Jack S. Levy, Reflections on Life in Israel after October 7

92-114 Jack Levy
Jack Levy, Will Bachman

Will Bachman  00:02
Will, hello and welcome to the 92 Report. I’m your host. Will Bachman, and I’m happy to be here today with our classmate, Jack Levy, Jack, welcome to the show.

Jack Levy  00:13
It’s great to be here. Will, thanks for having me. Thanks for doing what you’re doing with all of us.

Will Bachman  00:19
Thank you very much. And I will mention right up front, this will take us a day or two or a week to get published, but we are recording this on October 7, 2024 Jack is in Israel right now, before we start recording, Jack, you told me that you’re actually in the safe room of your house, and so that’s very much probably going to be a present topic in our conversation. Jack, why don’t we start with my standard question, just tell us about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

Jack Levy  00:53
All right. Terrific. So graduated, like all of us, in 92 and I spent the following year in Israel. I had already spent a year before college. I deferred. So I spent a year before college studying Judaic Studies, Talmudic studies in the Old City of Jerusalem. And that was, I would say, a very sort of spiritual year. And during my time in Harvard, I think I became particularly interested in Israel. I grew up with a very strong Jewish background. But that doesn’t mean that you understand modern Israel as an American Jew. And I hadn’t really traveled to Israel that much. I did spend the summer there in 1990 and then I so I wanted to come back. So there was at the time of fellowship, which unfortunately doesn’t exist anymore. It was funded by a man named Fred Schwartz, who those people who grew up in New York would remember his commercials as Fred the Furrier. And he gave us a fellowship to go to Hebrew University for a year, not towards any particular degree. You can’t really get a degree in a year. Maybe some people were able to, but just to take courses. And I spent that year in 1992-93 at Hebrew University. But also I interned for a member of Knesset, a very liberal member of Knesset, Naomi Hazan. And I also worked for the Association for civil rights in Israel, which was actually sort of like the ACLU of Israel. Interestingly enough, the big case that they had that year was about the deportation of 415 members of Hamas over the border into Lebanon. And they they brought a TRO to try to stop it. It ultimately went forward, and that’s an important part of history that Rabin did, and this is before the Oslo Accords. So it was an amazing year for me, a year of sort of integration into Israeli society. And I think it left me wanting to come back. That said at the time, I had been admitted to Columbia Law School, and so I returned. And it took me, in a sense, nine years to get back, or maybe more actually, right from 93 to 10 years, 10 to 2003.  So I then went to Columbia Law School briefly. I’ll say I it was. I had a great experience. Actually sat down in my first day of class next to Kathy Strobos, a classmate as well, and made good friends there. I started out as a human rights lawyer, that’s what interested me. And I think, like many people who started out interested in public interest law, but then quickly, sort of realized that they were in debt, decided to go to Wall Street to pay back my debt. And that’s okay. I mean, you know, it worked. I was able to pay it back in a couple of years, and by then, I think I was very committed towards making my way back to Israel. And so I actually chose the law firm that I wanted to work with based on the Israeli clients. And that was, you know, it’s sort of like a tip I give to a lot of young people now. It’s like, if you walk in for a job interview and you’re particularly passionate about something, you know, the interviewer will respond. He’s like, Oh, wow, this guy likes what I’m doing, right?  So I had a fabulous mentor there named Peter Jakes, who represented Teva Pharmaceuticals, and I had a good experience. A lot of young lawyers are not happy. I had a pretty good experience. Most importantly, while I was at law school, I met my wife, she’s came over from London to work at the Yale Child Study Center, and met another one of our classmates, Elie Fishman. So indeed, I owe all my life’s happiness to my Harvard classmate Elie Fishman, who introduced me to Dahlia. I’d like to say Ellie was already taken, in a sense, with a Harvard 90 you know he was, he was pretty good as a in 92 he was able to pull an upper class woman, and who he’s been married with for over 30 years just around I’ve been married 29 years so, and then Dahlia and I settled in New York for a little while. I worked at the law firm. I then did a quick tour at an internet company. Not so actually, not so quick. It was a detour, I should say, is the phrase, you know. I always thought, hey, I’ll be a lawyer. I’m a pretty happy lawyer. I’ll move to Israel. I’ll be a lawyer there. And it was 99 and the Internet was the rage, and through actually, a classmate of my wife’s, she was getting her PhD in Psychology at Citi, and a classmate’s husband was the founder of a company that only people our age might remember called register.com now, and I talk to young people about it, they’re like, what’s that? I’m like, Well, you know, GoDaddy. They’re like, oh yeah. Well, this was GoDaddy before there was GoDaddy. And so I spent a little brief time, not so brief. I was four years actually, the General Counsel of an internet company that really rode an incredible wave up and down of the .com boom. So that’s also something to chat about. I know some of my classmates, some of our classmates have were involved with that as well. It was an amazing moment in time, and it was great. But then in 2003 sort of the time came our oldest child. At that point in time, Amitai, was going into kindergarten, and we were like, Look, if we wanted to move to Israel, as we had planned on doing, we said, why? This is a good time. This is a good time for a transition. Let him do all of his education over there. I had, we had two kids at the time, five and three, and Dahlia was pregnant with our third. And so in August of 2003 I moved to Raanana, which is a suburb of Tel Aviv, about 20 minutes north of Tel Aviv, and we’ve lived here ever since, raised our three children here. Two of those boys got married in 2003 and, sorry, in 2023 which was not necessarily expected — married, you know, at the ages of 22 and 24 but absolutely wonderful. So now I have two daughters in law and my daughter is 20.  Professionally, I practiced law here briefly, just really for, like, a year, but then I became a venture capitalist, and I’ll say about that. I owe that to another Harvard classmate and one of my dearest friends, Sanjay Wagle, he was doing what we then called cleantech in the West Coast. Now people call it climate tech, and Israel has a very robust venture capital ecosystem, but nobody was looking at Clean Tech or climate tech in Israel. And Sanjay and I were talking, I’d been accepted potentially to join a fund. And I said, Okay, now I have to choose some areas that I’ll specialize in. He says, Jack, listen, I’m seeing deals in Israel, and there’s nobody in Israel that’s investing in this. You guys have VC there, but nobody’s looking at this. And so I was the first to, sort of, thanks to Sanjay, raise the banner of cleantech, or climate tech in Israel in 2006-2007 those of us who have been in the space know that that was hard and a lot of mistakes were made, and unfortunately, a fair amount of money was lost, but now it feels like the world is caught up to maybe where some of us were earlier, and it’s a good area to be in. And my own fund is kind of expanded into other areas, and now I’m hoping to focus much more on climate tech going forward. So in a nutshell, that sort of, you know, kind of covers and, you know. And then, of course, the last thing I’ll say is, given, you know, I think it was a year ago, and I chose will to do this interview on this day because I thought it would be particularly poignant a year ago. I think life changed. Life changed for all Israelis, for all people in this region, certainly for Palestinians, for Israelis, and with the Hamas attack that started on the morning of October 7, and has continued and now is, unfortunately, a multi front war. And all of my children serve in the military, because that’s a requirement here in Israel, of course, but they do it willingly and proudly and and we’ve had a lot of losses in my community, so I’ll take a step back, but let you you know, guide the guide the conversation where you like. But there’s, in a nutshell, the the 20, no, I guess it’s from 92 to now. So it’s 30 wherever we were at 32 years.

