The Match That Lit the Flame: Hannah Senesh and the Creation of Modern Israel (with Matti Friedman)

Why would a group of young Jews who escaped the Holocaust choose to parachute back into Nazi-occupied Europe? How did they become heroes despite the failure of that mission? Author Matti Friedman joins EconTalk's Russ Roberts to unravel these mysteries through his book Out of the Sky, revealing why a failed mission became one of Israel's most powerful founding myths. At the heart of the story is Hannah Senesh, a 23-year-old Hungarian poet who traded her Budapest life for a kibbutz, then traded the kibbutz for a parachute and a near-certain death sentence--and whose poems, scribbled on scraps of paper in forests near the Hungarian border, became some of the most famous texts in modern Hebrew.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you. Today is January 18, 2026. I'm a guest journalist and author, Matti Friedman. This is Matti's

• 0:43Speaker 00

  fourth appearance on the program. He was last here in December of 2024, talking about Israel's war with Hezbollah and his book, Pumpkin Flowers. Our topic for today is his latest book, Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe, which is the strange tale of a group of Jews living in Palestine under the British mandate during the Second World War, who parachuted back into Nazi-occupied Europe. And the most famous member of this group was a woman Hannah or Hannah Senesh, a name some of you may know. Matti, welcome back to Econ Talk.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:26Speaker 00

  Now Hannah is famous in Israel, and I want, and I knew of her before I moved here. As an American Jew, I knew about her before I moved to Israel. You grew up in Canada. You may have heard about her when you were a boy. But in Israel, the way you might encounter her name is much more ubiquitous. So give us a flavor of her cultural importance here, and why you would write a book about someone who actually sadly did not accomplish what she had hoped to accomplish.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  So Chana Senesh is one of four main characters in this book. And the operation that I'm describing, which is a very strange episode in which a group of young Jews who escaped the Holocaust to British mandate Palestine, volunteered to parachute back into the Holocaust. The group is 32 parachutists. I've chosen a core group of characters who are participants in the most dramatic part of that operation. And of those four, the best known is Chana. So while some of these characters have a kibbutz named after them or a street named after them, Chana Senesh has 32 streets named after her. She has a kibbutz named after her. She has a forest named after her. She is one of the most famous national characters in Israel.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  She's probably as famous as someone like Judah Maccabee, just in terms of name recognition to an Israeli. One of my kids brought home, I mentioned this in the book, a couple of years ago, a deck of patriotic playing cards. And there was a set of four cards that had a kind of pantheon of the nation's greatest characters. So one of them was Theodore Herzl, who's of course the founder of modern Zionism. One of them was Golda Meir, who was the only woman to ever become a prime minister in Israel. One was Moshe Dayan, the famous one-eyed general. And the fourth was Chana Senesh, who was a 23-year-old woman who had come to Israel from Hungary and was here for a few years and wrote some poems that have become among

• 3:31Speaker 01

  the most famous texts in Hebrew. So Chana Senesh is a legend, but it's not 100% clear, or at least it wasn't to me before I wrote the book, why she was a legend. Because as you hinted in your question, she doesn't seem to have succeeded at her mission. So that mystery is one of the reasons that I wanted to write this book. How could you become a hero if you failed?

• 3:53Speaker 00

  And let's talk a little bit about what you did to write this book. I was actually in Tel Aviv over this past weekend, and I was thinking about you because I was looking forward to our interview. And I know you spent some time in an archive in Tel Aviv. I was having coffee and I think it's No Memo, No Memo, No Menno. And it's the kind of building that would house the archive that you found. You also did some other strange things. You parachuted, you visited Dachau, you went to Budapest. What are some of the things you did and why did you do them in the search for what had happened to these four people?

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Unfortunately, all of the characters in the story are dead, even the ones who survived to the end of 1944. And I had no one to interview and I wanted to bring the story to life. So there were two main ways to do that. One was the incredible amount of documentation that turned out to survive from the operation. Most of it kept in Tel Aviv in the archive of the Haganah, which is the pre-state militia. It's kind of a Jewish underground militia that becomes, it ultimately becomes the IDF. And their archive is in Tel Aviv in this old mansion that used to belong to one of the militia commanders, Eliau Golum. So I spent a lot of time there, going through thousands of documents that were kind of telling the story of this operation in real time.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  The operation stretches from the, basically from the beginning of 1944 to the end of 1944. That's more or less the time span. So that's one way that I recreated the action. But another way to do it is to go to the places that I'm writing about and see if I can breathe. And the smell that these characters would have smelled and walked to the extent that is possible on the streets that they walked. So I tried to do that by going to Rome, which is where one of the main characters is from. A character named Enzo Sereni, who was one of the commanders of the mission. Very literate, kind of aristocratic Roman Jew. And I went to Budapest, which is where Hanasenesh is from. I went to Dachau, as you, as you mentioned, because one of the characters ends up there.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  And maybe the funnest thing I did was to take an incredible train journey from Rome over the Alps to Munich and to Dachau, which must be one of the most beautiful train journeys in the world. Although I was retracing a train journey that one of my characters took in much darker circumstances. But it was certainly something that helped me recreate for myself the world that these characters inhabited. And then I hope to recreate it in an accurate fashion for the readers.

• 6:27Speaker 00

  You mentioned in passing that you had not, I think you say you did not visit a death camp until you went to Krakow. Why not?

• 6:38Speaker 01

  I've always had an ambivalent relationship to the Holocaust, recognizing, of course, that it is one of the most important events in Jewish history and certainly one of the most important events of the 20th century, but I never wanted to let it define my own Jewish story. I don't see my own story as being one of victimhood. And I think that in the time that we're in now, victimhood is really the currency that is exchanged in cultural discourse. And everyone wants to be a victim, and I'm not interested in that. And I think that the Zionist movement was not interested in that. And that's another reason, I think, or that's one reason that the Zionist movement always had an ambivalent relationship with the Holocaust and never quite wanted to remember it quite in the way that it happened. They wanted to remember it in a slightly different way. Holocaust

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Remembrance Day here is called officially the Remembrance Day for Holocaust and heroism. And there was always, there was always an emphasis on heroic events like the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. So the Zionist movement never accepted that Jews were victims because the whole idea of Zionism is that Jews are actors in history, that we're agents of our own fate and not victims. And I think that that very much was my own mindset. So I don't, I've never been drawn to visit Auschwitz or any of these places. In fact, I once went to Krakow, which is right next to Auschwitz. And I considered going to the camp because I was already in Krakow and there are signs up all over Krakow advertising tours to Auschwitz. And I was really turned off by the whole thing, the idea of going to a camp that's

