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Touro Talks are timely conversations engaging college students, thought leaders and experts from around the world on academic and contemporary issues. Hosted by Touro University president, Dr. Alan Kadish.
Touro Talks is sponsored by Robert and Arlene Rosenberg. If you would like to sponsor, please email tourotalks@touro.edu
[MATTI FRIEDMAN] [TEASER CLIP] You could dismiss the story of the parachutists as just a story because they didn't accomplish anything. So why would you care about it? All it is is a story about heroes, a story about doomed heroes. But to a Jewish brain and to the Zionist mind, there's no such thing as just a story. there's nothing more powerful.
[music]
[ALAN KADISH] Hi, I'm Dr. Alan Kadish. Welcome to Touro Talks. Today, we're absolutely thrilled to have the best selling author, Matti Friedman with us. Matti is the award winning author of five works of non-fiction that have been translated into more than a dozen languages. One of his prior works, The Aleppo Codex, is a fascinating story about an old codex of Torah scrolls shrouded in mystery that won several awards, including the Rohr prize.
His newest book, Out of the Sky-- Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe, examines the tragic 1944 mission of Holocaust escapees, including the poet Hannah Szenes, explaining how they returned to occupied Europe, became a fundamental legend in Israel. His work as a reporter has taken him to Israel, Lebanon, Morocco, Moscow, the Caucasus and Washington DC.
A former AP correspondent, his work has appeared in The New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. He currently writes from Israel for The Free Press. Matti was born in Toronto and lives in Jerusalem with his family. Welcome, Matti.
[MATTI FRIEDMAN] Thank you so much for having me.
[ALAN KADISH] So let's start by saying, how did you decide to write books? What's your background, and how did you become an author?
[MATTI FRIEDMAN] That's a great question. I grew up, of course, reading a lot of books, as I think many Jewish kids do, without realizing that our obsession with books and writing and words is not universally shared. That's something that you discover later on. And I knew that I wanted to be a reporter. That's what I would have said if you'd caught me as a kid. There's a picture in my eighth grade yearbook that has a very nerdy photograph of me in eighth grade, and under it says, what do you want to be when you grow up? And it says journalist.
I did not know what that was. I had no idea what it might involve, but it seemed to me to involve writing, maybe talking to people. And ultimately, that's what I ended up doing. So I started working as a reporter, first for an Israeli news magazine called The Jerusalem Report, then for the AP. The idea of writing books seems so far beyond any reasonable expectation that I think it was for a long time just too grandiose a dream. But ultimately, an article that I wrote for the AP in 2008 became my first book, which is The Aleppo Codex. And since then, I've had the great luck to write four more, and I feel blessed to be able to call this my job if that's the right word.
[ALAN KADISH] So you were born in Toronto. When did you move to Israel and how did that come about?
[MATTI FRIEDMAN] I came to Israel when I was 17. I finished high school, came here right away, did not immediately understand that I was moving here. I thought I was going to work for a year on a kibbutz. I wanted to experience Labor Zionism. And in a way that's related to your previous question, I'd probably read too many books by AD Gordon and the great early thinkers of Labor Zionism. It's not quite what I found when I arrived here in 1995, but I did have this idea that it would be amazing to do agricultural work and be part of a collective farm and experience the rebirth of the Jewish nation in its ancestral home.
And I showed up on a kibbutz in the fall of '95, and within two or three months, I realized I was never going to leave. And I've been here ever since. So it's been-- as hard as it is to believe for me, it's been 31 years.
[ALAN KADISH] So when you said in 1995, when you came to Israel with this idea of labor Zionism, it wasn't exactly what you found. So tell me what you mean by that. And what was it like in '95 on the kibbutz?
[MATTI FRIEDMAN] In '95, in retrospect, I know that this was the end of the kibbutz. So it was the end of the kibbutz movement. And in many ways, it was the end of that Israel that many of us grew up with, which is very much an Israel that revolves around the idea of the kibbutz, and it revolves around figures like Ben Gurion and Golda Meir and the great heroes of Labor Zionism. So I did experience kibbutz life. There was a dining hall.
The kibbutz I was on, which is called Ma'ale Gilboa, was collective. My wife, who I married not when I was 17 but a few years later, she comes from another religious kibbutz not far away from Ma'ale Gilboa called Sde Eliyahu. So I kind of entered this world, and I think that I really caught the tail end of it.
Within a few years, the kibbutz movement had basically been privatized, and the Israel of the kibbutz movement, which was still to a very large extent led by people from the kibbutz movement, people like Rabin and Ehud Barak and Shimon Perez and people who had kind of emerged from Labor Zionism, that Israel was really over around 2000. So I did manage to experience the tail end of this great kind of vision of Jewish socialism, but it was really on its last legs, unfortunately. And Israel in 2026 has many advantages, in my opinion, over the old Israel. But it also-- you feel the lack of that great egalitarian vision at the core of the national project.