Will Bachman  09:06
Maybe you could tell us a bit more about what the past year has been like for you and your family and the impact of this conflict. Yeah.

Jack Levy  09:14
So, you know, we woke up October 7 was was a holiday here. Um, it was the the end of the Feast of Tabernacles, and we woke up to sirens, which is not uncommon in parts of the country, unfortunately, and had become increasingly common in the southern parts of the country, near Gaza, and we ourselves had already lived through maybe three or four conflicts, serious ones, while we were here. There was the Second Lebanon War in 2006 three years after we lived here. And then there was we came at the tail end of the Second Intifada with. Was more of a Palestinian Israeli, not suicide bombings and the like that happened from 2000 to 2003 but then 2006 there was war with Hezbolla – The Second Lebanon War. And then in I don’t even remember, I think 2012 2014 and then maybe 2017 there were fights with Hamas, which included missile attacks. And so it was not the first time that we’d woken up to a missile, you know, attack in Ra’anana, where I live, but it’s much more rare in Ra’anana. I always like to say, you know, if they’re going to take a shot to make a point, they would just shoot a Tel Aviv, which is south of us, right? They don’t have to go to this little suburban area that we’re in. But the entire country was under attack on October 7 of 2023 and you know, as as I think people know, Yahia Sinuar, the leader of Hamas, had made this decision to just launch an all out surprise attack, which resulted in horrific tragedy and awful violence and crimes and and destruction and rape and murder and burning of people, etc, in the Southern Communities. So it from our perspective, it hit us, you know, sort of we were in synagogue, it was a holiday, and sort of the rumors started to spread. I We don’t use electronics on the Sabbath, right? So it wasn’t like I was watching the news, although by the afternoon, not only were we all watching the news, but everybody that was a soldier, effectively in reserves was getting called up. And so the rest of that day, I’m a perennial optimist, and I remember talking and we had just married off my son on September 26 so it was sort of like, and by the way, just even adds a wrinkle to the story. What had I done between September 26 and October 7 with two other couples, we had visited Jordan. I mean, we were sort of living the new Middle East. We were vacationing in Jordan. I was in Amman and I was in we had done southern Jordan the year before, Petra and that beautiful Aqaba and all that. And this time we did northern Jordan, Jerash and Amman and like and I got back from Jordan on October 5. Imagine, it’s boggles my mind. And then October 7, this happened, but the tragedy struck our family basically six o’clock on the morning on October 8, our best friends called to tell us that their son had been killed. And that’s his name is Aryeh Ziering, a major. Aryeh Ziering, he was 27 years old, and he was a professional soldier. He was a company commander, and he was actually more than a company commander, you know, I don’t know how to translate the military ranks in from Hebrew to English, but he was effectively responsible for the all of the training, all of the attack units, if they use dogs in warfare, for not for the bomb sniffing, but for actual sort of sniffing out terrorists themselves. And Aryeh was a warrior. He was but he was also Aryeh. He was just, you know, he was, when I see was almost like a son. We our family, the Ziering family, the Levy family. We have one Whatsapp group called the Levierings. That’s how close we sort of are. And Areyh heard the news by seven o’clock in the morning. He was at home for the weekend, and he had heard the news, and he just went down there, like many, many other heroes did that day. And as horrible as the stories were of of victims, there were and also, of course, a massive failure from the Israeli defense establishment to allow this attack, not to not to test it, not to detect it from an intelligence perspective and to allow it go unhindered for a long time, the stories of the heroism of that day, of people like Areh who just grabbed their weapons went down there in whatever manner they could to rescue people, are stories that will just be told for generations. Aryeh went down to what he gathered. You know, people were just kind of gathering. There weren’t like units formed and he gathered with a couple of other people that were senior officers, and Aryeh was an excellent fighter. I mean, he given who he was, he had basically been somebody that had literally captured terrorists alongside some of the most elite forces. Aryeh had actually gone to the United States and helped train Navy SEALs with canine warfare. That’s how good he was. Also, he was an American originally, so it was easy for him to communicate and all that. And he was killed by Hamas command naval commandos who had infiltrated Israel. And he we, I think he didn’t know what he was getting into, right? None of us did, and so he, they, he was killed by 1pm that day, and our friends called us the next day at six in the morning. They found out at midnight and and we just immediately went over there, and our lives changed. I mean, it’s as simple as that, to fast forward, just to give you a sense of the. Of the of the pain, personal pain. We found out later that day that our friends Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg, whom many of our classmates probably heard speak at the Democratic National Convention, that their son Hirsch, had been kidnapped into Gaza. That story was unfortunately ended with tragedy about a month ago when he was killed by Hamas, as Israeli forces were approaching the tunnels where they’d been held, where he’d been held for 11 months. So by the end of the first day, we had one friend whose son had been killed as a fighter, one friend who had been captured from the Nova festival and was in Hamas and was in Gaza, held prisoner by Hamas, and another one of my business partner’s lost his cousin’s child fighting that day as well. And then as the year went on and the war, you know, got spread, we have in just my close, close network of friends. One of my dearest friends lost their nephew in December fighting in in Gaza and another very, very close friend, their daughter’s boyfriend was killed fighting a terrorist attack in the West Bank, some Hamas terrorists who was shooting at a bus like a minibus, and other friends whose son in law was killed. It’s just we’re at war. And as a 50 year old, it means that you have kids who are, you know, 18 to 25 and it means that your kids are fighting. So thank God. My own children, you know, are fine. I have three children. They were all my my oldest son was in Vietnam on his honeymoon, and his wife is in the army, professionally, they’re both on technology units in the intelligence forces, so I never really quite have to worry about them as active fighters. But they, he they had to immediately find a way back. We had to break the news to them about Arias death, and then they had to find a way back in the middle of their honeymoon to come back. And they immediately went into service. And when I say immediately went into service, I mean, like for the next 30 straight days, we barely saw them. They didn’t even have their apartment yet in Tel Aviv, like they didn’t get their apartment till January. They just kind of lived at our place and at his in laws place. And we would it was like past the tupperwares around right? Like they would go back to base and come to us, and then my second son, my is a fighter, and so he was quickly drafted, and immediately he went up to the Lebanon border, and he was there to make sure that there wasn’t going to be the Lebanon part of this war. Early on, that was when Biden said, the famous Don’t you know, which I wish you know, would still be in effect, but it worked at the time, and the war really didn’t spread that much to Lebanon, as much as it is now. But then Nadav went into Gaza to fight in December. And he was fought in Gaza for two months. And my daughter is was in the army, was on a base that day, described, not, thankfully, anywhere near the southern border, but, but was on a base, and even though she’s in the education core, that day was a pretty harrowing day for her. And of course, I had to pick her up to bring her to Ari, his funeral and and that was very difficult my daughter, that daughter, just went to her fifth funeral yesterday, because she’s 20, and, yeah, so I don’t mean to be a downer, but this is, this has been the Israeli experience for the 50 year olds, right? You know, if you’re you expect, you know, if you’re 20, if you’re 20s, you’re fighting, right? And that’s the, you know, this generation is, is a remarkable generation. I wrote a piece on the Times of Israel that if classmates are interested, they can look it up. But they, you know, Google Jack Levy, Times of Israel. It’s just a local online paper called My Little League team went to war because I was a little league coach here for 12 years. One of the, one of the best things I should have mentioned that early on my bio, right? That was probably my favorite thing that I’ve ever done, and I hope to be again as a grandfather. I’ve been taking a break now, but I still play softball with my boys. I played this Saturday night, and I just It occurred to me by December that basically every single one of the kids that I coached was was was fighting in this war. That’s the experience of our generation here at this moment, unfortunately,