• 8:04Speaker 01

  also a tourist site. So I ended up just hanging out in a bookstore in Krakow. I found a book by Primo Levi and bought the book. And I sat in the bookstore café reading Primo Levi with a couple Polish goths. That was my alternative to actually going to a Nazi death camp. I've always thought that the history of those places and the history of the Holocaust is something best pondered by the Societies that perpetrated it. And I'd like to tell a different story about myself. So it turned out that when I went to Dachau, because I was researching the fate of one of my characters, of Enzo Sereni, and I wanted to see the camp and I wanted to research in the archive, that's at the camp. And I went to Dachau really unprepared for it because I was just going for technical reasons. And I was quite bowled over, as I recount in the book,

• 8:49Speaker 01

  just by how evil the place was. I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting, but it was probably the most evil place I've ever been. You could just feel it. It was in the air. It kind of seeped from the ground. And I'm glad I had that. I'm glad I had that chance. And I'm glad that I went when I did in my mid 40s and not, you know, as an impressionable 16 or 17 year old. Many Jewish teenagers get taken to these places, I think, at a time when they're not really capable of understanding what they are, placing it in the right location in their own story about themselves and about the Jewish people. But it was one of the most powerful experiences that I had writing this book.

• 9:28Speaker 00

  Let's digress for a minute and talk a little bit about the Holocaust and Zionism, which you just obliquely referenced, the discomfort or lack of interest that Zionism had with the traditional historical account.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  And certainly as an American Jew, growing up in America, this idea that the Holocaust was uncomfortable to many Israelis struck me as weird until I lived here in Lorne Moore. And Israel's treatment of Holocaust survivors is also disturbing, troubling.

• 10:10Speaker 00

  There was a certain... Disinterest might be a little strong, but discomfort would not be incorrect. And there was a... I think for people who don't live here, the self-image that Israelis want, the identity that people here want to embrace is very different. The role the Holocaust plays in that is very different than, say, as you say, in America, where the currency of victimization is often exchanged. Explain what you mean by that and try to give listeners a feel for what... how the Holocaust is seen here.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  So the way the Holocaust is seen in Israel has really changed in the past 20 or 30 years. But traditionally, Zionism was uncomfortable with it. And they were uncomfortable with the fact, it seems ludicrous to even say this now, but this was really a prevalent way of thinking about it. In the early days of Israel, they were uncomfortable with the fact that the Jews hadn't rebelled, or that they had, you know, the line was that Jews went like sheep to the slaughter. And that was, that was anathema to Zionism. I mean, Zionism was all about Jewish power and, you know, Jewish military bravery. And the Zionists were very much concerned, even before the founding of the state, with inculcating an ethos of military prowess.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  And Zionism abandons the original Jewish heroes, who are these, you know, rabbis and scholars and timid intellectuals, and replaces them with military heroes, people like Bar Kokhba, who was the leader of a disastrous revolt against Rome in the 2nd century CE. And he'd always actually been hated by the rabbis because he very unwisely rebelled against the superpower and brought an absolute disaster on the Jewish people. But he gets reborn as an example of Jewish prowess, or Judah Machabe, who'd been a relatively minor character, who led a successful rebellion against the Seleucid Greeks a couple centuries earlier. So Zionism is very much interested in that kind of Jew.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  And then there's this terrible thing in Europe, which seems to be about passive Jews just getting on trains and being shipped to their deaths. And that, that's not true. That's not an accurate representation of what happened. And it's actually a terrible insult, I think, to the people who went through it. But that was very much the vibe in Israel in the early years. And eventually, the Holocaust is commemorated in a very Zionist way. As I mentioned, they call the Remembrance Day for the Holocaust, and heroism. And there was really an emphasis on people who had resisted the Nazis. And there was a lot of discomfort with those who didn't. And many Holocaust survivors who came to Israel were misunderstood at best, sometimes treated with disrespect. There was an assumption among some people that if you survived the Holocaust, you must

• 13:00Speaker 01

  have done something shady, so you must be crooked in some way, or you must have collaborated in some way, or you must have done something untoward in order to... Survive when so many other people were killed. So it takes decades for that event just to be digested by the psyche. Of course, it makes perfect sense. I mean, some things can't be understood right away. And the Holocaust is certainly an example of something that maybe can't be understood at all, certainly not within a decade or two of it happening. In the past 20 or 30 years, I think things have become much more sane and Israelis have learned to think about it, think about it differently. But there's still an unwillingness to see ourselves as victims. We've seen it over the past two years or so, since October 7th, where we've had to participate

• 13:45Speaker 01

  in a discourse in the West where it's all about victimhood. The question is, who is the bigger victim? And the greater your victimhood, the more cultural power you have and increasingly political power you have. So everyone wants to be a victim. And we have to play that game. So we have to kind of play up the way we were victimized on October 7th. But you can see that for a lot of Israelis, that doesn't come naturally because the Zionist story is not about playing up your victimization. It's about being strong. And if you're victimized, then you go and you kick ass. You don't whine about being victimized. So there is a tension that exists to this day, which is still the one that the Zionist movement felt in the days of the Holocaust.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  In fact, this operation, the parachutist operation of 1944, is essentially a product of that tension. So you have the Zionist movement in what was then British Mandate Palestine, watching this catastrophe unfold in Europe. They're unable to stop it despite their ethos of heroism and prowess. The Jews don't have an army. They need to get people into Europe. The Jews don't have an air force. They have no way of doing anything. They're completely helpless. So they come up with what seems like the only plan at their disposal and send these people who'd escaped the Holocaust back into the Holocaust.

• 15:02Speaker 00

  And to set the stage a little bit for where they were headed in 1944, the year where these events take place, I mean, it's unspeakably sad when you read the history of it because...

• 15:21Speaker 00

  The Nazis kill and come close to exterminating with near completenessous entire communities throughout Europe, you know, to the point where, you know, you talk about one town where 18,000 people get put on trains and 18 come home. But Hungary had this privileged, the Jews of Hungary were spared for the first years of the war until 1944. And it's just so sad because they almost made it, and some did, but hundreds of thousands were murdered in a systematic way.

• 16:04Speaker 00

  And if you're watching this from Israel and you were, had come from there, as some of the people in the story had, also with Italy, where, again, there was a lot of relatively cheerful news in the beginning of the war for the Jews, but eventually the Nazi death machine comes for them. And so these survivors in Palestine, under the British mandate, were desperate to do something. So what did they have in mind? As you point out, this mission that many of them were on, wearing British uniforms

• 16:45Speaker 00

  often, was, had two prongs. One, the people who dispatched them from British military headquarters had one goal, but the Israeli soon-to-be leaders of a new state in a few years had a different mission. So how did those, what were those two missions and how did that work out?

