Barak Hullman, at The Blogs

Sep 1, 2024, 5:07 PM

How Does a General Strike Help Anything?

I am an avid reader of the Times of Israel and I feel the pain that everyone else in Israel felt when we read about the death of the six hostages this morning, and especially Hersh Goldberg-Polin who has...

Aug 21, 2024, 7:05 PM

The Middle East is a Simple Place to Understand

The Middle East is a fairly simple place to understand as long as a liberal progressive Western mind does not complicate it. Despite numerous clear signs from Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and the Muslim-Arab world, Israelis in the leadership of...

Jul 1, 2024, 3:26 PM

12 tough questions, 12 simple answers about Israel

I read Gil Troy’s attempt to answer the following questions ( and felt that they needed shorter and punchier answers. He wrote: My good friend, Taglit-Birthright Israel’s CEO Gidi Mark, challenged me recently: 'Can you offer short, punchy answers to some...

Jul 1, 2024, 12:37 AM

Understanding ‘The Conceptia’

For many months now I have been trying to under “The Conceptia” (the mental concept) which led the most powerful army in the Middle East to allow Hamas to attack its citizens when the IDF and government had over...

Dec 25, 2023, 5:57 PM

Israeli Jew Reacts to the Islamist Doctor

In two previous pieces, 10 Difficult Questions, 10 Easy Answers and Simple Answers to Difficult Questions, I tried to help Israel supporters answer challenging questions being asked in the Western media. I wrote "The hypocrisy of the world might...

Nov 12, 2023, 6:47 PM

10 Difficult Questions, 10 Easy Answers

Since I was an undergraduate student of Arabic and Islam at Rutgers in the early 1990s, I have been studying Palestinian propaganda in the Western media. I watched hundreds of debates and interviews, writing down the questions and coming...

Oct 24, 2023, 9:48 PM

Major General (res.) Brik: Don’t Enter Gaza Now

Major General (res.) Yitzhak Brik served for 10 years as the Commissioner of the Israeli Military Ombudsman. His job was to examine the IDF's preparedness for war. He predicted this war. He shouted from the rooftops. He had meetings...

Oct 22, 2023, 4:21 PM

Simple answers to difficult questions

Q: What is a proportionate response to terrorism? A: In the past Israel responded with targeted killings and destroying Hamas's infrastructure, ending the war before Hamas was defeated. But the real question is what is an appropriate response to terrorism...

Mar 3, 2022, 6:19 PM

Chabad vs Hillel on Campus

I recently had a conversation with Professor Ruth Wisse, formerly of Harvard University and currently with the Tikvah Fund. For a few years now I’ve been creating two podcasts, the first is The Chassidic Story Project and the second...

Feb 3, 2022, 12:02 AM

American Jews did not see Whoopi Goldberg coming

Whoopi Goldberg offended many American Jews by saying “The Holocaust isn’t about race,” but rather about “man’s inhumanity to man.” The problem is not what Whoopi said, it’s how the Jews of America didn’t see this coming. Anyone willing to...

About Me

Barak Hullman studied for a PhD in Islamic History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (MA at Princeton). He made aliyah from South Florida in 1995. He lives in Jerusalem, Israel with his wife and their 7 children (all born in Jerusalem). Barak is the author of two books, Figure It Out When You Get There: A Memoir of Stories About Living Life First and Watching How Everything Else Falls Into Place and A Shtikel Sholom: A Student, His Mentor and Their Unconventional Conversations, available at bit.ly/barakhullman. He has two podcasts, Jewish People & Ideas: Conversations with Jewish Thought Leaders (guests have included Yossi Klein Halevi, Michael Oren, Natan Sharansky, Daniel Gordis and others) at jewishpeopleideas.com and The Chassidic Story Project at hasidicstory.com. Learn more by going to barakhullman.com.

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