JAMES CLAPPER, SUEZ CANAL, BEN GURION, GOLD, BRICS, CCP, RUSSIA, IRAN, COMMUNISM, NATO, UKRAINE, RUSSIA, BRICS, GOLD, VENEZUELA, TACTICAL CIVICS, INSURRECTION, STOLEN ELECTION, TRUMP, BIDEN.WE ARE BEING INVADED. WILL YOU STAND AND DEFEND OUR REPUBLIC?PLEASE SUPPORT GiveSendGo.com/BurningEdgeOPERATION BURNING EDGE is a serious operation studying the negative impacts and downstream carnage caused by the Biden policies and illegal unconstitutional border migration forever changing the tapestry of America.Cartels are in control of the border running drugs, people and disease into America. Zoonotic disease are jumping from people to animals and back again leaving our cattle industry very vulnerable to slaughter as TB is making a comeback into humans and animals. The U.S. government is funding this invasion and aiding and abetting the trojan army being installed in America. You can support this work at GiveSendGo.com/BurningEdge.Stay tuned for daily updates weeknights on Brighteon TV at 8pm and Rumble and the rest at 9pm.Please consider supporting Operation Burning Edge: https://givesendgo.com/burningedgeFamed war correspondent, Michael Yon, and I are organizing a Southern border Expedition in Texas and Panama for the months of August/September. We have the top of the line gear and security for this entire trip filled with migrant encounters, helicopters, fixed wing aircraft, Law Enforcement, Customs and Border Patrol, Congressman and more who all want to learn from the intel gathering we will be doing in the field. Live reporting daily from the field with the latest on the invasion and who is behind it along with who is REALLY TRYING to stop it.HELP US COVER THE INVASION:- Top of the line Military Grade Communications, Gear, and Accommodations - Military Grade Communications Gear for ground-to-ground, ground-to-air, and satellite comms.- Starlink for broadband communications and broadcasting- Various sensors, including $500,000 cooled thermal camera attached to an $80,000 fifty-foot mast.- Image intensifiers, handheld thermal scanners, high quality low-light optics including the most modern optics platforms.- IR spotlights & detectors- Helicopter coverage- Multiple aviation options including helicopters and various fixed wing aircraft allowing for video capture and real-time thermal imaging.- Advanced drone technology with FAA certified Drone pilots.- Advanced audio and video equipment for discreet and overt audio/video capture - Multiple vehicles, RVs, and staff with military trained securityFollow Michael & Ann on Twitterhttps://twitter.com/Michael_Yonhttps://twitter.com/annvandersteelLIVE: BRIGHTEON.TV 8PM ETSPONSORED BY:MAKE HONEY GREAT AGAIN: https://MakeHoneyGreatAgain.comPROMO CODE: AVRICHARDSON NUTRITIONAL STORE – LAETRILLE / APRICOT SEEDS FOR HEALTHhttps://RNCStore.com PROMO CODE “AV”SATELLITE PHONE STOREhttps://sat123.comLIGHTS OUT BEEFhttps://LightsOutBeef.comC60 EVO -My health and beauty secret!https://www.c60evo.com/annvandersteel/ PROMO CODE “EVAV” 10%FOR RADIANT ENERGY & MENTAL FOCUS, INCREASED FLEXIBILITY, IMMUNITY & LONGEVITYàFOR PEOPLE & PETSALIAS IDhttps://AliasID.com PROMO CODE “AV”MY PILLOWhttps://MyPillow.com PROMO CODE “AV”EMF DEFENSEhttps://www.ftwproject.com/ref/470/STREAMING 8PM EThttps://RightNow.NewsSTREAMING 9PM ETCLOUTHUB https://clouthub.com/c/gyFG3mMSRUMBLE https://rumble.com/AnnVandersteel/liveGETTR https://gettr.com/user/annvandersteelFACEBOOK https://www.facebook.com/ann.vandersteelYOURNEWS https://yournews.com/area/videos/TWITTER https://twitter.com/annvandersteelEMAILRightNowAnn@protonmail.comSNAIL MAILAnn Vandersteel℅ P.O. BOX 386Palm City, Florida [34991]SPONSORS:https://lightsoutbeef.comhttps://AliasID.com Promo Code AVhttps://zstacklife.com Promo FOUNDATIONhttps://www.mypillow.com/ Promo AVhttps://www.ftwproject.com/ref/470/Transform the harmful wireless fields from; cell towers, smart meters, smartphones, internet router and your television, into more beneficial energy for you and your plants and petsBECOME A CITIZEN JOURNALISThttps://yournews.com/become-a-yournews-citizen-journalist/FOLLOW & SUBSCRIBE:https://AnnVandersteel.Substack.comhttps://twitter.com/annvandersteelhttps://truthsocial.com/@annvandersteelhttps://gettr.com/i/annvandersteelhttps://t.me/AnnVandersteelTruthhttps://annvandersteel.locals.comhttps://app.clouthub.com/#/users/u/AnnVandersteel/postshttps://gab.com/AnnVandersteelhttps://facebook.com/annvandersteelhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/ann-vandersteel-312310260/FAIR USE NOTICE These pages may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, such material has been referenced to advance understanding of political, human rights, ecological, economic, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues. This constitutes a "fair use" of any such material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.

https://annvandersteel.comhttps://annvandersteel.substack.comhttps://RightNow.NewsHARD HITTING TRUTH AND PERSONAL IMPACT STORIES THAT MAKE A DIFFERENCESPECIAL GUEST:MICHAEL YON:https://MichaelYon.comhttps://twitter.com/michael_yonSHOW DESCRIPTION:From the conception of Operation Burning Edge, former Green Beret and current War Correspondent, Michael Yon decided to collaborate with Ann Vandersteel to help inform the world of events set in motion and unfolding that would result in one world government. From the Texas border, illegal alien invasion, Venezuelan migration to Guyana, garnering the attention of Glenn Beck to investigate Colony Ridge, the obvious planned destruction of America is everywhere.NATO is in trouble, the planned Ukraine and Israel conflict has impacts on the global trade routes which are designed to support the CCP Belt and Road Initiative.Who will win, how will America be saved?KEY WORDS: ANN VANDERSTEEL, MICHAEL YON, SUEZ CANAL, BEN GURION, GOLD, BRICS, CCP, RUSSIA, IRAN, COMMUISM, NATO, UKRAINE, RUSSIA, BRICS, GOLD, VENEZUELA, TACTICAL CIVICS, INSURRECTION, STOLEN ELECTION, TRUMP, BIDEN.WE ARE BEING INVADED. WILL YOU STAND AND DEFEND OUR REPUBLIC?PLEASE SUPPORT GiveSendGo.com/BurningEdgeOPERATION BURNING EDGE is a serious operation studying the negative impacts and downstream carnage caused by the Biden policies and illegal unconstitutional border migration forever changing the tapestry of America.Cartels are in control of the border running drugs, people and disease into America. Zoonotic disease are jumping from people to animals and back again leaving our cattle industry very vulnerable to slaughter as TB is making a comeback into humans and animals. The U.S. government is funding this invasion and aiding and abetting the trojan army being installed in America. You can support this work at GiveSendGo.com/BurningEdge.Stay tuned for daily updates weeknights on Brighteon TV at 8pm and Rumble and the rest at 9pm.Please consider supporting Operation Burning Edge: https://givesendgo.com/burningedgeFamed war correspondent, Michael Yon, and I are organizing a Southern border Expedition in Texas and Panama for the months of August/September. We have the top of the line gear and security for this entire trip filled with migrant encounters, helicopters, fixed wing aircraft, Law Enforcement, Customs and Border Patrol, Congressman and more who all want to learn from the intel gathering we will be doing in the field. Live reporting daily from the field with the latest on the invasion and who is behind it along with who is REALLY TRYING to stop it.HELP US COVER THE INVASION:- Top of the line Military Grade Communications, Gear, and Accommodations - Military Grade Communications Gear for ground-to-ground, ground-to-air, and satellite comms.- Starlink for broadband communications and broadcasting- Various sensors, including $500,000 cooled thermal camera attached to an $80,000 fifty-foot mast.- Image intensifiers, handheld thermal scanners, high quality low-light optics including the most modern optics platforms.- IR spotlights & detectors- Helicopter coverage- Multiple aviation options including helicopters and various fixed wing aircraft allowing for video capture and real-time thermal imaging.- Advanced drone technology with FAA certified Drone pilots.- Advanced audio and video equipment for discreet and overt audio/video capture - Multiple vehicles, RVs, and staff with military trained securityFollow Michael & Ann on Twitterhttps://twitter.com/Michael_Yonhttps://twitter.com/annvandersteelLIVE: BRIGHTEON.TV 8PM ETSPONSORED BY:MAKE HONEY GREAT AGAIN: https://MakeHoneyGreatAgain.comPROMO CODE: AVRICHARDSON NUTRITIONAL STORE – LAETRILLE / APRICOT SEEDS FOR HEALTHhttps://RNCStore.com PROMO CODE “AV”SATELLITE PHONE STOREhttps://sat123.comLIGHTS OUT BEEFhttps://LightsOutBeef.comC60 EVO -My health and beauty secret!https://www.c60evo.com/annvandersteel/ PROMO CODE “EVAV” 10%FOR RADIANT ENERGY & MENTAL FOCUS, INCREASED FLEXIBILITY, IMMUNITY & LONGEVITYàFOR PEOPLE & PETSALIAS IDhttps://AliasID.com PROMO CODE “AV”MY PILLOWhttps://MyPillow.com PROMO CODE “AV”EMF DEFENSEhttps://www.ftwproject.com/ref/470/STREAMING 8PM EThttps://RightNow.NewsSTREAMING 9PM ETCLOUTHUB https://clouthub.com/c/gyFG3mMSRUMBLE https://rumble.com/AnnVandersteel/liveGETTR https://gettr.com/user/annvandersteelFACEBOOK https://www.facebook.com/ann.vandersteelYOURNEWS https://yournews.com/area/videos/TWITTER https://twitter.com/annvandersteelEMAILRightNowAnn@protonmail.comSNAIL MAILAnn Vandersteel℅ P.O. BOX 386Palm City, Florida [34991]SPONSORS:https://lightsoutbeef.comhttps://AliasID.com Promo Code AVhttps://zstacklife.com Promo FOUNDATIONhttps://www.mypillow.com/ Promo AVhttps://www.ftwproject.com/ref/470/Transform the harmful wireless fields from; cell towers, smart meters, smartphones, internet router and your television, into more beneficial energy for you and your plants and petsBECOME A CITIZEN JOURNALISThttps://yournews.com/become-a-yournews-citizen-journalist/FOLLOW & SUBSCRIBE:https://AnnVandersteel.Substack.comhttps://twitter.com/annvandersteelhttps://truthsocial.com/@annvandersteelhttps://gettr.com/i/annvandersteelhttps://t.me/AnnVandersteelTruthhttps://annvandersteel.locals.comhttps://app.clouthub.com/#/users/u/AnnVandersteel/postshttps://gab.com/AnnVandersteelhttps://facebook.com/annvandersteelhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/ann-vandersteel-312310260/FAIR USE NOTICE These pages may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, such material has been referenced to advance understanding of political, human rights, ecological, economic, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues. This constitutes a "fair use" of any such material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.