[ALAN KADISH] So I wanted to spend a couple more minutes talking about this because after all, many of the parachutists were on kibbutz before they became parachutists. So why did the kibbutz movement fall apart? What were the factors that were involved, in your view?
[MATTI FRIEDMAN] I guess there are local causes and there are global causes. I mean, when Israel is founded, it's the heyday of global socialism and communism, and the founders of Israel view themselves as the Jewish front in the global workers revolution. That's what they think is going on, and Israel's going to be a kind of maybe even a Soviet-style republic on the banks of the Mediterranean. And many of the characters in this story, like many of their comrades, are inspired by socialism, if not by communism.
And if we look at a pre-state militia like the Palmach, which is the kind of elite pre-state militia, one of the organizations that eventually becomes the IDF, the Palmach is not interested in the years of World War II in the American army, and they're not emulating the British army. In fact, they hate the British. The force that they look up to is the Red Army, and the leader who they find really inspiring is Tito. And it's hard for us to reverse engineer Zionism and remember what it was because very early on, Israel comes into the western sphere of influence, and it's clear that we're going to be in the American-- in the world of America, not in the world of the Soviet Union.
But to these characters that was not clear. They certainly saw the Jewish revolution, the Zionist revolution, as part of the liberation of the global proletariat of which they were part. And this kind of language in 2026 literally sounds like gibberish, but when you enter the world of those characters, that's really what they thought they were doing. They were freeing the Jewish worker. They were fighting imperialism, including British imperialism.
Of course, the British ruled Palestine and, in the view of the Zionist movement, were preventing the emergence of a free Jewish state in the homeland. So there was actually a kind of a convergence of interest between these scrappy underground fighters. They identified with the Soviet socialists, and they didn't like the British imperialist capitalists. And it's hard to remember that that's where this country comes from, but it very much was, and it's also the world that produces this very unique mission in 1944.
[ALAN KADISH] So tell us the story about how the mission was doomed from the start before we start talking about why it took on this mythical quality.
[MATTI FRIEDMAN] No spoilers, no spoilers, but the mission was doomed from the start. I guess it depends really what we think the mission was, and that is the point that I try to make in the book. I try to make an argument for the success of the mission even given its abject military failure. So the mission, just briefly so for our viewers can understand what we're talking about, is a mission that takes place over most of 1944. It involves a small group of Jews in what was then British-mandate Palestine. This is four years before the creation of the state of Israel.
They are young people who have escaped the Holocaust. They've made it to relative safety in British Palestine, and then they volunteer to parachute back into the Holocaust. That's what's going on in this mission. And it's a mission being run by British officers from an intelligence office called MI9, which no longer exists. Its cousins, MI5 and MI6, still exist, but MI9 is in charge of escape and evasion, which basically means extracting downed allied pilots and POWs who are behind enemy lines and getting them back somehow to allied lines. That's MI9.
So the MI9 officers need people who can go back into Europe and blend in and speak local languages. And the Jews in British mandate Palestine are those people. They can speak Romanian, Serbian, Hungarian, Polish, whatever you need. So even though the Jews are seen by the British as a real-- they're a pain in the neck in the '40s because they're constantly rebelling against British rule there. They're also very useful to the spies because they're very motivated to fight the Nazis, and they can be dropped into Europe.
The Zionist movement collaborates, in this case, with the British, even though they're at odds with the British because they want to get people into Europe. They have no other way to get agents into Europe. There is no Jewish Air Force. There is no Jewish army. There's no Mossad. All they can do is sign up for service in the British Army, swear an oath of allegiance to the King, suit up in British uniforms, and jump out of British bombers back into Europe. So there's a convergence of interests that leads these people to volunteer for what many of them understand is a suicidal mission.
And when you say that the mission is kind of doomed from the start, I think that is to a very large extent true, and many of the characters realize this. I mean, if the idea, the Zionist idea, is that these people are supposed to save Jews and fight the Nazis, how exactly is that supposed to happen? I mean, we're talking about 32 people who are being dropped in twos and threes into about a half dozen countries under axis occupation.
How are they supposed to defeat the Wehrmacht in some way? Are they supposed to raid a concentration camp and free the Jews. I mean, how exactly is this supposed to happen? Clearly, it's not going to happen, which, I think, leads us or led me, certainly, in the writing of this book to ask what they really intended. What was the mission as they understood it? Why would you volunteer for a mission that is almost certain to fail and quite likely to result in your own death?
And I was, I think, surprised to find that these characters were incredibly smart and knowing, and they understood what they were getting into. They weren't dupes and they weren't fantasists. They had a different perception of what this mission was, and I think that you can argue, and I do in the book, that their perception of the mission actually is a success.
[ALAN KADISH] So you just talked about potentially three different missions. So why don't you try to elaborate a little bit? The British, you mentioned, wanted them to help downed aviators. So how was that supposed to work?
