A Musical Hug From Israel

I wasn’t unusually quiet about 7 October. I will never be quiet about that date.

But this year, on the third anniversary, I didn’t want to rush into writing something simply because the calendar told me I should.

Instead, I spent part of the day talking with Josh Shron for his programme, Israel Hour Radio.

And then I spent the next few days thinking carefully about what I actually wanted to say.

Maybe that was the right way to mark the day. Not with noise for the sake of noise. But with conversation. Music. Memory. Identity. Israel. And connection.

Because somehow, on a date carrying so much grief, I ended up spending around 90 minutes laughing, talking and reflecting with somebody I had never actually met face-to-face before.

Well, face-to-face-ish. Zoom counts. 🤣

Josh and I have only known each other for around a year or so, but over that time, we have become friends. And what felt so lovely about finally seeing each other and talking properly was how completely natural it felt.

Not like meeting someone for the first time. More like reconnecting with an old friend you somehow hadn’t got around to meeting yet.

58.5 minutes. Apparently.

The original plan was wonderfully simple.

Josh’s programme needed to be 58.5 minutes long, including the 14 Israeli songs I had chosen and wanted to talk about.

Perfect. Plenty of time. One tiny problem. Me.

Anyone who knows me understands that my vocal off switch is slightly broken. 😬

I genuinely tried to keep my answers brief. I really did. But then Josh kept asking interesting questions.

And apparently when somebody asks me an interesting, open-ended question about Israel, Jewish identity, music, history, my books, the Diaspora, belonging or pretty much anything I care deeply about, my internal editor quietly leaves the building.

So Josh asked a question. I gave an answer.

Then an explanation. Then some context. Then possibly a small historical detour. Then another thought I had forgotten to mention. Then probably a story.

Josh talked too, obviously. But let’s be fair here.

Most of the 90-minute problem was me. 🤣 By the time we finished, we had somehow recorded around an hour and a half of conversation without even including any of the songs.

Josh, I am so sorry. I do not envy the editing job ahead of you. ✂️🥴😵‍💫🤣

The man hunting Israeli music before Spotify existed

For anyone who doesn’t know Josh or Israel Hour Radio, his story is wonderful.

Josh started his radio programme more than 30 years ago in America after falling in love with Israeli music. And, somewhere along the way, an Israeli woman too. 🇮🇱❤️

Today we can open Apple Music, Spotify or YouTube and find almost anything within seconds.

Back then? Not quite.

Josh would hunt for Israeli records and CDs wherever he could find them.

When visiting Israel, he would routinely return home with suitcases stuffed with music: CDs he had bought, second-hand recordings and material passed to him by Israeli radio stations.

Then he would take that music back to America and play it.

Long before algorithms could recommend the latest Israeli artist. Long before streaming made Israeli music instantly available around the world. Long before 7 October made so many Jews in the Diaspora suddenly search desperately for ways to reconnect with Israel.

Josh was already doing it.

Week after week. Year after year. Decade after decade. His programme became this extraordinary window into Israeli music and culture.

Most of the music is Ivrit (Hebrew), but the programme itself is overwhelmingly in English, so whether your Hebrew is fluent, rusty, somewhere around ani rotzeh falafel, or virtually nonexistent, it doesn’t matter. You can still belong.

And that mattered enormously to me.

And then he finally came home

There is another part of Josh’s story that makes all of this even more extraordinary.

For years, Josh and his family had talked about making Aliyah.

Like so many Jewish families in the Diaspora, it was never simply a question of whether Israel felt like home.

It was finding the right moment. Work. Family. Children. Schools. Life. All the practical things that sit between the dream and the boarding pass.

Eventually, they decided the time had come.

In August 2023, Josh and his family packed up their lives in America and made Aliyah.

After decades of broadcasting Israeli music, carrying Israeli culture across the Atlantic and helping other Jews feel connected to Israel, Josh finally came home himself.

And then, barely six weeks later, came 7 October.

They had hardly had time to unpack the suitcases. Hardly had time to fill the cupboards. Hardly had time to settle into the rhythms of their new country and begin building this life they had waited years to begin.

And then all hell broke loose.

Sirens. War. Fear. Shock. A country in trauma.

For Josh and his family, their first weeks as new olim became something nobody could possibly have imagined when they booked those flights.

There is something almost surreal about that timing.

For more than 30 years, Josh had been telling people through music: This is Israel.

Then he finally moved there. And within weeks, Israel was facing one of the darkest days in its history.

Yet he stayed. He continued broadcasting. Continued sharing Israeli music. Continued connecting Jews around the world to the country he had finally chosen not simply to love from afar, but to call home.

And that makes what happened next in my own story feel even more meaningful.

The show I found when my heart was broken

I discovered Josh shortly after 7 October 2023.

My heart was in pieces. My head was filled with the images and stories coming out of Israel, and the events of that day had stirred up something incredibly deep in me.

I needed Israel. Not necessarily physically.

I needed the sound of Israel. The language. The music. The food. The humour. The emotion. The familiar rhythms of a place that feels embedded somewhere far deeper than geography.

And somehow I found Israel Hour Radio.

It became one of those small anchors you grab hold of when the sea around you feels completely out of control.

What I didn’t initially appreciate was that the man behind the microphone was experiencing that same national trauma from inside Israel.

Josh wasn’t broadcasting some distant idea of home from thousands of miles away.

He had just arrived home himself.

And through all of that chaos, he kept doing what he had been doing for decades: Playing the music. Connecting people. Keeping that thread between Israel and the Diaspora intact.

Through Josh’s programme I realised something enormously comforting: I wasn’t alone.