0:00 Ben Gurion CANAL 1:09:50 Interview with Michael Yon For more updates, visit: http://www.brighteon.com/channel/hrreport NaturalNews videos would not be possible without you, as always we remain passionately dedicated to our mission of educating people all over the world on the subject of natural healing remedies and personal liberty (food freedom, medical freedom, the freedom of speech, etc.). Together, we're helping create a better world, with more honest food labeling, reduced chemical contamination, the avoidance of toxic heavy metals and vastly increased scientific transparency. ▶️ Every dollar you spend at the Health Ranger Store goes toward helping us achieve important science and content goals for humanity: https://www.healthrangerstore.com/ ▶️ Sign Up For Our Newsletter: https://www.naturalnews.com/Readerregistration.html ▶️ Brighteon: https://www.brighteon.com/channels/hrreport ▶️ Join Our Social Network: https://brighteon.social/@HealthRanger ▶️ Check In Stock Products at: https://PrepWithMike.com

In this week's episode, Anna (https://twitter.com/annarrose) and Nico (https://twitter.com/nico_mnbl) interview Or Sattath (https://twitter.com/or_sattath), Assistant Professor at the Ben-Gurion (https://cris.bgu.ac.il/en/persons/or-sattath) University in the Computer Science department. This is the 2nd episode with Or on this show, continuing the conversation around Quantum Cryptography. This time, he describes how we can transition from a pre-quantum to a post-quantum environment, looking at existing systems like Bitcoin and Ethereum. He covers why the methods used in the transition will be important, techniques on how this could be executed and the challenges in designing these techniques and the complications that can arise. Finally, they go on to discuss Quantum Money and recent works in this area. Here's some additional links for this episode: Part 1 - Episode 288: Quantum Cryptography with Or Sattath (https://zeroknowledge.fm/288-2/) Polynomial-Time Algorithms for Prime Factorization and Discrete Logarithms on a Quantum Computer by Shor (https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9508027) Shor's Algorithm (https://quantum-computing.ibm.com/composer/docs/iqx/guide/shors-algorithm) Grover's Algorithm (https://quantum-computing.ibm.com/composer/docs/iqx/guide/grovers-algorithm) A fast quantum mechanical algorithm for database search by Grover (https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9605043) Fawkescoin: A cryptocurrency without public-key cryptography by Bonneau and Miller (https://jbonneau.com/doc/BM14-SPW-fawkescoin.pdf) Bitcoin is not quantum-safe, and how we can fix it when needed by Buterin (https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/bitcoin-is-not-quantum-safe-and-how-we-can-fix-1375242150) Cryptographic canaries and backups by Justin Drake (https://ethresear.ch/t/cryptographic-canaries-and-backups/1235) Notes and recommended links by Or Sattath: NIST post-quantum standardization (https://csrc.nist.gov/Projects/post-quantum-cryptography) for post-quantum digital signatures and public-key encryption (or, more precisely, Key Encapsulation Mechanism, KEM). These are classical schemes that, unlike almost all the existing schemes that are used in practice, are secure against quantum adversaries. Signature Lifting (arXiv link) (https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.06754) is discussed as a technique to migrate to post-quantum signatures, especially for those who didn't prepare in advance. Here's a recommended Twitter thread (https://twitter.com/DesheShai/status/1635599973269098499) summarizing the results by Shai Wyborski, Or's co-author. An approach to upgrade Bitcoin to quantum money is available here (https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.11998). This uses a cryptographic primitive which is called quantum lightning, which was introduced here (https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1080.pdf). Some smart contacts capabilities can be supported (https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.12806) as well. This construction is based on one-shot signatures (https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/107), which isdiscussed in some detail during the interview. The bottom line of this work is that we can have the most important utility that Bitcoin provides, without the need for a blockchain, or any other consensus mechanism. Uncloneable cryptography (https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.14265) was discussed during the interview. Quantum encryption with certified deletion (https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.03551) was discussed as an interesting example of a property that can be achieved only in quantum cryptography. Applications are now open to attend zkHack Istanbul - Nov 10-12! Apply here: https://www.zkistanbul.com/ (https://www.zkistanbul.com/) Aleo (http://aleo.org/) is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup. As Aleo is gearing up for their mainnet launch in Q4, this is an invitation to be part of a transformational ZK journey. Dive deeper and discover more about Aleo at aleo.org (http://aleo.org/) If you like what we do: * Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree (https://linktr.ee/zeroknowledge) * Subscribe to our podcast newsletter (https://zeroknowledge.substack.com) * Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm (https://twitter.com/zeroknowledgefm) * Join us on Telegram (https://zeroknowledge.fm/telegram) * Catch us on YouTube (https://zeroknowledge.fm/)

How the encounter between the חֲזוֹן אִי"שׁ and Ben Gurion affects the current Israeli domestic crisis

In this week's episode, Anna Rose (https://twitter.com/annarrose) and Kobi Gurkan (https://twitter.com/kobigurk) chat with Or Sattath (https://twitter.com/or_sattath), Assistant Professor at the Ben-Gurion (https://cris.bgu.ac.il/en/persons/or-sattath) University in the Computer Science department. They deep dive into Or's work on Quantum Cryptography. They begin with definitions of Quantum Computing and Quantum Cryptography, covering what these will mean for existing cryptography. They also explore how new discoveries in this field can interact with existing Proof-of-work systems and how Quantum computers could affect the game theory of mining in the future. Here's some additional links for this episode: On the insecurity of quantum Bitcoin mining by Sattath (https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.08118) Strategies for quantum races by Lee, Ray, and Santha (https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.03671) Polynomial-Time Algorithms for Prime Factorization and Discrete Logarithms on a Quantum Computer by Shor (https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9508027) Shor's Algorithm (https://quantum-computing.ibm.com/composer/docs/iqx/guide/shors-algorithm) Grover's Algorithm (https://quantum-computing.ibm.com/composer/docs/iqx/guide/grovers-algorithm) A fast quantum mechanical algorithm for database search by Grover (https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9605043) Bell's Theorem (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bell-theorem/) More in-depth resources recommended by Or Sattath: A recommended smbc-comics (https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3) about the power of quantum computing, authored by Zack Weinersmith (the usual cartoonist) and Scott Aaronson (a quantum computing expert) For an in-depth introduction to quantum computing, I recommend Ronald de-Wolf's lecture notes (https://homepages.cwi.nl/~rdewolf/qcnotes.pdf) The Bitcoin backbone protocol with a single quantum miner, by Cojocaru et al (https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1150) The fingerprint of quantum mining slightly below 16 minutes by Nerem-Gaur (https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.00878) Some estimates regarding timelines, which we didn't discuss, are available here (https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.10377) and here (https://qrc.btq.li/) The insecurity of quantum Bitcoin mining (https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.08118), and the need to change the tie-breaking rule. The work by Lee-Ray-Santh (https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.03671) that analyzes the equilibrium strategy for multiple quantum miners, as a simplified one-shot game. zkSummit 10 is happening in London on September 20, 2023! Apply to attend now -> zkSummit 10 Application Form (https://9lcje6jbgv1.typeform.com/zkSummit10). Polygon Labs (https://polygon.technology/) is thrilled to announce Polygon 2.0: The Value Layer for the Internet (https://polygon.technology/roadmap). Polygon 2.0 and all of our ZK tech is open-source and community-driven. Reach out to the Polygon community on Discord (https://discord.gg/0xpolygon) to learn more, contribute, or join in and build the future of Web3 together with Polygon! If you like what we do: * Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree (https://linktr.ee/zeroknowledge) * Subscribe to our podcast newsletter (https://zeroknowledge.substack.com) * Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm (https://twitter.com/zeroknowledgefm) * Join us on Telegram (https://zeroknowledge.fm/telegram) * Catch us on YouTube (https://zeroknowledge.fm/)

Last month, we sat down with journalist and author Matti Friedman in a Jerusalem studio to talk about Leonard Cohen, the Israel-Diaspora relationship, and the turning point that was the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Selected by Vanity Fair as one of the best books of 2022, Friedman's “Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai,” explores the late poet and singer's concert tour on the front lines of the Yom Kippur War – a historic moment of introspection for the Jewish State that continues to reverberate through events we witness today.  *The views and opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect the views or position of AJC.  __ Episode Lineup:  (0:40) Matti Friedman __ Show Notes: Listen: From the Black-Jewish Caucus to Shabbat and Sunday Dinners: Connecting Through Food and Allyship How to Tell Fact from Fiction About the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Live from Jerusalem: Exploring Israel and the Media with Matti Friedman Watch: Should Diaspora Jews Have a Say in Israeli Affairs?  Learn: Four Common Tough Questions on Israel 75 Years of Israel: How much do you know about the Jewish state? Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod You can reach us at: peopleofthepod@ajc.org If you've enjoyed this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, tag us on social media with #PeopleofthePod, and hop onto Apple Podcasts to rate us and write a review, to help more listeners find us. __ Transcript of Interview with Matti Friedman: Manya Brachear Pashman:   Matti Friedman has joined us on this podcast multiple times. Last year, he gave us an essential lesson on how to tell fact from fiction about Israel, and when AJC held its global forum in Jerusalem in 2018, he joined us for our first live recording, so I could not pass through Jerusalem without looking him up, Especially after learning that the writer behind Shtisel is adapting Matti's latest book, “Who By Fire” about the late great Leonard Cohen's time on the front lines of the Yom Kippur War. He joins us now in a studio in the Talpiot neighborhood of Jerusalem. Matti, welcome to People of the Pod. Matti Friedman:   Thank you for having me. Manya Brachear Pashman:   So I take it you're a fan of Leonard Cohen, or just as a journalist you find him fascinating? Matti Friedman:   No, of course, I'm a fan of Leonard Cohen. First of all, I'm Canadian. So if you are Canadian, you really have no choice. You have to be a Leonard Cohen fan, and certainly if you're a Canadian Jew. We grew up listening to Leonard Cohen. So absolutely, I'm a big admirer of the man and his music. Manya Brachear Pashman:   What are your favorite songs? Matti Friedman:   Probably my favorite Leonard Cohen song is called “If it Be Your Will." Just a prayer that came out on a Cohen album in the 80s. But I love all the Cohen you know top 10- Suzanne and So Long Marianne, Famous Blue Raincoat and Chelsea Hotel. It's a very long list. Manya Brachear Pashman:   So I should clarify that your book is not a biography of Leonard Cohen. It's about just a few weeks of his life when he came in 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, and these few weeks were a real turning point in his life, also for Israel, but we can talk about that later. But I want to know, why is it important? Why do you think it's important for Leonard Cohen fans, for Jews, particularly Israelis, to know this story about him? Matti Friedman:   I think that those few weeks in the fall of 1973, when Cohen finds himself at the front of the Yom Kippur War, those weeks are really an incredible meeting of Israel and the diaspora, maybe one of the ultimate diaspora figures, Leonard Cohen, this kind of universal poet and creature of the village, and this product of a very specific moment in North American Jewish life, when Jews are really kind of bursting out of the ghetto and entering the mainstream. And we can think of names like Paul Simon and Bob Dylan, even Phil Ochs, and people like that. And Cohen is very much part of that.  