Will Bachman  19:29
what does someone in your position? What have you learned that Americans don’t understand

Jack Levy  19:44
good question. You know, I think of my own self at Harvard and most definitely, and I learned this well before this war started, right? But as the father of a soldier in in, like I said, times where there were conflicts as well, right? Even when there’s no war. There’s, unfortunately, you’re always lower level conflict. And even when there’s no lower level conflict, just military training is very dangerous. When I was at Harvard, and I remember the debates about ROTC, and I remember probably being on the side against ROTC, just because I don’t know, I just was right. I don’t know why. I’m a pretty liberal Democrat. I just sort of identify, you know, and and I look back on that aspect of myself. I wrote this in my 20th report, or whatever. There’s one thing that I could change about myself is to it just have some understanding of what it means to be a military family, and the level of respect that I have for American military families. And so what I would say to my American classmates is, you know, if you see anybody who serves their country or their or their state or city in that way, just like, go give them a hug. I think, tragically, one of the soldiers that was killed just before the New Year, like five days ago, he had recorded a little video of himself before he went into Lebanon. And this isn’t somebody that I know, but, but I identify with all these, you know. And he said he quoted somebody. I couldn’t figure out who it was, but it sounded like it was an American name. And he said, I’ve been, he said, I’ve been touring the northern border communities, which have been completely abandoned because Hezbollah has been launching missiles at them since October 8, and they and all that. So we’ve had basically, you know, 60,000 refugees from the north in our own country moves out. And he said, There’s noone here. And he said, and then he quoted an American. He said, When you go to war, you do it not out of hate for the person you’re facing, but out of love for the person that’s behind you. And that’s what I think Americans of my generation don’t really understand. I think about military and about military families. I certainly didn’t. I grew up in the time of the beginning of the realization of the facing of the tragedy of the Vietnam War and and, you know, sort of the Oliver Stone movies of babies, that’s our generation, right? It’s sort of like, so like for us, war was, like, unjust or wrong or bad, or, you know, that was kind of, at least for me, I don’t want to say, you know. And then the Gulf War, which happened while we were in college, was interesting. It was a little different. Maybe it was just, it certainly seemed more sanitary. And then, of course, the later on, wars of the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, much more difficult, problematic, confusing, that what they accomplished, what they didn’t accomplish. But the one thing that I understand from my perspective, that I hope my classmates would really understand, is those, those it’s not just boys, those men and women who are fighting are often just the best, the best motivated, the most kind, the most loving, the people that basically like you want in your corner, right? I mean, when I wrote in that piece about my Lily team, went to war, I never served. I got here at the age of 33 I’ve never shot a gun in my life. I’m somewhat proud of that. To some extent, I feel I can identify even a bit with pacifism, but I live only because there are people that are willing to defend me. And I think that, I think that that’s something that, as an American, for the first 33 years of my life, I never quite fathomed and understood. And so, boy, when I come back to the United States and I travel around there, if I ever see a service person, you know, I go right up to them and give them a pat on the back and hug an appreciation.

Will Bachman  23:32
You hear about when there’s some kind of severe hurricane and houses get destroyed, and then people are relying on one another to ferry themselves around, like on boats and so forth, or or in in wartime, that there’s this enhanced sense of community, and people, you know, become, in some ways, like much more generous and so forth and community minded. I’m curious if it’s you to react to that, have you, you know, has there been a change in Israeli society, in terms of people coming together?

