Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. Two years after Russia invaded Ukraine, the conflict is giving all appearances of turning into a "forever war." But in other parts of the world, Russia's influence has arguably grown. This week on What Matters Now, former MK Ksenia Svetlova, an expert in the Middle East and Russia, speaks about how Russia's forces remain throughout the Middle East and how its reach has deepened in Africa. Born in Moscow, Svetlova immigrated to Israel at the age of 14. She is a journalist and analyst and was a member of the 20th Knesset on behalf of the Zionist Union coalition.  Unlike most Western countries, Russia sees Hamas as a legitimate political player on the global stage. Next week, Moscow is potentially set to host a peace summit in the hopes of a reconciliation between the terrorist rulers of Gaza and the leadership of the West Bank's Palestinian Authority. Why? Svetlova also shares how Russian citizens are faring after two years of Western sanctions. So this week, after two years of war in Ukraine, we ask Ksenia Svetlova, what matters now. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Former MK Ksenia Svetlova, an expert on the Middle East and Russia. (courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. The Israel Defense Forces revealed this week that beneath the Gaza Strip headquarters of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, the controversial aid organization known commonly as UNRWA, the Hamas terror group hid one of its most significant assets, a subterranean data center. As witnessed by ToI military reporter Emanuel Fabian, cables were discovered running from a UNRWA server room to the Hamas data center underground. According to ToI senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur, however, Hamas's infiltration of UNRWA should be taken as a given. The great "evil" behind the United Nation's outfit, the only humanitarian aid on the ground, is the fact that it is more of an ideology than an aid organization. We hear about UNRWA's origin story and how its mission will only be fulfilled when the State of Israel no longer exists. So in this week of proof of UNRWA workers' collaboration with Hamas, we ask Haviv Rettig Gur, what matters now? What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Image: Senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur and deputy editor Amanda Borschel-Dan at The Times of Israel's Jerusalem office. (Eli Katoff)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that he told visiting US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that Israel is “within touching distance of absolute victory,” and that Hamas’s defeat will be the “victory of the entire free world.” In a rebuttal to the prime minister, five women released from captivity in Gaza during a weeklong truce in late November stated that "absolute victory" for Israel would only come with the release of the remaining 136 hostages. At the same time, Saudi Arabia is hosting a summit of foreign ministers from five countries in the region -- Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, along with a representative from the Palestinian Authority -- to advance a united Arab stance regarding the war in Gaza as well as political initiatives for when the fighting ends. The united front that Israel’s Arab partners and potential allies are building is increasingly at odds with the Israeli government. And finally, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday warned Israel that it does not have “a license to dehumanize others,” the harshest criticism from the United States to date. So in this week of statements and conflicting stances, we ask Haviv Rettig Gur, what matters now? What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Image: Times of Israel senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur. (courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. Israel often prides itself on being the most moral army in the world. Whether you subscribe to that or not, there is a long history of ethical thinking that influences its operations on the ground. This week on What Matters Now, we speak with Rabbi Dr. Shlomo Brody, the author of the new and extremely timely book, “Ethics of Our Fighters: A Jewish View on War and Morality.” With rabbinic ordination and a PhD from Bar-Ilan Law School, Brody is the executive director of Ematai, an organization dedicated to helping Jews navigate dilemmas regarding aging, end-of-life treatment, and organ donation. His previous book, "A Guide to the Complex: Contemporary Halakhic Debates,” was a National Jewish Book Award winner. In our wide-ranging conversation, we speak about the history of Jewish military ethics, starting from the Bible, through rabbinical literature and the blossoming of thinking from just before the foundation of the State of Israel and onward. The applications of military ethics in the current Israel-Hamas War are unprecedented. We hear about how taking a stance of self-defense may help guide Israel as the conflict continues, and potentially spreads. So this week, we ask author Shlomo Brody, what matters now? What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Rabbi Dr. Shlomo Brody in The Times of Israel's Jerusalem office, February 1, 2023. (Amanda Borschel-Dan/ToI)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. This week we're bringing excerpts from a Behind the Headlines video interview with author and journalist Yossi Klein Halevi, conducted exclusively for our Times of Israel Community. A senior fellow and the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, Klein Halevi is the author of books including, “Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor” and “Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist.” Drawing on themes from both of those books, as well as his other work, we asked Klein Halevi to answer five big questions about the war. We touch on topics including, what "Never Again" means to Israelis today and how the Jewish community should relate to the anti-Zionist Jewish youth protesting on university campuses. So this week, we ask thinker Yossi Klein Halevi, what matters now. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Author Yossi Klein Halevi (Shalom Hartman Institute)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. According to the Hamas-run Health Ministry, over 24,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Israel declared war on Hamas in retaliation to the bloody invasion by 3,000 terrorists from Gaza who massacred 1,200 -- mostly civilians -- and took over 240 hostages to Gaza.  And while it is clear that Hamas began the war, it's also clear that Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip are being used as human shields to tactically and cynically generate public outcry against Israel. In a difficult and sensitive conversation, ToI's senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur delves into Israelis' awareness of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the death toll, and how much this is taken into account by Israelis, who are still overwhelmingly supportive of the stated goal of toppling Hamas.  Rettig Gur shares conversations he's had with staunch pro-Israel supporters in the United States and United Kingdom and an interesting idea that came out of them in which Israel could be an active player in ameliorating the suffering of the people of Gaza. So this week, we ask Haviv Rettig Gur, what matters now?  What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Times of Israel's senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur (left) and deputy editor Amanda Borschel-Dan record a podcast in ToI's Jerusalem office, January 2024. (Eli Katzoff)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. This week on What Matters Now, we're again handing the mic to Mishy Harman, the co-founder of The Times of Israel’s podcast partner, Israel Story, the premiere narrative English-language podcast from Israel. Since the October 7 massacre across southern Israel by Hamas of some 1,200 individuals, mostly civilians, Harman and his team at Israel Story have pivoted from their long-form, carefully nurtured episodes to producing almost daily Wartime Diaries. We at The Times of Israel asked the Israel Story team to compile a few episodes and after much deliberation, together we selected three: Wartime Diaries: Shira Masami More than 200,000 Israelis – from both the South and the North – have been forced to leave their homes since the start of the war. Some have relocated to hotels or kibbutzim, others have opted to move in with family or friends, or else even rent apartments in entirely new surroundings. In today’s episode we get a glimpse of what that reality feels like. Shira Masami is one of nearly 30,000 residents who have left the southern city of Sderot – a city that suffered a horrendous attack on October 7 – and who are now dispersed around the country. Wartime Diaries: Charlene Seidle Upwards of $1 billion in donations have been sent to Israel since the start of the war. For years, Charlene Seidle, the Executive Vice President of the San Diego-based Leichtag Foundation, has been at the forefront of the Jewish philanthropic world. While the Leichtag Foundation supports various causes in the States and in Israel, their main local focus is bridging social and economic gaps in Jerusalem. Leichtag has given life to hundreds of grassroots initiatives and has created the ‘Jerusalem Model’ – a diverse network of social entrepreneurs, activists and leaders from all sectors around town – Jews, Muslims, Christians, religious, secular, etc. Since Charlene and her team have been nurturing and cultivating these relationships for so long, they were particularly well-situated to understand the needs on the ground in the immediate aftermath of October 7th. Wartime Diaries: Omer Ohana The war has brought many new people into the limelight: For nearly three months we’ve been hearing countless stories of casualties, hostages, survivors and family members, many of whom have entered our hearts and never left. In some cases we feel like we’ve gotten to know these unsung heroes personally. One of the first big stories of the war, in that initial crazy week after October 7, was that of 30-year-old Sagi Golan from Herzliya – a decorated officer in an anti-terrorism unit who was killed in action in Be’eri in the early hours of October 8. His story made headlines because Sagi was supposed to have married his partner, Omer Ohana, two weeks later, and his death brought to the fore – once again – the matter of the army and LGBTQ rights. Though the IDF has recognized same-sex partners of fallen soldiers as eligible for full financial and emotional support since the mid-1990s, the matter had never been enshrined in law. So in the weeks after Sagi’s death, Omer led a successful campaign to legally secure the rights of same-sex and common-law partners of fallen soldiers. So this week, we ask Mishy Harman, what matters now? What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: (Clockwise from top right) Shira Masami; Sagi Golan (left) and Omer Ohana; Charlene Seidle (courtesy Israel Story)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. This week the Supreme Court delivered a long-awaited decision on whether or not it would repeal the one piece of judicial overhaul legislation passed by the so-called pure right coalition under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Held on September 12, the hearing in front of a full bench of all 15 Supreme Court justices made for a day-long media event. Citizens across the country became armchair legal experts and held watch parties. Since the Hamas invasion of Israel on October 7, the existential discussion about Israel's democracy has been sidelined. But with this ruling, along with a second Supreme Court decision this week, the judicial overhaul and all of its surrounding debate have again made headlines. To parse out the ruling and how it may — or may not — rekindle fears of a societal schism, Times of Israel senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur joins this week's podcast for an informal, but hopefully informative chat. So this week, as the Supreme Court redefines its own powers, we ask Haviv Rettig Gur, what matters now? What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. Photo: ToI senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur. (courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. Within days of the murderous October 7 Hamas invasion of Israel, William Daroff, CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, headed a mission of 50 heads of Jewish legacy organizations back to Israel, where he was when the massacre occurred. In conversation with The Times of Israel this week, he describes how following the brutal slaying of 1,200 mostly citizens and hostage-taking of dozens of others, a second punch in the gut awaited him back in the United States. "While we were punched in the gut by what you experienced here, we get punched in the gut by what we experienced in America -- an incredible disconnect, a moment of cognitive dissonance where our allies, our neighbors, the people we work with, the people that we have marched with -- seemed to not get it, seemed to not understand the tragedy that had occurred. And continue to not get it.” We speak about the November 14 March for Israel rally, which brought an unprecedented 290,000 to the Washington, DC, National Mall. And how, at this moment, pernicious TikTok algorithms may dictate how the next generation of American Jewry views the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  This week, we ask long-time American Jewish leader William Daroff, where American Jews can go from here and what matters now. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations William Daroff at the site of the October 7 Supernova rave massacre, December 25, 2023. (courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. The past several weeks have seen the publication of a slew of high-profile opinion surveys on the war with Hamas. They include deep looks into the psyche of the Palestinian people in both the West Bank and Gaza and a probe into how Israeli Jews and Arabs differ in perspectives. Out of the United States, there are a few surveys that take the temperature of the American electorate during the war with Hamas. Among those with findings featured in the podcast is the poll from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR). Between November 22 and December 2, questions were asked of 1231 adults, of whom 750 were interviewed face to face in the West Bank and 481 in the Gaza Strip. The findings are eye-opening. Next, we speak in depth about the Harvard CAPS/Harris poll, an online survey within the United States from December 13-14 among 2,034 registered voters. Rettig Gur notes that on several questions, voters in the 18-24 age group seemed to express contradicting or muddled views. He explains why. We also speak about The New York Times/Siena College poll of 1,016 registered US voters that was conducted by telephone from December 10 to 14. With similar, yet different questions about the war with Hamas, it is interesting to compare findings with the previous survey. Finally, we discuss the Israel Democracy Institute's seventh flash survey that was carried out between December 11–13, with 503 men and women interviewed via the internet and by telephone in Hebrew and 101 in Arabic. The schisms in Israeli society are made crystal clear. This week on What Matters Now, ToI's senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur sits down for a frank discussion of some of the polls' findings in the first of an ongoing series of bi-weekly conversations on varied topical issues. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: ToI senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur (courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. Is the IDF acting legally and ethically in Gaza? We at The Times of Israel recently held an hour-long webinar on this topic for our Times of Israel Community with Prof. Amichai Cohen of the Israel Democracy Institute. Cohen is a recognized expert in the International Law of Armed Conflict, National Security Law, and Civil-Military Relations. International pressure is building on Israel to lessen the impact on Palestinian civilians while the IDF prosecutes this war against Hamas in all of Gaza. During this webinar, we ask Cohen about the legal legitimacy of Israel's right to self-defense, the international bodies that determine laws of warfare and how to try Hamas for international war crimes. It’s a long and fascinating discussion as we ask Prof. Amichai Cohen, what matters now? What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. Illustrative: Prof. Amichai Cohen at a ToI Live event in Jerusalem's Israel Democracy Institute, December 15, 2022. (Oded Antman/IDI)  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. This week on What Matters Now, we're again handing the mic to Mishy Harman, the co-founder of The Times of Israel’s podcast partner, Israel Story, the premiere English-language podcast from Israel. Since the October 7 massacre by Hamas of some 1,200 individuals, mostly civilians, Harman and his team at Israel Story have pivoted from their long-form, carefully nurtured episodes to producing almost daily Wartime Diaries. We at The Times of Israel asked the Israel Story team to compile a few episodes and after much deliberation, they selected three: Wartime Diaries: Rachel Goldberg and Jon Polin Rachel Goldberg and Jon Polin, the parents of 23-year-old Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was kidnapped from the Supernova Party, have in many ways emerged as the face of the hostage families. They’ve met with US President Joe Biden and the Pope, they were on the cover of Time Magazine, and Rachel has spoken at the UN and at the March for Israel Rally in Washington, DC. In all those places, as well as in countless other interviews, speeches and meetings, they’ve told the heartbreaking tale of the two text messages Hersh sent on the morning of October 7, one saying, “I love you,” and the other, “I’m sorry.” He wrote those messages from within a shelter where he was hiding with 28 other partygoers. Eighteen of them were killed, and Hersh was badly wounded when his left arm was blown off. Shortly thereafter, Hersh and three others from the shelter were loaded onto Hamas pickup trucks and taken into Gaza. At recording time, it was 55 days since their abduction. Wartime Diaries: Datya Itzhaki In the summer of 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza under the leadership of premier Ariel Sharon. The roughly 8,000 residents of the 21 Jewish settlements within the Gaza Strip were forced to leave their homes and their communities, which for decades they had actually been encouraged and incentivized to inhabit. The move brought the country to the brink of a civil war. This was especially palpable in the tense relations between the residents of Gush Katif (as the main block of Gaza settlements was known) and their neighbors from the other side of the fence — the largely left-leaning residents of the same kibbutzim that 18 years later suffered most in the October 7 Hamas atrocities. Now, many of the former residents of the Gaza settlements who never stopped dreaming of returning to the sand dunes of the Strip feel at least partially vindicated. Had their communities not been dismantled back in 2005, they claim, the army would have still been in Gaza, and none of this calamity would have occurred. One such voice is that of 63-year-old Datya Itzhaki, who used to live in the Gush Katif settlement of Kfar Yam. Wartime Diaries: Sahar Vardi During this terrible moment, many people can’t make space for anyone else’s pain -- and that’s understandable. But for those who are open to it, Israel Story’s motto is that everybody's story matters. Without pointing fingers or making equivalencies, we're trying to stay true to our mission of sharing stories from different perspectives to complicate, humanize, and insert shades of nuance into what can often feel like a black-and-white, us-versus-them reality. In our 21st diary, we hear from Sahar Vardi, a Jewish-Israeli peace activist who lost a dear friend, Khalil Abu Yahia, in Gaza. So this week, we ask Mishy Harman, what matters now? What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: What Matters Now hosts the Israel Story podcast, with three episodes featuring: Rachel Goldberg and Jon Polin (upper right), Datya Itzhaki (lower left) and Sahar Vardi. (Courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. For Israelis, there is before October 7 and after. So the idea of a book called “The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World” written during those “before” times may not feel like the most relevant reading material. But it is. “Start-Up Nation” authors Saul Singer and Dan Senor have again joined forces to dissect what makes Israelis tick — and keep on ticking. One conclusion? It’s all about the unity of purpose. If that unity was once what made us strong, well, “Now it’s become existential. If we don’t stay unified, we’re just going to go into a downward spiral,” says co-author Saul Singer. So this week, we speak with bestselling author Saul Singer and find out, what matters now. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. Image: 'The Genius of Israel' co-author Saul Singer. (courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. Several entire families were slaughtered during the Hamas onslaught on southern Israel on October 7 which left 1,200 dead. They were killed by terrorists together, so why shouldn’t a father, mother and their children be buried together? When the father is not Jewish, the question becomes more complicated, at least in the Jewish state. "In today’s modern state of Israel, we need a new tool kit in many ways. It doesn’t have to deny Halacha, it doesn’t have to ignore it, it doesn’t have to say it’s irrelevant, it just has to find those moments in Jewish legal history that enable us to live together with our communities,” said Rabbi Seth Farber, the head of ITIM on Thursday. ITIM is an organization that helps Israelis navigate the country’s religious bureaucracy. In its mission statement, the NGO says it is committed to increasing participation in Jewish life by making Israel’s religious establishment respectful of and responsive to the diverse Jewish needs of the Jewish people. During this current war with Hamas, ITIM found itself helping on the issue of burials for those who are not considered halachically Jewish, as well as the idea of preemptively preventing anchored women, the wives of soldiers who may be taken captive. So this week we hear from Rabbi Seth Farber, what matters now. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. iMAGE: ITIM head Rabbi Seth Farber (courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. The destruction wrought by Hamas on October 7 at the small Israeli communities surrounding the Gaza border was so complete that in many cases, only microscopic remnants of those 1,200 who were killed there can be found today. The Israel Antiquities Authority is accustomed to searching for such human remains — albeit for people who lived hundreds, if not thousands of years ago. Today, some 30 volunteers from the IAA are working in shifts, sifting through the rubble — in Be’eri, in Kfar Aza, in the cars that were torched fleeing the Supernova rave. “We're searching for things that are so small that if it's not using archaeological methodologies, they're not possible to be found,” the IAA's Dead Sea Scrolls unit head Dr. Joe Uziel told The Times of Israel this week.  He honed his CSI skills on, for example, remains of the Babylonian conquest in Jerusalem’s City of David. Today, he is volunteering to help identify those killed near Gaza with the same techniques. The team of volunteers has so far found the remains of some 60 people who were killed. But identifying who they are is difficult because some of the small bone fragments are from the terrorists that came into the kibbutzim, others are from foreign workers and young children whose DNA is not on file. So this week, archaeologist Dr. Joe Uziel tells us, what matters now. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: IAA archaeologist Dr. Joe Uziel (left) in a home destroyed by Hamas during its murderous rampage on October 7, 2023, sifting through the rubble in search of human remains. (Shai Halevi/Israel Antiquities Authority)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. No one knew what to expect on October 7 when the initial rocket barrages from the Gaza Strip began pounding Israel. But veteran, war-hardened residents of the Gaza envelope sensed immediately that something was different this time. They had no idea what was to come. Adele Raemer has lived on Kibbutz Nirim since 1975. Just 2 kilometers from the Gaza border, on the morning of October 7 she hosted several Facebook live sessions, beginning at the start of the Hamas barrage, and her social media posts document the evolution of the Israeli awareness of the horrifically brutal invasion. Five Israelis were murdered at Kibbutz Nirim on October 7 and another five are missing. Today, Raemer and the rest of Kibbutz Nirim are now in a hotel in Eilat. The former teacher is a cherished Times of Israel blogger -- and a trained medical clown who always has a red nose in her bag. She has now made it her life’s mission to tell the world about what happened on October 7. This week on What Matters Now, we speak with Kibbutz Nirim member Adele Raemer about the events of October 7 and how she and her community are faring now. Blogs written by Adele Raemer on and since October 7: I hear massive shooting. I have never been this scared in my life Painful homecoming PHOTO ESSAY: My people of Kibbutz Nirim, in black and white What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. Check out the previous What Matters Now episode: https://omny.fm/shows/times-will-tell/what-matters-now-to-israel-storys-mishy-harman-war IMAGE: Kibbutz Nirim member Adele Raemer in a self-portrait taken in the Kibbutz Nir Oz pomegranate orchard, September 2023. (courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. This week on What Matters Now, we're handing the mic to Mishy Harman, the founder of The Times of Israel’s podcast partner, Israel Story. Since the October 7 massacre by Hamas of some 1,400 individuals, mostly civilians, Harman and his team at Israel Story have pivoted from their long-form, carefully nurtured episodes to producing almost daily Wartime Diaries. We at The Times of Israel asked the Israel Story team to compile a few episodes and after much deliberation, they selected three: Wartime Diaries: Sasha Ariev Karina Ariev, a 19-year-old corporal, was stationed at the Nahal Oz military base on the border with Gaza. Her family hasn’t heard from her since the morning of Saturday, October 7, when she was – most likely – abducted to Gaza. Karina’s sister, Sasha, shares what life has been like since that fateful day. Wartime Diaries: Sivan Avnery For months Sivan Avnery -- a physical therapist from Kfar Shmaryahu -- was active in the demonstrations against the judicial reforms. Like hundreds of thousands of other Israelis, he felt he was fighting for his home, for the very nature of his country. But he had no idea how true that was about to become. On Saturday morning, October 7, Avnery received a message that is every parent's worst nightmare: His 18-year-old son Tal was -- unbeknownst to him -- at the Supernova party in Re’im, and was now fleeing for his life. Without a second of hesitation, Avnery knew exactly what he needed to do. Wartime Diaries: Mor Maisel This war has forced many people to reevaluate their identities and political sensibilities—not an easy task during these shocking and painful days. Mor Maisel’s opinions are complicated and don’t conform to the norm, which may be challenging for some listeners, and reassuring for others. So this week, we ask Mishy Harman, what matters now? What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Clockwise from top right: Sasha Ariev, Sivan Avnery and son Tal, and Mor Maisel. (Israel Story)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. The ripple effects of Hamas’s massacre of 1,400 people in Israel on October 7 are still being felt. The dead were mostly civilians — many entire families — whom Israel continues to identify and bury. Israelis were the primary target of the barbaric attack, but their pain is shared by Jewish brothers and sisters in the Diaspora, just as, five years ago this week, Israelis shared the shock and pain of the deadly shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue. Here this week from New York to show his love and solidarity with Israelis is Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism which represents some two million Jews in North America. He sat with The Times of Israel after touring the country and getting briefed on the situation here on the ground. We speak about how Jews -- even some from the most progressive edges -- are pulling together today, with some humanitarian caveats. “This is a moment when we have to be leaning into the kind of response that the world doesn't like to see from us — when we have a strong military response to protect our community, our families, our country. And at the same time, can we hold, in whatever portion of our moral stance in the world, that we do not look at the suffering of innocents, not the suffering of those who are bringing this assault? That's part of us retaining our Jewish religious sensibilities, which we can't lose ever,” said Jacobs. So this week, we ask Rabbi Rick Jacobs, what matters now. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, in Jerusalem on June 27, 2018. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. It's the 13th day of the war, nearly two weeks since Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg-Polin have heard from their son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, missing since October 7, when Hamas terrorists descended upon the Supernova desert rave and proceeded to massacre at least 200 people, taking others captive. Polin-Goldberg was last seen in a field shelter where he and other partygoers had fled, trying to escape the falling rockets and Hamas gunmen. For the last 13 days, Hersh's parents have veered from horror and fear to a calm determination as they, assisted and supported by a cadre of family and friends, launched an international media campaign to find out every detail available about Hersh, and hopefully save him, and the other nearly 200 Hamas hostages. As news of the Hamas atrocities continues to be told, we ask Rachel Goldberg-Polin, what matters now. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: File: Relatives of US citizens missing since October 7 surprise attack by Hamas militants near the Gaza border, attend a news conference on Oct. 10, 2023 in Tel Aviv, Israel. At the far right, Rachel Goldberg, mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, and Jonathan Polin, Hersh's father. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. Israel is at war. And, while we are fighting on our southern, and increasingly, our northern borders, one of the biggest battles is global — for the hearts and minds of those who could support Israel in this time of need. Because the battle is international, it’s not only about the Palestinians versus the Israelis. It goes far beyond that. “Hamas is just a forefront of Iran. It’s one large, organic monster. So we weren’t attacked by the local militia, we were attacked by the Persian Empire," according to Dr. Micah Goodman. The author of influential works such as "Catch-67" has appeared on What Matters Now in the past, speaking on politics and on the judicial overhaul. But on a morning in which we both received terrible news of fallen loved ones, we had a raw and very real conversation in which Goodman makes a unique plea for help. In this week of terrible tragedy, we ask Dr. Micah Goodman, what matters now. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Dr. Micah Goodman (Yonit Schiller)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. A small agile nation takes advantage of an unprecedented window of opportunity. As that start-up nation’s influence quickly spreads throughout the Holy Land, it gains the begrudging admiration of its neighboring frenemy states. Sound familiar? But of course, we're not talking about the modern state of Israel’s hi-tech scene, rather the period in which ancient Israelites founded the biblical United Monarchy some 3,000 years ago. “It’s exactly the time when things changed dramatically. The Egyptian empire that was the ruler of the region collapsed, so the stabilizing force that was here to make sure that these nomads do not interfere and do not disrupt trade and the livelihood of the city-states, this force was not here anymore,” Tel Aviv University Prof. Erez Ben-Yosef, the head of the ongoing Timna Valley Archaeological Expedition, told The Times of Israel this week. While excavating at Timna, Ben-Yosef realized that it was not the commonly thought ancient Egyptian empire that ruled the copper mines at their prime, but rather the Edomites, a nomadic biblical kingdom. This led Ben-Yosef to propose a theory that the beginnings of the United Monarchy under King David — as described in the Bible — was also nomadic, but equally complex. If true, his theory of a nomadic, largely tent-dwelling kingdom would explain why there is a general paucity of architectural evidence of grand palaces during this Iron Age era. So this week, as the Jewish people return to temporary dwellings during the festival of Sukkot, we ask Prof. Erez Ben-Yosef, what matters now. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. This week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flew to the United States for a series of meetings, including a long-awaited face-to-face with US President Joe Biden. He was met by anti-judicial overhaul protesters at every possible stop. But are these protests the right move for Diaspora Jews? Do they actually serve their purpose or are they, as the prime minister himself insinuated, fodder for the BDS movement? This week I bring you a second webinar with a panel of experts who discuss the role of global Jewry during this time of intense internal conflict in the Jewish State. So this week, we ask former US ambassador David Friedman, Israel’s Special Envoy for Combatting Antisemitism Michal Cotler-Wunsh and leading Zionism expert Prof. Gil Troy, what matters now. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Protesters wave flags and chant slogans near the site of a planned meeting between United States President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in New York, Sept. 20, 2023. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. It’s July, just after the end of Shabbat and about 100 people have gathered in the Likud-majority West Bank city of Ma'ale Adumim. Hebrew University law Prof. Benjamin (Benny) Porat, a resident of the city, is addressing the crowd. During his 10-minute speech, Porat — standing next to the police headquarters in Maaleh Adumim — said statements such as, “The Israeli majority has risen up and will no longer be silent” — even as a few of the West Bank city’s residents attempted to drown him out. Porat is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the director of the Matz Institute for Jewish Law. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute. He is also a settler who is vocally in opposition to the coalition’s judicial overhaul. The Times of Israel sat with Porat in his home this week to discuss Tuesday’s long-awaited and explosive High Court hearing over the first piece of the judicial overhaul legislation. We also talk about how Jewish legal tradition may help solve parts of this clash of the titans crisis. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Hebrew University Prof. Benny Porat (Israel Democracy Institute)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. “To Israel’s friends in North America, we are taking the unusual step of directly addressing you at a moment of acute crisis in Israel. We write with a sense of anguish and anxiety for the future of our country.” With these words, authors Yossi Klein Halevi, Daniel Gordis and Matti Friedman began a February oped on The Times of Israel that they titled, “An open letter to Israel’s friends in North America.” The Times of Israel hosted the trio this week in a webinar and this week’s What Matters Now episode is a very lightly edited recording of the event. It’s rather long, so we’ll get right to it. So this week, we ask Yossi Klein Halevi, Daniel Gordis and Matti Friedman, what matters now. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. Image: Anti-overhaul activists protest against the government's judicial overhaul outside the president's residence in Jerusalem, on July 29, 2023. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. This week, we're taking a brief break from the headlines and turning to a topic we covered last summer, hearing the experiences of a young Israeli staff member at a Jewish summer camp. This week's What Matters Now guest, Yishai Mogilner, is royalty of a sort at Camp Ramah in the Poconos, where his late grandfather, Rabbi David Mogilner, was a revered director who helped shape the camp and tragically died of a heart attack, at the age of 42, while at camp one summer. Yishai Mogilner's father, the late Eitan Mogilner, also worked at Ramah Poconos, and Yishai Mogilner, 19, now spent a summer at the same Ramah, ahead of being drafted into the army and following a year spent in a mechina preparatory program. He speaks about being in the place that was shaped by his grandfather, that then shaped his own father's life and in turn, has been formative for Yishai and his siblings back home in Israel, where they were raised. Mogilner talks about being an Israeli in such an American Jewish space, and what that's been like this summer. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Yishai Mogilner (Courtesy Ella Goldberg)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. Next month will mark the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Oslo Accords in which Israeli and Palestinian leaders agreed to establish the Palestinian Authority, what was supposed to be a temporary body responsible for limited Palestinian self-governance over parts of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip -- a body that would serve as the foundation of a future Palestinian state. Three decades later, we’re about as far away from that vision as ever. While the PA still exists, and one of the leaders who signed the Oslo Accords, Mahmoud Abbas, remains at the helm, the mechanism he operates largely fails to deliver for its people. But should the Palestinians’ problems be Israel’s as well? This week's What Matters Now guest, journalist Adam Rasgon, appeared to argue as much: “It ultimately is in Israel's interest to have a transparent and effective Palestinian Authority because when you have that, it will bring greater stability to the West Bank and to the region more broadly," he told the podcast. Rasgon has almost a decade of experience covering Palestinian Affairs for The Times of Israel, The Jerusalem Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Now a member of the New Yorker’s editorial staff, he recently co-wrote a tour de force profile of one of Mahmoud Abbas’s closest aides, Hussein al-Sheikh. The story is about Sheikh, but it’s also a larger one about a PA that was born out of support from the masses but that, like Sheikh, has gradually distanced itself from the people and their struggles. We discussed what can be learned from Sheikh’s career, what his and the PA’s futures look like as well as Israel’s role in it all. So this week, we ask journalist Adam Rasgon, what matters now? What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Journalist Adam Rasgon. (Luke Tress/Times of Israel)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. Jewish-American journalist Norman Cousins once said, “History is a vast early warning system.” This week we speak with Oren Kessler, the author of “Palestine 1936,” who would likely agree. But as we see in Kessler's new book, history can also be a collection of missed opportunities. “David Ben-Gurion, starting in about 1933-34, had a series of meetings with a man by the name Musa Alami and he and Ben-Gurion met again and again throughout the early mid-1930s and they come tantalizingly close to some sort of an agreement before everything goes wrong, as tends to happen,” Kessler said this week in Jerusalem's Nomi Studios. Kessler’s new book is about the Arab Revolt that took place from 1936-1939. He argues, quite convincingly, that these years in British Mandate Palestine form the roots of the Middle East conflict. The book attempts to illuminate all three sides of the complex relationship between the British, Jews and Arabs attempting to occupy the Holy Land during these formative years. Kessler is a journalist and political analyst based in  Tel Aviv. He spent five years researching and writing “Palestine 1936” and it’s clearly a labor he loved. There are many lessons that have yet to be learned as we see this bloody history repeating itself in Israel, even today. So this week, we ask author Oren Kessler, what mattered then and why does that matter now? What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Journalist Oren Kessler, author of 'Palestine 1936' (Hadas Parush)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. This week, a Tel Aviv bus driver shouted at 20-year-old passenger, Romi Inbar, for wearing a tank top, which he considered to be immodest, telling at her repeatedly to put a shirt on. “You can’t walk around like that,” the driver said. She told Israeli television that the whole bus remained silent except for a mother who told the driver that Inbar can wear whatever she wants. She said she felt totally humiliated and she posted what happened to Instagram so it doesn’t happen to others. The bus company apologized, but this is hardly the first time this public shaming of women is happening in today’s Israel. The fact that Inbar is speaking up and publicizing her story is the glass half full here. But, according to this week’s What Matters Now guest, attorney Susan Weiss, men are increasingly emboldened to marginalize and sexualize women -- even as avenues for the protection of their rights, such as the Supreme Court, are being shut. "We do have this dichotomy in this country, we have this situation where women can be fighter pilots but they can’t get divorced,” said Weiss. The founder of the Center for Women’s Justice joined The Times of Israel this week in Jerusalem to analyze how the status of women has changed since the current, right-wing, and highly religious, government has taken office. Spoiler: it’s not good. We also talk about the new “Barbie” movie and what message Weiss took away that makes her feel bold. So this week, we ask attorney Dr. Susan Weiss, what matters now. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Center for Women's Justice founder attorney Dr. Susan Weiss. (Rachel Markowitz Bader)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. Over 30 years ago, American political consultant, James Carville quipped during former US president Bill Clinton's successful 1992 presidential campaign, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Today, a growing chorus of Israeli economists are echoing this phrase while attempting to pause the government’s judicial overhaul legislation in the hopes of maintaining Israel’s up-till-now flourishing growth. “We are now at a crossroads and I’m extremely concerned. But when I look back I think we’ve done tremendously well and that’s why I think we have so much to lose," Prof. Karnit Flug, a former governor of the Bank of Israel, told The Times of Israel this week. Today, Flug is a Vice President of Research and the William Davidson Senior Fellow for Economic Policy at the Israel Democracy Institute and a professor in the Department of Economics at the Hebrew University. Flug is hardly alone in her concerns: This week, the Bank of Israel issued its Financial Stability Report for the first half of 2023. It warned that growing and prolonged uncertainty around the implications of the controversial legislation poses a threat to the country’s financial system and economy. In our talk, Flug gives concrete examples of what she and other analysts are seeing, right now. So this week, we ask Prof. Karnit Flug, what matters now. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Karnit Flug is a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, vice-president at the Israel Democracy Institute and former governor of the Bank of Israel (courtesy Israel Democracy Institute)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. This week, the Knesset passed the first contentious judicial overhaul bill into law. So, six months after getting perspective from philosopher Dr. Micah Goodman in the inaugural What Matters Now episode, I went back for more. “Two constitutional instincts have been unleashed and are clashing with each other: The Israelis who want to be empowered through government versus the Israelis who want to be protected from government. I think that’s what’s happening in the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and all over Israel as we’re talking,” says Goodman, the author of the best-selling “Catch-67” and “The Wondering Jew.” His book, “The Last Words of Moses” recently hit shelves in English. For much of the past six months, Goodman has been performing a unique kind of reserve duty: speaking with people from all sides of the judicial overhaul conflict, from teams of politicians during the negotiations at the President’s Residence — at the request of President Isaac Herzog — to squadrons of pilots who are on the brink of refusing service -- again, at the request of the IDF. In keeping with this Tisha B’Av week, this is an in-depth and quite sober conversation. But, as you will hear, Goodman is, as always, a dedicated optimist. “I think the cynics will determine what happens tomorrow and next week, but I think it’s the optimists who will determine what will happen next year and two years from now,” he says. So this week, we ask philosopher Dr. Micah Goodman, what matters now. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Philosopher and public intellectual Dr. Micah Goodman (Yonit Schiller)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish world — right now. What is the tipping point between democracy and dictatorship? Why do some nations fall under one supreme leader’s sway? And what actually is the perfect storm that can turn a thriving democratic nation into a totalitarian nightmare? “Economic ruin, war, massive immigration, no money, no water, no nothing... this is a recipe for a strong leader to take over and for the army to have a coup d’etat,” according to Dr. Yonatan Freeman, our guest on this week's What Matters Now. Freeman is an international relations and media expert, who lectures at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem on national security, government and politics, Israel’s relations with the world and civil-military relations. This week, the Brothers in Arms protest group is signing on thousands of IDF reservists to a document objecting to the Israeli government’s judicial overhaul, stating “We will not serve in a dictatorship.” At the same time, hundreds are marching from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to build a tent city near the Knesset ahead of next week’s fateful vote on the Reasonableness Bill. All of this is to prevent what they see as steps leading to a dictatorship. However, unlike most Israelis you meet today, Freeman is passionately optimistic about the strong state of Israel’s democracy. So this week, we ask Dr. Yonatan Freeman, what matters now. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: International relations expert Dr. Yonatan Freeman lectures at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. (Jenny Pepperman)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish world — right now. Since 1981, the archetypical image of an archaeologist has included a wide-brimmed brown hat, a brown leather jacket — and, of course, a bullwhip. This week, with a new Indiana Jones film having hit screens across the globe, we wondered how this Hollywood legend has affected the careers of the actual, digging-in-the-trenches excavators here in Israel today. So we met up in Jerusalem with Prof. Aren Maeir, who recently published an essay, “On My ‘Colleague’ Dr. Jones and His ‘Publications’” and discussed how archaeology has shifted from the first Indiana Jones installment until today. “I think this has nothing to do with archaeology, and if anything, I would say it’s almost anti-archaeology in many ways, but, it has brought archaeology to the public’s interest in a very very significant manner and numerous archaeologists in the field for the last several decades have come to the field of archaeology because of the Indiana Jones movies," said Maeir, the head of Bar-Ilan University’s Institute of Archaeology and the longtime director of The Tell es-Safi/Gath Archaeological Project. After watching the new Indiana Jones film, "Dial of Destiny," we ask Prof. Aren Maier, what matters now. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Prof. Aren M. Maeir at the Tell es Safi/Gath excavation, summer 2021. (courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish world — right now. This week, the Knesset’s Constitution Committee restarted deliberations over pieces of judicial overhaul legislation after compromise talks in the President’s residence broke down. 75 years after its foundation, Israel’s rules of procedural governance are still unclear, and clearly hot-button issues as the country heads into a 26th week of judicial overhaul protests. But from the first announcement of the judicial overhaul in January, our guest this week, Prof. Yedidia Stern got to work: In cooperation with other former heads of law schools and under the aegis of President Isaac Herzog, they came up with a first compromise solution — which was turned down. Today, he’s bring to the podcast a partial solution, what is called a thin constitution. Stern, who is now the head of the Jewish People Policy Institute, talks about the procedural constitution as well as earlier attempts in Israeli history to write a constitution and why they didn’t work out. But when, several months ago Stern brought the first potential judicial overhaul solutions to Justice Minister Yariv Levin, he didn’t receive the welcome he’d been expecting. "I formed a group of 10 law professors, trying to figure out a professional solution to this situation and we met with Simcha Rothman, and we met also with [Justice Minister] Yariv Levin. So when Yariv Levin, first meeting, entered the room, he gave us a big smile... he looked at me, pointed with his finger and told me, 'The whole thing is because of you, Prof. Stern.'" Find out how Levin's former teacher was an impetus for his judicial overhaul work today as we ask Prof. Yedidia Stern, what matters now. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts.  IMAGE: JPPI head Prof. Yedidia Stern, a leading Israeli legal scholar. (Courtesy JPPI)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish world — right now. On March 22, 2022, four Israelis were murdered in a stabbing attack in Beersheba. In the same week, a terrorist shot and killed five civilians in Bnei Brak. Days later in Hadera, another terrorist attack occurred in which two Border Police officers were killed and 12 civilians were injured. After this bloody week, the IDF initiated Operation Break the Wave, which the army defines as “a counterterrorism operation conducted to thwart future attacks and apprehend those involved in terrorist activities against Israeli civilians.” It’s been 15 months since the operation's launch and again this week Israel was rocked by a bloody week, including the killing of four more citizens in a terrorist shooting. So we reached out to Brig.-Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser. He is the former head of the research division in the IDF’s Military Intelligence division and former Director General of the Israel Ministry of Strategic Affairs. Among his other current roles, Kuperwasser heads up The Institute for the Research of the Methodology of Intelligence. And at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) think tank, he specializes in the security dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. According to Kuperwasser, the current flare-up of Palestinian armed violence is not coincidental, but the fruit of a carefully cultivated extremism that surrounds Palestinians on all sides. And the region's many terror groups are all too ready to embrace any volunteer. “That’s why I’m totally against this idea of lone wolves. These are not lone wolves. These are wolves that were bred by the incitement that comes from all these places. And once you prepare them mentally to be a wolf, eventually they are going to carry out a terror attack,” said Kuperwasser on Wednesday. In this week of yet another surge in terror, we ask security expert Yossi Kuperwasser, what matters now. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Brig.-Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, the former head of the research division in the IDF’s Military Intelligence division and former Director General of the Israel Ministry of Strategic Affairs outside the Nomi Studios in Jerusalem, June 21, 2023. (Amanda Borschel-Dan/Times of Israel)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish world — right now. This past weekend, Israel marked a tragic milestone: In the first half of 2023, over 100 Arab citizens have died by violence. Just like its manifestation in every community throughout the world, this scourge has many faces — organized crime, domestic violence, random acts of anger, and more. But according to polling by the Abraham Initiative, for several years running, members of Arab communities have said that the issues that most concern them are crime and violence, well above civil status, racist legislation and the stalemate in the peace process. However, many Arab citizens of Israel feel that the Jewish state just isn’t putting the resources into fighting the wave of violence in a long-term, comprehensive way. "People are talking about it as the violence in the Arab society. First of all, it’s the violence in the Israeli society," said Prof. Mona Khoury, the Vice President for Strategy and Diversity at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Khoury, a full professor at the Hebrew University School of Social Work, sat with The Times of Israel in her Mount Scopus office this week. Much of her research focuses on children and adolescents' deviant and delinquent behaviors. But instead of merely studying the phenomena, she has concrete suggestions for breaking the cycle of violence. This week, when all eyes are finally on the uptick of violence in Arab communities, we ask Prof. Mona Khoury, what matters now. The following transcript has been lightly edited. IMAGE: Prof. Mona Khoury, Vice President for Strategy and Diversity, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. (Sharon Gabay) What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish world — right now. Eleven years ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered his much-quoted "Iranian nuclear duck" speech at AIPAC warning against United States plans for a nuclear deal. Fast forward to today and we hear reports that the United States is now looking for a “less for less” deal to stave off that Iranian duck’s final launch. This week alone, Iran made international headlines as it claimed it had developed a hypersonic missile capable of traveling at 15 times the speed of sound. We were likewise told that Iran will head a naval alliance in cooperation with other Gulf states. And we heard that Iran is set to reopen its embassy in Saudi Arabia. There are new truces in the region and a re-embrace of Syria in the Arab League. And that’s just the beginning. This week, Dr. Jonathan Spyer, the director of research at the Middle East Forum and editor of Middle East Quarterly, gives us a whirlwind tour of the new alliances threading through a tangled region. A freelance security analyst for Janes Information Group and a columnist at the Jerusalem Post, Spyer is also an on-the-ground journalist who has entered Syria, Lebanon and Iraq numerous times and is the author of the 2018 book “Days of the Fall: A Reporter's Journey in the Syria and Iraq Wars.” And so this week of increased news out of Iran, we ask Jonathan Spyer, what matters now. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Dr. Jonathan Spyer on a reporting trip in Mosul, Iraq, September 2017. (courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish world — right now. On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened his cabinet meeting with an announcement that his government will draft a decision to establish a new ministerial committee -- that he will head. In his remarks, Netanyahu stated, “The fight against the cost of living tops our government's list of national priorities. We will take determined and strong action to lower prices in all areas." Our What Matters Now guest this week points out that this new Netanyahu-led committee is perhaps the fifth such task force the government has established to study the cost of living since 2011. But lawyer and "people’s lobbyist" Rachel Gur is ready to take up the fight to lower Israel's outlandishly inflated prices. Gur moved to Israel from the United States at age 17 and served in the IDF Spokesperson's Unit. After demobbing, she earned an L.L.B. and B.A. in political science from the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya and an L.L.M in Legal Theory from New York University Law School. (She also married The Times of Israel's senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur.) Like any reputable lobbyist, she knows how to walk the halls of power: From 2011 until a few years ago, Gur served in senior positions in the Israeli government. Today the Director of Public Policy for Lobby 99, Gur is an expert in the fields of Israeli legislation, regulation, and public policy. But what makes Lobby 99 different from other pressure groups is that we, the people, set the agenda. This week, as the cost of living is again on the cabinet’s agenda, we ask Rachel Gur, what matters now. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Rachel Gur, Director of Public Policy for Lobby 99. (courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. This week, Jews all over the world will mark the holiday of Shavuot by reading from the Book of Ruth. In this biblical tale, disaster and famine strike and an elderly widow called Naomi loses her two sons. Childless, she tells her daughters-in-law to return to their parents’ homes in Moab and says that she will make her own way back to her family in Bethlehem. One daughter-in-law, Orpah, regretfully leaves. The other, Ruth, says the famous lines, “Where you go I will go, and where you slumber I will slumber. Your people will be my people and your God my God.” And with that, she joins the People of Israel and eventually becomes the ancestor of the much-heralded King David. The Book of Ruth was written about 2,500 years ago. However, argues our guest this week, it couldn’t be more relevant today as a model of “creative halacha.” Israel Prize-winning Bible scholar Prof. Yair Zakovitch joined The Times of Israel this week in his Hebrew University book-lined office to discuss the societal context of the Book of Ruth and the halachic “problems” it solves. The author of best-selling works on the Bible was born in the pluralistic northern city of Haifa in 1945 and joined the faculty of Hebrew University in 1978. When awarded the Israel Prize for Bible in 2021, then Education Minister Yoav Gallant said, "Yair Zakovitch is one of the most original Bible researchers in the country and the world." To bring the Bible to the next generation, Zakovtich helped found the Hebrew University's Revivim program, a prestigious teacher-training program for outstanding university students, who sign on to teach in state schools post-graduation. In our in-depth conversation on the Book of Ruth, we hear how the scroll's author — in opposition to the writers of the contemporary prophets — offers a scripture of compassion in solving that era's challenge with intermarriage. We also hear about today’s rampant biblical illiteracy and why it is immensely important for secular Israelis to readopt the Bible for themselves. This Shavuot week, we ask Prof. Yair Zakovitch, What Matters Now. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Prof. Yair Zakovitch in his Hebrew University of Jerusalem office, May 23, 2023. (Amanda Borschel-Dan/Times of Israel)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. On Thursday this week, tens of thousands of marchers -- including several government ministers and MKs -- marked the 1967 reunification of Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty with participation in the annual Flag March. While most of the masses sang, danced, and yes, caused a ruckus through the Old City’s Muslim Quarter, much like every year in the recent past, at times parts of the mostly under-30, largely male crowd acted like a tinderbox eager for a spark. What was different this year is a group of left-wing activists blocked a main artery from the West Bank bloc of Gush Etzion to prevent marchers from reaching the capital. Perhaps taking a page out of the judicial overhaul protests, they stood with massive banners, chanting, "Fascism will not pass; the marchers will not pass." This push-pull political situation in Israel is the stuff scholars of contemporary history dream of. And for Dr. Sara Hirschhorn, an American historian and public intellectual who focuses on the Israeli ultranationalist movement, a research visit to the Holy Land couldn’t have been better timed. Hirschhorn is currently an inaugural fellow at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Center for Antisemitism Research and an instructor in Jewish and Israel Studies at Rutgers University. In addition to her research into Israeli extremism, she also focuses on Diaspora-Israel relations and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Her first, award-winning book, "City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement" (Harvard, 2017) will soon be followed up on with an in-progress manuscript entitled "New Day in Babylon and Jerusalem: Zionism, Jewish Power, and Identity Politics Since 1967."We sat together this week and in our wide-ranging conversation, we discuss the increasing extremist symbolism of the Jerusalem Day Flag March. We also drill down on how Israel’s far-right parties are now considered mainstream as part of the Knesset coalition. And, we discuss how by simply envisioning what the world could look like the day after peace breaks out, we may actually get there. This week we ask Dr. Sara Hirschhorn, What Matters Now. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Dr. Sara Hirschhorn in the Nomi Studios in Jerusalem. (Amanda Borschel-Dan/Times of Israel)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. Israel stands unified this week as hundreds of Gaza rockets rain on the country. Unusually of late, even Israel’s political echelon has put aside its differences to stand together during the IDF’s Operation Shield and Arrow. That’s really good news for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose own coalition has increasingly taken to covert -- and overt -- threats against the stability of his government. But even after this conflict with Palestinian Islamic Jihad is put to rest, Netanyahu still has a battle on his hands: He must pass the budget or, as mandated by law, see his government topple. When the budget does pass, and most think it will, only then will we see where the prime minister really stands on hot-button issues such as the judicial overhaul legislation package, according to senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur, our guest this week. “One of the terrible costs Netanyahu will pay for suddenly being in control again, for being in a position where his own coalition partners can’t topple him and demand from him everything they want and embarrass him, shatter his popularity and just destroy everything for him, is that the buck stops with him,” said Rettig Gur on Wednesday. We sat down during a pocket of tense calm, just before the rain of rockets began. In our in-depth conversation, we speak about how Israeli leadership fares under rocket fire — for better and worse. We then turn to Netanyahu’s next operation, the budget, which has a fast-approaching expiration date of May 31. In this week of rare political and national unity, we ask Haviv Rettig Gur What Matters Now. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Times of Israel senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur at Jerusalem's Nomi Studios, May 10, 2023. (Jamal Risheq/Israel Story)  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. The Knesset reconvened this week and anti-judicial overhaul protestors ramped up their demonstrations with Thursday’s nationwide Day of Disruptions. While these protests were going on nationwide, a panel appearing on Israel’s Channel 14 talked about the upcoming protest outside former Supreme Court president Aharon Barak’s house that night. Barak, the panel agreed, is the puppet master who is pulling all the strings in the anti-judicial overhaul movement. He is to blame for the mess the country is in and only if Barak agrees to the reform, they said, will all protests stop. Even as Fox News captures headlines throughout the world for skewed coverage, Israel’s version, Channel 14, is slowly capturing an increasingly larger audience. So, I sat down this week with Zman Yisrael editor Biranit Goren to make sense of Israel's Hebrew-language media map. A three-decade veteran of Israeli journalism, Goren started out as an investigative reporter at the Ha'aretz group, moved on to become the news and magazine editor at Yedioth Aharonot and then editor-in-chief of Ma'ariv's website. Goren also crossed into the tech world, developing and maintaining dozens of media websites -- including The Times of Israel and Zman Israel, where she is also the editor-in-chief since its foundation. Now celebrating four years, Zman Israel, The Times of Israel's sister Hebrew website, covers politics, economy, environment, diplomacy and the rule of law. With a staff of highly experienced journalists, the current affairs website focuses on investigative reporting, exclusive news and in-depth analysis. In our in-depth discussion -- recorded on World Press Freedom Day -- Goren explains the lay of the land in Israel's Hebrew-language media and suggests that all of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s three ongoing court cases are tied to its control. In this week of dueling narratives, we ask veteran journalist Biranit Goren, What Matters Now. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Zman Yisrael editor Biranit Goren at an event celebrating ToI's 10th anniversary, May 1, 2022. (Ariel Jerozolimski)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. National Resilience Minister Yitzhak Wasserlauf announced Wednesday that he will advance legislation to make Zionism a “guiding and crucial value” in government decision-making. But what exactly is Zionism? In this week of Memorial Day for Israel’s fallen and Independence Day, we invited Prof. Gil Troy to The Times of Israel’s Jerusalem office to discuss the nationalist movement's ever-shifting role in the Jewish world. Among his other scholarly pursuits, the American historian has written several books on Zionism, including 2018's "The Zionist Ideas; Visions for the Jewish Homeland — Then, Now, Tomorrow," and is currently re-releasing early Zionist thinkers’ works. During our conversation, Troy speaks about "coming out of the closet" as a Zionist after many years on faculty at McGill University in Montreal. We speak about the changing definitions of Zionism, past, present and future, including the increasing lack of Zionism and pro-Israel support among Diaspora Jews. In a Zionist emotional roller coaster of a week, we ask Gil Troy, What Matters Now. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: McGill University History Prof. Gil Troy in The Times of Israel's office, April 25, 2023. (Amanda Borschel-Dan/ToI)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. This episode is being published during a uniquely Israeli window of time that occurs between Yom Hashoah — Holocaust Remembrance Day — and Yom Hazikaron — our Memorial Day for fallen soldiers. This is a liminal space naturally inhabited by our What Matters Now guest this week, former director general of the Justice Ministry Emi Palmor. A specialist in international human rights and government policy, she is the daughter of Holocaust survivors and — when not lecturing at law schools and leadership programs, or concentrating on her part-time work on the Facebook Oversight Board — she is also the volunteer head of Natal, an apolitical nonprofit organization that specializes in the field of war and terror-related trauma. This week, headlines were again made about looming judicial overhaul legislation, this time, regarding a potential legal counsel bill that would make ministry legal advisors a discretionary role in ministries. As she is a 24-year veteran of the Justice Ministry, six of which she spent as its director general under several ministers from different parties, we, ask Emi Palmor, What Matters Now. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Former Justice Ministry director-general Emi Palmor is now a member of the select Meta Oversight Board and head of the nonprofit PTSD organization Natal. (courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. This week, like every week, antisemitism has captured media headlines around the world, ranging from "'Death to the Jews' chants heard at Berlin rally" to "Bone-chilling antisemitic display in Poland sparks condemnation."  