The crew discuss: 1) How fast an IDF casualty tragic got politicized 2) Whether and how cities should observe “shmita” 3) Whether Israel makes the chasm between Jews and everyone else wider and less bridgeable to our own detriment, and everyone else’s, too

The crew discuss: 1) the past year, and what we did right and what went wrong 2) the late-night, on the down-low meeting between Defense Minister Gantz and Palestinian President Abbas 3) what Israelis can learn from the heartbreaking spectacle of Afghanistan falling to the Taliban as America hastily, messily retreats

The crew discuss: 1) what we’ve learned from the pandemic about how to teach our kids 2) how our new govt is doing 73 days in 3) a documentary movie about the struggle of one ultra-Orthodox woman over whether or not to take off the wig

Forty years passed before the first song was written in Israel about the Holocaust. For a long generation, Holocaust survivors, and their kids, were mostly quiet about the events that, more than any other, shaped their lives. Then that all changed.

The crew discuss: 1) new taxes meant to wean us from sugary soda pop and single-use plastic ware 2) a Haaretz story rocking the headline, “You can’t train people to be less racist, Israeli researchers find” 3) a documentary movie about ultra-Orthodox life during the pandemic

The crew discuss: 1) a new law that would make it harder to use improperly-gotten evidence in court 2) the weird ways the Olympics have become a litmus test for Israeli identity 3) what we can learn from a documentary about growing up on a kibbutz

The crew discuss: 1) a proposed “revolutionary reform” in Israel’s agriculture policy 2) a proposed “revolutionary reform” in who can certify food as Kosher 3) a new “Culinary Institute of Israel” attacked for “food-washing”

The crew discuss: 1) the spy software used to surveil journalists, political opponents and activists 2) a poll of American Jews, a 1/4 of whom think Israel is an Apartheid state 3) the decision by a beloved ice cream company to freeze out settlers

The crew discuss: 1) The Supreme Court’s rejection to strike down the “Nation-State” law 2) The decision to cancel day-care subsidies for toddlers whose fathers study full-time in a Yeshiva 3) What changes resulted from the social protests in 2011

The crew discuss: 1) The compromise that led to the peaceable evacuation of Eviatar 2) What to make of the tenure of President Rivlin 3) A shocking and controversial about Hebrew grammar