And he comes to Israel and meets, I guess the other main trend in Jewish history, in the second half of the 20th century, which is the State of Israel, and Israelis, who are not bursting into, you know, a universal culture in the United States, they're trying to create a very specific Jewish culture–in Hebrew, in this very kind of tortured scrap of the Middle East.  And the meeting of those two sides, who have a very powerful connection to each other, but don't really understand each other. It's a very interesting meeting. And the fact that it happens at this moment of acute crisis, one of the darkest moments in Israel's history, which is the Yom Kippur War, that makes it even more powerful.  So I think if we take that snapshot, from October 1973, we get something very interesting about Israel, and about the Jewish world and about this artist. And in some ways, I think those weeks really encapsulate much of Leonard Cohen's story. So it's not a biography, it doesn't trace his life from birth to death. But it gives us something very deep about the guy by looking at him at this very intense and kind of traumatic moment. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Do you also think it sheds some light on the relationship between diaspora Jews and Israel? And how has that relationship changed and evolved since the 1970s? Matti Friedman:   When Cohen embarks on this strange journey to the war, which, I mean, it's a long story, and I tell it in the book, but it starts on a Greek island or he's kind of holed up. He's in a crisis, and he's unhappy with his domestic life and he's unhappy with his creative life and he kind of needs to escape. So he gets on a ferry from the island and gets on an airplane from Athens and inserts himself into this war, by mistake, not really intending to do it. And he says in this manuscript that he writes about that time, which is unpublished until, until my own book, I published segments of it.  He says, I'm going to my myth home. That's how he describes Israel. He uses this very interesting phrase myth home. And it's hard to understand exactly what he means. But I think many Jewish listeners will understand kind of almost automatically what that means. Israel is not necessarily your home. And it's possible that you've never even been there. But you have this sense that it is your mythical home or some alternate universe where you belong. And of course, that makes the relationship very fraught. It's a lot of baggage on a relationship with a country that is, after all, a foreign country.  And Cohen lands in Israel and has a very powerful, but also very confusing time and leaves quite conflicted about it. And I think that is reflective, more generally of the experience of many Jews from the diaspora who come here with ideas about the country and then are forced to admit that those ideas have very little connection to reality. And it's one reason I think that I often meet Jews here from, you know, from North America, and they're not even fascinated by the country, but they're kind of thrown off by it, because it doesn't really function in the way they expect. It's a country in the Middle East. It's very different from Jewish life in North America. And as time goes on, those two things are increasingly disconnected from each other. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Yeah. Which is something that I think you say, Israelis say repeatedly, that lots of people have opinions about Israel and decisions that are made and how it's run. But they have no idea what life is like here, right? That's part of the disconnect. And the reason why there's so much tumult. Matti Friedman:   Yes, and runs in the other direction, too, of course. Israelis just have less and less idea of what animates Jews in the United States. So the idea that we're one people, and we should kind of automatically understand each other. That just doesn't work anymore. I think in the years after the Second World War, it might have worked better because people were more closely connected by family ties. So you'd have two brothers from Warsaw or whatever, and one would go to Rehovot, and one would go to Brooklyn, but they were brothers. And then in the next generation, you know, their children were cousins, and they kind of knew something about each other, but a few generations have gone by, and it's much more infrequent to find people who have Israeli cousins, or American cousins, you know, it might be second cousins or third cousins, but the familial connections have kind of frayed and because the communities are being formed by completely different sets of circumstances, it's much harder for Americans to understand Israelis and for Israelis to understand Americans. And we're really seeing that play out more and more in the communication or miscommunication between the two big Jewish communities here in the United States. Manya Brachear Pashman:   So this is my first trip to Israel. And many people told me that I would never be the same after this trip. Was that true for Leonard Cohen? Matti Friedman:   I think it was, I think it was a turning point in his life. Of course, I wrote a book about it. I would have to say that, even if it weren't true, but I happen to think that it is true. He comes here at a moment of a real kind of desperation, he had announced that he was retiring from music that year. So he had this string of hits, and he was a major star of the 60s and early 70s. And those really famous Cohen songs that I mentioned, most of them had already come out and he'd been playing at the biggest music festivals at the Isle of White, which was a bigger festival than Woodstock. And he was a big deal. And, and he just given up, he felt that he had hit a wall and he no longer had anything to say. And he was 39 years old. That's pretty old for a rock star. And he was in those days, of course, people are dying at 27. So he kind of thought he was washed up. And he came to Israel. And he writes in this manuscript, this very strange manuscript that he wrote, and then shelved, that he thinks that Israel is a place where he might be able to be born again, or just saying, again, he writes both of those thoughts. And in a very weird way, it happens.  So he's too sophisticated a character to tell us exactly how that happened, or to ever say that he went to Israel and was saved or changed in some way. Leonard Cohen would never give us that moment that of course, as a journalist I'm looking for but they won't give us all we can do is look at the fact that he had announced his retirement before the war, came home from this war very rattled, not at all waving the Israeli flag and singing the national anthem or anything like that, but he came back invigorated in some way.  And a few months after that war, he releases one of his best albums, which is called “New Skin for the Old Ceremony.” Which is a reference, of course, to circumcision, which is itself a kind of wink toward rebirth. And that album includes Chelsea Hotel and Lover Lover Lover and Who by Fire and he's back on the horse and he goes on to have this absolutely incredible career that lasts until he's 80 years old and beyond. Manya Brachear Pashman:   So let's talk about Lover Lover Lover, and the line of that song. You had interviewed a former soldier on the frontlines in the Yom Kippur War. He had heard Leonard Cohen sing, was very moved by that song, which was composed on an Israeli Air Force Base, I believe originally. And then the album comes out and he hears it again. And something is different. The soldier is not happy about that. Can you talk a little bit about how you confirmed that?  Matti Friedman:   Right, so I spent a lot of time trying to track down the soldiers who had seen Leonard Cohen during this very weird concert tour that he ends up giving on the Sinai front of the Yom Kippur War. And it's this series of concerts, these very small concerts, mostly for just small units of soldiers who are in the sand and suddenly Leonard Cohen shows up in a jeep and plays music for them. And it's kind of a hallucinatory scene.  And one of the soldiers told me that he will never forget the song that Cohen sang, and it was on the far side of the Suez Canal. So the Israeli army having kind of fallen back in the first week and a half of the war has crossed the Suez Canal, in the great counter attack that changes the course of the war, and now they're fighting on Egyptian territory. And one night, on that, on the far side of the canal, he meets Leonard Cohen, it's just kind of sitting on a helmet in the sand playing guitar, and he sang a song that would later become famous, but no one knew it at the time, because it had just been written. As you said, it was written for an audience of Israeli pilots at an Air Force base a few weeks before, or a few days before.  And the song's lyrics address the Israeli soldiers as brothers. That's what the soldier remembered. And he said, I'll never forget it. He called us his brothers. And that was a big deal for the Israelis, to hear an international star like Leonard Cohen, say,  I'm a member of this family, and you're my brothers. And that was a great memory. But there's no verse like that in the song Lover, Lover, Lover. And there's no reference at all that's explicit to Israeli soldiers. And the word brothers does not appear in the song. Manya Brachear Pashman: At least the one on the album, the song on the album. Matti Friedman: On the album, right. So that is the only one that was known at the time that I was writing the book. And then I kind of set it aside, I just figured that it was a strange memory that was, you know, mistaken or manufactured. And I didn't think much more about it. But I was going through Cohen's old notebooks and the Cohen archive in Los Angeles, which is where many of his documents are kept. And he had a notebook in his pocket throughout the war, and was writing down notes and writing down lyrics and writing on people's phone numbers. And in in the notebook, I found the first draft of  Lover, Lover, Lover, and this verse, which had somehow disappeared from the song and the verse is a really powerful expression of identification, not uncomplicated identification, but definitely sympathy for the Israelis who was traveling with, he was traveling with a group of Israeli musicians, he was wearing something that looked a lot like an Israeli uniform, he was asking people to call him by his Hebrew name, which was Eliezer Cohen.  So he was definitely, he had kind of gone native. And the verse, the verse goes, ‘I went down to the desert to help my brothers fight. I knew that they weren't wrong. I knew that they weren't right. But bones must stand up straight and walk and blood must move around. And men go making ugly lines across the holy ground.'  It's quite a potent verse. And it definitely places Cohen on one side of the Yom Kippur War. And when he records the song, a few months later, that verse is gone. So he obviously made a different decision about how to locate himself in the experience. And ultimately, the experience of the war kind of disappears from the Cohen story. He doesn't talk about it. Later on, he very rarely makes any explicit reference to it. The Cohen biographies mention it in passing, but don't make a big deal of it. And I think that's in part because he  always played it down.  And when that soldier Shlomi Groner, who I call the soldier, but he's going into his seventies, but you know, for me, he's a soldier. He heard that song when it came out on the radio, and he was waiting for that verse where Cohen called Israeli soldiers, his brothers and the verse was gone. And he never forgave Leonard Cohen for it, for erasing that expression of tribal solidarity.  