These modern iterations of antisemitism are, of course, of concern to Israel’s national Holocaust memorial museum Yad Vashem. But it was yet another headline this week that caused Yad Vashem head Dani Dayan to speak out, "'Polish propaganda': Critics assail deal to resume Israeli youth trips to Poland." As a guardian against the distortion of Holocaust memory, in the past year, the Buenos Aires-born Dayan, a former head of the settler movement and a past Consul General of New York, has spoken up in several other cases, including when Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban made comments this summer that evoked Nazi ideology. Speaking with The Times of Israel on Thursday, Dayan says, he sees results. This week, days before Israel marks Yom Hashoah, the national Holocaust memorial day we ask Yad Vashem head Dani Dayan, what matters now? What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Dani Dayan in the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem (Alex Kolomoisky)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — except this week. Ahead of Passover, as some Jews all over the world change sets of dishes, blowtorch their stoves and, of course, cover every last counter and corner with aluminum foil, we wonder: when did the practice of this crazy religion get its start? So I invited Ariel University's head of the Institute of Archaeology Prof. Yonatan Adler to our Jerusalem office to speak about his new book, “The Origins of Judaism.” In our lengthy conversation, we hear how he treats the origins of the practice of Judaism as an archaeological excavation, working backward in time to gather physical and textual proof of the observance of the laws and commandments charted out in the Torah. This is a topic that has engaged Adler for well over a decade -- including his doctoral research for "The Archaeology of Purity" -- and he continues to explore it through his Origins of Judaism Project. Adler, who obtained rabbinical ordination through the Israeli chief rabbinate in 2001, treats this question through a scientific assemblage of data points collected throughout the centuries and the guiding archaeological principle that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." While Adler hasn’t yet found evidence for foil-covered kitchen counters, at the end of our discussion he does speak about the earliest evidence for the observance of Passover, and that matters now. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. Image: Ariel University's Dr. Yonatan Adler. (courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. Suddenly, about three months ago when Justice Minister Yariv presented the judicial overhaul package, it seemed like everyone in Israel's pro-reform camp began speaking about Canada as a justification for the coalition's controversial bills. That made this week’s What Matters Now guest, former Canadian Justice Minister Irwin Cotler, take notice. Cotler joined me at The Times of Israel's Jerusalem offices this week to discuss how the use of Canada as an example in support of the judicial overhaul package is basically "fake news." The veteran human rights lawyer discusses how Canada worked through its own constitutional crisis in the 1980s, how Israel is setting itself up for trouble with the International Court of Justice and his fervent hope that the Jewish state will reach 75 with a consensual, ratified People’s Constitution. In a week in which hundreds of thousands of Israelis spontaneously took to the streets to vote against the judicial overhaul with their feet, find out What Matters Now to international legal authority Irwin Cotler. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a new weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. On Thursday, Israelis watched as Shikma Bressler, a world-renowned physicist, was arrested during the nationwide “Day of Paralysis,” a day of ramped-up civil protests against the government's judicial overhaul. Bressler, who is also one of the top leaders of the grassroots protests against the widespread changes to the judiciary, was dragged toward a police car as bystanders shouted, "shame, shame, shame." Following Bressler's short detainment, social media lit up with the news and, among other responses, Labor leader MK Merav Michaeli tweeted, “In a normal country Shikma Bressler would be given the Israel Prize.” I met with Bressler, 42, at her Weizman Institute office in Rehovot on Wednesday this week to hear how the scientist, a co-founder of the Black Flags protest movement and head of a collaborative project with CERN, originally activated her activist gene. We hear what she sees as the next steps in stepping up civil disobedience, even as she believes we're already in a form of a civil war. With her mild, almost professorial manner, she explained that Israel is quickly nearing the point of no return. That things are much worse than most international observers can imagine. During our lengthy conversation, Bressler also laughingly told me that three years ago in her initial protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, she coined the chant “De-mo-crat-ya.” This week, we ask Dr. Shikma Bressler, What Matters Now? IMAGE: Physicist Dr. Shikma Bressler, co-founder of the Black Flag protest movement. (Eldad Rafaeli, Photoactive)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a new weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. Wednesday night on primetime news, Israeli President Isaac Herzog presented his long-awaited "People’s Framework," a platform meant to be the basis for working toward a compromise on the judicial overhaul. A few hours later, the platform was rejected by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and judicial overhaul legislation continues apace. This week on What Matters Now, we learn how the new legislation could affect issues of religion and state. We hear from attorney and Reform Rabbi Uri Regev, the head of Hiddush: For Religious Freedom and Democracy, which describes itself as "a non-denominational, non-partisan Israel-Diaspora partnership uniting people across political and religious spectrums." Before founding Hiddush 12 years ago, Regev served as president of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, a global umbrella organization of the Progressive, Reform, Liberal and Reconstructionist movements, and was the founding chair and executive director and legal counsel of the Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC). Prophetically, back in 2015, Regev told The Times of Israel -- after facing off and winning a Supreme Court case against the future MK Simcha Rothman, the author of much of the judicial overhaul --  “it starts and ends with people fighting for the Declaration of Independence.” This week, we hear What Matters Now to religious rights activist Uri Regev. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. Image: Attorney and Reform Rabbi Uri Regev (far right), head of Hiddush: For Religious Freedom and Equality, in the Israeli Supreme Court. (Courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a new weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. As Israel celebrated Purim this week, putting on costumes and trading sweet treats with neighbors and friends, we took a brief, humorous break to speak with Benji Lovitt and Joel Chasnoff, comics, educators and speakers who recently launched a new book, “Israel 201, Your Next-Level Guide to the Magic, Mystery and Chaos! of Life in the Holy Land," written to mark Israel’s 75 years of existence. “Israel 201” (Gefen Publishing) is Chasnoff’s fourth book, and Lovitt’s first, and the 265-page book is an ode to life in Israel, with all its ironic, annoying and heartwarming aspects. It's a comic -- at times -- and in-depth primer to some daily aspects of life in Israel that are rarely discussed in book form. And as Israel grapples with the vagaries of the planned judicial overhaul, a new government and its 75th birthday, we talk about their path to this manuscript and What Matters Now. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a new weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. On Wednesday, stun grenades, tear gas, water cannons and horse-mounted police were deployed against Israelis protesting the judicial overhaul. Images of a wall of citizens of all ages holding Israeli flags, standing defiantly opposite a line of mounted armed law enforcement headlined Israeli media and were seen all over the world. These images are galvanizing, and to many, terrifyingly indicative of what will follow once the government’s reforms are passed. Because despite the massive protests, according to many experts including The Times of Israel’s senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur, they’re sure to go through. This became more clear when, on Wednesday night, Israelis who had seen liberal Tel Aviv in turmoil that day, tuned in to primetime news at 8 p.m. to see whether this increased violence and chaos on the streets was a watershed moment. Would it prompt Prime Minister Netanyahu to slow down the judicial overhaul that was rocketing ahead through the Knesset even as tear gas was deployed on Israeli citizens? Netanyahu, like a father chiding his miscreant children, compared the anti-overhaul protestors, who are stopping traffic and disrupting the nation, to those rampaging Israelis who had torched the Arab village of Huwara on Sunday night. Netanyahu is clearly determined to charge ahead with the overhaul package — even while parts of Israel are burning. So this week, we ask Rettig Gur, how did we get here and What Matters Now? What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a new weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. A year into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is Israel maintaining its policy of neutrality? Is the Russian presence in Syria still a good enough reason for the Jewish state to decline underdog Ukraine’s repeated requests of anti-missile defense systems? To find out answers to these questions, I turned to Middle East and Russo-Ukraine expert, Ksenia Svetlova. Svetlova immigrated to Israel from Moscow at age 14. Later, as a fluent Arabic-speaking journalist, for years she was able to use her Russian passport to report from areas most Israelis will never see in the Middle East. In 2015, she renounced that Russian passport and stepped away from journalism to join the Knesset in the Zionist Union party, headed by Tsipi Livni. Svetlova served there until 2019. This week, a year into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I made Svetlova a cup of hot tea in Jerusalem and I found out What Matters Now ahead of a new phase of the war in Ukraine-- and the legal battlefield here in Israel. Tune in to the podcast episode to hear diplomatic correspondent Lazar Berman weigh in on Svetlova's statements. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. Image: Ksenia Svetlova in the West Bank (courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to What Matters Now, a new weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. On Monday, tens of thousands of Israelis took a day off work to protest outside the Knesset against the proposed judicial overhaul that was -- at the very same time -- being discussed at a stormy session of the Constitutional Committee inside. The crowd was a sea of blue and white Israeli flags. Mostly secular, they sang, shouted, laughed and cried together against the bills that were, despite all their raucous energy, indeed passed for preliminary readings. Many in Israel who support the judicial overhaul say that by adopting practices from other countries’ judicial systems, they are bringing the country in line with the standards of the international community. Many who oppose the legislation do agree to a need for reform, but say they are frightened that in cherry-picking from around the globe -- an override clause from Canada, a law from Norway and elements from the United States -- we will be headed toward a “Frankenstate.” In 2013, Princeton University Prof. Kim Lane Scheppele coined the visceral term in her article, "Not Your Father’s Authoritarianism: The Creation of the "Frankenstate.'" In that essay, she writes, “A Frankenstate is an abusive form of rule, created by combining the bits and pieces of perfectly reasonable democratic institutions in monstrous ways, much as Frankenstein’s monster was created from bits and pieces of other living things. No one part is objectionable; the horror emerges from the combinations.” This week, I made my way to the heart of old Jerusalem to the Israel Democracy Institute where I asked IDI vice president Suzie Navot, professor of Constitutional Law, what could happen if other legal systems are grafted on Israel’s judiciary. Born in Uruguay, Navot made aliya to Israel at age 14. A polyglot, she has taught at the Sorbonne as a visiting professor as well as on the faculties of the Striks Faculty of Law at the College of Management and the National Security College in Israel. Navot specializes in constitutional law, law of institutions, parliamentary law and comparative constitutional law, which gives her unique insight into what could happen if indeed this global mosaic of legislation does pass. After this tempestuous week, we hear What Matters Now to leading Israeli legal expert, Prof. Suzie Navot. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Vice president of the Israel Democracy Institute Prof. Suzie Navot at the IDI, December 2022. (Michal Fattal/IDI)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to our second episode of What Matters Now, a new weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. In a rare moment of agreement, Israeli media from all sides of the political spectrum is closely following the proposed legislation for judicial overhauls — some of which will have their first preliminary votes early next week. And while almost everyone seems to agree that there is a need for a judicial overhaul, many ask, why so extreme and why so fast? For weeks we've reported on protests in the street, sharp rebukes from legal experts, and businessmen threatening to take their money elsewhere. The President of Israel Isaac Herzog waded in and asked legislators for a pause for reconsideration and potential compromise. But one who doesn't think the overhaul is all that radical is the Member of Knesset who wrote the bills that are being determinedly pushed through, Simcha Rothman from the Religious Zionism party. For the past decade, Rothman, a lawyer by training, has worked towards this legislation through his advocacy work at Meshilut, the Movement for Governability and Democracy. A fixture in the halls of the Knesset, Rothman has written books and lobbied for what he terms a stronger democracy -- through a rebalancing of power from the Supreme Court to the Knesset. A member of Knesset since 2021, Rothman is clearly one of the most driven lawmakers in the new coalition. As the chair of the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, he is fast-tracking these first points of reform, which include judicial appointments, curbing the Supreme Court’s test of reasonability, a slim override clause and severely limiting the High Court of Justice’s ability to strike down Basic Laws. This week, days before a first vote on Monday for two proposals, I made my way through the labyrinth of the Knesset to speak with Rothman and hear why these reforms, and why so quickly. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: MK Simcha Rothman gives his first remarks at the Israeli Knesset in Jerusalem, August 3, 2021. (Noam Moskovitch/Knesset Spokesman)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to our inaugural episode of What Matters Now, a new weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World -- right now. Now, I don't know about you, but even for newshounds like me, sometimes the 24/7 headline barrage zooms by so fast that I feel like I don't catch all the nuance. There are so many hot-button issues that understanding the arguments for and against them feels like a Herculean task. So each week, we'll sit for an in-depth conversation and find out what matters now to one journalist, thinker or newsmaker. For this first episode, I turned to philosopher and author Dr. Micah Goodman. While his books are read by the country's leaders, he's made a career of explaining Israel and all her nuances -- even to Israelis themselves. Goodman is the author of the best-selling "Catch-67," as well as "The Wondering Jew" and several surprising bestsellers on canonical Jewish texts, including works on Maimonides. For this perplexed journalist, understanding this moment in Israel meant having tea with my friendly neighborhood philosopher. What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week on Times Will Tell, host Amanda Borschel-Dan takes you with her to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem to view for the first time seven new contemporary art sculptures in an exhibit called Disrupted Layer. The seven pieces were all created by artist Zohar Gotesman, who was inspired by archaeological artifacts from the museum’s collection. They are distributed throughout the archaeology wing, much like stops on a treasure map. As you’ll hear, some pieces blend in more than others. Gotesman and Borschel-Dan were joined by the exhibit's co-curators, Sally Haftel Naveh and Tali Sharvit, whom you’ll also hear during this slightly longer-than-usual podcast in which we tour the exhibit and match first impressions with the artist's real intentions. Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Curator Tali Sharvit (from left) with artist Zohar Gotesman and co-curator Sally Haftel Naveh clown around next to the first of seven contemporary art sculptures inspired by the Israel Museum's archaeology wing. (Zohar Shemesh)  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this week's Times Will Tell, we speak with Ariel Leizgold, cocktail master and one of the founders of the Bellboy Group, a hospitality and bar firm with six bars in Tel Aviv, one in Berlin and plans to expand. Leizgold talks about growing up in his Russian-Israeli family, where hospitality and vodka --along with mayonnaise -- were regularly featured, but his medical professional parents never expected him to work in the service and hospitality industry. He discusses the early days of cocktail making in Tel Aviv, when customers had to be convinced to try something more daring than vodka mixed with Red Bull, and what it means to bring the Tel Aviv bar experience to the globe. Finally, Leizgold mixes his favorite cocktail of late, a Boulevardier, and shares his recipe: Boulevardier        Glass: CoupeGarnish: Absinthe spray on glass, large chocolate diamond, black ribbon on stemMethod: Throw30 ml rye whisky20 ml cognac    20 ml amaro20 ml sweet vermouth15 ml Campari Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Ariel Leizgold of the Bellboy Group pours a cocktail (Courtesy PR)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week on Times Will Tell we're speaking with Shalom Simcha Elbert, head of research and development at OCD, recently named Israel’s best restaurant at the 2022 Israeli Kitchen Awards, sponsored by American Express. The name (an acronym for obsessive compulsive disorder) refers to the meticulous care that the culinary team, led by chef Raz Rahav, pours into each dish of the nightly tasting menu served to every diner. The Jerusalem-born and raised, Italian-trained Elbert found his way to the world of fermentation in Italy and now handles that process at OCD, which prides itself on being a zero waste restaurant, where all parts of every ingredient are used, often fermented for use in the restaurant's pantry.  When an OCD grower had an overflow of apricots, the restaurant took them all, fermenting, curing, making hot sauce, baking into bread and bringing that conversation to the open bar where all 23 diners are seated each night, in constant conversation with the chefs cooking right in front of them. "We tell the story of what's going on," said Elbert.  IMAGE: OCD's head of development Simcha Shalom Elbert in front of OCD in Jaffa (Courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week on Times Will Tell we’re speaking with Prof. Alvin Rosenfeld, the director of Indiana University’s Center for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism. Prof. Rosenfeld founded the Jewish Studies program at Indiana University some 50 years ago and served as its director for 30 years. But retirement has eluded Rosenfeld and in 2009 he founded the Center for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism after observing the rise of anti-Jewish hostility all over the world. "The last time I saw Elie [Weisel] shortly before he died, he was very downcast... He looked at me and he said, 'I've failed... Look at the rise of antisemitism today.' So he thought, I thought, we all thought that the more people come to know about the persecution and mass murder of the Jews the more reluctant anyone would be to speak hostilely against Jews in the public sphere. But we were simply wrong," said Rosenfeld.  And while early in his career he was able to concentrate on poets William Blake and John Wheelwright, Prof. Rosenfeld’s recent work deals with antisemitism, Holocaust literature and memory, including the 2011 book “The End of the Holocaust," and the 2021 collection of essays “Contending with Antisemitism in a Rapidly Changing Political Climate.”  Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Indiana University Prof. Alvin Rosenfeld, December 2022. (Gale Nichols)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week's Times Will Tell is a recording of a recent sold-out Times of Israel live event in Jerusalem, featuring an English language screening of the award-winning "Cinema Sabaya" film followed by a conversation with filmmaker Orit Fouks Rotem. "Cinema Sabaya," starring Dana Ivgy, tells the story of Arab and Jewish female municipal workers who take part in a video workshop, documenting their own lives and viewing each others’ — challenging their beliefs in order to get to know one another. Fouks Rotem spoke with Times of Israel arts and culture editor Jessica Steinberg about the making of the film, her casting of mostly unknown actors who had a lot of freedom with the script and her goals in making this movie about women of different stripes. As the Best Picture winner in the Ophir Awards, Israel's version of the Oscars, "Cinema Sabaya" automatically became Israel’s selection for consideration as a foreign film nominee at the 2023 Academy Awards in the United States, a voting race that Fouks Rotem describes as well. The following transcript has been very lightly edited. Times of Israel: This week's Times Will Tell is a recording of a recently sold-out Times@10 event, a screening in English of “Cinema Sabaya,” the award-winning Israeli film that is Israel's choice for an Oscar foreign film nomination, followed by a conversation with director Orit Fouks Rotem, at Jerusalem's Yes Planet. Have a listen and enjoy. I'm very pleased to introduce Orit Fouks Rotem, the director of Cinema Sabaya, which won the Ophir Award, Israel's Oscar for Best Film, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress for Joanna Said, Best Costumes and Best Casting. Cinema Sabaya is the underdog film that unexpectedly swept the awards, automatically making it Israel's selection for consideration as foreign film nominee at the 2023 Academy Awards in the US. It's also Orit’s first full feature film, one that she worked on for eight years. She's a graduate of Jerusalem's Sam Spiegel Film School. And we considered showing this screening there in the new arts campus where they have a screening room that fits 120. That's the largest one, but it wouldn't have fit all of you. So it’s a good thing that we did it here at Yes Planet. It's very good to have you here and we're going to have a little conversation that we’ll also open to some questions from the audience.  I know your mother was involved in the initial idea. So if you could tell us a little bit of the story of how it came about and how your mother was involved in it from the very start. Orit Fouks Rotem: So thank you for coming and taking the time to watch the film. Yeah, so my mother is the advisor for women's issues to the mayor of Hadera and she was a participant in a group like this, like you just saw, she studied stills photography with Arab women in the area of Hadera. And I just finished film school and looked for an idea for a film and she told me about the course and I thought it's very interesting platform to discuss a lot of subjects through women and through women's eyes. And then I started making those kind of groups as research for a few years. Tell us how you found your first group. That's a great story. So I wanted to make this kind of group and I didn't really know what I'm going to do, so I just went to Acre because someone told me, you should go to Acre. There are a lot of Jewish and a lot of Arab women. I just walked in the street and asked women if they want to study how to use the video cameras. And they looked at me like I'm crazy. And then I went to this small shop and this woman there told me, go to this place. There are women meeting there once a week. It was like a shelter and I offered them to teach them a course of video filmmaking and they said yes. And then I just went there once a week for a while and actually made up this course that you saw in the film. And on the way I thought, maybe it can be also a documentary. But then I understood that many of the things that came up there, I wouldn't be able to use them in a documentary. So I decided to go with my first plan and make a fiction film. But take this conflict for this character that I wrote based on me, of course. And that's it. That's my mother's. So your mother helped get you started. Art imitates life. Life imitates art. You wrote the film, you were thinking about it as a documentary, but ended up making it into a feature film. Tell us a little bit about why you wanted those elements of truth and reality as opposed to full-on fiction. For me, as a viewer, when I believe what I see, it touches me. And if I don't believe it, I can understand it intellectually, but I don't feel it. So for me, it's the most important thing to do is to make this believable. And that was the way I think, to make it believable. Because a lot of people ask me after the film if it's a documentary or if it's a fiction film, mostly outside of Israel, where they don't know that I've been any of the actresses. And for me it's the best compliment because it means that they weren't sure if what they see is real life. Talk about the actors a little bit. Dana Ivgy, the main character, plays Rona, the filmmaking teacher, is a very well known actress who actually was up for two of the awards in September. Both this for this film and for another film. But she is the most well known actor in the film. The rest were some of them had never acted before. Correct. And some of them just hadn't really acted a lot. Can you tell us a little bit about the casting process, how you found these women, who they are in real life? So all of them are actresses except for Liora Levi who really lives on a boat and I found her through my script advisor, who told me I just have to meet this woman to take her to my film. And then I met her and wrote her in after that. So she is the only one who's not really an actor. Did you have to convince her? It was her dream for a long time to be in the film. In the beginning, I wasn't sure if she can act and I also made auditions for her character. It's really funny to think that someone else could be her. So yeah, she's one of a kind and all the others have something to do with acting. Some of them did, like, commercials and Joanna Said, this is her first film and she studied it for a semester in the Hazuti, and she did some theater, but not in a professional way. All the rest are actresses, not so known, but Amal Murkus, who's the singer, is really known. You and I spoke about what you call the trick of the story, which is that most of the film takes place in this one room and the other scenes that we see are brought from the videos that the characters that the women made from their own homes. So tell us a little bit about that, how you came to decide that that was going to be the setting and also how did you make those films? So the film they're bringing into class is of mostly the women themselves shot the videos. I went with them to locations that we found and we brought actors like the one who cuts his fingernail is my landlord because in the same day there was an extra that was supposed to come and he didn't show up. They thought, who can be her husband? They needed to have the location. We're paying those people. So I just called him and luckily he didn't cut his nails before and showed up. He's Jewish. My landlord got money for this. He didn't take it from the rent. And Yulia Tagil, the actor who plays Yelena, she really lived with her mother at that time and she's divorced and it's really her daughters in the film. So we used reality sometimes, but she's different. We did a mix of the real life and their true emotions. Were they okay with that? Was that something you had to discuss? As far as I discussed with each one of them, some of them didn't want to bring, so it was their choice. Some of them don't share. Some of them don't share at all.  Yeah, like Nahed. I found that in every group I made, always there was one that didn't share. And she also suspects Rona’s intentions so that also gives her a reason not to share. Right. She's suspicious the whole time about what's really happening there. Yes. You told me that Dana Ivgy sometimes filmed. She filmed all the way. She held the camera, right. And she kept it going. And in the end we decided to use her footage only in three parts of the film. But at the beginning I didn't know. I thought maybe a lot of the film would be from her perspective. What about the women as a group? The cast as a group, obviously the experience changed them in terms of making a film. For some of them, it was their first time. But did it affect them as a group? As a community of people together? So yes, of course. It was really interesting to see they didn't know each other before. We didn't rehearse. We met twice in order to read the script together, so they will understand everything. But we didn't do the scenes, we didn't rehearse because I wanted to keep everything to the shooting days. We had twelve shooting days only. Tell everyone where the room was, where you filmed it. We filmed in Ben Shemen. It's a boarding school. And we filmed in a place where Shimon Peres got married. It was just an empty hall. When we came down and we fixed everything, the curtains, the color of the walls, which was, like, abandoned. In the weeks since the elections, we're feeling the effects of what's happening around us. When did you actually film this? In what year? 2019? Right before COVID closed everything. Three months before COVID and what were you looking to bring to the table in terms of your Arab Jewish subject matter? How deeply did you want to get into it? Did you get into subjects that you didn't anticipate beforehand? My main motivation was to bring deep and full feminine characters to the screen. It was more important for me than the conflict, in a way, because I saw many films about the conflict that tells you what to think. And I didn't want it to be this kind of film. I wanted it to be more open. So the main thing will be the women themselves. And of course, when I go to Arab and Jewish women together, I have to put the concept on the table because it's very not to do that. It's there. So I did it, like in the beginning of the film, just to get rid of it and not to get rid of it, but to finish with it and to make room for these women. Because I think it's even more political when you identify with the character that you will never be identified, maybe before and when you see the film and not to have an agenda that tells you what to think about it. Did you have any reactions as you went through the editing process from your cast or from your editing team of putting more in, putting less in? How did you react to that? I didn't really open it to the cast, but, yeah, it was a dilemma how much to put it, because what you see in the film, the political part, was in the shooting much longer. We decided to put it there, but don't let it take over everything. And Amal Murkius is a really political figure and it was important for me to be loyal to what she wanted and to give her a place to say what she thinks and also to the actor that plays Esti. They felt like they represent all the Jewish and all the Arabs in Israel. So I tried to tell them it's not true, but in a way it's a bit true because I see when people see it outside of Israel, mostly they look at this like, as a representation of what is happening. So you just came back from a road show in the States showing the film, working on exposing it in terms of the Oscar nomination. What was it like to show it to audiences out there? What were their reactions to this film that is presenting what is happening here, but not intending to necessarily. A lot of questions were about the election and what's going to be in Israel now. They reacted like in Israel, everyone has a character that he likes the most. And the questions were a lot about the work in progress and how we got this authenticity that there is in the film. So it wasn't really different in that part. Okay, so you are in this race to try and win the Oscar nomination. Yes, we are at the voting starts in the 12th.  