← Identity/Crisis
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- [00:01]
A
In today's endless news cycle, it's harder than ever to understand what's really happening in Israel. That's why I Recommend Israel Policy Forum's podcast, Israel PolicyPod. Israel PolicyPod goes in depth on what actually matters when it comes to the Israeli Palestinian conflict and US Israel relations, Israeli politics and wider Middle east developments. It's hosted by Tel Aviv based journalist Neri Zilber, who's great at cutting through the noise to explain what's driving events on the ground. Neri breaks down current affairs with people who deal in substance, not top Israeli journalists, former US diplomats, Palestinian political experts and regional analysts. If you really care about Israel's future as a secure Jewish and democratic state, Israel policypod is a must. Listen. You can find Israel policypod wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everyone. Welcome to Identity Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute, creating better convers about the essential issues facing Jewish life. I'm Yehuda Kurtzer. We're recording on Tuesday, February 17, 2026. In the early 1980s, a former IDF Military Intelligence chief wrote a book that briefly took Israeli society and certainly the media, by storm. The book was called the Bar Kokhba Syndrome. It was authored by Yehoshaphat Harkabi. I like to call him Yumping Yehoshaphat. And in it he argued that too many Israeli leaders were motivated in their thinking by fantasies of heroism, messianic thinking and ideological extremism. With Bar Kokhba, the failed ancient messianic revolutionary of the second century, as their template and forebear. Herkabi was insistent, in contrast, that wisdom in political and military strategy lay with political realism, pragmatism and clear headed analysis on its face. Yeah, of course, that's right. Bar Kokhfa's failed revolt against the Roman Empire led to mass death and exile. It demanded that the Jews see themselves alone against the world in ways that became prophecy. It was a catastrophic strategy that was rejected by the rabbinic tradition and only rehabilitated in modern Israel as a heroic account. But because of that new life, the resistance to Harqabi in the 1980s was profound. It's one thing to criticize someone else's politics. It's another thing entirely to take away their heroic story. This past Rosh Hashanah, or maybe it was the year before, I can't really remember. It was one of the two Rosh Hashanahs during the war. I was walking to shul in the morning and planning things out for the services I was leading. And it struck me on the walk that we had nothing planned to say about the binding of Isaac, which we were to read from the Torah that morning. Now, I'm not one for trigger warnings about the Torah or about the prayer book, but it felt, it felt irresponsible to not say something, anything about the hopeless, tragic story we were meant to read. The near sacrifice by a father of his son amidst the horror of a war in which sons were being sent by their fathers into combat daily and regularly finding that unlike Abraham, the sacrifice was not interrupted. I spoke about this briefly mentioned the scholarship of my colleague Ronit Irshai, who notes that in many religious contexts, especially as relate to Orthodox women, the people who talk about the merit of sacrifice are often not those who have to actually do the sacrificing. I spoke about our desperate hope that this culture of sacrifice, even necessary sacrifice, comes to an end. I think I was implicitly also asking us to consider how a story of heroic self sacrifice may be hurting us more than inspiring us. I am thus the ideal targeted demographic for Mati Friedman's haunting new book out of the sky, which is out at the end of March from Spiegel and Grau. It's a treatment of the heroic, tragic story of the Zionist paratroopers in Europe in 1944 who failed entirely in their missions but are remembered as heroes, Hanasen being the most famous of the bunch. This is Mati's fifth book and it is consistent with his oeuvre, in which he finds a captivating story of Israel and infuses it with humanity and deep reporting in a way that bridges between past and present. I was fortunate to get to know Matti as a teenager and since then have loved watching him get to where he is today. One of the finest Jewish writers of our time and one of the most important. Although I suspect that for writers, being thought of as great is probably better than being thought of as important. Important sounds ponderous. Either way, I take pride in our friendship and I'm always grateful for these opportunities to talk about his work. Mati is now the Alec Baldwin of identity crisis. I think this is at least his fourth appearance. He's nicer to his kids. Mati, thanks for coming back on the show. Mazel Tova and the book, and I'm thrilled to be able to talk to you about it.
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B
Thank you so much for having me. And Yuda, I will never quibble with any compliments. So important. Great. As long as it's not blistering criticism, I will enthusiastically agree.
- [04:57]
A
Mati, I'm going to start in a Little bit of a dark place. This I found of your five books is the saddest. Aleppo Codex is like a mystery story, by the way. All five of them are optionable. Hope you're working on that. Aleppo Codex is a mystery story. Leonard Cohen in the Sinai is a totally inspiring story. The Spies of Early Israel also. Pumpkin Flowers, your memoir of the war, of course, is very difficult and very hard to read, but this. Something about this felt very sad. And I know our listeners haven't read it yet, but maybe it's the hopelessness of the whole thing. Maybe it's where you are, maybe it's where Israel is. I felt sad. Am I. Did I read it right?