And in fact, the years after the war, 1976, Cohen is playing the song in Paris, you can actually find this on YouTube. And he introduces the song to a French audience by saying, he admits that he wrote the song in the war in Sinai, and he says, he wrote the song for the Egyptians, and the Israelis, in that order. So he was very careful about, you know, where he placed himself, and he was a universal poet. He couldn't be on one side of a war, you couldn't be limited to any particular war, he was trying to address the human soul.  And he was aware of that contradiction, which I think is a very Jewish contradiction. Is our Judaism best expressed by tribal solidarity, or is it best expressed in some kind of universal message about the shared humanity of anyone who might be reading a Leonard Cohen poem? So that tension is very much present for him and it's present for many of us. Manya Brachear Pashman:   So he replaces the line though with watching the children, he goes down to watch the children fight. Matti Friedman:   So before he erases the whole verse, he starts fiddling with it. And we can actually see this in the notebook because we can see him crossing out words and adding words. So he has this very strong sentence that says, I went down to the desert to help my brothers fight, which suggests active participation in this war and, and then we see that he's erase that line held my brothers fight, and he's replaced it with, I went on to the desert to watch the children fight.  So now he's not helping, and it's not his brothers, he's kind of a parent at the sandbox watching some other people play in the sand. So he's taken a step back, he's taken himself out of the picture. And ultimately, that whole verse goes into the memory hold, and it only surfaces. When I found it, and I had the amazing experience of sending it to the soldier who'd heard it and didn't quite remember the words, he just remembered the word brothers. And over the years, I think he thought maybe he was mistaken, he wasn't 100% sure that he was remembering correctly and I had the opportunity to say, I found the verse, you're not crazy, here's the verse. It was quite a moment for him. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Yeah, confirmation, validation. Certainly not an expression of solidarity anymore, but I read it as an expression of critique of war, right. Your government's sending sons and daughter's off to fight you know, that kind of critique, but it changes it when you know that he erased one sentiment and replaced it with another. Matti Friedman:   Right, even finding the Yom Kippur War in the song now is very complicated, although when you know where it was written, then the song makes a lot more sense. When you think a song called Lover Lover Lover would be a love song, but it's not really if you listen to the lyrics.  He says, “The Spirit of the song may rise up true and free. May be a shield for you, a shield against the enemy”. It's a weird lyric for a love song. But if you understand that he's writing for an audience of Israeli pilots are being absolutely shredded in the first week of the Yom Kippur War, it makes sense. The words start to make sense the kind of militaristic tone of the words and even the kind of rhythmic marching quality of the melody, it starts to make more sense, if we know where it was written, I think Cohen would probably deny. Cohen never wanted to be pinned down by journalism, you know, he wasn't writing a song about the Yom Kippur War. And I don't think he'd like what I'm doing, which is trying to pin him down and tie him to specific historical circumstances. But, that's what I'm doing. And I think it's very interesting to try to locate his art in a specific set of circumstances, which are, the Yom Kippur war, this absolute dark moment for Israel, a Jewish artist who's very preoccupied with his own Judaism, and who grows up in this really kind of rich and deep Jewish tradition in Montreal, and then kind of escapes it, but can never quite escape it and doesn't really want to escape it, or does he want to escape it and, and then here he is, in this incredible Jewish moment with the Israeli Army in 1973.  And we even have a picture of him standing next to general Ariel Sharon, who is maybe the other symbolic Jew of the 20th century, right? You have Leonard Cohen, who is this universal artists, this kind of, you know, man of culture and a kind of a dissolute poet and and you have this uniform general, this kind of Jewish warrior, this kind of reborn new Jew of the Zionist imagination, and we have a photograph of them standing next to each other in the desert. I mean, it's quite an amazing moment. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Yeah. I love that you use the word hallucinatory earlier to describe the soldier coming upon Leonard Cohen in the desert, because it reminded me that it was not Leonard Cohen's first tour of sorts in Israel. He had been in Israel the year before, 1972, gave a concert in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, very different shows. Can you speak to that? Matti Friedman:   So Cohen was here a year before the war. And what's amazing is that you can actually see the concerts because there was a documentary filmmaker with him named Tony Palmer. And there's a documentary that ultimately comes out very briefly, that is shelved because Cohen hates it, and then resurfaces a couple of decades later, it's called Bird on a Wire. And it's worth seeing. And you can see the concert in Tel Aviv. And then the concert in Jerusalem the next day, which are the end of this problematic European tour, which kind of goes awry, as far as Cohen is concerned.  In Tel Aviv, they have to stop a concert in the middle because there's a riot in the audience and for kind of strange technical reason, which was that the arena in Tel Aviv had decided to keep the audience really far away from the stage and people tried to get close to Leonard Cohen and Cohen wanted them to come closer to the stage because they were absurdly far from the musicians and they tried to move closer but the security guards wouldn't let them and they start, you know, people start fighting, and Cohen's begging them to calm down.  And you can see this in the, in the documentary and then ultimately he leaves the stage, he says, you know, it's just not I can't perform like this, and he and the whole band just walk off the stage, and you get the impression that this country is on the brink of total chaos, like it's a place that's out of control. And then the next day, he's in Jerusalem for the last concert of this tour. And the concert also goes awry. But this time, it's Cohen's fault. And he is onstage, and you can see that he can't focus, like he just can't put it together. And in the documentary, you can see that he took acid before the show. So it might have had something to do with that. But also, it's just the fact that he's in Jerusalem. And for him, that's a big deal. And he just can't treat it like a normal place. It's not a normal concert. So there's, there's so much riding on it, that it's too much for him, and he just stops playing in the middle of a concert. And he starts talking to the audience about the Kabbalah. And it's an amazing speech, it's totally off the cuff.  It's not something that he prepared, but he starts to explain that, in the Kabbalistic tradition, in order for God to be seated on his throne, Adam and Eve need to face each other, or the man and the woman need to face each other in order for the divine presence to be enthroned. And he says, my male and female sides aren't facing each other, so I can't get off the ground. And it's a terrible thing to have happen in Jerusalem. That's what he says. And then he leaves, he says, I'm gonna give you your money back, and he leaves. And instead of rioting, which is what you'd expect them to do, or getting really angry, or leaving, the audience starts to sing, “Haveinu Shalom Alechem,” that song from summer camp that everyone knows, I think they just assume that he would know it.  And in the documentary, you see him in the dressing room trying to kind of get himself together. And hears the audience singing, a couple thousand young Israelis singing the song out in the auditorium, and he goes back out on stage and kind of just beams at that. He just kind of can't believe it, and just smiling out at them. They're entertaining him, but he's on the stage. And they're singing to him, and then the band comes back on. And they give this incredible show that ends with everyone crying. You see Cohen's crying and the band's crying and he says later that the only time that something like that had ever happened to him before was in Montreal when he was playing a show for an audience that included his family. So there was a lot going on for Cohen in Israel, it wasn't a normal place. It wasn't just a regular gig. And that's all present in his brain when he comes back the following year for the war. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Makes that weird decision to get on the ferry, and come to Israel make a little more sense. I had tickets to see Leonard Cohen in 2013. He was in Chicago, and Pope Benedict the 16th decided to resign. And as the religion reporter, I had to give up those tickets and go to Rome on assignment. And I really regret that because he died in 2016. I never got the chance to see him live. Did you ever get the chance to see him live?  Matti Friedman:   I wonder if we should add that to the long list of, you know, Jewish claims against Catholicism, but I guess we can let it slide. I never got to see him. And I regret it to this day, of course, when he came to Israel in 2009 for this great concert that ended up being his last concert here. I had twins who were barely a year old. And I was kind of dysfunctional and hadn't slept in a long time. And I just couldn't get my act together to go. And that's when I got the idea for this book for the first time. And I said, well, you know, just catch him the next time he comes. You know, the guy was in his late 70s. There wasn't gonna be a next time. So it was a real lapse of judgment, which I regret of course. Manya Brachear Pashman:   I do wonder if I should have gone to Rome for that unprecedented moment in history to cover that, kind wish I had been at the show. So you do think that the Jerusalem show played a role in him returning to Israel when it was under attack? Matti Friedman:   Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, he had this very again, complicated, powerful, not entirely positive experience in Israel. And he'd also met a woman here. And that also became clear when I was researching the book that there was, there was a relationship that began when he was here in 1972, and continued. He had a few contacts here, and it wasn't a completely foreign place. And he had some memory of it and some memory of it being a very powerful experience. But when he came in ‘73, he wasn't coming to play. So he didn't come with his guitar. He didn't bring any instruments. He didn't come with anyone. He came by himself. So there is no band. There's no crew, there's no PR people. He understands that there's some kind of crisis facing the Jewish people and he needs to be here.  Manya Brachear Pashman:   I interviewed Mishy Harman yesterday about the Declaration of Independence, the series that [the I`srael Story podcast] are doing, and he calls it one of Israel's last moments of consensus. We are at a very historic moment right now. How much did this kind of centrifugal force of the Yom Kippur War, where everybody was kind of scattered to different directions, very different ways of soul searching, very Cohen-esque. How much of that has to do with where Israel is now, 50 years later? Matti Friedman:   That's a great question. The Yom Kippur war is this moment of crisis that changes the country and the country is a different place after the Yom Kippur War. So until 73, it's that old Israel where the leadership is very clear. It's the labor Zionist leadership. It's the founders of the country, Ben Gurion and Golda Meir, and the people who kind of willed this country into existence against long odds and won this incredible victory in the 1967 War. And then it's all shattered by this catastrophe in 1973. And even though Israel wins the war and the end, it's a victory that feels a lot like a defeat, and 2600 soldiers are killed in three weeks in a country of barely 3 million people and many more wounded and the whole country is kind of shocked. And it takes a few years for things to play out. But basically, the old Israeli consensus is shattered. And within a few years within the war, the Likud wins an election victory for the first time. And it's a direct result of, of a loss of faith and leadership after the Yom Kippur War. That's 1977.  