Elders of Zionism

Judah Friedman, Guy Goldstein, Golan Ramraz
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Elders of Zionism - hosted by writer Judah Friedman, political strategist Guy Goldstein and Hollywood producer Golan Ramraz - is a podcast of three Jews taking back the name. At a time when Zionism has become a dirty word, we're asking why. Because the ideas under attack didn't start in Washington, Philadelphia or with the Magna Carta. They started at Sinai. Each week, we explore the connections between Zionism, Americanism and the broader Judeo-Christian tradition in an unapologetic conversation about civilization, sovereignty and the future of the West.

  1. 1 day ago

    Protocol 33: REMEMBERING 9/11 ISN'T COMFORTABLE & IT'S NOT MEANT TO BE

    We dissect a Haaretz report claiming Netanyahu was warned by the UAE before October 7, the evidence undermining it, the rush by his political opponents to embrace it and the danger of anonymous sourcing becoming a vehicle for propaganda (01:27). We assess Iran’s escalating provocations, its collapsing economy and the possibility that a desperate regime actually wants an American attack to rally its population and manipulate Western opinion (11:08). We condemn European and Canadian moves to sanction Israel and applaud Israel finally answering hostility with consequences, from expelling diplomats to potentially withholding intelligence (15:22). We expose how boycotts supposedly designed to help Palestinians instead destroy Palestinian jobs and examine the Palestinian Authority’s continuing pay-to-slay program (19:49). We celebrate the deeper bond between America and Israel, rooted not merely in strategic interests but in a shared belief in liberty and the biblical foundations of Western freedom (25:17). We mourn how badly America has preserved the memory and lessons of 9/11 and how quickly unity against jihad gave way to excuses, historical amnesia and fear of confronting Islamic ideology (32:07). We argue that the deeper problem is not ignorance but maleducation, with young people deliberately taught a distorted history that leaves them unable to recognize threats their parents understood (39:25). We prescribe the only lasting response: teach the real history, fight for honest curricula, engage locally and make sure our children understand what happened on 9/11 and why it still matters (40:55). Finally, we remember the terror of being unable to reach family on 9/11 and October 7 and resolve to pass those memories forward so future generations are better prepared to fight the battles history keeps returning to them (43:51).

    Protocol 33: REMEMBERING 9/11 ISN'T COMFORTABLE & IT'S NOT MEANT TO BE

  2. 4 days ago

    Protocol 32: Movements Fall To The People They Let Inside

    Karis Reyes returns to Elders of Zionism (00:41) Six million is the number everyone knows. Sixty-seven is not, and a hundred and seventeen is not, and that's exactly the point Guy Goldstein makes on this episode of Elders of Zionism when he walks through the pogroms at Hebron and Kishinev that most people, including most Jews, have never been taught (28:00-30:48). Judah opens with something the show rarely admits on air: the three hosts don't come from the same place, religiously or politically, and neither do most of their guests (03:49-04:44). Karis lays out her own path first, Bay Area secular household, two grandparent Holocaust survivors, a father obsessed enough with the history to fill the home with documentaries (06:06), and a political conversion that started quietly around 9/11 and didn't fully surface until she was voted Republican co-chair of her high school mock senate without meaning to be one (09:42-12:31). Guy's version is heavier. His grandparents fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance, and he grew up understanding the Holocaust the way American film taught it, Jews as scenery and Schindler as the hero (13:39). That framing becomes the engine of the episode. Judah cites Bush 41's collapse to eleven percent of the Jewish vote after telling Israel to stand down in the Gulf War (17:59); Karis makes the case that one in three Jews on earth were wiped out and the Germans documented it too meticulously for denial to hold (19:38-21:47); and Guy extends the argument backward into a century of pogroms nobody remembers and forward into the Farhud, the massacre that ended twenty-five hundred years of Jewish life in Baghdad in one week (30:xx). Karis connects that history directly to modern Jewish political liberalism, arguing the instinct to assimilate and soften Jewish identity was a survival response to exactly this pattern (31:26), and Guy closes the historical arc with a hard argument about why AI models keep producing antisemitic output, two thousand years of Shylock and Fagin don't get erased by a system prompt (33:14-35:31). From there the show turns present-tense. Guy argues Charlie Kirk's death removed the one gatekeeper holding the Groyper faction out of the mainstream right, and traces a straight line from that vacuum to Tucker Carlson's interview with Fuentes weeks later (38:24-45:53), while Karis complicates the story by insisting the rot was already spreading before Kirk died. Karis closes with a quiet trip bringing health-freedom leaders to Israel, careful to clarify it was not an official MAHA operation (46:42), a long Pop Tarts tangent involving Marco Rubio's wife that derails the panel for several minutes (47:13-49:44), and a final message about turning toward family and community when the political fight gets too heavy to hold alone (51:55-53:39). Find Karis at X @ReaKaris.

