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Shortly after the war began, a European journalist wrote to Daniel Gordis. She wanted to interview the leaders of Israel's 2023 protest movement about the war, and she couldn't reach any of them. He wrote back that they were in cockpits and in tanks, and he says that wasn't a metaphor. That, he argues, is the difference between the two lefts. Israel's left "at the end of the day serves in the army," and almost none of it still talks about a two-state solution. For most of the last century and a half, American Jews worked from a quiet bargain: the Jews are a faith, not a people, and America is the promised land. In a Hebrew essay this summer, Gordis says the bargain is over. He traces it from the rise of Reform Judaism, through Will Herberg's Protestant-Catholic-Jew and Woodrow Wilson's warnings about "hyphenated" Americans, to Jacob Blaustein telling David Ben-Gurion that America was American Jews' Zion. His conclusion: "We are a people, and America is not Zion." Then the personal side. His son is called up for reserve duty, and his daughter-in-law and three grandchildren move into the Gordises' Jerusalem home. He describes families who leave the front door open so no one will knock, the October 7th night his son made him buy a lock for the safe room, and why he thinks these have been such lonely years for Israelis. He also says what distance can give American Jews that Israelis don't have. Gordis is candid about his own book. We Stand Divided, published in 2019, held up for two-thirds of its length, he says, and the last third, about building bridges, was wrong. He says he never believed it. The core still stands: "No American Jew ever went to war because she or he was an American Jew… Israelis go to war because we're Jews." He rejects the easy line that classical Zionism was simply right. He also says Israel "invested exactly zero effort in trying to tell its story to the wider world," and he describes the question Israelis now ask each other at their own Shabbat tables. On what an American Jew owes Israel, his first answer is understanding: "the depth of the brokenness here, the depth of the exhaustion, the depth of the fear." He suggests starting with Israeli novels and television. He draws a hard line at Jewish anti-Zionism and says why he will no longer debate Peter Beinart. And he closes with hope, borrowing a distinction from the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: you don't have to be optimistic, but "hopeful is a command." Also in this episode: Rabbi David Ingber's Rosh Hashanah sermon and the image of the watchman asleep at his post; the Jewish professionals who paid for boats from Haifa to Cyprus; the matching tents at Columbia; Howard Zinn's America and Israel's own left-wing historians; why tikkun olam isn't what the Jews are for; why Gordis says to skip the King David Hotel pool; David Grossman's To the End of the Land and Fauda's fifth season; an afternoon with Rabbi Yitz Greenberg; and Kol Nidre on the playground where his neighbors once sat and wept over judicial reform. DANIEL GORDIS Israel from the Inside (Substack): https://danielgordis.substack.com/ Daniel Gordis at Shalem College: https://shalem.ac.il/en/personnel/daniel-gordis/ We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2019): https://www.harpercollins.com/products/we-stand-divided-daniel-gordis REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Daniel Gordis, "The Jews Are a Nation, and America Is Not Zion," HaShiloach (in Hebrew), June 28, 2026: https://hashiloach.org.il/usa-judaisam/ "The Alarm We Must Not Ignore," Rabbi David Ingber's Rosh Hashanah sermon, shared on Israel from the Inside, Sept. 18, 2026: https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/the-alarm-we-must-not-ignore MORE FROM THE HONEST TAKE Ben M. Freeman, "The Broken Mirror": https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/the-broken-mirror-internalized-antisemitism-the-non-jewish-gaze-and-why-jews-are-the-only-ones-who-get-to-define-what-jewish-means-ben-m-freeman THE HONEST TAKE Podcast: https://podcast.honestreporting.com Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1pCnClcM4jiggKP46YZGjG YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLuF-lEHTGTw_RrfN9EP6pdWhgjMX7Fg5HonestReporting: https://honestreporting.com HonestReporting on X: https://x.com/HonestReporting The Honest Take is HonestReporting's weekly long-form interview show — 60 to 90 minutes, recorded remotely, hosted by Ben Chertoff. Every episode at podcast.honestreporting.com. If this conversation gave you something to chew on, please leave The Honest Take a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the single biggest thing that helps new listeners find the show.

