Episodes
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How do you raise a child who is on both sides of a war? The end song is Yalda Sheli Ktana ("Little Girl of Mine") by Idan Raichel.
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When war needs you in two very different capacities, how on earth do you decide what to do?
The end song is Ana Efneh ("Where Shall I Turn?") by Erez Lev Ari.
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Missing episodes?
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Today weâre releasing something new for us - a short video - in which we returned to Ariel Markose, exactly one year after profiling her on "Wartime Diaries." You can find the video here
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Families, lovers, fighters, and more: one year of Wartime Diaries.
The end song is B'Shana Haba'ah ("In the Next Year") by Shiri Maimon.
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A parent being called to war impacts the entire family. So she stepped up.
The end song is Imma ("Mom") by Shiri Maimon.
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Two bus stops in two neighboring towns capture how war can unify, and how it can divide.
The end song is Autobus Mispar Echad ("Bus Number One") by Shlomo Artzi.
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Seeking love. Called to war.
For our Tu B'Av special, we wanted to get a bird's eye view of the local, post-October 7th dating scene. So we went to visit Rebetzin Toby Einhorn, who runs a one-stop-shop for all matters of the heart.
Image courtesy of Jenny Peperman.
The end song is Shir HaShadchanit ("Matchmaker, Matchmaker") from the Hebrew adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof.
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Despite all the experts and pundits out there, few know Hezbollah as well as the members of a small, and often forgotten, community living in Israel.
This community has found itself in an impossible position: Their adoptive country (Israel) is at war with their sworn enemy (Hezbollah), but is also - as a by-product - bombing their hometowns and villages in Southern Lebanon, where many of their friends and family members still reside.
Welcome to the Middle East. As always, itâs complicated.
In today's episode, we hear from Maryam Younnes, whose father was an SLA commander who relocated to Israel back in May 2000.
The end song is Shir Matzav ("A Song of the Situation") by Mika Karni.
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On Monday evening Jerusalem lost one of its cornerstones, and we lost a very close friend. While you haven't heard Shai Doron - the President of the Jerusalem Foundation - on our show, he was a major force behind all that we do: He encouraged us, gave us a home, helped us build our studio, envisioned our series of live-storytelling events in Jerusalem, and enthusiastically supported our activity. Shai believed in Jerusalem's endless potential, saw its diversity as its main asset, and worked tirelessly to build a better - and shared - society. We will miss him terribly.
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For the last nine-and-a-half months, weâve been experiencing different kinds of battlefields: There are actual battlefields, where people fight and are wounded and killed. And then, of course, there are secondary battlefields - on college campuses, in the court of public opinion, on social media, on TV, in newspapers, via text messages. And while no one has, thankfully, been killed on those battlefields, they are - in disturbing ways - no less vicious. This reality is so pervasive that for many itâs become the haunting soundtrack of the entire period. But today we want to share one small story, one of countless similar ones that have crossed our radar - about trolling, virtual bullying and Israel bashing.
The end song is Kol Ha'Olam Kulo ("The Whole Wide World") by the Djamchid Sisters.
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Arab-Israelis, or Palestinian Citizens of Israel, or Palestinian-Israelis - all these definitions are obviously complicated and personal and have hefty connotations - found themselves in a very difficult place following the attacks of October 7th. There was a lot of confusion, a lot of suspicion and mainly - a lot of fear. Any statement, any post, any tweet came under extreme scrutiny. Most people chose, therefore, to remain silent. They figured that the benefits of speaking up seemed to be dwarfed by the possible outcomes - being fired, arrested, accused of treason or support of terrorism.
But Ibrahim Abu Ahmad and Amira Mohammed are not most people. Theyâre both peace activists who live in between the two societies: Theyâre Muslim and proud Palestinians, on the one hand, but they are also Israeli citizens, speak Hebrew, have many Jewish friends and either live or work in predominantly Jewish cities in the center of Israel.
