The Match That Lit the Flame: Hannah Senesh and the Creation of Modern Israel (with Matti Friedman)

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🗓️ 23 March 2026

⏱️ 70 minutes

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Summary

Why would a group of young Jews who escaped the Holocaust choose to parachute back into Nazi-occupied Europe? How did they become heroes despite the failure of that mission? Author Matti Friedman joins EconTalk's Russ Roberts to unravel these mysteries through his book Out of the Sky, revealing why a failed mission became one of Israel's most powerful founding myths. At the heart of the story is Hannah Senesh, a 23-year-old Hungarian poet who traded her Budapest life for a kibbutz, then traded the kibbutz for a parachute and a near-certain death sentence--and whose poems, scribbled on scraps of paper in forests near the Hungarian border, became some of the most famous texts in modern Hebrew.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.9	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.8	Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.2	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.7	Our email address is mail at econTalk.org.
0:30.0	We'd love to hear from you.
0:36.7	Today is January 18th, 2026.
0:39.6	I'm a guestist and author, Mati Friedman.
0:42.6	This is Monty's fourth appearance on the program.
0:44.9	He was last here in December of 2024, talking about Israel's war with Hezbollah and his book, Pumpkin Flowers.
0:53.9	Our topic for today is his latest book,
0:57.1	Out of the Sky, Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe, which is the strange tale of a group of
1:03.1	Jews living in Palestine under the British mandate during the Second World War, who parachuted
1:08.4	back into Nazi occupied Europe.
1:11.7	And the most famous member of this group was a woman, Hannah or Hannah Senish, a name some of you may know.
1:22.1	Mati, welcome back to Econ Talk.
1:24.7	Thank you so much for having me.
1:26.8	Now, Hana is famous in Israel, and I want, and I knew of her before I moved here as an
1:35.3	American Jew I knew about her before I moved to Israel.
1:37.3	You grew up in Canada, you may have heard about her when you were a boy, but in Israel,
1:43.3	the way you might encounter her name is much more
1:47.4	ubiquitous. So give us a flavor of her cultural importance here and why you would write a book
	...

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