What Matters Now The Times of Israel

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring one key issue currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, hosted by deputy editor Amanda Borschel-Dan.

Last week, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene -- a Georgia Republican who has been criticized in the past for her dalliances with antisemitic tropes and influencers -- explained her vote against a bill defining antisemitism by saying that the bill rejects the “gospel” that “the Jews” handed Jesus over to his crucifiers.

When the Georgia Republican stated these "facts," she echoed thousands of years of blood libel used to excuse the antisemitic massacre of Jews.

In this week's What Matters Now, The Times of Israel's senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur explains some of the history behind this statement and how antisemitism differs from "regular" racism.

We see how antisemitism plays out in the ongoing anti-Israel protests on North American university campuses and discuss how a majority of the over 2,000 arrested in recent weeks have not actually been college students.

On Monday, we in Israel marked Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and for next week are looking ahead to Memorial Day and Independence Day. Rettig Gur looks at how these days affect Israelis -- and why they are observed day-after-day.

So in a week in which US President Joe Biden denounces rising antisemitism, we ask Haviv Rettig Gur, what matters now?

What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was produced by the Pod-Waves. 

IMAGE: A woman wears a hat that reads 'Curb Your Antisemitism' during a rally against campus antisemitism at George Washington University on May 2, 2024 in Washington, DC. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images/AFP)
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Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring one key issue currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, hosted by deputy editor Amanda Borschel-Dan.

Police cleared 30 to 40 people from inside Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall on Tuesday night after protesters against Israel occupied the administration building in New York earlier in the day. Hundreds of New York Police Department officers acted after the school’s president said there was no other way to ensure safety and restore order on campus and sought help from the police.

The confrontation occurred more than 12 hours after the demonstrators took over Hamilton Hall shortly after midnight Tuesday, spreading their reach from an anti-Israel tent encampment elsewhere on the grounds that’s was there for nearly two weeks.

This week we speak with two Jewish student leaders from Columbia University, Eden Yadegar, the president of Columbia's chapter of Students Supporting Israel, and Elisha H. Baker, a senior editor at the Columbia Political Review.

We speak about the pro-Palestine encampment that has sparked a wave of copycat protests throughout campuses in the United States. But we also set the scene on the Columbia campus, which led up to these protests and hear about an atmosphere in which latent antisemitism was released from its cage after the October 7 Hamas onslaught on southern Israel in which terrorists massacred 1,200 and took 253 individuals hostage.

We also hear about how Yadegar, after speaking at a congressional roundtable about on-campus antisemitism organized by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce alongside students from eight other universities, returned to campus to face derision.

So this week, we ask Columbia University students Eden Yadegar and Elisha H. Baker, what matters now?

What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was produced by the Pod-Waves. 

IMAGE: Columbia University students Eden Yadegar and Elisha H. Baker lead songs in support of Israel on October 12, 2023 at the Columbia University campus in New York. (courtesy)
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Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring one key issue currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, hosted by deputy editor Amanda Borschel-Dan.

This week, we speak with The Times of Israel's senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur about the controversial Netzah Yehudah battalion that is on the docket for blacklisting by the United States under the 1997 Leahy Law.

In August 2022, Israeli troops from the religious Netzah Yehuda battalion were filmed beating two Palestinian detainees in the West Bank in a video posted to the TikTok video-sharing site. Three soldiers were seen repeatedly kicking two Palestinian men near Ramallah as a fourth soldier stands nearby. They were suspended and investigated.

This well-publicized beating came months after the death of Omar As’ad, a 78-year-old Palestinian-American who died after being detained, handcuffed, blindfolded, and later abandoned in near-freezing conditions by soldiers of the battalion.

As Washington is increasingly clamping down on extremist Jewish settler violence in the West Bank, the State Department probed Netzah Yehuda and several of the other units in the Israeli security forces for well over a year due to alleged human rights violations.

