These are strange times to be a Jew. Jews are in many ways safer and stronger than ever, but face a surge of antisemitism unlike anything seen in generations. This includes a hatred of Jewish collective identity on the progressive left as well as hatred of Jews as Jews in millions of online posts each day and in the mainstream platforming of neo-Nazis like Fuentes and Carroll by the Tucker Carlsons of the West. These people aren't engaged in criticism of Israeli actions or of the Gaza war, but r...
Nov 16, 2025•48 min•Ep. 60
We’re trying something new at AHA: Short-from episodes interspersed with the regular interviews that dive into an often-asked question about Israel, Jews and the Middle East. Our first question sent in by a listener: Are Jews really indigenous to Israel? If you like what we do here, please join our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything. There you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join in our great discussions where listeners share news and valua...
Nov 13, 2025•13 min•Ep. 59
As Israelis wait with bated breath to discover if the body of Hadar Goldin, killed and taken into Gaza in 2014, will be returned for burial in Israel, we sit down with returned hostage Tal Shoham for a conversation about his harrowing experience and insights into Hamas and Gazan society. Long-time listeners will recognize Tal's name from one of our earliest episodes with his sister-in-law, our friend Shaked Haran, who described her fight to bring back the eight members of her family who were tak...
Nov 09, 2025•58 min•Ep. 58
Human rights organizations help shape the world's understanding of conflicts, including the one between Israelis and Palestinians. Some of the biggest groups, especially Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, are immensely influential in government, the media and civil society in Western countries. And for decades, their expertise, detailed reports and moral reputations made them agents of positive change. But signs are mounting that that's changing, and you don't have to be Israeli to no...
Nov 05, 2025•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 57
Today we step out of the politics and anxious debates of this difficult time and go back 5,500 years to the Chalcolithic, the so-called Copper Age. Our guide is Prof. Tom Levy, eminent archaeologist and emeritus Norma Kershaw Chair in the Archaeology of Ancient Israel and Neighboring Lands at the University of California, San Diego. Tom's new graphic-novel memoir, The Boomer Archaeologist, tells the story of his journey into the deep past of the land of Israel, and offers an opportunity for us t...
Nov 02, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 56
Trump's peace plan explicitly calls for deradicalization of the Gazan population. Countries like Saudi Arabia and Indonesia are hoping to take part in Gaza's rebuilding in part so they can help push back against the radical Islamism of Hamas, which those countries see as a larger threat to themselves as well. Can Palestinian society be deradicalized? What might that even mean? Is the problem a religious one? A political one? Can Israel play a part, and how would that look? We turned to Dr. Einat...
Oct 29, 2025•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 55
The Gaza war may now be over. But Hamas remains entrenched in the half of Gaza from which the IDF has withdrawn. Many are hopeful that this marks a new and better day for Gaza, but it's hard to see how Gaza moves forward to the better future envisioned in the Trump peace plan as long as Hamas continues to rule there. Prof. Dan Schueftan, a preeminent and blunt-spoken Israeli national security scholar who helped craft the original 2005 Israeli withdrawal from Gaza joins the podcast to talk about ...
Oct 23, 2025•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 54
Rabbi Elhanan Miller has half a million online followers, and almost all of them are Arabs. They tune in to his "People of the Book" project on YouTube and other platforms to learn in Arabic about Jewish ideas, customs and holidays, and to hear the testimonies of Jews from the Arab and Muslim worlds who now live in Israel or the West. Elhanan has appeared hundreds of times on Arabic-language television networks throughout the Gaza war, where is asked to convey the views and experiences of Israel...
Oct 21, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 53
Dr. Dara Horn, award-winning novelist and scholar of Yiddish and Hebrew literature, joins the podcast to help us dig deep into the Jewish bookshelf, the whirlwind of antisemitism in which so many Jews find themselves, and, unavoidably, into Judaism’s most successful go-to solution for seemingly every problem: Education. We talk about Jewish “anti-literature,” about why people (and museums and politicians) so often seem to love stories about dead Jews but get uncomfortable with living ones, and a...
Oct 17, 2025•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 52
Coleman Hughes is an American writer, host of the podcast Conversations with Coleman, a visiting professor at the University of Austin, and the author of The End of Race Politics. He joins the podcast to talk about America, the Gaza war and the standing of American Jews in American society. A prominent Black thinker who has written and spoken a great deal about race in America, Coleman also helps guide us through the complicated intellectual and cultural story of Black antisemitism in America. T...
