Lior Schleien is often referred to as Israel’s Jon Stewart, a comparison that amuses him, since it exaggerates his small country’s standing even more than his own, but he’ll take it. Schleien, who is forty-eight, was born and grew up in Tel Aviv; he earned a master’s degree in law, but in the early two-thousands he turned his focus to comedy, writing a satirical column for the newspaper Maariv and appearing on a prime-time TV show. Soon, he was hosting a late-night talk show, “Halayla” (“Tonight”), for which he won the Israeli equivalent of an Emmy, in 2008. He then created and hosted two hit programs: “Matzav Ha’Uma” (“The State of the Nation”), which began in 2010, the year after Benjamin Netanyahu returned to the premiership, following a decade out of the office; and a successor show, “Gav Ha’Uma” (“The Nation’s Backbone”), which he also produced and ran from 2015 to 2020. His programs featured elements similar to those of Stewart’s “Daily Show”: a monologue, riffs on the news, a supporting panel of “pundits,” and a not quite playful interview segment with leading politicians and officials—including, in 2014, with Netanyahu himself, who then sought exposure among hipper voters.

Actually, Schleien had voted for Netanyahu more than once, when he was younger. (As a teen-ager, in 1994, he had been in central Tel Aviv when a Hamas suicide bombing on a nearby bus killed twenty-two people. “I belonged to the strong right, not to the weak left,” he said.) By 2014, however, he had “grown up” and was ensconced in Tel Aviv’s live-and-let-live culture with his partner, Merav Michaeli, a feminist activist and a Labor Party member in the Knesset. (She served as the Party leader from 2021 to 2024; the couple now have three young children.) And as Netanyahu’s coalitions hardened Schleien’s programs became edgier, skewering Netanyahu sycophants in the Likud Party, anti-élitist demagogues, cultic settlers, and rabbinic mandarins. Schleien, like Stewart, had become a sapper in a culture war he did not seek. “I saw myself doing satire—television, standup, books, films—until I died, not a player on the court but a referee,” he told me. For years, as a showrunner, he was the one in the writers’ room who “argued for playing it cool”: “Let’s make fun of them, get paid, take the applause, and come back tomorrow for another day’s work.” But, he added, “With this government, that ain’t the case anymore: we are being led to a hellhole.”

Schleien isn’t on broadcast television anymore, either. His shows were cancelled for what writers for Ynet and Haaretz considered questionable reasons, among them alleged pressure from Netanyahu’s allies, although the networks involved named other justifications, including financial ones. But Schleien has responded with a coruscating online presence, emerging as less of a jester and more of a conscience for Israeli liberals. In this crucial election year, he is arguably the most effective, and certainly the most daring, opposition voice in the country.

Schleien’s shows landed because, like all great satire, they presupposed a commonwealth of decency and reasonableness—and the liberty to mock violations of it. But, outside of cosmopolitan sections of Tel Aviv, Herzliya, and Haifa, the liberalism that fuelled his humor couldn’t be taken for granted. Politicized Judaism has enabled the most egregious violations of that freedom—in the form of the militant Religious Zionist Party and ultra-Orthodox parties, which are part of Netanyahu’s coalition, and their educational institutions, which are based in Jerusalem and increasingly provide ideological grounding to the Israeli right. (On a Times of Israel podcast, the Tel Aviv University economist Dan Ben-David recently cited a study that found that the state provides a roughly thirty-eight-billion-shekel subsidy for ultra-Orthodox communities, which, he said, is a third more than it spends on hospitals and public research universities combined.) For Schleien, these have been major foils.

