"I was sure I would lose my job and be sued. And then I went to play basketball, and the world went on"
Jeremy Fogel believes that philosophy does not belong only to academia, but can help us understand reality - even when it is chaotic. On the occasion of his new children's book, "The Book of Opposites", he talks about the storm surrounding the interview with MK Zvi Sukkot ("They are good at creating content, but not at managing a country"), about the item on Channel 14 that led to the removal of his lecture from a teacher training course, and explains why he decided to turn specifically to children, just before he becomes a father: "Childhood is the philosophical age par excellence. That is where the big questions are asked."
The interview with Zvi Sukkot on his podcast is probably one of the moments in life where the ability of philosopher and author Jeremy Fogel to bring the life wisdom of philosophy down to earth was tested. Fogel hosted the right-wing Knesset member on his podcast, "The Radical", in which in-depth interviews are conducted with Israelis from both sides of the reality. "We had a very interesting and pleasant conversation," Fogel testifies, "This was the first conversation I recorded with a politician, and I am not very good at political interviews. It is hard for me to attack people in conversations and challenge them, and I don't do homework, I come spontaneously."
However, the success of the interview turned out to be problematic shortly after, when citizens, alongside MK Sukkot himself, broke into the Sde Teiman detention facility as a protest against the arrest of reservists suspected of severe abuse of a Palestinian detainee. The pleasant conversation with Sukkot from the current angle seemed disconnected to Fogel. "I felt that the joking and fun tone of the conversation was very problematic," he recalls. "Meanwhile, the head of Sukkot's party, Bezalel Smotrich, said that it is moral to let two million Gazans die of hunger. And then I made a decision to 'give another voice'." Fogel decided not to censor the episode, but to hold a public discussion about it with some friends. "I turned the interview into a kind of Talmud," he defines, "I added an interpretive layer."
The interpretive layer, which Fogel defined in retrospect as an unfortunate decision, did not please, to say the least, Sukkot and his milieu. "He complained that we censored him, which was not true. We included 50 minutes out of 56 minutes of the interview, a perfectly reasonable edit for a podcast," explains Fogel, "but the things that were said were not nice and dismissive, harsh and offensive. We added a rude interpretive layer." Why? "In my feeling, Zvi Sukkot lied to me. I asked him about the sukkah he stayed in in Huwara on October 6, and I felt that with true honesty, almost with tears in his eyes, he defended himself against the thought that the fact that the army had to secure a sukkah in Huwara affected his readiness for October 7."
The affair caused a "huge scandal" that included a threat of a lawsuit and a public storm, and Fogel felt the power of the digital arm on his own skin. "It was very stressful," he recalls, "You are sure that you are going to lose your job and that you will be sued from every direction. And then I went to play basketball, and the moment I wasn't with the phone everything was calm and okay. The world goes on. It was very interesting how a person with a large digital presence operates. After all, this is the great talent of many of these young politicians - they are influencers, good at creating content. They are not good at managing a country or bringing security, not to mention leading a moral line, but they excel in content and creating interest as part of a culture of constant stimulation. Itamar Ben Gvir with his nonsense about the crocodiles knows how to be part of this environment, and Zvi Sukkot who enters like Chuck Norris into schools in Arab villages with a saw, it is a world of cheap sensations that these people excel in."
The spirits calmed down after Fogel published a public apology for the offensive style of the original episode and uploaded the full and original conversation to the digital platforms. "It pained me that my friends, religious-nationalists, were very hurt by the things," he admits, "The editing was really not respectful on a personal level. Let's say that I will have to give an account to God for a podcast that is edited negligently, and Zvi Sukkot will have to give an account for the fact that he is a partner in the coalition that brought us to October 7."