[MATTI FRIEDMAN] So mi9 is in charge of getting people out from behind enemy lines. There are bomber fleets going across Central Europe, mainly to bomb oil fields in Romania. A lot of these planes are being shot down, and the aircrews are parachuting into the area around Yugoslavia. And they need people in Yugoslavia to be able to make contact with these people and get them out. That's what they're trying to do.
There's an officer named Tony Simmons, Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Simmons, who is running MI9 in this part of the world. So he's running escape routes that go through Greece and into the Balkans. And he's got skippers sailing little boats around the Mediterranean, picking people up on secluded beaches and things like that. It's actually quite cinematic, what he's doing, and this is one part of his operation.
He'd been a British officer in Palestine in the 30s, where he got to know the Zionists and fell in love with them. He was a philo-semite. He actually describes himself as an anti-Semite, which is interesting. But he definitely supported the Jewish national project. He understood why the Jews needed a state, and he kind of liked the people who he met in Jewish Palestine. So he had a natural affinity for the Zionist leadership, and he finds it easy to cooperate with them on this mission.
The Zionists are kind of lobbying to fight. They want to fight the Nazis. They keep lobbying the British to allow the Jews to form fighting units as Jews and fight the Nazis. And the British are saying no. The British keep telling them, absolutely not, because they realize correctly that any training and weapons that they give the Jews will be used against the British as soon as the war is over. So the British, I think, quite wisely from their perspective, say, we're absolutely not training the Jews.
But Simmons, as a special operations guy, doesn't really care about the administration of British Palestine after the war. He's just looking for people who he can use. So just taking Hannah Szenes as an example, she's the most famous character in the story. She's trained in Cairo to use her radio, and she's trained to know Morse code. And she's given some pretty rudimentary military training. I mean, she's not any kind of a commando. She's given parachute training, and then she's flown from Cairo to Italy, and from an air base in Italy, she's flown over Yugoslavia and dropped from an airplane in the spring of 1944.
In Yugoslavia, she joins Tito's partisans, the Communist partisans who are fighting Nazi rule in Yugoslavia, so allied with them with the British and her small detachment of MI9 people who are Jews, are in charge of locating these kind of downed airmen or escaped POWs and coordinating their extraction with British forces. Essentially, they're liaisons between the British and the partisans, and there are similar missions unfolding at the same time in Romania and in Slovakia, which is also part of the story. And some of these cells are trying to infiltrate into Hungary, which goes badly awry. But that's another part of the mission. So that's what this mission looks like from the British perspective, from the perspective of MI9.
[ALAN KADISH] So how about the Zionist perspective? You mentioned that it's not exactly clear how 32 parachutists are going to change the course of the war. But as you point out, not just the parachutes themselves, but the people who sent them, including Ben Gurion, these are smart people who are very savvy and ultimately extraordinarily successful against great odds. So what was their thinking?
[MATTI FRIEDMAN] So that question preoccupied me for much of the writing of this book. I mean, we have these great heroes. These are people who are quite famous in Israel. Today, I would say that the name that really survives is Hannah Szenes. There was a time in Israel when other names from this mission were famous, and we have kibbutzim named for Enzo Sereni, who's one of the commanders of the mission. He's an Italian. We have a kibbutz named for Haviva Reik, who's the other who's kind of Hannah's rival as the heroine of the mission. And there are a few other places in Israel that are named after participants in this mission.
So these people are kind of plugged into the mythology of Zionism at the earliest stage to such a great extent that our landscape reflects this story. So it's a story of Jews who set off at the darkest moment of Jewish history to save Jews from the Holocaust. That's the story as it is known. And yet, if you look into this story, you find that they did not save a single Jew or kill a single Nazi. So what's the heroism here? I mean, how did these people become Zionist myths if their mission was a military failure?
So I kind of start with that question. There's clearly something else going on here. As you mentioned, these people and the people who sent them are not stupid. They don't think that 32 people are going to change the course of the war. What are they actually-- what are they actually trying to do? So they have vague directives to make contact with any Jews who they find. There aren't many left by the time that they get there, but they're supposed to make contact with Jews. And there's some very vague ideas about blowing up railroad tracks or something like that. None of it ever comes to fruition, and I think that we need to understand the mission differently.
And it took me a while of being immersed in this story to really think about it in this way, but the Zionist movement is really expert at deploying stories. And in fact, Zionism essentially is a story. I mean, it starts with this journalist and playwright who senses this great change in his life and in his city, which is Vienna in the 1890s. And he sits down and writes a different story about the Jewish future. And I'm talking about Herzl, of course, and the Jewish state. He sits down in a hotel room in Paris and writes this pamphlet which must have seemed insane to anyone reading it at the time, The Jewish State. And I'm sitting in that state right now.