• 17:08Speaker 01

  Well, at the time, I guess we should say for listeners who may not be familiar with the history, this country is a British mandate territory called Palestine. The British conquered in 1917 from the Ottoman Turks and are given the mandate by the League of Nations to Create a Jewish national home and they've been running it essentially since the end of the First World War and they're about to leave in 1948. So, you know, the whole thing lasts about 30 years and this is the waning years of the mandate, although that's not at all clear at the time that we're talking about. This is the middle of the Second World War. So the Jews are trying to form a state in Palestine, but the ruling authority is

• 17:51Speaker 01

  British and the Jews do not have a military or a government. They have a quasi governing authority that they recognize called the Jewish Agency, but it's not, it's not a real government and they don't have any military force. And at the beginning of the war, the Jews are begging the British to allow them to form Jewish fighting units and go to Europe to fight the Nazis. And, you know, the Jews, of course, are, they have good reason to want to fight the Nazis. However, they're also at odds with, with British authorities. So the Jews also hate the British. They hate the British, but they hate them less than they hate the Germans. Why do they hate the British? Because the British, having promised to create a Jewish national home that will be a refuge for the Jewish people, in the

• 18:35Speaker 01

  1930s, they basically slammed the door on, on, on that in order to placate Arab public opinion, which is very much opposed to Jewish immigration and opposed to the British empire in general.

• 18:47Speaker 00

  And they have their own national aspirations, which they're pressuring the British to give voice to and not going so well for them. The British are crossing between a rock and a hard place.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. So there are two competing national movements that are, you know, they're kind of alive and, and at odds in this place. So the British are in a, in a bit of a pickle. What they do is they, they stop Jewish immigration with, with few exceptions, precisely at the time when it's a matter of life and death for millions of Jews and, and people have nowhere to go and they can't come here. So the Jews, of course, are furious at the British about that, but they, they have no choice but to be on the allied side in the war. So they're trying to get the British to allow them to form fighting battalions. And the British won't do it because they're worried about forming military units of Jews that could, after the war, boomerang against the British. And I think that concern was quite well placed and indeed.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  Would prove to be proved to be completely justified. So we can understand where the British are coming from. But this is intensely frustrating for the for the Jews. So what remains of these grandiose plans to form specifically a plan to drop a battalion of paratroopers, Jewish paratroopers into Europe in order to lead a Jewish uprising? That was the original plan. This is whittled down by British colonial officials into a plan that will see just over 30 Jewish parachutists dropped, not as a fighting unit and not together. They'll be dropped in twos and threes and they'll be dropped mainly by an outfit called MI9, which is now largely forgotten, but it's the arm of British military intelligence that deals with escape and evasion.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  So their their job is to pick up downed allied pilots or escape POWs, people who are behind enemy lines and get them back to allied lines so they can be, you know, put on new airplanes and sent back into the war. So that's that's MI9 and it's being run out of Cairo in this part of the world by an officer named Tony Simmons, who's a very pro Zionist officer who's been in Palestine for a while and who the Jews trust. So because of this relationship that Simmons has with the Zionist leadership, they create this plan to recruit newly arrived Jews, mainly from Central Europe. People who speak the local languages know the territory and these people will be recruited into the British Army. They'll be given British uniforms.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  They'll be given radio training and parachute training and then they will be dropped via an allied airbase in Italy back into Central Europe. That's what the British think they're doing. These people are meant to maintain radio contact between British military headquarters and partisan forces, resistance forces behind enemy lines, and they're supposed to help locate and rescue allied personnel behind enemy lines. That's the British mission. As far as the Jewish leadership is concerned, and this is mainly a group of men who will ultimately be the creators of the Mossad. So in my book in English, I call them the Mossad because they're actually part of a small office that's called the Mossad al-Aliabet, which means the, basically the illegal immigration bureau. But it will eventually morph into what we now call the Mossad.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  So I refer to the Mossad. These are intelligence men, although of course there's no state and they don't actually belong to an official intelligence service. And they have a different plan. And their plan, of course, is to save Jews. The allied mission is secondary to them. Their idea is to get Zionist agents back into Europe to fight the Nazis and save Jews. And eventually, they also want people who will have gained enough military experience to be able to use it against the British after the war is over. So this British operation is also an operation against the British. So it's a complicated affair, but there's a confluence of interests here for a while between the Zionist leadership and certain British military officers that allows this

• 22:42Speaker 01

  operation to take place. The Jews want to get people into Europe, but they don't have their own air force. The British need agents who can fit in behind enemy lines, and they have almost no one who can do it. And they realize that the Jews in Palestine have this incredible reservoir of agents because the place is full of people who come from what are now occupied countries in Europe. So if you need someone who, you know, can pass in Nazi occupied France, no problem. You know, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, the Jews have whatever you need. So those are the conditions that create this strange operation in 1944, which was at least officially a British operation run by MI-9 out of Cairo.

• 23:27Speaker 00

  And how do we know anything about it? It's not, on the surface, which is a phrase I'm going to use a lot in this, rest of this conversation, on the surface, this is not even a footnote to a footnote to a footnote. It's such a minor thing. Thirty-two people, parachute into...

• 23:49Speaker 00

  What was then, I think, sort of Czechoslovakia, but who knows what it's called, really. But they're near the Hungarian border and they, and a few other places. They don't achieve very much. Most of them die. Not all of them, but most of them are killed in the process. And how do we know anything about them? In a way, they're lost to history. One of the beautiful things about your book is you've brought them alive, which is wonderful. And in a minute, we'll talk about why we might care, under the circumstances of a footnote to a footnote. But how do we know anything about this experience?

• 24:31Speaker 01

  Well, the operation is documented in a very thorough fashion. And I was surprised, when I went to the Haganah Archive in Tel Aviv to see what I could rustle up, I had no idea that there would be so much. So the Jewish intelligence men who leave these documents are very organized and everything is documented, catalogued, and eventually saved in the Haganah Archive. So there's actually a lot of material that allows us to recreate the mission, not from a distance, but from, you know, from the perspective of the people who are running it in real time. So we have letters from my characters sent to headquarters. We have radio transmissions.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  We have telegrams. We have personal archives of some of these people. Hanasenish, for example, because she became a legend afterward, her diaries and letters have been published. Another one of my characters, Chaviva Reik, was a very interesting woman, who was probably the most efficient of the parachutists, but she's not the most remembered of them. She left, she has an archive, she left an archive of fascinating letters on her kibbutz, which is a kibbutz called Ma'Anit. One of the characters is the only one of my characters to walk out of this mission alive. He wrote very... A really superb memoir about it that has been forgotten and is out of print and was