- [05:43]
B
You know, any reader's response is the right response. And I think that there is definitely a tragic element to this story. I mean, there's really no way around it. It's a story that takes place at a moment of acute tragedy. Of course, it takes place in the middle of the Holocaust in 1944, and it's an attempt by the Zionist movement to write a different story about that moment. But of course, the story that they end up writing is in itself tragic, although it's tragic in a different way, at least in their understanding, than the Holocaust is tragic. And I think that that is basically what they were hoping for. You know, they're hoping for a different kind of tragedy that could lead us not to hopelessness, but to action. This kind of story that would spur us to action and hope. And the participants in the mission, at least some of them get that that is the mission. And I think that in many ways they succeed. I mean, as you point out, they fail at what is officially their mission, but succeed at what is actually their mission, which is to enact a story of Jewish heroism that will echo through the ages. And here we are in 2026 talking about them. So clearly that part of it worked.
- [06:48]
A
I couldn't quite tell in the book. Do you think that the people who sent them on the mission knew how catastrophically failed it would be, and that they were basically staging them to be paratroopers who would obviously fail at the mission? What are they going to do? Stop the war? Rescue Jews? You know, like, unthinkable. You describe in the book that they realize that is taking place, or at least Hana Senesch seems to realize that that's what's taking place. In fact, you describe the ultimate mission was storytelling, and she becomes the primary storyteller of the whole incident, but also of something much larger. Do you think that the people who sent them, felt that that was the mission.
- [07:23]
B
I think answering that question requires me to just explain a bit about what the mission was was, or what the multiple missions were, because I would say that there were three missions going on simultaneously involving the same group of people. So ostensibly, we're talking about a British Special operations mission in 1944 that takes Jews from British Mandate Palestine, people who are recently arrived from Central Europe and can speak useful Central European languages, primarily Hungarian, but other languages as well, and drops them into that part of Europe in order to serve as liaisons between British forces and partisan fighters and to help downed Allied airmen or escaped POWs who are on enemy territory get back to Allied lines. That's the mission. And it's run by an obscure part of British military intelligence called MI9, which is responsible for escape and evasion. And you can Google them. People have kind of forgotten Mi9. Of course, there's Mi5 and Mi6, which remain in action and remain quite famous. But that's the British mission. And it's a cooperation between British authorities in Palestine because, of course, Palestine is ruled at that time by the British Empire. So it's a cooperation between the British authorities and the Zionist movement, which has this very ambiguous relationship with the British. Sometimes they cooperate, sometimes they rebel. At this particular moment, they're more cooperating than rebelling, because the idea is to win the war. And there's no question of where Jewish loyalties are in the war. So the Zionists volunteer to come up with able participants in this secret mission, and they find about just over 30, 32 who ultimately end up jumping, including Hannes, Senesh and a few other names that might be familiar to readers who know Israeli history. So that's the mission. Underneath that is a mission that is being carried out by the Zionist movement, which of course has its own motivations, and they're not averse to helping the British win the war. But that's not their prime motivation, in fact, that they don't like the British. They hate the British less than they hate the Germans. But the British are preventing Jewish refugees from reaching the only safe haven that was tenable at that time, and condemning hundreds of thousands or millions of people to death because the doors of Land of Israel had been closed by the British Empire. So it's happening at that moment. So what the Zionists want to do is they want to demonstrate their loyalty to the British and to the Allies in the hopes that that will help after the war, when people's contribution to the war is calculated and adjudicated and they also want to gain military experience because the Zionist movement understands that after the war there's going to be another war for independence in the land of Israel. And the Jews need as many people with military experience and military training as possible. And so this British mission is in fact, in some ways a mission against the British. And there's a reason that British authorities do not want to arm Jewish units and include Jews in the war against Nazism. They understand that these skills are going to be used against the British as soon as the war is over. And that understanding is completely correct. The Jews are lobbying to send fighting forces to Europe from the very beginning of the war, and the British won't let them until the very end of the war when there's a Jewish unit that's engaged in combat in Italy. But it's a very late and a very marginal story. And until that point, the prime Jewish contribution to the war effort is this or the most notable, I would say, contribution to the war effort is this Jewish group of parachutists. So that's the second mission. You have the British mission and you have the Zionist mission as it is explained in military terms. And underneath that, there's this other mission which you mentioned, which is this storytelling mission, an attempt to provide a story about the war that Zionism can live with. And Zionism understands the power of storytelling. Of course. It's a movement that begins in some ways with a journalist and a playwright named Theodore Herzl, who sits down having encountered this really just baffling and terrifying wave of anti Jewish hostility in the liberal cities of Europe, the city where he lives, Vienna, and in Paris. And he responds to this incredible turn of events by sitting down and writing. He literally sits down in a hotel room in Paris and he writes a different story about the Jewish people and the way the future is going to unfold. And the story that he writes is crazy. If you read it at the time, it must have seemed completely, absolutely unhinged. It's called the Jewish State and I'm sitting in it right now. So Zionism understands the power of the story. And subconsciously or in some place in the consciousness of the people running this mission, they understand that this is really what they're going to do. And at least some of the participants in the mission get that that is their mission, that that is essentially what they're setting out to do. They're telling a different story, they're setting an example. They're enacting the correct response to tragedy, the Zionist response, which is not to jump into bed and pull the covers over your head and not to lie to yourself about what's going on, but rather to grasp the sides of the hatch of the bomber and jump out into the night over Nazi occupied Europe.
