Advertise on podcast: Statecraft with Avi Jorisch

Lori Palatnik has spent years helping Jewish women build stronger Jewish lives around the world. Now, speaking personally rather than for Momentum, she believes God is “shutting down the Diaspora.” What does she see coming, and what should Jewish families outside Israel do now? The founding director of Momentum and a member of IEF’s board of advisors joins Avi Jorisch for a candid conversation about faith, difficult choices, and the Jewish future. Lori recalls leaving a career in advertising and a life her friends envied to pursue questions about God and Judaism, even as she hoped the answers would allow her to return to that life. She takes us inside the gathering of eight women that became Momentum, and shares why she now connects donating a kidney to a stranger with the courage to build a global movement. Looking toward 2035, she explains her deeply personal outlook on the Diaspora, Israel, and what families should do to prepare. Her advice comes down to two words: “Point east.” Statecraft with Avi Jorisch: conversations with those shaping the future of the Jewish people and the State of Israel. An IEF production.

Ambassador Fitz Haney raised money for Barack Obama and served as his ambassador. Today the lifelong Democrat says he feels politically homeless. S. Fitzgerald "Fitz" Haney is Managing Director for Latin America at the Genesis Prize Foundation and American Friends of Isaac Accords, and former U.S. Ambassador to Costa Rica. Raised Catholic by a widowed mother outside Chicago, he went to an Orthodox rabbi in Mexico City hoping to find his way back to the church. Somewhere along the way he found something else, and he eventually made his home in Israel. He has spent his life as the person every community had to make sense of. After October 7th, on a London street, a stranger came for every part of him at once. Asked whether he truly understood what he took on when he became a Jew, he gives an answer he knows will draw criticism, one that overturns what he believed the day he converted. This is not a conversation about switching parties. It is about a man who chose each of his identities and is now watching every one of them tested. And Avi Jorisch asks him one question with no clear answer: after October 7th, where did the betrayal cut deepest? Statecraft with Avi Jorisch is a production of IEF. Conversations with the people shaping the destiny of Israel and the Jewish people.

Martin Engelberg is a psychoanalyst and leadership coach and a former member of Austria's Parliament. The son of Holocaust survivors, Martin Engelberg has built a deeply Jewish life in Vienna while France has become the battleground for Europe's Jews. He believes staying and being ready to leave belong to the same commitment. He grew up in a city that would not speak about its past. Decades later he entered parliament to help shape the country his parents had chosen as their home. That choice put him at odds with parts of his own community, when he defended a governing coalition with the Freedom Party, a party whose roots lie among former Nazis. Then Avi Jorisch hands him a Jewish community's budget. Martin would put the money into education and the next generation, and leave the fight against antisemitism to the state. Avi follows with a more personal question: what is his own plan B? This is not a conversation about whether Europe is safe for Jews. It is about what a family owes its children when the answer keeps changing. And it ends on the choice his father faced after the war, and what Martin hopes his own children will say about his. Statecraft with Avi Jorisch is a production of IEF. Conversations with the people shaping the destiny of Israel and the Jewish people.

Rawan Osman was raised to hate Israel. Now she calls it home, and she dreams of living there as a Jew. Rawan Osman is a Syrian-born German activist and writer confronting antisemitism in the Arab world. She grew up between Damascus and the Beqaa Valley, believing the Jew was her enemy. Then she crossed the one line no one from her world is allowed to cross, knowing she could never go back. Today she speaks for Israel to audiences around the world. The cost was steeper than she expected, and it came from the people closest to her. At the Kotel, she found herself furious with God. What a rabbi saw in that anger changed how she understood it, and why she keeps walking toward Judaism while her conversion moves through Israel's careful security review. This is not the story of how she stopped hating Israel. It is the story of what comes after, when you have chosen a people and are still on the road to becoming one of them. And at the end, Avi Jorisch asks her a question she calls painful. Statecraft with Avi Jorisch is a production of IEF. Conversations with the people shaping the destiny of Israel and the Jewish people. Chapters 00:00 Introduction 02:15 Looking across the border 04:45 The feisty girl and the nun 06:09 The God she was given 10:03 Not Jewish yet 12:03 Blocked after October 8 16:41 A wine bar in Damascus 20:49 Strasbourg and a collapsing worldview 23:14 Her grandmother's words 27:04 The DNA test 30:22 Why convert at all 36:14 Trusting the process 39:22 What she wants for Israel 46:34 The Palestinian question 50:13 What each side gets wrong 55:28 Lightning Round 1:01:27 What home means

"I'm probably not supposed to, but I will anyway." Dara Horn is about to describe a meeting she has never discussed in public. Harvard's deans, in one room, and what she calls extremely disturbing. It opens a conversation with the author of The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living, a New York Times best seller. She argues that antisemitism is a lie, not just a hatred, and that the community has been fighting it with the wrong tool. She describes a coordinated effort to shape what AI believes about Jews. And when Avi Jorisch asks whether American Jews need a Plan B, she refuses the question. She says the strategy is clear. Almost no one, she says, is pursuing it. Statecraft with Avi Jorisch is a production of IEF. Conversations with the people shaping the destiny of Israel and the Jewish people. Chapters: 00:00 Introduction 02:32 A Jewish Home Built From Scratch 06:40 Tinoket in a Class of Retirees 08:49 The Data Poisoning Plot 12:12 Rethinking What Antisemitism Is 14:33 How People Love Dead Jews Began 17:44 The Premise of The Final Solution 21:54 A Proposal in a Harvard Library 23:49 The Meeting With Harvard's Deans 29:09 American Jewry in 2050 32:55 Irwin Cotler's Warning 39:22 The Plan B Question 45:26 Inside the Tell Institute 49:43 Lightning Round