So when many people around them retreated into a self-imposed post-October 7th silence, they did the exact opposite: They started a podcast called âUnapologetic: The Third Narrative.â On the show they explore their complex identities, and talk to a wide range of guests - Jews, Arabs, Gazans, Israelis. The podcast has taken off, and Amira and Ibrahim have come to model a different kind of discourse, one that challenges the binary and dichotomous definitions weâre so accustomed to hearing.
The end song is Bahlawan ("Acrobat") by Mira Awad.
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On Saturday, four hostages - Noa Argamani, Shlomi Ziv, Almog Meir Jan and Andrey Kozlov - were heroically rescued by the Israeli security forces, and safely brought home alive. Still, 120 hostages remain in Gaza - 43 of whom have already been declared dead - and the pressure to sign a deal that will bring them home is mounting from day to day.
Such a deal, of course, has two sides: We tend to focus on what we stand to get, i.e. the hostages. To many, thatâs really all that matters. But there are also those who emphasize the other side - what weâd be forced to give, the price weâd need to pay and the people weâd need to release. Our episode today brings us that part of the story.
Moriah Cohen is 29 years old. She and her family are part of the small Jewish settlement of Shimon HaTzadik, inside the predominantly Palestinian neighborhood of Sheikh Jarah in East Jerusalem. For years this neighborhood has been a focal point of legal battles, demonstrations and violent clashes between Israelis and Palestinians. On December 8th, 2021, Moriah was stabbed right outside her home. Her attacker was Nafoz Hamad, her next door neighbor's 14-year-old daughter. Hamad was apprehended, tried and sentenced to 12 years in prison. But then, in November 2023, as part of the prisoner swap between Israel and the Hamas that brought 80 Israeli hostages back home, she was set free. And not only was she released, Hamad moved back home, right across the street from her victim, Moriah. We visited Moriah in her home, and talked about this complicated and utterly surreal reality.
Maya Thomas is our dubber.
The end song is Hacheder Ha'Intimi Sheli ("My Intimate Room") by Taarovet Eskot.
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Lihi Lapid is a celebrated photojournalist, columnist and best-selling author - of children's books, cookbooks and award-winning novels. Sheâs also married to Yair Lapid, the former Israeli Prime Minister and current Leader of the Opposition. In 2021 Lihi published Zarot, a sweeping tale that explores a complicated mother-daughter relationship, the tolls of immigration and the reality of marginalized groups within Israeli society. When it came out, it received glowing praise, especially from the notoriously harsh critics at Haaretz who called the novel, âa wonderful work written with restraint and wisdom.â And this spring, three years later and in what is an entirely different world, the English translation - On Her Own - was published by HarperCollins. We sat down to talk about October 7th, feminism, special needs, and what itâs like to have a major work of fiction - written by the former Prime Ministerâs wife - come out in the middle of a war.
The end song is Hey Shketa ("Hey Quiet One") by Ivri Lider.
Photograph by Jennifer Bukovza, courtesy of Lihi Lapid.
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Itâs Yom HaZikaron again, Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terror. Since the start of the war, 1511 Israeli civilians and members of the armed forces have been killed. That's 1511 families who have joined the dreaded circle of grief and bereavement. 1511 families whose lives will never again be the same.
Today, we share the story of one such family. A small family. One that was just starting off, really. Thirty-year-old Yuval Halivni was a reserve officer who was killed on October 9th. He left behind a wife, Amit Halivni Bar-Peled, who is a pastry chef and makes amazingly elaborate wedding cakes, and a little boy, Jon-Jon, who was less than two when his dad was killed.
The end song is Hatishma Koli ("Hear My Voice") by Rivka Revivo.
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Forty-seven-year-old Tzvika Mor is from the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba, near Hebron. His son, Eitan, was kidnapped from the Nova Festival, where he had been working as a security guard. In fact, Eitan was only kidnapped in the afternoon of October 7th, after spending nearly nine hours evacuating injured party-goers to safe locations nearby. During that whole time Eitan heroically returned to the festival grounds again and again, under fire, to save complete strangers. At around 15:30 he was himself taken by terrorists and driven into Gaza, where heâs remained ever since.
