For the foreseeable future, our Zoom calls will be moving to a new time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern. Our guest this week is someone I admire greatly, Tel Aviv University History Professor Yael Sternhell . We’ll talk about repression in Israeli academia following the arrest of Palestinian legal scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who teaches at Hebrew University. We’ll also talk about Israeli discourse about the Gaza War and the response in Israel to protests in the US. As an Israeli who is also a hi...
May 13, 2024•8 min
Our Zoom call this week will be at a Special Time: 1 PM Eastern . Our guests will be two professors— one Palestinian and Jewish— with deep insights into the protests on their campus: The first is Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia who gave this blistering speech about the university’s crackdown on pro-Palestine protesters. The second is David Myers , the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History at UCLA, who was present during the attack on UCLA’s enc...
May 06, 2024•21 min
Our Zoom call this week will be at our regular time: Noon on Friday. Our guests will be two Columbia University undergraduates with differing views on the protests at their campus: Ilan Cohen, a senior who attends Columbia and the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Gabi Frants, a senior who attends Barnard College. They’ll talk about the student movement that has swept Columbia, and the nation. Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday night and the video the following week. They’ll also gai...
Apr 28, 2024•11 min
Our Zoom call this week will be at a special time: Thursday at Noon EDT . Our guest will be Musallam Abu Khalil , a doctor in Gaza. Musallam works for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) running a primary care clinic in a makeshift school shelter in the Nusierat refugee camp in central Gaza, which houses thousands of internally displaced people. In his personal time, he runs the Dignity for Palestinians Campaign , which aims to preserve the dignity of Palestinians in Gaza through ...
Apr 22, 2024•10 min
Our Zoom call this week will be at a special time: Friday at 11 AM EDT . Our guest will be Vali Nasr , Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle East Studies and International Affairs at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies, author of The Shia Revival , former official in the Obama administration and one of America’s leading experts on Iranian foreign policy. We’ll talk about the dangers of a full-scale war between Israel and Iran and what the Biden administration can do to avoid it....
Apr 15, 2024•7 min
Our Zoom call this week will be at our normal time: Friday at Noon EDT. Our guest will be Abdalhadi Alijla, a Gaza-born political scientist who has done some intriguing writing about Gaza’s political future after this war. We’ll talk about Israel’s stated plans to empower Gaza’s families and tribes, the Biden administration’s effort to empower the Palestinian Authority, and what will become of Hamas. Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also g...
Apr 01, 2024•6 min
Our Zoom call this week will be at our normal time: Friday at Noon EDT. This Friday, I’ll be answering questions. Feel free to ask me anything during the Zoom call and I’ll do my best to answer. Since I just published an essay in the New York Times about the historic rupture between American Jewry’s two dominant creeds— liberalism and Zionism— I thought it might be a good moment to talk directly with you. Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll a...
Mar 25, 2024•15 min
Our Zoom call this week will be at a special time: Thursday at Noon EST . Our guest will be Avner Gvaryahu, Executive Director of Breaking the Silence, an organization of Israeli military veterans who oppose the occupation. We’ll discuss his recent essay in Foreign Affairs , “ The Myth of Israel’s ‘Moral Army ’” as part of a broader discussion about the way Israel is fighting in Gaza and why it is wreaking such devastation there. Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the ...
Mar 18, 2024•6 min
Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST. Our guest will be Norman Finkelstein , someone who has long fascinated me but whom I’ve never met. I want to ask about his upbringing as the child of Holocaust survivors, how his parents imparted the Holocaust’s moral lessons to him, and about how he understands the very different ways that many other children of Holocaust survivors interpret that horror. I want to ask how he first encountered Palestinians, how he decided to ...
Mar 11, 2024•11 min
Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST. Our guest will Ussama Makdisi , Professor of History and Chancellor’s Chair at the University of California Berkeley, author most recently of Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World and co-host of the Makdisi Street Podcast . I want to ask Ussama, who is one of America’s leading historians of the Middle East and of the long encounter between Palestinians and Zionism, what makes this cu...
