The Honest Take

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

people is the Jewish people, and Israel is a major manifestation of that.

Welcome to The Honest Take, the show that goes past the headlines to find out what's actually

true about Israel and the people covering it. I'm Ben Chertoff. Most weeks we spend an hour with

one person. This week we're doing something different. We're in the Ten Days. That stretch

between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, where you're supposed to sit down and take an honest

accounting of yourself, not resolutions. An accounting. So we went back through a year of

conversations and pulled the moments that had nothing to do with the news cycle. Instead, nine

people, on a harder question: who we are. What do we actually know about ourselves? And what do we owe

the people who handed this to us? Ben M. Freeman is first.

Jews who are proud, who are literate, will be more likely to fight Jew hatred. They'll be more

likely to teach their friends about what it means to be Jewish, to explain Jewish experience and

identity. So Jewish pride, to me, is the route to fighting Jew hatred. It's also it teaches us that

we deserve better, right? The greatest achievement of the Jewish people is not Israel. The greatest

achievement of the Jewish people is the Jewish people, and Israel is a major manifestation of

that. Can you define plainly for me what is Jewish pride, which has been one of your

marquee things beyond the hashtag? How is it different from just fighting antisemitism?

Because it's not about fighting antisemitism. It's actually not about Jew hatred. It's not

really about the non-Jewish world. It's internal focusing. So I, you know, my elevator pitch is that

it's a movement to educate, inspire and empower Jews to see their Jewishness as a source of pride

and never shame. But what does that look like? So I have three kind of main pillars. The first is

inoculating Jews against the shame of Jew hatred because one of the byproducts of Jew hatred is that we

are shamed. It impacts us psychologically. It's not just, not just, it's not only pogroms or Shoah or

October 7th or displacement or, you know, oppression. There is a psychological cost to being

a Jew in the non-Jewish world, and it forces us often to make ourselves smaller, to diminish

ourselves. So I want to build a barrier, inoculate Jews against that. The second is really the thing

that I harp on about the most is that Jews are the only ones who get to define Jewish identity,

right? Non-Jewish perspectives on Jewish identity, to me, are illegitimate. And then people say to me,

well, what about allies? Allies should still be parroting Jewish perspectives, right? They should

not be speaking over us. They should be speaking on our behalf. After listening and understanding

our ideas of of who we are or how we experience the world. And then the last one is really, you

know, people say this to me, I was talking about this the other day, that it's possible for a Jew

to parrot non-Jewish perspectives on Jewish identity. Just because it comes from a Jew doesn't

actually make it a Jewish perspective. So the last is really an action point. It's that we have to

understand what it means to be Jewish through a Jewish lens. We're an am. I mean, Dara Horn has

recently been talking about this, I think, in preparation for a new book. We're an am, which is a

people, because yes, when we, when we try to fit into modern categorizations, it's a square peg,

round hole. We have to acknowledge that we're an ancient people. We're an ancient people. Our ancient

contemporaries were the ancient Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Persians, they were

the people we were like, not hanging out with. They were often beating us in battle. But, you know, they

were our contemporaries. Yeah. It's not the modern Western world, post enlightenment. So we're a

people. We're a nation, we're a civilization. To me, civilization is really the term I enjoy because

it's so it encompasses everything that it's it's real and it's distinct and there's so many

components. And when I'm explaining to people that we're not a religion, I talk about ancient Egypt

and I say ancient. You know, I've seen the Prince of Egypt. They have gods, right? They have that song.

Ra, I'm not going to sing it, but there, there's, you know, they had gods. They also had monarchy and

laws and culture and practices and food and all of these things and music which make up a

civilization. No one would ever refer to ancient Egypt as a religion. You'd say they had religion.

We're the same. Judaism is not the name of the Jewish religion. Judaism is equivalent to

Jewishness. It's all encompassing. The name of the Jewish religion is the Jewish religion. We do have

a religion. We're not diminishing that. But we are so much more than that, because there's, and the

problem is when we only define us through the lens of religion, there's so many contradictions

that we have to accept. If we acknowledge that the idea that we're tied to a land. Religions don't

have homelands. Yes, there are nations with state religions, and that's not the same. That's not the

same relationship we have. It's not just that Judaism is the state religion of the Jewish state.