In Jerusalem’s Old City, for example, the Western Wall, which abuts the site of the destroyed Judean temple, is still frequented by pilgrims, tourists, and visiting dignitaries, including American politicians, who typically slip handwritten messages in between its stones. But in recent years it’s become a shrine for religious zealots, who march there in the thousands on Jerusalem Day, often menacing Arab shopkeepers along the way. So, one year, to counter that politicized piety, Schleien had the cast of “Gav Ha’Uma” dress up as “Wizard of Oz” characters and dance to the Wall while singing a made-up Hebrew version of “We’re Off to See the Wizard.” Schleien was equally impatient with the paid official state rabbinate, which oversees rabbinic courts and has guarded its right—first established under the British Mandate—to certify marriages, divorces, burials, and dietary laws. This entails handing out thousands of patronage jobs to rabbis, bureaucrats, undertakers, and inspectors. In a 2019 monologue, Schleien featured clips of a sermon by a retired chief rabbi, Yisrael Meir Lau, in which he extolled the ingenuity of medieval Talmudic sages for their method of determining a woman’s virginity, which involved, grotesquely, having her sit on a barrel of wine.

Mocking the Wall and a former chief rabbi took some cheek, especially because Lau is a Holocaust survivor, and because religious devotion may have seemed a secondary target at the time, given the security threats that Israel was facing: Iranian hostility, rockets from Gaza and Lebanon. But Schleien considers official pietism—the theocratic strictures, the holy geographies, and Iron Age notions of vengeance—a threat in its own right, and one that exacerbates various security crises. In 2016, on “Gav Ha’Uma,” he grilled the settler leader Bezalel Smotrich, now Netanyahu’s finance minister, who had argued for building a new Jewish temple on the Mount adjacent to Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, and who has said that Jerusalem will reach Damascus. “You realize,” Schleien told him, referring to the boycott movement against Israel, “how you are prompting more antisemitism, and more B.D.S.?”

But Schleien has been correspondingly irritated by self-styled “centrist” politicians, such as Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz, who, though secularists themselves, coddled the religious establishment purportedly in the interests of national solidarity—what Gantz’s party has called “consensus and unity”—but in what was widely interpreted as blatantly pandering to their voters. For Schleien, centrists are so “desperate for the ‘middle center,’ or ‘extreme center,’ that one can find political room, not to the left and right but only up and down.” When, in 2020, “Gav Ha’Uma” was taken off the air, it was “a knife in the back of secularism,” Ram Fruman, the founder of the Secular Forum, said in Haaretz. “Management claimed it was for financial reasons,” Schleien told me, “much like, but before, Stephen Colbert—our clock runs ahead of America’s.”

So Schleien turned to standup comedy and to posting videos on YouTube that continued where his programs had left off. In 2022, when a new election was in the offing, he co-founded the online channel Relevant. Netanyahu was returned to power in the fall; in January, 2023, he began an assault on the judiciary, aiming to subordinate the Supreme Court to his Knesset majority. That move prompted months of mass demonstrations, and Schleien’s videos added to their impact. After the October 7th massacre, he tempered his tone. By the spring of 2024, however, Netanyahu’s assault on Gaza seemed to be endless, ruthless, governed by no diplomatic strategy—sacrificing civilians and hostages alike—and the Biden Administration was repeatedly cautioning the Israel Defense Forces about “humanitarian law.” Schleien returned to form.

He created a video for Relevant about President Isaac Herzog’s visit to the state-supported Bnei David academy, in the West Bank settlement of Eli, where, augmented by Torah studies, young Israelis train to join the I.D.F., many of them as officers. (Some forty per cent of graduates from infantry-officer schools have a national religious background.) In his talk, Herzog—another erstwhile “centrist”—condemned the “groundless hatred” and the “divisions” that had roiled the nation before October 7th, implying that it was the pro-judiciary demonstrators, not theocratic settlers, like those in the audience, who had somehow weakened the country. Schleien intercut video of a sermon by the head of Bnei David, Rabbi Eliezer Kashtiel, who had notoriously suggested that Arabs had “genetic problems,” and thus were better off under occupation. Kashtiel also criticized women’s equality, and he weighed in on Gaza: “Even if the residents of Gaza had come to us with flowers and love letters full of hearts,” he said, “it would have been our obligation,” even on the Sabbath, “to start the war to conquer the Land of Israel.”