Other Jews and Israelis outside Israel were feeling that same ache. That same longing. That strange gravitational pull towards home. That desire to understand who we were, where we belonged and why something thousands of miles away could hurt so much.

In Judaism there is a beautiful word: Teshuvah.

It is usually translated as repentance. But literally, it means something closer to: return.

And that is exactly what those months felt like for me.

A return. To Israel. To Am Yisrael. To our history. To our music. And, ultimately, to myself.

And then Josh became part of the story

Not long after discovering Josh and Israel Hour Radio, I realised something else.

He had to be in my book.

When I began writing Legends of the Light, I never wanted the word legend to mean simply somebody famous, powerful or historically important.

For me, a legend is someone who brings light into the world. Someone who leaves something behind. Someone who lifts other people, connects them, teaches them, protects them, inspires them or simply makes the world around them a little brighter.

And, in particular, someone who brings light to Am Yisrael.

By that definition, Josh was an absolute no-brainer.

For more than three decades, he has been taking Israeli voices, Israeli stories and Israeli music and carrying them beyond Israel’s borders. He has helped Jews in the Diaspora stay connected to home. He has introduced people to artists they might otherwise never have heard.

And, without ever knowing it at the time, at one particularly difficult point in my own life, he helped me find my way back too.

So Josh earned his place among my Legends.

And then, incredibly generously, he agreed to do something even more special. He agreed to write the foreword to Legends of the Light.

That meant an enormous amount to me.

Here was somebody whose programme had helped reconnect me with Israel after 7 October, now standing at the very front of a book I had written about people who spend their lives bringing light to others.

It felt strangely circular. Light creating light.

Josh, I remain enormously grateful for the time you gave me, for your encouragement and for the incredibly kind words you wrote about the book. You didn’t simply appear inside Legends of the Light. In a very real sense, you helped open the door and welcome readers into it.

Fourteen songs. Thousands of stories.

So when Josh invited me onto the programme, one of the things he asked me to do was choose 14 Israeli songs that mean something deeply personal to me.

I loved that. Because music has become one of the strongest threads running through my reconnection with Israel.

What surprised both of us was that several of the songs, or particular versions I had selected, were ones Josh either hadn’t heard before or wasn’t especially familiar with.

Think about that. This is a man who has spent more than 30 years broadcasting Israeli music. Yet I could still bring songs to his programme that were new to him.

That says something extraordinary about Israeli culture. For such a tiny country and such a tiny people, our musical universe is enormous: Mizrahi. Rock. Rap. Pop. Prayer. Folk. Hip-hop. Electronic. Yemenite. Ethiopian. Sephardi. Ashkenazi. Arabic. Hebrew. English. French.

Ancient melodies reborn through modern voices. Songs written in grief. Songs written in defiance. Songs written because somebody fell hopelessly in love. And songs written because sometimes singing is the only way we know how to explain what being Israeli actually feels like.

I had the honour of introducing my choices and explaining why each one meant something to me.

And as we talked, I realised that a thread ran through almost all of them: Pride. Belonging. Responsibility. Memory. Peace. Hope.

Which probably shouldn’t surprise me. They are the same themes running through so much of what I write here, through my books, through the music I am now creating myself and through the way I increasingly understand my Jewish and Israeli identity.

Different medium. Same light.

A Musical Hug From Israel

Josh also takes his love of Israeli music beyond the radio studio.

He travels to synagogues and Jewish communities presenting a programme beautifully called: A Musical Hug From Israel.

And honestly, the name couldn’t be more perfect. Because sometimes that is exactly what music can be. A hug. A memory. A doorway. A few notes capable of transporting somebody thousands of miles in three seconds. A reminder that wherever we happen to live, there is this extraordinary cultural conversation taking place between Jews and Israelis around the world.

I would absolutely love to see Josh bring A Musical Hug From Israel to the UK and present it in one of our beautiful synagogues or Jewish communities here.

If you are involved with a synagogue, community organisation or Jewish cultural programme and would be interested in bringing Josh over, you can find out more here: https://www.joshshron.com/programs/a-musical-hug-from-israel

And finally, Josh…

Thank you. Truly. Thank you for giving me so much of your time. Thank you for the questions. Thank you for somehow managing to remain cheerful while discovering in real time that asking me an open-ended question is an extremely dangerous broadcasting decision. 🤣

Thank you for listening while I rattled on about Israel, identity, music, history, my books and fourteen songs that apparently each required their own documentary series.

And thank you for your kindness towards Legends of the Light, for agreeing to write its foreword, and for the generous words you used to introduce something so personal to me.

But more importantly: Thank you for what you have been doing for more than three decades.

Because long before I needed Israel Hour Radio after 7 October. Long before thousands of Jews around the world found themselves searching again for that connection. Long before streaming made the music easy to find… you were already out there finding it.

Hunting down Israeli records. Stuffing CDs into suitcases. Taking them back to America. Putting them on the radio. And saying, in your own way: Listen to this. This is Israel. This is us.

There is something beautifully stubborn about that.

For more than 30 years, Josh has helped Israeli voices travel across oceans.

Then he packed his own suitcase and followed them home.

And three years after one of the darkest days in our history, there felt something particularly meaningful about finally sitting face-to-face, even if through a screen, and talking about everything that has happened since.

About music. About home. About what changed. About what survived. And about the strange, powerful ways we keep finding one another.

Turn up the music. Tell the stories. Bring people together. Keep the light travelling.

That, to me, is exactly what makes someone a Legend of the Light.

Am Yisrael Chai. 🇮🇱✡️💙