Jack Levy  24:06
Yeah, that’s also really accurate. One of the things that absolutely happened was a complete rise. There was a bit of a failure of the state apparatus of the defense established on October 7, not a bit of a failure. That’s an understatement, right? We effectively allowed hordes to burst through our our borders and kidnap and there’s 101 hoppages still held in the in the dungeons of Gaza, 30 or so, 35 or so or whom are presumed dead, but, but maybe 60 or so are still potentially alive and stuff. So that failed, what immediately jumped in to replace it, until we got things sort of going, was this, like they called them war rooms, right? But they were war rooms of civilians, and so I’ll give you a few examples. So the. These internal refugees immediately, all of the Southern Communities, and then the next day, all the northern communities, like within five miles of the border, basically evacuated and came to the center of the country. Now in the Second Lebanon War, we had seen this as well. We actually had a family live in our basement right here in the Second Lebanon War. The funny thing about that is that they kind of liked Rana so much that they ended up moving here. And I saw them. I saw the kid in school like that. You know, after in September, I’m like, wait a minute, why are you still around? You’re not in my basement anymore. He goes, Oh, my parents really liked it here they moved. But that kind of community of sort of accepting refugees literally into your houses, and then, if it wasn’t, into your houses. You know my a dear friend of mine who lost her nephew. I alluded to her earlier. She’s a principal of the school. So within four days, what was she doing? She was living in the Dead Sea area. Because Israel has a lot of hotels in the Dead Sea area. Of course, we weren’t going to have any tourism, so they moved a lot of these refugees into those hotels. So then the question is, okay, well, now you have all these families living in these hotels. So my friend Lisa’s like, okay, we’re setting up a school. And basically she set up a school. And so once our friend Lisa is setting up a school, that means she needs 1000 things. So that’s when I came into action. And I’m like, you know, my kids are off being drafted. I’m like, what, you know, I was comforting My dear friends, Debbie and Mark. But after the Shiva period ended, you know, what am I doing? Or even during it? And the next thing you know, I was ferrying tables and chairs and computers and getting donations down to a hotel in the Dead Sea so that Lisa could run a school, all of which, by the way, are still down there, like when the school ended, you know, two, three months later, nobody asked for their tables back, right? And the computers were donated by a company I got that going. Ironically, you know, this is, this is an interesting thing that some people you know who follow this closely enough would know. But like even Israel, mobilized 300 I think, 325,000 reservists that first month, that has never happened before, and that means that even the military was sorely lacking in equipment. And so when you talk about community, the community extends even broader. And so next thing you know, my son is a reservist. He’s telling me that some of his equipment is lacking. I’m like, Oh, my God, you’re going into war and you don’t have the right helmet, let’s raise some money and let’s get the helmets, you know? And so that happened as well. And it’s like, you know, we have a whole defense budget, which is massive, but that kind of volunteering there were, I mean, there’s, there’s a video of Secretary of State Blinken on one of his early visits here, going into one of these civilian War Rooms were basically just, you know, sort of material for not just refugees, mostly for the refugees, you know, but also for additional assistance for soldiers. Was all just being organized. And it was pretty it was pretty remarkable and very comforting for sure, to see that kind of coming together, like, like you allude, you know, is probably happening in North Carolina. You know, as we speak, in the wake of that hurricane Helene, um,

Will Bachman  28:15
this, tell me if you just want to take a pass on this one. But I you know you mentioned that you were a human rights attorney. And talk to me about how you, or just your public opinion, thinks about the situation with the civilians in Gaza. And it’s like, I mean, I’m just as like an outsider. You say, wow. Like, you can certainly see from Israel’s perspective, like, they got hostages. You know, you want to go defend and get your people back, and then, like, strategically, though, like, wow, you know, I don’t know they just, should we kill 100,000 people or something, right? Like, and you’ve suffered. I mean, you’ve your close, closest friend’s son got killed. So, like, how do you how do you think about, like, just strategically, was it a smart, proportionate response? Is it, like, how do you feel about just the approach that’s been taken? Is it there’s no right choice, right? And I don’t, I don’t know enough about this situation. I’m curious if someone is living through it. How do you feel about about that?