So Zionism has this ability to work with stories, and that's all the Jews have in the 1890s and beyond. There's no army, there's no government, there's no movement. There's nothing. There's just stories and the Jewish aptitude for telling and retelling powerful stories. So Herzl comes up with the story, which, I mean, he didn't really come up with it, but he provides the most influential version of it, and the story is that we're returning to Zion, and that's the solution to the Jewish problem.
And as the Zionist movement progresses, they really show this incredible, almost a superpower in telling stories. For example, one of the great stories of the war years and the years right after the war is the story of these refugee ships braving the British blockade and bringing Holocaust survivors to the shores of the homeland. And this is simultaneously a mission to actually bring people to Israel and, I think, primarily a story that is supposed to mobilize world opinion. So they make sure that journalists are covering it.
They make sure to have film crews on the ships. They're telling this incredible story about Jews who are desperate to get to the homeland. They refuse to go anywhere else. They don't want to go to America. They don't want to return home to Europe. They're demanding to go to Palestine. And this story is so powerful that it actually influences reality. And the UN, of course, votes to partition Palestine in 1947. So Zionism has this ability to tell stories, and it's linked to that classic Jewish ability to tell stories, which is essentially the only thing that we've-- or I guess, the most notable thing we've managed to do for the past 3,000 years or so.
Interestingly, a lot of the people involved in the parachutist mission are the same people who ran the refugee ships. It's an office of the Zionist movement called HaMossad LiAliya Bet, the illegal immigration office. And if you caught the word Mossad, then you know this is going to evolve into the actual Mossad. And there's a group of men, mostly men, not only men, who are involved in running these operations, and they have a very strong sense of a powerful story. So they, I think, decide that Zionism needs a different story about the Holocaust. Zionism can't live with the Holocaust. That cannot be the Jewish story, 6 million people being butchered. An entire Jewish world is being destroyed.
What will that lead to? I mean, what does that story make you want to do? It doesn't lead you anywhere good. It doesn't create a better future. It might lead you to despair. It might lead you to revenge. None of that is what Zionism is looking for. Zionism wants to build something. So they need a new story. They need a different story about what this war is, and they send 32 people to write that story with their blood, essentially. And in this story, Jews will be not victims, but heroes, and they're not going to be people in striped pajamas marching off to the gas chambers. They're going to be people with guns jumping out of airplanes.
And they're going to face a catastrophe. And in the face of this catastrophe, they're not going to give up, and they're not going to pull the covers over their heads, and they're not going to collaborate. And people were doing all of those things in those years. They're going to act. They're going to undertake heroic action. And even if the action doesn't succeed and they understand that it's not going to succeed, people will be inspired by that action to build something else when the war is over.
And the participants in the mission understand this. If you read the writings of Hannah Szenes-- and we can talk about a poem that she wrote that, I think, explains this quite explicitly. But Enzo Sereni understands this, and so does Haviva Reik, and so do the others. They're writing a story. Essentially, they're storytellers, not commandos. And their job is not to defeat the Wehrmacht. Their job is to set an example that will inspire others.
And for years after this mission, thousands and thousands of young Jews in Palestine set off to create a Jewish state, singing the songs of Hannah Szenes. That's not metaphorical. They were actually singing the songs of Hannah Szenes, and they're inspired by her example to risk their lives to create something new. So when I say that the mission succeeds, that's what I mean. As a military mission, it's an utter failure. As a storytelling mission, it works, and it works so well that here we are, 80 years later, talking about it.
[ALAN KADISH] So you talked a little bit about Hannah Szenes as a poet. So tell us a little bit about her poetry and why that probably is the reason that she sort of became the heroine who's known out of these 32 people, even if at the time, she wasn't the leader of the mission.
[MATTI FRIEDMAN] Right, she wasn't the leader of the mission or the most successful of the parachutists. Hannah Szenes was 22 when she jumps out of the airplane into occupied Yugoslavia. She's a child of relative privilege from Budapest. She grew up in an upper middle class family. Her father, who died when she was young, was a playwright and a journalist, Béla Szenes, quite a well-known writer in Hungary. So she's kind of a theater kid in many ways and a bookworm, a recognizable character. I think if you read her diaries, incredibly smart and a gifted writer.
Her military accomplishments in the mission are nonexistent. I mean, none of what she tries to do works, and yet she's the only name that survives. And at least in Israel, I would say that Hannah Szenes is as famous a name as Judah the Maccabee or maybe Theodor Herzl. I mean, everyone knows the name Hannah Szenes. They might not know exactly what she did, but everyone knows Hannah Szenes, and there are 32 Hannah Szenes streets in Israel, and there's a kibbutz named after her, and there's a forest named after her. And for a long time, there was an Israeli ship named after her. So she's a big deal.
But why? So that's also one of the questions that I ponder in this book, and I think it's related to the previous question. If the mission is primarily a storytelling mission, then the heroine will be the best writer. And indeed, Hannah Szenes is not the best commando of the 32, but she is by a very wide margin the best writer. And she leaves two poems that become really famous. She has other writings that are known and a diary that was published. No really good English translation exists. There's a very archaic one, but I hope that is rectified at some point.