And then you have all kinds of different voices that emerge in Israel. So you have, you know, you have Likud. You have the voice of Israelis, who came from the Arab world who didn't share the background of, you know, Eastern Europe and Yiddish and who had a different kind of Judaism and a different kind of Zionism and they begin to express themselves in a more forceful way and you have Israelis who are demanding peace now. You know, on the left, and you have a settlement movement, the religious settlement movement really kind of becomes empowered and emboldened after the Yom Kippur War after the labor Zionist leadership loses its confidence and that's when you really start seeing movements like Gush Emunim pop up in the West Bank with this messianic script and so, so the the fracturing of that that consensus really happens in wake of Yom Kippur war and you can kind of see it in in the music, which is an interesting way of looking at it because the music until 73 had really been this folk music that still maybe the only place that still sees it as Israeli music might be American Jewish summer camp, where it kind of retains its, its, its hold and yeah, that those great old songs that were sung around the campfire and the songs of early Israel and that was very much the music that dominated the airwaves. After the Yom Kippur War, it's different, the singers start expressing themselves a lot less in the collective we and much more in using the word I and talking about their own soul and you hear a lot more about God after 73 than you did before. And the country really becomes a much more heterogeneous place and a much more difficult place, I think, to run and with that consensus, you're talking about the Declaration of Independence. And that series, by the way, Israel Story, which I highly recommend, it's a wonderful series about an incredible document, which we still should be proud of, and which we should pay much more attention to than we do. But when do we have consensus, when we're under incredible pressure from the outside. The Declaration of Independence is signed, you know, as we face the threat of invasion by fighter armies.  So that's basically what it takes to get the Jews to sit down and agree with each other. And, you know, there are these years of crisis and poverty after the 48 war into the 60s. And that kind of keeps the consensus more or less in place, and then it fractures. And we're in a country where it's much easier to be many different things, you know, you can be ultra-Orthodox, and you can be Mizrachi, and you can be gay, and you can be all kinds of things that you couldn't really be here in the 60s.  But at the same time, the consensus is so fractured, that we can barely, you know, form a coherent political system that works to solve the problems of the public. And we're really saying that in a very dramatic and disturbing way in the dysfunction, in the Knesset and in our political system, which is, you know, has become so extreme.  The political system is simply incapable of a constructive role in the society and has moved from solving the problems of the society to creating problems for a society that probably doesn't have that many problems. And it's all a reflection of this kind of fracturing of the consensus and this disagreement on what it means to be Israeli what the meaning of the state is, once you don't have those labor Zionists saying, you know, we are a part of a global proletarian revolution, and the kibbutz is at the center of our national ethos. Okay, we don't have that. But then what is this place? And if you grab 10 Israelis on the street outside the studio, they'll give you 10 different answers. And increasingly, the answers are, are at odds with each other, and Israelis are at odds with each other. And the government instead of trying to ease those divisions, is exacerbating them for political gain. So you're right, this is a very important and I think, very dark moment for the society. Manya Brachear Pashman:   And do you trace it back to that kind of individualistic approach that Cohen brought with him, and that the war, not that he introduced it to Israel, and it's all his fault, that the war, and its very dark outcome, dark victory, if you will, produced? Matti Friedman:   I don't want to be too deterministic about it. But definitely, that is the moment of fracture. The old labor Zionist leadership would have faded anyway. And just looking at the world, that kind of ethos, and that ideology is kind of gone everywhere, not just in Israel. But definitely the moment that does it here is that war, and we're very much in post-1973 Israel.  Which in some ways is good, again, a more pluralistic society is good. And I'm happy that many identities that were kind of in the basement before ‘73 are out of the basement. But we have not managed to find a replacement for that old unifying ideology. And we're really feeling it right now. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Thank you so much, Matti, for joining us. Matti Friedman:   Thank you very, very much. That was great.

Two of the Jewish world's leading podcasts, People of the Pod and Israel Story, are teaming up to bring you inside the making of ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered?' – the latest series from Israel Story that explores the lives of the signatories of Israel's Declaration of Independence and their descendants. Recorded live at AJC Global Forum 2023 in Tel Aviv, the episode features Mishy Harman, host of Israel Story, and Eran Peleg, the grandson of signatory Moshe Kol (born Moshe Kolodny). Tune in to hear Eran's lasting memories of his grandfather, the strong Zionist values he instilled in his family, and why the Declaration of Independence matters 75 years later. *The views and opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect the views or position of AJC.  ___ Episode Lineup:  (0:40) Mishy Harman and Eran Peleg (42:35) Yehudit Kol Inbar and Mishy Harman  ___ Show Notes: Listen: People of the Pod: Israeli President Isaac Herzog in Conversation with AJC CEO Ted Deutch People of the Pod: Two Ukrainian Refugees Reflect on Escaping War, and Life in Israel– Live from AJC Global Forum 2023 Israel Story: Episode 89 - Moshe Kol  Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod You can reach us at: peopleofthepod@ajc.org If you've enjoyed this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, tag us on social media with #PeopleofthePod, and hop onto Apple Podcasts to rate us and write a review, to help more listeners find us. __ Transcript of Interview with Mishy Harman and Eran Peleg: Manya Brachear Pashman:   As many of our listeners know, People of the Pod recorded not just one but two episodes in front of a live audience at AJC Global Forum 2023 in Tel Aviv. We also took the show on the road and did a few more interviews in Tel Aviv and in Jerusalem. You'll hear those episodes in the months to come. This week, we bring you our second live show in partnership with one of Israel's most popular podcasts: Israel Story.  Welcome to the second live podcast recording here at AJC Global Forum 2023 in Tel Aviv. So on Monday, you heard two very different perspectives from two women who fled war torn Ukraine and landed here in Israel, their new home. Today, you will hear the story of Israeli Moshe Kol, born Moshe Kolodny, in 1911, in what is now Belarus. He was one of the 37 founders of the State of Israel, who signed Israel's Declaration of Independence. We're bringing you this live show together with another podcast that you might enjoy, Israel Story. Think This American Life except it's This Israeli Life. Broadcasting in English since 2014, each episode introduces us to the wide array of characters who make up this diverse and dynamic democratic nation.  In honor of Israel's 75th year of independence, the team at Israel Story set out to find the closest living relative of all 37, who signed Megilat Ha'atzmaut. In March, they began rolling out what I would call audio portraits of those 37 people. Portraits about who they met, what they could tell us about the 37 people who signed that founding document. They call the series, 'Signed, Sealed, Delivered?' And since March, we have met eight of Israel's founding mothers and fathers. Over the next several months we will meet the other 29 including Moshe Kol, through the lens of his daughter. Today, you get a special preview through the lens of his grandson. With me to talk about 'Signed, Sealed, Delivered?' is the host of Israel Story, Mishy Harman, and the grandson of Moshe Kol, Eran Peleg.  Mishy, Eran, welcome to People of the Pod, live in Tel Aviv.  So Mishy, I will start with you. The title is not 'Signed, Sealed, Delivered,' it's 'Signed, Sealed, Delivered?' What's with the question mark? Mishy Harman:   Well, first of all, that's a good question. I mean, it's always difficult to adjust with your intonation to indicate a question mark. But I think that this is a real question. When we began this series, it was actually before the last elections which took place in November, and before this unprecedented wave of democratic, cry for democratic values in this country in light of the government's judicial reform. And we set out to ask, there is this founding document, its status, its legal status is unclear. It's the best way I think, to think of it is, it's some sort of moral compass for our country. And, you know, interestingly, the only action item that actually exists within the Declaration of Independence is to formalize the Constitution, which of course, never happened. So we want to say, to ask the question of what this document actually is in Israeli society, whether we live up to the promise of the words and the ideas that were described within it, whether we haven't. In which ways we have or we haven't, and we wanted to do this through the prism. I'm sure every citizen of Israel has something to say about this and we wanted to do it through the prism of the descendants of the people who signed this document who you know with, with strike of their pen birthed, this country. Actually Moshe Kol call was in Jerusalem at the, on the day of the declaration. There were 11 out of members from Moetzet Ha'am who were who were stuck in Jerusalem, that was besieged and didn't participate in the, in the ceremony, which was here in Tel Aviv. So I think your grandfather signed something like a month later, during the first ceasefire, the different members of Moetzet Ha'am were brought to Tel Aviv by plane actually, to sign. But we wanted to ask, well, here we have this group of people. And it's an interesting group, because the first thing to say about it is that there are no non Jews who signed Megillat Ha'atzmaut, and that's, I think, a very important thing to keep in mind. But when you look at the group of these 37 signatories, it's a little bit like a pointillist painting. So when you look from afar, it looks like a pretty monolithic group of Polish and Ukrainian and Russian Labor Party operatives. But when you come closer, you actually see that there was a dazzling diversity among the signatories. There were ultra-orthodox Jews, and there were atheists, and there were revisionists. And there were communists. And there were people who were born in the middle of the 19th century, and there were people like Moshe Kol, who was the second youngest signatory who was born in 1911, I think. And they represented very different ideologies. And we want to see if a generation and a half or two afterwards whether that diversity had expanded, or shrunken. And to what extent these people who are closest to the ones who imagines the state, how they think about the place we live in today. Manya Brachear Pashman:   So 25 signed in Independence Hall, just a little ways from here, actually, here in Tel Aviv, 11, we're in Jerusalem under siege, including your grandfather, two women. Hm. But there was a lot of diversity in the group. That said, I know that they–oh, one in America, I forgot about one in America. They organized it alphabetically. When they signed it, though, even though they signed it at different times? Mishy Harman:   With the exception of David Ben-Gurion, who signed first. Everyone else signed alphabetically, and they left little spaces for them. Some of them signed terribly. Like, even though it was the founding document of the state, they couldn't sign on the right line. And actually right underneath Ben-Gurion is the signature of Daniel Auster who was the mayor of Jerusalem. His surname is Auster, which begins with an aleph. So he was the first to sign. And he recalled how Ben-Gurion berated him because his signature was just like some sort of scribble and Ben-Gurion said, don't you understand the importance, the historical importance of the document you're signing. I think your grandfather's signature actually is sort of legible, right?  