The Honest Take

"The greatest achievement of the Jewish people is not Israel. The greatest achievement of the Jewish people is the Jewish people."

That's Ben M. Freeman, and that's where this episode starts.

Most weeks on The Honest Take, we spend an hour with one guest. This week is different. We're in the Ten Days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the stretch when you're supposed to sit down and take an honest accounting of yourself. So we went back through the conversations on this show and pulled the moments that had nothing to do with the news cycle.

Nobody in this episode is going to tell you what's being done to us. You already know that. Instead, nine people take on a harder question: Who are we? What do we actually know about ourselves? And what do we owe the people who handed this to us?

Ben M. Freeman, founder of the Jewish Pride movement, explains why Jews are a people, a nation and a civilization, not only a religion, and why "religions don't have homelands."

Rawan Osman grew up in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley and spent seven years reading her way out of what she was taught about Jews. She describes what she found when she finally walked into a synagogue, and tells young Jews that being born a Jew "is like winning the lottery."

Yossi Klein Halevi of the Shalom Hartman Institute names the failure: "We have the most compelling national story out there… And we're not telling it."

Dr. Henry Green, founder of Sephardi Voices, turns the same charge inward. Nearly every Jewish community marks Yom HaShoah, and almost none mark Yom HaPlitim, the day that honors the Jews who left the Arab world.

Author Meg Keene says the community is going to have to build its own institutions, and pay for them.

Brigadier General Amir Avivi argues that security starts with spirit and purpose, and that a nation that has been around for thousands of years should be able to think a thousand years ahead.

Alana Newhouse, founder and editor-in-chief of Tablet, says Zionism is "not something that we picked up at Walmart 20 years ago," and lays out four survival tests that, she argues, only Israel in the West currently passes.

Shai Davidai, who was teaching at Columbia Business School on October 7, explains what he decided to do after getting punched in the face.

And Arnold Roth, whose daughter Malki was murdered in the 2001 Sbarro bombing in Jerusalem, answers the question of what still gives him hope: "I'm a Jew. I'm a proud Jew."

From all of us at HonestReporting, g'mar chatima tova.

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Every guest in this episode sat down with Ben for a full-length episode of The Honest Take.

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