On February 4th, President Donald Trump said that all Palestinians in Gaza should leave the coastal enclave and go to other Arab countries such as Egypt or Jordan—a move that, if actualized, would mark a drastic chapter in the Palestinians’ history of being ethnically cleansed. Israel immediately embraced the idea, with the country’s war minister ordering the military to draft plans to facilitate a mass exodus of Palestinians from Gaza. Palestinian groups as well as Egypt, Jordan, and many other...
Mar 06, 2025•41 min•Ep 99•Transcript available on Metacast Brady Corbet’s epic Academy Award-nominated film, The Brutalist , traces the career and personal life of fictional architect and Holocaust survivor László Toth, played by Adrien Brody, as he seeks to find his place in the United States after World War II. In this episode of On the Nose, contributing writer Rebecca Pierce, associate editor Mari Cohen, contributing editor Siddhartha Mahanta, and contributor Noah Kulwin unpack the film’s symbolic use of Israel and Zionism as an apparent solution to...
Feb 20, 2025•49 min•Ep 98•Transcript available on Metacast Israeli warplanes have stopped dropping bombs on Gaza, at least for now, but there’s no ceasefire in the occupied West Bank. Since October 2023, and especially since this January, the intensity of Israeli military operations in the West Bank has escalated to a degree unseen since the Second Intifada. On January 21st, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced “Operation Iron Wall”—a bombing campaign and ground invasion centered on the city of Jenin in the northern West Bank. Jenin house...
Feb 06, 2025•38 min•Ep 97•Transcript available on Metacast On Sunday, Israel and Hamas entered into the first phase of what could become a permanent ceasefire. Under the agreement that led to the pause, Israel will release hundreds of Palestinians, many held without charge or trial, from its prisons in exchange for the release of 98 Israeli hostages by Palestinian militants in Gaza. The deal also allows Palestinians forcibly displaced from the north of Gaza to return to that area, promises a surge in humanitarian aid to a Palestinian population that was...
Jan 22, 2025•32 min•Ep 96•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of On the Nose —a recording of an online event for Jewish Currents members, co-sponsored by the Beinart Notebook—editor-at-large Peter Beinart speaks with Mahmoud Muna, Matthew Teller, and Juliette Touma, three of the editors of the new anthology Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture . This volume includes nearly 100 stories from people in Gaza, recorded both before and amidst Israel’s ongoing assault. In this conversation, the editors discuss the collection ...
Jan 10, 2025•42 min•Ep 95•Transcript available on Metacast Since October 2023, Palestine solidarity activists have faced a climate of McCarthyist repression, and all signs point to the incoming Trump administration escalating that campaign to silence the anti-genocide movement. Trump’s cabinet appointees and supporters have embraced plans to revoke visas of pro-Palestine student organizers, sue colleges to ensure they crack down on protesters, subject anti-Zionist students to FBI questioning, and more—all in the name of fighting antisemitism. In t...
Dec 19, 2024•51 min•Ep 94•Transcript available on Metacast A Real Pain is a film starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Kulkin as two American Jewish cousins who take a trip to Poland to visit the childhood home of their grandmother. In this episode of On the Nose , editor-in-chief Arielle Angel, contributing editor Maia Ipp, and author Menachem Kaiser—all of whom are grandchildren of Holocaust survivors—dissect the movie’s depiction of millennial neuroses, its relationship to other Holocaust films, and its grappling with the question of how to make meanin...
Dec 05, 2024•39 min•Ep 93•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of On the Nose —recorded at an online event on October 30th—editor-in-chief Arielle Angel speaks with author Naomi Klein and writer and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan about the place of feelings and affect in the movement for Palestinian liberation. They discuss the role of grief and rage, how movements can accommodate affective diversity, and what it means to channel emotions politically. Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for producing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his s...
Nov 14, 2024•48 min•Ep 92•Transcript available on Metacast On this special episode of On the Nose —recorded live on November 4th at McNally Jackson Books in Manhattan— Jewish Currents senior reporter Alex Kane hosts a discussion about foreign policy and the 2024 presidential election. Historian Stephen Wertheim, Arab American Institute executive director Maya Berry, and national security reporter Spencer Ackerman discuss Donald Trump’s and Kamala Harris’s foreign policy visions, regional war in the Middle East, and the bipartisan consensus on upholding ...
Nov 05, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Ep 91•Transcript available on Metacast In 2003, a group of Indian Americans deeply involved in India's Hindu supremacist, or Hindutva, movement established the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), an organization explicitly modeled on the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Just as the ADL has long insisted that fighting American antisemitism requires bolstering support for Israel, the HAF committed itself to lobbying for Hindutva in the name of protecting Hindu Americans’ civil rights, an approach...
