Allison Kaplan Sommer, Don Futterman and Noah Efron discuss three topics of incomparable importance and end with an anecdote about something in Israel that made them smile this week.

Looking for the extra-special, special extra segment?

The Small Matter of the Bill

New elections may cost Israel as much as 5 billion shekels. Should politicians take into account the small matter of the bill?

Friedman is the New Jabotinsky

The “First Conference on Israeli Conservatism” fills a huge conference center, mostly with kippah-capped men. What accounts for the new affinity between Reagan-Thatcher politics and economics and Israeli Modern Orthodoxy?

Heschel is the New Herzl

Should Reform, conservative and reconstructionist Jews in Israel take to the streets to fight for political causes that have nothing to do with religious pluralism like, say, social and economic justice?

Why Has TAU Declined to Denude the University of All Its Sackleriana?

For our most extremely generous Patreon supporters, we discuss in our extra-special, special extra segment the urgent request sent by Physicians for Human Rights, Israel, to Tel Aviv University, asking to remove the name “Sackler” from the Sackler Faculty of Medicine, on the grounds that the famous family of Jewish philanthropists’ own Purdue Pharma, the makers of Oxycontin, a drug that has ravaged so much of the US (which request the university refused because, you know, money is useful to buy things).

Music

New singles by Adiel Tiri:

• Halas (חלאס)
• Behiat Iyuni (בחייאת עיוני)
• Zeh Mesubah (זה מסובך)
• La-Hatzot Yabeshet (לחצות יבשת)