Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week, we’re speaking with Dr. David Sasso. A musician and psychiatrist, David works in the intersection of mental health, music, and the arts and serves as Assistant Clinical Professor at the Yale School of Medicine.

Full disclosure, David and host Amanda Borschel-Dan attended high school together in Indianapolis, after which he studied Music Composition at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and double majored in biochemistry before attending medical school at Northwestern. As a teen, David premiered works with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, and later his full-length opera "The Trio of Minuet" was performed featuring children as the main characters.

More recently, David has focused on various traditional folk genres and his duo project -- Kat Wallace and David Sasso -- is releasing its second album in October.

We’ll discuss the idea of the creative genius and hear excerpts of his music, especially two very different pieces he wrote about Noah’s Ark.

IMAGE: Dr. David Sasso (courtesy)

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Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week we’re speaking with Mark Halawa, who -- although Jewish from birth according to halacha or Jewish law -- only after some 11 years in Israel recently gained his Israeli citizenship.

That's because Mark was born and raised in Kuwait to a family of Palestinian refugees. His father, once a colleague of Yasser Arafat, is a secular Muslim. His mother is the daughter of a Jewish woman from the Holy Land who married a Muslim man. So according to Muslim law, he’s Muslim. And according to Jewish law, he’s a Jew.

Hear how Mark learned about his Jewish identity and made his way from Kuwait to Jerusalem, where he is building his own tribe of tolerant citizens of the world.

IMAGE: Kuwaiti-born Mark Halawa receives his Israeli citizenship, August 2021. (Courtesy)

Read more here: https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-a-kuwaiti-muslim-made-a-jewish-home-in-jerusalem/

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Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week, we’re speaking with Ariel Zwang, the new CEO of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

Zwang is a longtime CEO of other nonprofits, but for the Jewish world, it is still a real rarity to see a woman at the top. We’ll speak about a life of breaking glass ceilings and what still needs to be done for more gender parity in the Jewish organizational sphere. 

Zwang is just back from a month-long tour of Israel where she visited Lod and other sites of coexistence flar-ups during the recent May conflict. Also, Zwang discusses the JDC’s footprint around the world, among all nations regardless of religion, its work here in Israel, and how the mammoth organization is trying to get more input from the next generation of leaders.

IMAGE: JDC's new CEO Ariel Zwang visits with participants of Hanoch Digital, a JDC program that helps Israeli Haredim embrace technology to confidently enter the job market. (courtesy)

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Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week we're speaking with an up-and-coming high-risk pregnancy specialist Dr. Joshua Rosenbloom. The Harvard Medical School trained magna cum laude immigrated to Israel a few years ago and now works from Jerusalem’s Hadassah Ein Kerem medical campus.

When we spoke, Rosenbloom was fresh from delivering a baby a few minutes earlier via cesarean section and could have been called at any moment to deliver another, so our conversation is concise, fast-paced and informative.

It is also based on the curiosity of host Amanda Borschel-Dan as a 45-year-old woman who has just entered her 8th month of pregnancy. She has found very little information online for pregnancy in her age bracket and wanted to set the record straight for others.

We discuss high-risk pregnancy, fertility, pre-natal testing, and how Israel compares versus North America.

ILLUSTRATIVE IMAGE: A pregnant woman undergoes an ultrasound in Israel. (Chen Leopold/Flash90)

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Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week, ahead of Sunday's observance of Tisha B’Av on Sunday, which commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples, we go onsite in Jerusalem to the Temple Mount Sifting Project.

We speak with archaeologist Zachi Dvira, who is the co-director of the project. He’ll explain its controversial genesis and continuing struggle. At the end of our conversation, you'll hear as we wet sift a bucket of earth taken from the Temple Mount.

Founded in 2004 near the Mount of Olives, it’s now at a new location called Mitzpe Hamasuot, near the Hebrew University. The new site is easily accessible and has an auditorium and a shady picnic grove, which was made possible with the help of American Friends of Beit Orot.

Dvira calls for all who have not been to help sift through thousands of years of Temple Mount history to "hurry up!"

IMAGE: Visitors sifting buckets of earth from the Temple Mount at the relaunch of the Temple Mount Sifting Project, June 2, 2019. (Yosef Huri)

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Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel.

