Episode Details

Please Help Palestinians in Gaza.

There is no Zoom call this Friday. We’ll return on Friday, October 3.

With the Jewish High Holidays approaching, I’m opening up for all readers my conversation with Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, former chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, who argues that what Israel is doing in Gaza and the West Bank constitutes a stain on Judaism itself.

Cited in Today’s Video

Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates on the murder of Charlie Kirk.

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 writes about the aid group favored by pro-Israel organizations.

Leonard Benardo interviews Rob Malley for the Ideas Letter.

In The New York Times, I wrote about the Trump Administration’s use of Charlie Kirk’s murder to crack down on dissent

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace, I interviewed David Adler, who is aboard the Sumud flotilla heading to Gaza.

On Monday September 22, I’ll be discussing the parallels between Israel’s response to 10/7 and America’s response to 9/11 for the Quincy Institute.

See you a week from Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, a really interesting debate broke out, last week between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates about the legacy of Charlie Kirk. Ezra Klein wrote a column in which he said that Charlie Kirk was practicing politics in the right way because he was trying to persuade people. He was going to college campuses where, you know, lefty students are around, and he was engaging them in argument. And he contrasted this persuasion with this rising political violence that we see in America.

And Coates was challenging that binary, and I want to explain why I agree with Coates. As I understand it, I think the point that Coates is making is not just that the kind of persuasion that Charlie Kirk is engaged in isn’t really good faith discourse, that it’s more like demagoguery, right, in which he tries to kind of make his political opponents look like fools, especially through the kind of editing of these interactions he’s having on college campuses.