Jack Levy  29:27
Yeah, definitely don’t want to take the past look. This is what I studied in college as well. I mean, one of my favorite courses was ethics, and IR was Stanley Hoffmann, ethics and international relations. And I think about this all the time, and I think about it, it’s deeply personal, because I want my children fighting a just war, and I don’t want them to do any acts, God forbid. You know, then what are you fighting for? If you turn into something anywhere near even the monster? That you’re fighting, I think so. The the destruction to Gaza is horrific, and it’s tragic. 40,000 people were killed in Gaza, but that’s not 40,000 civilians, not at all, and that’s part of the problem is that it gets reported by the Hamas authorities, and so they say 40,000 and they don’t tell you how many of those were Hamas fighters. So the most recent estimates are that 30,000 of those were Hamas fighters or their family members. Now killing a family member of a Hamas fighter is not something that you want to do either, not at all. And to say that then there were 10,000 potentially, who were not Hamas fighters and not their family members, is horrifically, horrifically tragic. I blame Hamas for all of that. It, you know, I’ll come back to the there’s the morality, and then there’s the, as you called it, sort of the don’t you damage your own cause, even if it might be just right. So I do believe I know, I know, and this is what I wrote in that piece about my little league team coast, where I know these boys, and I have first hand testimony from my own son, who describes how he he’s in a surveillance unit. So when he was in Han Eunice, his job was to sort of, thankfully for his father, by the way, right? He wasn’t at the tip of the spear. He was kind of posted somewhere where he could look, and he would report in what he sees, and he’d say, I’m seeing movement of, you know, five, six people between buildings. And then he gets a call, are they armed? He says, No, they’re not armed. And then they say, okay, don’t do anything. And next thing you know, from the building that they’re in, there’s an RPG attack, and one of our guys has gotten wounded or killed because they were storing the arms in the houses already. And there’s just tremendous amount of evidence of this from Gaza and now in Lebanon as well. And it’s, it’s much more. It’s too long, obviously, for this, for this forum, but I fundamentally can sleep at night with the justness of our cause. Now that doesn’t mean that it’s not horrific. It’s not a tragedy. And I need, and all Israelis need, to develop much more empathy for the Palestinian side. And what I would say to my American friends is, don’t think about being pro Israel or pro Palestinian. You need to be pro peace, because we can’t right now. And you need to be, you need to be the voice of, Hey guys, when this is all over, where you’re going to be. And let us help you try to realize that you have to, ultimately, as hard as it is in the in this darkest of moments, you have to find a way to try to come together. And I think the Biden administration has tried that and continues to, I hope they will continue to. There’s a lot of you know, I’ll say one other thing, by the way, which is just generally, I think, from an American, Israeli perspective, Americans at this moment, for obvious reasons, personalize politics a lot, right? They all Netanyahu, Netanyahu. Netanyahu. Netanyahu, right? For obvious reasons, there’s a tremendous focus on Trump and the damage that the has done. Can do, you know, what have you won’t get into my opinions about that. I’m happy to but, but Netanyahu is, is, I have a lot of problems with him, and especially with the fact that he hasn’t kind of stepped up and said, I, you know, my administration was responsible for this massive failure, right? And that said, I think he’s an external, completely different character than Trump, you know, I don’t think that there’s anywhere I think he’s fundamentally a patriot. That’s the difference, okay, like, and so I but that said I think that we have made a lot of mistakes. There are a lot of things that the world has criticized us for that we deserve criticism for. We could have gotten much more ahead on humanitarian relief efforts. We did that, and the lies that are being spread about us. Makes it really, really difficult for me to want to criticize us. But in this kind of Family Forum, right? In a sense, I feel perfectly comfortable being critical, just certainly like I am in Israel, right? So that we’ve made a lot of mistakes. We have fought a horrific war that nobody could ever think about fighting effectively, right? It’s like Hamas has held the entire Palestinian population hostage. Has held our own people hostage, fine, and then gone underground. And so when we went in, there they were underground, and they left weapons in all of the. Civilian houses for us to have to go house by house, and the destruction is a result of that. It doesn’t make it good. It doesn’t make it smart, even if maybe it was just, and I’m sure, by the way, that there were incidents, plenty of incidents. Okay, you can’t fight a year long war without bad soldiers on our side as well doing bad things. So I’m sure there are plenty of but, but I really think that they are remarkably few and far between, and the monster of the terrorist organization that we’ve been fighting against, both in Gaza and now in in Lebanon, they are responsible for all of it, nothing would have happened after October 7 if Thomas hadn’t done what they had done. And so you can challenge me on that, by the way, by going further back into other sins of Israel, settlement policies, etc, and that I would tend to agree with, we have plenty of sins as well. But like this moment, this conflict, you know, we we were attacked and and our response, though devastating, is, is just,

Will Bachman  36:13
I’m curious to hear what has happened in your professional life, in the business world, with so many people being called up to duty, you’re an investor, you know, talking to startups, probably a lot of young founders, entrepreneurs. What’s kind of happening to that whole startup economy right now?