- [12:24]
A
Yeah, although that's not the only option. The other option could have been to basically ignore it and fight the war in Palestine. It does seem like a novel and crazy move, like we're going to go in and fight or do something or gain military training, whatever it is, when it's completely futile. So I guess maybe what your argument is that it's not just that they are grasping the sides of the bomber and jumping out, but they are placing themselves in the narration of the Jewish people's story in a totally different way, I guess for their own benefit, for the world's benefit. Like who's supposed to really derive power from that story?
- [13:00]
B
The Jewish people. The Jewish people after the war are supposed to look at these people and say, we will be like them. We're not going to be like people who are hiding in the basement. We're not going to be like people who are running away. The Zionist movement has a very ambiguous take on the Jews of Europe at this time and certainly after the war. And Zionism is very embarrassed about this later on. But there is this sense of why are these people helpless? Why are they not rebelling? These are ludicrous questions in retrospect. But this was just anathema to the Zionist ethos, which was, we fight. You know, we're Bar Kochba, like you said at the beginning. We're Judah the Maccabee. We're not timid rabbis. We're people who fight back and we jump out of airplanes. So the benefit was supposed to be derived by, I think, what the parachutists would have called the youth. They're very preoccupied with the youth. And many of these people are the products of youth movements. And they are themselves counselors in youth movements. And what they're doing is instructing people in the proper response, which they understand will be necessary shortly, and it will be in the War of Independence and beyond. They're trying to re engineer the Jewish mind away from quietism and away from, you know, kind of waiting for things to pass or cutting a deal with the authorities. And they're trying to move people toward acts of military heroism. And, you know, the mission doesn't work, but that story works. There's a reason that, you know, Hannes Senish's immortal song Eli Eli is being sung in 1948. The songs that she Writes are already in action within a year or two of her death. So there's something very powerful going on here. And what was fascinating to me about this is that they understand it, the characters understand it. Certainly Hana Senesch, who's a fascinating character, she understands it. She's really been reduced to kind of a two dimensional Zionist poster, essentially, which kind of like a Davy Crockett figure or something. You know, people don't hear Hannes and they think, oh, whatever, you know, I sang Eli Eli in Hebrew school. And that's about as much as I want to know about her. But she's so much more interesting than that. And she's so much smarter, I think, than I expected. She was very, very young. She's 22 when she jumps. And there's another character in the book whose name is familiar to some Israelis and I think not familiar at all outside of Israel, which is Enzo Sereni, who's this incredible Italian character who's much older than the rest of the parachutists. He's 39 at the time of the mission and he has three kids. But he's also like Hannah, he's a literary figure. Then he's written a book, and posthumously another book of his is published. And he's just a great writer. And he dreams of writing the great novel that will encompass the drama of the lives of the Jews of Rome, which is where he's from. And he's going to describe the different forces that are at work on his family, on the Cereni family, Italian nationalism and the animosity of the Catholic Church and the rise of fascism and the pull of Jewish tradition and Zionism and assimilation. And he's going to encompass it all in a great novel that he never gets to write because he jumps out of an airplane and instead turns himself into the lead character in a story that someone else is going to tell.
- [15:59]
A
I mean, I thought one of the great lines in the book is pretty early on, but you're talking about one of the other parachuters and you said he doesn't like her about Hanasenis. I thought that was a great line, just because that's like a way of saying to your readers, a, these are much more complicated people than, you know. Right. And this is not about whether you like them or not. It's whether they actually kind of serve this function. But there was also something heretical about the line itself disclosing to like they weren't like sitting around a campfire singing with each other as though they were best friends. They Were all of these complicated figures who were brought together by history, forces larger than themselves, playing out a story that we see as a unified, coherent story, but actually as all these different threads that you're trying to pull together in the book.
- [16:44]
B
Right. It's a challenge for a writer to. You've noticed it. It's not really one story. It's a bunch of stories. And actually molding it into one narrative is challenging. But, I mean, they're sent on a rescue mission. Essentially. They're supposed to rescue allied airmen, they're supposed to rescue the Jews, whatever that means. And I saw my role as a writer here also as a rescue mission, because I was trying to rescue them not just from amnesia, which has kind of enveloped most of the characters in the story, but from mythology, from this kind of cheap propaganda that took these real life people and made them heroes. And, you know, becoming a hero sounds great, but actually it flattens your entire character and robs you of your humanity in many ways. And there's a fascinating scene which does not involve any of the famous participants in this. In this mission. But I recount it. It happens in a jail, in a Nazi jail in Slovakia where a few of the parachutists are about to be executed. And two of them write letters separately. They're not in the same cell, and they write letters which somehow survive. And in both letters, they ask not to be turned into heroes. Yeah, they have this explicit request, do not make me into a hero.