Almost everyone now has an opinion about how Israel fights its wars: mayors, cabinet ministers, courts, comment sections. Almost none of them have ever had to make the call. Colonel Richard Kemp has. Kemp served 29 years in the British Army. He did tours in Northern Ireland, the Gulf War and Bosnia, and in 2003 he commanded British forces in Afghanistan. He later ran the international terrorism team at the Cabinet Office in London during the 7/7 bombings. In Kabul, he once had to decide whether to order an attack on an al-Qaeda cell hiding in a civilian neighborhood, knowing there was a very high likelihood of killing civilians. He gave the order. In this conversation he explains what that decision is actually like, how rarely intelligence is complete, and why every commander, himself included, makes mistakes that cost lives. Then he takes on the word genocide. Genocide is a crime of intent, not a crime of scale. So what would it look like if the IDF were actually trying to destroy a people? Kemp's answer: it would not warn civilians, abort strikes, or put its own soldiers at greater risk to keep civilians out of harm's way. It would not build roads inside a combat zone to move food and water, or open new crossings, or bring in vaccines. And if Israel's war in Gaza counts as genocide, he argues, so does almost every modern war fought among civilians. He walks through what the law of armed conflict actually says about hospitals and human shields, and who it holds responsible when civilians die. He also explains why he would rather call Hamas's strategy "human sacrifice" than "human shields." He describes sitting in an IDF planning meeting inside Gaza before a strike on a former school compound housing displaced people, where he says at least half the meeting was spent on how to protect civilians. He also tells the story of an Israeli Air Force pilot who flew sortie after sortie against one target and abandoned the attack because there were too many civilians nearby. Also in this episode: how much time a commander really gets when the shooting starts; what IDF precautions cost in soldiers' lives; the debate over civilian-to-combatant ratios; where the legal line sits between a besieged population going hungry and a commander starving it on purpose; what a ceasefire actually obligates each side to do; how a democracy fights an enemy that wants its own civilians killed; whether Israel could defend itself if the United States cut off arms; where the IDF could have done better; and the one question Kemp would put to someone convinced it's a genocide. He's not a neutral party, and he says so himself. But he has stood where the people being accused stand. COLONEL RICHARD KEMP Website: https://richard-kemp.com/ Writing at Gatestone Institute: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/author/Richard+KempWriting at JNS: https://www.jns.org/author/richard-kemp THE HONEST TAKE Podcast: https://podcast.honestreporting.com Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1pCnClcM4jiggKP46YZGjG YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLuF-lEHTGTw_RrfN9EP6pdWhgjMX7Fg5HonestReporting: https://honestreporting.com HonestReporting on X: https://x.com/HonestReporting The Honest Take is HonestReporting's weekly long-form interview show, 60 to 90 minutes long and recorded remotely. It's hosted by Ben Chertoff. Every episode is at podcast.honestreporting.com. If this episode gave you something to think about, please leave The Honest Take a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the single biggest thing that helps new listeners find the show.

Recorded live on October 7, 2026, three years to the day. Shahar Horovitz was 22 and had just come home from nine months of backpacking in South America when she went to the Nova music festival with about 30 of the friends she'd made on that trip. At 6:29 a.m. the music stopped. By 7:30 there were gunshots, and when she asked a police officer what to do, the officer told her: you have to run, I can't help you. She ran for hours through the fields of the Gaza envelope, lost her friends, and joined three strangers she found catching their breath under a tree. They hid in a greenhouse, called the police and were told to hide, and finally reached a farm run by a Bedouin farmer named Yunus. When terrorists came into the farm, they crawled under his office and lay there while armed men walked inches away. Yunus, hiding under a tractor, was found and told them the survivors had left. He saved eight people that day, and was later honored at the President's Residence. Shahar talks about thinking of her great-grandparents, Auschwitz survivors, while she lay under that building; going to five or six funerals in the first week; the guilt survivors carry; and why she gave herself and her friends new names in her book but kept the real names of the five friends who were killed. She also talks about recovering in New York, the stranger who called her book "biased" without reading it, the therapist who told her "you're not finished," and the text a friend sent her the day after: "You fought yesterday and you won. Keep winning." SHAHAR HOROVITZ Surviving October 7 (published in Hebrew as We Were the Sun), on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FV2SG227 We Were the Sun: https://www.wewerethesun.com/ THE HONEST TAKE Podcast: https://podcast.honestreporting.com Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1pCnClcM4jiggKP46YZGjG YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLuF-lEHTGTw_RrfN9EP6pdWhgjMX7Fg5HonestReporting: https://honestreporting.com HonestReporting on X: https://x.com/HonestReporting The Honest Take is HonestReporting's weekly long-form interview show, hosted by Ben Chertoff. Every episode at podcast.honestreporting.com. If this conversation stayed with you, please leave The Honest Take a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the single biggest thing that helps new listeners find the show.

