The Jewish Story – A Wandering Jewish History Podcast

The Jewish Story Podcast

Narrative Therapy for a Nation

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Start at the beginning

The Jewish Story is one continuous story, told in order. The best place to begin is the first episode.

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2,500 years, in order

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Series

The Second Temple Era

Where the Jewish Story begins: the return from Babylon, the Men of the Great Assembly, the Greek encounter, the…10 episodes →Series

After the Destruction: Rome, Babylon and the Geonim

How a people without a land stayed a people: the refusal to be absorbed by Rome, the portable homeland of Torah, the…7 episodes →Series

Golden Age to Expulsion: The Jews of Spain

The full arc of Sefarad: its legendary origins, Yehuda HaLevi and the Rambam, the Zohar, the riots of 1391, the…10 episodes →Series

From Safed to Shabbetai Tzvi

The early modern Jewish world after the expulsion: the printing press, Dona Gracia, the mystics of Safed and the…10 episodes →Series

Hasidim, Enlighteners and Reformers

Eastern and Western Jewry meet modernity: the rise of Hasidism and its opponents, Mendelssohn and the Berlin…8 episodes →Series

The Birth of Zionism

From the age of nationalism to the first pioneers: the heralds of Zion, Herzl at Basel, the New Jew, and the religion…7 episodes →Series

Building the Yishuv: Balfour to the Arab Revolt

The Zionist movement grows into a state-in-the-making: the alliance with Britain, the challenge of Jewish power, the…8 episodes →Playlist

The Holocaust and Its Memory

The Holocaust, the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, and the long struggle over how to remember: the reparations…6 episodes →Series

Making 1948: The Birth of the State

From the revolt against British rule to independence: the underground, Zionism after the Holocaust, the battle for the…5 episodes →Series

The Great Aliyah: Absorbing the Exiles After 1948

The new state doubles its population in a few short years. Two episodes on what a Jewish state is for, and what it took…2 episodes →Playlist

Settling the Land After 1967

What Israel did with the territories it won in 1967: a greater Israel, the return to Hebron, Gush Emunim, the Jewish…9 episodes →Playlist

Rabin, Begin and Peace with Egypt

Israel after the Yom Kippur War: Rabin's first term, the 1977 upheaval that brought Menachem Begin to power, Camp…7 episodes →Series

The Temple Mount

Every tale has a point around which it revolves, and for the Jewish Story that point is the Temple Mount. In four…4 episodes →

The people who shaped it

The leaders

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Person

Hillel and Rabbi Akiva

The two great sages on either side of the destruction: Hillel, prince of the Torah in the last generations of the…3 episodes →Person

The Rambam

The Rambam, Maimonides: physician, philosopher and codifier, the storm over his books after his death, and the long…7 episodes →Person

The Baal Shem Tov and Hasidism

The Baal Shem Tov, the Hasidic movement he inspired, the opposition it provoked, and the courts it built across Eastern…3 episodes →Person

Theodor Herzl

Theodor Herzl, the Viennese journalist who turned an ancient longing into a political movement, from the heralds who…5 episodes →Person

Rav Kook and Religious Zionism

Rav Avraham Yitzchak Kook runs through the whole Jewish Story. These are the episodes where his ideas carry the weight,…15 episodes →Person

Ze'ev Jabotinsky

Ze'ev Jabotinsky, founder of Revisionist Zionism and author of “The Iron Wall,” and the movement he left behind.6 episodes →Person

David Ben-Gurion

David Ben-Gurion, the labor leader who declared the state and dominated its first decades.12 episodes →Person

Golda Meir

Golda Meir, from the early struggle for Soviet Jewry to the prime minister’s office, through the War of Attrition and…4 episodes →Person

Levi Eshkol

Levi Eshkol, the prime minister who led Israel into the Six-Day War, and a very different face of leadership after…8 episodes →Person

Moshe Dayan

Moshe Dayan, the soldier and politician at the center of Israel's wars from the 1950s to the 1970s, and of the status…12 episodes →Person

Yitzhak Rabin

Yitzhak Rabin, chief of staff in 1967, ambassador in Washington, and twice prime minister, from Entebbe to Oslo.9 episodes →Person

Menachem Begin

Menachem Begin, from the underground to the 1977 upheaval, Camp David and the Lebanon War.9 episodes →Person

Ariel Sharon

Ariel Sharon, from the reprisal raids of the 1950s to the crossing of the Suez Canal, the Lebanon War, the Temple Mount…10 episodes →

Where it happened

Places that shaped us

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Place

Jerusalem

The city at the center of the story: the Maccabees and Herod, the destruction, the poets who longed for it, the battles…12 episodes →Series

The Temple Mount

Every tale has a point around which it revolves, and for the Jewish Story that point is the Temple Mount. In four…4 episodes →Place

Babylon

Babylon: home of the exile, the Talmud and the Geonim, and for a thousand years a second center of Jewish life.7 episodes →Series

Golden Age to Expulsion: The Jews of Spain

The full arc of Sefarad: its legendary origins, Yehuda HaLevi and the Rambam, the Zohar, the riots of 1391, the…10 episodes →Place

Tiberias, Safed and the Galilee

The Galilee: the war against Rome, the holy cities of Tiberias and Safed, and Israel's northern border under fire.6 episodes →Place

Poland

Poland, heartland of Jewish life for centuries: the new homeland, the massacres of 1648, the Hasidic courts, the…10 episodes →Place

From the Pale to the Soviet Union

Russia and the Pale of Settlement, where most of world Jewry lived: the movements it produced, the pioneers it sent,…7 episodes →Place

Germany

Germany: the Berlin Enlightenment and the science of Judaism, the Holocaust, the reckoning that followed, and Munich.7 episodes →Place

Britain and the Mandate

Britain and the Jewish story: the Balfour Declaration, the Mandate, the revolt that ended it, and Suez.10 episodes →Place

Sinai and the Suez Canal

The Sinai and the Suez Canal, fought over in 1956, 1967 and 1973 and returned to Egypt for peace.8 episodes →Place

The Golan Heights

The Golan Heights, taken in 1967, held at great cost in 1973, and brought under Israeli law in 1981.4 episodes →Place

Gaza

Gaza, from Nathan of Gaza, prophet of Shabbetai Tzvi, to the raids of the 1950s and the intifadas.6 episodes →

See the whole story

The Timeline

Twenty-five centuries on one map, from the return out of Babylon to today. Pick an era to jump to its playlists.

Explore the timeline
The Second Temple600 BCE–70 CESages and Geonim70–1000Sefarad and Ashkenaz1000–1492After the Expulsion1492–1700Modernity Arrives1700–1880Return and Catastrophe1880–1948The Young State1948–1967After 19671967–1987Into the Present1987–2023
586 BCE First Temple destroyed70 Second Temple destroyed1492 Expulsion from Spain1897 First Zionist Congress1948 Independence1967 Six-Day War
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Past Episodes

TJS S6E20 Temple Mount part IV

June 1, 2023

Was Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount in 2000 the trigger for what the Arab community calls the Al Aqsa Intifada? Or was this a pre-planned assault...

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The Jewish Heroism Project

The final episode of The Jewish Story announced Rav Mike’s next project: a free course on Jewish heroism and identity.

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