- [17:51]
A
Good luck with that.
- [17:52]
B
Yeah, exactly. It didn't work. But I felt that my job as a writer here was to restore their humanity and kind of portray them as real people. That does not lessen their heroism. In fact, for me, it heightens it many times over. Because someone who's not real, who's a hero. Okay, whatever. You know, Davy Crockett, George Washington, you know, who are they? You know, those are just like generic heroes. But if you understand, you know, Channa has this diary that she writes from a very young age. So we can kind of get a picture of who she was. And who she was, was someone who's very smart, very idealistic. You can understand why her comrades, some of them, didn't like her. She could be a real. Should give you a pain in the neck. So this isn't some rosy picture about, you know, cartoons around a Zionist bonfire. These are really complicated people, really smart, interacting with a time that seems to offer them absolutely not just no solutions, but not even a crack through which they can slip. And yet. And yet they act.
- [18:51]
A
So I Want to come back to the demythologization in a moment, because I think that's the crux of this for me at least. But how did you get to this story? I know in some of the books you've written before, somebody has slipped something to you or has told you, oh, dig into this. How did you get to this? Were you just biking around and past Enzo Serenity street in Herzliya? Was that what's going on here?
- [19:11]
B
Well, it's funny because the story is encoded in the landscape of Israel in a way that I only really understood after I started reporting it. So if you just drive around Israel, you're constantly running into reminders of this mission. So, you know, if you're driving near Rehoboth, for example, you're going to pass a kibbutz called Netzer Sereni, which means the stem of sereni, and that's named after Enso. Or farther north, you could be driving past Lavot Havivah, which is a kibbutz with a beautiful name. It means the flames of Chaviva. And it's named after another one of the parachutists we haven't mentioned, even though in some ways she's the most amazing character in the Mission. Aviva Reich, and there are others alone. Abba in the north is named after one of the parachutists, Abba Berdichev. And there are 32 Hanasenish streets, and there's a Hanasenish forest. And so the story is present in the landscape of Israel in a very interesting way. But I don't think I ever really thought about the story beyond a vague familiarity with Hannes Senesh, of course. But almost everyone has mostly based on very little in terms of actual knowledge about her. But a friend of mine, a journalist named Israel Rosner, who was my partner in a TV series that we did for Israeli public television about the security zone war in Lebanon, which is the subject of my book Pumpkin Flowers. We produced three episode series series for Khan Khadisla, which is the Israeli public broadcaster, about that war. And then that went pretty well. We're kind of kicking around afterwards. This is like four or five years ago after it was aired, and I was just looking for a new idea. I had finished this book about Leonard Cohen's bizarre concert tour in the Yom Kippur War, and I couldn't quite figure out what I was going to do next. And Israel said, you should check out the parachutists. He was just reading a Hebrew biography of Enzo Serenity. There's only one. And he said, this is a crazy story. Story. I mean, who are these people? And what did they think they were doing? And I said, okay. And I did a bit of reading. And yeah, and the more you dive into it, the stranger it is. Because these are. I mean, they're Israeli heroes, but they, they weren't Israeli. I mean, they didn't know they were Israeli. Their whole act of heroism takes place four years before the state of Israel is founded or before anyone used the word Israeli. So they're British agents, but they didn't like the British. And none of them were British. None of them had ever been to Britain.
- [21:11]
A
Yeah.
- [21:11]
B
So who were they? Exactly. And they're heroes who saved Jews and fought the Nazis, but they don't seem to have saved any Jews or killed any Nazis. So what was going on here? What is this Israeli myth? And I decided, yeah, the gaps between the perception and reality in the story were wide enough that it seemed to promise that whatever I found would probably be worth writing.
- [21:31]
A
So this is what makes the book sad for me. Right. Which is this whole question. By rescuing them from their own mythology, you're restoring their humanity, but you're also signaling that there's something about that mythology that actually is not great. Right. There's something concerning about it. Maybe that's because it's the province of the young. And you allude to this yourself. You are a character in this book. You allude to the moment where you realize as an 18 year old arriving in Israel, you were here. You weren't going back to Toronto. You identified with Hanasenis, basically doing the same thing. This is where my future is. She had not been a Zionist all along. Kind of gets converted to it. Maybe it's the stuff of the young. Stephanie told me yesterday that King was 26 at the March on Washington.
- [22:16]
B
Wow.
- [22:17]
A
She's like, oh, that makes sense. That's like, you'd have to be crazy to do things like that. And that maybe, you know, neither of us is 26 anymore. Maybe there's something going on around why it's important to notice that those myths are really useful for young people to do crazy things, but they're not great as like orientations for society. Thoughts on that?
