Ambassador Fitz Haney raised money for Barack Obama and served as his ambassador. Today the lifelong Democrat says he feels politically homeless.

S. Fitzgerald "Fitz" Haney is Managing Director for Latin America at the Genesis Prize Foundation and American Friends of Isaac Accords, and former U.S. Ambassador to Costa Rica.

Raised Catholic by a widowed mother outside Chicago, he went to an Orthodox rabbi in Mexico City hoping to find his way back to the church. Somewhere along the way he found something else, and he eventually made his home in Israel.

He has spent his life as the person every community had to make sense of. After October 7th, on a London street, a stranger came for every part of him at once.

Asked whether he truly understood what he took on when he became a Jew, he gives an answer he knows will draw criticism, one that overturns what he believed the day he converted.

This is not a conversation about switching parties. It is about a man who chose each of his identities and is now watching every one of them tested.

And Avi Jorisch asks him one question with no clear answer: after October 7th, where did the betrayal cut deepest?

Statecraft with Avi Jorisch is a production of IEF. Conversations with the people shaping the destiny of Israel and the Jewish people.

The son of Holocaust survivors, Martin Engelberg has built a deeply Jewish life in Vienna while France has become the battleground for Europe's Jews. He believes staying and being ready to leave belong to the same commitment.

Martin Engelberg is a psychoanalyst and leadership coach and a former member of Austria's National Council.

He grew up in a city that would not speak about its past. Decades later he entered parliament to help shape the country his parents had chosen as their home.

That choice put him at odds with parts of his own community, when he defended a governing coalition with the Freedom Party, a party whose roots lie among former Nazis.

Then Avi Jorisch hands him a Jewish community's budget. Martin would put the money into education and the next generation, and leave the fight against antisemitism to the state. Avi follows with a more personal question: what is his own plan B?

This is not a conversation about whether Europe is safe for Jews. It is about what a family owes its children when the answer keeps changing.

And it ends on the choice his father faced after the war, and what Martin hopes his own children will say about his.

Statecraft with Avi Jorisch is a production of IEF. Conversations with the people shaping the destiny of Israel and the Jewish people.

Rawan Osman was raised to hate Israel. Now she calls it home, and she dreams of living there as a Jew.

Rawan Osman is a Syrian-born German activist and writer confronting antisemitism in the Arab world.

She grew up between Damascus and the Beqaa Valley, believing the Jew was her enemy. Then she crossed the one line no one from her world is allowed to cross, knowing she could never go back. Today she speaks for Israel to audiences around the world.

The cost was steeper than she expected, and it came from the people closest to her.

At the Kotel, she found herself furious with God. What a rabbi saw in that anger changed how she understood it, and why she keeps walking toward Judaism while her conversion moves through Israel's careful security review.

This is not the story of how she stopped hating Israel. It is the story of what comes after, when you have chosen a people and are still on the road to becoming one of them.

And at the end, Avi Jorisch asks her a question she calls painful.

Statecraft with Avi Jorisch is a production of IEF. Conversations with the people shaping the destiny of Israel and the Jewish people.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction

02:15 Looking across the border

04:45 The feisty girl and the nun

06:09 The God she was given

10:03 Not Jewish yet

12:03 Blocked after October 8

16:41 A wine bar in Damascus

20:49 Strasbourg and a collapsing worldview

23:14 Her grandmother's words

27:04 The DNA test

30:22 Why convert at all

36:14 Trusting the process

39:22 What she wants for Israel

46:34 The Palestinian question

50:13 What each side gets wrong

55:28 Lightning Round

1:01:27 What home means