It's that this is the Jewish land in the way that the Maori would feel New Zealand, or the

Aboriginal tribes would feel their, their particular section of Australia. It's, we're a

people and we have to get comfortable again, being different and explaining that and understanding

ourselves and not fitting into these modern categorizations. Holocaust education is supremely

important. I used to take trips to Auschwitz, people, especially Jews and non-Jews. Of course, we

should learn about it and understand it, but it cannot be the basis for our identity because we

belong to an ancient civilization, right? That we today are two Jews in 2026 having a conversation

about Jewish identity. That's the story of Jewish continuity. It's not the story of Jewish tragedy.

Freeman says that it starts on the inside, that you stop asking for permission. And it's worth

hearing what it sounds like from somebody who started on the outside and who had farther to

travel than anyone else we've had on the show. Rawan Osman grew up in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley,

Hezbollah country. Everything she was taught about Jews came from a world with no Jews left in it to

argue back. And it took her seven years of reading her way out. Here she is on what she found when

she finally walked into a synagogue, and what she wants young Jews to understand about the thing

they were born into. This story happened in 2011. The first time

in my life to trust myself, to ask to visit a synagogue. I went back to

Strasbourg with my son, who's now at university. He was young back then. I went back, I showed him

where I lived. I showed him the grocery store where this happened. I wanted to tell the

storekeeper how he changed my life. But unfortunately, it's no longer a grocery store. It's

a Carrefour Express, so I couldn't talk to him. But in 2018, when I did this,

I took my son and I requested a tour in the synagogue that was 200 meters away from where I

lived. And I still, after reading for seven years, I was still sure that they're going to reject my

request because I'm born in Damascus. I needed to go in to see the inside of the synagogue, to be

reassured that they are normal people. So it took a long time. It wasn't overnight

because we are intensively brainwashed. To undo that is not, is not an easy

process. And you've gone so far as to convert to Judaism, which

is not an easy... We don't make it easy to do that. Um, it's, I mean, that's, that's a

commitment. And how has your family reacted to that? So I

decided to convert to Judaism. Um, for many reasons. I just realized I'm Jewish. And if I

realize I'm Jewish, that means if I have Jewish blood, that means my family has Jewish blood as

well. But I did not share this before October 7th. I thought that this is very personal

and it did not need to make sense to anyone except myself and my son, because I'm authority in

his world and I needed him to understand this was not an impulsive decision and I was an atheist

all my life, raised him an atheist, so he needed to understand other than the people involved in the

process, nobody knew. On October 7th, I decided to share with the world that this is what I'm doing

because it's part of my mission. I am so fond of

Judaism, um, in so much awe that I wanted to inspire, especially youngsters,

to understand that being born a Jew is like winning the lottery and you are born with a

responsibility. But still, whether you're religious or not, you should wear your Jewishness as a badge

of honor. This is why I thought after October 7th, converting to Judaism is not my dirty secret. I'm

sharing it with the world to make a point. And then, of course, my family knew about it as well.

And of course, they were deeply shocked because I was an atheist who ridiculed religion

for as long as they remember. Even when I was a child and I was, I got in a lot of trouble, um,

in the Catholic school, but also because they thought working with Israelis

and Jews, especially since the signing of the Abraham Accords, resulted in

her becoming so brainwashed. Now she's in love with them to the extent that she wants to join

the Jewish people. Nobody asked me why, and they would have understood the depth of

my decision. Now I'm writing a book, and whether they ask or not, out of curiosity, a lot will

understand why I made that decision. A badge of honor from a woman raised to

believe the exact opposite. Which raises an uncomfortable question: if someone from

Hezbollah's backyard can get there on her own, why is it so hard for the rest of the world to hear

it from us? Yossi Klein Halevi has spent decades on that question. He's at the Shalom Hartman

Institute in Jerusalem, and he's been writing across that divide for most of his adult life.