- [22:40]
B
Right. I think a society needs both. I mean, Herzl, when he wrote his great works, was younger than both of us are now. I mean, it's worth dwelling on that because you have to be young perhaps just to have the kind of crazy idea that we need. I mean, had everyone been really responsible and you know, engage with reality. And if everyone had the limited horizons of age in Vienna in the 1890s, I would not be sitting in a Jewish state right now. And the Jewish people. Who knows where the Jewish people would be in the 20th century without those people who had that kind of crazy idea and then, maybe more astonishingly, the power to execute it. So it's not just that Herzl sits in that hotel room and writes this crazy book called the Jewish State. It's that then these small groups of very tough Russians basically start going and realizing that reality. So we need it. You need the wisdom of age, and Jews need the wisdom of the ages and the books and the kind of deep knowledge that comes with age and experience. And you need this crazy energy of the young. Someone needs to jump out of a plane. Okay, I'll do it. It's kind of a contradiction of Zionism in Israel in some ways. And getting back to something that you said at the beginning, which is that you can look at this kind of act of heroism. It has no chance at succeeding, right? It seems completely crazy, just like Kurzel in 1895 when he writes the Jewish state that has no chance of succeeding. The problem is that Zionism is the result of something that had basically no chance of succeeding. So Israelis are constantly looking at the state and they're saying, okay, this seems to have no chance. However, here we are. So clearly, things that have no chance can sometimes happen. And that voice is very much in the Israeli imagination. So when they set off to fight the Nazis and save the Jews, crazier things have happened. And they've seen them, they've witnessed them. And that instinct is sometimes good and sometimes bad. And we just don't know when it's good and when it's bad. Sometimes it's good to be realistic, and sometimes it isn't.
- [24:35]
A
But I want you to unpack the bad, right? Because I think it's coursing through the book, right? Even you talk at one point about your kids like you're biking around enzocerreni street, and you're like, your kids don't operate with that same mythology. They don't think of Israel as being a crazy project. It's just the place that it is. They don't understand Diaspora Jews. That seems crazy. So there does seem to be some work that you're doing in the book to kind of get us off of the mythology sort of, or to warn us away from them. And I wonder if you could unpack that a little bit.
- [25:05]
B
That's interesting. You're picking up on a contradiction in the book that I'm not sure I'm that aware of, which is always something so great about writing a book. There's definitely tons of stuff in this book that I haven't thought of, and there's more of me in there than I probably wanted to reveal. That's something I've discovered about all the books. If you think you're controlling the narrative, that's the first idea that you need to abandon when you're writing something.
- [25:27]
A
No, but by the way, Monte, I want to tell you I love that because I know you. And so when I am visualizing you, including, you know, jumping out of a plane and tracing these steps and looking for things and, like, sitting in coffee shops when you and I have sat in coffee shops together, I'm, like, in the book with you, I'm, like, looking with you. But then I also see you.
- [25:45]
B
Right.
- [25:46]
A
In a way that you don't see yourself.
- [25:47]
B
Right. We've never jumped out of a plane together yet. Yes. Not yet. I think maybe once was enough for me. I did it for the purpose of, you know, understanding the souls of my characters. But now I completely understand the souls of my characters. No need to do that again. But you know, what I really admire about that generation is that transformation of these ideas into a reality. So that generation, which is Ben Gurion and it's Senesh and so. And all these incredible people who really. We think we live at a dark time. I mean, our time is nothing compared to their time. They had no good options. This whole thing seemed like a really unlikely project. I mean, how could anyone have imagined that this would have worked? And they do it. They turn this crazy idea into a reality that's real enough. It's not, unfortunately, done in time to save the Jews of Europe, who are, you know, mostly dead by the time the state is founded, but it's real enough to save. I don't think I'm overstating it, to save the Jews in the 20th century after what happens in the first half of the 20th century. And, you know, they had that ability to create a place, as I write, where you can get a parking ticket in Hebrew and, you know, barbecue with 5,000 other sweaty Israelis on Independence Day and do things that are completely unheroic and, you know, unmythical. That's their amazing accomplishment. And that's why I think that they're so. They're so incredible. My admiration for that generation just goes up with every day that passes. And, you know, in the 21st century. They saw something. They saw the barest crack in history open. They sensed that there was a crack, and they grasped it and they made it 2cm wider, and they got us through. And that's what's amazing about them. So the kind of mundane realities of the state, that parking ticket, or, you know, the fact that my kids speak here, I think it's no big deal. I see that as amazing. I don't see that as mundane. For me, that's not a letdown from the age of heroism. For me, that's the most incredible testament
- [27:41]
A
to what these people pulled off, Right? That's a paradox of heroism. It's that it creates conditions for normalcy, right?