Jack Levy  36:37
Yeah, so that’s pretty remarkable. The biggest negative impact in the tech world in Israel, in my opinion, has come from the travel restrictions. So in other words, when we used to have conferences, right? We would have, you know, 1000, you know, like, let’s say you have 1000 person conference on, I don’t know, a climate tech event. We had one planet tech. We had, I think, 2000 maybe about 2000 people come to it. Let’s say about six, 700 were from abroad, because Israel really has a tremendous reputation on cutting edge technology across all sorts of fields and so and that’s how you know my most of my LP base is from abroad. Most of my co investors are from abroad. We sort of incubate, start things over here, and then if they’re going to succeed, they’re going to succeed, often by with a CEO, often relocating to closer to the market. Lots of my CEOs have relocated to New York, to Boston, to the West Coast, what have you, to Austin, and then hiring up the sales and marketing team, you know, closer to the market, with a tech team generally remaining in Israel. That’s sort of been the roadmap for Israeli startups, the the travel restrictions because of the missile attacks that have been happening, first from Hamas and now from Hezbollah, have, I think, been extremely problematic the companies themselves, like the the ability of the Israeli companies to function throughout this period has been remarkably resilient. And it’s not just me saying that I I actually just saw a very senior person at Google Talk about, there’s a big team of Google here in the in Israel, probably more than 1000 people. And he was complimenting that team and how they were able to function and absolutely with people cycling in and out of of war. I mean, you would come to conferences, and it’s when I say, what’s not like a deployment? You know, like in the United States, if you’re deployed over to the Middle East, you’re deployed for six months, you’re not seen, or nine months, or knows what, right, this is like you could be fighting in Gaza, and you could be back home in that evening. It’s two hours away, it’s a two hour drive, and so you literally could be on a special mission, you know, trying to rescue hostages one day, and you could be back at work the next day. It’s hard to sort of Fathom as an American, but that’s kind of what life has been like here for the past year, and we’re equally motivated and committed to trying to maintain our economy. It’s but it’s not easy. I mean, I would be lying also to say if there, you know, we have experienced as part of the ostracism that people have felt against Israel because of what others have seen as, you know, an overreaction and unjust as aspects of the war and God, you know, I’ve seen investors say, you know, we’re not going to go there. Rarely. I haven’t seen that much of it, but the biggest thing that I’ve really seen is like, Oh, God, I want to go over there and look at that company and due diligence on it, but I can’t get a flight, and I’m a nervous. Go, or if I’m a big corporate, my travel policy doesn’t allow me to go to Israel right now. So we need this to end. I mean, we do. We are exhausted. We are weary. And it’s getting scarier with, you know, 180 Iranian ballistic missiles attacking us. You know, a week ago, I do, do, do hope that we can figure out a way to get a 10 for that to happen. I think we need a bit more of a muscular US administration reaction. And I do think that the fact that there’s elections in the United States in a month is preventing that to some extent, and we’ll see. I hope something can. You know, we were weary and we want, we want normalcy. And if I, and if I’m saying that, I can only imagine how much a Palestinian feels that, or somebody who lives in South Lebanon, whose lives were entirely hijacked by Hezbollah, and now they’re, they’re suffering as well. And frankly, I think even people in Tehran are beginning to feel it as well, because now they’re afraid about what our reaction might be to that. So it’s, it’s, it’s not good. I definitely, as much as I, you know, sort of justified the war. I walk around humming that old song, you know, war. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

Will Bachman  41:15
Yeah. Talk to me about any courses or professors that you had at Harvard that continue to resonate with you?

