In this episode of the18Forty Podcast, we talk to Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, about what it means to be a Zionist and a Jew post-October 7.

Since Simchas Torah, we’ve spent lots of time airing our political differences with others. What might be harder, though, is asking the uncomfortable questions about our own beliefs. Our guest today has decades of experience with this kind of soul-searching. In this episode we discuss:

• What is our relationship to the State of Israel, and how seriously must we take our participation in the building and rebuilding of the nation we envision?
• How might we maintain a sense of empathy for and kinship with the Muslim world and the Palestinian people?
• Why is it so important that we continue to have a Jewish state?

Tune in to hear a conversation about the tensions that come with trying to uphold the rights of both Israelis and Palestinians.

Interview begins at 6:54.

Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. Together with Imam Abdullah Antepli of Duke University, he co-directs the Institute's Muslim Leadership Initiative (MLI), which teaches emerging young Muslim American leaders about Judaism, Jewish identity and Israel. Halevi’s 2013 book, Like Dreamers, won the Jewish Book Council's Everett Book of the Year Award. His latest book, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, is a New York Times bestseller. He writes for leading op-ed pages in the US, including the Times and the Wall Street Journal, and is a former contributing editor to the New Republic.

References:

“What Israelis Fear the World Does Not Understand” with Ezra Klein and Yossi Klein Halevi

Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor by Yossi Klein Halevi

Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation by Yossi Klein Halevi

Arab Strategies and Israel's Response by Yehoshafat Harkabi