A rabbi picks Dara Horn up at the airport and tells her what she's walking into. Someone had been posting online about murdering children on the playground of the town's Jewish day school, and then their parents in the carpool line. The horrible part, her host says, isn't the plot. It's who was behind it: the school's own security guard. After People Love Dead Jews, stories like that came to her by the hundreds, and one of her sisters started calling her the antisemitism Lorax. So October 8 didn't shock her. The speed and the organization of it did. Her new book, The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living, argues that we've been fighting the wrong thing. We treat antisemitism as a prejudice, something you cure by building empathy. Horn says it works more like a con. "The lie is always the same. Jews are destroying what you value the most." Only the value changes. To capitalists the Jews are communists, and to communists they're capitalists. To racists they're race polluters, and to anti-racists they're racists. To human rights advocates, the world's only Jewish state is the world's worst violator of human rights. That changes the answer. Instead of debunking claims one at a time, which she compares to taking the stand in a show trial, Horn turns the question back on the people spreading the lie and asks who profits from it. When campus hecklers hand her a slogan, she answers it as if they meant the question, and she says the conversation usually ends right there. Her advice to students is that "you don't need a PhD to defeat an argument that's three words long." What they need is courage, and the discovery that far more people are standing behind them than they knew. Horn also talks about what she saw from inside the antisemitism advisory group Harvard's president convened after October 7, and why the student complaints there were about harassment, not slogans. She covers the 2001 UN conference in Durban, where crowds were already chanting what you hear on campus today. And she remembers the week a fact checker asked her to document pogroms from a century ago while the same paper put Hamas's account of the al-Ahli hospital blast in a banner headline. She closes on what the book's title means. Every Jew alive today is descended from someone who made a costly, countercultural choice. And for the young people chanting at her talks, she now feels something closer to sympathy than fear. Also in this episode: "kill the Jews, save the turtles"; the Z word and the J word; why antisemitism inside an institution is the tail end of its collapse, not the canary; the Talmud's Rabbi Yochanan and Resh Lakish, and why a study partner who agrees with you is useless; the Passover story as a story about burning down the palace; pre-bunking and the eight-lesson curriculum at The Tell Institute; the Muslim allies risking their lives, and the Pakistani journalist Imtiaz Mir; and New York City's new antisemitism plan ("Wait, how is it something?"). DARA HORN Dara Horn: https://www.darahorn.com The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living (Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster): https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Final-Solution-to-the-Jewish-Question/Dara-Horn/9781668090169 Buy it at Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/a/1688/9781668090169 The Tell Institute: https://www.thetellinstitute.org REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Bret Stephens, "For America's Jews, Every Day Must Be Oct. 8," The New York Times, Nov. 7, 2023: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/07/opinion/us-jewish-israel-sept-11.html American Muslim Multifaith Women's Empowerment Council (AMMWEC): https://ammwec.org NYC Mayor's Office, "Mayor Mamdani Unveils New York City's First Strategy to Combat Antisemitism," Sept. 29, 2026: https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/09/mayor-mamdani-unveils-new-york-city-s-first-strategy-to-combat-a Ben M. Freeman on The Honest Take, "The Broken Mirror": https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/the-broken-mirror-internalized-antisemitism-the-non-jewish-gaze-and-why-jews-are-the-only-ones-who-get-to-define-what-jewish-means-ben-m-freeman Hillel Neuer on The Honest Take, on Durban and the genocide charge: https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/a-verdict-waiting-for-a-trial-where-israel-is-committing-genocide-came-from-decades-before-gaza-with-hillel-neuer THE HONEST TAKE Podcast: https://podcast.honestreporting.com Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1pCnClcM4jiggKP46YZGjG YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLuF-lEHTGTw_RrfN9EP6pdWhgjMX7Fg5 HonestReporting: https://honestreporting.com HonestReporting on X: https://x.com/HonestReporting The Honest Take is HonestReporting's weekly long-form interview show — 60 to 90 minutes, recorded remotely, hosted by Ben Chertoff. Every episode at podcast.honestreporting.com. If this one gave you something to argue about at your own table, please leave The Honest Take a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the single biggest thing that helps new listeners find the show.

