Episode Details

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 an emergency health and wellness assistance program. He will be speaking in his personal capacity and not as an UNRWA representative.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Monday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

A complete video of last Wednesday’s congressional hearings featuring Columbia University officials.

The number of children in Gaza injured or killed.

Genesis 16 and Genesis 21, which discuss the story of Hagar.

Rabbinic teachings about Hagar and Ishmael.

Rabbi Shai Held’s book, Judaism is About Love.

A statue of Hagar and Ishmael in Nazareth. As James Zogby notes, “Her skirt’s a tent, representing the refugees. She’s facing north to Lebanon,” to which many Palestinians were expelled in 1948.

In Genesis, Hagar and Ishmael are expelled into the desert of Beer Sheva. Today, the only school in Beer Sheva that teaches both Jewish and Palestinian children in both Arabic and Hebrew bears Hagar’s name.

If you’re looking for Haggadah supplements that speak to this moment, consider these.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In the Jewish Currents (

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