While the State Department looks into thousands of allegations of Leahy Law violations each year, it created a special panel known as the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum that exclusively vets allegations against the IDF and Israel Police due to the political sensitivity of the issue.

So this week in which an IDF unit may be defunded by the United States, we ask Haviv Rettig Gur, what matters now? 

With contributions from Jacob Magid. 

What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was produced by the Pod-Waves. 

IMAGE: Israeli soldiers from the Netzah Yehuda Battalion patrol near the Israeli-Gaza border, October 20, 2023. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
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Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring one key issue currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, hosted by deputy editor Amanda Borschel-Dan.

In a post-October 7 Israeli reality, is any new security threat outside the realm of imagination?

This week, when over 300 projectiles were sent from Iran to Israel, we pose this question to journalist and hit Israeli drama "Fauda" co-creator Avi Issacharoff.

Legions of fans around the world know of Issacharoff’s fiction writing from the popular television series, loosely based on his experiences in the IDF’s elite Duvdevan unit, that is written alongside "Fauda" star Lior Raz. (We'll hear a story of their post-October 7 real-life bravery during our conversation.)

But Issacharoff is first and foremost a long-time, die-hard journalist and analyst of the Arab world -- one who has put his life on the line in the past to cover a story.

We pick Issacharoff’s brain as we unpick the knotty situation Israel is currently facing with enemies on our borders, and Iran as a puppet master who is coming increasingly closer to a nuclear bomb.

So this week, we ask journalist Avi Issaharoff, What Matters Now.

What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was produced by the Pod-Waves. 

IMAGE: Mideast analyst Avi Issacharoff, one of the co-creators of the Israeli TV drama 'Fauda,' (Photo by JACK GUEZ / AFP)
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Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring one key issue currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, hosted by deputy editor Amanda Borschel-Dan.

Speaking in our Jerusalem office, The Times of Israel editor David Horovitz offers a rare in-depth look at the professional challenges and personal conflicts he’s faced in covering the war against Hamas for the past half year.

Horovitz gives a candid survey at what it is to run a site that, following the surprise October 7 Hamas infiltration of southern Israel and massacre of 1,200 people, jumped 600% in its readership to become, according to news site Press Gazette, the fastest-growing news website in the world in October and November.

The Times of Israel's 24/7 coverage remains unabated as we mark six months of war.

So this week we ask Times of Israel editor David Horovitz, what matters now.

What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was produced by the Pod-Waves. 

IMAGE: David Horovitz, editor, The Times of Israel (Amanda Borschel-Dan/ToI)
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Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring one key issue currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, hosted by deputy editor Amanda Borschel-Dan.

In six months of war, Israel has systematically broken down Hamas’s battalions in the Gaza Strip. But in achieving terrible success in its aim to defang the terrorist army, the Jewish state is no longer seen on the world stage as the attacked underdog David, but increasingly reviled as a cruel Goliath.

According to many in the West, it is up to Israel to immediately stop the war regardless of Hamas’s clear ability to regroup and again attack, just as the terror group has publicly vowed to do.

This week, What Matters Now again speaks with public intellectual and philosopher Dr. Micah Goodman. We revisit the raw conversation we held six months ago, mere days after Hamas’s murderous attack, and see just how right Goodman’s predictions were.

In our conversation this week, Goodman explains the completely different framings of the war held by the West and Israel, and how they influence both sides’ actions and words.

And we hear about how Israelis, forever changed by the war, are now standing at a crossroads. Can civil society regroup and reemerge from this war stronger, saner and more united?

Goodman spent the past six months writing his seventh best-selling book, "Hayom Hashmini" ("The Eighth Day"), which was published in late March. He sees the end of this war as an opportunity for restructuring and revitalizing Israelis, as long as they embrace a new paradigm.

So this week, six months to the war, we ask Dr. Micah Goodman, what matters now.

What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was produced by the Pod-Waves. 

IMAGE: Philosopher and public intellectual Dr. Micah Goodman. (Yonit Schiller)
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