Next week. Next week. No pressure. No pressure. If you know any Academy members, please tell them to see the film. It's amazing how many people know Academy members. It's a really small world. Tell us a little bit about the process. Now, there is 93 films from all over the world. And in the 12th until the 15th, they're voting for the 15, the short list, and after and who goes to the shortlist, competes to be in the five, and then you're a nominee. Each Academy member gets, like, I think, eight films. And you can vote for 15 films to rate 15 films. And, yeah, it's supposed to be equal, but I don't know how it really works. It's a lot about money. I see. And big companies like Netflix that run the film can have more impact. And the Jordanian film now gets a lot of attention to our government, thanks to them. Right. So, of course, you want this nomination, but at the same time, how does it actually feel to be in this place? In other words, it is your first feature film. It did do incredibly well. It's a film that really catches people emotionally and through the vibrancy of what we see on the screen. Where are you right now in terms of the Cinema aabaya effect on yourself? Where do you want to go with all of this besides obviously wanting a nomination? That would be pretty nice. Yes. In a way, all the time you want more and more. In a way, I want it to end and to have a good memory and keep going to the next film. Okay. Well, we want to see what your next film is. Thank you very much, Orit Fouks Rotem. Thank you. IMAGE: The cast of 'Cinema Sabaya' (Courtesy PR)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We speak this week with clinical social worker Carla Naumburg about her latest book, "You Are Not a Shitty Parent, How to Practice Self-Compassion and Give Yourself a Break,” a self-compassion primer and guide that came out this fall. Naumburg, based in Boston, talks about her own kids and family, using a welcome dose of humor and practical advice, hammering home the need to accept oneself and not feel guilty, because most parents are generally doing their best. She wants people to acknowledge how tough parenting can be, and to treat themselves with kindness, following through on various strategies in order to care for themselves. Naumburg offers some personal examples of how she practices self-compassion in her own life. She also talks about modern parenting as opposed to how our parents and grandparents parented, and how that's changed over the decades. "Just because things are really hard, doesn't mean I'm doing it wrong," said Naumburg. "It's just how life goes." The following transcript has been very lightly edited. The Times Will Tell: I'm here today with Carla Naumburg, a clinical social worker, writer and mother. She is the author of four books, and her writing has appeared all over the place, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Huffington Post, CNN, and she lives outside of Boston with her husband and two daughters. Hi, Carla. Carla Naumburg: Hi, Jessica. Carla's latest book is, "You are not a Shitty Parent." She writes with great clarity about the conundrum of parents who often feel that they are shitty parents, parents who aren't succeeding at caring for their kids in the way that they should. And I guess the first thing I wanted to talk about is we don't usually curse on The Times Will Tell. And I wanted to ask if you thought twice, three times, at all, about using the s-word, because, of course, it's something that you use throughout the book.  This is a great question. And for this book, there was really no question about using the word, because this book follows on the heels of my previous book, "How to Stop Losing Your Shit with Your Kids." So the decision was really about whether or not to use the s-word in that title. And I decided that for a few reasons. One, from a very pragmatic perspective, if you look at the New York Times bestseller list, there's a ton of books with profanity in the titles. It just seemed to be a moment in time when readers are really resonating with this kind of casual, everyday language, which is what I think a lot of us are craving right now. But also, when I wrote "How to Stop Losing Your Shit with Your Kids," I wanted to convey through the title that I'm not here to judge parents. I'm not some expert saying, I never do this and you should never do this, and I'm going to talk down to you and give you all this judgmental advice. I was trying to convey the sense of, like, you know, what if we were like two parents sitting down for a cup of coffee, just talking about how hard parenting is? So I wanted to use the language and the voice that I use all the time in my life, right? And I swear. And I'm funny. And so that's what I hope comes through in the book. Absolutely. It definitely does. And I think it's a funny kind of thing. I always think about my mother when I use profanity, which I do a lot, and I try not to use it with my kids, and then I say, really, what is stopping me? Now let's go back into other the main subject of the book, really, which is about self compassion for parents. Carla, it would be extremely helpful for you to define self compassion as you do in the book.  Yes. So the way I think about self compassion and I'm following on the work of giants in the field, like Kristen Neff and Christopher Germer and others who I just want to acknowledge have done amazing work in this area. It's really about noticing when you're suffering and instead of beating yourself up or feeling guilty, you're going down a shame spiral. It's about treating yourself with kindness and understanding. And so the three specific practices I look at in the book are once you've sort of noticed that you're suffering, which is a thing that many of us don't do right. We're so busy in our daily lives, we've got kids to pick up from school. And as you and I are talking right now, Jessica, there's like Thanksgiving to prepare for and we've got all the moving pieces and then doctors appointments and do we pay the bills and what's going on with the mother-in-law, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We don't even notice when we're suffering, when we're in pain, either emotionally, physically, psychologically. So the first step is to just take a moment and kind of notice that. And then we can look at these three specific strategies I outlined in the book, which is connecting to the people we love, to the people who will be compassionate with us. So that moment of connection. Also curiosity, kind of getting interested in what's going on for us and what do we need and how can we take care of ourselves. And then also just kindness, really choosing not to beat ourselves up when we're struggling or suffering, and instead treating ourselves with the kindness that we would offer to a good friend or a loved one. So that's how I think about self compassion in the book. OK, let's talk about real life for a second. You are the mother of a 12-year-old and a 13-year-old. I am the mother of two 14-year-old boys. And I was thinking a lot about this from my own life, but I wanted to ask you, how does self compassion as a parent enter into your own life really of late? Like the last couple of weeks, the last day, the last month. Over the long term, self compassion changed everything about parenting for me. But let's so the last week is a great example. I live on the East Coast of the United States, and I had a very close family member in a medical emergency on the West Coast just last week. I flew home on a red eye two days ago. So at the very last minute, I had to rush to get a plane ticket, hop on a plane, kind of dump everything on my husband. But he's a fully involved parent, and he stepped up, and it was seamless. He's the primary caretaker of our children at this point, which is amazing. But I missed some things that my kids were doing that I wanted to be there for. I wasn't able to be there for my husband during a time when he needed some additional support, and I felt like I wasn't. My gut initial thought was, I am not enough. I am failing everyone. I'm failing my family on the West Coast because I wasn't there for them all along. Like, I chose to go away. I'm failing my family on the East Coast because I'm bailing on all these plans. And what I had to repeatedly say to myself and what I was able to say to myself because I've been practicing self compassion for so many years is life is really hard. I'm talking to a bunch of Jews. Why do I need to explain to them that life is hard? We all know life is hard, right? Life is so stinking hard, even on the good days, and then these things happen that just kind of blow everything up and make it almost intolerable. And I have to keep reminding myself that just because things are really hard doesn't mean I'm doing it wrong. And just because I'm missing these moments with my kids or I'm not being as present wherever as I would like to be, it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with me. It's just how life goes. And it's okay if this feels hard. It doesn't mean I'm a problem or what I'm doing is a problem. But I will tell you, just because a few years ago I didn't have that language at all, I didn't have that perspective, I would have thought, I screwed this up. This is all falling apart because I'm doing it wrong. If I planned better, if I thought I had better, if I had blah blah blah, whatever better, this wouldn't be this way, which is, by the way, total BS. That's not true. Like, crazy, awful things happen that are completely beyond our control. So self compassion really made the last week, which was a very hard week on many levels. It just made it a little bit easier and less stressful, and in this day and age, easier and less stressful in many cases. Is amazing, right? That's like the best we can hope for. So this past week my self compassion was on high practice recently. We think about our parents and how they dealt with these situations. We all know that life was different then. No seatbelts, there was no Netflix, there was no cable, there were no cell phones. Do you look at that generational difference for yourself and in terms of your writing when you think about all of this, do you think about us now compared to your parents, your grandparents, in terms of parenting, in terms of self compassion? Absolutely. And I think that keeping that bigger perspective in mind is so important because we humans, this is a very human dynamic, tend to think of our imperfections or our problems or our struggles as very personal. Like I am the cause of this when in fact sometimes it is, right? Sometimes it's a personal problem that really has to do with our very unique situation. But more often than not it's a societal dynamic, a societal cultural context that we are taking personal responsibility for. And so, you know, I was talking to my husband's grandmother, so my daughter's great grandmother who is going to be, God-willing, 100 in a couple of months and she's amazing. And I was trying to explain this book to her and she's very with it, right? I was trying to explain my book to her and she was like what are you talking about? The idea that parents would think of themselves as shitty parents and have this total shame cloud that we're walking around in was very foreign to her. And I think that's also true for to some degree to our parents generation. And it's not that they didn't care about parenting, of course they cared about parenting but they were getting a very different message. First of all, I think so much of our shame and blame of parents today comes from comparison, right? And people, humans have been comparing themselves to other people since time and memorial. But back when we were growing up, the parenting comparison happened primarily in our neighborhood. It was the person next door. And so yes, there were always the people who were richer and better resourced than us and there was always that mom who life looked so perfect and whatever. There was always somebody to compare yourself to but at least it was generally happening in the same context. Like you have the same options for school and you have the same snow days to figure out and you had all the same stuff whereas now we are comparing ourselves, thanks to social media and reality TV, we are comparing ourselves to literally every other person on the planet, and we're comparing ourselves to lies about their lives. So I got hooked on a reality show about some family with like 13 kids. It's like mom and dad and 13 or 14 kids. They have no help in the house. They have no help. They're homeschooling these children. And not once in like two seasons do you see the mom lose her shit, right? And at first I was like, oh my God, I can barely get my kids off to school, at the school I send them away to for like six or seven hours a day. And I only have two kids and I'm losing it. And then I had to step back and be like, oh, wait, this is not a reality show. It is labeled as reality, but it's, you know, it's actually TV, just TV. It's entertainment. And then we also see Gwen Paltrow. All of a sudden, we know how Gwen Paltrow parents. We know that. So this is a person with unlimited resources. Right. And I am comparing myself to what I think is her reality, but clearly not because I have no business knowing what Gwen Paltrow's reality is. But like, I am comparing myself to what I think is going on with her. And of course, I'm going to come up short. She has all this staff, right? I have two cats. They're not helpful. My husband is very helpful. That's true. I do have an extremely helpful husband. But I think that's part of just one example of the generational differences and why there are many more, but that's one example of why I think it's actually in some ways harder to be a parent now than perhaps it was when you and I were growing up. You write about the different inspirations that you have yourself. Meditation. I don't know if Buddhism is a personal one. Brene Brown, therapy. You wrote in Kveller about how the book is an exploration of Hillel's teachings. If you sort of break that all down, what really comes to the fore for you? What are some of these teachings that have really helped you personally and professionally in coming up with these concepts and moving yourself forward and writing this book?  So if we need the tagline about, like, my inspirations, I'm just a Jewish mother who overthinks everything, right? That's really what it boils down to. Overthinking is like, my favorite hobby. What I tend to think about when I'm looking for inspiration and I'm not a practicing Buddhist, but I think Buddhist psychology is some of the wisest stuff out there. It's really brilliant. But when I'm looking for inspiration. Here's what I'm looking for. I'm looking for ideas and practices that align with my values, some of which, many of which are drawn from Judaism. And I'm also looking for something that's practical, pragmatic, doable. Right? So I remember reading a parenting book years ago that was like, you should spend ten minutes a day alone with each of your kids. And at that point, I only have two daughters. It's not that many in the grand scheme of things, but they're only 20 months apart. And I think when I read that book, they were like, that's hard, right? And you have twins, what am I telling you for? But I think at that time, the girls were like, in preschool, and I'm thinking, what am I supposed to do? Like, lock one kid in her room and tell her I'm playing with the other kids? Like that advice. And I was like, I don't understand, because the girls are so close. And even now, if I said to my daughters, who are twelve and 14, I'm going to take one of you out for ten minutes and we're going to do something fun together, and the other one has to stay here and what, stare at your phone? I don't know. Like, it's bonkers, right? So I'm always looking for advice. Look, I love evidence-based advice. I love when there's research. And I also realize that the most important research we can do is in our own home, on our own family, trying to see if things actually work for us, because research is one important step. Evidence from the outside world is really important, but also, like, being real about what works for us. But I need advice that is pragmatic, that is doable, that is workable. I can handle it. It doesn't make my life harder. And also that aligns with my values. So that's really where I come from. But yes, Brene Brown is my favorite pop culture social worker. She's extremely wise and she writes a lot about sort of shame and vulnerability, and I think her stuff is really brilliant. Okay, take a step back for me into what made you decide to take your professional advice and knowledge and to write books. Self-help books and parenting books are great, and people sometimes need them. They need to sit down and be able to say, okay, who is going to be able to help me to see myself through this situation? And on the other hand, of course, sometimes you look at the pile of the shelf or the pile of self-help books, of parenting books, and you say, how am I going to take this advice and apply it into my life?  That is a brilliant question. And I share the same ambivalence about parenting books and parenting advice and self-help books and self-help advice as you do. On the one hand, I've read some parenting books that have been incredibly useful and helpful, and on the other hand, I've had more than my share of parenting advice that left me feeling overwhelmed and confused. And I probably would have been better served by going and sitting on my porch and reading a juicy romance novel and calming myself down so I could go back and be present with my kids. So I think it's a great question. Look, I have always wanted to write. I remember being like six years old and being in a diner with my grandfather and being like, Poppa, I'm definitely going to write a book because, you know, you're smart if you write a book. And he's probably thinking, yeah, there's a lot of morons who wrote books, but he said to me, you should definitely write books. So even before I understood why, it's always been a thing I've wanted to do, I picked college majors and I picked a master's program and I picked my doctor program because they all required a significant amount of writing because I love it. The writing has always been my way of exploring my own experience, and trying to get a handle on what the hell I'm doing. And so I started writing books when I became a parent. Not necessarily because I felt like I had the answers to give other people, but because this was my journey to finding the answers for myself and it was a journey of doing this work for myself. So in both "How to Stop Losing Your Shit with Your Kids" and "You Are Not a Shitty Parent" it really draws from a lot of work I did personally around mindfulness work and self compassion because after a lot of searching and experimenting that was what I found actually helped me be a calmer, more present, more focused parent. Because I struggle hugely with anxiety. This is a big part of my life and the anxiety impacts a lot of different parts of my parenting. And so I've developed these practices over the years that I kind of have to stay on top of so that I'm not an anxious, irritable mess with my kids. So that's just one example. But these really came from my own love of writing and my desire to share what I've learned with other people, but also in the writing process, I learned a lot about myself. And you've got the humor, of course, which does not hurt in a parenting self-help book. It's a very, very helpful part of it when you literally laugh out loud in this passage or another because you're saying, that's funny, and that is something that you, the reader, have experienced. If I couldn't laugh about parenting, I don't have anything left. Like, humor is in life and everything. My number one coping mechanism. And I will say that you might experience as Jessica, but my 14-year-old occasionally has no sense of humor whatsoever. She'll get it back. But for me, humor is, if we can't laugh at this, what are we going to do? It's so absurd. Does everyone stop you in the neighborhood, at the supermarket, at the pharmacy, and say, Carla, this is the situation I'm dealing with right now. What should I do? Do you get these questions all the time? I don't, actually. Thankfully, I do every once in a while. My family and I, before COVID we used to do this thing, you might remember, it was called going out to restaurants where you actually go into a building and someone else cooks for you and does all the dishes, and you just pay the money. Oh, my God. It's amazing. And every once in my family and I would be out, and somebody would, like, hear my name and be like, oh, you're that person. But no, people don't generally ask me for parenting advice, which is good, because my books aren't really about how to parent, right. They're about how to take care of yourself as a parent. So when people ask me something like, how do I get my kids to put their shoes on? I often say, like, Good luck, godspeed, and let me know when you figure it out, because that's not the kind of parenting advice I have. But I will say you know what? If you want to talk about parenting, let's grab a cup of coffee and sit down and laugh, cry into our mochas, because that's what I can do with you. Something that I really liked were your maps of compassion. Yeah, it's something that made me think a lot about how I take care of myself as a parent, how I take care of my partner, my husband as a fellow parent, friends as parents. I was curious if that was something that came later on in the process of researching and writing this, or if that was out there for you early on. You mean the crap maps? Yes, crap maps and compassion. I think that's something that came up for me in a conversation with someone once. What I was trying to explain was it was actually before I wrote this book, and I was thinking a lot about the ways in which we really treat ourselves so poorly when things go wrong, when we're feeling lost and confused in parenting and we don't know how to solve a problem or how to support our children. And we end up saying things like, god, I'm a shitty parent, I'm really screwing this up. And we sort of think everybody else knows how to handle this problem and I don't. And in that moment, I was seeing, what is the metaphor for this? I love thinking in metaphors. I think they're very useful, especially when you're talking about hard stuff. And I was imagining somebody who's out for a hike and they get lost and they're really confused. I have a whole little funny vignette about this in the book, and a park ranger comes up and hands them a map, and the map just says, you're lost and you suck. Right? Like, that's essentially what we're doing to ourselves and self compassion is when that whole script kind of gets flipped and we're having a hard moment. We're lost, we're confused. And the park ranger shows up at the map, and the map says, you're lost. It's okay that you're lost. This is a hard trail. Lots of people get lost. You'll figure this out and P. S you're a great parent, right? And so that's sort of the thing about self compassion, is it doesn't really give us the answers. It doesn't say to us, this is how to deal with your child's struggles in math class. This is, you know, the right choice to make when they've been diagnosed with ADHD or whatever it is. Self compassion doesn't do that. But self compassion calms us down, helps us kind of clear out all this really judgmental crappy thinking that we have so that we can focus, we can get a little clarity on the situation. We can think creatively about what to do. Right. If you're out for a hike and you're so stressed out about how did you get lost in what a terrible person and parent and partner you are, you can't think clearly about what to do next. You're not going to come up with any creative solutions. But when you're calmer, when you're not beating yourself up, there's a lot more sort of head space and heart space to get a handle on what to do next. IMAGE: Clinical social worker and writer Carla Naumburg (Courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We speak this week with chef Nomi Zysblat, creator of Paletas, a Tel Aviv-based company that makes natural popsicles with fresh, seasonal fruit and ingredients, inspired by the Mexican version of this frozen treat that she discovered while living in New York. We discuss the inspiration for Paletas, driven by seasonal fruits and flavors, and the timing of Zysblat's venture just a decade ago, just as Israel was deep diving into vegan and farm-to-table trends. Zysblat talks about what it's like to run a small, growing business out a small Tel Aviv factory and her expansion into stores countrywide. She also discusses the learning curve with customers, figuring out what both kids and adults want from natural, artisanal popsicles. We chew over favorite flavors and some of Zysblat's inspired creations, including the Sufganyeta for Chanukah, jelly doughnut popsicles, made from jelly doughnut-flavored milk and filled with homemade strawberry jam. IMAGE: Nomi Zysblat, Israeli creator of Paletas, homemade natural popsicles See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this week's Times Will Tell, we speak to Eytan Peled, an emerging Israeli singer-songwriter whose first song, "Where Are The Days?" went viral, placing him at the top of the Israeli charts. That attention put the US-born Peled in the perfect situation to write songs -- primarily in English -- for breakout Israeli artists Mergui, Noa Kirel and others. He also writes and sings in Arabic, a language he first learned in high school, then perfected during his army service and while living in a northern Druze village. We listen to Peled's most recent release, "Sakatna," sung by Peled in English and Arabic, with an accompanying video made with star producer Stav Beger and set in a southern Bedouin village, complete with a hip-hop Bedouin dancer. Peled wants to bridge together Jews and Arabs with his music, bringing that message of  Israeli mainstream music. IMAGE: Singer/songwriter Eytan Peled (Courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week's Times Will Tell introduces Lena Glikson, the Russian-born, Jewish music editor who was part of the 2022 Emmy-winning editing team for Netflix's hit series, "Stranger Things." Lena speaks about her work in Season 4's scene featuring Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill," editing the music to picture and helping slingshot the 80s song into a viral hit. She talks about her journey from Russia to the US a decade ago, the distance from her family and friends, and experiencing the onset of Putin's war against Ukraine from afar. She also examines the development of her own Jewish identity as a teenager, discovering and exploring her Jewish roots and facing a turning tide of anti-Semitism in her native land as she left for the US. Glikson talks about Israel, her hopes to work on Israeli films and productions, and her efforts to study Hebrew as part of her own personal journey. The following transcript has been very lightly edited. The Times of Israel: Lena, welcome. We're so happy to have you here with us. Lena Glikson: Thank you, Jessica, for having me. It's such a pleasure to be a part of your podcast. I think we're going to have to start with Stranger Things. Tell us when and how you joined the Stranger Things music crew and a little about development of music for this show. So, season four of Stranger Things is my first season on the show. I've been working as a music editor in Hollywood for the past six years at this point. Receiving this email from David Claude, the music editor for all the seasons of the show, was kind of surprising. And I couldn't even believe it because I actually was a big fan of the show and I watched all these seasons and I was one of the people googling the release date for season four. I literally saw that and thought it was a junk email. That's funny. And, yeah, it was real. And apparently the Duffer brothers were looking for the second music editor because the episodes in season four are so long, many different processes were happening in parallel. So while one episode was dubbed, meaning the sound for the episode was mixed, the Duffer brothers were already cutting and working on the following episode. So poor David, the music editor, would have to be in two places simultaneously. And the Duffer Brothers needed someone who would be actually working with them in the cutting room every single day. And that person was me. And it was just an amazing experience. I was spending a lot of time with the Duffer Brothers and we were working very closely on the music, both the score and the source pieces. And of course, “Running Up That Hill” was one of the songs that we worked closely on and it was just amazing. And they gave me so much creative freedom and just things to experiment with. And they trust me to a point where they can just bring up a few pieces from the previous seasons and tell me, can you cut this one over here or is that one over there? I kind of had to take pre-existing piece of music and then place it in a new scene and actually make it work in that context, which is always a very, very fun thing to do. And the entire crew is just so lovely and amazing. And the vibes you're getting from the show, it's so interesting because these positive, friendly vibes, they actually live in the cutting room, which is a very unique thing, I think, even from my experience. Talk to us a little bit about how the music gets chosen. What is it like to work as part of the music editing team and to make the decisions about various songs? Many of the songs are already scripted. At some point it becomes about licensing. How much money do we have to spend on the music and where can we save a bit if we can pick certain alternatives for some of the songs? But when it comes to big songs, I think most of them are kind of predetermined and it's a combination of director's work and showrunner's work. And we also have our amazing music supervisor, Nora Felder, who helps us providing alternatives for certain songs. And also she does all the licensing for the show. And in terms of picking and choosing songs, basically if we need some options, then Nora would come up with a number of different songs and I would be the person cutting them into the scene. Basically, and showing them to the Duffer Brothers because obviously all the songs are different tempo, different length. And my job, just as a music editor in general, is to make a particular piece of music work syncwise and dramatically within a certain scene and make it all very musical so that it develops beautifully and works with a picture. And then sometimes we're just narrowing down the choice to two or three different pieces and then go from there. I’d like to dig in a little bit to Running Up That Hill from Kate Bush. We're going to listen for a moment to a snapshot of the scene in season four in which Max, played by Sadie Sink, is able to overcome the powerful curse, spoiler alert for those who have not gotten to season four yet. And she's able to overcome the curse by hearing her favorite song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV0RAcuG2Ao It becomes such an indelible moment in the season. I know that that was supposed to be a very, very big moment. And when I saw the song for the very first time, it was instructed and told that, okay, so this is the scene, this is our feature song. Please be super careful about cutting it. Make sure that it all works. And the way it works, really, in the movie world, is that the songs and the music is being cut to picture, and very rarely it works vice versa. So the song always has to be adjusted in one way or the other. And to be honest, there are so many different stories about how the song was picked for the series. One of them is that it was scripted. The other one is that the director of that particular episode, Sean Levy, brought it in. But the way it was originally cut, it was cut by Dean Zimmerman, our picture editor. And it was just a very kind of rough shape of the song. And my job was basically just making it work within the scene and making it develop in a certain way. And we actually even had to adjust the picture a little bit to kind of make the song shine, which happens very, very rarely. It just tells you about how important this song was for the episode and for the season. And for me personally, the other interesting experience was cutting the same song in episode nine during this big epic montage where it's not just the main version of the song, but it's the remix by the artist Totem. And that one was fun because originally in that scene, we were supposed to have the score and then the Duffer brothers just brought it in and said, oh, we have this cool version of the Kate Bush song and it's a remix and let's try cutting it in. And basically I had all the separate instruments and elements for the remix. So just assembling such an epic version of that song for that scene was amazing. And when the Duffer brothers saw it, they really loved it and it was just such a happy moment for me when they actually fell in love with something that I did and I was the first person who kind of tried doing it. So it was very, very cool. And that sequence actually also lives on YouTube, I believe, as a separate video, because, again, it's a very rare thing, I think, when a song and the sequence, the video sequence, they live together and you can actually watch them separately from the episode, which kind of shows that people also like that one and were interested and it was cool reading the comments on YouTube. Let’s turn to you now. You trained in piano and voice and did a lot of classical music training, and then made your way to sound editing. Was that always your goal? Well, as a child, my dream was actually to become a professional singer. And I think I started playing piano mostly because I wanted to be a singer and there was no official way of studying voice back in Russia. And I was always doing the two things in parallel and also because there was nowhere to study jazz vocals or pop vocals when it came to choosing like a career path when I was still living back in Russia. It's surprising and it's a bit weird, but out of all the options that I had, I picked classical music theory. And I think partially it's because my parents are programmers. And there was something about that, just like the specific way my brain works and kind of the logical component to the artistic component. And just that particular major appealed to me simply because it was a combination of both. But my goal was still to become a singer. So that's how I discovered Berklee College of Music in Boston. How many years ago did you come from Russia to the US? Ten years ago. Ten years ago? So not that long. Yeah, but that's still the third of my life. Okay, so most of your education was in Russia, and where in Russia did you live? Voronezh. It's a city really, really close to Ukraine. It's pretty much on the border with Ukraine. I was also considering a Rimon School of Music in Israel and kind of choosing between the two in a way, but also kind of thinking that maybe after a couple of years at Rimon, I would probably be able to go to Berklee. But the thing was that I didn't speak Hebrew, and I thought that that was kind of a bigger issue. I spoke English, so that was one of the main reasons why I actually went to Berklee, just to be able to absorb as much knowledge as I could. Well, what I realized at Berklee was that my dream of becoming a singer was a lovely dream, but I just had way too much classical background to kind of forget about that and only concentrate on performance. And because Berklee has to offer a number of very unique majors, and one of those was film scoring, I felt like that would be an amazing way of combining my more technical and logical side with a very, very creative, orchestral writing and just kind of using all my knowledge, basically. And that's why I came to Los Angeles, because with such a degree, this is kind of the number one place. And because music editing was one of the classes that we had to take as film scoring students, I considered it as one of the options for myself. And the first internship that I found was with the music editor, Nick South. And I already had kind of all the knowledge about creating a score for movies and how it all works and who is involved and had the basic technical skills. But I needed those specific skills for music editing. And my mentor, Nick, taught me pretty much everything he