Mar 04, 2024•7 min
Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST. Our guests will Dr. Lina Qassem-Hassan , the Chairperson of the Board of Directors of Physicians for Human Rights Israel and Guy Shalev, the organization’s Executive Director. They’ll talk about the unfolding public health catastrophe in Gaza. Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas...
Feb 26, 2024•13 min
Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST. Our guests will be James Zogby , President and Co-Founder of the Arab American Institute, and Abdelnasser Rashid , a Palestinian-American State Representative from Illinois. We’ll talk about how the war in Gaza is affecting Arab Americans and whether they will vote for Joe Biden this fall. Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom int...
Feb 12, 2024•12 min
Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST. Our guest will be Rabbi David Wolpe , a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Divinity School and the Inaugural Rabbinic Fellow at the Anti-Defamation League. Rabbi Wolpe has argued that “the reactions that occurred at Harvard in the wake of Oct. 7 considered Jews oppressors and, in some way, unworthy of human consideration.” He says the “overlap” between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is “striking.” I disagree. Since October 7, it’s be...
Feb 05, 2024•15 min
Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST. Our guest will be Fadi Quran , a Senior Campaigner at Avaaz, a Popular Struggle community organizer in the West Bank and one of the most eloquent voices I know about the moral principles undergirding the struggle for Palestinian freedom. Since October 7, his writing has been desperate and enraged , but never lost its ethical core. We’ll talk about what it’s like to be a Palestinian watching Western governments tolerate—if not...
Jan 29, 2024•8 min
Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST. Our guests will be two of America’s most insightful commentators on Israel-Palestine, and foreign policy more generally: Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah and Terrell Starr , author of the Black Diplomats newsletter on Substack. We’ll talk about the evolution of Black political discourse on Israel-Palestine and the way race structures debates over America’s role in the world. Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesd...
Jan 22, 2024•8 min
Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST. Our guest will be Columbia Professor Rashid Khalidi , America’s most eminent historian of the Palestinian people and the Palestinian struggle. We’ll talk about this latest iteration of what he’s called “ The Hundred Years' War on Palestine ”— what’s new and what’s old since October 7. We’ll talk about where the Palestinian national movement goes from here, why Palestinian freedom has become a defining issue for progressive ac...
Jan 15, 2024•11 min
Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST. Our guest will be Omer Bartov , Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown. Omer is one of the world’s most prominent scholars of the Holocaust. He’s also an Israeli who has warned about the genocidal rhetoric of some Israeli leaders since October 7. Now that South Africa has brought a case to the International Court of Justice charging Israel with genocide for its actions since October 7, I want to ask Omer what he...
Jan 08, 2024•11 min
Our Zoom call this week, for paid subscribers, will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST. Our guest will be Mikhael Manekin . For me, some of the most unsettling scenes from Gaza have been the images of Jewish worship— a soldier using a knife as his yad (pointer) as he reads Torah, a soldier reciting the Shema from the balcony of a mosque, soldiers singing to welcome Shabbat at the Islamic University of Gaza. It’s not the liturgy itself that unnerves me. It’s the images of religious conquest...
Jan 02, 2024•9 min
Our Zoom call this week will be at a special time: Thursday at 1 PM EST . There will be no zoom call on the week of Friday, December 22 or 29. Our guest will be Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute and the author of three highly acclaimed books on the relationship between the United States, Iran, and Israel. We’ll talk about the response by Iran and its allies to October 7 and the risks that Israel’s Gaza war could convulse the entire Middle East. As usual, paid subscrib...
Dec 11, 2023•16 min
Our Zoom call this week will be at the regular time: Friday at Noon EST. (I’ve decided to stop mentioning Friday’s guests at the beginning of these Monday videos.) Our guests this week will be Diana Buttu and Emily Schaeffer Omer-Man . Diana is a Palestinian-Canadian lawyer and a former spokesperson for the Palestine Liberation Organization. Emily is a Jewish Israeli human rights lawyer. They’ll talk about the challenges and opportunities that this terrible war poses for Palestinians and Jews wh...
Dec 04, 2023•8 min