"If you are Hamas, you have to be laughing at how easily you can play the international and American news media." For Elliot Kaufman, the coverage turned ten days in, when the blast at al-Ahli hospital was reported around the world as an Israeli strike that had killed hundreds. He points out that it was a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that landed in the hospital's parking lot. From there, he argues, the war was told as if Hamas weren't in it: not in the footage, not in the casualty counts, not in the story of the aid. He's just as blunt about Israel's own failures. On aid, he says, "I don't think Israel messed up on the PR there. I think Israel messed up. Period." Kaufman is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, and he writes about Israel and Iran. With Yonah Jeremy Bob of The Jerusalem Post, he wrote In the War Room: The Inside Story of Israel's Fight Against Hamas and the Iranian Axis. The two reported it while the war was still going on. They interviewed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Benny Gantz, who made up the original war cabinet, along with Jake Sullivan, Steve Witkoff and more than a hundred Israeli military officials. The Netanyahu in the book is not the one most coverage describes. Kaufman argues that in the opening weeks he was the brake. He held back Gallant's plan to hit Hezbollah first. On October 11, 2023, Israeli warplanes were already in the air to strike Hezbollah when radar picked up what looked like paragliders crossing from Lebanon; they turned out to be geese, and the planes were called back. Kaufman says the whole war could have turned on that one misreading. Netanyahu then spent the 20 days between October 7 and the October 27 ground invasion holding back the push into Gaza. Kaufman says the IDF had no plan on the shelf for a full invasion of Gaza at all. His verdict on the war that followed is that Israel didn't go too far in Gaza. "I think it fought for too long," he says, because under a raid-and-leave strategy troops had to fight for the same neighborhoods again and again. Then the conversation comes home to Brooklyn. In 2021 Kaufman went back to the 1991 Crown Heights riot for the Journal. For three nights, Jews in the neighborhood hid in their homes while rioters threw bricks through their windows, and Yankel Rosenbaum was stabbed and killed. His argument is that the police stood back and the press filed the violence as a racial clash, when the actual story was antisemitism. He closes on hope, and on a warning. He argues that the practical, interest-based case for Israel as an ally has never been stronger. He's worried about the right as well as the left: "The subtext of, say, the Tucker Carlson Show isn't that all Jews are evil. It's that all evil is Jewish." Also in this episode: the joke Kaufman heard from the Prime Minister's Office about a "two-state solution" (Michigan and Nevada); the Students for Justice in Palestine toolkit sent to campus chapters on October 8, 2023; the advice Gallant got from General David Petraeus; what Netanyahu's own 2022 memoir predicted about invading Gaza; a documentary's claim about civilian-casualty approvals, set against the strike on Mohammed Deif; and how the war looks from Tehran. ELLIOT KAUFMAN Elliot Kaufman at The Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/news/author/elliot-kaufman Elliot Kaufman at Simon & Schuster: https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Elliot-Kaufman/260068537 REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Elliot Kaufman, "Could the Crown Heights Riots Recur?" The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 20, 2021: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/crown-heights-riot-hasidic-jews-black-chabad-dinkins-giuliani-brooklyn-new-york-11629481962 WSJ Opinion, "'Get the Jew': The Crown Heights Riot Revisited" (documentary): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpjLx-8xyJQ Matti Friedman on The Honest Take, "The Familiar Villain": https://share.transistor.fm/s/5f71c087 THE HONEST TAKE Podcast: https://podcast.honestreporting.com Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1pCnClcM4jiggKP46YZGjG YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLuF-lEHTGTw_RrfN9EP6pdWhgjMX7Fg5HonestReporting: https://honestreporting.com HonestReporting on X: https://x.com/HonestReporting The Honest Take is HonestReporting's weekly long-form interview show — 60 to 90 minutes, recorded remotely, hosted by Ben Chertoff. Every episode at podcast.honestreporting.com. If this episode changed how you think about the first draft of this war, please leave The Honest Take a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the single biggest thing that helps new listeners find the show.