But she leaves two poems that are very famous. The most famous one, and it might be familiar to people who are with us, is called Eli Eli, or that's what we tend to call it. The real name of the poem is "Walk to Caesarea, Halicha LeKeisarya, and it's this very short poem that she writes on this kibbutz, where she ends up in the early '40s called Sdot Yam. And it's a song that you sing in Jewish day schools, and you sing it at Jewish summer camps, and I won't sing it right now just to spare everyone that particular experience.
But many people know it, and I would say it's probably the most famous song in modern Hebrew. It's a beautiful song that's put to music within months of Hannah's death in a Hungarian prison. So this song really takes on a life of its own. And that is one of the reasons that Hannah becomes the heroine of the mission-- because she leaves this kind of great monument in words, which is, of course, how Jews like to build their monuments.
And it really is a beautiful poem. I mean, if you read it, it's simple. There's no ideology in it. It's about a moment where she's standing on the beach during a storm, and she talks about lightning in the sky and the sound of the water. It's very, very simple, and I would say it's kind of a perfect poem. And the tune that was written for the poem is also perfect. The second famous poem that she leaves us is no longer as well known because it is very kind of heavy and ideological in a way that isn't popular anymore.
But the story of this poem, I think, actually helps us understand the core of the mission, because I mean, there's this very cinematic scene in the story that happens in June 1944. So it's nighttime, and Hannah is about to cross the border between occupied Yugoslavia and occupied Hungary. So which is where she's from. And her mother at this point is trapped in Budapest. The Jews of Hungary have been-- the great murder of the Jews of Hungary has begun. There are 800,000 Jews in Hungary, and most of them will be murdered.
Her mother is in Budapest and is still alive. Another person in Budapest at this time is Adolf Eichmann, who's there engineering the genocide of Jews in Hungary. Hannah crosses the border. She's accompanied to the border by a male comrade of hers, another parachutist from the land of Israel named Reuven Dafni. And one thing that you find when you read the memoirs of Hannah's comrades is that-- and this is surprising if you grew up with a legend of Hanna Szenes. They don't like Hanna Szenes because she is very opinionated, and she's very stubborn, and she's a young woman, and she doesn't accept their primacy. She doesn't think that they're smarter than her, and they find that very annoying, and they find her annoying.
So Dafni writes afterward that he respected Hannah, but he didn't like her. So he's accompanying Hannah to the border. He's trying to convince her not to cross into Hungary, because they realize that if she crosses into Hungary, she's not coming back. Hungary is under direct Nazi occupation, and the chances of her being caught are very high. So her comrades understand that this is a one way crossing. I mean, if Hannah goes, it's probably the last they're going to see of her. And by the way, they are right about that. Hannah Szenes will not be coming back from Hungary, but Hannah insists on going.
So they're in the forest on the border, about to cross. She's about to cross. They're about to part, she and Reuven Dafni. Hannah shakes his hand, and he feels, and he recounts this afterward, he feels that she's pressing into his hand a folded piece of paper. And then she walks away, never to be seen again. So this sounds like a very cinematic moment or a very literary scene, which it is. I mean, she's basically engineering a scene from a movie. That's what I think is going on. She's a woman who grew up at her father's theater premieres.
She read an incredible number of books. We know that because she wrote down every single one of them, and we still have the list of every book that Hannah Szenes read from the time she was 12. So if this scene seems very literary, it's because Hannah Szenes understands the role of a literary heroine, and she knows that she's supposed to enact it. Her role is not to turn back at the border and play it safe. Her role is to go off into the darkness and perhaps never to return. She gets it, and that's what she does.
Reuven Dafni is so annoyed by this, this kind of theatrical move, that he throws the paper away as soon as Hanna's gone, and he stomps off back to the partisan base where he's staying. In his account, he says about an hour later, he realizes he shouldn't have thrown away Hannah Szenes's his last note. So he returns to the place where they parted, and he looks in the bushes, and he manages to find this piece of paper, which I saw a few months ago. It's kept here at a kibbutz in northern Israel called Lohamei Hageta'ot, the ghetto fighters kibbutz, and it's about the size of an index card, and it was folded.
And if you look at it, there are four lines of writing on it in Hannah's handwriting. And it's a poem. It's her second most famous poem, and it's called, in Hebrew, Ashrei HaGafror which means "Happy is the Match." Sometimes it's translated "Blessed is the Match." And it starts like this. She writes, "Ashrei hagaf'rur shenis'raf vehitzit lehavot" / Happy is the match that flared and lit the flames. So what is she saying with this poem and what is she trying to tell us? Happy is the match that flared and lit the flames? She's about to cross the border into Hungary.
