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The conversations that matter, unfiltered. In a world where headlines tell only half the story, "JPost sits down with..." brings you face-to-face with the voices shaping our reality. From Israeli...
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The conversations that matter, unfiltered.
In a world where headlines tell only half the story, "JPost sits down with..." brings you face-to-face with the voices shaping our reality. From Israeli leaders navigating existential challenges to global figures wrestling with the Middle East's complexities, we go beyond the soundbites to explore the stories behind the headlines.
Each episode features candid, no-holds-barred conversations with politicians, thought leaders, activists, and newsmakers who are driving change—or standing in its way.
If you're seeking to understand the nuances of one of the world's most scrutinized regions, these intimate discussions reveal the motivations, struggles, and hopes of those at the center of it all.
This isn't about easy answers or comfortable narratives. It's about real talk with real people making real decisions that affect millions. Join us as we sit down with the figures who matter most, when their stories matter most.
New episodes drop when news breaks and voices need to be heard.
Get more from The Jerusalem Post at JPost.com
show less
In a world where headlines tell only half the story, "JPost sits down with..." brings you face-to-face with the voices shaping our reality. From Israeli leaders navigating existential challenges to global figures wrestling with the Middle East's complexities, we go beyond the soundbites to explore the stories behind the headlines.
Each episode features candid, no-holds-barred conversations with politicians, thought leaders, activists, and newsmakers who are driving change—or standing in its way.
If you're seeking to understand the nuances of one of the world's most scrutinized regions, these intimate discussions reveal the motivations, struggles, and hopes of those at the center of it all.
This isn't about easy answers or comfortable narratives. It's about real talk with real people making real decisions that affect millions. Join us as we sit down with the figures who matter most, when their stories matter most.
New episodes drop when news breaks and voices need to be heard.
Get more from The Jerusalem Post at JPost.com
Episodes & Posts
Episodes
Posts
Transcribed
4 SEP 2026 · Former Israeli PM Naftali Bennett calls Benjamin Netanyahu the man "most responsible for October 7th," then argues Netanyahu should be pardoned and sent home, not jailed.
In this Jerusalem Post interview, Bennett, Israel's prime minister from 2021 to 2022 and now leader of a new party ahead of the 2026 election, lays out the case for his political comeback. He says Netanyahu "should go home… he should be pardoned" as part of a deal to exit politics, while insisting the former leader initiated the "strategy of feeding Hamas" that ended in catastrophe. Bennett also unveils his flagship reform: integrating 1.5 million ultra-Orthodox Israelis into the military, workforce and a shared school curriculum through financial incentives rather than arrests: "I'm a big believer in Milton Friedman, in free to choose."
The conversation ranges across Bennett's own October 7 record versus Netanyahu's Hamas "containment" policy, his call to declare Qatar "a full-fledged enemy state immediately," and his claim that Netanyahu's wartime advisers were "on Qatari payroll." He addresses the broken promise that formed his 2021 coalition, why he won't govern with non-Zionist parties after October 7, and how he'd rebuild ties with the United States and American Jews, arguing half the damage is "self-inflicted." It's a candid, combative preview of the platform he's taking into the election.
Transcribed
3 SEP 2026 · US Ambassador Mike Huckabee makes the case for the US–Israel alliance at a moment he openly admits American support for Israel is at an all-time low.
Sitting down with the Jerusalem Report editor-in-chief, Ruth Marks Eglash, and the diplomatic reporter, Amichai Stein, at the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem, Huckabee argues the partnership pays off for both sides and pushes back on the idea that the relationship is one-directional.
He is blunt about where progress has stalled: on Hamas disarmament, he notes the group has surrendered "not even a cap pistol," and on the permanence of the US embassy he insists America is "putting our flag deep in the ground."
Huckabee also details the joint US–Israel strike on Iran, describing pilots flying "wingtip to wingtip" and operations rooms where the only way to tell the two militaries apart was the flag on their shoulders.
