“Voices of Europe” is a podcast series that offers insights and research-based debates on various aspects of the European Union as well as presents the relationship between the EU and Israel in a constantly changing reality. European and Israeli representatives from different academic disciplines – e.g. art, culture, humanities and natural sciences – discuss current topics of mutual interest. The bilingual (English and Hebrew) podcast is curated and hosted by Israeli journalist, Oren Nahari, and is aimed at not only Israeli listeners, but also an international audience.
The podcast is an initiative supported by the Cluster Fund 2020, jointly produced by Haaretz Labels and EUNIC, including: Austrian Cultural Forum, Goethe-Institute, French Institute, Italian Institute of Culture, Lithuanian Culture Institute, Polish Institute, Embassy of Portugal, Romanian Cultural Institute in Tel Aviv, Spanish Embassy and the Delegation of the European Union to the State of Israel. “Voices of Europe” was submitted to the EUNIC-Cluster Fund and received financial support of € 15,000 for the implementation of its second season.
The project aimed at contributing to the relevance of the EU in Israel as well as at facilitating productive encounters between European and Israeli contributors from various disciplines.
Thus, the jointly elaborated project addressed this cluster’s goal of facilitating visibility of and relatability to the EU and to offer incentives of engagement to a diverse local audience.
It also offered representatives from various backgrounds in arts, culture and science to made their voices heard in front of a big audience and to communicate with one another, thereby establishing avenues of communication.
Challenges and Learnings
The project started in 2020 and was a great way to reach a larger audience in times of social distancing and home-quarantine. In the meantime, two seasons of the podcast, each with 8-9 episodes, have been published, which are available on the most popular podcast platforms such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.
Despite some challenges for the project to be recalculated after some partners opted out of participating in the project, the partnership was overall deemed positively. The cooperation with Haaretz was satisfying for the most part and improved in administrative aspects in comparison to the first season. Nevertheless, the structuring of content was deemed more challenging this second season.
It has been shown that the podcast format is very well suited as a stage for scientific discussions. In conclusion, the final product of both seasons turned out very well and “Voices of Europe” can be considered a prime example of the good cooperation of the EUNIC-Cluster in Israel.