She realizes that her chances of coming back are very slim, and she's telling us that she's happy to go. She understands that her match, she's the match. It's going to flare. It's going to be burned. And the act of burning herself is going to light a flame. So she's going to inspire others with this act of self-sacrifice. That's the only way to understand the poem. The poem is essentially a suicide note or maybe a last will and testament. She's explaining to us why she's doing what she's doing, and she's explaining what the mission is as she understands it.
The mission is not to defeat the Wehrmacht. That's obviously not something that a 22-year-old is going to be able to do. It's not to save the Jews of Hungary. The Jews of Hungary are going to be murdered, and there's not a whole lot that she's going to be able to do about it. What she can do is inspire others with the light of her action, with the act of flaring and lighting the flames. And I think that explains her own mindset and explains the mindset of the other participants in this very puzzling and mysterious episode in 1944.
[ALAN KADISH] So you talk a lot about the-- first of all, that's an incredible story of someone who's so young recognizing the power of words and the power of actions. So it's amazing. But you don't have formal training as an historian. You're a storyteller, really. And your books are so compelling because just as you've shown us in this interview, you have this incredible ability to tell a story. So how did you decide to become a storyteller, or did that just sort of happen naturally? After all, as a journalist, you are sort of a storyteller. But this is a little bit different.
[MATTI FRIEDMAN] Right, I mean, yeah, kind of-- I never got into this field in any kind of calculated way. I've just been kind of following things that interest me, and I've always been just riveted by great stories, mainly great true stories. And I say that word, of course, with the necessary ironic distance. But I'm a sucker for a great nonfiction book, and I understand that there's a lot of art in nonfiction. And of course, I'm a practitioner. So I'm aware that with all of the caveats, there's nothing like a great true story.
And I grew up reading them, and I remember reading years ago, not long after I got out of the army-- so it would have been the early aughts. I read a book called Rivertown by a writer named Peter Hessler, who was in the Peace Corps, and he spent a couple of years in a Chinese city teaching English. And he wrote this really compelling book about his experience in China. And that was the first time I really realized that you could do this. You could have a great experience and then craft it in a way that would make sense to readers and that would be as compelling as a novel, but it would be true. That book was really the first time that I remember having that realization and deciding that it was something that I wanted to do.
The first book that I tried to write, which wasn't the first book that I ended up publishing, but it was the first attempt, is a book about my own military service in Lebanon at the end of the 1990s and about a trip that I took back to Lebanon as a tourist a few years later to try to understand those events. Eventually, it was published as Pumpkin Flowers, but I actually wrote it around that same time, 2002, 2003. I wrote a manuscript that was so bad that no one would publish it, luckily for me. I see that. I was, of course, depressed about it at the time, but I think they did me a favor.
And ultimately, I published this book called The Aleppo Codex, which wasn't about my own experience. It was about an investigation that I carried out into the fate of one of the great Jewish texts. And the success of that book allowed me to go back to that first manuscript and write what ultimately became Pumpkin Flowers. And I think that there is a way to remain within the boundaries of journalism and historical research and reach the emotional power of a novel. And that's what I'm trying to do, and I'm lucky to be freed of the constraints of academic writing, but I do see myself as bound by the rules of journalism. So there are always source notes at the ends of my books and-- at the end of my books. And I'm not inventing characters. I'm not inventing dialogue.
Everything in any of my books can be sourced to a document or an interview, but I'm allowing myself to use the tools of a writer to make that story compelling to a reader, which means arranging the chronology in a way that's interesting, which means inserting myself when that is necessary, then trying to bring the present into stories about the past, which I've done here. I mean, the story is about a war in the '40s that was written during another war, and this war is very much present in the story, certainly between the lines. So yeah, so it's a strange profession, but as I said, I'm very, very lucky to be able to do it for a living.
[ALAN KADISH] So let's talk a little bit about the history of storytelling. You talked about the Jews being storytellers for thousands of years. And of course, the Talmud is replete with stories. Some seem relevant to the discussion and some seem-- it's sort of hard to understand where they came from. And some are realistic. Some are mystical. Some are heroic, and they're a huge part of that sort of seminal work that relates to us. But I want to explore a little bit about the idea of storytelling and fiction and nonfiction.
So you talked a little bit about Herzl's a-ha moment writing his nonfiction vision for the future, even though perhaps at the time it seemed like fiction. Some people suggest that whether-- and it's hard to know, I think, historically how much it influenced Herzl. But George Eliot sort of wrote a novel rather than a true story, which kind of in some ways kindled the start of this idea of Zionism. So you said you love a nonfiction story. What do you think about the role of fiction and nonfiction in creating a narrative and creating a myth and creating a movement, which is really what Zionism, as the way you describe it, was?
[MATTI FRIEDMAN] Yeah, that's such an interesting question. It's, I guess, almost a philosophical question because our great motivating text is, of course, the Tanakh. And is the Tanakh non-fiction? I mean, it's a great question. It's too simple a question to-- and it's almost a ridiculous question to ask of the Tanakh. That's like, it's really beside the point whether it happened or didn't happen. I mean, the book is about something much deeper than that, but it's certainly a book that made things happen, whether it actually happened or not.
