JOHN PODHORETZ: Dan, you and I are in a unique position because for the last two years, our respective podcasts have become a key source of a complex blend of information, news, perspective, and comfort to people deeply affected by October 7 and the two-year war that followed. And one of the things that Call Me Back and The Commentary Magazine Podcast have in common is that this was entirely situational. We didn’t plan it. We didn’t think that this is what we were going to talk about for two years on the morning of October 6, 2023. You had been doing this podcast about what America might be like after the coronavirus. Then, after a couple of months of podcasting about the aftermath of October 7, Call Me Back took off like few things I can think of taking off. It was like suddenly two months in, it was all I heard people talking about, you shot up the Apple charts. Why did you connect so viscerally with so many people?
DAN SENOR: What I felt was missing from all the international press coverage and many of the conversations was Israelis speaking to the world from Israel trying to explain the dilemmas and the challenges they were dealing with as they were confronted with this war—Israelis who don’t always agree with each other and don’t always agree with certain parts of our audience. I had no idea there’d be a big market for it. I had no idea there’d be that much interest in it. It was who I wanted to hear from. And in hearing these Israelis wrestle with these challenges and talk about these challenges, they also explained basic facts and basic history when the conversation and the press coverage turned so dark over here and was so unnerving to so many of us in the Jewish community. I mean, it’s crazy. There’s your podcast, there’s my podcast; we can probably count on one hand how many others that actually just provided basic facts, basic history. Listeners were like, Oh, this could be my anchor. This could be the place I go to just make sure I’m not losing my mind. No, Israel’s not actually trying to impose a mass famine on the Palestinian people. No, Israel’s not targeting hospitals in order to kill babies in incubators. We were providing that content to people who needed it. One thing I did, and you sometimes give me a hard time about, is I included in the conversations people who are considerably to the left of me. And I know that made some of our listeners crazy, but I just thought it was important to keep everybody in the room, you know. I’ve heard from many people over here in this community, in the Diaspora community, including someone who’s a close friend of yours and mine, say to me, “You know, your podcast is holding the whole community together. Like, otherwise it’s gonna split apart.” Now, I don’t think our podcast was single-handedly doing that, but in a sense, it’s a metaphor.
JOHN: There’s also a question of family.
DAN: I think we talk about how October 7 and the war that followed touched every single Israeli. As Tal Becker said on my podcast, Israel is a very small country, but it’s a really big family. As a percentage of the population, more Israelis served in this war than Americans fought in World War II. And those family connections are broader than that. We have that, right? You have a nephew and a nephew-in-law serving. I have sisters who are living through this and whose daughters and sons have all served in some way, been called up for reserve duty, have spouses and boyfriends who’ve all been called up, one of whom is literally right now in Gaza waiting for when he gets pulled back but hasn’t been pulled out yet. What’s the secret sauce? I think part of it is that we have this very intuitive, instinctive sense for what’s going on. Because we’re talking to family members who are in it every single day.
JOHN: Our audiences are not parallel, I think, though it’s likely that they overlap very, very substantially. My audience probably has a larger contingent of non-Jews in it than yours. When you say I gave you a hard time about having people on that I don’t agree with ideologically, some of that is jokey. Because I think there was a real lesson in what you’ve been doing. Israelis, all Israelis, understood down to their kishkas that the attack of October 7 was an attack on all of them. It was designed to lead to a multifront attack, to bring Hezbollah down from the north to create a two-front war, maybe ignite the West Bank to create a third front. All so Israel would be pincered on all sides. There was no safe harbor. So you’re having on people of different ideological colorations, including somebody like Benny Morris, who is reviled in many quarters for having stained Israel’s reputation in the world as a historian by focusing on supposed atrocities that Israel committed in the War of Independence. Benny Morris was no different from anybody else in Israel in saying, “Yes, this is an existential threat to us, and this is a war that we have to win, and we have no choice.” It was very meaningful that he said that to you, just as it was meaningful on your podcast that you surfaced people who are very much on the left in the United States. I think particularly of Sam Harris and Scott Galloway, who emerged as defenders of Israel and the Zionist project and whatever out of nowhere. But they saw what they saw with their eyes, and they could not stay silent, and that had great meaning to people. So what you and we were saying seemed to be not only helpful to people but drew this audience because their friends were saying, “You’ve got to listen to Call Me Back or COMMENTARY because everybody is talking nonsense or worse or is being deliberately dishonest, and you can get a better flavor of the situation.” From us. People needed to hear voices saying, “No, you’re not crazy. What’s happening to Israel is evil and it’s barbaric.”
