Episode Details

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

Sources Cited in this Video

My essay in Jewish Currents about Harvard’s old antisemitism task force.

Harvard’s new antisemitism task force, co-chaired by Professor Derek Penslar.

Penslar’s book, Zionism: An Emotional State.

Abe Foxman and Bill Ackman attack Penslar.

Alan Dershowitz calls for disbanding Jewish Studies departments (14 minutes into the video).

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 Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane and Jonathan Shamir explain the dangers of a regional war in the Middle East.

Joe Biden admits that US strikes against the Houthis in Yemen aren’t working—then says they’ll continue.

A Breaking the Silence explainer answering the claim that Israel left the Gaza Strip in 2005.

I’ll be speaking about Israel, Gaza and the debate about the war on campus at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School on January 25.

The night before my event, Harvard Medical School is sponsoring a symposium on the public health crisis in Gaza.

See you on Friday at Noon,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:

Hi. There’s been a lot of talk of course about antisemitism since October 7th. And there has been, I think, clearly a rise of antisemitism, and I’ve talked about that before. But I also think that underneath this discussion of antisemitism are also dynamics among American Jews inside the American Jewish community that are sometimes obscured from view that the media doesn’t quite pick up on. And these are a kind of, I would say, an intra-Jewish civil war. The civil war is partly generational with younger American