Against All Odds
NIF-Produced Talk Show Draws Strong Ratings

Against All Odds, an innovative 12-part weekly talk show about Israel’s social change leaders initiated and produced by NIF, is now airing on Channel Two, the country’s most popular television channel.

NIF conceived and produced this unique look into the world of social change. Each installment features one activist from the NIF family talking with an interviewer about his or her road to activism. The activists’ compelling stories, which seamlessly marry the personal and the political, and a skilled interviewer unafraid to ask provocative questions have made for high ratings for the series.

The first program in the series, broadcast in mid-December, featured Chana Kehat, founder of NIF grantee Religious Women’s Forum, who spoke of her organization’s feminist Orthodox activities, which include rooting out rabbis who have sexually harassed women.

Succeeding episodes have featured:

• Asaf Phillip, who discussed how Hillel: Association for Jewish Leaving Ultra-Orthodoxy helped him make the transition from the religious to the secular world.
• Mandy Leighton, a member of the executive committee of Bizchut: Center for Human Rights of Persons with Disabilities, on her personal battle with disabilities and how her work with Bizchut has transformed her life.
• Yaakov Bar Haim, founder of Beer Sheva-based Living in Dignity, which has put homelessness and the need for affordable housing on the public agenda.
• Dafna Banai, an activist with Machsom Watch, which observes military checkpoints to monitor human rights abuses, on how her exposure to the everyday realities of the occupation has transformed her comfortable upper middle class life.
• Aida Touma-Suliman, executive director of Women Against Violence, which established the first shelters for Arab Israeli women and has led the fight against domestic violence in Arab society.
• Hagai Elad, one of the leaders of Israel’s gay rights movement and a founder of “Jerusalem Open House,” the meeting place for the city's gay community. Since 2002 Hagai has led the annual Jerusalem Gay Pride parade and in August 2006 will host the International Gay Pride parade.
• Suhad Abu Ajaj, a mother of nine from the village of Kuseifa in the Negev, who enrolled in SHATIL's Bedouin Women's Empowerment Course and became an activist for Bedouin women.

Against All Odds will conclude in early April. You can watch the series, in Hebrew with English subtitles, on the NIF web site at http://www.nif.org/content.cfm?id=2499&currbody=1