• 25:56Speaker 01

  never translated. But if you're looking for material, it's there. And all I lacked was an opportunity to actually speak to the people who participated in the mission. But I had a lot of material to work with, and that allowed me to create a story that I think, or I hope, is very rich in texture. This is not a bird's eye view of the story. This is a very high resolution take on the mission, as viewed mainly through documents telling us what this felt like day to day. And I tried to zoom out and give us some context and try to think a bit about what all of it means. But the narrative rests on a very

• 26:35Speaker 01

  granular portrait of four characters who are part of this pretty small and marginal mission that somehow becomes a legend and the subject of myth to such an extent that, again, you can say Hannah Senesh to an Israeli kid, and they'll know exactly who you're talking about.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're going to get into why that is. But I just want to add that the texture is there that you're talking about. It's a very vivid account. But equally vivid is your reflections on it as a modern Israeli, looking back at it. And it's really quite moving. I finished the book an hour or so before our conversation, and it put me in a very reflective and contemplative mood, which I thank you for. Let's talk, you don't quite make this comparison, but it's hanging in the air around the book. Two young women had diaries and writings, had aspirations to be writers. That's Anne Frank and Hannah

• 27:40Speaker 00

  Senesh, both died during the war. And Anne Frank becomes a lot more famous than Hannah Senesh. I think there are many reasons, possibly, but one of them is the appeal of

• 27:59Speaker 00

  How she has been portrayed by history, I don't think it's quite fair. But she's portrayed as a universalist, and this is very appealing to many people. Hannah Senesh is not a universalist, and reading her writings in your book, which is scattered through the whole book, is especially moving to a Jew, but it reminds you of the contrast with Anne Frank. So talk a little bit about Hannah's aspirations as a writer, and what we have of her writing, and why it's important.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  I guess you'd say that Hannah Senesh was a universalist who was mugged by reality. I think at heart, that's the world that she wanted, and she came out of this very liberal environment in Budapest. Her dad's a playwright, and a novelist, and a bohemian, and she fully expects to have a liberal life as an equal citizen in a European state. And like many Jews, she's disabused of that notion in the late 1930s, and she realized it's not going to happen. And her solution is to become a Zionist, and luckily for her, she gets a visa really on the eve of the war. It's the fall of 1939. She gets a very

• 29:22Speaker 01

  rare immigration certificate to British Palestine, and she leaves, and her mother remains behind in Budapest. And she makes it out just as the door is closing. So her lesson from this is not a universal lesson. I think she would like to see the kind of world where all people are siblings. But I think she's lived long enough and seen enough to know that that world does not yet exist. And if she wants to be able to exist in the world, it's going to be as a Jew, and the Jews are going to have to defend themselves, because no one else is going to do it. And she's not the only one to reach that conclusion in those years. And it's interesting to make a comparison between these two young women, because they literally have the same name, Anne, Hannah's.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  It's the same name. I mean, Hannah is, Hannah and Anne is the same. Anne is an English translation of the Hebrew name Hannah, but even more than that, her name in Hungary was actually Anna Seneš. That's her Hungarian name. And when she becomes a Zionist pioneer, she Hebraicizes the name and becomes Hannah. So she has consciously made a decision not to be Anne, but to be Hannah, who is a different person in that she's not part of a universal or European story. She is definitely a Jew and her name is Hebrew. So even, there's a story even just in the names of these two young women. Hannah Seneš is a bit older than Anne Frank. Anne Frank is a teenager. Hannah Seneš is a young woman, but they both write.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  I think they, they would recognize each other as kindred spirits in many ways. They're both very literary. They both read. I'm sure they read some of the same books and they have the idea that they're, that they can write. So Anne, of course, has her famous diary, which becomes one of the bestselling books in the world after the war. And it's, you know, it's a bestseller in Japan. And Frank really becomes a global icon. Hannah Seneš writes initially in Hungarian and then after she moves to Israel, she begins writing in Hebrew and she's incredibly adept at languages. And she manages to write some really excellent poems, even though there are poems written by a young person who's not quite there yet. But it's quite clear when you read her early writing that she, had she been allowed to live past age 23, she eventually would have been

• 31:35Speaker 01

  probably an important writer. I think that's, that's clear. She had incredible powers of observation. She was, she was really skillful with language, even in a language that Hebrew, which she only spoke for four or five years. She was already writing things of worth in that language. So I think we, you know, we could have seen some important literature come from Hannah Seneš's pen had she, had she lived. And Anne, her observations about the world are cut off, of course, by, by her death. So she's remembered for universalist pronouncements like her famous sentence where she says, I'm not quoting this verbatim, but she says, "Deep in my heart, I believe that..."

• 32:18Speaker 01

  Deep inside, I believe that people are good at heart. That she has that famous sentence. That's Anne Frank. That's Anne Frank, right? So that, and that is her most famous sentence. And as my friend and colleague Darryl Horn pointed out in a great book called People Love Dead Jews, she pointed out that Anne wrote that, of course, before she was arrested by murderers and killed in a camp. So had we been able to speak to her a few years after that, it's possible that her conclusions about human nature would have been different, and it's possible that her worldview would have been closer to that of Hannah Senesh. We don't know, but it's certainly true that the universal message of Anne Frank and the fact that she is a perfect victim, she's just a girl and she's murdered, that makes

• 33:01Speaker 01

  her a much more palatable character for people outside this story looking in. They want Anne Frank. They want someone who believes in the goodness of humanity. They want someone who doesn't really do anything threatening. Anne Frank just dies and doesn't live after the war to disturb the peace of Christians or Muslims by trying to set up a state where Jews can be at home. So Hannah Senesh, who is the more heroic character, it's no fault of Anne Frank's that she wasn't a hero, but Hannah Senesh lived long enough to be able to make a decision about whether or not to take action, and she decides to take action. Hannah Senesh is known and venerated mostly among Israelis and Jews who value what she

• 33:43Speaker 01

  did, and outside that group, she's barely known. So it'll be interesting to see what happens with this book once it comes out, if people can kind of maybe better understand her per character, if we understand what made her tick in the way that she saw the world. It's, I'm not giving anything away to say that. I think that Hannah's analysis of the world and human nature was closer to the accurate one, unfortunately.

• 34:13Speaker 00

  So I promised you before we recorded this that I have a Chana Senesh story. I'll try to make brief. It'll be a nice lead in to the next thing I want to ask you, which is, my wife and I were in Budapest for the first time. We spent four or five days there and there's a skating rink. And Saturday night, my wife and I decided to go skating. Well, that's not true. My wife decided to go skating. I don't skate, but she skates and I take pictures of her when she comes around. So we go to the locker room. We're going to rent skates. She's going to rent skates. And they asked for a deposit in euros. And I realized, we have no euros.