Eran Peleg:   Yeah, you can read it. Mishy Harman:   I don't know if you sort of, when you were a boy, when you went up to the Declaration of Independence and sort of pointed to your grandfather's signature with pride or something.  Manya Brachear Pashman:   One of the women you interviewed said that her father or grandfather, I don't recall, but she remembers practicing and practicing the signature beforehand. It was an exciting, it was such an exciting moment. So going back to the organization, how did you organize the episodes? And how did you decide the sequence of how you would release the episodes? Mishy Harman:   So we decided not to follow the order in which they appear on the scroll. We did start with David Ben-Gurion. An episode in which his grandson who was really his, the closest person, I would say to him in the family, including his own children, talked about Ben-Gurion. And interestingly, Yariv Ben-Eliezer, Ben-Gurion's grandson, has quite radical views about Israel today. And he thinks of Israel as an apartheid state and says that his grandfather would be very, very upset, and that the whole dream sort of went down the drain.  So it was important to us in the next episode to present a pretty different view. So the next episode was the son of Zerach Warhaftig, who was one of the leaders of the Religious Zionist movement. And is a sort of mainstream right winger today. We do try to take into account, you know, gender. So even though there were only two female signatories, we obviously tried to interview as many women as we could who are descendants. Some sort of political variation, we also do try to have episodes have a theme, so whether it's economy or socialism, or tourism or you know, Yemenite Jewelry, or women's rights. So it's not just about the, about the signatory himself or herself, but also sort of about the things that were most important to that person. Manya Brachear Pashman:   I tried to as we were, as we were planning this and planning this episode, I tried my hand at tracking someone down from Israeli history and tracking down descendants. And I told your producer that it just made me even more impressed by the work that went into this project, because it was damn near impossible to find who I was looking for. Tell us how you tracked everyone down? Or are there some really good stories about how you connected the dots and landed the right, right person. Mishy Harman:   So all of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence are dead. The last one, who was the only one who was younger than your grandfather, Meir Vilner, died about 20 years ago. 14 of the 37 have children who are still alive. In fact, your grandfather, you were just telling me that all of his three daughters are still alive. So that was quite straightforward to find the children. When you start getting into grandchildren and great grandchildren, it becomes quite messy, there are 1000s of descendants. There were only three ultra orthodox Haredi signatories, but they have many, many descendants. And there becomes an interesting question of who you choose, right? Because depending on who you choose, you can tell a very, very different story. And we always tried to prefer people who knew their ancestor, and had firsthand experiences with them. But also to try and maybe we'll get into this a little bit later, but to try to demonstrate a variety of opinions today, too. So it is an interesting fact that the vast, and maybe maybe you'll talk about this, but it is an interesting fact that the vast majority of the descendants of the signatories of the declaration are in what you might call today, the sort of center and center left camp in in Israel, who are concerned about assaults on Israeli democracy. And in fact, the Declaration of Independence has, in recent months, become a rallying cry for the demonstrations. Suddenly the Declaration of Independence, you can't you can't escape it. It's everywhere. The municipality of Tel Aviv, hunger, massive replica, on the building. In demonstrations. There's sort of resigning of the Declaration of Independence, it's really, it's really become an icon, basically. And it was important for us to also show that there are descendants who think otherwise. And so for example, in episodes that haven't yet come out, their descendants who wonder why we even talk about Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, they say democracy is an important concept. It's some sort of Hellenistic fossil. It's not a Jewish value. We don't think that that should even be something that we aspire to. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Interesting. Interesting. Eran, how did you get the call that Israel Story was putting this together? Do you recall that day? Eran Peleg:   The truth is, I don't remember exactly. Because I've had numerous conversations with them. I think it was probably towards the end of last year at some point. And again, as Mishy said, it was before kind of all these events happened here in Israel. Very happy because I thought, you know, it's, as you say, now it's like the declaration is everywhere. Yeah, people talk about it all of a sudden people, you know, it's, we see it everywhere. But for many years, I mean, hasn't been much discussed, actually. So I was kind of saying, Ah, yeah, it was the 75th anniversary, the State of Israel is coming up. Some chance that we'll get something about it, but that wasn't expecting much. And I was quite happy, to have the opportunity to talk about the declaration, my grandfather, obviously. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Tell us a little bit about your own upbringing and what Moshe Kol was like as a grandfather. Eran Peleg:   Well, I was just telling Mishy, I mean, quite a small family. My grandfather Moshe or as we called him, Saba Misha, grandfather Misha. You know, he had three daughters. Elisa, Sari, who's my mother and Yehudit, who is the younger one. And altogether, you know, a bunch of grandchildren, seven grandchildren. But that's, that's pretty much it. And so we're a very close family. Every Friday night, for example, we would all gather at my grandparents house and have Shabbat dinner there that was like, you know, you had to be there was no discussion about it or negotiation. So even like, my friends always know that if we want to go out on Friday nights, always after dinner at Saba Misha and my grandmother Keta's house. So we spent a lot of time together. At the point when I was growing up already, my grandfather was obviously getting less involved with state affairs.  When I was seven years old, he kind of retired essentially, in 1977. So I had the opportunity to spend time with him actually, both here and also they took me abroad on a couple of trips with them. So it was very interesting. He was a very kind man, very interesting man.  I thought he was very smart. The Zionist project was kind of his life mission, if you like. So he was always talking in some way about it. He was always involved even after he retired he was involved in various different projects. Some of them had to do with coexistence within Israel, between Arabs and Jews, Druze, he was very involved with the Druze community, actually, he made good friends there. So even after his retirement, he continued to be active. And so I had the great privilege of kind of knowing him until I was 19 years old when he passed away. And really learned a lot from him. Manya Brachear Pashman:   When did you learn that he had signed the Declaration of Independence? Eran Peleg:   I don't remember exactly, frankly. And this is one of the interesting things is that I don't remember much discussion at home about the Declaration of Independence. And I think my mother and aunt as well, I don't think, I think they'll probably agree with that even at an earlier stage. And it's quite interesting that he never made a big deal about it, definitely. And I think that in a way, he, although obviously, in hindsight, it was, and maybe at the time, it was a big event, but to him it was I think, and look at here, I'm kind of interpreting, this is my perspective on it. I think to him, it was one necessary and important, obviously, but you know, one necessary step in the big project, and the big project was, you know, establishing and building the Jewish state, the state of Israel. But I don't think if you asked him probably what was the highlight of kind of what was the most important thing you did in your life? I'm not sure if he would have said signing the Declaration of Independence. For example, I think— Mishy Harman:   He would have said bringing over 100,000 kids from the Diaspora. Eran Peleg:   Exactly yeah, so he was head of youth Aliyah for 18 years after the Holocaust and after the establishment of the State of Israel. To him, I think that was his kind of big, the big thing he you know, he accomplished more than anything else, and he was even later a minister, a cabinet minister, and so he did you know, many other things, but I think that was probably to him, the highlight of his career, Zionist, you know, and the declaration was kind of, you know, one step, kind of  a necessary step, but just, you know, one step along the way. Manya Brachear Pashman:   So why was he invited to sign that day? Eran Peleg:   So, and maybe Mishy, who's more of a historian can, perhaps, can you shed more light on this? But what I know is that, you know, the signatories were invited, it was based on kind of a, it was a party basis, or there were different movements, as Mishy mentioned, within, you know, Zionism or wasn't specific Zionism, because it really, it was supposed to represent the people who were living here actually ex the non Jews, right?  Mishy Harman:   Though interestingly, there probably would have been non Jews who would have agreed to have been part of this effort, I mean, your grandfather was involved in, in the cause of Christian Arabs from the North, who were, who were removed from their villages, Iqrit and Biram and stuff like that. Those kinds of people were actually allies of the Zionist movement in those days. And it's, it's possible, although Druze leaders- Eran Peleg:   It's possible, although, I mean, it's difficult, I think, for us sitting here now to know, because we have to remember this was like, it was a very tense time and, you know, we just had the War of Independence, kind of breaking out and all that. So it's difficult to say, I think. So he was representative of one of the movements, one of the factions within the Zionist movement, he was part of the, what they called, at the time, the General Zionists, Tzionim Haklaliym. And I think he was one of six representatives, I think of the General Zionists. And already at the time, he was a prominent leader within, you know, the kind of centrist Zionism. He was very early on in his life, he was already head of the, what was called the Noar Hatzioni, the movement, the global leader of the Noar Hatzioni. From there, so he kind of knew, he attended several of the Zionist congressional,l the conferences along the years, he was already a member of the executive committee of the Jewish Agency at that point. So he already had a certain position or statue within the kind of Zionist Movement. And as one of the leaders of the General Zionist, he was invited to participate in Moetzet Ha'am, which were the signatories of the declaration. Manya Brachear Pashman:   You said, I'm sorry, the first thing you said, he was the global leader of, and I didn't quite hear what you said. Eran Peleg:   The Noar Hatzioni movement. Manya Brachear Pashman:  What is that?  Eran Peleg:   It was a youth movement. One of the, at time it still exists, actually. Interestingly, less so in Israel, actually. But in some countries in South America, I know it still exists. Today it's quite small, then it was a decent youth movement. That's actually how we met my grandmother. Because my grandmother was involved in the Noar Hatzioni in Belgium in Brussels. She was one of the heads of the Noar Hatzioni there, and and he has kind of part of his job as the Global Head, whatever of the movement, he was traveling and went to see all these different, all these different places. And that's how he ended up in Brussels where he met my grandmother. Manya Brachear Pashman:   You mentioned earlier that some of the descendants had evolved, drifted away from their ancestors, ideologies, political perspectives or philosophies. I'm curious, what your team found was it was did that account for most of the interviews that you did? Or a minority? I mean, did you find that in most of the interviews, the philosophies were kind of embedded in the family DNA? Mishy Harman:   It's interesting. Most people are quite similar to their fathers, grandfathers, uncles, mothers, and so on, so forth. But, and, of course, I mean, the important thing to remember is that we're talking in a completely different worlds now, right? If you think about Israeli society today, and you think about our chances of ever agreeing on a single document or a single vision of this state, that's you have to be crazy, basically, to think that that's possible.  