    Protocol 32: Movements Fall To The People They Let Inside

  3. 3 Sept

    Protocol 31: JD Finally Defends Wife. Dodges Tucker. Jew Do the Math.

    Judah Friedman and Guy Goldstein open Protocol 31 breaking down the pressure campaign on Iran (0:54), where Trump's insistence that the midterms aren't driving his Iran timeline collides with growing signs the regime is cracking under economic strangulation, from IRGC loyalists getting attacked in the streets to a ramming incident at a pro-regime protest, with Guy pointing to pipeline projects slated for 2027 that could permanently kill Iran's Hormuz leverage. The guys pivot hard into Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel's comments (9:50), where Judah and Guy tear apart her framing that Jews should sacrifice their safety for "the rest of humanity," calling it suicidal empathy taken to its logical, grotesque endpoint and a total inversion of the core Jewish choice between life and death. From there it's straight into JD Vance's closed-door RJC meeting (15:10), where Guy walks through how badly Vance botched the definition of blood libel in front of the most prominent Jewish Republicans in the country (fact-check: verify the specific quotes attributed to Vance and confirm the Haaretz piece and its exact framing before publishing), and why his continued refusal to distance himself from Tucker Carlson looks even worse next to Abdullah El-Sayed distancing himself from Hassan Piker within 24 hours. The conversation widens into the Vance-versus-Rubio question for 2028 (24:31) and what that primary actually decides about the GOP's direction, before Judah and Guy dig into the generational rot in economic messaging (27:57), contrasting old-school economists and philosophers with a new generation raised on catastrophizing and imported Marxist framing, and Guy makes the case that materially things are better while structurally, young people are genuinely getting squeezed out of the ladder their parents climbed. Guy also lays out why he's grown more optimistic about how Trump is managing the Iran conflict without letting it blow up the oil markets (38:29). The back half covers a coalition of Christian lawmakers pushing for a legal immigration pathway for Jewish Canadians fleeing rising antisemitism (42:49, fact-check: confirm the coalition's name, scope, and current legislative status), a gutting personal story about a Jewish friend in the UK getting screamed at on the street just for being visibly Jewish, and Guy's sobering history lesson on how fast Jewish populations disappeared from Morocco and Iraq within a single generation (44:32, fact-check: verify the population figures cited for Moroccan and Iraqi Jewry). They close on the shifting polling in the Israeli elections and why nobody trusts a poll that swings ten seats in four days (49:54), plus a hard, no-apologies case for voter ID and election integrity (53:09). Sunday's episode brings Karis Reyes back to the show.

    Protocol 31: JD Finally Defends Wife. Dodges Tucker. Jew Do the Math.

  4. 1 Sept

    Protocol 30: Infidel Awareness Month With Guest Richard Landes

    Historian Richard Landes joins Judah and Guy for a conversation that reframes the last twenty five years of Western weakness in the face of jihad (00:13). Landes, a medievalist turned scholar of millennial movements, lays out the caliphater ideology driving the push to convert Dar al Harb into Dar al Islam, and the two hosts dig into why messaging on the right has failed to keep pace (02:39). The conversation turns to Islamophobia as a manufactured term built to shield the religion most in need of scrutiny from any scrutiny at all, and to the insecurity underneath religious supremacism (04:57). Landes explains the origin of his term Pollywood and the case for reforming legacy media rather than chasing social media (07:19), then traces how NGOs, academia, and journalism all drifted from their founding purpose into activist narrative work (09:47). The group ranks the failures of American, European, and Israeli media against each other before landing on the Gaza starvation narrative as what Landes calls a postmodern blood libel, built on staged footage while Gazans were documented eating in restaurants (12:10 to 16:56). Landes breaks down the four image sets driving Gaza coverage, genocide, starvation, camps, and ethnic cleansing, and shows how deliberately they mirror Holocaust imagery, then walks through how the word genocide has been captured almost entirely for one side of the story (16:56 to 18:14). The show covers media guidance quietly rewriting the language of 9/11 ahead of its 25th anniversary, softening hijackers where terrorists once stood (20:33), and names CARE and elements of academia as the machinery laundering jihadi propaganda into democratic language (22:59). Landes lays out Infidel Awareness Month in full, from the meaning of kafir to the fifty year horizon running through 2076, including plans to mark September 17th with George Bush's Islamic Center speech and an essay contest imagining the speech he should have given instead (25:22 to 34:37). The back half turns personal and historical, contrasting Israel's institutionalized memorial culture with America's fading memory of 9/11 (39:09), unpacking why infidel was chosen as a unifying term across faiths (41:29), previewing plans to profile former radicals like Ateret Schmuel of Indigenous Bridges (46:09), and closing on Landes's account of the Overton window inversion since 2000, where liberal became a synonym for excusing jihadi terror and centrist warnings about political Islam became far right (55:15). Judah and Guy close out on the Jewish tradition of disagreement without division, and Landes's warning about the danger of assuming political opponents act from malevolence rather than honest disagreement (57:31 to 59:58).