This is the most honest thing anybody has said to us all year, and it's not optimistic.

I think that part of the problem, which is that we

in Jewish community are still fighting this war, uh, in

20th century terms. You know, when when I was growing up, there was a series of books

that were published every year. It might have been by AIPAC or some other Jewish organization called

Myths and Facts. And, uh, and it was great. You know, you open it up: refugees.

There it is. There's the myths and there's the facts. Doesn't work anymore. Right? Because it's not

about facts. It's about narrative. And we are not

telling a compelling story, which is extraordinary to me because we have the most

compelling national story out there. And it's it it is one of the one of

history's, not just Jewish history, one of history's greatest stories. And we're not telling it. And I feel

this frustration as a writer, as a writer of the Jewish story. You know, I, I've seen my,

my, my purpose, uh, as someone who, who writes the

narrative, who's one of the people trying to to turn this story into a

narrative and, you know, I, I don't know, I don't

know really at this. I'm in my 70s now and I don't really know how to do this any other way, but it's

not working. I, I apparently none of us have found a way of telling this

story that that is strong enough. That's worthy of the story itself.

And I don't know what to do about that. It's it's something it's it's something that I live with in

a permanent state of frustration and failure. We're

not telling it. He's right. And it's worse than he says, because it isn't only the world that isn't

hearing our story. There's a whole half of it we're not telling to our own children. Henry

Green built Sephardi Voices to record the testimony of Jews driven out of the Arab world

after 1948, something like 850,000 people. In 2014, the Knesset

created a day to remember them. Yom HaPlitim. Start with how far back those communities go.

The story of the Jews in in Iraq. Um. What's Babylon, Iraq. Um,

the person would call themselves today if they came from Baghdad. They would say, I'm a Babylonian

Jew, which says something about their identity. How far back it goes? Yeah. They don't say I'm Iraqi.

They say I'm Babylonian. Um, so, uh uh, indeed. Um, the Sephardi

community, the, uh, Jews from Arab lands. Uh, if you take communities like Baghdad, have been there

for a long time, extremely thriving. In the 1920s, the minister of finance was a Sephardic Jew.

And these communities are completely gone now. Yeah. So let's take Libya, for example.

Libya in 1948 had 38,000 Jews. Today there are zero. And if I go back to the story of

Dangour, Dangour, who, who saw the British cross the river, and then he leaves in the

1960s. And when I asked him in the interview, my last question is always, well, how do you identify

yourself? And so what does he say? He says, well, well, I'm British, I've lived here 60 years. But

then he says, how can I deny that I'm Iraqi? I've lived there for 3,000 years.

We used to tell the Muslim friends. We used to tell them, we are

here before you. We have more right than you have. But how can I deny that I'm an Iraqi?

I didn't go there as an immigrant. I've been there.

for 3,000 years. And what Jews want is one

voice. And so you don't have the luxury of saying, oh, we

have this kind of, um, history. We have these kinds of issues.

And so the Ashkenazi leadership in, in, in America in particular, has not

advocated for the Sephardi. In 2014, the Israeli government passed a new law that

you would have Yom HaPlitim, means refugee day for the Sephardi. Okay. We have Yom HaShoah,

Holocaust Day. In 2015, it was passed, uh, it was launched by President Rivlin in his

house. I was there for the event. And in the last ten years, how many Jewish

communities celebrate Holocaust Day? I would say everyone. Right.

How many celebrate Yom HaPlitim or even have heard of it, which says something

about Ashkenazi leadership. It's it's a law passed by the Knesset. They celebrate it in

Israel every year. Why is Ashkenazi leadership, why are our communities not having

it? And my view on this is, gee, how hard is this? You bring a Holocaust survivor to class

for a Holocaust day. Why can't you bring a person who survived and became

a member of your community in New York? Wherever you are in a Jewish school,

and the child or the grandchild will take such pride in hearing their parents or

grandparents speak. You can show some video and then have this event to honor the people who

left the Arab world. A Holocaust survivor in every classroom, a

Mizrahi survivor in almost none. That's not the world doing that to us. That's us. Which brings up

the part nobody enjoys. This is fixable, and fixing it costs money and effort and somebody's

Sunday. Meg Keene is a bestselling author who was told flat out that her Jewish novel wouldn't sell.