- [27:46]
B
I mean, America's living with it right now. I mean, look at World War II, you know, the most incredible American heroism. Americans go off and save the world, and that's not really an overstatement. That really happened. And then look at America now. I mean, they saved the world, and the country is, you know, reality TV and the mall. Okay, so that's not heroic, but that is like enabling normal life for people. You know, enabling people to go about their lives without violence, to kind of live in their own culture without being persecuted. That's worth a lot. It doesn't feel good. It's not enough for us. We're kind of disappointed by it. But I guess that's a human tension.
- [28:21]
A
Well, it also kind of makes you need to forget the mythic heroism just enough, because otherwise it would stare at you in the face all the time and indict you for your society's failings. This reminded me a lot, actually, of Dara Horne's book the Rescuer, about Varian Fry, who is also a rescuer of Jews in Europe. And he is more intentionally forgotten by the people who he saved because they're embarrassed by the fact that they had to be rescued. It's a different story in that sense, but it's reminiscent because she talks about a street, maybe in Montclair, called Varian Fry Road or something, and that's like the only recollection of it. There's some usefulness about. You can't think about these people too much, because if they do, then you're like, oh, the crappiness of my country is an important embarrassment to that heroism, even though they made it possible.
- [29:07]
B
Or even more, you look at a hero and you say, who am I? I mean, I'm so pathetic. You know, there was a time when heroes were really worshipped. So, you know, heroes from World War II or war heroes. People looked up to that kind of heroism. And the idea was that you have heroes and then you seek to emulate them. You know, you look at Neil Armstrong and you want to be Neil Armstrong. You know, you kind of say, wow, that is a model that I can attain if I try hard enough. The other human response is to say, I'm just gonna rip that guy down a few notches. You know, this guy wasn't a real hero. You know, he. He did it for his own reasons. His motivations were dark. He was a mean person. You know, he was mean to his kids. He was dysfunctional. He was an alcoholic. So we have all these, oh, you know, the classic example, maybe, you know, Trump's approach to John McCain, which was maybe kind of an emblematic example of that someone who is not heroic, looking at someone who is heroic. I mean, John McCain survives in the captivity of the North Vietnamese and undergoes unbelievable torture, and he walks out of it in this really noble and admirable way. And someone like President Trump can't deal with that. So instead of saying, you know, wow, I really respect John McCain. I would never have been able to withstand what he withstood. He says, I prefer people who weren't caught. That's a very 21st century approach to heroism, and it exists in Israel, too. So people looking at Hannes are likely to say, oh, Hannesinesh. It really is like Davy Cross Crockett. It's kind of like, oh, don't start telling me about these ludicrous caricatures from the early age of Zionism. I'm talking about Moshe Dayan. Now, who are these people? But actually, these people were incredible. And when you belittle them, you're actually belittling yourself. It's not. The action that you're undertaking is not doing what you think that it's doing. It's actually not making you bigger to try to tear down your heroes. It's making you smaller. The correct approach, particularly at this point in our writing of the history of Israel, which is kind of. I feel like we're after that moment where all the myths have been dismantled and we've done the post Zionist historical writing and whatever, and that's all been done and it's born. The correct response is to look at here, like Hanasens or like Enzo Sereni or Chaviva Reich or the other characters in this book, not to believe the simple, inflated mythology that was built around them in the 1950s, but also not to dismantle them as heroes. We just need to understand why they were heroes using the tools that are at our disposal in 2026. So I've tried to re understand their heroism, but not by any means to dismantle their heroism or suggest that they were anything other than heroes.
- [31:38]
A
You know, I'm going to ask you a question you're not going to like so you can tell me that.
- [31:42]
B
Thanks for the warning.
- [31:43]
A
I think the real reason why I found the book sad, that's not a criticism of the book, but it's just like emotional register of the books because I was like, oh, this book isn't really about the war in 1944. This is a book about the war now where we're sending a tremendous amount of young people to do things that only young people could do because their frontal lobes aren't developed enough to know that they're running into risk. This is like a well established thing about war. Why they have 18 year olds is because their risk variables aren't completely worked out yet. So of course they'll do those crazy things. It's a book that's dedicated to the deaths of two young people who both of us knew who were in your community who were killed. One is taken hostage and one in his tank. It is a book that you make mention of the fact that your sons are on the verge of being of military age. And I don't know if they're enlisted already or I'm sure they've gotten their first calls. That felt to me like the sad piece of this of like a kind of sense of a recurring, of this narrative for the future of Israel is going to constantly need crazy 18 year olds who are willing to jump out of a plane either into Nazi occupied Europe with no hope or into war. That's going to shred them up with maybe some hope of sustainability for the country. But it's just we need to do it. Am I being unfair to your book? And I feel like I'm not because you make mention of them in the book, but I just felt like that was coursing through it.
