About this episode

Matti Friedman discusses the story of Hannah Senesh and the significance of a failed mission during the Holocaust in shaping Israeli identity.

Why would a group of young Jews who escaped the Holocaust choose to parachute back into Nazi-occupied Europe? How did they become heroes despite the failure of that mission? Author Matti Friedman joins EconTalk's Russ Roberts to unravel these mysteries through his book Out of the Sky, revealing why a failed mission became one of Israel's most powerful founding myths. At the heart of the story is Hannah Senesh, a 23-year-old Hungarian poet who traded her Budapest life for a kibbutz, then traded the kibbutz for a parachute and a near-certain death sentence--and whose poems, scribbled on scraps of paper in forests near the Hungarian border, became some of the most famous texts in modern Hebrew.

People in this episode

Host: Russ Roberts

Guest: Matti Friedman

Topics covered

• Hannah Senesh
• Holocaust
• Israel
• parachuting
• founding myths
• modern Hebrew

Keywords

• Hannah Senesh
• Matti Friedman
• Holocaust
• Israel
• founding myths
• Out of the Sky
• modern Hebrew

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Out of the Sky

Places: Hungary, Israel, Nazi-occupied Europe

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