Mishy Harman and Federica Sasso are married, they have a daughter, and live in a mixed neighborhood in Jerusalem. Theirs is not a conventional family: Mishy is an Israeli Jew, Federica is Italian (she comes from a small village in Liguria that has just under six thousand inhabitants) and is Catholic. They met through a shared openness towards meeting the other and through their work: they are both journalists. He produces the most famous podcast in Israel, Israel Story, while she writes and works for the Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue. “When we got married, I did know whether my mom or my wife’s mom was more surprised,” says Mishy: ”Yet, I come from a family that has a very unique history....” His grandparents, he recounts, were British Jews. They met in the early 1930s, during a debate at the University of Oxford. He was the head of the Zionist student society (which at the time was fighting for the nationalist dream), she was the spokesperson of the anti-Zionist student society. “I do not know who was better during that debate, but ten years later my grandmother found herself in Palestine, married to my grandfather, and devoted the rest of her life to working as an ambassador and diplomat for the Jewish state.”

Mishy’s journey is also quite curious. After his military service, which is compulsory in Israel, he studied History at Harvard, archaeology at Cambridge, and his PhD was a biography of the first protestant missionary in Ethiopia. He then turned to journalism, photographing Israel with disenchantment through the stories of those who live there: Israelis, Jews, Arabs, Palestinians, Druze, Christians, Muslims... The war that is shaking the Holy Land today is also a watershed for Mishy and Federica's personal lives, as she herself explains, “I can say that these months have been an opportunity to look again at our marriage, at what keeps us together. And they are our common values: faith, the desire for a dignified and just life for everyone. No one excluded.” As guests at the Meeting in Rimini, Mishy and Federica recounted their human and professional experiences. “I am very struck by this place,” he admits, “It is impressive how so many people mobilized themselves by taking vacations or using their summer break from their studies to be here. After October 7, many people have also mobilized themselves in and outside Israel. But they did it in defense, out of anger. Instead, here you all act to offer a joyfulness, a testimony of joyful faith to everyone you meet. It is fascinating.”

Harman uses this expression a second time, “I am fascinated by my wife's Christian faith, so clear. She has a very strong faith, much stronger than mine. I observe her move in the world, her criteria, the language she adopts. It is educational for me to see things through her eyes, to put myself in her shoes and look at my life, my country, my history as she looks at them.” He wishes the same for his daughter. And he does the same with his podcasts. “We started Israel Story thirteen years ago (the editorial staff includes three childhood friends: Yochai Maital, Shai Satran and Ro'ee Gilron), with the decision not to be political in our narrative, even though everything is ultimately political. It is not that we have held back from telling stories from Palestine or the Arab world, quite the opposite. But we have tried to go beyond the issues of the conflict and occupation to also uncover those realities and communities that are often marginalized or not reported by the media. This has worked well because our podcasts have attracted listeners from really diverse backgrounds. However, in 2023, the Israeli government promoted a judicial reform that would change the face of the country, leading millions of people to take to the streets in protest. At that point, we realized that not getting involved would be a much more political act than actually getting involved. So we began a series of episodes dedicated to the Declaration of Independence of Israel, established in 1948. We sought out the signatories, or their children and grandchildren. We interviewed them about this idea of Israel being a Jewish state and genuinely democratic. While we were working on these episodes, October 7 happened. We are not a new agency like the BBC or CNN, but it was impossible not to report what was happening. We started doing so, trying to offer our listeners all the human, religious, social and politics perspectives, so that they could understand a wide range of life experiences.” The they started calling some relatives of the hostages, then some farmers, rabbis, educators, musicians, and eventually, they spoke with people living in the West Bank. They did not forget the stories of the Druze, and with difficulty, they managed to reach and interview people living in Gaza under the bombings.

Not an easy task for journalists who are Israeli Jews. “What we do is partial; we will never be able to understand everything, but we still try to show the pain, dignity, resilience, and courage of the human so that all world can know. The Meeting tells us that if we do not seek the essence, what are we in the world for? That is what we are trying to answer. The alternative is seeking to close ourselves off in bubbles, in narrow circles, without the capacity to be amazed. In bubbles, we may feel apparently safer, but ultimately we are alone. If in our work, as Cardinal Pizzaballa told us, we are able to meet the other, we all lose. We will never be able to live with security. Only when we know the humanity of those who are far away and different from us, can we defeat fear and thus recognize what makes life important to live.”

Mishy never loses his smile when he speaks in his warm voice, behind his round glasses and a head of curly hair that gives him the air of an intellectual. He tells while his editorial team initially collected random stories from every corner of the world after October 7, their narrative has changed. “We had to follow the changing reality in front of us.” The first episode of the new podcast was released a few days after the massacre, on October 12, 2023. It features an interview with Sasha Ariev, an Israeli woman distraught over the kidnapping of her younger sister, Karina, 19, a soldier taken hostage in Gaza. Episode after episode, the series Wartime diaries was born – chronicles of wartime.

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There is room for everyone: war widows, the workers at Jerusalem zoo, archaeologists, university professors, even a woman who is part of a tiny, unknown community in Israel. These are former fighters of a Christian Lebanese militia that for years fought alongside Israel against Hezbollah and Palestine Liberation Organization. Everyone has a voice on air; each broadcast is about 15 minutes each. Even two bus stops can become a meaningful glimpse of what life is like in the Holy Land today. “Even though Tzur Hadassah and Beitar Illit are geographically close, they could very well be in two different worlds. It is not just that they are on opposite sides of the Green Line. Tzur Hadassah has a mixed population of secular and religious Jews, while Beitar Illit is almost entirely Haredi, followers of a very conservative form of Orthodox Judaism. Welcome to the Middle East. As always, it is complicated,” Harman explains.

What will you tell your daughter about all this chaos? Will you stay in Jerusalem or will you leave? His expression becomes serious: “I hope our daughter can see how my wife and I are together. More than words – because she is only three and a half years old – I think that what we can give her is a tool for life. I know that my roots are here, in Israel, despite the challenges and a government that I currently feel the need to oppose. Just as Federica’s true roots are in Italy and in the deep Catholic religion she practices. It has taken me years to realize that she is as strongly rooted in her faith as I am in my country. We can live together – more than that, we can be married – because of the respect we have of each other's history and experience.” “I am fascinated,” Mishy repeats, “by the sense of total belonging that my wife's faith gives her. I see the same belonging in the Meeting. When the war broke out, thousands of people volunteered for Israel: some organized transportation, some provided food, others provided security and everything the government needed to face the war. But there it happened at a time of emergency, here it has been happening every year for over forty years and it demonstrates a deep desire to be together, to learn, to be able to ask profound questions. What the Meeting gives to people is encounter, knowledge, education. We live in a time in which there are billions of ways to learn things, and the fact that this place still exists and is successful is unusual.” He uses the term “fascinated” for the third time. The secret of this man, who describes himself as a “secular Jew”, and of his podcasts – with over a million downloads – perhaps lies here: in the ability to question and be amazed by everything.