• 34:57Speaker 00

  They don't take credit card for the deposit. You've got to have cash. So I pull out of my wallet, a set of Israeli currency. I said, would you take this? Which of course is absurd. It's worth, they have no idea how much it's worth. It actually was somewhat akin to the amount that was the round of deposits. And to be honest, this was shortly after October 7th. And I wasn't particularly interested in advertising. I was traveling from Israel, as many Israelis have discovered since October 7th. Sometimes I'm open about it, sometimes less so. And I'm talking to this very nice 20-year-old girl who is asking for currency and I take this out.

• 35:42Speaker 00

  The 100 shekel or whatever it was note. And I had a couple and I showed them to her and she says, instead of going like, why would we take this? Or what's this worth? She says, these are so beautiful because on Israeli currency, they've got this lovely portrait of various people embedded in the paper currency. And she proceeds to call the entire staff, 10 people or so, to admire Israeli currency. It's like, it's a very funny moment. And I had like a weird brain freeze and I didn't know who was on the 100 or 200 shekel note or 50 that I was showing her. But it was a woman.

• 36:26Speaker 00

  And I think it's Leia or Rachel, Israeli poets. But for some reason, it just crossed my mind. I said, you know, I think maybe it's Chana Senesh.

• 36:37Speaker 00

  And of course, this 20-year-old Budapest woman, and I was thinking of Chana because I toured the Jewish synagogue two days before, and I'd heard about Chana Senesh. And she, of course, looks at me and says, "Who's Chana Senesh?" Right? This woman who's world, who's not world, she's very famous in Israel. She's Hungarian. She's from Budapest. And this woman goes like, "Well, who's Chana Senesh?" And I'm kind of like, have this moment of pride. And I said, "Well, she was a hero. She parachuted back into Nazi-controlled Hungary." And she looked at me and said, puzzled, deeply puzzled, troubled, "Why would she do

• 37:22Speaker 00

  that?" A fair question. So that's my question, Monty. What was she thinking?

• 37:28Speaker 01

  Right. I guess that the question asked by the woman at the skating rink is essentially the question I'm asking in this book. What motivated these characters to embark on a quest that seems quite hopeless? And the chances of success were very small if they existed at all. Certainly, the idea that they were going to go save Jews or fight the Nazis, I mean, it seems quite unrealistic. There's actually, I mentioned this in the book, a very funny skit, kind of funny in a painful way, done by an Israeli satire program called "The Jews Are Coming." It's a famous satire program.

• 38:07Speaker 00

  Very funny.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  And they riff on biblical stories and they kind of make fun of Israeli national myths. And they have this skit where you see, it's in the 40s, and you see this Jewish militia commander, this really tough guy, he's standing in front of a map of Europe with a big swastika on it, and he's saying, "We're gonna go, we're gonna fight the Nazis, we're gonna kill the Germans." And then the camera swivels, and you see there's just one person in the room, and it's this very young woman, and it's Chana Senesh. And she raises her hand, and she says, "I'm sorry, who's we?" You know, and the commander is forced to admit that actually it's not we, it's just you. And what was Hanasenish supposed to do against, against, against the Nazis? And that, I guess, was more than anything else, the mystery that led me to write the

• 38:52Speaker 01

  book, because there's this incredible gap between the legend of the mission and the actual accomplishments of the mission. And there's this gap between what they said they were going to do and what they could have reasonably expected to do. Again, this is 32 people dropped in twos and threes in about a half dozen Axis countries, you know, in the middle of, of the war. So, you know, I tried to unravel it in, in the book. And my, my conclusion is that it's related to, to storytelling. And it was interesting, you know, to write a book, which is essentially about the act of storytelling. But Zionism has always been a movement based in telling, based on telling a different story about

• 39:32Speaker 01

  ourselves. And it's not a coincidence that the greatest minds of Zionism are often writers, most prominently Theodor Herzl, who was playwright and a journalist. And he comes up with political Zionism because he understands that the story that the Jews are telling themselves in the 1890s in Cosmopolitan Vienna, which is a story of increasing assimilation and liberalism and acceptance in a Christian society. He realizes that this story is not true. And he understands that the Jews are going to need to tell themselves a different story and mobilize themselves for a different purpose. And his idea is that, which seems insane at the time, is that there's going to be a Jewish state and the Jews are going to emigrate from Europe and they're going to go to this state and they're going to

• 40:14Speaker 01

  be free people in their own land, to quote what ultimately becomes the Israeli national anthem. So, it's, he's, he's a writer, Jabotinsky's a writer, Begin's a journalist. And these people are, are writers. So the Zionist movement is essentially a storytelling movement. And it tells people that they're not refugees, they're pioneers. Which is a very effective form of storytelling because it takes people who are victims and turns them into agents of their own fate. And, you know, they're not, they're not running away from their home in Poland because that was never their home. They're, they're going to their real home. And whether or not this is real or fake is almost beside the point. It is a great story that saves the Jews in the 20th century. So there's a real connection between Zionism and the ability to tell, to tell a story.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  And here too, in 1944, we have an example of a mission that I think was mainly about a story. It was the Zionist movement using, using the story weapon. What was the idea? These people would go to Europe and they would write a different story about the Second World War. And in this story, the Jews would not be victims, they would be heroes. And they would not be miserable people in cattle cars. They would be parachutists jumping out of airplanes into occupied countries to bravely fight the Nazis. And this story would be so powerful that it would, of course, not change anything about the war, but it would change the way the war is remembered and then change the actions of people after the war. And I think that if you understand the, the mission in those terms, it makes sense.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  And it also then makes sense why the participants in the mission tended to be very literary people. Hanasenish is a good example, but Enzo Sorene was also a writer. He wrote a history of Italian fascism. He wrote a, a treatise, or he edited and wrote a treatise on Jewish-Arab coexistence under Zionist socialism, which is very interesting to read from 2026, but it made sense, I guess, at the time it was written in the 1930s. So these, these are people who wrote, and he dreamed of writing a great novel. So these people, these people understood storytelling and they understood themselves as characters in a story. And no one understood that better than Hanasenish, who was the daughter of a playwright and the daughter of a novelist and a bookworm and a theater kid.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  She literally grows up in, in a milieu of theater people in Budapest. So she knows exactly what a heroic quest is. She knows what the role of the heroine is. She knows who Joan of Arc was. She knows what's expected of her. She is not remembered because she's the best commando. She's remembered because she's the best writer. And I think that she instinctively gets this. And when we understand that this enterprise is not a military enterprise, it is at its root a literary enterprise, the thing begins to make more sense. So when the...