So we have this idea that these stories explain our lives and explain our world. And every year, we tell the cycle of stories, and every year, we go from the creation of the world to Moshe standing on Har Nevo looking over the promised land and unable to enter. And as soon as he's unable to enter, we go back to the beginning, and we tell it again. And every year, we sit down at the Seder, and we tell the story of the exodus, and we tell it again and again and again and again because we have this idea that stories are really the only stable thing, which is-- it's such a counterintuitive thing.
Most other cultures probably think that stories are the least stable thing because what's stable is the land, the government, the church. And we know that that's all ephemeral and that the only thing that lasts are these words that we're going to repeat. I mean, if you grow up in it, as I was lucky enough to do, you don't realize how unique it is. You just think that everyone thinks like that, and this obsession with words and books is shared. But it's really not, and it comes out of this world of stories, and part of that world is the Talmud, and part of that world is Nachman of Breslov.
And part of that world is Theodor Herzl, and part of that world is Philip Roth. And I mean, it's coming from the same crazy, crazy engine. So in some ways, the state of Israel, which is a real country, and I'm sitting in it right now, comes out of this world of stories, and it comes out of a culture that is maintained by storytelling and, of course, legal observance, and it's not just stories. It's also actions that we're required to do because of the stories.
But nothing's more real than a story, and that is really what Zionism believes. Zionism believes in a way that I think other people would think is crazy that you can create a country with powerful storytelling. And Herzl thinks that this is going to happen. I mean, he sits down in a hotel room, 2,000 years after the last Jewish state existed, and he really believes it's going to happen. He has this great line where he says-- I think it's-- he says within 5 years, certainly within 50, this state's going to exist. That's paraphrasing.
And I think it was 49 years after he wrote that that the state of Israel was founded. So to say that-- you could dismiss the story of the parachutists as just a story because they didn't accomplish anything. So why would you care about it? All it is is a story about heroes, a story about doomed heroes. But to a Jewish brain and to the Zionist mind, there's no such thing as just a story. There's nothing more powerful. Hannah Szenes knows that because Hannah Szenes grows up in the theater and grows up reading books, and she goes to a synagogue in Budapest where which I've visited, the Dohány Street Synagogue.
And she hears the stories-- the story of Deborah, the story of Moses, the story of David, these great heroic figures whose actions are so dramatic and memorable that they will be told forever. So if you grow up with that kind of story, yeah, you might jump out of a British bomber into the night over Yugoslavia. Like, that might make sense to you. And it's that kind of unrealistic action, maybe based on fictional texts, that gives us the real all state that has revolutionized Jewish life in modern times.
[ALAN KADISH] So storytelling in 2026 maybe has changed a little bit because so much of it is based on soundbites and social media, as opposed to the kinds of stories you tell and the kinds of stories we've always told.
[MATTI FRIEDMAN] Yes.
[ALAN KADISH] And one might argue, despite our success at storytelling historically, that we're not telling a very good story now. And the story of Israel right now is not what historically it has been around the world, in the United States, maybe even in parts of Israel. And it seems that perhaps one way to think about this is that we haven't properly adapted our great talent for storytelling to the different ways that stories are told now, because a lot of-- I'm not trying to say anything that hasn't been said by many others. We're not sort of winning the story of storytelling right now. So what's been the challenge, and why aren't we doing a better job at storytelling?
[MATTI FRIEDMAN] Yeah, I think that's an understatement to say we're not winning, and it's interesting to think about the kind of Jewish superpower or the Zionist ability to tell stories through the 1940s, those ships and the parachutists and other stories that come to mind, Trumpeldor. And then Israel achieves the regular kind of power. So Israel's going to have a government, and there's going to be a post office, and there's going to be an army. And then it's going to be a country like everyone else has. And then the superpower kind of withers because now, we're trying to live like everyone else, and we don't have that storytelling magic that the Jews always had.
And I think if you look at the Israeli government that we have right now, I mean, they have no ability to tell any kind of compelling story that makes sense beyond the most narrow political base that they rely on for support. And that's a real reversal. I mean, it's really different from the early leadership of Israel, which came from the diaspora which realized that you need to tell a story, and you need to win friends, and you need to explain what you're doing in a way that's compelling. And I think you're absolutely right, and we do not know how to do it.
And that is one reason that I wrote the book. I mean, I wrote this book. I started researching the book a year before this war started, but it was already clear to me and many others that we've kind of lost our story. So that old story of Israel that we were talking about, the kibbutz and the pioneers and that great story of Israel, I mean, it's gone. It was a great story, and I'm sorry that it's gone, but Israel's a different place. And for the past 20, maybe 30 years, we haven't really had a central story.