A fourth-grade math textbook asks Palestinian children to add the number of martyrs killed in the First Intifada to the number killed in the Second. A physics lesson teaches Newton's second law using a boy with a slingshot aimed at an Israeli soldier. A first-grade Arabic book introduces the letter ha with two words: attack, and martyr. Marcus Sheff runs the institute that found all of it. He was a political reporter, then an editor at The Jerusalem Post, then a foreign correspondent, and then he ran a communications firm — and now he is CEO of IMPACT-se, the Jerusalem-based research institute that reads school textbooks across the Middle East and Europe line by line and grades them against UNESCO's own standards on peace, tolerance and non-violence. His analysts go through every line of every book of every subject of every grade; one country can mean 350 textbooks in a year. The Syrian report is 300 pages. His central claim is not that the books are offensive. It is that they are predictive. "Textbooks are remarkable political predictors," Sheff says. "What children are taught today in classrooms all over the world is a pretty good indication of what the country is going to be like in ten years' time." A fourteen-year-old reading a physics problem about throwing rocks is twenty-four in a decade, and a fully formed member of a society. What a regime prints is what it intends. Sheff walks through what IMPACT-se found in the Palestinian Authority curriculum and why he reads it as strategy rather than accident: the peace agreements that used to be in the books — Israel and Egypt, Israel and Jordan, the Wye Accords — were taken out when the curriculum was rewritten between 2016 and 2018, leaving only a dismissive account of Oslo, along with the letter Yasser Arafat wrote to Yitzhak Rabin renouncing violence, which was doctored. None of that, he argues, happens by accident. It was done at the top, in the open, with the international community in the room. Then there is UNRWA — the UN agency that runs most of the schools in Gaza, teaches the Palestinian Authority curriculum in them, and has produced some of its own supplementary material besides, one piece of which describes an attack on a bus full of Israeli civilians as a barbecue party. Sheff testified to the committee the UN set up to investigate the agency after October 7; IMPACT-se was the only nonprofit asked. He describes what the committee recommended and what happened next, which was very little. The obvious objection gets its turn: does any of this actually change anyone, and isn't the whole thing impossible to fix anyway? Sheff's answer is the most useful thing on the tape. Changing a curriculum is not hard. These are thin, magazine-format books, reprinted constantly, and the world has two billion children in school — it is not short of experience in producing textbooks. The refusal is not technical. "This is not a pedagogical question," he says. "This is a political question." He also turns the same standards on Israel — IMPACT-se examines the Israeli curriculum, he says, more comprehensively than any other — and describes what the Ministry of Education's civics textbook actually teaches Israeli children about 1948, including the Palestinian account of it. And there is a genuinely hopeful half to this. The Palestinian Authority curriculum is not the regional norm; it is the outlier. The United Arab Emirates rebuilt its textbooks first. Saudi Arabia has been reforming its curriculum since 2020. Morocco's books, built on the country's 2011 constitutional reform, treat the Jewish community and the Amazigh as part of the Moroccan tapestry, right down to a photograph of a Muslim family at a Jewish Friday night table. Central Asia is doing better on antisemitism than much of Western Europe, where Sheff calls the picture a mixed bag and puts Ireland at the bottom of it. Also in this episode: what the analysts physically do with a stack of several hundred textbooks; why UNESCO doesn't conduct this kind of country-level review itself; the fact that Hamas, on taking Gaza, did not change a word of the curriculum Fatah wrote in Ramallah; why the US withdrew its UNRWA funding after IMPACT-se testified in Congress; what Sheff would say if he had one sentence in front of the UN General Assembly; and where his hope comes from after a career spent reading the