• 42:56Speaker 00

  Cashier at the skating rink asked me, "Why would she do that?" Which was a rhetorical question, to be sure, not a quest... question for information. I said, "Well, to save her people." And there was a long pause, and this 20-year-old, nice Hungarian young woman who had really no interest in a philosophical conversation on a Saturday night, nodded and said, "Oh, yeah, I get it." So, um... She didn't save her people. She couldn't save her people. But she could make a brave gesture

• 43:39Speaker 00

  about what it meant to be a member of a people that had this crazy dream of a country. And in parts of the book, we see Chana from her diary, talking about working on a farm in pre-Israel Palestine. And it's not her cup of tea. It's a hard... A lot of European Jews found themselves doing agriculture when they arrived in Israel, either before or after 1948, and struggled with it because it's not what they were used to. But she, at one point, you call it her second most famous poem. Read that poem, if you would.

• 44:22Speaker 00

  Do you have it handy? In... I'd love for you to read it in... I think she wrote it in Hebrew. So you could read it in Hebrew. And then you translated it. And you point out it's sometimes mistranslated. But it's, um... It's an anthemic... It's very brief.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  And so, the poem that I refer to as Chana's second most famous poem is called... In Hebrew, it's called "Ashrei HaGefur." And there's a debate about how to translate that name. Most of the translations will translate that as, most of the translations you'll see in English translate it as, blessed is the match. That's the most common translation of it, which in my opinion is a mistranslation of it. It's much closer to happy is the match. The word asheray in Hebrew comes from the prayer book. It's from a prayer that we say multiple times a day, which is happy, asheray asheray be tcha, happy are those who dwell in your house. So Hannah's playing on the words of a prayer. And I'll read it in Hebrew and then I'll read it, I'll read my own translation into English. So that in Hebrew it reads like this.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  Asheray ag'poru shnissraf ve'acit le'avot. Asheray hal'ava shba'arah besitrei le'avot. Asheray le'avot she'doul achdol bek'vod. Asheray ag'poru shnissraf ve'acit le'avot. So that's the poem. In my translation, which differs a bit from the most common one in English, it means something like this. Happy is the match that flared and lit the flames. Happy is the flame that burns secret in the deepest hearts. Happy is the heart that knew when in honor to stop. Happy is the match that flared and lit the flames.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  So this is a poem that we have, because of a pretty incredible series of events. Hannah is about to cross the border from Yugoslavia, where she's been with Tito's partisan army for a few months in the spring and early summer of 1944. And she's about to cross into Nazi occupied Hungary. And she knows that she's crossing a hostile border and that there's a very good chance she's not coming back. And her comrades are actually trying to convince her not to go. They think it's too dangerous. And she is not listening to reason as they see it. And she's insisting on crossing the border. She needs to get into Hungary. She needs to complete her mission. And her mother is trapped in Budapest, literally a few...

• 46:53Speaker 01

  You know, streets away from the villa where Adolf Eichmann is planning the liquidation of the Jews of Hungary. So she's, she needs to get into, into Hungary. And she, and she insists on going. And as she parts from a comrade named Ruven Daphne, another one of the Jewish parachutists in the forest near the border, she shakes his hand and he feels that she's pressing something into his hand. And she leaves and he sees that she's left him with a folded piece of paper. And when he unfolds the paper, he sees that she's written this poem. So in many ways, this poem is Hannah's last will and testament. She will write a few other documents in prison after she's, after she's captured.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  But, but this is something that she's writing with the knowledge that it might be her last communication with, with home. So Daphne says in his account of these events that he was so annoyed that, at this theatrical gesture, that he throws the poem away, throws it into the bushes and kind of stomps off back to the partisan camp and then regrets it and comes back to look for the, look for the piece of paper. And he finds it in, in a bush and brings it back. And it eventually travels from Yugoslavia across the Mediterranean back to British Mandate Palestine. And I've seen it. I've seen the note. It's kept at a keyboard in northern Israel. So that's how this poem makes it, makes it home. And

• 48:19Speaker 01

  it, it's a very famous poem at the time. It's printed almost immediately. It's put to music. It becomes kind of a staple of youth movement meetings and rallies. And what Hannah's saying here is something that I think is very important, that the ideological style of the poem, I think, hasn't aged well. So we kind of have to re-inhabit that world where people felt comfortable making high-minded ideological pronouncements, which is what she's doing. But it's Quite clear here, I think, what she's saying. If you look at the common English translation of the poem, the first line reads, "Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame." That's the way it's usually translated. And when I went to the Hebrew, I realized that that's a mistranslation.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  And in fact, that mistranslation tells us something very important about the mission, because the whole point of the first line is not that the match is consumed in kindling flame. The point is that the match lights the flame. The match is consumed after lighting the flame. And in fact, that word, I think, explains what Hannah thinks that she's doing. And it kind of explains her transformation from a young woman living in bohemian Budapest into a Zionist pioneer, because what differentiates Anna Senesh from Hannah Senesh's action, she's a woman of action. And she knows the match might be consumed, but first, it will light the flame that consumes the match. And that's what this poem says.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  So the poem has kind of been forgotten. It's much less known today than Hannah's most famous poem, which we could talk about if you want.

• 49:53Speaker 00

  We will.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  It's still quite a famous poem in Hebrew. And it kind of falls on hard dimes, along with all of the simple-sounding ideology of early Israel. And eventually, of course, there's a discomfort with martyrdom, and there's a discomfort with this whole story and what it seems to mean. But if we recreate the headspace of this very young woman in the summer of 1944, I think we can understand what she's saying. She knows she's about to cross the border between life and death, and she explicitly tells us that she's happy to cross.

• 50:32Speaker 00

  One of my students said Israelis don't do lofty, modern Israelis. But they do have their lofty moments, and I think this poem speaks to that. What's her most famous poem? And why is it famous?

• 50:47Speaker 01

  Hannah's most famous poem, which is probably one of the most famous Hebrew texts in our times, is a song that is now called Eli Eli. That's the song title. As it eventually becomes famous, Hannah actually gave that poem a different name. She called it "The Walk to Caesaria," Eli Hala Kesaria. Caesaria is a Roman ruin that was not far from the kibbutz where Hannah lived, which is called Stotiam. And it's this very short poem, it's just a few lines, and she writes it in 1942. And it's just, there's no ideology in it, there's no pronouncements about anything.

