Unholy: Two Jews on the News

Maoz Inon lost his parents on October 7th. They were in their safe room, 200 meters from the Gaza border wall, when Hamas came. Aziz Abu Sarah lost his brother — the person who raised him — after he was tortured in an Israeli prison during the First Intifada. Two days after October 7th, Aziz wrote Maoz a letter. Maoz wrote back. That exchange became a friendship, a journey across the Holy Land, and now a New York Times bestselling book: "The Future Is Peace."

This is not a polemic. It is not a policy paper. It is an invitation — to sit with grief that belongs to both sides, to doubt the narratives handed to you, and to imagine that the conflict will end. Because, as Maoz says, it will. The only question is when and how many more lives are lost before it does.

Yonit and Jonathan talk with them about Hamas, religious extremism, on what peace would actually look like, on whether Israelis have any reason to trust again. 

 

Watch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/0nJ3q4kvVPs

⏱ CHAPTERS:

[00:00] Intro — who are Aziz and Maoz?

[00:47] Maoz: the last phone call with his parents on October 7th

[02:57] Aziz: losing a brother who was his parent

[04:34] The kind of people Maoz's parents were

[08:12] Aziz reaches out — what the letter said

[09:47] Why Aziz wanted to learn Hebrew

[14:23] Are they the minority? How do you make peace mainstream?

[16:36] What would peace actually look like?

[20:18] Yonit pushes: what about Hamas, what about religion?

[24:44] The travelogue — hospitals, holy sites, and shared grief

[26:38] Do Israelis and Palestinians have to give up their narratives?

[33:27] What do Aziz and Maoz still disagree on?

[38:48] Closing — the book, the journey, the invitation

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The Iran war may be over — or it may not. In the space of a few hours this week, Washington ordered warships into the Strait of Hormuz, paused the operation, threatened to resume bombing at higher intensity, and then declared peace was near. 

Yonit and Jonathan cut through the chaos — and ask the question the ceasefire deal still hasn't answered: what happened to Iran's nuclear stockpile? 

Also this week: Bezalel Smotrich calls October 7th "a tactical failure" and says including Arab parties in government would be a thousand times worse. Gadi Eisenkot and former Shin Bet chief Yoram Cohen join forces. Netanyahu's plea deal murmurs get louder. The UK goes to the polls with antisemitism front and center. And the Chutzpah and Mensch awards both go to the same unlikely figure: Nick Cave, who told a hostile fan to go F himself — and blamed his wife's absence.

Watch us on Youtube: https://youtu.be/R-2p4tL6e7E

[00:00] Intro — Jewish American Heritage Month

[06:54] Iran ceasefire chaos — what is Washington actually doing? 

[10:14] The nuclear question the deal still hasn't answered 

[15:21] Israeli politics: Bennett-Lapid merger recap 

[17:43] Eisenkot + Yoram Cohen join forces 

[21:10] Smotrich calls October 7th a "tactical failure" 

[26:46] Netanyahu: plea deal or Saudi peace card? 

[31:05] UK local elections — Jews as political football [37:05] Chutzpah & Mensch: Nick Cave vs. Lee from Bournemouth [41:10] Ted Turner — a different kind of media owner

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Forty days of war with Iran. Four weeks of an uneasy ceasefire. And one verdict that nobody in Washington wants to say out loud: the Islamic Republic came out of this stronger.

Dr. Suzanne Maloney, Vice President of the Brookings Institution's foreign policy program and one of America's most trusted voices on Iran, joins Yonit and Jonathan as US warships attempt to escort vessels through a Strait of Hormuz that Iran still effectively controls. They get into whether the ceasefire can hold, why the nuclear threat was never really addressed, who is actually making decisions inside Tehran now that the supreme leader is gone, and what a realistic deal — if one exists — might look like.

Watch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/D_P_lca1OzQ

Unholy Conversations drops every Tuesday.

Listen to the regular episode on Friday to get the full Two Jews on the News Experience

 

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As stabbing against Jews in Golders Green rises up, again, the question of security of Jewish communities around the world,  Israel starts the countdown: 6 months to the elections. Yonit and Jonathan discuss the Golders Green knife attack and the wave of antisemitism hitting Britain since October 7th; the Bennett–Lapid merger and what it means for Israel's October elections; whether the Iran–Israel war is on pause or simply reloading; Jake Sullivan's bombshell statement on arms sales to Israel; and — in the awards — Israeli police cutting a Palestinian flag from a Jewish man's kippah, and King Charles delivering a Magna Carta reminder to Congress that Democrats jumped to their feet for. 

Watch us on youtube: https://youtu.be/tCqzaU-DlPM

This week on Unholy Conversations - Howard Jacobson: https://youtu.be/aB-eNbxb41w

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Howard Jacobson has screamed "liar" at the BBC, lost friends over a newspaper article, and started asking his wife whether it's still safe to live in London. Now he's written a novel about all of it.

*Howl* is the story of Ferdinand Draxler — Jewish headmaster, reluctant marcher, man on the edge — who watches the world he believed in applaud the October 7th massacre and descends into a rage that may or may not be madness. Jacobson says he borrowed quite a lot from the last two years of his life.

In this Unholy Conversations episode, Jacobson talks with Yonit and Jonathan about the ungovernable anger behind the novel, why he chose comedy as the only honest vehicle for it, the friends who wrote accusing him of celebrating Palestinian deaths, the Manchester synagogue where he was bar mitzvahed and which was attacked on Yom Kippur, and the question he can't shake: what would we have done in Berlin in 1932?

 

Watch it on Youtube: https://youtu.be/aB-eNbxb41w

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🎙️ THE HOSTS
Yonit Levi
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