- Economics
- Answering Challenges to Advanced Economies
- Reforming Education
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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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Matti Friedman is the author of five works of nonfiction that have been translated into more than a dozen languages. His newest book is Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe (2026). His other books include, Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai (2022), selected as one of the year’s best books by Vanity Fair; Spies of No Country: The Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel (2019), winner of the the Natan Book Award; Pumpkin Flowers: A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War (2016), which was chosen as one of Amazon’s ten best books of the year; and The Aleppo Codex (2013), an investigation into the strange fate of the ancient Bible manuscript, which won numerous awards including the ALA’s Sophie Brody Medal. Friedman’s work as a reporter has taken him across the world, including the Middle East, Russia, the Caucuses, and Washington, DC. He currently writes for The Free Press.
Visit Matti Friedman's Website
RELATED SOURCES
- Matti Friedman's EconTalk Episodes
- Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe by Matti Friedman on Amazon.com
- Hannah Senesh: Her Life and Diary, the First Complete Edition by Hannah Senesh on Amazon.com
- The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition by Anne Frank on Amazon.com
- "HaYehudim Ba’im: Satirical Sketches and How to Use Them"
- Theodor Herzl in The Encyclopedia Britannica
- Zeev Jabotinsky in The Jabotinsky Institute in Israel
- Enzo Sereni in The Jewish Virtual Library
- "Ashrei hagafrur" by Hannah Senesh (Transliteration)
- "Ashrei hagafrur" by Hannah Senesh (in Hebrew)
- Ashrei, Jewish Prayer, on Wikipedia
- "Ukrainian army choir sings 'Eli Eli' on International Holocaust Memorial Day" in The Jerusalem Post
