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.

Martin Engelberg is a psychoanalyst and leadership coach and a former member of Austria's Parliament.

The son of Holocaust survivors, Martin Engelberg has built a deeply Jewish life in Vienna while France has become the battleground for Europe's Jews. He believes staying and being ready to leave belong to the same commitment.

He grew up in a city that would not speak about its past. Decades later he entered parliament to help shape the country his parents had chosen as their home.

That choice put him at odds with parts of his own community, when he defended a governing coalition with the Freedom Party, a party whose roots lie among former Nazis.

Then Avi Jorisch hands him a Jewish community's budget. Martin would put the money into education and the next generation, and leave the fight against antisemitism to the state. Avi follows with a more personal question: what is his own plan B?

This is not a conversation about whether Europe is safe for Jews. It is about what a family owes its children when the answer keeps changing.

And it ends on the choice his father faced after the war, and what Martin hopes his own children will say about his.

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

Rawan Osman was raised to hate Israel. Now she calls it home, and she dreams of living there as a Jew.

Rawan Osman is a Syrian-born German activist and writer confronting antisemitism in the Arab world.

She grew up between Damascus and the Beqaa Valley, believing the Jew was her enemy. Then she crossed the one line no one from her world is allowed to cross, knowing she could never go back. Today she speaks for Israel to audiences around the world.

The cost was steeper than she expected, and it came from the people closest to her.

At the Kotel, she found herself furious with God. What a rabbi saw in that anger changed how she understood it, and why she keeps walking toward Judaism while her conversion moves through Israel's careful security review.

This is not the story of how she stopped hating Israel. It is the story of what comes after, when you have chosen a people and are still on the road to becoming one of them.

And at the end, Avi Jorisch asks her a question she calls painful.

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

Chapters

00:00 Introduction

02:15 Looking across the border

04:45 The feisty girl and the nun

06:09 The God she was given

10:03 Not Jewish yet

12:03 Blocked after October 8

16:41 A wine bar in Damascus

20:49 Strasbourg and a collapsing worldview

23:14 Her grandmother's words

27:04 The DNA test

30:22 Why convert at all

36:14 Trusting the process

39:22 What she wants for Israel

46:34 The Palestinian question

50:13 What each side gets wrong

55:28 Lightning Round

1:01:27 What home means

"I'm probably not supposed to, but I will anyway."

Dara Horn is about to describe a meeting she has never discussed in public. Harvard's deans, in one room, and what she calls extremely disturbing.

It opens a conversation with the author of The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living, a New York Times best seller. She argues that antisemitism is a lie, not just a hatred, and that the community has been fighting it with the wrong tool. She describes a coordinated effort to shape what AI believes about Jews. And when Avi Jorisch asks whether American Jews need a Plan B, she refuses the question.

She says the strategy is clear. Almost no one, she says, is pursuing it.

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

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction

02:32 A Jewish Home Built From Scratch

06:40 Tinoket in a Class of Retirees

08:49 The Data Poisoning Plot

12:12 Rethinking What Antisemitism Is

14:33 How People Love Dead Jews Began

17:44 The Premise of The Final Solution

21:54 A Proposal in a Harvard Library

23:49 The Meeting With Harvard's Deans

29:09 American Jewry in 2050

32:55 Irwin Cotler's Warning

39:22 The Plan B Question

45:26 Inside the Tell Institute

49:43 Lightning Round

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum thinks Israel is fighting the wrong war. And she thinks she knows what needs to change.

Born into Gibraltar’s most prominent political family, Fleur trained as a barrister in London before moving to Jerusalem at the height of the second intifada. She went on to serve as deputy mayor of Jerusalem, build bridges in the Gulf before the Abraham Accords, and, after October 7, become one of Israel’s most recognizable voices on international television.

But this conversation goes well beyond the talking points.

At her home in Jerusalem, Fleur tells Avi Jorisch about the political legacy she inherited, the moment someone tried to buy her, what she risked in the Gulf, and the experiences that have forced her to rethink some of her own long-held assumptions. They talk about what Israel is getting wrong, the challenges it can no longer afford to avoid, and why Fleur may not be finished with politics.

She also opens up about the personal cost of public life and the questions she is still wrestling with.

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

Chapters:

00:00 Welcome to Statecraft

02:07 The father who built modern Gibraltar

06:27 A decision at 14

08:19 Moving to Jerusalem in the second intifada

12:36 From the innovation ecosystem to city hall

16:20 Why the narrative war has no strategy

20:55 Campus Israel and a possible run

23:13 October 7 and the BBC call

26:21 When someone tried to buy her

29:23 The mind she changed on two states

33:58 The Emirates before normalization

40:16 The personal cost

42:55 What she still wrestles with

45:26 Israel at 100

48:21 Lightning Round

56:45 One final question

Those who know, know Eyal Hulata.

For more than two decades, he operated in the world of Israeli national security, where some of the most consequential work is also the least visible.

He joined the Mossad at 21 and eventually rose to senior leadership, working on missions senior officials had deemed impossible, including the operation to seize Iran's secret nuclear archive. He later served as national security advisor to Prime Ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, with Iran, Lebanon, and the U.S.-Israel relationship among the defining issues on his desk.

In this episode of Statecraft, Avi Jorisch takes Hulata well beyond the usual national security conversation.

What happens when your judgment and the prime minister's diverge? Who do you ultimately serve? And does he bear some responsibility for what happened on October 7?

Hulata answers that last question without hesitation and describes the months afterward when he couldn't sleep, and what he has since concluded about how Israel arrived there.

He also talks about his first day at the Mossad, the mentors who shaped him, preparing Bennett's first meeting with Joe Biden, the one moment in his career when he was completely paralyzed, and what he is weighing now about a return to public service.

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

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