Jack Levy  41:25
Yeah, so, so I mentioned Stanley Hoffman’s course ethics and International Relations, and in that course, he taught Just and Unjust Wars, which was a book by Michael Waltzer, who’s a Princeton professor, and Michael Walter just published an op ed in the New York Times where he was he’s actually been fairly defensive, of not defensive, but he’s defended sort of the justice of Israel’s war against Hamas and Hezbollah. But he was critical actually about the alleged Israeli because Israel hasn’t taken credit for it. Pager attack, if you remember that three weeks ago with the exploding pagers that wounded a lot of Hezbollah people. Interestingly enough, I was so touched by by Hoffman’s course. It was such an important course for me. I mentioned to you that Gary bass is a dear friend. I often remember the image of I met Gary at the coop. Gary’s a Professor of International Relations at Princeton, right? I’m a venture capitalist. How do you know? Because when I met him at the coop for that course, I was holding about five bucks. Because I looked at the syllabus, I’m like, Oh, if they assigned 20 pages of that, 10 pages of that 40 pages of that, I’ll borrow the book. I’ll figure it out. And I met Gary at the books, you know, while we were buying the books. And Gary’s stack was, like, this big, right? Because he was going to read everything. And of course, Gary ended up having Hoffman as his thesis advisor and the like. That’s just so that course was very subtle for me. I actually wrote a paper about Israel’s first Lebanon War, and was critical about a lot of it in that course. So I wrote a letter to Michael Walzer, actually, to an email to him. Now, the nice thing is, I didn’t realize he’s like, 90 something years old, and he answered the email the next day, and I said, I can’t believe, Professor Walter, that you think that that type of a Patriot Act wasn’t just because I actually think, having studied your works, that it’s, it’s, it’s literally going in the most precise way at the combatant, you know, and, and, and he wrote back to me and actually engaged in the email. So like, courses that I took are really, I feel like I’m living them on a regular basis. The other thing I’ll say is I was privileged not only to have taken somebody like Stanley hopping and by the way, Michael Sandel is a professor who I loved, and I’ve read every book since, and really enjoyed his books, particularly on, you know, when he when I think, when he’s trying to grapple himself with, sort of like, how did Trumpism come to America? Like, and I don’t really understand that as well, because I’ve been living here for 20 something years, but I’ve, I’ve enjoyed always listening and following him, and even my oldest son, who is a computer science person, he took justice like, you know, online, right? Just, I don’t know if he did all the work, but I’ve encouraged them to do that. So he’s definitely stayed in my life. But the other person who I’m privileged to have in my life is Louise Richardson. Dame, Louise Richardson, I should say now, now, the beauty of that relationship is just that I was, you know, 21 years old when she was my junior faculty, seminar professor, and then she became my thesis advisor. And but when I look back on it, she was probably only like 31 or 32 right? And, you know, she was a young tenured, not, sorry, not tenured. She was a young professor. She didn’t get tenure. That was the thing, I hope, if she ever sees you like a but that’s why, because what was her topic, terrorism. And at the time, the in the infinite wisdom of the Harvard government thought, you know, that was more history than it was political theory, political science right now, not political theory. Didn’t have to be political theory, but there was enough political science around it. And she wrote this great book called What terrorists want. And by the way, after after September 11, her course at Harvard became one of the most popular courses. I had her for us European relations, sort of, you know, boring stuff like Fauci and wars and and skybolt affair and all these other sort of you know, and the foundation of the EU and all that. But she was my thesis advisor on a thesis that I wrote about us Israeli and US British relations and crises in those relationships. So obviously that’s a topic that I live with all the time, and and she is somebody that I’ve just been privileged to stay in touch with. Now her career took off because even though she didn’t get tenure at Harvard, they recruited her to become the head of St Andrews College, and then she was for 10 years, the head of Oxford, and now she’s running the Carnegie Endowment Foundation. So she is just a remarkable human being who whose book I absolutely recommend to everybody what terrorists want. And I sat