Haredim for the State – A Shared Story
A weekly podcast amplifying a growing Haredi voice committed to democratic values, civic responsibility, and Israel’s future. It builds belonging within Haredi society and helps liberal and democratic Israelis recognize and engage Haredi partners in shaping Israel’s democratic future.
Project Overview
Haredim for the State – A Shared Story
A podcast by the Haredi Institute for Democracy
A weekly podcast amplifying a growing Haredi voice committed to democratic values, civic responsibility, and Israel’s future. It builds belonging within Haredi society and helps liberal and democratic Israelis recognize and engage Haredi partners in shaping Israel’s democratic future.
Israeli public discourse often treats Haredi society as a single political and ideological bloc, represented by established parties and familiar leadership. But this picture is incomplete.
Within Haredi society, there are men and women who are deeply rooted in Haredi life and tradition while also believing in democracy, civic responsibility, and responsibility for the future of the State of Israel. Their voices are still largely invisible – both within Haredi society and to the broader Israeli public.
The podcast Haredim for the State – A Shared Story was created to make these voices visible.
The weekly podcast is hosted by Michal Gilboa Ater, a secular Israeli civic leader, and Rabbi Bezalel Cohen, a Haredi educator and public leader. Both are co-founders of the Haredi Institute for Democracy. The partnership between the two hosts is itself part of the message: people from profoundly different ways of life can build a meaningful relationship around shared democratic values and a shared sense of responsibility for the country.
The podcast brings forward Haredi voices, ideas, and personal stories that demonstrate a Haredi identity grounded in both religious commitment and democratic civic responsibility.
The project speaks to two audiences.
For Haredi listeners, the podcast creates recognition, connection, and a concrete point of entry into a wider community. Listeners encounter Haredi men and women who articulate ideas they may already hold but rarely hear expressed publicly. They gain language for their own views, discover that others share them, and are introduced to the Haredi Institute for Democracy as a place where these ideas are developed, discussed, and translated into civic engagement.
For secular, liberal, and democratic Israelis, the podcast offers direct exposure to Haredi voices that are rarely heard in mainstream discourse. It helps listeners recognize the ideological diversity within Haredi society, identify potential partners around democratic and civic values, and build a more informed basis for dialogue, cooperation, and long-term partnership.
At the heart of the project is the possibility of meaningful partnership between people whose ways of life may be profoundly different, but who share deep values – responsibility for the country, commitment to democracy, and concern for the future of Israeli society.
The democratic change we seek is concrete: to strengthen a visible Haredi public that sees itself as an active stakeholder in Israel’s democratic future, and to build practical partnership with secular, liberal, and democratic Israelis so that both groups can act together to shape Israel’s democratic future.
By making these voices visible, connecting people who already share these values, and giving them a public platform, the podcast seeks to help turn an existing but dispersed constituency into a stronger civic-democratic community with greater confidence, presence, and capacity to act.
For us, this is where hope lies: in building a broader democratic future in which very different communities can take shared responsibility for the country without giving up the identities that make them different.