History repeats itself, as is known, but not always on the same track. Just last week, Fogel found himself on the other side of the fence. On Channel 14, an item was published according to which "Training for Bible became an extreme political event - due to comparisons to Auschwitz", following a lecture that Fogel gave to teachers on the subject of the importance of the Enlightenment. "There is training for Bible teachers, and as part of it they interview all kinds of people from all political and cultural ends to talk about the Bible. I was interviewed there, and among others they also interview Chili Tropper, Moshe Feiglin there. I talk about the importance of Enlightenment, a logical thing to talk about with adult teachers, with the ability for independent and critical thinking."
"When a person sees 'comparisons to Auschwitz', what does he think? That I compared Gaza to Auschwitz. This is a complete lie. What I compared to Auschwitz was the trans-Atlantic slavery from the 16th century to the 19th. It is clear that the Holocaust is a unique event, but slavery is also a unique event. It is about 12 million people who were kidnapped from Africa and enslaved in America. I had a black humor joke there - when I saw with my roommate '12 Years a Slave', we laughed: 'Tell me, what would you prefer - Auschwitz or slavery?'. In Auschwitz your chances of surviving are small, but if you survive a few years - you can be in Ramat Gan and drink tea. In slavery you will die, your children and grandchildren will die in slavery, and if they sell your wife and child - you will not see them again. Both are terrible. My whole point there was that sometimes because of too much focus on Jewish suffering, we do not see the suffering of other cultures and peoples."
Following the pressure of Channel 14, Fogel's lecture was removed from the training program. "Because my ideas about 'Enlightenment' are extreme, it turns out. Falsely, things were taken out of context to censor the possibility of Bible teachers to hear a critical opinion and decide for themselves. Everyone who was outraged about Zvi Sukkot - I expect you to be outraged about this too."
"Every time Bibi and Ben Gvir work together there is blood, suffering, murder and division"
As someone who immigrated to Israel in high school from Belgium, as a direct result of the Rabin assassination (his father, who was shaken by the assassination, decided to immigrate to Israel because "history is calling them"), young Fogel was amazed to discover the gap between Israel and the Zionism on which he was educated and the actual situation in the land of the Jews. "After a few months I understood how partial the Zionist education I received in Belgium was," he recalls, "and how many components of the story were not told to me, specifically the Palestinian narrative. They explained the issue in a very superficial way and from the point of view of Jewish-Israeli suffering. When I arrived here and understood that there is a much more complex story, it very much unsettled me, I had no idea that this was happening. They educated us very Zionistically and did not bother to talk to us about the fact that there is another people here between the river and the Jordan, and that there is a problem - not only security and political, but also a deep moral problem. I did not understand how I was supposed to know what is true and what is not, if part of what I was educated according to was a lie."
And today, 30 years later, how do you see it? "In some way, the prominent figures who led the political discourse to this assassination are those who rule us today, in the style of 'Have you murdered and also inherited?'. Benjamin Netanyahu and Itamar Ben Gvir are the Lennon and McCartney of the Rabin assassination. Every time Lennon and McCartney met - a song came out that gave the world love, joy, comfort and beauty. In the meeting and cooperation between Benjamin Netanyahu and Itamar Ben Gvir, every time they work together there is blood, suffering, destruction, murder and division."
This crisis intersected with the growing interest of the teenager Fogel in philosophy. Over the years he deepened his engagement in the field, made it official with an academic degree and today he makes a living as a lecturer and author ("The book "Philosophers against God"), who invested his best efforts in making the field accessible and building a psychological ladder that will help people without prior knowledge to climb the palaces of Spinoza and Plato. The next population segment he is aiming at, by the way, is children. In his new book, "The Book of Opposites", which was illustrated by Noma Bar, he presents pairs of opposites and finds the thread whose one end is fed by philosophy, and the other is connected to the lives of young people and touches on questions that may occupy them too.