I mean, we live in such a fragmented and fractured society today, that getting a group that is in some way representative of the country to agree on what this country actually is, what this project that we call Israel, really is, today seems almost unimaginable. And I think, honestly, that it was pretty unimaginable at the time too. I think that they had other things going for them that in the background that allowed them to reach this moment of agreement. Which, you know, there were, as Eran just said, that we were in the middle of a war and it was, seemed like an existential war, right. We were gonna live or die. This all came together very, very quickly. You know, people understood that this was this opportunity, the British Mandate was about to end, there was going to be a power vacuum, the Zionist movement had an opportunity to declare statehood, which was something that, you know, in the Jewish psyche, had been a dream for 2000 years, 1900 years.  And they weren't going to, there was some sense of sort of, I would say, communal responsibility, which, you know, there's this word in Hebrew that is difficult to translate, really, which is Mamlachtiut, it's really some sort of sense of, of being part of a larger state collective, that that wasn't going to allow them even if they disagreed with a specific phrasing or a specific idea to be the one saying, No, I'm going to I'm going to be the sole naysayer in this otherwise historic opportunity. And that's what got a lot of people on board, right. I mean, otherwise, how, and I know, they're all these stories about sort of vague phrasings whether they refer to God or don't refer to God or whether they can be interpreted in other ways, and so on and so forth. Today, we're a much more blunt society today. People would want things to be said very, very clearly. And we just unfortunately, and then I'd be interested to hear what you think. But I don't think that as a collective we share any clear understanding of what we can agree on. At least it doesn't seem that way today. Eran Peleg:   It's definitely, I agree. But I still remain optimistic, maybe it's my nature. But I do think that, you know, we've seen, you know, the huge amount we've achieved here in such a short period of time. And I do think that, you know, in some ways the values and political views are more clear now than they were back then. As you say, because of everything that was going on at the time, and they, and they were really occupied with kind of let's build this state more than anything else. You know, they put a lot of other things aside, frankly, it's not that they didn't have views about the economy about, you know, they had views about other other things about education, economy, it's just that they said, let's put this aside for now. And let's focus on the main project or the main mission.  And they hope to get to the other stuff. Well, they actually promised to put together a constitution, which I guess, but the truth is, it was, frankly, with historical perspective, I think it was very difficult because they were actually set a date. I think. They said that until the, you know, the declaration was signed in May. And they said by October 1st, something like that, I think it's a very short period of time after they already want to have a constitution. And I think that probably wasn't realistic.  Also because there was a war going on. And they were occupied with, you know, just existence, or survival. But also, because, you know, views were not, you know, really clear on many different issues, and they didn't have the opportunity to discuss them really yet. United States, for example, putting together a constitution, the Constitution came really only I think, like more than 150 years after people landed, with the Mayflower. So there was a long time where they were already living together. And also then, there was a very serious job around putting together the American Constitution here, they, they were trying to put it together a middle of a war and just wasn't realistic.  Mishy Harman:   I think that this is particularly interesting for American listeners, because 75 years is a long time, but it's also almost no time at all. And what we feel lucky about with this project is that we're able to still touch these people, who, before they sort of drift into the realm of becoming historical figures in in books and research papers and stuff like that, and we can, we can talk to two sons and daughters, who remember these people as real as real people. And I think, you know, that's unimaginable, obviously, in the American context. And we tend to, we tend to attribute so much importance to phrasings and to wordings, of these kinds of declarations of, and we forget that at the end of the day, these are people who are writing writing these words within within specific historical context and bringing themselves and you know, Moshe Kol, for example, is signing, signing his name on on this scroll of independence. You know, a few years, four years, I don't know, after, after his parents and sister are murdered in the Holocaust, and that was the story of many of the signatories. And as it was saying, it was in the middle of the war and 1% of the population was killed in this war. I mean, they're writing these words, both without sort of knowing what we know today that 75 years hence, Israel is going to be around and Israel is going to be this thriving country with a cantankerous democracy. It was, I think, in many ways, sort of a prayer or a wish, of what, of what this place could be. Many of them came from, you know, socialist backgrounds or from small villages and stuff like that, and suddenly found themselves here in this radically different environment than anything that they had known previously. And they were trying to imagine, well, what can we imagine a just society being? And another interesting thing is that, sort of patriotic symbols like the flag and like the Declaration of Independence, which for years had been essentially owned by the right in this country have in the last year. Eran Peleg:   Less so the Declaration. Mishy Harman:  The declaration was a little more in the right. But have been completely appropriated by the protest movement, right? I mean, if you go here to Kaplan on Saturday night, which I strongly recommend everyone to do, whether you agree with the protests, or not just because it's a really, it's an incredible, incredible sight for anyone who cares about democracy, to see what these protests are like. You'll see basically a sea of flags, of Israeli flag. So that's, for me, that's a fascinating development.  Manya Brachear Pashman:   But doesn't it belong to both? I mean– Eran Peleg:   I mean, it definitely does. But, you know, the flag was, you know, is always perceived as a bit kind of nationalistic kind of, has this kind of flavor to it. But yeah, but you're right, it obviously belongs to both. Manya Brachear Pashman:   They're just embracing it in different ways.  Mishy Harman:   One question that I would have to you about who things belong to is whether, sorry, I don't know if you– is whether being the grandson of one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, makes you feel different about your own ownership of this place? Whether it sort of casts a shadow of responsibility.  Eran Peleg:   I don't think I'm in a position of privilege or entitlement different from anyone else. I happen to be his grand, yeah, grand grandson. But, but what I think I do have, which maybe some other people don't, I do have, I think, a good sense of history, at least, kind of understanding where we've come from, you know, etc. And I think that's something that sometimes I see missing with other people, maybe that gives me a slightly different perspective on things. So, for example, I see, you know, because we're the generation that was already born into the state of Israel. For us, it was like a given that, right? Self-evident, it's given. And I see especially with people who, like us, some people. It does make me angry when some people might say, I don't like what's going on, I'm just gonna go elsewhere. And to me, like, that makes me angry. But I don't think it makes me angry. Because I'm the son of Moshe Kol, I think it makes me angry, because at least I have an understanding of, you know, what's been put into this project already.  And the efforts that have been made, and obviously, you know, people have given their lives as well, I mean, soldiers, for us to be where we are today as well. So, just kind of thinking that, Oh, you know, Israel will always be there for us, even if we go elsewhere, then we decide to come back, right. If we want, we can always come back. But no, that's not the case. Israel wasn't always here.  I mean, you have to understand that we have a very, very special situation or position where we have the State of Israel, it's such a valuable thing. We can't just give it up, you know, just like that, okay. And you can't just take it for granted that we'll be here or that it's here, that we'll be here when you decide one day to come back from wherever you're going.  Manya Brachear Pashman:   Maybe you don't feel that Israel belongs to you. But do you belong to Israel?  Eran Peleg:   Definitely. Yeah. It's definitely the case.  Manya Brachear Pashman:   Do you ever, and I actually, I address this question to both of you. Wouldn't it be great if we could make plans. But if you had complete control over the universe, and your future, do you foresee ever leaving Israel? Mishy Harman:   Eran? Eran Peleg:   Again, it's very difficult to know what the future holds. But I see Israel as my home, I've actually had the opportunity to go abroad and come back. And part of the decision to come back was because this is my home. And my home also consists of the fact that my family's here, obviously. So it's a family, family reasons as well. But also, definitely, also Zionism played a role in my decision. I've lived 12 years outside of Israel, but my assumption was always that I'm there for a limited period of time, and I'm going to come back at some point. And that's actually what happened. And so, to me, Israel is where it's place for me.  Mishy Harman:   So I don't totally know what the word Zionism really means. Today, and something I think about a lot. My grandparents, who were of the same generation of Eran's grandparents, and also very active in the Zionist movement and in building the state. So not quite the blue-bloodedness of signing the Declaration, but they met in the early 30s. They were both students, they were both British, and they met because my grandfather, who was later on Israel's ambassador to the US for many, many years and the president of the Hebrew University, he was the he was the head of the student of design a student union at Oxford, and they met at a debate in which he debated my grandmother who was the head of the anti Zionist Student Union at the London School of Economics and she was an anti Zionist not because she had any particular beef with the Zionist movement but because she was an internationalist and she didn't believe as many others in the in the years between the wars, but leave she did believed in the concept of nation states and, of course, then spent the remainder of her life in the service of this particular nation state. But she was a tremendous presence in my life, she lived to be almost 100 and lived across the street from us.  