Episode Details

An Auction to Support the People of Gaza

WEDNESDAY Zoom Call

This week’s Zoom call will be at a special time, WEDNESDAY at 1 PM Eastern. Our guest will be Avrum Burg, the former speaker of the Knesset, who has been using traditional Jewish religious forms in remarkable ways to challenge the genocide in Gaza. He has authored a poem entitled, “If God Were in the Heavens of Gaza” and a Kaddish “for the blessed memory of all innocent” victims. He will read them during our Zoom call, and we will discuss, in these days leading up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, how Jews can repent for our complicity in the horror being committed in our name.

Ask Me Anything

Our next Ask Me Anything session, for premium subscribers, will be this Tuesday, September 16, from 1-2 PM Eastern time.

Cited in Today’s Video

Bari Weiss on “Je Suis Charlie.”

Bari Weiss on overcoming “Trump derangement syndrome.”

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!), Sean Pergola reflects on the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum’s apology for saying “’Never Again’ Can’t Only Mean Never Again For Jews.”

Sam Adler-Bell on how former Biden officials are spinning their actions on Gaza.

Nadine Apelian Dobbs on a story of Palestinian survival.

Daniel Levy on how Israel’s disengagement from Gaza laid the foundation for the current genocide.

How many Democrats does New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand know?

I was the subject of a profile in Haaretz’s magazine

See you on WEDNESDAY,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, in the wake of the terrible murder of Charlie Kirk, I was struck by this tweet by Bari Weiss. And Bari Weiss writes, ‘whether you agree with him or not is completely, utterly, totally beside the point. We won’t do it. Je suis Charlie.’ That’s a kind of reference to the newspaper Charlie Hebdo, the French newspaper, where there were these terrible murders 10 years ago by people supposedly upset by the kind of the cartoons that the newspaper was doing of the prophet Muhammad. And Bari Weiss, as I understand it, is suggesting here that there’s something wrong with saying in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder that you think that some of his political views were reprehensible, that somehow that detracts from your opposition to his murder. This doesn’t seem to me to make any sense whatsoever.

I think it’s obvious that the killing of Charlie Kirk was horrifying, that that person should be put in jail. They should be punished to the fu