"I am a bit repelled by the thought that philosophy is a high and disconnected field of knowledge," he says. "You get up in the morning, you decide what you put on the plate, if you put animal products, if you refuse or if you eat kosher - all these are philosophical questions. You are on the road, you choose how to behave with other people, that is a question of ethics and morality. You choose who to vote for. There was here - there still is - a regime revolution. This raises fascinating questions in political philosophy. Although good news it is not, but in the period of the big protests around the regime revolution, I did very much like that the whole discourse of the whole country was actually a discourse of political philosophy. What is democracy anyway? Democracy is that thing that was in Athens and from there the word comes? On one hand yes, on the other hand I hope to think that it is clear to all of us that a regime in which women have no part in voting or in forcing the policy or in operating it, this is not something that we today would identify as democracy. But this is the original democracy. So democracy is not only elections and it is not only a name, it is all kinds of other things. What are these things? That is to say, we are constantly dealing with philosophical questions, if we want and if we are aware of it and if not."
So you look at our reality - at the polarization, at the violence, at the numbness in the face of all the destruction, the war and the fatigue - and you see where philosophy can help people overcome this situation? "For years I did a podcast about philosophy - currently we are locked out of the account so it is suspended, and if someone in the audience knows how to connect me to someone at SoundCloud I would be happy - and when October 7 arrived I was in shock like everyone. Watching TV from morning to night. People started writing to us, 'Tell me, what about the podcast? You disappeared. Especially in this period people need'. I returned to the Stoic philosophers and did an episode about Stoic philosophy. This was the most listened to and most popular episode we did, and very many people wrote me very moving emails, people who experienced uncertainty and distress. Someone who wrote to me that she is in the south, her husband is in the reserves, she has three small children and she is in the safe room. She told me: 'I just repeated like a mantra a sentence I heard you say in the podcast, a sentence of Epictetus: 'It is not reality that scares human beings, but their opinions and thoughts about reality'. She repeated this sentence again and again, and it took her out of a moment of breakdown."
So how would the philosopher improve the situation? "One needs to understand how we establish a contemporary Israeli Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was a movement that in decades succeeded in taking a whole society out of subordination to oppressive, misanthropic, misogynistic and violent religious institutions, which relied on ignorance to continue and maintain their power - intentional ignorance that creates acquired helplessness and political control. The Enlightenment moves a person from a state of a child to an adult. There is great logic in the fact that after the so cruel and shaking attack of October 7 we entered a state where we will stop thinking morally about conduct in war. But now, when one sees that there is no absolute victory and no solution in the childish sense of the term... this also has a negative meaning: to promise 'absolute victory', to talk to children as if they are in kindergarten, to promise them absolute victory, to treat adult people like the Haredi elite treats them, like babies."
"Think about encyclopedias - today you walk down the street and there are encyclopedias on every corner. Once they were inside the houses. In the 18th century this was the advanced technology for massive dissemination of knowledge. They understood that if people came out of intentional ignorance, it does not mean that they will stop believing in God, it just means that they will be adults and it will be impossible to control them as if they are children. I have no problem with faith and with religion, I myself am a person with spiritual life, but simplistic and idolatrous repentance sets a simplistic image of God and leads to obedience to a group of fundamentalist, selfish and corrupt men who pretend to speak in the name of God - which is the most terrible heresy that can be."
How do you convince an adult person to grow up? "Here enters the enormous importance of education."
"Childhood is the age of big questions - and not by chance"
This interview takes place just as Fogel, 45, returns from his baby-moon with his wife, Einav, in her ninth month of pregnancy. The term baby-moon is intended to mark the last time that a couple, who are about to become parents for the first time in their lives, can spend time together in a couple's outing just before they change status. "But okay, I had mine," Fogel consoles himself. Do you think philosophy will help you in your future role as a parent? "I respect very much what people say, that you don't know what you are getting into until it happens to you. Maybe it will help in that in philosophy one practices accepting uncertainty and the unknown. In 20 years you will ask the star of my fatherhood what she says. It is not me who needs to determine."
