The 90-minute salon briefing

In Israel, over coffee and cake or via Zoom.

Entitled “Threats Facing Israel: External and Domestic,” my aim is to expose fundamental realities; to go beyond the frenzied news cycle. Let’s look at the constants (what does not change day-to-day) that are often concealed in the deluge of news and surge of social media posts.

What’s covered — besides the current War with Iran:

1. Political geography, demography, and political culture

2. Jerusalem municipality: typography, population, and politics

3. Gaza (how Hamas survived to fight another day)

4. West Bank - Judea & Samaria (powderkeg)

5. External threats facing Israel - ideational and actual on-the-ground

6. Domestic threats facing Israel - conceptual and in society

7. What needs to be done

You might be surprised by what you can learn from a balding, portly Jewish man from the Lower East Side.

What I bring to the coffee table.

Life experience. Work experience. Academic credentials. And a post-ideological, post-denominational analytic outlook.

I identify as a Lower East Sider more than a New Yorker. Born when Dwight Eisenhower was president and Robert F. Wagner was mayor, I have journeyed from the public housing projects on Avenue D to the Jerusalem neighborhood of Talpiot.

I have worked chiefly in journalism, NYC government, academia, and the not-for-profit sector.

My journalism experience includes 11 years as a senior editor at The Jerusalem Post, including as the paper’s leader writer (editorialist) under Bret Stephens and David Horovitz.

I left the Post to become the founding managing editor of Jewish Ideas Daily (now Mosaic). I also worked as a night editor at Newsmax, covering U.S. politics. Between and betwixt, I wrote for The Jerusalem Report and the pro-Israel Christian magazine Israel My Glory. In 2021, I edited Isi Leibler’s authorized biography, Lone Voice, by Prof. Suzanne Rutland. Leibler was a truly great man, and Rutland is the foremost scholar of Australian Jewry.

My own books include:

1. Jewish Civilization and its Discontents: A post-October 7 Primer and Polemic

2. The Balfour Declaration: 67 Words, 100 Years of Conflict

3. The Pater: My Father, My Judaism, My Childlessness

All my life, I have been mainly interested in two big, intertwined subjects – politics and the civilization of Judaism. I love teaching and taught politics at the university level for some 10 years in metro-NY.

My perspective today — which did not come easy — is to dread majoritarian democracy, disdain populism, scorn utopianism, reject zealotry, and embrace Jewish literacy.

I earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from New York University, an M.A. in International Relations from NYU, and a B.A. in Jewish Studies from Brooklyn College. I got my Jewish education at Yeshiva Chasen Sofer and at Mesiftha Tiffereth Jerusalem.

To arrange an in-person salon briefing in Jerusalem or via Zoom, please email me: elliot_jager@yahoo.com