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 ...
Jan 11, 2024•1 hr 4 min
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 ...
Jan 04, 2024•37 min
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...
Dec 28, 2023•37 min
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 ele...
Dec 21, 2023•48 min
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 buil...
Dec 14, 2023•57 min
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 epi...
Dec 07, 2023•1 hr 8 min
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 I...
Nov 30, 2023•27 min
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, w...
Nov 23, 2023•31 min
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...
Nov 16, 2023•28 min
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 ...
Nov 09, 2023•37 min
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 T...
Nov 02, 2023•49 min
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 ...
Oct 26, 2023•36 min
Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now. It is nearly two weeks since parents Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg 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 260 people, taking others captive. Goldberg-Polin was last seen in a field shelter where he and other partygoers had fled, trying t...
Oct 19, 2023•27 min
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 Ir...
Oct 11, 2023•32 min
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 f...
Sep 28, 2023•38 min
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 i...
Sep 21, 2023•1 hr 1 min
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 majorit...
Sep 14, 2023•34 min
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...
Sep 07, 2023•1 hr 1 min
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 s...
Aug 31, 2023•26 min
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 ...
Aug 24, 2023•24 min
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 n...
Aug 17, 2023•33 min
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 wa...
Aug 10, 2023•29 min
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 ...
Aug 03, 2023•31 min
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 ...
Jul 27, 2023•48 min
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 arm...
Jul 20, 2023•36 min
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 i...
Jul 06, 2023•38 min
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 ...
Jun 29, 2023•41 min
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...
Jun 22, 2023•48 min
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, me...
Jun 15, 2023•34 min
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 headli...
Jun 08, 2023•37 min