DAN: You mentioned Sam Harris and Scott Galloway and people like that. I think that was in part the wake-up call because Sam Harris is an elite podcaster. And Scott Galloway is affiliated with a university. He’s affiliated with NYU. So he was watching what was happening at NYU and he was like, wait a minute. Harris was watching people he knew and listened to, what they were saying, and he was shocked by it. I do think there are a lot of liberal Jews, even Jews who would self-describe as progressive, who were drawn to my podcast because of people like that, because of Sam Harris and Scott Galloway. I had Sam Harris on again on my podcast for the two-year anniversary of October 7, and he’d come on my podcast for a long conversation for the one-year anniversary of October 7. I’d asked him on the first anniversary, I said, “What has surprised you most over the past year?” And he said, “This explosion of anti-Semitism. I thought we’d lived through, like, an enlightened era and I was so floored by it.” So then we did a conversation for the two-year anniversary. And I said, “After the first year, you told me your biggest surprise was the explosion of anti-Semitism. Now, tell me your biggest surprise in the second year.” And he said, “It’s just still the explosion of anti-Semitism. I’m still shocked by it. Like, two years in, I’m still shocked by it.”
JOHN: What I’m floored by is hearing Harry Enten on CNN telling me that in the immediate aftermath of October 7, America supported Israel over the Palestinians by 49 points. Two years in, and America supports Palestinians over Israel by 1 point. That’s a 48-point swing. That says to me that these two years have featured an unbelievably successful propaganda campaign against Israel, against Zionism, against the idea that what was going on was a response to unprecedented assault and that Israel had the right to defend itself. That’s frightening and dangerous.
DAN: I’d say less than a quarter of our audience is not Jewish. But when we drill down and understand where that audience is, the non-Jewish audience, it’s basically in two corners. One is a lot of journalists who aren’t Jewish, who quietly, secretly listen to Call Me Back. I don’t want to out people here, but there are journalists who are at CNN and the Atlantic and the New York Times. So I have found that even in the non-Jewish world, among elite types, there are some people who don’t wake up as cheerleaders for Israel every day, but they also don’t wake up every day with this hostility to Israel. I think what October 7 did for them is it at least got them thinking about how complicated this was and that the mainstream media was missing the complexity. And they felt a sense of responsibility, to their credit, to at least try to address the complexity, even if they wouldn’t wind up on every issue where you would or I would wind up. At least they knew, it’s more complicated than it’s being reported.
JOHN: Something happened to you in London with a listener.
DAN: I was in London in December 2023, and I was invited to meet with the Saudi ambassador to the UK. It turned out he was a regular listener to the podcast. And he wanted to talk about what was going on in Israel. At some point I said to him, “You know, Mr. Ambassador, I’m flattered, but why? Why are you listening to my podcast?” And he said, “You know, as a diplomat for Saudi Arabia, I get official transcripts of statements by the prime minister at the beginning of cabinet meetings or press statements. But I don’t really understand how actual Israelis are thinking about things. And your podcast is delivering that for me.” After that, I said to my colleague Ilan, “Can you see geographically where our listeners are?” And sure enough, we have a big audience in the Arab world. Had no idea. I mean, not big relative to our audience in the U.S. or Canada or the UK, but it was much bigger than I expected. And I assume these are all elites. It’s not like the guy on the street is listening to us. These are all professors, I’m sure, like at Cairo University or the diplomats at the Saudi foreign ministry. They’re elite types, but still. And I just thought to myself, podcasts like yours and mine, if we can reach people like that, there’s got to be something more here we can do now that we’re out of this. There’s got to be a way to start reaching these people in a systematic way because they admit that they can’t get this from the mainstream media.
JOHN: These are positive signs, but they come amidst frightening portents in American politics.
DAN: I don’t know if you saw this clip floating around, Kamala Harris giving an interview in which she was asked about whether Israel had committed a genocide, and she didn’t knock it down. She didn’t endorse it, but she basically gave oxygen to it. Like she legitimized it as a question.
JOHN: You can add to that, in terms of the mainstream Democratic Party that was in power until January, that Biden’s national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, says he now supports an arms embargo against Israel. He’s also now the spouse of a first-term congressman from New Hampshire. And I think he said what he said about an arms embargo for her sake. If his idea is that a member of Congress from New Hampshire, even in a liberal part of New Hampshire, needs her husband to say that he would support an arms embargo so that that can’t be used against her by a democratic socialist in a primary, that’s a …
DAN: To quote Abe Greenwald, it’s worse than that. It’s worse than that. I spoke to one of Sullivan’s former colleagues. And I said, “What was that about?” And this individual said, “Jake doesn’t believe that. It was only months ago that we were dealing repeatedly with these very issues, and it was constantly being proposed to us from various people within the administration and Congress that we consider doing this, and he was always against it. He wasn’t just against it. He was one of the people who was just constantly shutting it down. So I know he doesn’t support this.” So I said, “What is it then? Why the change?” He said, “Because Jake wants to maintain his viability to serve in a future Democratic administration. That’s what it is; that he needs to cleanse himself of the Biden foreign policy.” He was basically saying that no matter who is the next Democratic president, the price of entry is, at a minimum, supporting this position. That’s all you need to know. Sullivan is a young guy, like 45, he’s ambitious, he’s talented, he wants to serve in future administrations, and he could. He just needs to get this thing cleaned up, this whole pro-Israel thing.