This week we’re speaking with a dynamic young Israeli filmmaker named Dani Schoffman, whose short “Aye Ko” was filmed in Burma after he lived in the fascinating mysterious country for several years following NYU film school.

Here is a link to the film, so you can watch ”Aye Ko” now, before you hear us discuss it, or following our conversation.

The film follows a 12-year-old Burmese girl as she struggles to bring a blessed goat home to her village for her sister’s wedding. Everything goes wrong and we meet a colorful cast of characters along the way.

Schoffman describes his initial culture shock in arriving in Burma, a country that was essentially closed to the world for 60 years, how he found himself giving an offering to Buddha to ward off a curse while filming, and how the Yiddish phrase “Man tracht un gott lacht” — “Man plans and god laughs” couldn’t have been more true.

IMAGE: A still from 'Aye Ko' by Dani Schoffman (courtesy)

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Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week, at the tail end of Pride month, we're speaking with a leader of IGY — the Israel Gay Youth organization -- Rom Ohayon, who heads up all post-high school programs.

Today, IGY is funded in part by the Israeli Ministries of Education, Health and Social Welfare, in addition to private donations. There are some 400 IGY volunteers who offer support and advocacy for over 4,000 gay youth a year throughout Israel. IGY works in conjunction with the IDF, the National Service programs, and is launching a new pre-military academy named after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg this fall.

But it was not always on the Israeli scene and was only created in 2002 by Yaniv Weizman and Gal Ohovsky, specifically for youth aged 12-23. Its ongoing evolution and spread to all kinds of Israel’s diverse communities means the group is gradually filling a massive void for gay youth and helping them stay integrated within Israeli society.

By 2010, IGY started its post-high school Year of Service group. Some participants continue to the IDF’s Nahal Brigade, which was founded by David Ben-Gurion in 1948 and traditionally combines military service with serving in small communities.

Since 2018, several graduates of the service and army programs have settled in Afula and become IGY leaders. This is where we find 29-year-old Rom Ohayon today.

IMAGE: IGY participants (courtesy)

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Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week, as Israel is experiencing a minor surge of the delta or Indian variant of the coronavirus, we speak with The New York Times’s South Asia bureau chief Jeffrey Gettleman, who is based in New Delhi.

We discuss the horror of the height of the pandemic in India, which the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist describes as every nation’s nightmare.

Prior to his four years in India, Gettleman has reported from war fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq, was taken hostage in Fallujah, has covered conflict in Sudan, Somalia, Egypt, Yemen and Ethiopia.

Covering the pandemic is different, he said, and much closer to home.

Hear about the overloaded health care system and how India is slowly stymieing the pandemic.

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Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week, ToI published an article about a fascinating study that pinpoints when and where early modern man met up with their Neanderthal cousins -- 50,000 years ago in the Negev Desert.

The multi-disciplinary study was authored by the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Weizmann Institute and draws on hi-tech carbon-14 dating, alongside the discovery of material culture excavated by IAA prehistorian, Dr. Omry Barzilai, at the Boker Tachtit site in the Negev.

Barzilai explains his path into the world of prehistoric archaeology and helps put a human face on early man, whom he firmly believes were a lot like us.

For more on the new study, see:

Prehistoric man lived with and loved Neanderthals in the Negev 50,000 years ago

IMAGE: Prehistorian Dr. Omry Barzilai. (Courtesy)

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Even as the State of Israel appears poised to usher in a new era of politics, this week on Times Will Tell we are looking back at the prime minister who, in 1977, caused the original “Mahapach” or “Upheaval” -- Menachem Begin.

We’re speaking with director Jonathan Gruber, whose English-language film about Begin, “Upheaval,” opened this week.

Gruber paints a complex picture of Begin, a self-proclaimed “simple Jew” from Poland, whose Zionism led him to become one of Israel’s founders and most influential leaders.

The film is well worth viewing for the star-studded cast of interviewees and remarkable historical images and footage. We hope this conversation with Jonathan Gruber whets your appetite to see the movie, which is available now in virtual theaters.

IMAGE: In this November 16, 1980 file photo, Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin as he appeared on the ABC program 'Good Morning America.' (AP Photo, File)

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