Stay ConnectedWhere Israel’s hardest questions meet Jewish values.
This podcast brings Israeli lived reality and Diaspora perspective into honest conversation about religion and state, democracy, pluralism, and Jewish responsibility. Hosted by IRAC Executive Director and attorney Orly Erez-Likhovski and Rabbi Josh Weinberg, Vice President for Israel and Reform Zionism at the Union for Reform Judaism, each episode creates space for thoughtful dialogue — without slogans, and without simplifications.
Copyright: © 2025 Orly Erez-Likhovski
In this episode of The Pluralist Podcast, Orly Erez-Likhovski and Rabbi Josh Weinberg speak with Samah Darwish, Director of IRAC’s Racism Crisis Center, and Yolanda Savage-Narva, Vice President for Racial Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at the Union for Reform Judaism. At a time marked by war in Israel and growing fear within Jewish communities in the United States, this conversation explores how racism, extremism, and polarization are reshaping our societies. From legal advocacy and policy change to public awareness and shared society work, Samah and Yolanda offer a grounded, values-driven perspective on what it takes to confront racism today. This is a cross-ocean conversation about responsibility, leadership, and the challenge of holding onto democratic values even in moments of fear.
IN THIS EPISODE
About the guests:
Samah Darwish is the Director of IRAC’s Racism Crisis Center, leading efforts to combat racism in Israel through legal advocacy, policy engagement, and public education. Yolanda Savage-Narva is Vice President for Racial Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at the Union for Reform Judaism, where she leads work on racial justice and belonging in North American Jewish life.
Women’s rights are facing new challenges in both Israel and the United States.
In this episode of Pluralist: From Both Sides of the Ocean, Orly Erez-Likhovski and Rabbi Josh Weinberg speak with Rabbi Liz P.G. Hirsch, CEO of Women of Reform Judaism, about the fight for gender equality, religious pluralism, and democratic values across the Jewish world.
Drawing on her long-standing connection to Israel, Liz reflects on the tensions many progressive Jews feel today: how to remain deeply connected to Israel while confronting policies that challenge the egalitarian values many in the Jewish world hold dear.
Together, they explore how women’s leadership, cross-ocean partnerships, and honest conversations can strengthen the fight for equality across the Jewish world.
IN THIS EPISODE
• The current challenges facing women’s rights in Israel and the United States
• The growing phenomenon of women’s exclusion from the public sphere in Israel
• Why progressive Jewish voices remain deeply connected to Israel despite political tensions
• How organizations like WRJ and IRAC are working together to defend equality and democracy
About the guest
Rabbi Liz P.G. Hirsch is the CEO of Women of Reform Judaism (WRJ), representing tens of thousands of Reform Jewish women across North America and advocating for gender equality, Jewish leadership, and social justice.
As Israel faces a new phase of war with Iran, daily life has again become defined by sirens, shelters, and uncertainty.
In this special Purim episode of The Pluralist Podcast, Orly Erez Likhovski (Israel Religious Action Center) and Rabbi Josh Weinberg (URJ / ARZA) reflect on what it means to navigate a complex and painful moment — from both sides of the ocean.
This conversation is not geopolitical analysis. Instead, it models how Reform Jewish leaders think, wrestle, and remain grounded in Jewish values during moments of crisis.
Recorded during Purim — with the possibility of sirens interrupting the conversation — the episode explores how Jewish tradition, leadership, and moral responsibility intersect when the world feels unstable.
• What daily life in Israel looks like right now — sirens, shelters, and exhaustion
• How American Jews are experiencing the moment from afar
• How to navigate a complicated geopolitical situation when trust in leadership is low
• Why the story of Purim lands differently in the middle of war
• What Jewish tradition teaches about power, fear, and responsibility
At a moment when many voices are shouting certainty, this conversation offers something different: honest wrestling with complexity.
For generations, Jews around the world have faced Jerusalem in prayer.
Now, a bill in Israel’s Knesset could give the Chief Rabbinate the power to define which prayer is “acceptable” at the Western Wall — and potentially criminalize egalitarian worship.
In this clip from The Pluralist Podcast, Orly Erez Likhovski and Josh Weinberg discuss:
• Why dismissing this bill as “just politics” is dangerous
• What message it sends to liberal Jews worldwide
• Why the Kotel is more than a plaza — it’s the symbolic heart of Jewish peoplehood
• And what Israelis and Diaspora Jews can do now
At a time of rising antisemitism globally — and unprecedented support from Diaspora communities for Israel — this debate raises a deeper question:
Is Israel the homeland of all Jews?
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Violence in Arab communities in Israel has reached unbearable levels — and many people are asking: what is actually happening?
In this episode of The Pluralist Podcast, Orly Erez-Likhovski and Rabbi Josh Weinberg sit down with Lama Yassin of The Abraham Initiatives to unpack the rise in violence in Arab society, the policy failures behind it, and what would be required to reverse it.
This is a conversation about policing, governance, shared society, and whether Israel is living up to its democratic commitments.
In this episode, we discuss:
• What daily life looks like under persistent violence in Arab towns and cities
• The dramatic gap in murder-solving rates between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel
• The dual reality of over-policing and under-policing
• Poverty, land shortages, and structural neglect
• What changed under previous governments — and what reversed under the current one
• Why this crisis is not cultural — but policy-driven
If you want to better understand the systemic roots of violence in Arab communities — and what can realistically be done — this episode offers clarity, data, and lived experience.
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War. Democracy. Relationship.
In this special episode of The Pluralist Podcast, we share an edited conversation recorded live at the Religious Action Center’s Consultation of Conscience conference in Washington, D.C.