So there are many competing Israeli stories, and you can talk about the start-up nation, and you can talk about the settlements, and you can talk about, good things, and you can talk about bad things. But no one agrees, including Israelis, what the story. is And when you don't have your own story, then other people will tell your story for you. And we have enemies who are very numerous, and some of them are very capable at storytelling. In the past three years of this war, they've essentially hijacked the storytelling apparatus of the west to tell a completely different story about Israel, which is a story about evil in the world.
And it's obviously working quite well, and part of that is out of our hands. There aren't very many of us. So, even if we're amazing storytellers, it's not going to convince everyone, obviously. And I think Jewish history is rife with examples. But certainly, we need to be able to tell ourselves a story that makes sense. And one of the many failings of this government is that. I mean, maybe that's not in the top three failings of the government, but it is certainly one of the failings, the inability at a moment when we're being hammered from every side to come up with a compelling story about what we're doing and why it's necessary, and Israelis are suffering for that in the form of internal divisions that seem increasingly potent and dangerous.
But Jews in the diaspora are suffering because our communities in the diaspora are being hammered by these stories, which are, of course, more powerful in the diaspora than they are for Israelis. And the Israeli government is, in many cases, not making it easier by giving people a story to work with. They're making it worse by acting carelessly with this very unconstructive style that I think would have been shocking to the early Zionists and to people like Hannah Szenes, who saw themselves as acting in the cause of global justice.
I mean, they saw Zionism as a way to end the dehumanizing of Jews. That's what they thought that they were doing. They refused to allow Jews to be treated as inhuman, which they were by the Nazis and others, and they saw Zionism as the solution to that. So one of our challenges in the next couple of years and hopefully with a new leadership coming in is to think about what kind of story we want to tell other people and primarily what kind of story we want to tell ourselves.
[ALAN KADISH] So to try to summarize, I think you've really talked about a multifactorial reason why we've kind of failed in storytelling. I would argue, sure, there were great stories early in Zionism. But even through the Six Day War and even, quite frankly, through the Yom Kippur War, we could still tell a story. And I think that without-- we try at Touro University to stay apolitical. So I'm not going to comment on the government. But what I will say is I think you're right. The failure has really been 20 to 30 years old in some ways but has accelerated recently. And I'm not going to argue about whether the government bears a lot of responsibility, but I do also think that one of the things I suggest earlier, which is that the nature of storytelling has changed--
[MATTI FRIEDMAN] Yes.
[ALAN KADISH] --is also responsible. And--
[MATTI FRIEDMAN] I think that's true.
[ALAN KADISH] --we haven't adapted well enough to the new way of storytelling because our way of storytelling sort of builds on a, as you pointed out in Tanakh or in other places, it builds on a careful, dramatic build-up. Whereas now, it's an Insta shot. And I think part of what we need to do is have a better understanding of that and figure out how to adapt our natural talent to that new way of storytelling.
[MATTI FRIEDMAN] Right. I mean, I think it's a good question of whether our story can even work in those formats because our story does require a lot of background, and it requires a lot of knowledge and a lot of thought. It's almost impossible to make the Jewish case in a 17 second video clip. Now our enemies can do it by showing images of civilian carnage, or they can show an image of violence in which an Israeli soldier is seen behaving reprehensibly And that makes the case. It's a nine second clip that kind of hits you in the stomach and makes their case.
And the counter case would take me a very long time to make-- a story about people who were exiled and a people who were persecuted and people who were ultimately murdered en masse and who came back to their homeland which they'd never left and established a state that is, in some ways, one of the most successful in the world while being highly imperfect. And I mean, I'm already over the 17 second limit, and there are very few ways for me to illustrate that with highly potent images. So sometimes, we try to do that, and we say, we invented the cherry tomato.
I'm not sure if that's true, but I think that's something that-- we invented the flash drive, and the beaches in Tel Aviv are so great, and here are beautiful women, and you see that kind of attempt online. And it always strikes me as being a bit embarrassing. I mean, I realize we might have to play the game, but our story is a serious one. I mean, our enemies are facile in many cases, which is one reason they're having a lot of success in an age that is facile. And our story is deep, and it's going to be a hard case to make in the kind of storytelling environment that you're describing accurately, I think.
[ALAN KADISH] Well, Matti, it was great speaking with you. You were really one of the great storytellers of modern times. So I very much appreciate your insight into storytelling. I suggest that we need you to step up and figure out a way to do it because if you can't do it, few can. So thanks so much for being with us on Touro Talks. It's great having you, and in this difficult time, being able to read an inspiring book like yours is really uplifting. Even if ultimately, you can't point to a single victory based on that read, just as the parachutist couldn't, the stories still endure, and the chizzuk, or the uplifting, that they can provide are something we really need now. So thanks so much for writing that and thanks for being with us.
[MATTI FRIEDMAN] I think they might see this Zoom conversation as a victory. So we'll put that on the monument to the parachutists. Thank you so much for having me. It's been such a pleasure speaking to you.