    Protocol 30: Infidel Awareness Month With Guest Richard Landes

  5. 28 Aug

    Protocol 29: Can Bessent Best The Hawala Network

    We revisit Mike Rogers’ uphill Michigan Senate fight and argue that candidates need a recognizable political identity and messages that actually speak to voters rather than merely attacking opponents’ labels (03:24). We dissect El-Sayed’s Jesse Watters interview, Hasan Piker’s extremism and the dishonest attempt to equate Sharia with Catholic canon law while recasting Jesus as a socialist (16:31). We praise Scott Bessent’s economic assault on Iran while questioning whether sanctions can overcome lifelines from China, other authoritarian states and the Hawala network (25:15). We confront America’s dangerous dependence on Chinese manufacturing, rare earths and supply chains and debate whether secondary sanctions can force countries to choose between Iran and the American economy (27:46). We demand 10-, 20- and 50-year American strategies that survive election cycles, rebuild domestic industry and create durable national targets independent of partisan ideology (33:11). We condemn JD Vance's failure to defend his wife, Usha, from El-Sayed’s attacks and argue that the silence reveals something deeper about character, masculinity and political courage (36:38). We applaud Tim Scott for warning that the DSA is attacking American culture and reject the fear of accusations of racism when legitimate security concerns demand candor (43:24). We expose how Hawala, GoFundMe, PayPal, Stripe, charities and NGOs can keep money flowing to Iran, Hamas and other terrorist networks despite formal sanctions (45:35). We balance skepticism about Operation Economic Outcast with hope that Trump and Bessent can genuinely isolate Iran and cripple the regime (50:26). We warn that America’s fear of confronting Islamist extremism risks repeating Britain’s catastrophic failures and urge the silent majority to speak (52:07). We mourn Dolly Parton as a uniquely American icon whose talent, decency, faith, generosity and moral clarity embodied values increasingly absent from celebrity culture (53:39). Finally, we celebrate Brandon Flowers’ Thrasher as a stirring tribute to America and the West (56:54).

    Protocol 29: Can Bessent Best The Hawala Network

  6. 24 Aug

    Protocol 28: El-Sayed is a Doctor. So were Mengele, al-Assad, Fauci and Doom

    We dissect Abdul El-Sayed’s embrace of Sharia, the difference between private religious observance and coercive religious government and the disturbing history of educated professionals embracing radicalism (01:03). We warn that Michigan’s Senate race exposes the GOP’s chronic failure to recruit compelling candidates while El-Sayed packages Islamist politics inside a progressive platform tailor-made for the left (07:41). We contrast AIPAC’s record with CAIR’s documented history, its connection to the Holy Land Foundation case and its financial support for El-Sayed (16:34). We sound the alarm over America’s dangerously vulnerable infrastructure as cyberwarfare moves from Stuxnet and attacks on Ukraine and Israel to Iran attacking Britain’s power system (23:04). We blast Tom Barrack for calling the Golan Heights occupied despite explicit US policy recognizing Israeli sovereignty there and examine the competing Rubio, Vance and transactional factions shaping Trump’s foreign policy (31:07). We defend Jared Kushner’s record and the Abraham Accords while separating his approach from Witkoff and Barrack (36:33). We condemn Hasan Piker’s poisonous influence on millions of young followers and the left’s decision to elevate rather than marginalize him (38:47). We argue that fears about America’s deterioration aren’t hyperbole when institutional erosion, political radicalization and antisemitism are accelerating before our eyes (45:02). We confront the perennial question of why Jews still vote Democrat, and debate what Jewish identity actually means. (46:12). Finally, we urge Jews who prioritize progressive politics over their own people to recognize that antisemites will never care which kind of Jew they are, and to wake up and fight back (47:24).