knew and he was just amazing in terms of explaining not only the technicalities, but also the political side of the job because that's another very, very important side of it. What is the political side? A music editor is a person who lives between all the parties involved in creating the music. And we act as some sort of a bridge between the director and the composer and the studio. Our job is to save the composer from being fired or save the movie from all the music being thrown away. And it has a lot to do with just understanding people, feeling the room, making sure you are protecting everyone that needs to be protected, making sure that we stay on schedule, communicating with a movie studio, communicating with the director. And sometimes the composer, let's say, sends me a piece of score. And I know that the director is in a really, really bad mood and I know that I can show that piece of score to the director at the moment. So I need to figure out a way to find the best time to do that. And it's a lot of figuring out what you can say, what you cannot say, how to save this person, how to protect that person, and problem-solving, troubleshooting and just resolving conflicts. I imagine there is a sense of satisfaction from what you do now, even though it is a long road from where you began. Is there? For sure. Of course. I kind of miss the performance element a bit because I just don't have the time to do that anymore. But I feel like there are no skills that are completely abandoned and unused because in one way or the other, even my singing skills, because I often work in musicals and, for instance, now I work on a remake of The Color Purple and there are many, many songs in that movie. So just having that background, knowing about vocal position, knowing about just how to use your voice helps me a lot as a music editor when I'm working on musicals, and of course, all my classical background helps me with the editing bit of it. And yes, it's been a very interesting journey, and I probably could never imagine working in Hollywood and doing what I do when I was little and when I was dreaming of being on stage and performing, but it's still very exciting. There's been a lot of upheaval in the last months, with the war in Ukraine. Where has that put you in terms of your own personal life and what you're thinking about both in terms of career and home? For me, what happened on February 24 when Russia attacked Ukraine was a personal tragedy in a way. I do not have family in Ukraine, but just the fact that the city where I was born is so close to the border with Ukraine and you know, especially in my town, it's actually very hard to say, oh, this person is 100% Russian and that person is 27% Ukrainian. It's all very, very mixed. And I have many friends from Ukraine, and I thought, okay, so now the Russians are going to actually see what happened and what our government is like. But that did not happen. And that made me feel devastated, to be honest. Like the whole world started crashing and burning. And when I was living in Russia. I was kind of suffering a bit with my identity because I was born with my Dad's Jewish last name, which is Glikson. But when I turned three years old, my mom changed her last name and my last name to her maiden name, which sounds way more Slavic. And that's actually still the last name that I have in my passport. Mostly because swastikas were all over the city and antisemitism was kind of flourishing. So I was growing up with this idea that I was Jewish, but I kind of had to hide that from everyone, living in a pretty conservative society where the Russian Orthodox Church is still kind of a big thing, and all the kids in my class were wearing crosses, and kids would ask me, so have you ever been baptized? And I've never been baptized. And it just felt very uncomfortable. And I had this feeling that, okay, I need to hide my identity. And when I became a teenager, that was already in the late 2000s, the climate in the society started changing a bit, and the Jewish community in my hometown started having different activities and celebrating high holidays. So it started to feel like it's not as dangerous as it used to be to be Jewish and to be kind of open about it, but it was still very difficult because we had so many decades of that part of who we are kind of being hidden. And the generation of my grandparents was the first generation who started experiencing that and started hiding their Jewish identity because they couldn't really celebrate any high holidays. That's why the generation of my parents grew up completely Soviet as opposed to having their ethnicities kind of cherished and respected. And when I started feeling more Jewish, that's when I started discovering more things about my Jewish heritage and learning more about the Holocaust, because that's an important part of my family history. My grandfather, he left Poland in 1939, and his family was exterminated in one of the first extermination camps in Poland. So for me, that was this generational trauma that was living very, very deep inside. And for many years, I was reading a lot about it, was reading a lot about the Holocaust, trying to understand that. Circling back to February 24, just from my personal experience, knowing so much about the war, knowing so much about what happened with the Jews and even living in Russia. It's not just me. I have my personal story with the Jewish heritage in the background. But going through the Second World War for all the Russian families was also devastating. And everyone has ancestors who died in the Second World War and served in the army. And it's this huge tragedy, and people all of a sudden were manipulating into saying that, okay, we have such a great past, and we won over the Nazis in 1945, and now we're going to do the same thing again. And for me, the two dots, they don't connect. The Nazis they were fighting against in 1941 to 1945 are not the same Nazis they're fighting against today. And the fact that it was so easy for the society to believe this huge, huge, huge lie just made me feel like I don't feel connected to the place where I was born anymore. Your parents are there? Yes. My dad passed away a couple of years ago, but my mom still lives there. And for me, it's very difficult because, you know, even during the pandemic, it was very, very hard for me to travel just because I'm not a US citizen. I'm here on a work visa. And Russia has a horrible relationship with the United States, so getting a visa in Russia is impossible. All the other countries in the world would only issue visas to their own citizens. And when my dad passed away, I wasn't even able to go back home for his funeral. And just I always feel stuck between all these different factors. And again, like this war in Ukraine, there are so many things that I don't support that have something to do with the politics, of course, and with the government and I can't be associating myself with that place anymore. And because I have so many ties to my Jewish heritage and I've always been thinking about becoming a part of Israel because again, it's a very important part of who I am and my identity. And only when I came to the United States, I felt like, okay, I can finally be more open about being Jewish. When I was at Berklee, most of my recitals were actually me singing Jewish music and Ashkenazi music. Wow. And I would never be able to do that in Russia. And for me, this was an incredible opportunity, just exploring who I am, exploring the music, and I feel very, very connected with that music. You've had a lot of different journeys, this professional journey and a very personal, familial and individual journey. Where does that put you personally and professionally? Right now, I'm kind of at this place with my career where everything keeps changing and I keep seeing different opportunities and everything keeps developing so, so fast. Of course, long term, I would love to work on an Israeli movie as well. I think language is a very big thing, and I am learning Hebrew right now, even though I'm not in Israel. But I do feel like it's a very important thing and it's something that, again, brings me back to my roots and connects me to my ancestors, even though my grandparents, they spoke Yiddish. But still I feel like it's just an important part of who I am. And as soon as my Hebrew basically turns into something that I can use professionally, then it would be much, much easier and more convenient for me and the filmmakers to work on, let's say, Israeli movie. And I know that there are many Israelis working in Hollywood, and I would love to get to know them and potentially collaborate on a project that would actually be amazing. Right now, the world is just changing so fast, and every day something new happens and I'm trying to kind of protect myself, protect my family where I can, and just basically watching the world change every single second. So I hope that very, very soon we'll come to a point where things will stabilize and hopefully the war in Ukraine will stop as soon as possible. And I will be able to kind of take a breather and just absorb everything that's going on and plan accordingly. Right now, everything feels like chaos. Yes. It's hard to avoid that feeling these days. Let's turn back to the beginning of the conversation a little bit and tell us a little bit about your musical dreams. Finding that balance between work that's very, very crazy and very intense and art. Before the war in Ukraine, I also used to write music for a local theater in my hometown, which was an amazing way of just self-expression and artistry. And I do miss that. I don't think it's possible to do the same thing, keep doing it. And especially, again, considering everything else that's going on in the world at the moment, it's just unsafe for both parties, me and the theater I used to work with, to collaborate. But doing something like that and finding the time for it is definitely an amazing thing. And I was also recording songs for those theater productions. And this is kind of the dream job in a way, where you don't have to do it for the money. You can just do it for the sake of artistic pleasure, basically. And, you know, in terms of the movies, of course I can work even on bigger shows. And yes, I definitely have certain topics. Like, for instance, Schindler's List is one of my favorite movies and working with, let's say, Steven Spielberg or working on a movie about Holocaust. Because as I already mentioned, it's a very, very, very important part of my identity. And it's a very unique type of music and type of score that a movie like that requires. And maybe not necessarily even editing the music for a movie like that, maybe writing music for a movie like that, that would definitely be a big dream for me. Lena Glikson, we hope that you get to fulfill these dreams. And final question, next season of Stranger Things, are you working on it yet? Have my fingers crossed! Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you ghttps://vimeo.com/751681395et your podcasts. IMAGE: Lena Glikson, music editor for "Stranger Things" (Courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week's Times Will Tell brings us Nigerian-American filmmaker Ose Oyamendan (pronounced OH-SE), who spent the better part of a decade filming his feature documentary, "Other Voices," in Israel's Sderot and in Gaza, to capture a story that is not often told. The film brings viewers to the unexpected and unusual peace efforts and unwavering friendship between residents of Sderot, Israel and Gaza as the two bordering nations endure ongoing war, animosity and conflict. "People on different sides of a story find a way not to talk to each other," said Oyamendan, who refused to talk politics or edited it out of the film. "When you take the politics out of it, it's a very strong human story." Oyamendan talks about what initially brought him to the region and what it has been like to spend ten years visiting and spending time in the area, getting to know his protagonists, and how they cope with living in the region. Oyamendan is in Israel this week to premiere the film at the Jerusalem and Tel Aviv Cinematheques. "Other Voices" is also being shown on Amazon Prime. The following transcript has been very lightly edited. The Times Will Tell: I wanted to understand what brought you to this region from Nigeria, and what introduced you to the story and the protagonist in it? Tell us a little bit about that, please. Ose Oyamendan: Where I grew up, there were Jewish kids. There were Lebanese kids, Lebanese Arab kids, and we played together, played soccer together, and when we went to high school, they stopped talking to each other, and I was struck by it. I started life as a journalist and I think I subconsciously carried that story with me. And I wrote a short story about two kids who became friends playing football in Jerusalem. Now, I'd never been to Israel at that time and I don't even think I thought I would come to Israel, wasn't on my radar at all. And so in 2010 I went to Haiti during the earthquake and I ran into this Israeli NGO there. Now, I didn't know there was really NGOs there and they told me the politics of it, why they don't announce. Why they don't make it clear that they're Israeli. I'm just explaining that for listeners. As they told me, sometimes if they announced themselves as Israeli NGOs, maybe some people will pull out. So I was staying in this hotel that was the best hotel in Haiti at that time, because we had power for 6 hours a night and I think we had power from six to eleven, So that was where ABC network guys were, CNN network was, so everybody tried to get their work done then. They came to me and asked if they could use my computer because they've not been able to send messages home. And I didn't think I was very approachable, so I thought it was very interesting it's me that they had the chutzpah. So I said, of course. And while they were looking at it, it was like supposed to be a quick thing, but they were there for like maybe an hour or so. So we started talking and I said I wrote this story, this short story. I've never been to Jerusalem. Can you help me with the geographical accuracy? So they read it, they said oh, it's a great story, what do you want to do with it? I said, well, I want to publish it, I want to try to make a film or a TV series one day about something like this, something I'm passionate about. They said there is another story that is true. Have I heard of Gaza? And I said yes. Have you ever heard of Sderot? And I said no. So they are next to each other and that's where the war is fought for the most part. And there are people on both sides that want a return to the old times when they had peace there. And they were very friendly with each other, and they had a group called Other Voices. And this man, Eitan, who was one of the three people there, was one of them. So I said, okay. I said, I love this story. I would like to follow it. I would like to see. I said, can I come? So we communicated by email and then I came, and I was blown away how close they were to each other. And they were talking on the phone to some people there. And I said they genuinely cared about people on the other side. And then I met Natan, who had lost his daughter in this conflict, and he said, I don’t want the other person's daughter to suffer what I've gone through. And so I met a whole swath of people from both sides, and I decided I would love to tell this story. And that's how it started. So that was ten years ago? Yeah, it's very tough to get financing for something like this. I did what a poor filmmaker would do. I have these other jobs that I do, so when I have enough money, I put enough money together to get the crew to come and film, because I wanted to have my very independent, my own observation. And I also decided that I want to know how true these people are. The activists, the protagonists. Because it's very easy to want peace until you lose something. So I wanted to see how committed they were, and I also wanted to go to Gaza. So those days make it longer. I was also struck by how neutral the film was. It felt to me and this is not surprising, really, that it's a relatively small group of activists on both sides. When you compare to the population or even the region where they are, it's small. But I also think one of the reasons why it was fascinating to me is I also felt that a lot of people get lost in the politics of it. And there's this thing that I found, not just here all over the world, like people on different sides of the story find a way not to talk to each other, like they just stand there. And my whole thing for me was when you take the politics out of it, it's a very strong human story, like a very strong, tragic human story. And that's why I said we will not talk politics. Even the people in Gaza, when they will talk about Hamas, I was saying we're going to edit those things out. Because I just felt that the moment you bring politics into it, it just becomes like this fire you can't contain. And of course, there's politics there, but my own passion was to show to people how the kind of life people live there and how people cope with that life. And for me, why it shouldn't be like when you have a child, for instance, and you're not sure if you say goodbye to your child in the morning, you see them in the afternoon. And when I come into Israel at the airport and they said, Where are you going? I said, I'm going to Sderot. They say, Are you crazy? I just feel like we had to get the story of these people trying in their own little to way, live a normal life in a place like this right now. Was Sderot your base for filming? Yeah, because this group are mostly in Sderot. I mean, they spread out around the region, around the kibbutz there, but Sderot was their base and I didn't want to be one of those people with just helicopter in and I want to feel it. I felt I wanted to feel the heat of the other thing and be able to talk about it not with authority, but with some form of knowledge.You must have been caught in rocket attacks as well. Can you talk about that? About staying on both sides of the fence, so to speak? Yeah, I think it was very interesting because we tried for, like, a couple of years to get in [to Gaza] and I could not. I always felt like I don't have a film without going into Gaza. There's many ways to go into Gaza. You have to get Israeli permits, and then you have to get the Palestinian permit. Now, I had an option. I could come in through Egypt, which I thought was easier, but that is not the world of the story for me. I wanted to go because you could actually walk into Gaza. The gate was open, so I wanted to go. So when I went, I had no idea that I needed a permit to go into Gaza. I thought, I just need Israeli pass to go into Gaza. So when I got there, they refused me entry. And they were justifiably angry that I didn't think this was like an anchor, like a country on its own. And I just tried to explain. I didn't know. But I sat there because I was convinced this was my chance to do this. So I tried to find a connection. They were talking about football, and I realized that a lot of them were Real Madrid fans. I followed Barcelona. So we're talking about soccer. So I think we became human. We just became normal people. We could be in Tel Aviv, we could be in Glasgow, anywhere. And then after a while, this man came. I still remember. I can see his face. He came. And the strange thing is, they don't speak good English. I don't speak any Arabic, but we're able to talk soccer. And then this man came. And I said, Are you Real Madrid, too? He said yeah. And then he called me to go and see. So I found that he's the head of the whole place, the whole thing. And I think he just thought I was either crazy or something. I was there for five or six days the first time, so I had to see all my subjects and it’s the kind of things I've never seen. And I tell people it's tough to describe Gaza and I don't want to get into the politics of it, but the human aspect of it. They were free to talk politics or talk about their relationship with Israelis, even people that were subjects of the film. They were very bold people. They were bold to say, there has to be another way. And there are people that will say to me, you put my name in, like, this is what I'm saying. But I think because I come into this as a journalist, my life started as a journalist. And you have to protect your subjects sometimes. And there's so much stuff we have on the edit room floor that are just amazing, amazing revelations and stories, but also it may not be good for them or their families. So we have to trade that a little bit gently to protect them, in a sense. Did you come up against anyone on either side who said, I don't agree with what you're doing? I came against a lot of opposition, but I try not to look at opposition as opposition. I look at it as people expressing their opinion. And one of the things that we do take for granted in the free parts of the world is the fact that we are able to have an opinion. And it's a great thing. A lot of people die so we can have opinion, that we can speak, that we can vote and do all sorts of things. So if you come to me and say, I don't agree with this, and I say, yes, it's fine not to agree with it, but do listen, watch the film, listen to the other side. And I've met people that are so I hate to use the term left or right that are very right. And they watch the film, and you'll see the scales just for life, because they've never understood it like this. They've never seen that world like this, because that world is a very political world that people find themselves in. Like I told you, a lot of people know Sderot, a lot of people know Gaza, but all they know about our world is the few inches of print they read in the newspaper or like, they want to make, and that's it. I want them to be able to show the human side of it, to be able to show people mentally. I wanted to be able to take people into that geographical place, just put yourself there and see the way it is and then decide what to decide. How did the protagonists did they feel about it at first? I would say a lot of the people we talked to, they wanted to tell their story. And because we did it for a long time, so we're able to just take the time, get all these people, and then decide what is the story? I think there were a few people that were a little bit shy about it in Gaza. There were people that I would have loved to talk to, I did talk to, and I felt it may not be too safe, some of the things they said. So we just lose those storylines, right? What happens next with this now? Is this the end of the story for you, or did working on it bring up other storylines here in this region that you think about? I'm actually going back to what I came to do originally, like developing a TV series about two kids that brought it to Jerusalem. I just like this. There's something about Jerusalem that I find. It's such a rich place. It's so rich, it's so historical, and everything is there. So I'm working on this TV series I'm developing this TV series about two kids who brought Jerusalem together for one day with soccer. I like the inner sense of kids. I like the global nature of soccer. And I think it's another avenue to say, just take a look at what can happen. IMAGE: Nigerian-American filmmaker Ose Oyamendan (Courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Israel Philharmonic conductor Lahav Shani speaks with Jessica Steinberg for this week's Times Will Tell episode, ahead of the orchestra's nine-city tour in the US, beginning in November. The tour is the IPO's first since the start of the pandemic, and Shani's first as its artistic director. Shani, 33, is a world renowned pianist, double bass player and conductor, known for his skills as a musician and conductor as well as for the young age at which he's accomplished so much. The rising star also became the chief conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra in September 2018 and the principal guest conductor of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. Shani made his first appearance as a soloist with the Israel Philharmonic in 2007. Six years later, he conducted the debut concert of the Philharmonic’s 2013 season. (That same year, he won the coveted top prize at Germany’s Gustav Mahler International Conducting Competition.) He follows in the giant footsteps of the legendary Zubin Mehta, who led the IPO for nearly 50 years. Shani speaks about the challenges of following Mehta, about conducting his friends and colleagues, and the wonders of seeking new sounds and music. The following transcript has been very lightly edited. The Times of Israel: Tell us a little bit about this nine-city tour in the US, which is your first with the IPO since you just took over as musical director very recently.  Lahav Shani: Well, this is going to be the orchestra's very first tour since the pandemic, and that's a very serious thing for the Israel Philharmonic, because it's an orchestra that used to tour almost all the time relative to other orchestras. I toured with the orchestra before, but not as a conductor, as a pianist, or as a double bass player. On our tour to the Far East in 2010 is when I really got to know the orchestra in Japan, in South Korea, etc. That was also the very first time that I got the opportunity to conduct the orchestra. Wait, how old were you in 2010? I must have been 21. I went there as a double bass player and as a pianist soloist, and Zubin Mehta was still the music director, he just offered me to conduct the orchestra I had never heard. I had just started to study in Berlin the year before, and the musicians really wanted to see if I could really conduct. And so that was really the real beginning of my relationship with the orchestra as a conductor. So now, finally, to go on a real tour and be the music director, and in the US, in fantastic halls, that's a really special moment. You are the official conductor of the Israel Philharmonic. You're also the chief conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic. How does that actually work in real-time?  Well, conductors usually hardly see their own home, unfortunately, that's one of the biggest sacrifices one has to make in this profession. There are 52 weeks in a year, about nine of them I do in Israel, about eight or nine in Rotterdam, and a couple of weeks more with each orchestra on tour. And then the rest of the time, there's a little bit of piano playing. You still have your solo career, you still perform as a pianist, right? I play and conduct. I play chamber music with musicians from my orchestras and with soloists, at festivals, And I also like to enjoy my free time every once in a while. But then I go to Israel, now, for example, to rehearse with the orchestra for concerts in Israel. And then after we've done all the concerts, then we would have a few days to just refresh the repertoire that we're going to take on tour. Because we have played this repertoire before, so it's not like starting from scratch for us. So there's a lot of discussion, of course, about your youth, your age, you're in your early thirties if I'm not mistaken. Yes. You’re the first IPO musical director to be born in Israel, and dealing with this challenge of aging audiences. What does it mean in terms of the Philharmonic repertoire? Everything has to be looked at in the right context. First of all, we're just stepping out of these two years of pandemic everywhere in the world, during which classical music suffered. Taking that into account, the Israel Philharmonic is really blessed with one of the best audiences in the world, and we're already selling out concerts again in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa. This is really a blessing because it's not the same situation everywhere in the world. And our public is really loyal, there are great music lovers in Israel. The orchestra sometimes repeats the same program five, six, even seven times so that our entire Israeli public can hear the concert. So you're repeating it so that everyone can make it to the same repertoire. Exactly. So about three times in Tel Aviv, two times in Haifa, one time in Jerusalem. That's just to play for all of our subscribers. The problem of the age of the audience has been an ongoing thing for decades. Classical music was always something that the younger people didn’t find interesting. The important thing for me is that anyone who has any curiosity for music shouldn't be afraid to come and try it out and not to think that if they don't know enough, then they cannot enjoy it. The idea is that you first need the curiosity, and the music will just take you over if you're really interested, if you allow it, and if you become an active listener. You took over for Zubin Mehta, and I can't imagine what that's like, to follow in those footsteps.  First of all, it's a big honor, no question. Zubin Mehta is, I would say, one of my mentors, one of the musicians that really inspired me to become a conductor in the first place. I've played with him many times in the orchestra, as a double bass player. I played with him as a soloist pianist. I went on tours with him, with the orchestra. So there's a real feeling of being almost colleagues, even when I was much younger. My relationship with the orchestra has been shaped for many years. So it's not like I just came out of nowhere. They kept inviting me back every year as a [guest] conductor, and as a pianist. They liked you? Yeah, they liked me. I liked them. Many of the young musicians in the orchestra are people my age, these are people that I know since childhood. When they named me musical director, it was not the beginning of a relationship, but rather a continuation. It actually feels very natural and very much the right thing to do, and very comfortable. We're very direct with each other, as Israelis are in general. I often get the question, how do you deal with people older than you? Or how do you deal with people who are your friends, and you are supposed to lead them and tell them what to do. This relationship is so clear and direct and natural that I feel very comfortable with all of the musicians, and I feel that they're happy to go together with me and explore everything. What about your multifaceted career? You’re a conductor, a solo pianist, a double bass player. What is that like to be both a performer, a musician, and the one who is guiding the whole show? Well, at the end, it's the same thing. Making music is making music. However, the big difference between conducting and playing an instrument yourself is that when you conduct, you're always dependent on other people. You have your musical ideas, but you can move your hands as fast as you want or as loud as you can. It doesn't make any sound. It's other people that have to like what you do. They have to agree with you. You have to convince them, and then they might play as you think they should. And when you play the piano, it's just you and the keyboard, and that's it. And if you're in good shape and if you practice, there's a good chance that you might be able to make the sound that you imagine. So also, it's very healthy, in a way, as a conductor, to keep this physical contact with the sound, not to forget what it means for the musicians to make those sounds. It's not just that they do what you want and they do what you tell them. They are the ones who express themselves, and they're the ones who make the sound and try their best. So this is really a collaboration in the end. But if you really play an instrument often, then you don't lose this feeling and you don't lose the feeling of what it means to make sound for other people. I like that explanation. And then, given the fact that you have two different orchestras that you work so closely, what is that like in terms of what you produce? Is there ever any overlap? Well, any piece that I take for any orchestra, not just for my orchestra, but also when I'm a guest conductor, it is going to be different than other orchestras. And the rehearsal process, a lot of it is improvisation. You have an ideal way, let's say, in your mind, and the orchestra does something that may be slightly different than your idea, even though they see your body language and you're clear [about your intent], they have their tendencies or their habits, or they want to do something else. And then as a leader, you need to ask yourself the question often, should I just take what I have right now? Is it good enough? Is it better than what I thought? Or is it very far away? You try to stay as objective as you can, also as a conductor, because if you tell the musician in the orchestra, can you play it like that and not another way, there is a very good chance they will ask, why is your way better than mine? And it's a very fair question. So you must be able to convince the musicians why they should play one way or another. Or if you like what they do, also just say, actually I like that better than my idea. Think about film directors, for example. Most likely, they have a very clear vision, a very clear image of the entire film in their mind. But then they're facing these world-class actors. And the actors, sometimes they have their way to say the lines. So there must be very good communication between the director and the actor so that the actor is able to say things as he understands or as she understands, with their subtext. And if the director feels this could work well, then they should let it happen. And if not, they need to be able to guide them in another way. It's exactly the same kind of communication. I like that metaphor. Okay, last question. You obviously have many new beginnings happening in the next month and year, but what are one or two things that you're looking to bring to your plate this year? Well, repertoire is something that we determine one, two, sometimes three years before we actually play it. Sometimes it's a bit annoying because if there is something you really, really want to perform but maybe in three years, you won't like it anymore. Who knows? I want to continue and deepen the relationship with my orchestras. It's true that this relationship goes years back, but as music director, this is just going to be my second official season because my first season had to be delayed during the pandemic. So it's really about deepening these relationships and keep exploring different territories of the repertoire together and keep discovering our sound. The combination of a conductor and an orchestra needs to bring something unique, something that is different, and this is something that is to be discovered. It's not that I can imagine to the last note in my mind and the orchestra has to do exactly what I imagine. This is a process that we need to really understand each other better so that we're completely free to express the music and focus on the music itself and stay in the flow and in communicating it with the public. Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Lahav Shani, artistic director and chief conductor of the Israel Philharmonic, which will head to the US in November 2022 for its first US tour post-pandemic (Courtesy IPO)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We have a musical Times Will Tell this week with Lenka Lichtenberg, who talks about and shares songs from her new album “Thieves of Dreams: Songs of Theresienstadt's Secret Poetess.” Lichtenberg is a classically trained musician who grew up in the Czech Republic. Before eventually settling in Canada, she moved around Europe and dipped her toes in a variety of musical genres. Her eclectic musical background can be heard in her new project, which is based on poems that her grandmother Anna Hana Friesova wrote during the Holocaust -- before, during and after her years spent in Theresienstadt. A few years ago, Lichtenberg came across her grandmother’s two notebooks of poems in Prague while cleaning out her recently deceased mother’s apartment. Sixteen of the poems were turned into songs, eight of which Lichtenberg composed and eight others that were commissioned from Czech and Canadian composers. The arrangements feature 19 recording artists from Canada, the Czech Republic and Germany. The album was recorded and produced by Lichtenberg at her Melody Meadows barn studio in eastern Ontario. In this slightly longer episode this week, we learn about Lichtenberg and her family and hear excerpts from her remarkable album “Thieves of Dreams.” Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Musician Lenka Lichtenberg (Bo Huang)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Adam Duritz has waited decades to play in Israel, a place that he loves, said the Counting Crows frontman in this Times Will Tell podcast ahead of his band's Wednesday night show in Ra'anana, outside Tel Aviv. Duritz visited Israel several times in his teens, hiking through Sinai, working on a kibbutz and later learning Torah in Jerusalem, a "powerful place" for him, he says. Yet Duritz hadn't returned to Israel since then, as he built his career and band, waiting for the right opportunity to make it back to Israel and perform here. The lead singer of the California-founded band, known for hits such as "Mr. Jones," "Round Here," and "Accidentally In Love," credited the physical work he learned on the kibbutz as the foundation for the landscaping and construction jobs that he later did to support himself while building his musical career. He also spoke about his own struggles with religion and faith, and how those issues showed up in his music. The following transcript has been very lightly edited. The Times of Israel: Welcome Adam Duritz to the Times Will Tell, we are very honored to have you with us, and we appreciate you squeezing us into what I know is a busy schedule ahead of your Wednesday night performance in Ra'anana. Adam Duritz: I know I am. I'm very excited to play some place we've never played before. The Times of Israel: It's hard to believe. There's been a lot of preview interviews with you mentioning that you came here and you worked on the kibbutz when you were 18 and you came back to Jerusalem and did a little studying in the holy city. But it has been quite a few decades since you've been in Israel, correct? Adam Duritz: Four, I would think about. Four, yeah. It's been a really long time. The Times of Israel: Are you planning on traveling around for the next couple of days? Are you going to lay low and hang out at the beach? Adam Duritz: Well, I'd like to get a chance to travel around. I really want to go back to Jerusalem because that was someplace I really loved when I was a kid. But I don't really know. It depends on what kind of press and stuff they have us doing. That's the only thing that's going to take up the time. Except for our A gear, has all been in a locker in Liverpool for a year now. So we kind of have to go through that and make sure we have to do some pre-rehearsal with the band and the crew to make sure all the equipment gears. The Times of Israel: It got sent over for a concert that got canceled. And now you're basically doing the tour that you meant to do a while back. Adam Duritz: Because of Covid, I decided to leave it over there rather than bring it back on the risk that we would be able to reschedule the tour. I left it over there because especially nowadays, all the expenses for bands' prices haven't gone up at all, but the expenses are all doubled or tripled freight, airlines, flights, hotels, freight for your gear. All that is double or triple what it was. So I didn't want to waste the money by bringing it all back. There's a lot of things I'd like to do and hopefully I'll get to do some of them. But part of touring is realizing that the gig is everything. The Times of Israel: How is this tour going? I know that you were touring the US and now you're in Europe and you hopped over to Israel, and you have a lot of tour dates all over Europe. What does it feel like to be touring again? Adam Duritz: It's cool. I mean, this is the first gig of the European tour, so we haven't done that part yet. But the shows in America, we did a whole tour last summer and we've been playing gigs off and on this year. It's all been really cool. It's nice to be back playing. The Times of Israel: You've mentioned in a few interviews that it's been 30 years since your first album and that you feel, I guess, a sense of privilege that you guys are still together and that you perform these huge shows, [with] fans that are really excited to see you. Adam Duritz: Not so much that we're still together, but that people are still coming out to see us. You always worry about that because the shelf life of a band is very short, but especially after two years lay off, you really wonder whether things are going to pass you by. But we're still here. The Times of Israel: What was it like getting back onto those stages, getting back together, working together, performing together? Adam Duritz: Well, the same as it's always been. I mean, it's just performing. It's nice to play, you know, I think when you're in a band that was the longest I've ever gone without playing that period during Covid. In my entire adult life, I've never gone that long between gigs, so it was very strange. The Times of Israel: That must be incredibly strange. There are certain songs that are so familiar, so popular, that make people happy. "Mr Jones," "Big Yellow Taxi," "Roundhere." What is it like when you play these songs that you know are beloved by your fans, but that you have to keep on churning out all the time? What is it like to play those songs over again, knowing that your crowd wants to hear them, but knowing that maybe there's other things that you want to focus on more, or maybe not. Maybe those are the songs you always want to bring to your audience. Adam Duritz: If I want to play something else, I would just play it. There's nothing that has to get played every night. The only song that we play every night is "A Long December." And that's because for some reason, that's the only song I never ever get sick of. I don't think there's ever been a night where I didn't want to play that song. I don't know why that is, but I'm never tired of it. Everything else, if there's a night where I don't want to play it, I'm not going to play it. Because I think it would suck to play songs that you don't want to play. The Times of Israel: Really? You would do that to the audience? You would do that to the fans? Not play "Mr. Jones," for instance. Adam Duritz: Yeah, there's been lots of nights where we didn't play "Mr. Jones." I love that song. I love "Mr. Jones," but I want to keep loving "Mr. Jones." I don't want to hate the song. And I would think the quickest way to hating your own music is to play it on nights when you don't want to play it. The Times of Israel: Interesting, given that you've had this long-standing connection to Israel that it took so long to get back here. Adam Duritz: Bands want to go everywhere, but you can't go anywhere unless you have a promoter making you an offer that makes sense. The fact is, there's probably nowhere in the world we don't really want to go. But you just can't go until promoter gives you the right kind of offer. And I don't know that we've had those in the past. This offer was really good. The moment I heard it, I said, absolutely, let's do it. It's taking care of a lot of our European tour because some of the other gigs in Europe are smaller, not as well paying some of them. This is a great gig. I'd like to be able to come back here every few years because to go to a new country and find out that you have an audience where you can go right and play a 6,000-seat arena right off the bat, that's fantastic. I mean, not an arena, an amphitheater. So I don't know about the past, but I don't really remember offers from Israel. The only thing I say is, as soon as I heard this offer, I said, absolutely, let's do it. Okay. I love it here. The Times of Israel: I know it's always a little bit of a pain to come to Israel because of the fact that you have to ship everything over here and then ship it back to Europe. You're not playing in the countries that surround Israel, you're not going to Egypt, you're not going to Jordan, not going to Syria or Lebanon. You didn't get hit with any boycotts or sanctions, you didn't get hit with any criticism of coming to play in Israel. Adam Duritz: No. The only place I really heard about it were in the interviews. But, I mean, I will say that I've been pretty isolated this year because I haven't been out and about very much. Also, we're not exactly the center of the culture right now, so maybe it would be different in that situation, I don't know. But also, like, I'm a Jew. I understand the long tradition of, like, everything is the Jew's fault. I don't really buy it. The Times of Israel: So, talk about that a little bit. Now that you brought it up, what is it like to come back here and to bring the Counting Crows, to bring your people, to bring your band, to bring your bandmates to this place that you connected with a long time ago? What does that feel like? Adam Duritz: It feels pretty cool. It's a really long time ago for me, but there's some pretty powerful memories. I just think for the band, in a lot of ways, you expect your career to be shrinking. You expect to play less and less places every year, so a year where you can come and play, more places to go, someplace new for the first time. I don't think any of the guys in our band, except for me, have been here before, which is pretty rare. This tour,  we actually have three cities we've never played, Helsinki and Warsaw and Tel Aviv. And that's kind of great. It's the opposite direction you expect things to go in the later years of your career. So that always makes me really happy, especially if, considering how big the crowd could be here for us, it's someplace we could come back to. The Times of Israel: Can you share a memory? Adam Duritz: I mean, I was a kid, I went through the Sinai. It was still part of Israel back then. I spent a lot of time in Jerusalem. It was very powerful for me, that city, especially the Old City. I worked on a kibbutz for a little while, working in the apple orchard. I dug crap out of a grain silo. I really enjoyed the work. And it's funny because it kind of prepared me in some ways, because that kind of physical work is what I ended up doing to support myself all the years when I was in the band, at first and in different bands, I was a landscaper and I did construction work. And I think one of the reasons I knew that I was okay doing that kind of work is that I had done it. I had done it over here. I'd gotten up really early in the morning and done hard work all day, and that's kind of how I ended up supporting myself in the early days before the band was successful. But the first place I really did a lot of that was on the kibbutz here. Adam Duritz: I went back again a couple of years later when I was 18 and pretty much just spent time in Jerusalem in that time. A lot of it was also that I was a kid and I liked getting wasted and there was no drinking age over here, and I thoroughly appreciated that at the time. The Times of Israel: I don't know if this is too much of a stretch, but are there any of those early moments and early memories that made their way into your music at any point? Or is there any connection there between what you experienced and what you later started creating? Adam Duritz: Well, I think there's a lot of places where my struggle with religion and faith shows up in my music, and that certainly was a part of my time here. The Times of Israel: It's a pretty common theme coming to Israel, coming to Jerusalem, struggling with where you are in terms of faith. And of course, now you're here for work and you're here to perform and to give interviews and to maybe see a little bit of this country that you haven't seen in a while. But do you find that it tugs at you in a certain way or is that sort of in your past? Adam Duritz: Well, there are things about the country that tug at me a lot, like just the history and what part it plays in my own history. Being a Jew, that's a pretty powerful thing for any Jew. Being here is a very, what's the word? Intoxicating in that way. Israel is a heavy liquor for Jews, I would say. But no, the religion doesn't tug at me. I'm past believing things like that. The Times of Israel: Yeah, but the place, the scenery, what you're seeing outside your window, what you see when you drive from the airport, those kinds of things, the people on the street. Adam Duritz: The street, well, not as much from the airport to Tel Aviv, but just the knowledge of what it is and my memories, especially of Jerusalem, maybe if I went over to Jaffa, to the older parts of town. It's incredibly beautiful out the window, looking at the beach, but between me and the beach is a construction zone. I guess they're putting in a rapid transit system. I remember when they did that in LA. That always tears up for a bit. Yeah, I guess it's just like also, it's a country full of Jews, as opposed to being one in a crowd as you are in the rest of the world. In the rest of the world, you're one in a crowd and here you are, the crowd. That's a unique thing. The Times of Israel: Are you brushing up on any Hebrew for the show? Are we going to hear any? Adam Duritz: Yeah, if people are talking, I'll say, sheket. I remember sheket. I remember ken and lo. I remember shalom, which means aloha. I don't remember most of my Hebrew. I could sort of speak it back then, but yeah, I don't remember very much of it now. The Times of Israel: The crowd loves it when some beloved singer comes their way and throws a little shalom and a little sheket b'vakasha (please be quiet). I think they'll be happy on Wednesday night to hear that as well. Where are you in terms of new songs? In terms of new work? I know Covid, as we keep on saying, has been such a struggle for bands. Sometimes it's great for being inspired, and sometimes it has made it really difficult. Where is Counting Crows in terms of new music? Are we going to hear any? Adam Duritz: Well, I had written a second suite, but I threw it out. I sang on my friend's record and he sent me their record before it came out. They're this band called Gang of Youth. They have a new record called "Angel in Real Time." And when I listened to it, it was so good that for the first time, literally the first time in my entire career, I thought, oh, these songs aren't good enough, and I threw them out. So I have to rework.I mean, I'm reworking some of it, but his record was so much better, and that's not good enough. The Times of Israel: Okay, but the point is that you're working, we're going to hear more new music. You guys are going to keep on going for hopefully a very long time. Adam Duritz: The chances of us finding other jobs are pretty slim, so yeah. The Times of Israel: Well, you said landscape and construction. There's always something to fall back on. Right. Adam Duritz: I'm not falling back to that on that. I'll stick with my job. I loved it at the time, but I'm glad I like my new job better. The Times of Israel: The new job that you've been carrying out for a while, happily, for quite a few decades. Excellent. Well, we really thank you for being with us, Adam Duritz, it's great to have you here in Israel and looking forward to hearing you on stage on Wednesday night and hoping you have a great trip and that you get to do a few things and see a few places that you want to see while you're here. Adam Duritz: Absolutely. I hope so. But the main thing I really wanted to do was play here, so one way or another, I'll get it all. I really wanted to play here. Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Counting Crows lead singer Adam Duritz at the band's September 14 show in Ra'anana, Israel (Courtesy Shlomi Pinto)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There are basically two categories for novelist Elyssa Friedland's work: Jewy and super-Jewy. Friedland has a new book out this week, “The Most Likely Club,” but many listeners will know her from two, very Jewy, earlier works, “Last Summer at the Golden Hotel” and "The Floating Feldmans.” Friedland has written two other novels and is looking forward to the publication of her first children’s book soon. Today, in addition to working on her own books, Friedland teaches novel writing at her alma mater, Yale University. She’s also a Columbia Law School grad and once upon a time worked as an associate at a major law firm before turning to writing full-time. Her new novel, “The Most Likely Club,” has some of her trademark Jewish flavor in the characters, but weaves together the stories of four women, high school best friends, who are reunited for their 25th high school reunion. Friedland spoke with The Times of Israel for our weekly Times Will Tell podcast, a week before the publication of "The Most Likely Club." The following transcript has been very lightly edited. The Times of Israel: Elyssa, thank you so much for joining me today. Where am I finding you? Elyssa Friedland: You are finding me on Long Island in New York. So we came together, of course, to speak about your newest book, "The Most Likely Club," but also about some of your other great books that, coincidentally actually, I read four out of five of your novels without even knowing that they were written by you, aside from the last one, of course, which I asked for. Wow, that's very flattering. I'm very happy to hear that. You might be the only person other than my mother to do that. You can say that I'm your number one fan, but not in a "Misery" kind of way. I just really enjoyed your work, and I just would read the synopsis of a novel, buy it, read it, and say, this sounds somewhat familiar in tone to another book that I really enjoyed and read. And then I looked up and thought, yeah, same author -- again and again. It was just really kind of coincidental and strange, but fantastic. Well, I'm very happy to hear that. I do think I have a voice that carries through from book to book. So I do try, of course, to vary the plots, create new characters, always keep it interesting for myself, not only for the reader to have something new, but for me. I'm the one who has to be with it a lot longer than the reader does while I'm writing it. And so I do try to always come up with very new ideas, but I think my voice is my voice, so I'm not surprised that there are echoes of it in all the books. So for me personally, I kind of divide your works into extremely, very Jewy and medium Jewy. In the very Jewy category, we have, of course, "Last summer at the Golden Hotel" and "The Floating Feldmans." In the medium Jewy category I would put your newest novel, "The Most Likely Club," which comes out September 6, and then "Love and Miscommunication." Now, the one novel I didn't read, where would that fit in the Jewy or very Jewy spectrum? I would say, "The Intermission," the one you did not read is definitely medium- to low-Jewy. So you haven't missed out on any super Jewy. So let's just very briefly speak about the plot behind "The Most Likely Club." Give us a couple of sentences. What is this book about? "The Most Likely Club" is about four women that were very close friends in high school, and they are reunited. Three of the four of them reunite at their 25th high school reunion and one of them is unable to make it, she says, because of work obligations, and being back together on campus where they went to school. Seeing their former classmates just filled them with all the usual angsty feelings. And they really take a moment to take stock of their lives where they are 25 years out of high school and think about, is this where they wanted to be? Is this where they thought they would end up? After a sort of boozy night of reminiscing and remembering who they once were, they decide to try to make their high school superlative come true. Their "most likely" in the yearbook. And they embark on this plan to actualize some of their dreams from when they were teenagers. And as you can imagine, when you're in your mid-40s, it's difficult to make that kind of life change. And so we follow these women as they try to right the ship of their lives, but of course are met with all sorts of obstacles. And then the fourth friend who is not able to make it to the reunion, of course she folds into the story, and we learn some big surprises about her. And it's really just the story of what it's like to reach middle age, look back and take stock of where you are and really take time to think about if this is where you want to be and when is it too late to make a change. Not only do I know what you're talking about, I live what you're talking about. I realized suddenly when I was reading this book that my high school union will be 30 years in the spring. So, yes, I fully grasped all the different dramas and concerns of each of these women, and it really felt like they were all in me or I was all in them. And when you were writing these characters, did you feel that yourself? That you were splintering off different concerns and challenges of your life as a working mother, wife and professional and putting it into these four different women. Definitely. I mean, when I think about it -- I won't bore your listeners with going into each character -- exactly how I'm similar to them, but for sure there are some that I'm more similar to than others. I would say I'm not a doctor, obviously, I'm a writer. But the doctor character in the book is probably the one that I relate to the most in my day-to-day life, because she and her husband are both working professionals and they have three children, just like me and my husband. We have three children and I definitely still do the lion's share of the child -- I wouldn't necessarily say, like, child raising, I think we share that. But I certainly do the lion's share of the camp forms, the health forms, the dentist visits, the selection of camp and after-schools. I could go on and on. And I know many women who are listening to this can relate to that. And so in her life, Priya the character is named in the book, is really similar to mine. She's really overwhelmed. She doesn't quite understand why it has to be this way, like why her husband, who works basically in the same job, they work at the same hospital, is sort of let off scotch free and he can go out for a run while she's buried and, like, uploading the COVID vaccine cards, essentially. And she just doesn't have a free second to herself. Sometimes when she thinks about what she'd want to do with her free time, she can't even figure it out because she hasn't had free time in so long. And so she's a character that I really relate to in my day-to-day life. Although it was fun making her a doctor because it did still let me escape a little bit because I don't even know that much about the medical profession and I had to research that and it kind of let me have a little bit of distance from her. So I didn't pour every single detail of my life. If she had been a writer, that probably would have been a bit too much. So I have a lot in common with her. But the other women, too, there one character really fixated on her weight. And I'm definitely someone who if I had a reunion coming up, I would try some crash diet and I could see myself getting really obsessed with how I look when I'm going back to school, which is, of course, not the ideal way to be spending your time and your energy. And then the other women as well. There's a very powerful CEO. I'm not her, but she's just someone I don't know if I relate to her as much as I just think about women like that. And the double standard that is applied to women in positions of power and how unfair it is. Like the Hillary Clintons of the world who are just the more ambitious they are, the more maligned they are. So, yeah, I have bits and pieces of myself and all the women and things I see from my friends and just from the headlines that interests me. I just found myself nodding, laughing and wanting to cry with some of the situations. And we won't spoil it because it's definitely worth reading. I just want to mention that while it may sit in the chick-lit category, it is so deep in its message and it so hit home to me as a working mother of seven. It is no question that all of these concerns that especially the Priya character has, every woman I know in our situation of working and having children is facing this mental load challenge.  Now, that's turned to the "Last Summer at the Golden Hotel," which is actually, can I say this, referred to in "The Most Likely Club." I loved that. So tell us briefly, what is this book about? That book is about a hotel in the Catskills, very much like the hotel in "Dirty Dancing," if you can picture Kellermans. I know that's a movie that basically everyone with a pulse has seen. So it's about a hotel that was once the place to see and be seen, a thriving enterprise. But it's set in modern times and it's really on its last leg and needs a lot of refurbishment. Isn't attracting guests the way it used to. It's co-owned by two Jewish families, of which there are now three generations of each family, the Goldmans and the Winegolds. And one member of the Winegold family runs the hotel on a day-to-day basis. And he receives an offer from a casino operator who wants to buy the hotel, tear it down and put a casino up in his place, which is what happens at the Concord Resort, which is one of the greats in the area. And he calls a family meeting at the hotel and reluctantly, the three generations make their way back to campus. I guess I like a lot of back to campus because that's also the case in "The Most Likely Club." And so these three generations come back to the hotel and we learn what's going on in all of their lives. They all have full lives outside of the hotel and so we get slivers of their lives and the complications and the issues they're facing and then how those issues affect what they want to do with the hotel, if they want to sell it or if they want to try to revive it. And in some ways it's really an intergenerational story because the grandchildren who are in their 20s have a lot of ideas about how to make the hotel hip and cool and attract millennials and attract people who are living their lives on social media. And of course, the grandparents, the founder generation, can't really make heads or tails of some of these bizarre suggestions like let's make our own honey and have beehives, let's have all vegan food options, let's have goat yoga, et cetera, et cetera. So as I'm sure you can understand, they have very different ideas of what to do with the hotel. But for everyone, it's an important part of their legacy. And so it's really an emotional decision that has to be made. So I won't give away the ending. Don't give away the ending because I was actually surprised by the ending! But both in this book and in "The Floating Feldmans," it's really a tale of several generations getting together and what ensues right in these little microcosms. "The Floating Feldmans" on a cruise. And you are so good at writing the different voices of the different generations. Talk to me about how you capture the voice of an 80-year-old versus how you capture the voice of a 20-something-year-old. First of all, thank you for saying that. I definitely work hard at it. If I had to say why I am good at that, it's probably that I just have a really good ear when I'm out in the world. First of all, I live in New York City. So living in New York City, just going down the block, you are just constantly surrounded by people of all different ages, genders, and backgrounds. I could imagine if I had a more rural existence and I worked from home in a quiet town and went for a walk and maybe saw one person in an hour, it might be a very different experience. Whereas if I go to buy milk in Manhattan, I'm just surrounded by voices. And so I felt really lucky because I have exposure to a wide range of voices just when I walk down my block. And I think that because I am just a curious person and I'm always listening, I am able to absorb the intonation the verbiage, the mannerism. I look around and I listen. And that I think it helps me channel people that are in a different stage of life than I'm in. And so I just feel really grateful. I credit New York City with my ability to channel these voices that are very different than my own because otherwise, I don't know where else I could say that I get it from because yes, do I know older people? Sure. I have parents, I have in-laws. Do I know people in their twenties? I do teach at the college level, but the truth is, I'm in the classroom with them. I'm doing most of the talking for two hours, and I leave. So I don't think it comes from that. I think it really comes from just living in a bustling place and having a good ear. As you mentioned, you do teach. So is this something that you would give as a tip to your students?  I mean, not everyone can have the luxury of getting to live in New York City, and not everybody wants to. And for some people, from a writing perspective, that would be a terrible place to live because it's so full of distraction. And there's the Ralph Waldo Emerson version of writing, which is you got to go and tuck yourself in a cabin and have quiet. And so there are certainly many people who wouldn't get a stitch of work done if they lived in such a bustling place and would like to be off the grid. So I don't know that I would necessarily give that advice, but I would say maybe just see what you're good at. And if you feel like it's a really big stretch for you and it's not coming across as convincing to write like an 82-year-old man, don't write an 82-year-old man. Write the person that you feel comfortable writing, that you feel comfortable channeling. And maybe that's someone that's very similar to you. Maybe that's someone that you knew once upon a time. Very closely in life or you have some experience with. But you can tell. I think. If it's a massive struggle to channel someone else's voice. If it's very integral to the story. I would just make it my business to at least find someone. One or two people who can an authenticity read. If you're writing an 82-year-old man, find an 82-year-old man and have them read it and correct it. I mean, when I was first starting out, even just writing a male voice, my husband would read my work and he would say, "No man would say that." He can't speak for all men, but he can maybe speak for a majority of men or at least tell me that something didn't ring true to him personally. And then it was up to me to decide what to do with that. But I don't think there's any reason why someone shouldn't reach out and have someone read the work. For this book, "The Most Likely Club," my publisher hired people to read the book, to read the characters for an authenticity read, because there's an Asian character, there is a bisexual character, there's an Indian character. I am none of those things. And so they have these authenticity reads done, and I'm so grateful for that someone who says, "That's really not the way it works in an Indian family," or, "That's not the way I would phrase it." And I really get my publisher a lot of credit because they said to me, "You don't have to take any of this. This is for you to absorb and decide what you want to do." If there was something very offensive, they would want me to do something about it. But it was up to me, and I took basically almost everything because I just want to sound as authentic as humanly possible. It's interesting that you talk about wanting to sound authentic in these niche identities of the Indian or the bisexual, et cetera, et cetera, because at the same time, while they do to me at least sound authentic, definitely your Jewish voice sounds authentic. But it's always very universal stories that you're writing, too. Well, I think that's really true because we're all still people and we all still feel the same things. Of course you want to be factually correct: The only Indian food you know is the kind served in a restaurant, and that's never something that is served in an Indian home? That's not great. But does an Indian 16-year-old girl feel self-conscious in high school? Yeah. So do the Asian girl and the black girl and the white girl and the Jewish girl. Feeling self-conscious when you're 16 in high school is about as universal as it gets. Being middle-aged and thinking, "Oh, my God, how did I end up here? And is this what I want out of life again?" It's a privilege to be able to take the time to even think about that. And I do want to acknowledge that not everyone has the luxury of making the changes they want to make. But I would say if given the time and the space to think about it -- these women are 43. If you ask any 43-year-old, "Take an hour of quiet and think about where you are in your life, is there anything you want to change? I'm pretty sure they'd be able to come up with a couple of things. No matter what they look like or what their background is. Who has an hour, though, right? Let's talk about how Judaism plays a role in your writing. None of the characters are especially observant or religious Jews, but they are so steeped in the culture. Even in the least Jewy books that we identified, there's such striking cultural Judaism. So how is Judaism playing a role in your writing? I think that it's because it just plays such a big role in my own life that it filters over onto the page. I am not observant, but I'm just very culturally Jewish, as comes across in my books. I went to a Jewish day school. I go to synagogue on the major holidays. We celebrate Shabbat in our home, even if we're not observing it in a religious way. But we like candles, we eat challa, we have a Shabbat dinner. And this is the world I know. It's also, like, the humor I know. My grandparents were immigrants. Even my parents were immigrants from Europe. They were born after the war, and they came here from Eastern Europe. And so that's literally the humor that I grew up with, this sort of very Borsh belt, eastern European Jewish humor, and it's just who I am. I feel like I've just been steeped in Jewish culture from a very early age. And I grew up in a Jewish town. I went to Jewish camp. I could go on and on and on. So I feel like my Judaism is just a really big part of who I am. And so then it ends up becoming a natural part of my writing. Even when I don't set out to write the Jewish book, I end up incorporating some of it because I think I just like it and I feel comfortable. It's the opposite of needing the authenticity reads. Here is where I'm in my milieu, I know what I'm talking about. And that feels good because writing is really hard. And then when I can write about something that I feel like I know, first of all, I feel like I can push boundaries more because I feel more comfortable and I could just be more creative and find even more humor because I'm not first trying to learn about it and then write about it. I already know it. So it's a comfortable space for me to be in as a writer, so I find myself returning to it. Have you ever had any kind of antisemitic blowback because of this? Zero. Absolutely zero. And I love saying that. It's honest to God truth. And I've talked about this in previous interviews, but when "Last Summer at the Golden Hotel" came out, in May 2021, it happened to be the same month that there was a lot of media coverage about the rise in antisemitism, and the statistics were staggering about the antisemitic attacks that were happening across the globe. Up some crazy percentage, like up 100%, something really, really horrifying. And my book came out and it was received with the warmest embrace by so many non-Jewish readers. Most of my readers aren't Jewish. And I could just tell you, go on my Instagram, look at the comments, and it was like 1000 comments of, "I didn't know anything about Jewish culture. This is the first book I've read where I've learned a lot about Jewish identity and Jewish culture. And I'm fascinated." It was one positive thing after another after another after another, and it was a great reminder of,, yes, there are bad people doing crazy things, but most people don't hate Jews, and most people are very excited to read and learn about Jewish culture in the way that I love. And the book sold well enough and was distributed widely enough that I can honestly say that it means something that I never came across a single antisemitic reaction. That's really heartening. I wonder about this next novel's reception because it is basically about the inner lives of women of a certain age, my age essentially, and there's not a lot of empathy for that in American society. There's, of course, the Karen Meme. There's all sorts of things of that nature where we women can't have it all, women want to have it all, but suck it up and move on. Are you worried at all about this kind of reception? Yeah, I would say I am a bit worried about that. That people just are sick of what they would call whining. Enough. But I wasn't so worried that I wasn't going to write it because I feel like I'm living it and I lead a very privileged life, and yet I still feel like I can't take it. Like I'm losing it as a working mom, and I'm trying and I'm just coming apart at the seams. And if I feel it, I can only imagine people who don't have as much privilege and the luxuries that I have in my life. And so I know that I write from a place of privilege, I'm aware how much worse it is for people who don't have the resources to have a babysitter and not have to worry about every doctor bill that comes in. I have mostly female readers. And so it will be interesting. I think that people's responses are going to be very personal. It's going to strike a chord either very positively or negatively. People are going to have very strong reactions to the book, and I have to be prepared for that. All right, I'm reminding our listeners that we're about a week and a bit ahead of the publication of this newest book. So by the time they hear it, everything will be fine. It will be published. The world will embrace it, I feel sure, having read it just recently. And really such a pleasure reading your work -- as coincidentally as it has been. And I will, of course, follow you more intentionally from here on out. So really such a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you. And thank you so much for having me. It was very fun to discuss my books with you. Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Novelist Elyssa Friedland with her new book, 'The Most Likely Club.' (Courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, The Times of Israel’s weekly feature podcast. This week, we speak with Tova Dagan and Yoni Nuriel, two high school and middle school teachers in Jerusalem as they prepare for Israel’s new school year that aims to begin September 1. Despite the annual threat of a countrywide teachers' strike, the two discuss their outlook on the Israeli educational system and what they want for their own classrooms this year. Dagan has been a homeroom teacher and is currently an English teacher at Keshet, a dual religious and secular school in Jerusalem; Nuriel is a homeroom teacher for rising eighth graders at Hartman High School, a religious Orthodox school for boys in Jerusalem, with a dedication to tradition and tolerance. They both talk about how to teach kids during the ongoing pandemic, the challenges of finding better emotional boundaries between teachers and students and creating a stimulating educational environment despite the obstacles of the overall system. IMAGE: Keshet high school students take their mathematics matriculation examination Jerusalem on May 20, 2019 (Courtesy Noam Revkin Fenton/Flash90)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, The Times of Israel’s weekly feature podcast. This week, we speak with two camp counselors, Israeli shlichim, the Hebrew term for emissaries, who were sent through the Jewish Agency this summer to work at Camp Ramah in the Poconos of Pennsylvania, where they spent two months caring for campers and working and meeting fellow staff members. The two staffers are Halleli Busheri and Tair Offir, who had their own family connections to Camp Ramah, the Conservative Movement's camping movement. Both were seeking the challenges and new experiences of a Jewish American summer camp. They speak about camp life, and what it's been like to be the Israelis, known as mishlachat, on staff at camp. Busheri and Offir share moments from the summer, describing what it's been like to get to know people their age as well as their campers. They speak about what surprised them during the last two months, and some of the unexpected joys and tender moments in this very American Jewish summer experience. IMAGE: Halleli Busheri (left) and Tair Offir, two shlichim, emissaries on staff at Camp Ramah in the Poconos (Courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, The Times of Israel’s weekly feature podcast. This week, we speak with Jeff Abella, chief executive of Moka Origins, a kosher boutique coffee roaster and chocolate retailer based in Honesdale, PA, on the grounds of the Himalayan Institute, a yoga and meditation retreat in northeastern Pennsylvania. Abella and his staff of 15 roast and grind coffee and cocoa beans, creating their artisanal chocolates and coffee for a greater purpose. The products are part of the institute’s humanitarian efforts to help subsistence farmers in Cameroon find better ways to earn money and support themselves and their farms under better conditions. Moka Origins is looking ahead to helping farms as well as in Uganda, Costa Rica and Mexico. For Abella, it's all about excellent coffee and fine chocolate, but it’s just as much about social entrepreneurship. He wants more people consuming fine craft chocolate and coffee in order to broaden the net of people engaging in their social impact project. As Abella says, "the more chocolate and coffee we can sell, the more good we can do." IMAGE: Jeff Abella with a cacao pod (right hand) and sack of coffee beans (Courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, The Times of Israel’s weekly feature podcast. This week, we speak to two of the co-founders of New Legend, a pioneering company in the field of financing Israeli television content. After Israeli filmmakers and showrunners spent years chasing government funding and local production studios, New Legend has created a new model and venture for financing film and television projects, with backing from Israeli investment firm Meitav, which will tap into its network of investors and business relationships. Gal Yashar, CEO of New Legend, and Oded Turgeman, New Legend's director of content, talk about this new model of the film and TV business in Israel, building on the country's reputation as a high-tech nation and now becoming the content nation. New Legend recently established an accelerator with the Jerusalem Film and Television Fund, selecting 11 new TV projects for development, and bringing together additional funding from leading broadcasters, including Netflix, HBO, A&E  and Israeli studios Yes and Hot. Yashar comes from the world of Israeli high-tech while Turgeman has years of experience in developing animation content. IMAGE: Oded Turgeman (left) and Gal Yasher, two of the New Legend co-founders (Courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, The Times of Israel’s weekly feature podcast. This week, we speak to culinary expert, cookbook author and chef Adeena Sussman, whose bestselling book 'Sababa' took Israeli cooking and translated it for the larger, global audience. We catch Sussman after a week of culinary arts workshops at a summer camp in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, where she brought her homemade pita, hummus and roasted tomatoes, as well as fruity gazoz -- a fizzy soda water drink elevated with fresh fruit and homemade syrups -- chocolate-dipped dates topped with flaky salt and preserved lemons to the campers and young staff members. Sussman speaks about what she's learned about translating her ingredients and recipes for audiences outside of Israel. That experience keeps her cooking and teaching fresh and dynamic, particularly as she moves toward the final stages of her next cookbook, "Shabbat." IMAGE: Cookbook author Adeena Sussman shows how to mix tahini in the Camp Ramah in the Poconos kitchen (Courtesy Jessica Steinberg)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, The Times of Israel’s weekly feature podcast. This week we’re speaking to Shani and Yahala Lachmish, a pair of sisters who are musicians, singers and composers, and have been singing onstage for most of their lives. The Lachmish sisters speak about their band, Tandu, a loose translation from the Aramaic term for togetherness, which recently released its first album, "Savtuna," named for their great-grandmother, the spiritual beacon of their family. Their music is a mix of styles, with arrangements of falafel jazz, liturgical music courtesy of their cantor father, soul and world music. The sisters talk about the inspiration for their music, including their father and grandmothers, the musical worlds in Israel and what it took for them to finally appreciate their father's age-old piyyutim, or liturgical poems set to song. They also sing some selections from their album, acappella during the podcast. IMAGE: Yahala (left) and Shani Lachmish, sisters and singers in their band, Tandu (Courtesy Reuven Ben Haim)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, The Times of Israel’s weekly feature podcast. This week we’re speaking to Dr. Noya Rimalt, a professor of law at the University of Haifa who is at the forefront of the struggle for reproductive rights in Israel. Rimalt speaks about the history of abortions in Israel. Women can have abortions at local clinics and hospitals, but must undergo a complicated permissions process that often makes them seem "mad or bad," says Rimalt. She talks about her involvement in this battle for personal reasons and as a feminist law professor. Rimalt also discusses the passage of the recent new regulations that slightly ease the Israeli process, just as Roe vs. Wade was being overturned in the US. IMAGE: Dr. Noya Rimalt (Courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, The Times of Israel’s weekly feature podcast. This week we’re speaking to bestselling author Faye Kellerman about her latest book, "The Hunt," the final installment in her Decker/Lazarus series, coming out next month. As usual, there’s some intense drama, plenty of crime, punishment and suspense in "The Hunt," as well as the usual details about the observant Jewish life led by Kellerman's beloved characters, Detective Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus. Kellerman speaks about her writing career, what led her to this series, as well as why she chose to bring so much of her own lifestyle to her characters. She talks about what it's like to write about detective work now, as opposed to thirty years ago, and what different characters can teach us about life and decisions. Kellerman, soon approaching her 70th birthday, talks about what she's doing with her life now, and whether or not she'll be saying goodbye forever to Detective Decker and his beloved wife, Rina. IMAGE: Author Faye Kellerman (Courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, The Times of Israel’s weekly feature podcast. This week we’re speaking about evangelical support for Israel with Prof. Motti Inbari. Born, raised and educated in Israel, Motti is today a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. While most of his previous research has focussed on Jews, his forthcoming book, which was co-authored with Kirill Bumin, is “Christian Zionism of the Twenty-First Century: Evangelical Public Opinion on Israel.” It’s expected in 2023 from Oxford University Press.  The book is based on four consecutive surveys on the attitudes of American evangelicals on Israel. We learn that there is no such thing as a monolithic evangelical block. We hear how politics and other factors, such as age and race, can impact support for Israel and how the past five decades have shaped the ways in which evangelical theology has evolved, along with views on Jews’ roles in the Holy Land. IMAGE: Prof. Motti Inbari (Rose Trail Images)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, The Times of Israel’s weekly feature podcast. This week, we're speaking with Jamie Geller, often known as the Jewish Rachael Ray, who just published her eighth cookbook, "Farmer’s Kitchen Cookbook: 50 Recipes Celebrating Israel’s Veggies and their Growers." The cookbook features ten vegetables common to the Israeli kitchen, with guides on selecting, storing and cooking with them in 50 different recipes. Geller speaks about the process of writing the book during the pandemic, what she's learned about Israeli produce and seasonal vegetables during her ten years living in Israel, and whether her six kids actually eat braised fennel and leeks. "Farmer's Kitchen" also highlights Israeli farmers who are currently observing the biblical mitzvah or commandment of shmita, Israel's sabbatical for the land that comes around every seven years.  With farming families facing loss of income from the observance of shmita, Geller partnered with The Shmitah Fund, which offers farmers financial assistance, and she tells the stories of those families, taking a closer look at their farms and what they grow. IMAGE: From Jamie Geller's 'Farmer’s Kitchen Cookbook: 50 Recipes Celebrating Israel’s Veggies and their Growers' (Courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, The Times of Israel’s weekly feature podcast. Our guest this week is Dr. Mark Shinar, who captured the attention of host Amanda Borschel-Dan through his moving blog, “Broken roads: Leadership, authenticity and sexuality.” The blog discusses how, as an Orthodox father, husband and educator, he came out of the closet a year and a half ago. We’ll hear segments of the blog throughout the longer-than-usual episode. Shinar has been a Jewish day school administrator and Head of School for 20 years and has worked in Jewish summer camp for more than 25. Today, his main focus is on helping schools shape cultures that inspire within its administrators, teachers, and students a willingness to be vulnerable, to take risks, and to live lives of courageous authenticity and empathy. Shinar made aliyah in 2017 and lives in Modiin where he and his ex-wife are raising their four sons. Image: Dr. Mark Shinar (courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, The Times of Israel’s weekly feature podcast. This week, host Jessica Steinberg speaks to Dr. Tova Hartman, dean of the faculty of humanities at the Ono Academic Campus and founder of the Shira Hadasha congregation in Jerusalem, the first of its kind, a religious community that combines a commitment to Jewish law, with a commitment to prayer and feminism. At the time, it drew a lot of criticism from many Orthodox rabbis who opposed having women lead prayer and read from the Torah.  Hartman persisted and built Shira Hadasha with her fellow founders, spawning an entire movement in Judaism, of partnership minyanim, communities committed to Jewish law, as well as to feminism in prayer and action.  She speaks about the inspiration drawn from her father, Rabbi David Hartman, the American-Israeli leader and contemporary Jewish philosopher who founded the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. Hartman also speaks about making the world of academia accessible to the ultra-Orthodox and Arab populations within the multicultural campuses of the Ono Academic Campus, helping change the direction and goals of those societies. IMAGE: Dr. Tova Hartman (Courtesy Ono Academic College)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, The Times of Israel’s weekly feature podcast. This week, host Jessica Steinberg speaks to documentary filmmaker Tal Inbar and producer Nancy Spielberg, sister to Steven Spielberg, who premiered their new film, "Closed Circuit" at DocAviv, Tel Aviv’s annual documentary film festival. "Closed Circuits" uses security camera footage -- much of it taken on the night of the 2016 terror attack in Tel Aviv’s Sarona market -- when two men in suits shot at a crowd eating out. The use of the footage deconstructs the event augmented by interviews with those who survived the attack, and who speak about their insights into that event. Inbar speaks about how she came across the closed circuit footage of the attack and developed it into a fuller-length film. Spielberg discusses her fascination with the film upon receiving a 'cold' email from Inbar, as well as her own relationship to Israel, and how the film resonates, particularly in the US, currently reeling from its own spate of tragic attacks. IMAGE: A closed circuit screen grab from 'Closed Circuit,' Tal Inbar's 2022 film about the 2016 Sarona, Tel Aviv terror attack (Courtesy 'Closed Circuit)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, The Times of Israel’s weekly feature podcast. This week, host Amanda Borschel-Dan speaks with archaeologist Prof. Jennie Ebeling about women’s live in ancient Israel. In addition to leading and participating in archaeological excavations in Israel and Jordan, Ebeling is sculpting the next generation of scholars through her teaching at the University of Evansville in Indiana. She has written extensively about ancient food and drink technology which can offer a deeper look at women in antiquity, including a book, “Women’s Lives in Biblical Times.” One of the ways we can learn about women’s agency is through studying ancient ovens, said Ebeling, which in part has led her to hypothesize that women were the master brewers of ancient Israel.  IMAGE: Archaeologist Prof. Jennie Ebeling at the Jezreel Expedition. (Ashley Motes, courtesy of the Jezreel Expedition)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, The Times of Israel's weekly feature podcast. This week, we speak with journalist Joshua Prager, the author of "The Family Roe: An American Story," which was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. "The Family Roe" tells the larger story of abortion in America through focussing on the stories of "Jane Roe," Norma McCorvey, and her three daughters -- including the baby she was carrying that spawned Roe V Wade. Our conversation was prompted by a leaked draft of a Supreme Court decision that could overturn the constitutional right to an abortion. We discuss this potential decision’s implications. And finally, we talk about another book Prager wrote, "Half-Life," which charts the aftermath of a 1990 bus accident in Israel that left him paralyzed.  My destruction, my resurrection Half Life: Reflections from Jerusalem on a Broken Neck, by Joshua Prager Image: Journalist Joshua Prager, author of 'The Family Roe.' (Peter van Agtmael/Magnum Photos)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to a bonus episode of Times Will Tell, The Times of Israel's weekly feature podcast. We're speaking with Joshua Cohen, the prize-winning author of "The Netanyahus, An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family," who is in Israel for the Writers Festival and a residency at Jerusalem's Mishkenot Sha'ananim. We speak about his fictionalization of the very famous political Israeli family and how he chose the Netanyahus as his focus for the novel, as well as the twists of fact and fiction. Cohen talks about winning the Pulitzer for a book about identity, tokenism and, the Jews. IMAGE: American novelist Joshua Cohen speaks during a meeting with Journalists as part of the International Writers Festival, in Jerusalem, May 16, 2022. (Courtesy Yonatan Sindel/Flash 90)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to this week’s Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from the Times of Israel. This week, host Jessica Steinberg speaks with Abi Dauber Sterne and Robbie Gringras, two Israel-based educators and longtime professional collaborators who have just written a book, "Stories for the Sake of Argument," a collection of 24 tales designed to provoke disagreements  about Israel. The aim is to teach readers more about themselves, each other, and the world at large, with a how-to book of stories that address various controversial issues, taking place primarily in Israel but with universal themes. They tackle subjects such as religious freedom in Israel, demands of history, issues of social media, praying at the Western Wall, Arab-Israeli voting issues, refugees, racial profiling and the list goes on. Dauber Sterne and Gringrass discuss their working process, how they chose their subjects and the ultimate aims of this how-to-argue book. Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Abi Dauber Sterne and Robbie Gringrass, educators and authors of 'Stories for the Sake of Argument' (Courtesy PR)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from the Times of Israel. This week, we speak with Mayim Bialik, who has just released her filmmaking debut, “As They Made Us.” Most people know Bialik from her performance as neuroscientist Amy Farrah Fowler on “The Big Bang Theory,” from her work as a child as the title character on the sitcom “Blossom,” or lately, as the new host of "Jeopardy!"  Bialik wrote and directed “As They Made Us”," which is quite the departure from the rosy sitcom bubble. It is a tough look at tense family relations as the father’s life is winding to a close. It stars Dustin Hoffman as the dying father; Candice Bergen as the overbearing mother; Simon Helberg is the estranged older brother, and Dianna Agron plays the anchor of the family, Jewish journalist Abigail. "As They Made Us" is now in theaters. IMAGE: Filmmaker Mayim Bialik. (Storm Santos)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to this week’s Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from the Times of Israel. This week, host Jessica Steinberg speaks with Dr. Stephen Daniel Arnoff, CEO of the Fuchsberg Jerusalem Center and newly minted author of "About Man and God and Law, the Spiritual Wisdom of Bob Dylan." Arnoff discusses his own love for Bob Dylan and his personal rock 'n roll history and how that has morphed into a lifelong exploration of Dylan's music and lyrics. He looks at Judaism and Christianity through the prism of Dylan's music and the questions asked by Bob Dylan in a lifetime of songs. Join us for this conversation about one of music's greatest songwriters and the lessons that can be learned from Bob Dylan's music. Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Bob Dylan performs at the 44th Annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, California, February 26, 2002 (HECTOR MATA / AFP / File)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to this week’s Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from the Times of Israel. This week, ahead of Easter, host Amanda Borschel-Dan tours the Jerusalem Old City’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre with top archaeologist Prof. Jodi Magness. Christian tradition holds that Jesus was crucified and buried on the spot of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. As we tour the church and its surroundings, we see parts of the ruins of earlier stages of the church, including a find from when it was built by Constantine in around 330 CE, as well as remains of earlier structures. At the end of the tour, we see what Magness feels is the best evidence that supports the Christian tradition.  For much of our tour, we are standing next to praying pilgrims, so to respect them, at times we’re almost whispering. Apologies as well for the background noise as Holy Week was being observed in Jerusalem. Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Prof. Jodi Magness in the Jerusalem Old City's Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Monday, April 11, 2022. (Amanda Borschel-Dan/Times of Israel)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to this week’s Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from the Times of Israel. This week, we're thinking about Passover, the spring holiday that begins Friday night, April 15. We speak with two Jerusalem-based teachers and writers who have spent a lot of time studying the Haggadah, the Jewish text read during the Passover seder. First up is Rachel Sharansky Danziger, a teacher, writer and daughter of Natan Sharansky, the Soviet dissident whose battle for freedom formed the very background of his daughter’s life. She speaks about the disjointed storytelling of the Haggadah text, and how to think about that story as she teaches it, and her own family history, to her children. We also speak with Sarah Yehudit Schneider, a teacher of Hasidic philosophy and Kabbalah whose Haggadah, "A Small Still Voice" was recently published. She shares ideas and thoughts about matzah as a meditative focus and the telling of the Passover story as a form of narrative therapy. Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: An Israeli family seen during the Passover seder on the first night of the eight-day long Jewish holiday of Passover, in Tzur Hadassah on April 22, 2016 (Courtesy Nati Shohat/Flash 90)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week we speak with Eyal Sherf, an actor, singer and cantor who specializes in everything related to Broadway, and in particular, its musicals. The Israeli-born Sherf trained as an actor in England and New York, and has performed on various stages. He also realized early on that the performance aspect was just as interesting to him as the creative process of musical theater, delving into the work that went into the shows, their histories and putting that all together into shows melding information and music. He now performs shows around Israel that combine performance and lectures, fulfilling his own passion for musical theater. He takes us through several shows, from "The Sound of Music" and "West Side Story" to "Fiddler on the Roof" and a few others, discussing their histories, creators and why they still resonate so much, to this very day.  Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. This Times of Israel podcast is sponsored by Thirty-Six, in which host Justin Hayet scours Israel to find the 36 most wonderful, interesting people doing the most wonderful, interesting things. Subscribe to Thirty-Six on your favorite podcast platform. Image: Actor, singer and cantor Eyal Sherf onstage at Habima in Tel Aviv (Courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to a bonus episode of Times Will Tell for an archaeology update of an item that, if verified, may be one of the greatest discoveries of the century. On Thursday, March 24, Dr. Scott Stripling held a press conference in Houston, Texas, unveiling what he claims is the earliest proto-alphabetic Hebrew text discovered in ancient Israel. He has discovered what he claims is a 2 cm x 2 cm folded lead curse tablet or defixio that he dates to the late Bronze Age, before or around 1200 BCE. If this dating is verified, it would make the text centuries older than the previous record holder for Hebrew in the Land of Israel. However, there are some challenges: In 2019, it was discovered outside of a carefully excavated stratified context while his team was re-examining a dump pile from 1980s excavations at Mt Ebal that were held under Prof. Adam Zertal. The earth had been dry sifted then, and in 2019 Stripling’s team resifted it, in a wet sifting technique that was developed at the Temple Mount Sifting Project, where Stripling once worked.  The folded interior of the tablet has undergone hi-tech scans in a lab in Prague at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. The dating of the tiny tablet is mostly based on epigraphical analysis of these scans, along with analysis of the lead and potential ancient sources for it. The scans were read by a few epigraphers, including Haifa University Prof. Gershon Galil, and Stripling says it holds 40 letters. The reading includes the words "arur" (cursed) and "YHWH" (the tetragrammaton or the name of God).  The problem is, Stripling has not released images and the tablet has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal. So the academic community still has to weigh in. In the meantime, you can hear what Stripling has to say about it here. Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. This Times of Israel podcast is sponsored by Thirty-Six, in which host Justin Hayet scours Israel to find the 36 most wonderful, interesting people doing the most wonderful, interesting things. Subscribe to Thirty-Six on your favorite podcast platform. IMAGE: Close-up of the outside of the arguably Late Bronze Age lead curse tablet discovered on Mt. Ebal in 2019. (Michael C. Luddeni/Associates for Biblical Research)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week we speak with composer Andy Teirstein about his new contemporary classical music album, “Restless Nation” and play selections from it. Like his music, Teirstein is hard to categorize. Born in New York City to a Jewish family, he quickly diverted from his classical piano and violin lessons and formed folk bands in his youth. Later, he joined a wilderness school's itinerant bus and he traveled around the United States while hiking, working in local communities -- and absorbing their music. These travels and his subsequent varied occupations can be heard in his compositions, whether as a field hand, a clown, an actor, or a university professor. The inspiration for the new album's pieces comes from all over the globe, too, including here in Israel. We’ve played selections of “Restless Nation” throughout the conversation. One piece includes Israeli oud player Yair Dalal and was inspired by a camel trek with Bedouin in the Arava Desert which ended each night with fire-side jam sessions deep into the night. [caption id="attachment_2732495" align="alignnone" width="600"] Fire-side musical jam with Bedouin, oud player Yair Dalal and composer Andy Teirstein. (courtesy)[/caption] There is a whole cast of other leading musicians recorded on the album, including Teirstein himself on a haunting harmonica solo in his piece, "Letter to Woody," based on archival documents he found in the Woody Guthrie library. Today, Teirstein is a professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. He is also active in coexistence arts initiatives, such as the Translucent Boundaries project, which was founded in Israel and since expanded globally. It seeks to bring together the music and dance from peoples who share borders. A big thanks to Navona Records for granting permission for use of the album tracks. "Restless Nation" can now be streamed or purchased. Choose your platform here. Watch "Cluck Old Hen" here. Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. This Times of Israel podcast is sponsored by Thirty-Six, in which host Justin Hayet scours Israel to find the 36 most wonderful, interesting people doing the most wonderful, interesting things. Subscribe to Thirty-Six on your favorite podcast platform. Image: Composer Andy Teirstein during a desert trek in Israel with oud player Yair Dalal. (courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. We speak with Merav Oren, a serial entrepreneur and culinary creator, and now the CEO at Foodish, the new culinary arm of ANU, the renovated and rescaled Museum of the Jewish People (formerly known as Beit Hatfutsot). Foodish is bringing the story of Jewish food to the forefront, with recipes, stories, photos, videos and a Foodish culinary map. There are podcasts as well, hosted by Oren with chefs and celebrities, speaking about their relationship and memories of food, and visits with culinary luminaries, such as the recent visit by food writer Joan Nathan to Israel. Oren speaks about the goals of Foodish, which sends its team out to families who want to record their recipes for posterity, making sure those lists of ingredients and instructions are never completely lost. She shares stories and anecdotes, sharing information about this fulsome food endeavor. Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. This Times of Israel podcast is sponsored by Thirty-Six, in which host Justin Hayet scours Israel to find the 36 most wonderful, interesting people doing the most wonderful, interesting things. Subscribe to Thirty-Six on your favorite podcast platform. IMAGE: Foodish CEO Merav Oren, left, with food writer Joan Nathan, during Nathan's recent visit to Israel, hosted by Foodish, the culinary arm of Anu -- Museum of the Jewish People (Courtesy Merav Oren)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We’re speaking this week to 'Fauda' series creators Avi Issacharoff and Lior Raz, as well as documentary filmmaker Oren Rosenfeld, whose 2018 film 'The Real Fauda,' delved into the series' global popularity. Issacharoff and Lior Raz spoke to journalists this week just before taking off for Budapest, where the show will shoot part of the fourth season. Viewers have been waiting since 2020 for the latest installation of this series. While Israelis will be able to watch the fourth season of "Fauda" in Hebrew starting summer 2022, Netflix has yet to announce a date for the US release of the show, which has rocketed Issacharoff and Raz to TV stardom. The new season follows an Arab citizen of Israel who is suspected of having a terrorist history, and whose sister is an Israeli police officer. The plot -- which spirits viewers to Lebanon, Jenin, Israel, and Belgium -- was inspired by a true story that happened in Israel many years ago, said Issacharoff. The creators said writing began before the last year's violence. The pair recently announced a $50 million partnership with former Disney executives, and their production company Faraway Road is working on several films and TV series.  