She's blunt about what comes next. Things are real hard right now. Things are really depressing, and

if one of the things you can do to genuinely make a difference is to pick up a Jewish novel by a

new author and read it. Like over Shabbes or on the plane on your way to a business

meeting. Like, what a joy. I have just read like Jewish novels that were all recently came out a

bunch by Israeli authors. Like what a joy. And I felt. I went from feeling depressed, feeling like,

oh, this is like I live in a in a world and a culture worth being part of. So, you know, I think

not only does it save our culture, but I think it literally sort of helps save us in a in a

non-Christian ways. It helps like, quite literally like save and and heal our souls and help us, like,

return to ourselves in the midst of a global emergency. Yeah, I want to I want to

talk about the a bigger theme that I have seen developing. And I'm not obviously not the only one

who's noticed this. Um, the idea of, like, Gaza and Palestine as being this

messianic, uh, savior of the world. Matti Friedman, I'm sure you read his book. I mean, his historian,

cosmology, um, stories featuring Gaza. The other point of view

are not having a problem getting published. PEN was like, you know,

pro-Palestinian authors are being punished. And I read it all on my. Right. Was like, by my multi-

book deals, with, like, is there a punishment by, like, prominent bookstore placement. And yeah, you

can go into any independent bookstore now and there's a wall of books. All the books. I went to.

my 13-year-old son in a bookstore. And he was like, shaking his head at me and was like, no, we need to

leave. And I was like, I was gonna go buy, and he goes, not here. I'm like, 13-year-old. And finally I

walk him outside and he's like, tears are in his eyes. And he was like, I have to show you. And then

he walked me back in to this like, Gazaology shelf that he had looked at. That

was truly. I mean, to be clear, I am always like like most Jews, I think I am

in favor of more books, of more points. I do not think that these books should not be published. I

think they can't be the only thing published. But also, as Matti Friedman, like pointed out, there are

a lot of really ridiculous books. The other sort of piece of this is that means we are going to

have to build our own institutions. And that means like as a community, we have to understand why

Jewish literature is important, why we have never survived without our memory and our text and our

tradition. And like people are going to have to like to be perfectly frank. Like people are going

to have to open their checkbooks. And that's how we fight as a people. We have so many hospitals

with the with the with Jewish because we needed them and because Jews who were successful wrote

checks because they understood seeing it was needed. So I think it's multifaceted, but I think

we are just at the point where seeing silent is not serving us, and we know how to do this as the

people. Open their checkbooks. Institutions, memory, text, the unglamorous

infrastructure of staying a people. Brigadier General Amir Avivi thinks about that on a

different timescale. He spent his career in Israel's national security establishment, and his

argument is that security isn't fundamentally about hardware at all.

So you've described your worldview as absolute security control. Can you give me a

one sentence version? What does absolute security control mean and what does it cost?

Okay, so first when we talk about Israel's national security, the most important thing

for me, for us, for me, the national security is understanding that national security is first and

foremost about national values. It's about a deep connection to Judaism and Zionism, the sense of

rightness. It's if the biggest issue is the will. We talked about the US. What happens

with a country that has endless amount of capabilities and zero will to use it? Okay.

National security starts with a sense of purpose, and the sense of purpose comes

from the connection to our Jewish Zionist values, and this sense of purpose is the

fuel for will. Once you have a sense of purpose, you have the will to to

endure many challenges, you know, throughout the years. So we work a lot on, on, on the, on on

the issue of the spirit. It's all about spirit. Okay. This is the most important, a

weapon. Second thing is you don't talk about them before you are able to define

clearly what are your red lines? Or in other words, what is needed to secure Israel for generations

to come. Looking a thousand years ahead, not ten years ahead, a thousand years ahead. I always say that

a nation that has been around for a thousand years needs to see at least to be able to think a

thousand years ahead. So you want to be secure. You want to be connected to your

heritage and history, and live along the Bible Belt and in the places that are important to you.