    Protocol 28: El-Sayed is a Doctor. So were Mengele, al-Assad, Fauci and Doom

  7. 20 Aug

    Protocol 27: Marco Rubio, Pop-Tarts & The New Ottoman Empire

    We expose the Israeli media’s dramatic leftward bias, the collapse of public trust and the global market rewarding anti-Israel narratives (00:22). We ridicule Tucker Carlson’s claim about Israeli schools avoiding plus signs and the broader appetite for anti-Jewish nonsense dressed up as skepticism (05:12). We highlight the media blackout around a Muslim vandalizing a Jaffa church and the obvious double standard when Jews are involved (06:43). We condemn the horseshoe politics uniting the far right and far left, where vibes, loyalty and cancellation replace evidence and principle (07:47). We blast Tom Barrack for attacking Israel over its strike on a Syrian military base, question his judgment and trace his extensive financial history with Qatar (12:12). We defend Israel’s doctrine of preventing hostile military buildups on its borders and explain how its actions in Syria strengthened America’s negotiating position (15:05). We lament Trump taking his foot off the gas in Iran, arguing that stopping halfway created the worst of both worlds – the costs of intervention without victory and a more dangerous regional order (22:39). We celebrate Marco Rubio’s wonderfully human Pop-Tart moment and explore why ordinary glimpses of politicians and Jewish life can create more powerful soft power than endless victimhood (33:20). We praise Rubio’s ICC sanctions, his foreign-policy effectiveness and Scott Bessent’s financial muscle behind American pressure campaigns (40:02). Finally, Judah pitches direct WhatsApp channels for administration officials to bypass media filters, arm creators with shareable information and take political messaging directly to audiences (45:40).

    Protocol 27: Marco Rubio, Pop-Tarts & The New Ottoman Empire

  8. 17 Aug

    Protocol 26: Mecca Accords - Saudi, Pakistan & Turkey Get Rich, Everyone Else Gets The Shaft

    Sent from my We revisit why the left keeps overplaying its hand while conservatives keep failing to capitalize on the opportunity, and ask whether modern politics has become less left versus right than competing speeds toward the same destination (00:45). We dissect J.D. Vance’s economic populism, his resurfaced argument against the dollar’s reserve-currency status and the crucial difference between a strong dollar and American financial centrality (07:43). We question how a politician raised in the age of YouTube, X and bite-sized media can be so consistently bad at messaging. (17:37). We hammer Trump’s celebration of the new Mecca defense pact between Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, arguing that it represents a dangerous reversal of the Abraham Accords’ entire organizing principle (21:22). We trace the regional fallout through Lebanon, Hezbollah, Iran and renewed instability in Gaza and Judea and Samaria (27:10). We crunch the surprisingly small payroll required to keep Iran’s IRGC functioning and explain why Tehran’s deeper vulnerability may be water, food and collapsing infrastructure rather than cash (29:59). We warn that Iran’s deterioration could eventually unleash a refugee crisis dwarfing Syria’s impact on Europe (35:21). We unpack the reality of “settler violence,” exposing inflated statistics, self-defense recast as aggression and even Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount counted among incidents (36:20). We challenge the loaded political meaning of the word “settler” itself and examine how American citizenship in Palestinian villages can be weaponized to trigger US diplomatic pressure (40:55). We fault Israel for failing to fight the propaganda filling the vacuum left by its disastrous messaging (46:22). Finally, we argue that complicated stories cannot be understood through five-minute cable-news segments designed to produce clips instead of knowledge (50:19).

    Protocol 26: Mecca Accords - Saudi, Pakistan & Turkey Get Rich, Everyone Else Gets The Shaft
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About

Elders of Zionism - hosted by writer Judah Friedman, political strategist Guy Goldstein and Hollywood producer Golan Ramraz - is a podcast of three Jews taking back the name. At a time when Zionism has become a dirty word, we're asking why. Because the ideas under attack didn't start in Washington, Philadelphia or with the Magna Carta. They started at Sinai. Each week, we explore the connections between Zionism, Americanism and the broader Judeo-Christian tradition in an unapologetic conversation about civilization, sovereignty and the future of the West.

Information

  • Creator
    Judah Friedman, Guy Goldstein, Golan Ramraz
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    33
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © EldersofZionism
  • Show Website
    Elders of Zionism

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