Across the conversation Huckabee ranges over Iran's nuclear ambitions and expanding missile range, the plot against Prime Minister Netanyahu's son on US soil, Hezbollah's foothold across the Western Hemisphere, settler violence in the West Bank, tensions with Turkey over Syria, the slow-moving Lebanon talks, and the prospects for new Abraham Accords.
A former governor of Arkansas and two-time presidential candidate with a direct line to President Trump, he brings an unusually personal, Judeo-Christian framing to the role, and offers a preview of what the third anniversary of October 7 means to Washington.
Transcribed
2 SEP 2026 · Iranian-born and married into a Jewish family, NeOnc CEO Amir Heshmatpour says he's fighting cancer on two fronts, the brain, and the Iranian regime. In this Jerusalem Post interview, Heshmatpour tells news editor Alex Winston how the Islamic Republic jailed and tortured his father, who died at 46, the loss that shaped his life.
He explains why he calls the regime "a cancer in this part of the world," and describes being in Israel during the 12-day war with Iran. He also lays out the science behind NeOnc (Nasdaq: NTHI): an intranasal delivery platform, protected by more than 179 patents, that bypasses the blood-brain barrier to treat aggressive brain tumors.
"I'm fighting cancer on two fronts," says Heshmatpour, "one for the brain and one for the Iranian people." It's a rare vantage point, a Persian entrepreneur from Tabriz, now a Los Angeles biotech executive, who wants trials running at Sheba and Tel Aviv alongside sites in the US and UAE, and who talks openly about the Abraham Accords, a hoped-for "Cyrus Accords," and what a post-regime Iran could look like.
Whether you follow Middle East politics, diaspora Jewish affairs, or the business of biotech, this conversation sits at the intersection of all three.
Transcribed
25 AUG 2026 · Dr. Aliza Bloch, Beit Shemesh's first female mayor, turned down a Likud seat to join Erdan and Edelstein's new Unity Party, and she explains why.
After leading one of Israel's most religiously and ethnically mixed cities, Bloch says October 7 convinced her that Israel's real battle is internal: "There is more than one way to be a good person, and nobody has a monopoly on our country or our Torah." She argues that only a broad Zionist government, left and right together, can rebuild trust after the war, that universal enlistment is "a responsibility for everybody," and that education, starting in kindergarten, is where national unity is won or lost. On the leaders now topping the polls, her message is blunt: "To be prime minister is very important, but to build our society is more important."
A math teacher with a doctorate in education, daughter of Moroccan immigrants, and the mother of six children (including in-laws) who all served during the war, Bloch is a hard candidate to place in a box, right-wing by her own description, yet staking her political future on coalition-building. As Israel heads toward the 2026 election with a crowded field of small parties fighting over the threshold, her bet on unity over ideology is one of the race's more revealing tests.
Transcribed
21 AUG 2026 · Twenty-five years after the Sbarro pizzeria bombing, Arnold and Frimet Roth are still fighting to bring their daughter Malki's killer to justice.
Transcribed
21 AUG 2026 · Israel officially recognizes 3,500 "street dwellers." Ori Shoham, who has worked with them for 13 years, says the real figure is far higher, and nobody is counting. There is no legal definition of homelessness in Israel. What exists is a Ministry of Welfare category called "street dweller," and Shoham says Israel applies the harshest recognition criteria in the OECD: you have to be visibly on the street, visibly neglected, and you have to walk into a municipal welfare office and declare yourself. Those who manage it receive roughly 800 shekels a month plus about 1,100 shekels in housing aid paid directly to a landlord, money that, in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, buys a bed in an apartment shared with nine other people. Everyone else: people sleeping in cars, on friends' sofas, in a car park, simply isn't in the data. "They don't have a house," Shoham says. "But they will not be considered street dwellers." Home Base takes the opposite approach, and it is a deliberately strange one: soccer teams, a women's choir, a theater group, Friday dinners, lockers. Israel is a member of the Homeless World Cup network of some 70 countries, and the point of the ball is not fitness: it's contact. Shoham refuses to ask people what they need on a first meeting, calling it patronizing, and waits until trust exists. He says roughly 60% of participants who stay with the program turn their lives around. The interview closes with one of them: a man who spent 20 years in and out of prison and addiction, met Home Base in a hospital bed at 50, became captain of the team, and is now married with three children.
