Arsen Ostrovsky lived through years of war in Israel and never once questioned where he called home. Weeks after moving his family back to Sydney, he was shot in the head on Bondi Beach.

Arsen Ostrovsky is head of the Sydney office of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), former CEO of the International Legal Forum, and an international human rights lawyer.

He left Odessa as a boy because his parents wanted him free to live as a Jew. Daniel Pearl's last words later set him on the road to Israel, where he spent thirteen years defending the Jewish state in international courts and at the United Nations.

His wife and daughters were on the beach with him that night. They survived too, and the whole family is still healing.

Midway through the conversation, the advocate gives way to the father. He repeats something his daughter said to him out of the blue, and Avi Jorisch asks how he answered her.

This is not another account of the attack. It is about what a second chance at life asks of the man who receives it.

After Bondi, a journalist asked whether he was more or less a man of faith, and the question almost stopped him. Nearly a year later, Avi asks it again.

Statecraft with Avi Jorisch is a production of IEF. Conversations with the people shaping the destiny of Israel and the Jewish people.

An IEF Production

Lori Palatnik has spent years helping Jewish women build stronger Jewish lives around the world. Now, speaking personally rather than for Momentum, she believes God is “shutting down the Diaspora.”

What does she see coming, and what should Jewish families outside Israel do now?

The founding director of Momentum and a member of IEF’s board of advisors joins Avi Jorisch for a candid conversation about faith, difficult choices, and the Jewish future.

Lori recalls leaving a career in advertising and a life her friends envied to pursue questions about God and Judaism, even as she hoped the answers would allow her to return to that life. She takes us inside the gathering of eight women that became Momentum, and shares why she now connects donating a kidney to a stranger with the courage to build a global movement.

Looking toward 2035, she explains her deeply personal outlook on the Diaspora, Israel, and what families should do to prepare.

Her advice comes down to two words: “Point east.”

Statecraft with Avi Jorisch: conversations with those shaping the future of the Jewish people and the State of Israel.

An IEF production.

Ambassador Fitz Haney raised money for Barack Obama and served as his ambassador. Today the lifelong Democrat says he feels politically homeless.

S. Fitzgerald "Fitz" Haney is Managing Director for Latin America at the Genesis Prize Foundation and American Friends of Isaac Accords, and former U.S. Ambassador to Costa Rica.

Raised Catholic by a widowed mother outside Chicago, he went to an Orthodox rabbi in Mexico City hoping to find his way back to the church. Somewhere along the way he found something else, and he eventually made his home in Israel.

He has spent his life as the person every community had to make sense of. After October 7th, on a London street, a stranger came for every part of him at once.

Asked whether he truly understood what he took on when he became a Jew, he gives an answer he knows will draw criticism, one that overturns what he believed the day he converted.

This is not a conversation about switching parties. It is about a man who chose each of his identities and is now watching every one of them tested.

And Avi Jorisch asks him one question with no clear answer: after October 7th, where did the betrayal cut deepest?

Statecraft with Avi Jorisch is a production of IEF. Conversations with the people shaping the destiny of Israel and the Jewish people.