Day 652 - Actor Guri Alfi on the need to unite Israel and the Diaspora

The Times of Israel Daily Briefing

The Times of Israel

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4.4 • 864 Ratings

🗓️ 19 July 2025

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring key issues currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, with host Jessica Steinberg speaking with Guri Alfi, comic, actor and producer of "The New Jew."

Recorded before the conflict with Iran, Alfi speaks about his experiences filming the second season of "The New Jew," a series he first created with public broadcaster Kan 11 in 2021 that had him looking at the Jewish community in the United States.

For these latest episodes, Alfi traveled to the US to speak to Jews in the wake of October 7 and the intense antisemitism and anti-Zionism that exploded across college campuses and American cities.

Guri discusses his conversations with a range of Jewish leaders, including Reform Rabbi Angela Warnick Buchdahl, student leaders from Columbia and Harvard universities, and bereaved parents whose dual-citizen children became Israeli lone soldiers and were killed in the line of duty on October 7 and during the ongoing war.

Guri says he wanted to show the bonds between the Israeli and American Jewish communities, and to show the hope and future that still exist despite the terrible events and trauma of the last 21 months.

He also talks about one of his latest projects, “Speeches Against Despair” during the upcoming Israel Festival, in which he, along with actress Noa Koler, musician Noga Erez, actor Norman Issa, actress Maya Landsmann, screenwriter Galit Hoogi and others offer new interpretations to historical speeches.

And so this week, we ask Guri Alfi what matters now.

What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was produced by the Pod-Waves.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, welcome to the Times of Israel's What Matters Now, a weekly podcast delving into one issue,
0:07.8	or sometimes several, affecting Israel in the Jewish world right now.
0:11.7	I'm your host, Jessica Steinberg, and I'm joined today by Guri Alfie,
0:15.6	a very, very familiar household name here in Israel and elsewhere.
0:20.6	He's an Israeli actor, comic, writer,
0:23.0	host, director, many titles to offer to Guri Alfie. Guri, thanks so much for being with me today.
0:29.9	No problem. How are you? I'm okay. How are you? As we say, right? Doing as well as you can.
0:36.6	Right. Yeah, surviving this. Surviving another day.
0:40.2	Yeah. Right. Let me tell a little bit to our listeners about how they know you, just to remind them.
0:46.5	So I'm just going to list some of Gorey's credits that our listeners are certainly familiar with,
0:53.2	acted in the chef, perfect strangersangers, Shabadnikim,
0:57.1	which is a very popular show among our listeners and readers.
1:02.1	He was in the film, The Human Resources Manager, which was a very long time ago, but which
1:06.9	we were just talking about, directed the show's sisters, was a writer on Hayom Balala
1:12.6	and Matzava Umah and really many, many others. But I wanted to have you on, Gory,
1:19.6	on What Matters Now, because of your latest season of the New Jew, which is a Kanahadis Re, a Khan 11 show. You created it with them.
1:30.6	That's the public broadcaster in Israel. And you first connected, you created it back in
1:36.2	2021, right? Looking at the Jewish community in the United States, was that the first, right?
1:41.2	Yeah, that was the first. And the second was after the war, after, well, the war was not
1:47.9	over.
1:48.7	After the 7th of October, I wanted to see to come back and do this follow-up about the
1:55.5	people that I met there and how they're handling it and what happened, what changed,
	...

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