Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify.  Israel’s success in military cyber-operations and cyber-security, from disrupting Iranian nuclear development to covert intelligence gathering, is well known. It has given birth to a cluster of companies that have made Tel Aviv a global hub for cyber-security. Alon […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify.  Last Saturday, supporters and opponents of Eritrea’s president, Isaias Afwerki, confronted one another in violent clashes. Yet rather than in Asmara, Eritrea’s capital city, this confrontation took place in the streets of south Tel Aviv. In the second half […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify.  Since the end of the second intifada nearly twenty years ago, and the attendant calming of the West Bank, the main source of violence against Israel has been the Gaza Strip. That’s involved fewer terrorists blowing themselves up in […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify.  Starting in January of this year, there have been popular protests each week in Israel. On Saturday night, when Shabbat comes to a close, hundreds and thousands of people go into the streets protesting the government and its policies, […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify.  The 1st-century Roman essayist and philosopher Plutarch is perhaps most famous today for his stylized, paired biographies of Greek and Roman statesmen. In Plutarch’s parallel lives, Alexander, who conquered the Mediterranean world, is compared to Julius Caesar, who did […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  Patriotism—or one form of it at least—is an acknowledgment of the obligations that flow from recognizing all that one owes to previous generations and what they undertook and passed down. And if one wanted to inculcate that form […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  Recently, Yuval Levin, the editor of National Affairs, published an op-ed in the New York Times entitled “The Solution to Israel’s Crisis Might Be in America’s Constitution.” That essay forms the point of departure for this discussion with Levin himself. Levin […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  Nearly 75 years ago, on May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israel’s sovereignty: a renewed Jewish state, the political expression of the national home of the Jewish people, located in their ancestral homeland. Many essays and books have […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  Part of what animates the two sides in Israel’s current judicial-reform crisis has to do with the specific proposals that the Knesset is currently debating. But the crisis is not only about these concrete constitutional issues. It is also a proxy […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  To understand the dramas, disagreements, and protests roiling Israeli politics at this moment requires an understanding of the government’s proposed judicial reforms, as well as the history of Israel’s Supreme Court and its relationship to the Knesset. It also […]