The Match That Lit the Flame: Hannah Senesh and the Creation of Modern Israel (with Matti Friedman)
3/23/20261 hr 10 min
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.
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First 90 secondsRuss Roberts· Host0:00
[upbeat music] Welcome to EconTalk conversations for the curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to two thousand and six. Our email address is mail@econtalk.org. We'd love to hear from you. [upbeat music] Today is January eighteenth, twenty twenty-six, and my guest is journalist and author Matti Friedman. This is Matti's fourth appearance on the program. He was last here in December of twenty twenty-four talking about Israel's war with Hezbollah and his book Pumpkin Flowers. Our topic for today is his latest book, Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe, which is the strange tale of a group of Jews living in Palestine under the British mandate during the Second World War, who parachuted back into Nazi-occupied Europe. And the most fam-famous member of this group was a woman, Hannah or Hannah Szenes, a name some of you may know. Um, Matti, welcome back to EconTalk.
Matti Friedman· Guest1:23
Thank you so much for having me.
Russ Roberts· Host1:26
Now, Hannah is famous in Israel. Uh, I-- and I