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum thinks Israel is fighting the wrong war. And she thinks she knows what needs to change. Born into Gibraltar’s most prominent political family, Fleur trained as a barrister in London before moving to Jerusalem at the height of the second intifada. She went on to serve as deputy mayor of Jerusalem, build bridges in the Gulf before the Abraham Accords, and, after October 7, become one of Israel’s most recognizable voices on international television. But this conversation goes well beyond the talking points. At her home in Jerusalem, Fleur tells Avi Jorisch about the political legacy she inherited, the moment someone tried to buy her, what she risked in the Gulf, and the experiences that have forced her to rethink some of her own long-held assumptions. They talk about what Israel is getting wrong, the challenges it can no longer afford to avoid, and why Fleur may not be finished with politics. She also opens up about the personal cost of public life and the questions she is still wrestling with. Statecraft with Avi Jorisch is a production of IEF. Conversations with the people shaping the destiny of Israel and the Jewish people.  Chapters: 00:00 Welcome to Statecraft 02:07 The father who built modern Gibraltar 06:27 A decision at 14 08:19 Moving to Jerusalem in the second intifada 12:36 From the innovation ecosystem to city hall 16:20 Why the narrative war has no strategy 20:55 Campus Israel and a possible run 23:13 October 7 and the BBC call 26:21 When someone tried to buy her 29:23 The mind she changed on two states 33:58 The Emirates before normalization 40:16 The personal cost 42:55 What she still wrestles with 45:26 Israel at 100 48:21 Lightning Round 56:45 One final question

Those who know, know Eyal Hulata. For more than two decades, he operated in the world of Israeli national security, where some of the most consequential work is also the least visible. He joined the Mossad at 21 and eventually rose to senior leadership, working on missions senior officials had deemed impossible, including the operation to seize Iran's secret nuclear archive. He later served as national security advisor to Prime Ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, with Iran, Lebanon, and the U.S.-Israel relationship among the defining issues on his desk. In this episode of Statecraft, Avi Jorisch takes Hulata well beyond the usual national security conversation. What happens when your judgment and the prime minister's diverge? Who do you ultimately serve? And does he bear some responsibility for what happened on October 7? Hulata answers that last question without hesitation and describes the months afterward when he couldn't sleep, and what he has since concluded about how Israel arrived there. He also talks about his first day at the Mossad, the mentors who shaped him, preparing Bennett's first meeting with Joe Biden, the one moment in his career when he was completely paralyzed, and what he is weighing now about a return to public service. Statecraft with Avi Jorisch is a production of IEF. Conversations with the people shaping the destiny of Israel and the Jewish people. Be sure you don't miss future episodes by Liking & Subscribing!

George Deek is Israel's first special envoy to the Christian world, former Israeli Ambassador to Azerbaijan, and an Arab Christian from Jaffa whose family fled in 1948 and came back. No other country has created the position he holds. Deek fills it as a man who has spent his life outside the categories other people use to understand the Middle East: Arab, Christian, Israeli, and unwilling to surrender any of the three. In this conversation with Avi Jorisch, recorded live in Jerusalem at the IEF Global Summit, Deek traces the decision that put him in a diplomat's chair rather than a refugee camp, his grandfather's choice to walk back from Lebanon into the country his family had just fled. He describes the conversation with his father the night he was accepted into the foreign ministry, why he believes living between identities is where creativity comes from, and what Rabbi Jonathan Sacks changed in how he understands Israel's story. He also gets specific about the present. The Christian population of Israel has grown from 34,000 in 1950 to roughly 189,000 today, against collapse almost everywhere else in the region. Deek explains what he hears from church leaders behind closed doors that they will not say on camera, and why he thinks the story of Israel is the story of the last hope of the region's minorities. The conversation closes with a lightning round, including where he would take Jesus first if he came back. Statecraft with Avi Jorisch is a production of the Israel Economic Forum. Conversations with the people shaping the destiny of Israel and the Jewish people.

Dr. Einat Wilf served in Israeli military intelligence, advised Shimon Peres, and sat in the Knesset. She built her political identity inside Israel’s peace camp—then became one of its most formidable critics. After October 7, she decided writing and speaking were no longer enough and founded a political party. For twenty years, Wilf searched for Palestinians willing to say publicly that their future lies next to a Jewish state rather than in place of one. What she found challenged much of what she once believed. Avi Jorisch sat with Wilf at her home in Tel Aviv to talk about the Jerusalem childhood that pointed her toward the United Nations, the weekend that began to dismantle her worldview, and the handwritten note that arrived years later from someone she barely knew—with a single word on it. They also discuss what concerns her about holding real power. And Avi asks her directly: Does she want to be prime minister? Statecraft with Avi Jorisch is a production of IEF—conversations with the people shaping the destiny of Israel and the Jewish people. For more episodes, visit statecraftwithAviJorisch.com

Conversations with the people shaping the destiny of Israel and the Jewish people. New episodes released weekly.