So I'll just share with you very quickly, one of the sort of formative memories of my life is that in 2006, she was already a very elderly woman in her mid 90s. She, we were and not totally with it all the time. At that point, we were watching television together and it was the Second Lebanon War. And she sort of perked up out of nowhere. And she said, Look what a strange thing we're talking about, there are hills to the north of here, that have vegetation, and have wildlife, and have flowers. And we've drawn a line in the middle of those hills. And we call one side of that line, Israel and the other side of that line Lebanon. And there are people living on both sides of that line. And what the TV is saying is that when Moti Cohen's life is destructed, or he's injured, because a Katyusha missile fell on his building, or something, we need to be deeply, deeply sad. And Ahmad Salman''s life is destructed because the Israeli Air Force bombed his village or something, no one's saying that we need to be happy, but we can basically be kind of indifferent.  And she said, I don't know Moti Cohen. And I don't know Ahmad Salaman, but I'm equally saddened by the hurt that both of them are feeling. And that was that statement that stayed with me and stays with me, till today.  So my connection to this place, I would say, is less from an idealistic point of Zionism, in sort of the classic sense of Jewish self determination. And more from the fact that I was born here, and I grew up here. And the park in which I played soccer, growing up still exists, and the streets, in which I, you know, walked hand in hand with my first girlfriend still exist, and my family are here, and my friends are here. And I like the food that I am accustomed to eating my entire life. And in some fundamental way, this is my home. So, you know, Madison, Wisconsin, or London are not my home in the same way. So that's what makes me want to be here and in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, try to make our country live up to the lofty and beautiful ideals that that set out to achieve. Manya Brachear Pashman:   That's beautiful, both of you. Both beautiful answers. Before we go, I do want to talk about, you've mentioned that a couple times, maybe the absence of God and democracy, those words from the declaration, and I'm just curious if you could both share your thoughts on: does that matter? And is it mattering today? If those words were embedded in the document, would anything be different today, possibly? Mishy Harman:   I think the absence of the word God was very intentional. And there's a lot of historical documentation about that. And I think the absence of the word democracy was less intentional in that. I mean, I don't want to bore you with a lot of technicalities. But democracy did appear in previous drafts of of the Declaration of Independence, and was ultimately taken out but not because I think that anyone had any sense that they wanted to be less…yeah, the the intent of Israel being a democracy, I think it's very clearly stated that Israel will come into existence based on the guidelines of the United Nations and the Partition Plan that called for the creation two democratic entities here.  I think the Declaration of Independence talks about equality and about freedom of religion and, and in all the main tenets of democracy. So, I think that the Declaration of Independence does, as a document does appeal to a wide variety of people even today. I think that you know, it would be more difficult Today to write a founding document, that in the current makeup of Israeli society that doesn't refer to God and doesn't refer more clearly to the divine. Eran Peleg:   But there is some implicit- God is implicity present. I think there's a- Mishy Harman:   Tzur yisrael (rock of Israel). Eran Peleg:   Exactly, right.  Mishy Harman:   Which was sort of a very famous kind of pie style compromise, of saying things and not saying them at the same time. Mishy Harman:   And maybe as the last thing to say, which opens up a whole other conversation with you, if you maybe want to invite us again, to the podcast, we can discuss, is that, you know, the Declaration of Independence set in place, a notion which I think to most signatories did not seem like a contradictory notion of a Jewish and democratic state. And I think we're grappling till this day with whether those terms are contradictory whether a democracy can be a Jewish state, whether a Jewish state can be a democracy, I think all of them signed the Declaration thinking that this was a possible outcome. And I don't think that they thought that these terms would come to clash in the ways that they have.  And I think till today, we're dealing with that legacy of this sort of impossibly simple and yet impossibly difficult coupling of terms, which we're now living in a moment in which we're trying to understand whether the signatories were right, whether this is a possibility. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Mishy, I hope you don't mind me asking you a personal question to close us out. And that is, I know you lost your father shortly before the debut of this series. It is dedicated in his memory. And you just shared a story about his mother, I believe that was your paternal grandmother. I'm curious as your team was having all of these conversations, you and your team were having these conversations with children and grandchildren, about the people they love their legacies, did that shape any of the conversations you had with your father in his final days, because you were working on it kind of simultaneously. Mishy Harman:   Sure. My father would have loved this series very much because it represented his Israel. It's also Eran's Israel, which is an optimistic Israel, which sees the good in people and the potential and the dream of this project that we began here. I think he would have been very interested, he knew many of these characters who we're talking about. I think he would have also been saddened to hear that a lot of them are dismayed by where things have gone. And I think he was as well. He was the greatest Zionist that I could imagine. And that he really believed. Zionism is a sort of catchphrase in which you can insert almost anything that you want into it. But I think his most fundamental belief, which he attributed to the heart of Zionism was a belief and the quality and a belief that people are people and the belief in education, and the belief in the spirit of the Jewish people. And in this really miraculous entity that we've created that allows us to ask these fundamental, difficult questions about our past. And for me, it's very, very meaningful to be able to dedicate this series to his memory. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Thank you so much to both of you for joining us. Thank you for the series. I encourage everyone here to listen to episodes of- Mishy Harman:   And the next episode that's coming out on Monday is about Moshe Kol.  Manya Brachear Pashman:   Oh, perfect timing. Wonderful. And thank you both for joining us.  Mishy Harman:   Thank you. Eran Peleg: Thank you very much. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Thank you, audience. Manya Brachear Pashman: To listen to Israel Story's special series on the Declaration of Independence or any other regular episode, you can subscribe to Israel Story wherever you get your podcasts. Just don't forget to also subscribe to People of the Pod and our award-winning series, The Forgotten Exodus. To learn more about Moshe Kol, here's a sneak peek of Israel Story's interview with  his daughter, Yehudit Kol Inbar, the former director of the Museums Division of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Excerpt from Israel Story - Episode 89 - Moshe Kol:  Yehudit Kol Inbar: He was eating grapefruit and he was crying, because for him it represented, ‘wow, we are in Israel and we have a grapefruit that we ourself grew it.' He was very proud and happy with the feeling that they're building a place for the Jewish people. Mishy Harman: That's Yehudit Kol Inbar, the daughter of Moshe Kolodny, who - for nineteen years - headed the Jewish Agency's Youth Immigration Division, and was responsible for bringing more than 100,000 unaccompanied minors to Israel from eighty-five different countries. Despite being among the founders of at least seven kibbutzim and five youth villages, and later on holding senior cabinet posts, he considered that immigration effort to be his greatest public achievement. It was, he once said, a project that had no equivalent in the annals of human history. Manya Brachear Pashman: To listen to the rest of the episode, head to the link in our show notes. Our thanks once again to host Mishy Harman and the staff at Israel Story for sharing these incredible stories with us at AJC Global Forum 2023 in Tel Aviv.   

Nearly 75 years ago, on May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israel's sovereignty: a renewed Jewish state, the political expression of the national home of the Jewish people, located in their ancestral homeland. Many essays and books have been published about the words Ben-Gurion spoke that day—Israel's Declaration of Independence. But the professor Neil Rogachevsky and his co-author Dov Zigler take a new angle on the declaration and what it means. In a new book from Cambridge University Press, Israel's Declaration of Independence: The History and Political Theory of the Nation's Founding Moment, they look at the drafting process and distill from the elements that endured from draft to draft—as well as the elements that were changed or removed—a political theory of Israel's founding, in which the political purposes of the Israeli project are made most clearly manifest. How, in other words, did Israel's founders think about rights, about citizenship, about the justifications of Israel's sovereignty, an Israeli view of freedom, of civil order, and of religion? That's the subject of their new book—and the subject of the conversation they have here with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver. Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

What were the major political and diplomatic issues that Israel's founders faced in 1948? How did they inform the writing of Israel's Declaration of Independence? What can Israel's Declaration teach us about natural and historic rights, the relationship of religion and state, and the meaning of national sovereignty? To discuss these questions, we are joined by Neil Rogachevsky, a scholar of Israel studies and political thought at Yeshiva University in New York and co-author, with Dov Zigler, of the forthcoming book: Israel's Declaration of Independence. Rogachevsky tells the riveting story of the composition of Israel's Declaration of Independence. Its first draft, he explains, was a collaboration between an American rabbi and a young Israeli lawyer, and produced a text that fundamentally drew upon America's Declaration of Independence, which blended natural rights and Jewish justifications for the Jewish state. Rogachevsky narrates the drama of the weeks and days leading up to the eve of independence on May 14, 1948, as the Declaration weaved its way through the bureaucracy of the state-to-be before landing on the desk of Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion had to make monumental decisions about the character of the state and its relationship to the outside world. His choices, Rogachevsky argues, fundamentally shaped modern Israel—and offer lessons about democracy, rights, sovereignty, religion, and statecraft that resonate to this day.

What were the major political and diplomatic issues that Israel's founders faced in 1948? How did they inform the writing of Israel's Declaration of Independence? What can Israel's Declaration teach us about natural and historic rights, the relationship of religion and state, and the meaning of national sovereignty? To discuss these questions, we are joined by Neil Rogachevsky, a scholar of Israel studies and political thought at Yeshiva University in New York and co-author, with Dov Zigler, of the forthcoming book: Israel's Declaration of Independence. Rogachevsky tells the riveting story of the composition of Israel's Declaration of Independence. Its first draft, he explains, was a collaboration between an American rabbi and a young Israeli lawyer, and produced a text that fundamentally drew upon America's Declaration of Independence, which blended natural rights and Jewish justifications for the Jewish state. Rogachevsky narrates the drama of the weeks and days leading up to the eve of independence on May 14, 1948, as the Declaration weaved its way through the bureaucracy of the state-to-be before landing on the desk of Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion had to make monumental decisions about the character of the state and its relationship to the outside world. His choices, Rogachevsky argues, fundamentally shaped modern Israel—and offer lessons about democracy, rights, sovereignty, religion, and statecraft that resonate to this day.