Moderated by Daryl Messinger and featuring Orly Erez-Likhovski (IRAC), Rabbi Josh Weinberg (ARZA), and Michael Koplow (Israel Policy Forum), this panel wrestles with the evolving U.S.–Israel relationship in the shadow of war and growing democratic strain.
How are Israel’s internal political battles affecting its relationship with American Jewry?
What responsibility do American Jews have — and what influence do they actually hold?
How do we remain in relationship when disagreement feels sharp and generational divides widen?
This episode opens up a conversation that often happens in leadership rooms and brings it to you.
The Pluralist exists to make these tensions speakable — and to strengthen the relationship between Israel and Diaspora Jewry through honesty, accountability, and shared responsibility.
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Haredi society. Shared responsibility. Israeli democracy.
In this episode of The Pluralist Podcast, Orly Erez-Likhovski and Rabbi Josh Weinberg take on one of the most sensitive and misunderstood questions in Israeli society today: the place of Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) society in a shared Jewish and democratic state.
Sparked by a recent tragedy in an unsupervised childcare setting, the conversation moves beyond headlines to examine deeper questions of power, accountability, and belonging. What happens when a community holds significant political power but feels alienated from state institutions? How should a democracy balance religious autonomy with public safety, equality, and shared civic obligations?
Drawing on legal advocacy, Jewish history, and lived experience in Israel and the Diaspora, this episode insists on dignity without demonization — and pluralism with responsibility.
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What does it mean to grow up Jewish when the only Israel you’ve ever known is a Netanyahu-era Israel — and October 7 made everything harder?
In this episode of The Pluralist Podcast: From Both Sides of the Ocean, Orly Erez-Likhovski and Rabbi Josh Weinberg listen to three young Reform Jewish leaders — Tamara Upfall, Daniel Block, and Blake Ziegler — as they reflect on Israel, campus life, peer pressure, and identity in a moment that leaves little room for nuance.
These voices are not walking away from Israel. They are wrestling with how to hold Jewish peoplehood, Zionism, democracy, grief, and empathy at the same time — often feeling caught between generations and pushed to choose sides.
This conversation is about listening, bridging generational gaps, and staying in relationship when it’s hardest.
🔔 Subscribe to The Pluralist Podcast for thoughtful conversations on Israel, Judaism, and Jewish peoplehood — and share this episode with someone who cares about Israel’s future.
What does it mean to stand with Israel without looking away?
In this episode of The Pluralist Podcast: From Both Sides of the Ocean, Orly Erez-Likhovski and Rabbi Josh Weinberg take on one of the hardest questions facing Jews today:
How do we hold deep commitment to Israel while speaking honestly about the actions of its government?
While much of the world has been focused on war, grief, and recovery after October 7, Israel’s Knesset has quietly returned to an agenda that threatens democratic guardrails — not loudly, not dramatically, but steadily.
From inside Israel’s parliament and from the perspective of Reform Zionism in North America, this conversation explores:
- The renewed push to weaken key democratic institutions, including the Attorney General
- Legislative efforts targeting civil society, independent media, and academic freedom
- How the judicial overhaul is advancing in quieter, more incremental ways
- Why accountability for October 7 is a democratic necessity, not a political attack
- What real resistance looks like today — in the courts, in Knesset committees, and in civil society
Orly draws on her work leading the Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC), offering an inside view of how democratic defense actually happens: through legal filings, position papers, and relentless presence behind the scenes.
Josh gives voice to what many in the Diaspora are feeling — the pull between solidarity and alarm, loyalty and moral responsibility.
This is not a conversation about abandoning Israel.
It’s about protecting the democratic foundations that make Israel worth standing with.
If these conversations matter to you, please subscribe.
Subscriptions help this podcast grow and reach people who are trying to stay engaged — without denial or despair.
What happens when anti-Zionism and antisemitism blur together—and the people most affected are left to navigate the fallout alone?
In this episode of The Pluralist Podcast: From Both Sides of the Ocean, Orly Erez-Likhovski (Executive Director of IRAC) and Rabbi Josh Weinberg (URJ Vice President for Israel & Reform Zionism, Director of ARZA) are joined by Marc Dollinger, Professor of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University, for a deeply human conversation about life on campus after October 7.
Drawing on more than two decades of teaching—and lived experience on one of the most politically charged campuses in the United States—Professor Dollinger reflects on what it means to defend nuance in environments that increasingly punish it.
“At one university, I was labeled a self-hating leftist Jew,” he recalls. “And after a 400-mile drive north, I arrived in San Francisco as a right-wing Zionist colonial conspirator.” The journey between those two labels, he explains, is not just personal—it reveals how easily complex identities are flattened into caricatures.
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Together, they ask:
How do we distinguish legitimate political critique from antisemitism—not in theory, but in the lived reality of students and educators?
The conversation explores how academic ideas like “constructed narratives” move from theory into real-world clashes, and how groupthink on campus often replaces curiosity with certainty.
“If I treated all anti-Zionism as antisemitism,” Professor Dollinger explains, “that’s all I would be doing—and I’d burn out.”
They also reflect on the emotional toll this moment has taken on Jewish students, many of whom feel isolated or afraid to speak, and on the limits of institutional responses in spaces driven by polarization rather than care.
And yet, the conversation does not end in despair.
“My hope is in the humanity of individuals,” Professor Dollinger says. Not in slogans or movements, but in moments when people sit down, take a breath, and allow their souls to be open. In those encounters, he argues, understanding—fragile but real—is still possible.
This episode is for anyone trying to hold complexity without hardening, to listen without surrendering values, and to believe that individual openness can still push back against fear, flattening, and false binaries.
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