Hi everybody.

Welcome to Episode 4 of Ask Habib Anything.

Last Jew Standing.

Today we're going to dive deep into the history and the experiences that created Israeli Jews.

This isn't the story of Israeli Jews. This isn't the

totality of the history. This is what we tried to do two episodes ago in episode two for

American Jews. We dug into the things that made American Jews what they are, that

explains some of the strangest aspects of American Jewish life

and culture and institutions and religion and the detachment that American Jews seem to have

from the Jewish history that came before them. And the argument was that those come from a deep

place, from things that are from fundamental historical experiences that have been

lost in a kind of generational forgetfulness that makes it hard to see. And we dove into the

history that American Jews mostly don't know. Some obviously do, and all of our sources were

American Jewish historians.

But generally the general American Jewish population doesn't know this story that created and

shaped themselves. There's an old aphorism. A fish doesn't know it's swimming in water.

We swim in beliefs, in assumptions, in social structures that we don't see. They're too

big, they're too assumed, they're too much shared between us all. They've been there too long

for us to ever talk about them or need to grapple with them, and so we don't see them.

Today we're going to dive into the water that Israeli Jews swim in.

The historical experiences that created the fundamental assumptions that are so big,

Israeli Jews rarely talk about them, rarely, really grapple with them.

...