Because this is not just about, um, hardcore security. This is about spirit.

If you disregard your history, your Bible and everything, you won't exist. There will be no

spirit. So you have to bridge between these two needs.

A thousand years back, a thousand years forward. That long view is exactly what goes missing in

the way this argument usually gets conducted. As though Zionism were some recent political

position you might reasonably put down if it got too inconvenient. Alana Newhouse has no patience

for that. That idea could not be more misguided in my view. It's not something that we

picked up at Walmart 20 years ago and is now irrelevant to our lives. Zionism was

an idea that's thousands of years old, and we don't simply discard things from our legacy.

That's the first thing is it's right. Right. It doesn't seem like good hygiene culturally

to do that. But more importantly, I think that the the impulse to abrogate

this jewel that helped us get what nobody else has now

is a weak, it's defensive. And it's also the key to us

making everybody else vulnerable. Mhm. The Jews and Zionism are not the target. The target

here is the West. We are just in the way. And if we give up on that idea that's part of the

reason. The conversation around Sam's essay was another indication to me that there was something

right here. It's not simply about us not abrogating Zionism. It's about us

encouraging everyone else to embrace it too, because the reason they're fighting

about us is because they're really fighting about everybody else. Right. The question here is can

the can. Can the West have distinct civilizations? And we if the West would like to

fight for their own privilege to have distinct civilizations, it's going to need it.

It definitely will not be able to do that. If the price for

being in that conversation is the Jews giving it up. We're the first line of defense. So basically

what I the way that I described these is I described them as your survival tests. Right. So

pretty simple questions to ask yourself. But when you think about them, they're actually four

questions that only Israel right now in the West, um, answers in the affirmative. The first one is,

can you maintain your demographics? Do you have babies? Right. Israelis are having

kids above the replacement level, which makes them completely unique among Western nations. The

second question is, is can you defend yourself? It is a truism, whether we like it or not, that people

who can't defend themselves tend to not survive. Mhm. It's just one of the things about life. Right.

So you have to be able to not be be both able and willing to defend

your people, the people that you see yourself as a part of. Um, the third one is, is are you

happy? And by happy, you know, happiness is a kind of funny term,

but I use it because it's used sociologically. There are all these there are various studies and

markers of sort of happiness in countries. And Israel is reliably among the happiest nations on

earth, even though they are frequently in violent wars. It's astounding. I mean, you feel at the

moment you land, right? And that is where you see the forward-looking. The effect of having a

forward-looking vision there and then the final test is basically how you

engage with the challenge, the technological challenge of your moment. This isn't to say that

other other countries that are bigger or different can't meet the challenge. It's just that

Israel is meeting the challenge of an AI moment and of a technological moment in a very

particular way. Technology that we're looking at and that are covering our lives

tend to be ones where there's a primacy put on being able to deploy

small and cohesive teams. And if I told you that you had two choices, you could

be president of one of two countries right now. You could be the president of a large country

with very high obesity, problems in education. A lot of different diverse people who don't share

anything in common. Or you could be president of a country of 10 million people, half of whom serve

in the military together, and a large portion of whom sit around together in small groups and

learn an obscure legal document. There's one that, simply by

analysis, is going to be primed to be better at meeting this

technological moment. We don't simply discard things from our legacy.