Tzvika, is an outlier among the families of the hostages. As campaigns across the country and throughout the world call upon the leaders of Israel and the Hamas to reach a deal that would release the hostages, Tzvika believes that the Israeli government should keep on fighting, and reject any offer that includes a ceasefire, even if it comes at the cost of his sonâs freedom, perhaps even his life. He established a small group of like-minded relatives of hostages called Forum Tikvah, or the Hope Forum. They stress the importance of the nation and the state over the life of any individual, even if that individual happens to be your loved one. And in that, ironically, their right wing position echoes the left wing socialist and collectivist sentiments that were dominant in the early days of the state.
The end song is Akedat Yitzchak ("The Binding of Isaac") by Naomi Shemer.
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Next week, millions of Jews around the world will sit down at their Passover tables, for what will invariably be a very different kind of seder. The timeless question of how this night, or this Pesach, is different from all other nights, and all other Pesachs, has gained an entirely new - and tragic - dimension since October 7th. And few, if any, have thought about this matter more than forty-three year old Mishael Zion, a liberal Orthodox rabbi and Jewish educator from Jerusalem.
In 1997, Mishaelâs father - Noam Zion - together with his friend David Dishon - published a popular English-language Haggadah called âA Different Night.â Seven years later, Mishael joined forces with his dad in creating an Israeli version - HaLayla HaZeh: Haggadah Israelit. And this year, two decades after that Israeli Haggadah came out, Mishael and his father decided to update it, for the first post-October 7th seder.
The end song is Chad Gadya ("One Little Goat") by Chava Alberstein.
To purchase a digital copy of the Israeli Haggadah in Hebrew, click here.
To download the Zion Haggadah supplement in English, Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, German and French, click here.
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The horrific events of October 7th reminded many people of the darkest chapter in Jewish history - the Holocaust. And indeed, for the past six months, there have been as many comparisons to the Shoah as there have been critiques of those comparisons.
Of the roughly 130,000 Holocaust survivors living in Israel today, just under 10,000 reside in Jerusalem. Many of them participate in the Jerusalem Foundationâs CafĂ© Europa, which offers a physical meeting place, a wide range of social and cultural activities - concerts, lectures, memorials, workshops - and professional help in navigating the thickets of Israeli bureaucracy. We recently spent a morning at the CafĂ© Europa branch in Jerusalemâs German Colony neighborhood, where we heard all kinds of opinions about the Holocaust comparison. But the person with the strongest feelings on the matter just so happened to also be CafĂ© Europaâs oldest member - 100-year-old Walter Bingham.
The end song is Tzair LaNetzach ("Forever Young") by Rami Kleinstein.
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In the immediate aftermath of October 7th, Shai Davidai - an Assistant Professor at Columbia University - became an unlikely public defender of Israel. And truthfully, even he was surprised by this turn of events: As a committed left-wing Israeli, he had spent years criticizing the government, and often took to the streets to demonstrate against its policies. But the atmosphere he witnessed on college campuses (and specifically on his own campus at Columbia), compelled him to speak up and speak out.
The end song is Yesh Lecha Chaver ("You've Got a Friend") originally by Carol King, performed by Tzila Dagan.
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Alon Ohel - a talented young jazz pianist - was kidnapped from the Nova party on October 7th, and has been held hostage in Gaza ever since. His family has spent the last five plus months sending him good vibes and good music. In today's episode, his mother - Idit Ohel - talks about the importance of energy, friendship and hope during these dire times.
The end song is Shuvi Elay ("Return to Me") by Avishai Cohen and friends.
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One of very few positive outcomes of this war is that the ongoing debate surrounding the participation of female soldiers in combat has been decisively answered. Women are, as the IDFâs Chief of Staff - Herzi Halevi - has said on multiple occasions, an integral part of the military effort. They serve in tanks and in field intelligence posts, as pilots and naval officers, infantry soldiers, engineering specialists, canine handlers, medics and more. In fact, out of the 625 doctors and paramedics operating in Gaza in late December, 73 - more than ten percent - were women. In today's episode we talk to one of them, First Lieutenant Dr. Sharon Gutman Gilor.
The end song is Kol Sha'ah Neshika ("Every Hour, A Kiss") by Chava Alberstein.
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