IMAGE: 'Fauda' co-creators Lior Raz (left) and Avi Issacharoff at a March 6, 2022 press conference about the upcoming fourth season of 'Fauda' (Courtesy Rafi Daluya)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week we're marking International Women’s Day by speaking with the Director of Jerusalem’s Hadassah Mount Scopus Hospital, Dr. Tamar Elram. Born in England, Elram moved to Israel as a child with her family and lived in Jerusalem. A trained gynecologist, Elram has served in leadership positions at the Hadassah hospitals for the past decade. In November 2017 she became the director of Mount Scopus. We discuss the powerful female history behind the Hadassah hospitals and Elram's own hard-won wisdom around what she calls “Awareness-Based Leadership.” We also have a frank conversation about important developments in women’s health perspectives and how the #metoo movement has affected the field of gynecology. IMAGE: Dr. Tamar Elram, CEO of Hadassah Mount Scopus Hospital (Arnon Bosani)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We’re speaking this week to Israeli rap impresario Shaanan Streett, the founding member of hiphop/funk band Hadag Nahash, currently celebrating its 25th year. During our conversation in Streett's Jerusalem studio, we discuss reaching this career pinnacle, the band's improbable start and finding the balance between the songs of protest and, as Streett says, "the importance of having fun." We also talk about Streett's new solo album and his first Arabic single,"Arabiyaty ElMaksura," sung entirely by Streett in Arabic, the language he's been working on for the last decade.  Streett also recently published his first book, a fictional work about Jerusalem skateboarders and graffiti artists. We discuss the art of writing and interpreting dreams, something he does with friends in his "Dream a Dream" podcast and finally, his ongoing relationship with the city of Jerusalem, where he was raised and still lives and works. IMAGE: Rapper, writer and dream interpreter Shaanan Streett (Courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week, in honor of The Times of Israel's 10-year anniversary, Times Will Tell is speaking with founding editor David Horovitz. We here at The Times of Israel want to thank all of you for giving us a chance a decade ago and so we’re peeling back the curtain for a glimpse behind the scenes. Horovitz speaks about what it was like to launch a media platform in a crowded tough market. We talk about our five language platforms and deep dives into investigative journalism. We hear about the state of Israel generally, and finally, what gives Horovitz confidence in the future. Image: Founding The Times of Israel editor David Horovitz in our Jerusalem office. (Amanda Borschel-Dan/ToI)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We’re speaking this week to Anneke von der Lippe and Uri Barbash, the Norwegian actor and Israeli director of the current Netflix series, "The Girl From Oslo," which racked up views and placed in the top ten of series watched in 36 countries during its first week on the streaming platform. The 10-part series tells the story of a kidnapping of a young Norwegian woman and her two Israeli friends. The Norwegian Pia’s mother, Alex, played by von der Lippe, travels to Israel to make contact with two friends — Arik, an Israeli politician played by Amos Taman, and her Palestinian friend, Layla, played by Raida Adon. It’s a show that takes on many subjects; ISIS, Israel, Hamas, Oslo, Palestinian and Israeli conflict, personal relationships, husbands, wives and children, terror and mourning, for a sweep of emotions and drama. IMAGE: Anneke von der Lippe (left) and Amos Taman (right) as Alex and Arik in 'The Girl from Oslo,' currently on Netflix.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We're speaking this week with Daniel Sivan, the Israeli co-director of the new animated Netflix short film, “Camp Confidential: America’s Secret Nazis,” which was shortlisted for the best documentary short Oscar; final nominees will be announced on February 8. "Camp Confidential” is the latest of several Sivan documentary collaborations with his work and life partner, Mor Loushy, to explore different aspects of Jewish history — their previous films have dealt with subjects such as the Oslo Accords, the Six-Day War and the legacy of AIPAC. "Camp Confidential" tells the story of a group of Jewish American veterans, refugees of Nazi Germany, whose sole experience of WWII was guarding a secret Nazi POW camp on American soil, outside Washington, DC. Sivan discusses the use of animation to tell this story, their decision to make it into a short film and how he and Loushy unintentionally became filmmakers telling aspects of the Jewish story. IMAGE: A still from 'Camp Confidential.' (Netflix via JTA)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week in honor of the January 27 International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Times Will Tell spoke with Dani Dayan, the new head of Yad Vashem, in his Jerusalem-based museum and Holocaust education center. We met a few days after the Colleyville hostage situation, in which four Jews were held captive for some 11 hours in their Reform synagogue in what was arguably an antisemitic attack. We discuss what role Holocaust education could play in mitigating such attacks and how Dayan once naively thought they would not occur in the United States.  Dayan was born in 1955 in Argentina and moved to Israel in 1971. Prior to heading Yad Vashem, he was the Consul General of Israel in New York. Before that, he was a longtime activist and head of the right-wing Settler Movement’s Yesha Council. In the most recent elections, he ran on Gidon Sa’ar’s New Hope ticket and was appointed chair of Yad Vashem by the party’s Education Minister Yifat Shasha-Biton in August. Despite his former political ties, Dani tells me that he and Yad Vashem are strictly non-partisan in their work -- and why that is increasingly important.  IMAGE: Head of Yad Vashem Dani Dayan. (Alex Kolomoisky/Yad Vashem)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. We’re taking a deep dive today into Israel’s kosher certification system, as the government undertakes the first step in overhauling the industry. The new plan, unveiled in July by religious affairs minister Matan Kahana, would presumably end the monopoly of the chief rabbinate and local rabbinates as the only bodies that can issue kosher certificates, which costs businesses upwards of $2 million a year, and allow for other private kosher certification agencies. This long-awaited privatization of the kosher certification industry follows a path paved by the religious Zionist Tzohar organization, which launched its own kosher certification agency in 2018. They took over for a grassroots group that first entered the industry years before, aiming to break the rabbinate’s grip on what can be considered kosher. You'll hear from several people involved in this industry, including Rabbi David Stav, chairman of Tzohar; Tzvi Maller, the American-born owner of Crave, a restaurant in Jerusalem's Mahane Yehuda market that grappled with a fakin' bacon issue; Itzik Kadosh, a pastry chef and owner of a beloved Jerusalem cafe who fought the rabbinate over turning his croissants into triangles; Yittie Lawson, who runs Tacos Luis, a Mexican restaurant down the block from Kadosh; Dan Male, who runs Jerusalem's Angelica, a fine chef restaurant whose customers won't stand for anything other than the rabbinate's stamp of approval and Leon Avigad, who owns and operates the Brown Hotel chain in Israel, Greece and Europe and just wants his kosher supervisors to tell him what to do and how to do it. It's a wacky world of kosher laws and these people live it, every day. Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Crave Jerusalem's 'facon' duck bacon on its Black Forest Special (Courtesy Crave)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week we're speaking about the play "The Blessing of a Broken Heart," based on the book by Sherri Mandell, directed by Yael Valier of Theater and Theology and with the lead role played by Rebecca Sykes. The production was supposed to be performed this week in Jerusalem, but is being postponed due the current wave of the omicron variant. This latest version of the one-woman play is now backed by an ensemble created by Valier in order to underline the story and reflect what the Mandell character is thinking and feeling throughout the work. The production is about the brutal terrorist murder of Mandell's 13-year-old son Koby Mandell and his friend Yosef Ishran in 2001, near their home in Israel. This terrible tragic loss led the Mandell and her husband, Seth Mandell, to do many things, including establishing the Koby Mandell Foundation that offers support programs to people who have lost family members to terrorism. Mandell has always been a writer and "The Blessing of a Broken Heart" was written in the year after Koby's murder, portraying her experience of mourning and renewal. Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: From recent rehearsals of "The Blessings of a Broken Heart," the book by Sherri Mandell that's being performed by Theater and Theology in Jerusalem, in January 2022. (Courtesy PR)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week we're speaking with author and journalist Andrew Lawler, who recently published the fabulous “Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City.” Host Amanda Borschel-Dan absolutely devoured the book and highly recommends it to anyone interested in Holy Land history, archaeology, or even just tales of unbelievable, but real characters. It’s a real trip along the timeline of Jerusalem archaeologists, spanning from the 1860s through today. We get a sense of the crazy people behind the digs, government involvement and the sparks of geopolitical conflict that still simmer. Image: Author Andrew Lawler (Samir Al-Sharif) Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week, we're speaking to Danna Stern, the managing director of Yes Studios. This is the studio that brought us "Fauda" and "Shtisel," "On the Spectrum" and "Your Honor," and many hours of viewing pleasure in this new era of streaming platforms and often shorter, sharper series. We discuss what makes a successful Israeli show and when it can be 'translated' into success abroad, such as Kan 11's grocery store mockumentary "Checkout," being distributed by Yes. Stern feels that Netflix's recently canceled "Hit and Run," from the "Fauda" team, can be considered a success, given the parameters that brought it about, and waxes poetic over her own recent viewing favorites, "Squid Game" and Apple TV's "Ted Lasso." IMAGE: Yes Studios' Danna Stern (right), with Niv Majar (middle) and Naomi Levov of 'On the Spectrum,' during a 2019 awards ceremony in Monte Carlo (Courtesy Yes Studios)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week on Times Will Tell, we sent our New York-based film and culture critic Jordan Hoffman on an odyssey to ascertain how best to fulfill the American Jewish "mitzvah" of Chinese food and a movie on Christmas. Our tireless correspondent went deep into the heart of Chinatown and sampled dim sum and hot and sour soup. He also explains how the ongoing coronavirus pandemic is currently affecting the city that never sleeps, and who gets no (wonton) soup from him.  We hear about Columbus Park, a unique snapshot of New York at its finest, and where to go to get the best tea (and potential prezzie) ever.  In the second half of the show, Hoffman explores what's screening in local theaters. What's worth the hype -- and what decidedly is not. And finally, he explains where those New Yorkers who want to fulfill the Xmas mitzvah to its fullest can have a most goyische evening out.  ILLUSTRATIVE IMAGE: People are seen in the window eating at a Chinese restaurant decorated with menu items on its shop front on January 10, 2020, in New York City. (AP Photo/Wong Maye-E)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. We're speaking this week to Bishop Glenn Plummer, a minister, pastor and bishop of the Pentacostal Church, with Lazar Berman hosting, putting on his Christian Affairs correspondent hat. Plummer was appointed in 2019 as the first Pentacostal bishop of Israel, representing the predominantly Black church that has nearly nine million adherents worldwide. He was mandated, said Plummer, to "come and embrace Israel," from his position as one of the top African American, pro-Zionist clergy in the US. Berman and Plummer discuss his first few months in Israel, when certain Jewish Israelis felt threatened by his presence and intentions. They also discuss the roots of the Pentacostal Church, evangelical Christianity, Black-Jewish relations in the US and Plummer's plans and experiences in Israel until now. Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Bishop Glenn Plummer, the Pentacostal minister who moved to Israel during the pandemic, on a boat in the Galilee (Courtesy Bishop Plummer)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel.  We're speaking this week to flag football players who gathered in Jerusalem this week to play in the IFAF Flag Football world championship.  Organized by American Football in Israel founder Steve Leibowitz, who brought flag football to Israel in the 1980s, the championship gathers hundreds of athletes from all over the world to the Kraft Family Sports Campus in Jerusalem, for three days of games. Given the pandemic, it was a last minute decision to hold the championship in Israel, after other countries had to cancel. Leibowitz tells us that it was only back in May that he began organizing the games in Jerusalem, a plan that was nearly abandoned with the arrival of the Omicron variant. But Leibowitz and other government agencies prevailed, and the players arrived late lat week, quarantining for three days, sticking to their own team tents when not on the field, and only gathering together when it's time to play. According to them, it's all worth it. Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Flag football players competing in IFAF Flag Football world championship in Jerusalem, December 7, 2021 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel.  This week, we're speaking to the Djamchid Sisters, Shay-Li Djamchid and Eden Djamchid, sisters in life and in music, who have been composing, playing and singing together for the last 15 years, since they were teens. Their new single, "B'Yadayim Shelcha," ("In Your Hands") was recently released as part of their second album, "A Thousand Suns." It's an album that's been long awaited by local 88FM listeners, as well as their fans around the country.  During the conversation, the two sisters speak about being born in Jerusalem into a musical family. Shay-Li picked up the guitar when she was still in grade school, and began writing songs and music on her own. Her younger sister Eden, only by a year and a half, began learning how to play the cello at the age of five, when she was still in kindergarten. The two began playing and singing together from their bedrooms in their teens and performing soon followed, with a serious approach to their music from the very start. This latest collection of songs, say the sisters, reflects where they are in life now, older, wiser, still full of hopes and dreams.  Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: The Djamchid Sisters, Eden Djamchid (left) and Shay-Li Djamchid (Courtesy Omri Rosengart)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel.  This week, we're speaking to Samekh Zakout and Uriya Rosenman, the Arab rapper and Israeli educator who banded together in the last year to put their frustrations, thoughts and ideas into two raps so far, the first of which, “Bo Nedaber Dugri,” (Let’s Talk Straight), a six-minute, 28-second rap, went viral when released in May. They had been working together for months, but the impetus for releasing the first rap in May were the riots that raged through Israel's mixed cities. Now the two have released their second rap, "Munfas," and are on the road in Israel, speaking to Arabs and Jews, sometimes together, about what this country needs in order to find different solutions for future generations. Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Samekh Zakout, left and Uriya Rosenman of Dugri, the straight-talking rap pair who aim to find a different narrative for young Arabs and Jews in Israel.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel.  Thanksgiving has long been celebrated by American immigrants living in Israel, but what about Israelis, native Sabras, who don't know from pilgrims and pumpkin pie? Why would they celebrate this holiday about all foods related to pumpkin, stuffing and cranberries? This week, we're speaking to Israelis who have long celebrated Thanksgiving, chef Snir Eng Sela and Tel Aviv resident Yael Cnaan, who speak about how and why they celebrate this very American holiday. There's also a conversation with Gavi Nelson, the founder of Eating Around Israel, who exports his spice mixes, and created his own Middle Eastern version of pumpkin spice. Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Chef Snir Eng Sela's pumpkin pie at his bistro, Gouge and Daniel, where he often ends up eating most of the pie he makes, as Israeli customers often shy away from this most American of Thanksgiving desserts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week, we’re speaking to two musicians who will be performing at the upcoming 22nd Oud Festival, opening November 18 in Jerusalem.  Wisam Gibran is a composer, poet and oud player who will be performing with poet Ronny Somekh this year, bringing their music and words to the stage. It's not the first time at the Oud Festival for Gibran, a Palestinian from Nazareth who performs globally, and who enjoys the particular mix of people and place at the annual event. Singer Nataly Oryon, from Jerusalem, will be performing for the first time at the Oud Festival, bringing her mix of Greek music and song to the stage. Greek is a language Oryon learned on her own, having fallen in love with its musicality and tone. The music she sngs is classical and traditional Greek music, and other tunes she's discovered along the way both in Greece and back home in Israel. Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Musician Wisam Gibran on the oud, his instrument of choice during the upcoming Oud Festival in Jerusalem (Courtesy Wisam Gibran)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week, we’re speaking to David Kichka, founder and producer of the Israeli Cuisine Festival, opening November 11 for two weeks around the country. Kichka, a culinary entrepreneur who has produced different food events in Israel over the last decade, speaks about the Michelin-starred chef meals,  market tours, hummus, olive oil and wine tastings that make up this first-time event. There are chef meals and talks in several Dan hotels, dinners created by chefs Ezra Kedem and Erez Komarovsky in their pastoral homes, street food meals and 17-course dinners, the whole gamut of dining experiences. Kichka also delves more fully into his definition of Israeli cuisine, looking at the chefs who study abroad and bring their knowledge home, adding to the Israeli vibe that has helped create the local culinary culture. "It's okay to be an immigrant country," said Kichka, pointing to the "salad of origin" of Israelis, coming from different places and adding their tastes to the local gastronomical melting pot. "It's become part of our identity." Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: David Kichka, the culinary entrepreneur behind the new Israeli Cuisine Festival (Courtesy David Kichka)  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week, environmental reporter Sue Surkes speaks to award-winning Israeli photographer Roie Galitz, who uses his lens to show how climate change is impacting animals in the coldest parts of the planet. Galitz lives in Tel Aviv, and has spent years traveling to the North Pole,  Antartica and other cold corners of the world, where he documents animals -- polar bears are a particular favorite -- and climate change as a result. He wasn't always an environmentalist, Galitz tells Surkes, but through his fascination with the animals in those places and the immense changes taking place there, he watched the Arctic warming up, causing dramatic changes. "Photography freezes moments in time forever," said Galitz, "it's my time machine." Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Photographer Roie Galitz on one of his photoshoots, with animals who are "relaxed and calm," something he always aims for with his photography (Courtesy Roie Galitz)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week, arts and culture editor Jessica Steinberg headed to Arad, 25 kilometers west of the Dead Sea, where 200 participants volunteered to be photographed in the nude for Spencer Tunicks’ third installation at the Dead Sea, raising awareness about the retreating waters of this natural phenomenon. Tunick’s 2011 shots of the Dead Sea included shots of the models covered with Dead Sea mud. This time, they covered their bodies with white body paint, channeling Lot’s wife, the biblical character who turned into pillar of salt when she fled Sodom, and turned back to look at her city. The volunteer models spent several hours standing barefoot on the sharp rocks and stones of the arid hilltop, posing for Tunick who stood on a ladder, a megaphone in one hand and his camera in the other. Steinberg interviewed several of the volunteer models, and spoke with the Arad mayor and Spencer Tunick on the windy plateau overlooking the Dead Sea, bringing listeners to this unusual photoshoot on the border of the Negev and Judean Deserts. Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: A few hundred of naked people paint in white pose for a group picture taken by Jewish American artist Spencer Tunick and his team, outside Arad, Southern Israel, on October 17, 2021. Photo by Yonatan Sindel/Flash90See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week, we speak with Federica Sasso, a freelance writer for the Times of Israel, who is covering the story of Israeli-born Eitan Biran, the six-year-old sole survivor of the May cable car crash in northern Italy. Biran is the subject of a fierce custody battle between his maternal and paternal sides of the family. His parents, baby brother and maternal great-grandparents were all killed in the accident. Eitan has been raised in Italy since he was a baby, where his Israeli-born parents were living while his father studied medicine near Milan. His paternal aunt, also a doctor, lives in the same town where Eitan and his family lived. Eitan's maternal grandfather whisked him back to Israel in September, and a court case is now unfolding in Israel to determine whether the grandfather violated the Hague Convention and is guilty of abduction. Sasso, an Italian living in Israel, unfolds the story, the ongoing court cases and the two cultures at battle in this tragic tale. Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM, or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Aya Biran, third from left, a paternal aunt of Eitan Biran, who survived a cable car crash in Italy that killed his immediate family, arrives to court in Tel Aviv Friday, Oct. 8, 2021. The boy's parents and younger sibling were among 14 killed in May when a cable car slammed into a mountainside in northern Italy. He is now the focus of a custody battle between his maternal grandparents in Israel and his paternal relatives in Italy. (AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week, we speak with Michael Leventhal, the Yorkshire, England-based publisher of Greenhill Books and Green Bean Books, who authored "Babka, Boulou & Blintzes," a collection of Jewish chocolate recipes by 50 Jewish food writers, including Claudia Roden, Joan Nathan and others. The book includes everything from traditional babka and chocolate soup to chocolate Sacher torte and chocolate-tahini combinations. The cookbook also includes Leventhal's in-depth research and exploration of the history of Jewish food and culture through cocoa, examining the Cadbury family's connections to Israel; whether the creator of the Sacher torte was Jewish; and the popularity of babka. Leventhal's cookbook includes recipes from Jewish communities the world over, including Russia, Mexico, England, Israel, North America, Turkey, Egypt, Portugal and the Netherlands. All sales of the book will support Chai Cancer Care, a Jewish cancer support organization in England. Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: The cover of Michael Leventhal's cookbook, "Babka, Boulou & Blintzes, Jewish Chocolate Recipes from around the World"See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week, we speak with home chef Shaily Lipa about her latest book, "Hakol Beseder," about the power of an active, organized kitchen, and which is now being translated into English as "KitcheNeat." Lipa is a beloved Israeli TV personality and lifestyle authority, who has written eleven books in Hebrew. This book, which came out in March 2020 at the start of the coronavirus, just as Israel went into a lockdown, is about the benefits of a well-organized and active kitchen -- the heart and soul of any household -- and how it can offer the path to a healthy, balanced and fulfilling life. Lipa speaks about her 5 Rules to an Organized Kitchen, the guiding principles of KitcheNeat. She also talks about her studies in Hasidism and how that affected her research and writing, her thoughts about other home organizing experts, and how her readers' reactions to "KitcheNeat" have been a powerful antidote during these very uncertain times. Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Home chef and TV personality Shaily Lipa in her kitchen.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week, we speak with artist Mindy Wiesel about her lifelong search for beauty in her artwork and life, amid the turmoil, pain and love of her Holocaust survivor parents. "AFTER: The Obligation of Beauty," is an unusual memoir, a hardbound, slim volume that divides Weisel's life into chapters of her artistic experience, with photos of her work, which includes paintings, glassworks and sculpture, illustrating each section. It's a work that Weisel wrote over the course of eleven years, tracing her search for beauty in her life. She was born after the Holocaust, in the Bergen-Belsen Displaced Person's Camp to parents who survived Auschwitz, and is a cousin to the late Elie Wiesel. Yet despite those complicated beginnings, the book is Weisel's own story, her struggles as a "second generation," a child of survivors. The memoir traces Weisel's lifelong journey to understand her parents' trauma into which she was born and an unshakable will to live with beauty, one that she has attempted to fulfill  her entire life. By weaving a tapestry of her art, narrative, poetry and journals, Weisel offers moving insights into her life and work, especially her deep-seated conviction that beauty and love can overcome tragedy. Weisel, her husband and children lived in Washington, DC for forty years before she moved with her husband to Jerusalem ten years ago. Her art is on permanent display at the National Museum of American Art, Oxford University and the Israel Museum, and in many public and private collections. The book is available for purchase on Amazon; Weisel will also have a solo exhibit this November at the Rosenbach Gallery in Jerusalem. Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Artist Mindy Weisel in her Jerusalem home, prior to the September 2021 launch of her memoir, "After."See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week, we’re speaking with three different rabbis of Orthodox, Conservative and Reform denominations, in Israel and the US, about their work as congregational spiritual leaders during this high holiday period that began with Rosh Hashana on Monday night. The first rabbi to speak is Rabbi Seth Farber, an American-born rabbi living in Ra'anana, where he leads the Kehillat Netivot synagogue in his neighborhood. He talks about the logistics of running Rosh Hashana services this year, as well as some ideas from his sermon, including the destiny of the biblical Joseph who spent two years in isolation in an Egyptian prison, a formative period in his life. Our second rabbi is Rabbi Aaron Brusso of Bet Torah Synagogue in Mount Kisco in New York. He is also grappling with the realities of coronavirus restrictions in his Conservative congregation, which has both strengthened his connection with his congregants of all ages, and limited their physical presence as well. Rabbi Brusso speaks about his sermon topics, the state of everyone's empathy in this complicated time, followed by his second day open letter to the congregation's college students about Israel. Finally, we hear from Rabbi Toby Manewith, a Hebrew Union College-ordained rabbi from Chicago, who will be leading services at a nearby old age home and assisted living facility. Rabbi Manewith speaks about the particular issues confronting her aged congregation, and what they have handled over the last period. She tells one story she'll be relating on the first night of Rosh Hashanah, a folktale that will help people release their thoughts and concerns. Throughout the podcast, we listen to Ishay Ribo's "Seder HaAvoda" piece, a haunting work based solely on the prayers and liturgical poems of the Yom Kippur service. Times Will Tell podcasts are available for download on iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, PlayerFM or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: Jewish men blow the shofar during the forgivness (Selichot) prayer at the Rashbi gravesite in Meron, Northern Israel, on September 9, 2017, prior to the upcoming Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (Photo by David Cohen/Flash90)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week, we’re speaking with Bryan Friedland, an actor on the autism spectrum who recently participated in Kan 11 reality show, "Tnu L'avod," ("Let Us Work"). The show, which aired in August, comprises four episodes about nine people with neurological and cognitive differences. All nine want to integrate into the Israeli workplace, and engage in a months-long process to find their way toward jobs and acceptance in Israeli society. Friedland speaks with us about the process of participating in the show, working with a social worker and coach to figure out which jobs best suit his skills, and more importantly, the emotional and cognitive challenges of his life, along with his desire for acceptance and a life of meaning. IMAGE: Bryan Friedland, who appears on Kan 11's "Tnu L'Avod," in Jerusalem's Shekel candle workshop where he worked for ten years.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week, we’re speaking with Andrew Porwancher, a professor at the University of Oklahoma, and author of the recently published, "The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton," about the founding father's Jewish background and influences. Porwancher spent the better part of a decade researching "The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton," before Lin Manuel-Miranda's musical hit on Broadway, changing the way millions think about spoken word and the founding father's lasting influence on the American democracy. We’ll discuss Porwancher's research and his engrossing thesis about American Jewry, including what it meant to be a Jew in Hamilton's time. A native of Princeton, New Jersey, Porwancher earned degrees from Brown and Northwestern before completing his PhD in history at Cambridge. He currently serves as the Wick Cary Associate Professor at the University of Oklahoma and the Ernest May Fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center. IMAGE: Dr. Andrew PorwancherSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week, we’re speaking with Dr. David Sasso. A musician and psychiatrist, David works in the intersection of mental health, music, and the arts and serves as Assistant Clinical Professor at the Yale School of Medicine. Full disclosure, David and host Amanda Borschel-Dan attended high school together in Indianapolis, after which he studied Music Composition at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and double majored in biochemistry before attending medical school at Northwestern. As a teen, David premiered works with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, and later his full-length opera "The Trio of Minuet" was performed featuring children as the main characters. More recently, David has focused on various traditional folk genres and his duo project -- Kat Wallace and David Sasso -- is releasing its second album in October. We’ll discuss the idea of the creative genius and hear excerpts of his music, especially two very different pieces he wrote about Noah’s Ark. IMAGE: Dr. David Sasso (courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week we’re speaking with Mark Halawa, who -- although Jewish from birth according to halacha or Jewish law -- only after some 11 years in Israel recently gained his Israeli citizenship. That's because Mark was born and raised in Kuwait to a family of Palestinian refugees. His father, once a colleague of Yasser Arafat, is a secular Muslim. His mother is the daughter of a Jewish woman from the Holy Land who married a Muslim man. So according to Muslim law, he’s Muslim. And according to Jewish law, he’s a Jew. Hear how Mark learned about his Jewish identity and made his way from Kuwait to Jerusalem, where he is building his own tribe of tolerant citizens of the world. IMAGE: Kuwaiti-born Mark Halawa receives his Israeli citizenship, August 2021. (Courtesy) Read more here: https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-a-kuwaiti-muslim-made-a-jewish-home-in-jerusalem/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week, we’re speaking with Ariel Zwang, the new CEO of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Zwang is a longtime CEO of other nonprofits, but for the Jewish world, it is still a real rarity to see a woman at the top. We’ll speak about a life of breaking glass ceilings and what still needs to be done for more gender parity in the Jewish organizational sphere.  Zwang is just back from a month-long tour of Israel where she visited Lod and other sites of coexistence flar-ups during the recent May conflict. Also, Zwang discusses the JDC’s footprint around the world, among all nations regardless of religion, its work here in Israel, and how the mammoth organization is trying to get more input from the next generation of leaders. IMAGE: JDC's new CEO Ariel Zwang visits with participants of Hanoch Digital, a JDC program that helps Israeli Haredim embrace technology to confidently enter the job market. (courtesy)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.