All right. So you know who you are. And you know what you inherited, what you actually

do on a Tuesday when it's your turn and the room goes quiet? Shai Davidai was a business school

professor at Columbia University who could have kept his head down after October 7th. Most of his

colleagues did. Here's how he explains the choice he made instead. It starts with getting punched in

the face. So when I was in July 2023, I was in Israel. I

was protesting with, you know, almost 40% of the country against the

judicial reform, which, you know, some people saw it necessary, some people saw as an overreach. And we

were just protesting. And I got punched in the face by an undercover cop. And

that really affected me emotionally. I mean, I was okay, but it really affected me emotionally. It my

my sense of justice. Right? Because when you get my like my best friend said, when you get punched by

a cop, you can't push, you can't punch back. Um, and the next day,

my dad wanted to sue and other people were like, let's make him, like, notorious.

And I realized that I seek no revenge. I have no specific

anger on that specific cop. But when someone punches you in the face, it's like giving you a

mic. Now the attention is on me and why. And what I use that mic for

is my decision and can be for good, for bad, or for

indifference. On October 12th, 2023, when I was on campus and

seeing the celebrations of the massacre on campus, I felt like I was being punched in the face over

and over and over again. And I had that understanding again, like, oh, this.

They're giving me a mic now. Most professors on campus decided to hide and not use their

mic. But I said, like, no, if I'm getting a mic, I'm going to use that mic. Not only am I going to use

that mic, I'm going to use that mic now to amplify other people who may be, you know, who may have not

gotten the mic. So, I mean, it's very trite, but we do choose how we respond. We don't

choose what happens. We don't choose what happens. We do choose how we

respond. Which brings us to the last voice and the one man here with the most right to have chosen

differently. Arnold Roth's daughter, Malki, was murdered in the Sbarro pizzeria bombing in

Jerusalem. She was 15. He has spent the 25 years since refusing to let the world look away.

So we asked him what gives him hope. I'm a Jew. I'm a proud Jew. At

this point in my life, I'm an observant Jew. I wasn't always. Now I am. And I'm a relatively

educated Jew. Judaism and Jewish life is immensely rewarding for me and for the people I love and

the people around me. I want people who don't have the advantages that I got in life.

I'm speaking now about people who grew up in Jewish families to become more conversant with

what Jewish life can do to enrich their lives.

So I'm I'm really focused on, first of all, trying to make sure that young Jews don't

despair and walk away from Jewish life, because right now it's not a good

hand of cards to be holding. It's it's tough times. I'm quite tuned in to what's going on in

university campuses, not only in the United States, and I know that I'm glad I'm not there. Melbourne

has had more, at least in my generation, Holocaust survivors than any other community in

the world relative to its size. And so pretty much everything that turned me into the adult that I

grew up to be was a function of being raised by parents who were Holocaust survivors. None of my

friends had grandparents. None of them, as far as I can remember. Almost none of us had aunts or uncles

and small families. Everybody came out of concentration camps. People who didn't grow up as I

did in Melbourne, who weren't as lucky as I was to be raised by a family of Holocaust survivors, will

never really understand how you can have a solid, values based upbringing

by loving parents who did not have loving parents of their own because their parents were taken

from them when they were just teenagers and end up having good, constructive lives. I know it sounds a

little, uh, kind of wishy-washy when I say it, but

we are what we were raised to be by our families and families that have been raising people from

the 1960s onwards are caught up in the essential assumption that everybody is good. We just have to

find a common language. But that kind of avoids the reality that not everybody is good. And

sometimes we're called upon to work out strategies for living in a world where not

everybody is good. Nine people, one question running underneath all of

it. Ben M. Freeman opened by saying the greatest achievement of the Jewish people isn't Israel.

It's the Jewish people. Arnold Roth, who has more reason than anyone to argue, told us that Jewish

life is immensely rewarding and that he's a proud Jew. Everything in between is the argument for how

you get from the first to the second. Not by being reminded we're hated. We already know that. By

knowing that you belong to. From all of us at HonestReporting, g'mar chatima tova. If this was worth your

time, send it to somebody who needs it more than you did. Every episode is at

podcast.honestreporting.com. If you've got 30 seconds, leave us a review. It's genuinely one of the best things you can do

to help us reach more people. I'm Ben Chertoff. This is The Honest Take, and we'll see you next

time.