Transcribed
19 AUG 2026 · Most Israeli parties are founded by one person's ambition. Dr. Yoav Heller's was founded by a vote, 11,000 members of his grassroots Fourth Quarter movement chose to launch it, 69% in favor. His pitch to voters isn't "vote better," it's "vote different."
Historian and Fourth Quarter founder Yoav Heller sits down with the Jerusalem Post to explain why he's turning a four-year-old anti-polarization movement into a political party now, despite admitting the party is "struggling" while the movement keeps growing.
He argues Israel's so-called third bloc, polling at 9–11 seats, isn't just disillusioned left-wingers: by his account, a large share are former coalition voters who feel let down.
Heller lays out his first priorities in government, justice and judicial reform, and a "new Israeli contract" rethinking who shares the national burden, and makes an unusual case for giving Israelis abroad, and even world Jewry, a greater voice.
At the heart of the conversation is a distinction Heller keeps returning to: the Knesset represents those who voted for it, but a government, he insists, belongs to all citizens, "talk to everyone," not only your base.
Transcribed
18 AUG 2026 · Alex Rif spent her childhood trying to erase her Russian accent. Now she's running for Knesset on Gadi Eisenkot's list to make sure no immigrant has to.
Rif is a poet, founder of the One Million Lobby, and architect of Yashar's immigration absorption platform, and brings numbers that rarely make headlines: of olim who arrived in 2025, only 18% studied in ulpan and 17% found work in their field.
"55% feel that they're not welcomed in Israel," she says. She lays out the plan for the 30,000 Holocaust survivors living in poverty, the scams targeting elderly Russian speakers, and a bureaucracy that sends new arrivals to ten offices for one answer.
The conversation turns personal on what Israeli politics avoids: why she has three children with a partner she can't legally call her husband, why families of October 7 victims discovered their children would be buried in separate plots, and why she defends the Law of Return's grandchild clause.
She also answers the Likud campaign attacking Eisenkot's English: "We should evaluate people not by their English, but by their actions." With Israel voting on October 27, this is one of the few detailed English-language conversations about what a change of government would mean for olim.
Transcribed
5 AUG 2026 · A Haredi writer, a religious Zionist philosopher and a Palestinian Israeli from Nazareth sit in one room and talk about the conflict, without pretending to agree. They are part of TEMA, a cross-sector Israeli leadership network that deliberately has no solution to sell. Its method is unusual: participants first meet in homogeneous groups, Haredi with Haredi, Palestinian Israeli with Palestinian Israeli, and only later cross over. Kholoud Abu Ahmad, who grew up in Nazareth, describes how engaging with politics became an obligation rather than a choice from childhood. Prof. Benjamin Ish-Shalom draws a hard distinction between diplomatic agreements and human contact, pointing to more than fifty years of peace with Egypt that produced almost no ordinary traffic between the two societies. Tzippy Diskind describes a Haredi upbringing in which contact with non-Jews was bounded by halakhic norms, and recalls Rav Shach's position during the Oslo years that the questions could not simply be refused. What makes this conversation different from most Israeli dialogue programming is that it began roughly three years ago, before October 7, and that nobody in it is representing an official position. The participants also describe discovering something they hadn't expected: that the internal disagreements inside each of their own communities are as wide as the gaps between them. Chapters: 00:00 - What TEMA is, and why it has no solution to sell 02:30 - Growing up Palestinian in Nazareth: when politics stops being optional 08:00 - A Haredi childhood in Jerusalem during the First Intifada 13:30 - Prof. Ish-Shalom on Gesher, Beit Morasha and the limits of state-to-state peace 20:00 - Rabin's assassination and Oslo: two communities, two memories 26:00 - Inside TEMA's method: homogeneous groups first, mixed groups later
Transcribed
5 AUG 2026 · Most olim aren't lost on the way to Israel, they're lost the week after. Ofer Nachshon and Rabbi Sid Slivko explain why so many go home.
