Harman, who is 40, is the creator, host and senior producer of Israel Story, a narrative series modeled on This American Lifethat debuted in 2014. Until Oct. 6, it was the world’s most listened-to Jewish podcast, with about 35,000 downloads per episode. Wartime Diaries, which like Israel Story is in English and aimed at the global audience, has dwarfed that, averaging more than 100,000.
(This week, Harman’s team launched a new show, in Hebrew, called Sipur Yerushalmi — Jerusalem Story — based on The Moth-style storytelling events they’ve been hosting in the city for years.)
I’ve known Mishy since I moved to Jerusalem in 2012 as bureau chief for The New York Times — in fact, he told me Thursday that I played a minor but important role in the life of Israel Story. Turns out it was at my welcome party that he first pitched the show’s Hebrew precursor to the head of Israel’s Army Radio, where it launched with four episodes that Hanukkah.
But where Israel Story showcases deeply reported, highly edited, complicated and curated narrative arcs, Wartime Diaries presents visceral, raw, relatively short individual conversations. The two shows share a sensibility; both use compelling characters to create emotional connections with listeners. I asked Mishy how his team of about a dozen producers made the pivot.
“Like everyone else, we were shocked and didn’t know how to proceed or what to do — I’m not even talking as a workplace, just as individuals,” he recounted. “We’re, like, really ill-suited for the moment. The kind of content that we usually produce is this very, very carefully edited content which takes us months and months, and we write original music. It’s the opposite of fast paced. And also the story here was changing by the minute. It wasn’t even clear what the story was.
“We didn’t know whether we should do anything at all,” he added. “But it seemed to me we would no longer have any kind of right to exist, basically, if a show called Israel Story somehow glossed over what seemed to be the most dramatic event of our lifetime.”
He drew the team together that Monday, Oct. 9, at its “Nomi Studios” — named for Mishy’s beloved dog, who died in 2022 — in Jerusalem’s Talpiyot neighborhood. They considered all working together on a big investigation into Israel’s intelligence failure. They thought about setting up StoryCorps-style recording booths at the Dead Sea hotels where evacuees from the Gaza-area kibbutzim would just tell their own stories.
“But we’re not therapists and we don’t know how to deal with trauma — is that a responsible thing to do?” he recalled asking himself. “And what would we even do with all the material we recorded? We needed to do something that we could also get out into the world.
“People didn’t even know yet who was kidnapped, who was killed, there were still terrorists in Sderot,” Mishy continued. “Things were literally changing every 10 seconds. We said we’re not going to care about sound design, we’re not going to care about great cuts. No, we’ll just release, because that’s what makes sense now.”
The first episode was released three days later, on Oct. 12. It is 13 minutes and features Sasha Ariev, whose younger sister, a 19-year-old soldier named Karina, remains a hostage in Gaza. Next was a friend of Mishy’s whose husband had been called back to the army and was struggling to age-appropriately explain the situation to each of her four kids.
A 50-year-old man who decided to volunteer for reserve duty though he was past the age limit. A chef making 10,000 meals a day for kibbutz evacuees. The parents of hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin.
“It got a life of its own, and we were releasing nonstop every single day,” Mishy said.
“For us, it was also, like, a way of processing what was going on.”
The first 20 or so were all from what Mishy calls “a mainstream Jewish perspective.” He said he “really wanted to have Arabs on the show” but it was hard because “people were very, very afraid to talk” and because “some said things we felt that we couldn’t air,” like that Oct. 7 never happened or was somehow a mirage made by artificial intelligence bots.
When they did branch out to include Palestinians, Druze, Bedouins and people on the far-right or far-left fringes of Israeli life, listeners responded with both “delight” and “dismay,” Mishy told me.
Feedback has jumped tenfold, he said, with emails pouring in from the audience, which is about two-thirds in the United States. Donations have also skyrocketed; Israel Story has an annual budget of about $1 million; its prime backers are Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation and the Schusterman foundation, plus a partnership with Times of Israel.)
“The eyes and the ears of the world are on Israel right now,” Mishy said. “When you start typing ‘Israel’ into any podcast platform, we’re the first thing that comes up. I hope these people stay on.”