worst material anyone produces. MARCUS SHEFF AND IMPACT-se IMPACT-se: https://www.impact-se.org/ All IMPACT-se reports and research: https://www.impact-se.org/blog/ Marcus Sheff, Washington Institute expert bio: https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/experts/marcus-sheff-0 IMPACT-se team page: https://www.impact-se.org/about-us/team-impact/ REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Sheff's written testimony to the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, "UNRWA Exposed," Jan 30 2024: https://chrissmith.house.gov/uploadedfiles/2024-1-30-_witness_testimony_of_marcus_sheff.pdf IMPACT-se, "Analyzing UNRWA's Response" — the July 2 2026 review of UNRWA's compliance with the Colonna Report, including the eighth-grade Arabic textbook: https://impact-se.org/publication/analysing-unrwas-response-to-the-un-independent-review-colonna-report/ IMPACT-se, "Review of the 2025-2026 Palestinian Authority School Curriculum, Grades 1-12," November 2025 — 290 textbooks and 71 teacher guides: https://www.impact-se.org/wp-content/uploads/Review-of-the-2025-2026-Palestinian-Authority-School-Curriculum-v2.pdf IMPACT-se, "Review of UNRWA Schools Headed by Hamas Principals," Nov 10 2024: https://impact-se.org/publication/review-of-unrwa-schools-headed-by-hamas-principals/ IMPACT-se, "When Peace Goes to School: The Emirati Curriculum 2016–21": https://www.impact-se.org/wp-content/uploads/When-Peace-Goes-to-School_The-Emirati-Curriculum-2016%E2%80%9321.pdf IMPACT-se, "Review of Saudi Textbooks 2024–2026," July 2026: https://impact-se.org/publication/review-of-saudi-textbooks-2024-2026/ IMPACT-se, "In Syria, the Real Foreign Policy Is Written in the Classroom," July 21 2026: https://impact-se.org/publication/in-syria-the-real-foreign-policy-is-written-in-the-classroom/ IMPACT-se, "Review of the Jordanian Curriculum 2025–2026," Aug 11 2026: https://impact-se.org/publication/review-of-the-jordanian-curriculum-2025-2026/ US Government Accountability Office, GAO-26-107708 — gaps in State Department reporting on UNRWA textbook content, Jan 8 2026: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-107708 Dr. Charles Asher Small on The Honest Take, "Follow the Money: How the Muslim Brotherhood Bought a Seat in America's Schools": https://share.transistor.fm/s/a2cab...

"The greatest achievement of the Jewish people is not Israel. The greatest achievement of the Jewish people is the Jewish people." That's Ben M. Freeman, and that's where this episode starts. Most weeks on The Honest Take, we spend an hour with one guest. This week is different. We're in the Ten Days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the stretch when you're supposed to sit down and take an honest accounting of yourself. So we went back through the conversations on this show and pulled the moments that had nothing to do with the news cycle. Nobody in this episode is going to tell you what's being done to us. You already know that. Instead, nine people take on a harder question: Who are we? What do we actually know about ourselves? And what do we owe the people who handed this to us? Ben M. Freeman, founder of the Jewish Pride movement, explains why Jews are a people, a nation and a civilization, not only a religion, and why "religions don't have homelands." Rawan Osman grew up in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley and spent seven years reading her way out of what she was taught about Jews. She describes what she found when she finally walked into a synagogue, and tells young Jews that being born a Jew "is like winning the lottery." Yossi Klein Halevi of the Shalom Hartman Institute names the failure: "We have the most compelling national story out there… And we're not telling it." Dr. Henry Green, founder of Sephardi Voices, turns the same charge inward. Nearly every Jewish community marks Yom HaShoah, and almost none mark Yom HaPlitim, the day that honors the Jews who left the Arab world. Author Meg Keene says the community is going to have to build its own institutions, and pay for them. Brigadier General Amir Avivi argues that security starts with spirit and purpose, and that a nation that has been around for thousands of years should be able to think a thousand years ahead. Alana Newhouse, founder and editor-in-chief of Tablet, says Zionism is "not something that we picked up at