What makes children a good audience for philosophy? "Childhood is in my eyes the philosophical age par excellence. This is the age of big questions, and not by chance. Plato taught us that philosophy begins with wonder. I remember myself at the age of five, six, seven, eight standing in wonder before the big questions. What does it mean that the sky is infinite? Space is infinite - what is infinity? What is eternity? What is time? What is death? What am I supposed to do in the world? What is it to be good and not good? Unfortunately this wonder is a bit swallowed into life. Afterwards, you know, we live in an era where everything is taken for granted."
Everything becomes certain. "It is taken for granted when I have a phone in my hand with which I can access all the information that humanity has ever collected. It is always strange to me that people complain about a flight being late. This is a delusion. You enter a piece of iron and you are in London, but for us it is taken for granted, and what seems to us most taken for granted is the very existence, the very fact that something exists. Once you think about it, it is delusional that we woke up consciously to reality. I don't think it is possible to hold onto this wonder all the time, but it is possible to inject this color into our lives, to celebrate this initial wonder. When I speak to a child, I assume that I am speaking with a creature that is deep, very curious, and possesses an imagination ability that often exceeds that of adults. That he has this initial wonder before the strangeness of things, and that therefore in many senses he can understand these strange ideas faster, and even a bit deeper than people of other ages. He lacks prior knowledge, but that does not make him a dummy. Beyond that, I think that a children's book often functions as a stage for conversations with the parent, and much more than my text the matter is the conversation that it creates between parents and children. The book is short and concise, but Noma's amazing images and my texts are the spark of a real philosophical dialogue."
When did the making of philosophy accessible start to take a place in your life? "For me, as someone who teaches philosophy, I have an interest that people think that philosophy is an important thing that gives comfort and value to life because from this I make a living. You ask a tomato seller when he decided that tomatoes are important? From the day I decided that I am selling tomatoes. Often I meet people who are afraid to approach philosophy, fear that it is not for them, that they will not succeed in understanding and that it is too big for them. From my point of view, this thing is very far from the truth. This does not mean that you are going to sit on the beach and read Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason', and you are going to have an afternoon that is not traumatic, it certainly might be. But there are all kinds of stages on this ladder and if you get on the first stage and you have curiosity, more will come. I think of accessibility as a Gateway Drug, a drug that leads to heavier drugs. This is the first dose."
How do you prevent flattening or commercialization of the field? "I don't know if 'commercialize' is the right word, it is not clear to me what commercial value there is to this activity in our culture today. But I do say full-mouthed that both this book and 'Philosophers against God' (his book from 2025) are books in which I explicitly try to reach a wide audience," he says also as someone who participates in various programs, such as "You must read this" on Kan - and tries there also to lead people to read philosophy books. "I also release academic philosophy. I wrote this monster," he shows me a thick book, "372 pages, 1,327 footnotes, I wrote it for eight years. It will be read by between 15 to 30 researchers for whom this is really the field, and a few hundred more students who will read individual paragraphs or chapters. I do not dismiss it at all, it is very important that there be academia and that things be written at the level of depth and sophistication without accessibility, but if one wants to reach many people I think of Socrates who speaks in the market, in the gymnasium, in the agora and in the streets."
I look at Dan Ariely for example, on one hand a kind of rockstar of game theory, but on the other hand pays a price from the academy. Is this something that occupies you? "There is an understanding in the academy today that in the contemporary digital culture there is an academic obligation to make the accumulated knowledge accessible to the community and to take an active part in public life. Diogenes of Sinope, from the Cynics, the one who lived in a barrel, ate in the market and walked with a raised finger - to learn from him you didn't need to pass exams, you needed to walk for three weeks with a dead fish on a leash around the city, because if you are not capable of standing it that they say you are crazy, stupid, delusional or a dummy, you don't have at all the ability to start learning philosophy. So every time I have thoughts of this kind I say: 'Jeremy, think what Diogenes would say to you and get yourself together'."