• 51:31Speaker 01

  It's just a very personal moment on the beach, looking at the water, seems to be during a storm. And it's discovered in, along with Hannah's belongings, after she vanishes in Europe. And it's put to music immediately, it's put to music in 1945. And it's given this absolutely beautiful tune. And it's kind of a perfect marriage of melody and words. The composer adds a word to the text to make it match the melody. So he repeats the first word of the poem, which is "Eli," which in Hebrew means "my lord." So Hannah writes that once in her poem, and he adds another one, so it becomes "Eli Eli"

• 52:14Speaker 01

  in order to make it fit the scheme of the song. And that song becomes what Hannah Sinisch is known for, and it's been covered hundreds and hundreds of times. As I was writing this book, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, so this was a couple of years ago, I happened upon a video on YouTube of these very burly Slavic guys in camouflage uniforms singing "Eli Eli." And it was a Ukrainian military choir doing a version of "Eli Eli." So People who may know nothing about Israel or about Hebrew literature know this song. And anyone, any of our listeners who attended Hebrew schools or Jewish summer camps

• 52:57Speaker 01

  or something like that probably encountered "Elieli." They might not know the story behind it or the woman who wrote it, but it remains one of the most famous songs in modern Hebrew.

• 53:09Speaker 00

  So we'll put a link up to the musical version of it, but could you recite the Hebrew and then the translation for our listeners?

• 53:18Speaker 01

  Absolutely. The original Hebrew song, which is slightly different in one word from the poem that Hannah wrote, goes like this. "Elieli, shlo igamer le'olam. Achol ve'hyam, rishrush shel amayim. Brak ha'shmain, tefilat ha'adam."

• 53:41Speaker 01

  That's it. That's the whole poem. And in English, it means, "My Lord, may these things never end. The sand and the sea, the murmur of water, the lightning in the sky, a human prayer."

• 54:03Speaker 01

  That's it. It's kind of a perfect poem. And it's written by someone who writes it in Hebrew and has been speaking Hebrew at this time for three years. And what a funny detail that I discovered when I was looking into this. I was looking at the original copy of the poem from Hannah's notebook, where she writes this poem and there's a spelling mistake in it. She writes the word "le'olam," which means, in this case, "never, may these things never end." She writes it with, she gets one of the letters wrong. Instead of the word "ain," she writes the letter "alef." And it's a reminder. It's kind of like finding a typo in Yates or something.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  Because it's such a famous poem, or finding out that Shakespeare didn't know how to spell fish, or something like that. She was a new immigrant to this country, and she was operating in a place that she didn't know very well, and in a language that she had only recently learned. And that's, I think, an important insight into her character. Afterward, she becomes kind of a legendary Israeli pioneer hero. So she gets turned into almost the ultimate pioneer. So she loves menial labor, and she's always ready, which she hated. And she is ready for sacrifice, which she was. And she is, of course, she's daughter of the nation. She's essentially Israeli, even though she never lived in a country called Israel. And when you read this poem, you remember that she was a very young woman who came from somewhere else.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  And the character of Hannah Senesh, the pioneer, was, to a very large extent, a character that she created. And again, this is a very theatrical, literary, young woman. She understood character. And she made a conscious decision to stop being the character that she had inhabited until she finished high school, which was a Hungarian bourgeois girl named Anna Senesh. And she becomes something else. She becomes a pioneer named Hannah Senesh, and then she becomes a heroic parachutist. And these are all very conscious decisions. And she documents it in these poems. She has a notebook full of poems that she doesn't tell anyone about because she's embarrassed about writing poems, because she's meant to be a simple laborer and a socialist pioneer.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  And the sabres in those days did not respect poets. You weren't supposed to be an intellectual. The Jews had enough intellectuals. What they needed was dairy farmers and people who are happy to, I guess, scrub the pots in the kitchen. And she had a bit of an ambiguous relationship with her own poetry, which she hides in a suitcase. And then this notebook is found after her death, and people realize that she'd been writing quite striking poetry. And again, I don't want to oversell it. It's not the most amazing poetry ever written. And she was a very young person. And what it is really, I think Eli Eli is a wonderful poem, particularly when put

• 56:53Speaker 01

  Together with the music, but the this is poetry written by a very young person who would have been great, who could have been great. So when we read Hannah Sannish's diaries and letters and poems, and she left a lot, you see that it's potential. It's it's something that should have been allowed to grow into something amazing and wasn't. And that's part of the tragedy of this of this story.

• 57:16Speaker 00

  I I should just mention, by the way, I should have said it earlier when we're talking about Anne Frank. Anne Frank's view of the world was very much crafted by people other than herself.

• 57:31Speaker 00

  The the play about her and the historical image of her was,

• 57:41Speaker 00

  like all famous people, I suppose, was a distortion in some dimension. It was not literally who she was, but the world used her in certain ways. And people can go read about that if they want. It's an interesting story. But I I just I just wanted to be fair to her that she's more complicated than a naive 15 year old who said, you know, deep down, I think all people are good at heart, or whatever is the exact thing she said in her diary.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  Absolutely. These people are are kind of fated to be remembered as cartoons.

• 58:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  And the fate of the hero is essentially to be venerated to the point where you're a two dimensional, you know, cardboard cutout of a person. And and that has definitely happened to Anne Frank, and we can see that now. And as Anne Frank's memory is abused by every conceivable political movement, you know, from left to right, and she's a symbol of immigrants and, you know, progressive ideology and nonconformist sexuality. She's a symbol for Palestinians, if you're on that side of things. She's a symbol of people being forced to wear masks because of COVID, if you remember that that episode. So she's a symbol of, you know, whatever you want, and it's a terrible abuse of that.

• 58:58Speaker 01

  Person who was just, she was just a little girl who was killed because she was a Jew and she never thought anyone would read her diary and she never asked to be famous. And there's something tragic about it, just as there's something tragic about Hannah, who, she's venerated, right? She's not, she's, she becomes a national heroine and she's remembered beyond anything that she could possibly have expected when she was alive. But part of that process is just this flattening of her character. And one of the great things for me about writing this book was discovering what an incredible character she really was. So I also went in with this idea that she was kind of, that's like Davy Crockett, like, how seriously are you gonna take, you know? It's like George Washington and the cherry tree. I mean, literally, these are the things that people remember about people who are fantastically complex. And Hannah Senesh was young, so she didn't have time to be

• 59:43Speaker 01

  that complex, but she was an incredibly intelligent and determined woman. And when you read her letters and, and her diary entries, even from a very young age, you see that this is someone with very powerful powers of observation and very, very skillful way of expressing herself. And to turn her into the kind of Sabra, Sabra poster child actually does her an injustice. And it's better than the alternative, I guess, which is forgetting her. But one, one thing that I'm trying to do in this book is to rescue her and to some extent, her comrades, not just from amnesia, but from mythology. Because when you realize that they're, they're real people, they're much more impressive. The cardboard

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  cutouts aren't impressive because they don't seem like human beings. When you understand that she was a human being and she did what she did, I think she's more of a heroine than I appreciated at the beginning of my work on this book.

