Episode 27: Music amidst trauma - a conversation on life in a war with Aya Korem and Adam Ben Amitai

Ask Haviv Anything

Haviv Rettig Gur

History

4.9 • 640 Ratings

🗓️ 7 July 2025

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There are many ways to process and manage painful and difficult times. After the massacre of October 7 and the multi-front war that ensued, many Israelis turned to music, and often to the powerful ballads and melodies of singer-songwriter duo (and married couple) Aya Korem and Adam Ben Amitai.

Aya and Adam join us in a special song-laden episode to take a look back at 21 months of pain, resilience, solidarity and, in the end, also hope.

This episode was sponsored by Bennett and Robin Greenspan of Houston, Texas, who believe in Israel's centrality and importance for the Jewish world.

They chose to dedicate this episode to Edut710en.org, a grassroots, volunteer-driven initiative established in the wake of October 7 to listen to, document, preserve, share and amplify the voices of survivors, first responders, and entire communities who experienced Hamas’s brutal attack firsthand. Over 1,600 testimonies have already been recorded to this date—many of them accessible at www.edut710.org.

We hope you like our new musical intro, written just for us by the incomparable Adam Ben Amitai.

Please join me on Patreon to support this project: ⁠ www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnything⁠.

If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at ⁠[email protected]⁠.

A podcast by Haviv Rettig Gur

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everybody.
0:07.3	Welcome to an extraordinary episode of Ask Haviv Anything.
0:12.6	We are probably, possibly, hopefully, toward the end of the war, of the long war, the 21-month war in Gaza, started by October 7.
0:23.1	We are recording ahead of Netanyahu's trip to Washington, in which President Donald Trump has
0:28.0	already said the Israelis have agreed to a 60-day ceasefire that will get out eight to 10 living
0:34.4	hostages, which is roughly half of the number of living hostages still in Gaza,
0:41.2	and hopefully be a first step toward a final conclusion of the war under American parameters
0:49.6	that talk about Hamas's leadership leaving Gaza and Hamas being disarmed and other forces coming in
0:56.1	and beginning the whole question of law and order and rebuilding.
1:00.4	So we're looking at, you know, for the first time we can imagine that end.
1:05.2	It's an end that doesn't have Hamas in power in Gaza, which is, of course, the fundamental Israeli war goal, and nobody
1:12.9	has any idea if Hamas will agree to it, if levers of influence over Qatar will work. We don't
1:18.7	know. We are in the same fog that everyone else is in, but it is possible, more than it has ever
1:24.2	been in the past, that we are toward the end.
1:35.1	And Rhele and I, who if you're a regular watch or listener of this podcast, you know,
1:41.7	is the executive producer and my wife and boss, have decided to take a little bit of a break from the usual kinds of conversations that we have about this war, about, I would say, history, and try something utterly and completely different that is totally new to us. So if you don't like it, that's okay. It's important to spice things up. We have invited our very, very good friends, Ayakoram and Adam Benamitai,
2:01.5	who are two of the most remarkable politicians.
2:08.2	Everyone I ever talk about is, this is the thing, I can't get off that groove,
2:12.2	who are two of the most remarkable musicians Israel has today and have produced some of the most important
2:21.2	music and I would even say culturally iconic texts of this moment of how Israelis feel.
2:29.7	There's a residential building in the city of Batyam near Tel Aviv that took a hit from an Iranian missile.
2:37.0	And there was damage and families have to deal with it and figure out how to rebuild and
	...

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