Oct 31, 2024•44 min•Ep 90•Transcript available on Metacast Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of the most celebrated American political writers of our time, devotes much of his new book, The Message , to a withering and deeply personal critique of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. On this bonus episode of On the Nose —a recording of an online event for Jewish Currents members, co-sponsored by the Beinart Notebook and the Foundation for Middle East Peace—editor-at-large Peter Beinart speaks with Coates about his time in Israel and the West Bank, the silencing of P...
Oct 17, 2024•40 min•Ep 89•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of On the Nose —recorded live at Jewish Currents ’s daylong event on September 15th—editor-in-chief Arielle Angel speaks with a panel of authors, scholars, and activists about the movement for Palestinian freedom in the wake of Israel’s genocide. Noura Erakat, Fadi Quran, Dana El Kurd, Amjad Iraqi, and Ahmed Moor discuss the challenge of Palestinian unity under Israel’s program of fragmentation, the resurgence of the two-state solution and decline of the coexistence paradigm, Ame...
Oct 10, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep 88•Transcript available on Metacast For this live taping of the literary podcast Between the Covers —recorded at Jewish Currents’s daylong event on September 15th and presented in partnership with On the Nose —host David Naimon convened a conversation with renowned writers Dionne Brand and Adania Shibli about contesting colonial narratives. Rooted in their long-standing literary practice and in the demands of this moment of genocide, they discuss the vexed meanings of home, how to recover the everydayness of life erased by empire,...
Oct 02, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Ep 87•Transcript available on Metacast In this live taping of Jacobin ’s podcast The Dig —recorded at Jewish Currents’s recent daylong event and presented in partnership with On the Nose —host Daniel Denvir convened a conversation with scholars Aslı Bâli and Aziz Rana on the past and present of left internationalism. Placing the current eruption of solidarity with Palestine in the context of the rise and fall of Third Worldism, they discuss the history and legacy of that project, the lasting structures of neocolonialism, and the chal...
Sep 26, 2024•2 hr 31 min•Ep 86•Transcript available on Metacast Recently, far-right figures like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson have hitched their anti-Israel politics to blatant antisemitism , platforming Holocaust denial and using decontextualized passages from religious texts like the Talmud to argue for the fundamental immorality of Judaism; in some cases their rhetoric has migrated beyond the right-wing echo chamber. Meanwhile, following a cheeky tweet by conspiracy-minded Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal that attributed the congressional losses of Jama...
Sep 05, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep 85•Transcript available on Metacast On July 31st, Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s top political leader, was killed in Iran. Haniyeh came to the capital city of Tehran for the presidential inauguration; an explosive device went off in the guest house where he was staying. Just hours before, Haniyeh had met with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Israel hasn’t taken responsibility for the attack, but they’re widely believed to be responsible—especially given their history of targeted political assassinations. Indeed, Haniyeh’s k...
Aug 09, 2024•32 min•Ep 84•Transcript available on Metacast Since October 7th, a low-grade regional war has played out across the Middle East, pitting Israel and its Western allies against various Iran-backed forces. The Yemeni Houthi faction has targeted ships in the Red Sea in response to Israel’s war on Gaza, prompting a wave of US and British airstrikes on Yemen. Meanwhile, Iraqi militias have repeatedly fired rockets at US forces in their country. Hezbollah and Israel have also traded deadly fire on the Lebanon–Israel border, leading to mass displac...
Aug 07, 2024•48 min•Ep 83•Transcript available on Metacast Should leftists vote for the Democratic nominee in the 2024 presidential election? Many have balked at supporting an administration that has funded and armed Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza: Some are refusing to vote outright, while others are conditioning their vote on a dramatic shift in policy. Although President Joe Biden has now dropped out of the race, and will almost certainly be replaced by his vice president, Kamala Harris, this question remains live for many. American leftists hav...
Aug 01, 2024•34 min•Ep 82•Transcript available on Metacast Donald Trump’s decision to tap Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate marks the culmination of a Republican foreign policy transformation. While some aspects of Trump’s foreign policy choices in his first term alienated neoconservatives, other elements aligned with their views—and his previous vice presidential pick, Mike Pence, hailed from the interventionist wing of the party. By contrast, Vance has stridently denounced the Iraq War and criticized US funding for Ukraine. His selection sug...
Jul 25, 2024•40 min•Ep 81•Transcript available on Metacast Until 1948, around 800,000 Jews lived as an organic and inseparable part of the Arab Middle East and North Africa. But political shifts in the mid-20th century upended this reality. The violent creation of the State of Israel, and the rise of an increasingly exclusivist Arab nationalism, fueled anti-Jewish hostility that led to the exodus of all but a few thousand Jews from the region. The rich Arab-Jewish life that had characterized prior centuries was lost, and the vast majority of Arab Jews e...
