The “Oslo at 25” Edition

Allison Kaplan Sommer, Noah Efron, and Gilad Halpern discuss three topics of incomparable importance and end with an anecdote about something in Israel that made them smile this week.

“A New Chapter in the Sad Book of Our Lives”: The Oslo Accords at 25

25 years ago this week, Yitzhak Rabin, Yassir Arafat and Bill Clinton gathered on the White House Lawn and made us believe that maybe a century of Palestinian-Jewish enmity was ending. What do we make of that unfulfilled hope, a quarter of a century later?

Let them play X-Box!, or, The End of the People’s Army?

The IDF plans to draft some for eight years, others for one year, others not at all: Is it finally really time to stick a fork in the notion of a “People’s Army”?

The Hebrew Innoversity

The Hebrew University makes all students – physicists, poets and philosophers – take a course on “entrepreneurship and innovation,” so students will find their way in a gig-economy in a high-tech nation. Is the notion of learning-for-its-own-sake dying before our eyes?

Extra Segment: Does the Israeli Left Need to Fight for Its Own Truth?

For our most spectacularly generous patreon supporters, in our extra-special, special extra segment, we will discuss an essay in Haaretz called, “Israel's Opposition Needs Sincere Leaders”, by one-time Labor-lion Uzi Baram, a minister throughout Rabin’s second run as Prime Minister, who argues that “the great mistake of the camp opposing the right is that it hasn’t clearly demarcated the 'good' and 'bad' players, and hasn’t fought for its own truth.” Does he have a point?

Music

Orphaned Land, whose video “Like Orpheus” just won the 2018 Progressive Music Award for Video of the Year, at the world-famous Globe Theatre in London, and whom an online petition nominates for a Nobel Peace Prize!

The Cave Yedidi A’Salk El Meyod Na’ala