Episode Details

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 thinks of that legal argument. In the wake of the controversy over Masha Gessen’s declaration that in Gaza, “the ghetto is being liquidated,” I also want to ask him when, if ever, it’s appropriate to compare Israel’s actions to that of the Nazis. 

Paid subscribers will get the link this Wednesday 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, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Mahmoud Mamdani’s book, Neither Settler nor Native.

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!), Maya Rosen analyzes the public health catastrophe that Israel’s war is causing in Gaza.

In the London Review of Books, Mahmoud Muna writes about selling books in Jerusalem after October 7.

In the Boston Review, Barnett Rubin probes the relationship between Zionism and colonialism.

Mairav Zonszein on why Israel faces the “most unstable and precarious situation it has ever been in, certainly in a generation.”

A Beinart Notebook subscriber, David Mandel, is running for Congress on a platform that includes a ceasefire in Gaza.

In The New York Times, I wrote about the Israeli government’s growing threats to expel people in Gaza.

I’ll be speaking about Israel, Gaza, and the US debate about the war at the Center for Jewish Studie