Unholy: Two Jews on the News

With just a week to go, Israel’s election campaign caught fire at the weekend, thanks to an incendiary intervention by one of Benjamin Netanyahu’s most ardent media supporters. Channel 14’s Yinon Magal re-opened a deep racial divide when he repeatedly referred to Netanyahu’s prime challenger, Gadi Eisenkot - whose family roots are in Morocco - as a “monkey”.

What are the origins of the Mizrahi-Ash...

Twelve days before Israel votes, Yonit observes that the national mood is neither Britain in 1997 nor America in 2008 - a nation certain that it’s on the brink of change - but one of pure tension on both sides. In the final stretch, Binyamin Netanyahu is on an interview blitz, making no secret of his plans to maintain his current coalition while insisting Itamar Ben-Gvir will not be defense minister—a denial Jonathan re...

Two weeks before Israel votes, the polls seem to be telling two different stories — Channel 14 has the Netanyahu bloc at 63 seats, Channel 12 has it at 49. Dahlia Scheindlin, pollster and senior analyst at Haaretz, who has advised nine Israeli election campaigns, tells Yonit and Jonathan the picture is far less wild than it looks. Why do six of eight pollsters agree while two keep drifting? Who is actually still undecided, an...

Three years after October 7th, and eighteen days before Israel votes, this third anniversary felt different from the first two — and yet it may not move a single vote. With no state commission of inquiry, a flydubai near-disaster that echoed the state's failures and polls that point in wildly different directions, Yonit and Jonathan ask if the question of Netanyahu's responsibility has already been priced in by the Israeli el...

Three years ago this week, Amir Tibon spent ten hours in a safe room in Kibbutz Nahal Oz with his wife and daughters while Hamas gunmen moved from house to house. They stayed there until he was rescued - by his father, a retired general, who had driven down from Tel Aviv with a pistol to get them out. Amir has now moved with his family back to the kibbutz.

Jonathan talks to Tibon — Haaretz journalist and author of The Gates of...

A note to listeners: This episode includes a Nova survivor’s account of October 7, including descriptions of traumatic events that some listeners may find distressing.

Three years after the Nova festival massacre, Yuval Raphael is going back to Re'im — to sing at the memorial, on the ground where she survived eight hours in a roadside shelter. This week she sits down with Yonit for a conversation about what those three y...

As a wave of euphoria and relief sweeps Israel, following the attempted - and foiled - hijacking of Flight FZ1073, Yonit and Jonathan delve deep into the story and its implications. They discuss the courage and ingenuity of the passengers who took on a co-pilot apparently bent on causing the mass death of a plane full of Israelis, what the episode says about the character of the country - and what its impact might be on this month&...

Watch this interview in Hebrew and English subtitles: https://youtu.be/zh-KenD4s5w

Ra'am has done something no Arab party in Israel has tried before—put a Jewish, Zionist former police major general on its slate. With the election weeks away, Likud wants the party disqualified, much of the opposition insists it won't sit with it, and some in his own community call its leader a traitor. Yonit and Jonathan sit down with Mansour ...

Decision day approaches for the judges who will determine who is - and who is not - allowed to stand in the Israeli elections on 27 October. The supreme court is likely to overturn a move by the government to ban the main Arab parties, but more unpredictable is the fate of one individual politician from the Arab nationalist party, Balad - a man who seemingly wrote in praise of the 7 October attacks. Yonit and Jonathan debate the le...

With Israel deep in an election campaign and the country still grappling with the strains of a multi-front war, the fiercely contested exemption of ultra-Orthodox men from the IDF draft remains the issue threatening to tear Israeli society apart.
In this week's  candid, combative, and illuminating conversation, Yonit and Jonathan sit down with MK Yitzhak Pindrus of the United Torah Judaism party  to interrogate the the...

With Yonit feeling a little under the weather, Jonathan is joined by friend of the podcast, Haaretz military affairs analyst Amos Harel (also, author of 6:29). They discuss a new poll showing Benjamin Netanyahu gaining ground in his contest against former general Gady Eisenkot - with nearly six weeks to go till Israelis vote, is this a blip or did Eisenkot peak too early? Plus: the Israeli right declares war on a film almost no one...

As Israel heads into what may be the most consequential election of its history, the country is still arguing less about where it's going than about how it got here. This week, Yonit and Jonathan sit down with a titan of Israeli broadcasting — Ilana Dayan, anchor of the investigative program Uvda for three decades — who returns to Unholy to make sense of it all. She traces how Netnayahu survived a moment that should hav...

September 8th was the deadline for Israeli parties to file their lists — and Netanyahu reached it less organised than he'd have liked, with a rival on the right running alone, a reserved slot for his own Channel 14 broadcaster, and barely a handful of women anywhere near the top.

Then Britain, joined by France, Canada and nine others, sanctioned settlement goods, and used the words "ethnic cleansing" about settler violence in ...

The Jewish new year arrives with the word ‘Zionist’ deemed an insult and a technology that never forgets anything that anyone has ever said or done. Following Unholy tradition, Yonit and Jonathan usher in the season of awe and the High Holydays with Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, who leads New York’s Central Synagogue and whose congregation was rushed by an intruder during a packed Friday night service weeks before this c...

Seven weeks out from an election that in many ways is a referendum on culpability for October 7th, Benjamin Netanyahu tells Channel 14 that if only they had woken him earlier that fateful day, everything would have been different — and his wife goes considerably further about Yair Golan, a man who drove towards the gunfire that morning and saved lives. Yonit and Jonathan take Mrs Netanyahu’s accusation apart, then turn ...

The former UK Prime Minister and Chancellor joins Yonit and Jonathan for the latest of our Unholy Conversations — on the void populist nationalists have moved into, on the difference between hope and optimism, on the father whose projector slides taught him the kings of Israel before the kings of England, and on the Middle East peace deal he watched come apart in 2009.

Chapters:

00:06 Introduction to Gordon Brown and His New ...

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With sixty days to go until the Israeli elections, the political jockeying enters into overdrive. Yonit and Jonathan break down the high-stakes coalition arithmetic facing both Benjamin Netanyahu and Gadi Eisenkot, from the crowded field of small right-wing parties—including the entrance of retired general Ofer Winter—to the battle on the center ground. Me...

It's the end of summer, and Yonit and Jonathan are taking a break from the news with a nugget of pure Jewish joy. Andy Nyman — the West End actor, writer, director and magician currently starring as Max Bialystock in The Producers, and previously as an acclaimed Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof — joins the show for an Unholy Conversation. Why does Mel Brooks' nearly-60-year-old joke about Hitler still land? What makes Max B...

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Sixty-eight days from the election, the hardest problems on Benjamin Netanyahu's desk are arriving from Washington. Jared Kushner is meeting Hamas directly, and the Gaza withdrawal deadlines he is carrying — thirty, sixty and ninety days — all land inside the Is...