- [33:10]
B
Right? I mean there's no way around the time that this book was written. I started researching this story about a year before the war started. And so most of the research was done before October 7th. And it's thousands of, I mean, as you know, because you've read it, but thousands of documents in the Haganah archive and there's incredible documentation of this mission. So I'd done most of the research by the time the war hit, but I hadn't actually written the book. And the book ended up being written while this tragedy unfolded. And, of course, what was happening around my apartment in Jerusalem kind of seeps into the book, and it's very present. And in some ways, I think it's a much more timely book now than I understood that it would be before October 7th. And in many ways, I think that I understand my characters much better than I could have before October 7th, when I think many of us thought that we were kind of on the horse, you know, and I have my own critiques of what was going on. And we spoke about that on this podcast before. And, you know, I have my own sense of what's going on in the West. So I didn't think everything was great before October 7th, but I did think fundamentally that liberal democracy had solved the Jewish problem in the Diaspora and that Zionism had solved the Jewish problem, you know, for those of us living in Israel. And on October 7, it all collapsed, basically. I mean, we had images inside Israel that looked like pogroms from, you know, Kishinav in 1903, where the Cossacks are rampaging through the village, raping women and kidnapping children. And we've seen what has happened around Jewish communities in the Diaspora. I mean, hundreds of thousands of people were marching in the great cities of the west, basically baying for Israeli blood. And things have changed. So I'm not saying this is the 1940s, but it's a time much more reminiscent of the time that my character has lived in, in its lack of hope and its kind of seeming inability to really offer constructive solutions. Things look pretty dark for the Jewish people in 2026, much darker than they did in 2022, when I first had the idea for this book. So the war did seep into to my writing, and I'm trying to look at these characters through the lens of my own time. I mean, as I write, they were optimists. They understood that it was going to be a war, and they knew that the Jews were going to be asked to enact great deeds of heroism in order to create an independent state for the Jews. But they thought that would be it. I mean, they thought there would be a war, and then there would be a Jewish state, and then that state would be normalized in its surroundings, and their children would be free to read books or write books or grow pairs or whatever. And they didn't think that their kids would also be jumping out of airplanes and that their grandchildren would also be jumping out of airplanes and that, in fact, you know, jumping out of the airplane was going to be something that they would always have to do, always. And I look at a scene which really stuck out of my mind from the staging grounds right before the major ground push into Gaza in the fall of 2023, when one of the commanders addressing his soldiers before the the land invasion, read them a Hannesenish poem. And it's a great poem because it's really a humanist poem, and it's about making sure you don't lose your humanity in war. So I was very proud of him for reading that poem. It was very much not the vibe in the country at the time, but he read that poem, and I just imagined, what would Hannah think if she saw these guys? I mean, you know, thousands of Jewish soldiers speaking Hebrew. You know, they're not begging for a seat on a British airplane to get into Europe. So the revolution that Channa and her comrades were seeking, it succeeded. The Zionist revolution succeeded, but it didn't solve the problem that they thought they were going to solve. You know, it's a dark realization there. But if they didn't give up, and if they weren't driven to paralysis, despondency by their times, 1944, then who are we to go in that direction? And just as a one last thing about the age, you're right, of course, young people are more prone to acts of heroism. But Enzo was 39, he had three kids. He knew exactly what he was getting into. And he wrote a letter explaining that he knew exactly, exactly what he was getting into. In this war, one of the most striking things has been the fact that it has been fought to a very large extent by our reservists, who are people in their 30s and in some cases in their 40s. I mean, a friend of mine who lives, I guess about 100 yards from where I'm sitting right now is an officer in the reserves. And he's done, I think, 400 days of service. Right now he's in Syria, but he's been all over Gaza. And that is a pretty standard story. So, you know, the Israeli populace has really responded to this. Not all of it, but has really responded to this in quite an incredible way. I mean, October 7th could have, I think, collapsed a weaker society. And that's not what happened here. And it's had all kinds of negative effects in this society. But fundamentally, the society rallies after October 7th with no leadership, or worse, with a leadership to which many of us are viscerally opposed. And people set off to save the country. They kind of sign up and they grip the doors of the airplane, and they jump and they. And it's very much the model demonstrated to the Jewish people into the world by Channet and her comrades in 1944.
- [37:40]
A
Let me ask you one last question, Mati. Which is it kind of zoom out from the book a little bit. You have been arguing two things to your English readership for the last couple decades. One is decades.
- [37:52]
B
Wow. That makes me feel very, very old. It can't possibly be true.
- [37:56]
A
I think it kind of is. Yeah. One is that we here fundamentally misunderstand the story you argued on this podcast that was true about kind of liberal insistence about Hezbollah and Hamas and all of those forces in the region. You have argued that it has infused media coverage in a way that turns Israel into a morality story about the west, which is inaccurate. That there is something just prosaic about the state of Israel that is oftentimes misunderstood within the kind of mythic frames that are afforded to by everyone else. At the same time, you're writing books that are all about mythology and history. This is about the formative mythology of Zionism. This book, Aleppo Codex, about, like, Zionism's role in reclaiming the oldest manuscript we have of the Torah and why that's important about the spies and what they managed to achieve. There is something that seems very important in your writing about elevating these canonical stories of Israel itself, which themselves are infused with mythology and meaning and symbolism. I want you to help me as a reader to reconcile between those two things, because I'm persuaded, you know, I've pushed back. We've argued about some of this stuff for years. I push back. I'm persuaded. But I do feel that there's two different stories that you're pushing towards English readership. So help me distill this.
