The Jewish State: a new Mitzpe live course
Cohort 1 opens October 11.
Shavua tov, my friend.
I sent you today’s Israel Brief a few hours ago. But this is something different.
Look. Most people defending Israel in public work from a history that stops at 1967 and resumes on October 7. Not their fault. Nobody really taught them that middle. And, sadly, that middle is where they are losing the arguments.
Generally, I get a few minutes out of your morning and have to work with whatever the news hands me. I’m asking you to join me for a longer discussion.
A full course, over one session a week for eight weeks. We start at the Mandate and go forward until the century is one continuous story. Then? You’ll be able to stop improvising.
Details are below.
I hope you’ll join me.
— Uri
The Jewish State
Israeli history, read the way Mitzpe reads it
Outside powers spent a century handing Israel frameworks to live inside — the Mandate, the partition plans, Oslo, the Gaza disengagement — and judging each one by what it promised on paper. This course teaches you to judge them the way Mitzpe does: by what they actually built on the ground. Read the whole arc that way, from 1917 to the morning of October 7, and it stops looking like a run of accidents.
The course is built for the reader who wants to understand Israel well enough to explain it — the board or federation member, the donor, the educator, the journalist, the community leader who keeps getting asked and wants a better answer than the one on cable.
No prior coursework is required. The reading list is drawn from the Mitzpe Press catalog, and each session’s reading comes to you as a PDF, so there is nothing else to buy and nothing to track down.
Eight live 90-minute sessions across the arc — the British Mandate, 1948, 1967, Oslo, the Second Intifada, the Gaza disengagement, the decade of containment, and October 7 — taught by yours truly. Every session is recorded, so a missed week is never a lost week. So, if you’re thinking: oh, my schedule could never handle it? No need to worry.
There will be a few minor assignments that I’ll grade, if you want the feedback and to really dig in.
Cohort 1 is small on purpose and enrolling now.
Eight Sundays, October 11 to November 29, 2026, at 1 PM ET.
Code EARLYBIRD takes $36 off the $270 seat for Israel Brief readers. It expires September 1.