Oct 12, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 51
On October 8, President Donald Trump announced that Israel and Hamas had agreed to his peace and hostage release deal. Israel's tormented hostages will soon be home. The agreement delivers almost everything the pro-Palestinian campaign claimed to want. No Israeli annexation, no Gazans have to leave and any who do can return, and a full rebuilding and rehabilitation under Arab and international auspices - all of it confirmed in an explicit Israeli commitment to the United States. It's the best po...
Oct 09, 2025•23 min•Ep. 50
On October 7, 2023, Eli Sharabi's home was surrounded by Hamas terrorists. As he was dragged into Gaza, he shouted to his wife Leanna and two daughters Noiya and Yahel that "no matter what they do to me, I'll be back." It was only in February 2025, as he arrived back in Israel after enduring 491 days of physical and psychological torture at the hands of his captors, that he learned that his family was murdered that day. Eli's new book, "Hostage," is the first comprehensive account of the experie...
Oct 08, 2025•52 min•Ep. 49
The two-year anniversary of the October 7 massacre falls on the joyous holiday of Sukkot. The Hebrew calendar anniversary will fall on the holiday of Simchat Torah, literally "the Joy of Torah." How do we deal with the juxtaposition of these painful anniversaries, of wounds and anxieties and pain that are very much still with us, and the demand to be happy, to celebrate - or even just to try to find release from the pain? The sages of the Talmud, who lived through great and abiding traumas of th...
Oct 06, 2025•25 min•Ep. 48
The day after Trump's release of his 20-point plan for an end to the Gaza war, Haviv sat down with Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, Palestinian-American analyst and director of the Atlantic Council's Realign for Palestine project, to discuss what it means. Can Hamas really be disarmed and removed from power in Gaza, as the plan envisions? Can an international force in Gaza succeed where the likes of UNIFIL and countless other international interventions in the region have failed miserably? Who in Palestini...
Oct 03, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 47
Trump's 20-point grand bargain to end the Gaza war is a remarkable document. It offers Israel much of the Israeli cabinet's formally declared war goals, not least the summary release of Israeli hostages from Hamas hands. It seems to enjoy broad Arab backing, and it puts Hamas in the position of having to refuse not merely an end to war, but the beginning, now backed by the US and the Arab states, of Gaza's great rebuilding and rehabilitation. It's a remarkable achievement for the US administrati...
Sep 30, 2025•26 min•Ep. 46
Earlier this month, Times of Israel editor David Horovitz became one of only two or three Israeli journalists to have ever walked the streets of Damascus, Syria’s capital. But he was the very first to be welcomed there with open arms by the Syrian government. His visit with a group of American Jews led by Michigan Rabbi Asher Lopatin was part of the new regime’s efforts to show a new openness to the world. I asked David what he heard from senior government officials, what he saw among the Nation...
Sep 30, 2025•47 min•Ep. 45
Rosh Hashanah is the only Jewish holiday that falls on the first day of the lunar month - that begins in darkness. It is also the holiday most associated in Jewish tradition with great turning-points and new beginnings. The coming year will be a time of great change and momentous decisions. Israel will have some fundamental choices to make. This is a reflection on the holiday, on the state of the war, and on the responsibility that Judaism places upon us to shape our destiny. Today’s episode is ...
Sep 22, 2025•41 min•Ep. 44
On September 9, Israel tried but failed to kill Hamas leaders in Qatar. The regional blowback surprised the Israelis. Emirati and Saudi leaders, who have long seen Qatar as a foe in the region, visited Doha to express solidarity. Criticism of Israel came not only from the usual suspects, but even from Trump administration officials. Israel, many regional allies now worry, doesn't understand its new role as regional superpower. It's still locked into the mindset of a small besieged nation, and it...
Sep 14, 2025•50 min•Ep. 43
Events move fast in the Middle East. This episode was recorded before the Israeli strike in Qatar. We believed this episode was an important one because the world should be paying more attention to the deteriorating situation in Egypt. The attack on Hamas leaders in Doha did indeed grab the headlines. It's a dramatic development Haviv addressed in a Free Press livestream and that we plan to address in an episode already under development. But the original point behind this episode stands. Everyo...
Sep 12, 2025•56 min•Season 42Ep. 42
The first Jews to become subjects of the Ottoman Empire lived in Greek-speaking western Anatolia during the Ottoman conquests of the region in the early 1300s. The next seven centuries of Turkish-Jewish interaction were mostly a story of Turkish tolerance rooted in the Jews’ usefulness to the empire. For example, when Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492, Sultan Bayezid II sent his navy to offer them safe transport into his empire. The Jews were considered a talented and i...