In the video, Schleien added that the settlers and the whole religious apparat “force us to fund their way of life”—incomes, hence taxes, in Tel Aviv are generally far higher than those in Jerusalem and the settlements—“and force us to die in their religious wars.” (The ultra-Orthodox do not serve in the Army, and the Supreme Court’s ruling, in 2017, that they must is what initially precipitated the government assault on the judiciary.) “Unity is a lovely word, a good feeling,” Schleien said, “but we know from math class that, if one side of the equation is positive and the other is, in the same measure, negative, what they have between them is—nothing.”

Relevant closed in late 2024, but last November Schleien launched an online movement, called Free Israel, a play on the slogan “Free Palestine,” and released videos, he told me, aimed at influencing public opinion so that Israel can “free itself first from Netanyahu’s rule.” Soon after, he met with a group of secular and orthodox students in a military-preparatory program in the West Bank settlement of Susya, and, after his session, a counsellor who mentored a group of “hilltop youth”—young settlers who defiantly camp on West Bank heights hoping to establish yet more settlements—challenged Schleien to take on his more rightist audience, inviting him to a question-and-answer session with his own group. Schleien accepted.

The dialogue was respectful and unusually penetrating. The counsellor argued that “faith and roots”—adhering to religious law, based on rabbinic interpretations of the Talmud, and pursuing the settlement of the promised land—yielded “a staying power” that secular Jews lacked. Schleien countered, “I’m connected to my Judaism, to Israel, Zionism, and Hebrew culture no less than you, and maybe somewhat more,” since he is always weighing the extent of his “Jewishness and Israeliness,” and doesn’t “live according to a book.” Besides, he said, “My four grandfathers and grandmothers fled here to avoid being murdered.” In fact, the original Zionist pioneers were mainly secularists who “kicked against religion even before coming here,” Schleien said, to build “a new Judaism.”

The video became a sensation, viewed, in segments, more than two and a half million times. Since then, Schleien has continued his campaign, which he and a few friends have financed, to meet with dozens of groups of Israeli youth—some seven hundred thousand of whom will be voting for the first time in the fall and who, in their majority, identify as “right wing.” He also engaged in lengthy discussions with Assaf Sharon, a professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University who studied for several years in a settlement, and Avner Inbar, who are the founders of the liberal think tank Molad, and with Alissaa Symon, a scholar affiliated with it, to explore Israel’s democratic crisis. There are now more than ninety Free Israel videos, with more than sixty million views, in whole or in part, across social-media platforms, and Schleien has a waiting list of more than six hundred groups requesting a meeting. “I won’t get to all of them, but it’s nice to be asked,” he told me.

I attended two tapings, at which Schleien, readied like a shortstop, fielded predictable questions: How can he still want two states? How can Arabs be part of a “Jewish state”? Can secularism not be carried to an extreme? (“As if there is such a thing as ‘secular extremism’—what, defending, too fiercely, critical rationality and the freedom to choose?” he told me.) But Schleien has empathy for his young audiences. They are, he says, sheltering from missiles and dealing with a government that incites them to hatred. “They’re told that, if we just keep bombing the whole Middle East, then God—who is Jewish and on their side—will fix everything. It’s hard on them.”

What appears to be hardest on Schleien, perhaps, is the effect that Israel’s recent crises are having on people in other countries, particularly the United States. When, immediately after the Hamas attack, he heard young Americans chanting, “From the river to the sea,” whether they properly understood the meaning of the slogan or not, he feared that many American progressives, who traditionally have felt empathy for Israeli progressives and supported the secular democracy that they have long espoused, have ironically bought into the image of Israel projected by its far right, and that to them the idea of “a Jewish and democratic state” has become a contradiction in terms.

In fact, one of Schleien’s Free Israel videos was directed at American liberals, after a group of Hollywood actors and other film workers signed a letter pledging to boycott some institutions within the Israeli film industry. Schleien’s video was a plea for help, but also for recognition. “You don’t have to sabotage Israeli art and culture and academia and businesses,” he said. “Netanyahu’s government has already got that covered.” The point, as Schleien sees it, is to defeat this government, not the people and the institutions that are striving for a democratic country. ♦