Jul 10, 2024•49 min•Ep 80•Transcript available on Metacast On June 25th, New York Congressman Jamaal Bowman lost his primary election to George Latimer, a longtime Democratic Westchester County politician. The race attracted national attention because of the unprecedented role played by the Israel-advocacy group AIPAC: The lobby’s super PAC spent $14.5 million on television ads attacking Bowman, while AIPAC donors contributed about $2.5 million to Latimer’s campaign. Bowman’s loss marked a blow for the project of electing leftists to federal office, and...
Jul 05, 2024•27 min•Ep 79•Transcript available on Metacast In May 2021, Palestinian American poet, physician, translator, and essayist Fady Joudah wrote two poems engaged with the violence of Israeli apartheid. Reflecting on the conundrum of where and how to publish them, he explained : “I’ve long been aware of the crushing weight that reduces Palestine in English to a product with limited features . . . This sickening delimitation mimics physical entrapment. The silken compassion toward Palestinians in mainstream English thinks the language of the oppr...
Jun 20, 2024•28 min•Ep 78•Transcript available on Metacast Since October 7th, American Jews have been sharply divided over Israel’s war on Gaza—a fracture that has been manifest within all manner of institutions, including synagogues. Many leftist Jews do not participate in synagogue life at all, in part because most congregations are explicitly or tacitly Zionist. But for those who are affiliated with a synagogue community that doesn’t completely align with their politics, this moment has raised or reasserted pressing and difficult questions: Should we...
Jun 13, 2024•52 min•Ep 77•Transcript available on Metacast On March 29th, Jewish Currents began publishing a short commentary on the parshah—the portion of the Torah that Jews traditionally read each week—in the Shabbat Reading List newsletter. A note introducing this new feature situated it in the context of mainstream Jewish communal support for Israel’s war on Gaza: “While it might seem strange for a historically secular magazine to embark on such a project . . . we are trying this now because many in our community have expressed an unprecedented ali...
Jun 06, 2024•47 min•Ep 76•Transcript available on Metacast On April 7th, Larry David’s sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm —which debuted in 2000 and ran on and off for 24 years—concluded its twelfth and final season. For many critics, the finale marked not only the completion of a beloved show that sometimes seemed like it would run forever, but also the end of an era of American Jewish comedy, embodied by David and other comics of his generation. Curb follows the everyday antics of a fictionalized version of David, living a posh life in Los Angeles following ...
May 23, 2024•52 min•Ep 75•Transcript available on Metacast The recent wave of anti-Zionist Gaza solidarity protest encampments on college campuses has reignited a longstanding public debate over how to define “Zionist.” On May 8th, a week after the Columbia University encampment was dismantled by the NYPD, more than 500 Jewish students at the school who identify as Zionists published an open letter in which they laid out their perspective. “A large and vocal population of the Columbia community does not understand the meaning of Zionism, and consequentl...
May 16, 2024•51 min•Ep 74•Transcript available on Metacast Last fall, the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco put out an open call for artists to apply for the California Jewish Open . Some of the artists that were accepted into the show identified themselves openly in the application as anti-Zionist, and submitted work that contained content that straightforwardly advocated for Palestinian liberation. But in April, seven of the artists withdrew from the show. A statement released by a group calling themselves California Artists for Palest...
May 02, 2024•34 min•Ep 73•Transcript available on Metacast Chevruta is a column named for the traditional method of Jewish study, in which a pair of students analyzes a religious text together. In each installment, Jewish Currents will match leftist thinkers and organizers with a rabbi or Torah scholar. The activists will bring an urgent question that arises in their own work; the Torah scholar will lead them in exploring their question through Jewish text. By routing contemporary political questions through traditional religious sources, we aim to addr...
Apr 26, 2024•39 min•Ep 72•Transcript available on Metacast Last week, the NYPD—called in by Columbia University president Minouche Shafik—arrested 108 Columbia and Barnard students, who had set up a Gaza solidarity encampment on a lawn in the center of campus. The group of students was subsequently suspended, and those at Barnard were evicted from campus housing. Over the following days, others reestablished the encampment—continuing the call for the university to disclose their investments and divest from Israeli companies, to boycott Israeli academic ...
Apr 25, 2024•42 min•Ep 71•Transcript available on Metacast In recent months, a buzzy new pair of articles on the specter of rising “Israel-related” antisemitism have arrived in The Atlantic . One, by Franklin Foer, heralds the end of the “golden age of American Jews,” while another, by Theo Baker, details the current climate on Stanford’s campus. Though similar stories have circulated in Jewish communal outlets for years, these two longform pieces demonstrate how the subject has also taken center-stage in liberal media since October 7th, against a backd...
Apr 11, 2024•43 min•Ep 70•Transcript available on Metacast 