with her for about three hours two and a half months ago at the Carnegie Foundation. I had I had not seen her for about seven or eight years, but we always just kind of remained in touch. And it was because of the war that she reached out to me, and she also signed that email, which with a phrase that I’d never heard before, which was bone courage, which literally kind of made me cry, because that’s what I really needed a lot of this this year. It was courage, yeah, so I, I my experience at Harvard now, I have to say I was not always the best of of students, in terms of office hours, and maybe even sometimes in terms of attendance, you know, like, I love the Shakespeare course. I just wasn’t really there, but I managed to somehow learn it from my classmates, and then ultimately read all the plays and and I got through it, but, but, but, you know, things like even nauseous course on heroes for zeros, right? I mean, there are, there are, there are things that stick with me from those four years that will always be with me. And I can say that because so my father also just passed away about two months ago, and I’ve been, he lived a good long life to 86 and I’ve been I’ve gone through the whole Hey move every move my parents, three years ago, we moved them from the house that I grew up in into an apartment so they could be closer with my sister while my father apartments. And I had to shrink everything, and then all of a sudden, I had in the basement all my own stuff, and I had to smuggle out a box, because I’m telling my parents, you have to get rid of everything. But then I had to take my old box, and I was like, I can’t throw out my Michelangelo notes, my hero’s notes, my justice notes, because I’m going to go back when I’m retired, and I’m going to take all these courses again somehow, and I’m going to relearn everything that I learned and loved back then and I’ve completely forgotten. And so indeed, I smuggled the box to my friend’s apartment in Riverdale, next to my parents, and only now that my father passed away and we’ve gotten rid of a bunch of other of a bunch of other stuff, have I smuggled it back in, and I’m going to ship it over to Israel soon, and I hope to do that so, so I cherish those those years, and more, by the way, than the faculty, I cherish the friendships that I have, and I have a WhatsApp group. Those of us you know that live abroad, it’s all WhatsApp, right? That’s everything’s WhatsApp, right? I alluded to the levering Whatsapp group that that I am a part of with, with our dear friends whose son was killed on the seventh and and I have another Whatsapp group which is called reunion, because we all got together. I think it was for the 25th and that’s how we were saying, Oh, where are you going to be? It’s like my block mates, mostly, and maybe a few others and and I’ve been communicating on that Whatsapp group, you know, almost daily ever since.

Will Bachman  48:52
I think that your your box of Michelangelo notes is something that many, many classmates have, this, this aspiration someday, we’re going to go through those and relearn the material.

Jack Levy  49:05
Maybe, maybe will, because of your bringing us together, you should be the organizer. We’ll find Junior professors at this point in time, but we’ll give them the syllabi, or many years ago, and I would, I’m, I’m signed up. Yeah,

Will Bachman  49:21
I’ll get on that as soon as I 1600 interviews I have left to do. So, Jack, where can listeners find you online? I don’t know if you want to give your your company’s URL or any other

Jack Levy  49:35
Sure. Yeah, you can find me. Jack, J, C, K, at, more, VC, M, O, R, E, vcdotcom, and you can also find me on LinkedIn if you do jack levy Moore VC. We were originally Israel clean tech ventures, and then as we started broadening, we changed the name to more VC. And please, please do find. I love reconnecting with classmates. One of the there’s a good friend of mine from class of 91 who I’ve been also I’ve been out of touch with, but she wanted to really reconnect throughout this period. And and I, you know, I will say this, I I’m I give you a little bit of vignette into what it’s been like to be in Israeli this year. I think that one of the problems that we’ve been so focused on our on our own situation for obvious reasons that we need. We need outsiders to help us to we need outside perspectives. We need we need perspective, and I would love nothing more to connect with, with old classmates, especially if once travel starts to happen again, if they’re going to be coming over here, but I’m also in New York on a regular basis. So those are the places. Jack atmorevcdotcom,

Will Bachman  50:52
well, Jack, thank you for joining and to you and your family and loved ones. I think we can all wish you. Buon Karaj,