Episode Details

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank

A way to directly help victims of the massacre in Sydney

This week’s zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM. Our guests will be two remarkable people, Musya Herzog and Meyer Labin. Musya is a neuropsychologist who grew up in the Chabad-Lubavitch community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Meyer is a Yiddish-language journalist and writer from the Satmar community. Both are now active in Smol Emuni, the religious left. They’ll talk about the discourse about Israel and Zionism in ultra-Orthodox communities, and what it might take to make them more sympathetic to Palestinian rights.

Cited in Today’s Video

The premier of New South Wales calls for banning “globalize the intifada.”

Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.

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!), Samuel Stein reports on Zohran Mamdani’s looming struggle with the real estate industry.

Gaza no longer faces famine. But its people are still hungry.

Israel is preparing for a permanent presence in Gaza.

On January 6, I’ll be speaking on a panel at B’nai Jeshurun synagogue in Manhattan.

A Holiday Giveaway

We’ve had many requests to open up certain interviews, so they are free and shareable for all. So, this holiday season, I’m going to permanently remove the paywall for 8 posts from 2025. The first is my recent conversation with Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove. For the rest, we’ll go with your most popular choices in the comments to this post. (Please look at other comments and if your preference has already been nominated, you can have your vote counted by liking that comment.) If this goes well we’ll make it an annual tradition.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So now, a week or so after the terrible massacre in Sydney, Australia, the Australian government is considering doing some sensible things, like limiting the number of guns that any person in Australia can own, but also considering doing some things that would be really fundamental violations of people’s rights to free speech. Among them, the Premier of New South Wales, the Australian state that encompasses Sydney, said that he wants to ban the phrase “globalize the intifada.”

Now, this is really stupid and dangerous at a number of levels. First of all, does anyone really think that banning the phrase “globalize the intifada” would h