I'm Christopher Leiden, this is open source, around Zionism this time. I'm asking three

guests to consider whether there's time enough still to reinvent the idea.

Zionism has been the question that keeps changing. Once it was

how to build a safe home for the Jews of the world. Today it is more nearly how to

build a safe neighborhood around the mighty militarized state of Israel.

Yuvall Noah Harare, the Israeli philosopher historian, put the question bluntly in the Washington Post this spring, will Zionism survive the Gaza war?

There's the riddle. Depending on who's speaking and who's listening,

Zionism can stand for refuge or for settler statehood or for religious

ethnon nationalism. Early liberal Zionists like Albert Einstein and Hannah Arend thought we would have figured out by now how a religious nation could also be open, inclusive, democratic, and peaceful.

Were they asking too much? democratic and peaceful.

Were they asking too much?

I put it to you first, Michi Harmon in Jerusalem,

and ask you to be our sample of young Israel

under extreme pressure. You were born in Jerusalem, studied history at

Harvard, archaeology at Cambridge, and then went back to Israel and

co-founded the most popular English language podcast in your country.

Eight months now into a horrifying war in Gaza.

I want to know what you are Israel is going through,

generationally, humanly, where's to begin?

That's a tough question, Chris, is the truth.

On October 6th, 1973, my father was at home sick. It was Yom Kippu. He didn't go to synagogue for I think for the first time in his life.

And my mother who was a new immigrant from America came back from the synagogue and at 2 p.m.

...