JOHN: I think we have to talk a little about the surprise of the second administration of Donald Trump. You and I, I wouldn’t say famously, but at least publicly were, you know, anti-Trump in 2016. And I think we were pleasantly surprised in the first term by many actions taken by the Trump administration. But I was not prepared for the resolute quality of the nine months leading up to the astonishing events of September and October. I see something almost providential in what has happened here. This is the only issue on which Trump appears to come at matters in a moral and intellectual frame. On the floor of the Knesset, as the hostages were coming home, he stood there and said he believed that Israel not only won the war but was just and righteous. And his 20-point plan is basically Israel’s long-held wish list for peace with the Palestinians. The Palestinians have to disarm, they have to create a sort of a democratic polity. They need to change their education system. They need to change their media. They need to change their this, that, and the other thing. And then, at the end of that, and with various confidence-building measures, at that point, that’s when we can talk about a Palestinian state.
Speaking as a Zionist, as somebody with family in Israel, as somebody who believes in the Jewish state as an intellectual and historical project and believes that it is the fulfillment of my own faith’s deepest longing, yearning, and need, my personal feeling of gratitude to Donald Trump has kind of overwhelmed me in the last two weeks. There was a time it was the last thing I would ever have expected to feel; I expected I could feel grudging support for some policies that I thought were okay from somebody that I did not, you know, have the highest opinion of, but that was it. And here I am now.
DAN : I feel the same way. I will say I’m struck by how many Diaspora Jews I know who feel that way. I mean a lot, meaning it’s more than I expected. They’re not being clinical about it. They’re not being, Well, yeah, I guess this is good. I guess he deserves some credit, Trump. You know, they’re feeling a version of what you just expressed. I don’t know where people go with that, but I’m just hearing that over and over and over. I met with Trump in December of ’24 during the transition, at Mar-a-Lago. At one point, we’re talking about Israel on October 7. And he started to describe in excruciating, in very graphic detail, the images of October 7 of the hostages basically being taken. I don’t want to go through all of them now, but you know, just some of the more grotesque and ghoulish images. And I’m sitting there thinking, why is he sitting there going through all of these again? It can’t just be for my benefit and the people I was with because he knows we know this as well. He was almost describing it as though we didn’t see the images, and he was going to tell us how awful they were. So I do think he was affected by October 7. And I do think he was affected by the hostages and their families. I don’t know to what extent he’s affected by anything. I don’t know him well, certainly. But people I do know who know him well say he doesn’t usually talk in emotional terms about much of anything except this issue. So something about this touched him and moved him in a way that he can’t stop talking about it—even when he knows the people he’s talking to about it know. And yet, he still feels he needs to talk about it.
JOHN: I remember that in 2015 and 2016, one of the reasons that I was feeling negatively about him was that the tone that he took when he talked about the Middle East was very much different. It was him saying he could make the greatest real estate deal. But for me, this is a moral and civilizational struggle that Israel has been going through for more than seven decades, facing an eliminationist philosophy that it can’t really negotiate with. It sounded like Trump was coming at this from his transactional side: Everybody’s got their case and you sit down at a table and everybody can work it out. That sounded like the basis of something very bad. But something else happened, especially this year. During the High Holy Days, we read in synagogue from the Book of Numbers, the story of the Gentile prophet Balaam who was hired by an enemy of the Jews. Balaam is a real prophet with magical powers, so his curses can really have a devastating effect. So God puts words of praise rather than curse in Balaam’s mouth. I’m certainly not saying that Trump is an evil prophet and God had to put words in his mouth. But there is this tradition in Jewish history at very, very, very odd moments, when righteous Gentiles arise to help us, like Cyrus, the king of Persia, who lets the Jews return to Israel after their forcible exile. Donald Trump is now at the top of a list, at least at our moment, a list of righteous Gentiles who have affected Jewish history for the better.
DAN: Like you, I’m overwhelmed by it. I feel like we’re going to be processing this for a while. What has just happened. Because it’s not like there’s what Trump would have done, and then there’s what Trump did, and then the alternative would have been maybe not as good, but good enough. You know, or fine, or a little annoying, but fine. It’s the contrast to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. It wasn’t just that Trump did what he did. It’s that the other side has gone, you know, is going in this incredibly dark direction.
JOHN: I don’t know where things go from here. Optimism, you know, could be a fool’s errand.
DAN: That’s how I feel. On the one hand, I have extraordinary optimism, and I can paint a picture of how Israel is now in for a roaring few years of successes. And I feel that way economically, I feel that way militarily, I feel that way geopolitically, I feel that way even societally about Israel. And I could paint that picture and I tend to believe it, but I also know how shocked I was by October 7. And you know, and just when you’re feeling overly confident and rosy-eyed is when something sneaks up on you. So I’m, I’m, waiting.
JOHN: Well, that’s Jewish history for you.
We want to hear your thoughts about this article. Click here to send a letter to the editor.