Olim Paveway doesn't try to convince anyone to make aliyah. That's the point. Co-founder Ofer Nachshon, an Israeli entrepreneur, and Rabbi Sid Slivko, an American oleh of 30 years, sat down with the Jerusalem Post's Batsheva Shulman to talk about the part of aliyah nobody prepares for: the day after the plane lands. "Aliyah doesn't stop when you get the taxi back from Ben-Gurion," Slivko says. "Aliyah just starts when you do that." Their argument is that the return rate, still significant even as it declines, is driven less by ideology than by bank forms, bureaucracy, and a culture gap that can't be understood from abroad.
The conversation gets specific about what actually helps: a personal guide who walks olim through the supermarket, the cell phone contract and the school registration; a vetted network of service providers held to fair pricing; and weekly Toolbox Talks with experts. It also gets blunt about expectations. "Israel is not an escape," Slivko warns, and there is "no carbon copy aliyah," the friend who got a driver's license in two days is not a benchmark. Nachshon adds a challenge aimed squarely at Israelis: most, he argues, don't grasp what it costs to abandon a career, a status and a community and start from zero.
What makes this interview unusual is that both men are inside the problem from opposite sides: one a native Israeli watching olim collide with his own country's systems, the other still calling himself "an oleh with 30 years of experience." Slivko closes with the advice that rescued his own aliyah three decades ago: don't try to carbon-copy your American career, turn what you love into your profession. For anyone weighing aliyah, in year one of it, or quietly wondering how much longer they can last, this is the honest version.
The conversations that matter, unfiltered. In a world where headlines tell only half the story, "JPost sits down with..." brings you face-to-face with the voices shaping our reality. From Israeli...
show more
The conversations that matter, unfiltered.
In a world where headlines tell only half the story, "JPost sits down with..." brings you face-to-face with the voices shaping our reality. From Israeli leaders navigating existential challenges to global figures wrestling with the Middle East's complexities, we go beyond the soundbites to explore the stories behind the headlines.
Each episode features candid, no-holds-barred conversations with politicians, thought leaders, activists, and newsmakers who are driving change—or standing in its way.
If you're seeking to understand the nuances of one of the world's most scrutinized regions, these intimate discussions reveal the motivations, struggles, and hopes of those at the center of it all.
This isn't about easy answers or comfortable narratives. It's about real talk with real people making real decisions that affect millions. Join us as we sit down with the figures who matter most, when their stories matter most.
New episodes drop when news breaks and voices need to be heard.
Get more from The Jerusalem Post at JPost.com
show less
In a world where headlines tell only half the story, "JPost sits down with..." brings you face-to-face with the voices shaping our reality. From Israeli leaders navigating existential challenges to global figures wrestling with the Middle East's complexities, we go beyond the soundbites to explore the stories behind the headlines.
Each episode features candid, no-holds-barred conversations with politicians, thought leaders, activists, and newsmakers who are driving change—or standing in its way.
If you're seeking to understand the nuances of one of the world's most scrutinized regions, these intimate discussions reveal the motivations, struggles, and hopes of those at the center of it all.
This isn't about easy answers or comfortable narratives. It's about real talk with real people making real decisions that affect millions. Join us as we sit down with the figures who matter most, when their stories matter most.
New episodes drop when news breaks and voices need to be heard.
Get more from The Jerusalem Post at JPost.com
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| Author | Jerusalem Post Podcasts |
| Organization | Jerusalem Post Podcasts |
| Categories | News |
| Website | - |
| podcast@jpost.com |
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