• 1:00:37Speaker 00

  There's a poignant theme in the book. I think you mentioned it explicitly. It's might be in a couple of sentences, but it hovers over the book for me as somebody living in post October 7th, Israel. And by post October 7th, Israel, I mean, a world where Jews are hunted down and killed like animals at a music festival here, the Nova Festival on October 7th. Jews lighting a Hanukkah menorah in Australia are shot and killed.

• 1:01:12Speaker 00

  Inexplicably in modern times that we thought we'd never see again. And what hangs over the book that is poignant is that Herzl has a dream of a Jewish state as a way to deal with the fact that people don't seem to be able to get along with Jews. He's reacting to the pogroms of his day where particularly in Russia, in Eastern Europe, Jews are murdered, their houses are burned, their stores are looted. And he thinks, well, you know, we need to try to do something about this. And he says, if we only had our own state, this would be solved.

• 1:01:53Speaker 00

  So we do get our own state, which is, as you mentioned earlier, remarkably improbable. It is an historical blip, anomaly, whatever you want to call it, that is very unexpected, would not have been predicted for a long, long time until it happens. And even after it happened, it seemed impossible. Israel was attacked immediately by its Arab neighbors. It had no real army or air force. Somehow it manages to survive that attack, attacks that continue throughout the last 77 years. And I think there was a hope that the Jewish problem would go away. It didn't. It hasn't.

• 1:02:38Speaker 00

  And I'd just like to close and I'd like to hear your reflections on that as you're writing this book. Here are these characters, Khan and others, who are dreaming of a better world. They have their own naive idealism. It's not the same as Anne Frank's. It's a different one, that, you know, if only there were a place where Jews could be safe, there wouldn't be as much suffering in the world. They were wrong. As David Deutsch pointed out on our program, in my conversation with him, many, many Jews' lives were saved because of the establishment and state of Israel.

• 1:03:17Speaker 00

  But it has not solved the so-called Jewish problem, has not ended hatred of Jews. And you've been here a while, a lot longer than I have. You know how to spell. The Aleph and the I in correctly. Many new arrivals like myself make that error all the time because they're both somewhat silent.

• 1:03:41Speaker 00

  I say somewhat because that's a technicality we'll leave alone, but it's a common spelling error. Let's just leave it at that, especially for new arrivals. So you've been here a long time. You've fought in the IDF, in the Israeli army.

• 1:03:55Speaker 00

  You've endured a lot of things I haven't had to endure here. But we've both shared the last two years here together. What are your thoughts on what you were thinking when you wrote this book? And looking at that extraordinary idealism of being the match that lights a flame that they thought was going to put an end to a bunch of really horrible things, but hasn't quite managed to?

• 1:04:20Speaker 01

  I started writing this book in one state of mind and finished writing it in a completely different state of mind. I started the research more than a year before October 7th. And when I did, I thought I was writing a book about a very distant historical episode. And suddenly the times that Hannah lived in really came to life for me. And I'm not saying that, you know, this is the Holocaust and I'm not comparing the darkness of these times to the darkness of her times. But it's much easier to imagine her times now than it was when I started researching this book. And I think that when I moved here from Toronto, in my case, in 1995, I really felt that I was moving from one Jewish solution to another Jewish solution.

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  I did not feel that North American Judaism was precarious. And I thought that actually liberal Western democracy had essentially solved the problem for people who wanted to partake in it. And that Zionism had solved the Jewish problem for people who wanted to live in a Jewish state. And this is the mid 90s, so it's a pretty optimistic time. And things seem to be going in the right direction. It's the peace process. And I've been through a lot here long enough to doubt my certainty that everything was going in the right direction. But certainly it all crashed down on October 7th for everyone. And I think that anyone with their eyes open in the Jewish world understands that neither of these is a solution to the Jewish problem. And in fact, that we were, to a very large extent, deluded about where things stand in North America in one way, in Israel in a different way.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  But that many Jews had been pretty sanguine about our situation in the 21st century, when we should not have been. And I think we're in a very different... Yeah, pet space right now. And I think there's not much that's good about it. But one thing that was good about it for me was that I think it allowed me to inhabit more effectively the world of my characters and to understand who they were and how they saw things and just to understand what it's like to live in a world with where all the doors are slammed shut and where there is no clear way to progress. And if we feel that way now, then, I mean, Hanan or comrades felt that a million times over, we have a state, they had nothing and there was no clear path to one.

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  And in 1944, it was the heart of darkness. There was nothing good that seems possible. And yet, they didn't live in denial. They didn't go into their bed and pull the covers over their head and they didn't run away and didn't pretend to be something else. They got on an airplane and jumped back into the fire. And they offer us a model for how to act in a time where the options are unclear. So the designist path is action. And that's what Han is saying in that poem. The match isn't consumed in the flame. Match lights the flame. So it's all about action. So in 1944, it seems that there's nothing you can do.

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  Well, Ben Gurion would say, we need to build another farm, we need to pave another road, to build another school, we need to teach some more kids to speak Hebrew. It seems like nothing when 6 million people are being murdered. But eventually, that nothing becomes something. And just like this mission, which was essentially nothing in military terms, becomes something enormous that plays a part in saving the Jewish people. And that seems like a grand claim to make for a mission that clearly did not accomplish its goals. But it's the it's the story that Zionism tells people that allows the Jews to move

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  past the catastrophe and become actors again, become agents of their own fate again, and not fall into the trap of victimhood, which many have, including our most proximate neighbors, the Palestinians, who have a story that is about victimhood, and that is a trap. Because if you see yourself as a victim, you'll never be able to get anywhere. So the Jews basically make up a different story where, again, they're not refugees, they're pioneers, and they're not homeless, because this has always been their home. And, you know, when you run away to Israel, that's not running away, it's called aliyah, which means ascent. So there's a different way to see your situation. And stories are powerful things, and no one knows that better than better than the Jews, of course, who've survived

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  for 2,000 years, thanks to stories. That was all that was all they had, right? That was their only superpower. They certainly weren't, you know, they weren't known for military prowess, and they didn't they weren't known for their architecture, or their art, or for statecraft. You know, what they knew how to do was tell very powerful stories that kept this thing going through through the generations. Ironically, it's a superpower that we seem to have lost, to a large extent, since regaining sovereignty. So it's possible that, once you have the regular kind of power, you lose that old alchemy of storytelling. And, you know, what we've seen over the past few years has been an abject failure of this country to tell a story that makes sense about itself and about what it's doing. And we're dealing with the consequences of that, of course. But all of these thoughts occurred

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  to me, thanks to, that's a weird way of putting it, but occurred to me in the context of the post-October 7 world, which I think allowed me, gave me a different window into the time that I was writing about.

• 1:09:36Speaker 00

  My guest today has been Monty Friedman. His book is Out of the Sky. Monty, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  It was a pleasure, as always.

• 1:09:52Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.