The Match That Lit the Flame: Hannah Senesh and the Creation of Modern Israel (with Matti Friedman)

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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The Match That Lit the Flame: Hannah Senesh and the Creation of Modern Israel (with Matti Friedman) is an episode from EconTalk by Library of Economics and Liberty.

This episode is 01:10:19 long.

This episode was published on Mar 23, 2026.

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