Sep 07, 2025•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 41
Former Mossad director Yossi Cohen joins the podcast to talk about the war with Iran (spoiler: It isn’t over), the ayatollahs' regime (which won’t be easily felled), and his assurance that there are still strategic surprises in Mossad’s quiver. We discuss the stubborn Israeli insistence to continue investing heavily in HUMINT, or human intelligence - spies - in an age when other major agencies have turned away from classic spycraft to cyber, signals intelligence and AI. And we discuss how Gaza c...
Sep 04, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 40
During an August speaking tour in Norway, Haviv was interviewed at an event hosted by the remarkable Jewish organization Kos & Kaos - The Nordic Jewish Network. It's a unique group founded in 2016 that brings together Jewish voices and friends and allies of the Jewish community across Scandinavia for dialogue, cultural events and critical conversations. Norwegian writer and journalist Bjørn Gabrielsen interviewed Haviv in front of a packed house in Oslo on August 21 about the war in Gaza, th...
Aug 31, 2025•1 hr 59 min
Twenty-three months after the October 7 attack, Hamas is massively degraded in Gaza. At a terrible cost to Gaza itself, and after losing hundreds of IDF soldiers on the battlefield, Israel has managed to shatter its battalions and kill nearly all its pre-war command hierarchy. Yet, as with all guerrilla groups, the bar for Hamas to remain a strategic actor is very low. It can still disrupt aid distribution at a large scale, still launch guerrilla attacks out of tunnels, still even launch the occ...
Aug 27, 2025•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 38
Many of our Patreon subscribers have asked us to address the campaign against Israel that accuses it of genocide, colonialism and so on. This episode is the beginning of our deep dive into examining these questions. What do anti-Zionists argue? What do they want? When is it antisemitic and when legitimate? And how do we know? We posed these questions and more to anthropologist Adam Louis-Klein, a compelling commentator on academic and elite anti-Israel narratives and ideas. The resulting convers...
Aug 22, 2025•58 min
Long before the operational successes of the Mossad would become the stuff of legend in the espionage world, before the Twelve Day War, before Eli Cohen, before the Mossad itself had even come into being, a small ragtag band of courageous young Jews, without training or equipment, built the country’s first espionage arm to help the nascent Jewish state defend itself against its enemies. Journalist and author Matti Friedman returns to the podcast to talk about his book, Spies of No Country, about...
Aug 15, 2025•57 min•Ep. 36
Professor Yannay Spitzer is an economic historian who has studied food and hunger. His efforts over the past month to get real reliable data on hunger out of Gaza and publicize it to Israelis, data that is neither delayed nor politicized like the many claims of rampant hunger made over the past 22 months that turned out to be either inaccurate or untrue, helped change the conversation in Israel and surge aid into the strip. Professor Spitzer joins us to explain what went wrong, why Israeli offic...
Aug 08, 2025•53 min•Ep. 35
Aimen Dean was once a fervent young jihadi fighter, a passionate believer in radical Sunni Islam who had memorized the Quran by 12 and was fighting in the Bosnian jihad by 16. Haviv talked to Aimen about the religious and psychological journey of a young jihadi, his experiences in the wars in Bosnia and Chechnya, his recruitment by Bin Laden himself in the mountains of Afghanistan, and his sudden and powerful disillusionment, both political and religious, that led him to become an MI6 spy in Al ...
Aug 06, 2025•2 hr 9 min•Ep. 34
Our Patreon subscribers asked for a dvar Torah, a short homily, on the Jewish fast day of Tisha B'Av, which commemorates many of the great tragedies of Jewish history, including and especially the destruction of the two Temples in Jerusalem millennia ago. Tisha B'Av, Haviv argues, is a window into the Sages' conception of history, their view of the brokenness of the world reflected in the tragedies of history, and the power of the study of history to mend that brokenness. This episode is sponsor...
Aug 03, 2025•31 min•Ep. 33
There is now hunger in Gaza, widespread and dangerous. It's less dire than Western media claims, but could reach those proportions if it isn't reversed through an aid surge. How did we get to this point? What were Israeli officials thinking? And what does the current crisis tell us about the state of the war? This episode was sponsored by an anonymous sponsor who dedicated it to the bravery of our friend Shaked Haran, whose story is told in episode 5 of this podcast. On October 7, Shaked's fathe...
Jul 31, 2025•45 min•Ep. 32
Welcome to a special episode of Ask Haviv Anything. This episode was a live conversation with author Yardena Schwartz taped last week at Martha's Vineyard and hosted by Chabad on the Vineyard. Please note: Patreon subscribers have asked us to address the dramatic pivot in the IDF's strategy in Gaza and the question of widespread hunger there. We're now working on such an episode to provide an analysis and overview of what's happening and what it means. As always, if you have suggestions for topi...
Jul 27, 2025•1 hr•Ep. 31
