Episode Details

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. Our guest will be Mehdi Hasan, formerly of MSNBC and now founder and editor-in-chief of Zeteo. It’s a little unnerving to be interviewing Mehdi, who may be the single best political interviewer in America. We’ll talk about why American journalists don’t ask tougher questions. But we’ll also talk about more personal things. Mehdi isn’t only one of the most important progressive voices in American media. He’s also a Muslim who cares deeply about his faith, and about reconciling it with his progressive principles. For several years now, we’ve held a running conversation, mostly in private, about what it means to be a progressive Muslim, or a progressive Jew, when many of the people who speak for our faiths scorn the principles of human equality, and when white Christian nationalists run the United States. I’m looking forward to continuing that conversation in public this Friday. Please join us.

Cited in Today’s Video

A few articles on South Africa’s attacks on its neighbors in the 1980s.

In 2003, Iran offered to endorse the Arab peace initiative.

Hassan Nasrallah’s 2024 statement about reaching a ceasefire when the Palestinians did.

A great article by my Jewish Currents colleague Jonathan Shamir on some other linkages between Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and its conduct in Lebanon and Iran.

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!), Arielle Angel and Daniel May talk to the philosopher Elad Lapidot about antisemitism, Jewishness, and genocide.

Mona Ali on how the Strait of Hormuz crisis could end US hegemony.

Defending Academic Freedom

I’m grateful to teach at the City University of New York. But, sadly, it has not been immune to the crackdown on pro-Palestinian free speech that has swept campuses since October 7, 2023, and Donald Trump’s return to the White House. In 2025, four adjunct faculty members at Brooklyn College, which is part of the CUNY system, were fired in what appears to have been retaliation for their pro-Palestinian activism. This January, thanks in part to activism by CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress, three were reinstated. But a fourth has not been. Their plight has been covered