Mishy Harman, co-founder, host, and CEO of the award-winning podcast Israel Story, tells extraordinary tales of ordinary Israelis. His unique storytelling, enhanced by musical interludes, draws listeners in with emotionally raw moments, keeping audiences engaged and growing.
“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”, reported The Forward last February.
The man who rescued the cows of Kibbutz Kissiufim. The Santa Claus of Jaffa Gate. The workers at Jerusalem’s biblical zoo, a wartime bride, a 77-year-old poet. Since Oct. 7th, Wartime Diaries has introduced a range of powerful and poignant characters, offering a real-time window into Israel’s war story.
Ahead of Mishy’s April visit to Canada (Montreal, Winnipeg and Toronto), we asked him to tell us how he chooses which stories are told, and the difference between a live and produced show.
(Mishy’s answers have been edited for clarity and brevity).
Israel Story’s mission is to promote a deeper understanding of – and connection to – Israel, through human-interest storytelling. How did Israel Story develop this approach?
When we started the podcast, we made a decision that Israel Story was going to be apolitical and the focus would really be on human beings and human-interest stories, not on political theses and arguments. And we felt that that was a way for us to be able to reach a wider, broader audience without falling into these sorts of very obvious and predictable niches where you could basically guess what was going to be said. So even though we made that decision, it never really worked being apolitical. Everything is political in some way or another. And the way that we understood it was we said, okay, we’ll try to the best of our ability to stay out of current affairs. So, for more than a decade, we told love stories and adventure stories and stories of pain and resilience and life.
In an era of polarization and misinformation, how do you decide which stories deserve to be told?
Over the years, we developed a method for choosing what kind of stories we wanted to tell and the kinds of stories that surprised us. And we came up with a growing list of ingredients that we thought were crucial for a good story. And that worked very well because, you know, the audience grew a lot. It became the most listened-to Jewish podcast in the world by a very wide margin. Since we’re very data-driven, every year, we would release a listener survey and ask them if they thought Israel Story had a political bias. Year after year, about 90 or 91% of the respondents said they thought we were an honest broker. The remaining 8 or 9% were split between those who said that we were right-leaning and those who said we were left-leaning.
How did Israel Story shift its focus during the judicial reform?
And then during the judicial reform in Israel, in 2020 or 2022, I made a decision that not engaging with current affairs was a greater statement than engaging with them. Israel was going through a really momentous shift in public discourse, and I thought that if we didn’t relate to that, we would essentially be out of touch. So we embarked on a massive project called Signed, Sealed, Delivered, in which, using the narrative tools we had gathered and taught ourselves over the years, we did engage with current affairs. We tracked down the closest living relatives of all 37 signatories of the Israeli Declaration of Independence and interviewed them. It was a fascinating project because we heard vastly different interpretations of what Israel was meant to be, and everything in between.
How did Israel Story respond to the events of October 7?
Then October 7th happened while we were mid-series of Signed, Sealed, Delivered, and it was very clear to us that this was arguably the most dramatic story in Israel’s history, or at least within our own lifetimes. We had to address it, so we basically stopped everything we were doing and began releasing something called Wartime Diaries, which we are still doing. Early on in the war, we were focused on documentation, bringing different perspectives on what was happening here—everything from volunteer initiatives by farmers, rabbis, chefs, archaeologists, programmers, and educators, to the pain and feelings of loss, despair, and hope. As time went on, the war continued and the plot thickened, and we weren’t just running after our own tails documenting what was going on.
We began asking, ‘What kind of stories are our listeners around the world not hearing? How do we complicate the narrative? How do we inject nuance?’ Because I think, and this is perhaps the heart of the answer to your question, we never wanted to reinforce or strengthen simple narratives that exist about Israel—these unidimensional, flat narratives of the good or bad. We wanted to show that Israel is a very complicated place, not just the way it’s portrayed in school. It’s a vibrant place with all kinds of different communities and people coming from very different traditions. We wanted to capture the complexity and challenge listeners to think about the many Israels that exist.
What was the focus of the revived show about the Six-Day War and the basis of the Israel Story Live! coming to Canada?
This particular show is a single story that we did years ago, about two songs written in 1967, during the Six-Day War. One is very optimistic and dreamy, talking about the hope for the future, and the other talks about the reality of war. We decided to revive this story because, with the war, it’s added layers of complexity. The dramatic events of 1967 are still very much at the core and shaping our reality today.
How does live storytelling differ from radio production?
In live performances, I love the immediate connection with the audience. It’s different from working in radio, where everything is done in the studio with perfect editing and control. In live shows, there’s something invigorating about seeing the reactions of people in the audience. It changes the energy and makes the story feel different every time. Even though it’s the same show, the context changes with every performance. It’s very moving and exciting to see the real-time responses of the audience.
What are you looking forward to learning during your upcoming trip from ?
I’m looking forward to the trip, not just to share stories, but also to learn. I don’t fully understand the experience of living abroad right now, and I’m eager to learn from you and hear from the diverse communities of Canada, especially in this tremendously difficult year and a half. I’m looking forward to seeing reality through your eyes and expanding my own understanding.
Following his military service, Mishy studied history at Harvard, archeology at Cambridge and wrote his PhD – a biography of the first Protestant missionary in Ethiopia – at the Hebrew University. He co-founded Israel Story (Sipur Israeli) with three childhood friends in 2011, and English episodes launched in 2014.