- [39:30]
B
Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, my job as a reporter here in Israel is to understand the society, and I'm primarily doing it for myself and primarily trying to explain to myself this very complicated country where I ended up more than 30 years ago at this point, when I was 17. And I came expecting one thing and found something very different. And I've been trying to write the stories that explain that to me. So one of the major missing pieces for me has been the fact that, you know, I came with a very European story about Israel, but more than half of the Jews here come from the Islamic world. What does that mean for Israeli society? So that's why I wrote that book about spies, and that ended up being part of the story of the Aleppo Codex. And you know, we have all these famous wars like the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War. But I was involved in a war that no one even noticed, really, in South Lebanon. And I decided that I needed to understand that war and how it was echoing in our lives in the 21st century. And that's why I wrote Pumpkin Flowers. So I'm primarily trying to find ways to explain the story of this country to myself and to readers who may be interested. And I'm looking for stories that are kind of gripping human stories that are very small. So all of my books tend to have very few characters, and they're very kind of. It's never going to be Ben Gurion or, you know, or Herzl. It's basically people you've never heard of, I guess, with the exception of Leonard Cohen. But they say something big, small people who say something big about this country and about the human condition. Because I think you can look at our story, we're humans, and you can look at this as a lens into the human condition, just as I think you can look at the Bible as a story about Jews written by Jews for Jews. Or you can see them as a lens into the human condition. And many people do, and that's the way I see these stories as well. So I'm not trying to elevate Israel into the kind of mythic representation of the problems of mankind, which is often done. I'm trying to understand this very complicated country where I live. And I would hope that a writer in Argentina or in Poland or in Burkina Faso would be doing the same. I think that the perceptions of Israel more broadly have become really, I mean, deranged. Things that I had noticed as a reporter for this was at the AP when I was working for the international press, I guess, almost 15 years ago, you know, those trends have become much more pronounced to the point where it's almost impossible to have a sane conversation about a country that is 1,100th of 1% of the surface of the world. So I fight against that tendency to use Israel as a kind of symbol of what's wrong. This is a real country. The history here is perhaps abnormal, but many countries have history that doesn't quite fall into the norm, as that's understood. And I think that Israel needs to be understood as a group of humans in one place on earth who are suffering from the usual human problems. Shortsightedness, corruption, racism, bad traffic, sewage problems, the usual package of stuff. So I try to come at the country with that understanding, which is why in this book about mythic heroes? I mean, it is about mythic heroes, but it's about people who are very human and it's about, you know, the creation of a country where a parking ticket can be issued in Hebrew. So I'm not trying to elevate this place into some kind of great morality play where we can all, you know, take a stand and engage in our need for moral drama, which I think is true of far too many people looking at this place from outside and
- [42:43]
A
from inside, out of the sky. Available Everywhere as of March 24, 2026 thank you, Matti.
- [42:50]
B
Thank you so much for having me.
- [43:00]
C
Here are some other things that are happening at the Sholem Hartman Institute. Join us in Jerusalem this summer. Leaders, philanthropists and learners from around the world will gather for our Community Leadership program. Rabbis and cantors will convene in our Rabbinic Torah Seminar, and Jewish educators will study at the Wellspring Summit for Education. To learn more and to apply, click on the link in the show Notes. Space is limited and reserve your spot today. This Sunday, March 22nd in Miami, join President of the Sholem Hartman Institute, Danielle Hartman and veteran Israeli peace negotiator Tal Becker, as well as other leading Hartman thinkers for the first ever Florida Leadership Conference entitled Israel at a Moral Leadership in a Time of Crisis. Secure your spot Today at Shalom Hartman Hartman Senior Faculty member and Research Fellow Deborah Behr published a new book, Going Off Improvisational Judgment in the Talmud. The book examines classical rabbinic literature and what it tells us today about the relationship between Jewish ethics and Jewish law. Congratulations Deb, we can't wait to read it.
- [44:02]
D
Thanks for listening to our show and special thanks to our guest, Mati Friedman. Identity Crisis is produced by me, Tessa Zitter and our Executive producer is Maital Friedman. This episode was researched by Gabrielle Feinstone and edited by Josh Allen, with music provided by so called transcripts of our show are now available on our website. Typically, a week after an episode airs, we're always looking for ideas for what we should cover in future episodes. So if you have a topic you'd like to hear about or if you have comments about this episode, please write to us at identity crisis shalom hartman.com for more ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute about what's unfolding right now. Sign up for our newsletter in the show Notes and subscribe to this podcast everywhere podcasts are available. See you next time and thanks for listening.