"Tell me what happened these past two years." What would we say to a just-released hostage?
Description
As more details come out about the ordeal that the just-freed hostages had to endure, it’s hard at times to fathom how anyone survived. A few were held captive entirely by themselves the entire time, some in chains. The psychological terror we’re learning about is mind boggling. The starvation. The beatings.
And …. having no idea what was happening in the “real” world (though their world was all too real). A few had literally no exposure to news since they were kidnapped on October 7. And now, they’re home. Were they to sit with one of us and say, “Tell me what happened,” what would we say? We know where we’d start, but how much do we really remember?
That’s soon going to be more than a hypothetical issue, because contemporary men and women have short memories. In a few short years, our children or our grandchildren, too young to ask now, will ask us to tell them the story. How much of these agonizing 738 days are we really going to remember?
Professor Monty Penkower, a highly regarded historian of modern Jewish history, the Holocaust, Jew-hatred and Zionism, has prepared for this moment from the very beginning of the war, and in a series of volumes — which he can thankfully now end — has written a detailed account of the war we have just lived through.
With the Sukkot holiday behind us and the holiday season now completed, we resume our weekly Israel from the Inside podcast, with the full conversation as well as a transcript prepared for our paid subscribers. We renew our conversations today with Professor Penkower about the first volume of the history of this war.
Professor Monty Noam Penkower, is a professor emeritus of Jewish history at the Machon Lander Graduate School of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, and was one of four recipients of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Asia (ASMEA) 2023 Bernard Lewis book prize for his book “After the Holocaust”.
He is the former Victor J. Selmanowitz Professor of Modern Jewish History at Touro University in New York, and was one of Touro’s earliest full-time faculty members, having taught at the school’s Manhattan and Brooklyn divisions for both men and women since 1974. Upon moving to Israel in July 2002, he taught modern Jewish history at Touro’s Graduate School of Jewish Studies’ Israel branch campus for five years before retiring from academic teaching.
Prof. Penkower has lectured widely on American history and on modern Jewish history, and his numerous publications include “The Jews Were Expendable: Free World Diplomacy and the Holocaust,” (1983), “The Jews Were Expendable” that earned Prof. Penkower the Samuel Belkin Memorial Literary Award from Yeshiva University, together with his 1986 work, “The Emergence of Zionist Thought.” Especially noteworthy is Prof. Penkower’s five-volume study, four of which were published by the Touro University Press, of the rise of the State of Israel in the years 1933-1948, and his 2024 book “The Holocaust and Israel Restored: From Rupture to Revival”.
His latest book, “Awakening to Radical Islamist Evil: The Hamas War against Israel and the Jews”, offers the first daily account of the war forced upon the State of Israel by Hamas’s brutal attack on its southern communities near the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023. Focusing on the initial six months of that war, Professor Monty Penkower examines in detail its local, regional, and international significance.
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The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.
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