Walmart 20 years ago," and lays out four survival tests that, she argues, only Israel in the West currently passes. Shai Davidai, who was teaching at Columbia Business School on October 7, explains what he decided to do after getting punched in the face. And Arnold Roth, whose daughter Malki was murdered in the 2001 Sbarro bombing in Jerusalem, answers the question of what still gives him hope: "I'm a Jew. I'm a proud Jew." From all of us at HonestReporting, g'mar chatima tova. If this episode was worth your time, send it to someone who needs it, and leave a rating and a review. It genuinely helps other people find the show. Full conversations Every guest in this episode sat down with Ben for a full-length episode of The Honest Take. Ben M. Freeman: Broken Mirror: Internalized Antisemitism, the Non-Jewish Gaze, and Why Jewish Pride is the Answer to Jew Hate — https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/the-broken-mirror-internalized-antisemitism-the-non-jewish-gaze-and-why-jews-are-the-only-ones-who-get-to-define-what-jewish-means-ben-m-freemanRawan Osman: Why Is the Jew the Enemy? How Arab Antisemitism Is Built — And How It Breaks — https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/why-is-the-jew-the-enemy-how-arab-antisemitism-is-built-and-how-it-breaks-with-rawan-osmanYossi Klein Halevi: The Other Side of the Nakba: The Forgotten History of 1948 — https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/the-other-side-of-the-nakba-the-forgotten-history-of-1948-with-yossi-klein-haleviDr. Henry Green: The Second Exodus: How 850,000 Jews Were Erased From the Arab World — https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/exodus-erased-850-000-jews-were-erased-from-the-arab-world-heres-what-really-happened-dr-henry-greenMeg Keene: No One Wants a Jewish Protagonist: Inside Publishing's New Blacklist — https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/no-one-wants-a-jewish-protagonist-inside-publishings-new-blacklist-with-meg-keeneBrig. Gen. Amir Avivi: There Is Nowhere Else: Israeli Security, Zionist Pride, and the Doctrine That Broke on October 7 — https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/the-solution-is-israelAlana Newhouse: The Jews Are Not the Target. The West Is. Can Zionism Save It? — https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/the-jews-are-not-the-target-the-west-is-can-zionism-save-it-alana-newhouseShai Davidai: Elite, Educated, Antisemitic: How Academia Fosters Jew Hate — https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/elite-educated-antisemitic-how-academia-fosters-jew-hate-with-shai-davidaiArnold Roth: What "Globalize the Intifada" Actually Means, From Someone Who Lived It — https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/what-globalize-the-intifada-actually-means-from-someone-who-lived-it-arnold-rothMore from The Honest Take All episodes — https://podcast.honestreporting.comApple Podcasts — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802Spotify — https://open.spotify.com/show/1pCnClcM4jiggKP46YZGjGHonestReporting — https://honestreporting.com

"Israel is committing genocide." It's a sentence heard every day since October 7, and it is far older than the war. Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch in Geneva, returns to The Honest Take to trace where the charge came from, and how it was in circulation decades before the war it is now used to describe. Neuer traces the vocabulary back to Soviet propaganda that he says probably began in the 1950s, and to the UN's 1975 "Zionism is racism" resolution, which was repealed in 1991. A decade later it was revived at the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, which the United States and Israel walked out of 25 years ago this month. As Neuer puts it, "a conference that was supposed to be against racism became a conference that promoted racism." Marchers equated Zionism with Nazism. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were handed out as literature. A parallel NGO Forum adopted a declaration accusing Israel of "acts of genocide," "Israel's brand of apartheid" and "racist crimes against humanity." At the time, Human Rights Watch's Reed Brody, while accusing Israel of "serious crimes against Palestinian people," told CNN that "it is simply not accurate to use the word genocide." Congressman Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in Congress, called the conference "the most sickening and unabashed display of hate for Jews I had seen since the Nazi period." Neuer argues that the charge never went away. The same accusation now comes from UN mechanisms, including the Human Rights Council's commission of inquiry and Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. The UN is still marking the anniversary. On Monday, September 28, the General Assembly holds a high-level meeting to commemorate 25 years since the adoption of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action. The resolution setting it up passed in July, 142 to 3 with 13 abstentions; Argentina, Israel and the United States voted no. Ten countries pulled out of the 2009 Durban Review Conference in Geneva, and 38 boycotted the General Assembly's 20th-anniversary meeting in 2021. UN Watch is asking democracies to stay away again. Also in this episode: Secretary-General António Guterres telling the Financial Times that many UN special rapporteurs are "totally out of control, from the point of view of the Secretariat," and his spokesman's clarification days later; Deborah Lipstadt's account that Guterres privately called Albanese "a horrible person"; and Neuer's answer to Albanese's defamation charge: "Please go ahead and sue me. Make my day." SIGN THE PETITION UN Watch — Durban 25 petition: https://unwatch.org/petition-pull-out-of-uns-antisemitic-durban-25-meeting/ UN Watch — Durban 25 campaign and boycott history: https://unwatch.org/durban-25/ HILLEL NEUER AND UN WATCH UN Watch: https://unwatch.org Hillel Neuer on X: https://x.com/HillelNeuer UN Watch on X: https://x.com/UNWatch REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE UN High-Level Week 2026 (the September 28 Durban meeting): https://www.un.org/en/high-level-week-2026 UN press release GA/12774 — the July 28, 2026 vote, 142–3–13: https://press.un.org/en/2026/ga12774.doc.htm Resolution text, A/80/L.93: https://docs.un.org/A/80/L.93 US Mission to the UN — explanation of vote: https://usun.usmission.gov/explanation-of-vote-for-unga-resolution-scope-modalities-format-and-organization-of-the-high-level-meeting-of-the-general-assembly/ Durban 2001 NGO Forum Declaration (full text): https://www.adalah.org/uploads/oldfiles/eng/intladvocacy/ngoforumdecl.htm CNN, Sept. 2, 2001 — the NGO Forum declaration, and Human Rights Watch on the genocide charge: https://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/africa/09/02/durban.racism/index.html CNN, Sept. 3, 2001 — the US and Israel walk out: https://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/africa/09/03/racism.reaction/index.html UN Watch — Tom Lantos and other voices on the 2001 NGO Forum: https://unwatch.org/leading-international-voices-on-the-2001-durban-ngo-forum/ UN Watch — 25 Years After Durban (Feb. 2026): https://unwatch.org/25-years-after-durban-antisemitism-repackaged-as-human-rights/ James Loeffler, Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Yale): https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300217247/rooted-cosmopolitans/ NGO Monitor: https://ngo-monitor.org Guterres: Hamas attacks "did not happen in a vacuum" (Fortune, Oct. 2023): https://fortune.com/2023/10/25/un-secretary-general-says-hamas-attack-did-not-happen-in-vacuum-guterres-israel/ UN Watch — Guterres on rapporteurs "totally out of control," and Lipstadt's account: https://unwatch.org/un-chief-guterres-admits-special-rapporteurs-are-totally-out-of-control-after-privately-calling-francesca-albanese-a-horrible-person/ Jerusalem Post — the UN spokesman's clarification: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-906973 UN Watch — Albanese tells Middle East Eye the Secretary-General never spoke to her: https://unwatch.org/francesca-albanese-says-un-chief-never-spoke-to-her-and-expects-he-never-will/ Hillel Neuer's first Honest Take episode (March 24, 2026): https://honestreporting.com/the-un-is-broken-how-hillel-neuer-is-fighting-the-uns-anti-israel-machine-from-the-inside/ THE HONEST TAKE Podcast: https://podcast.honestreporting.com Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1pCnClcM4jiggKP46YZGjG YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLuF-lEHTGTw_RrfN9EP6pdWhgjMX7Fg5 HonestReporting: https://honestreporting.com HonestReporting on X: https://x.com/HonestReporting If this episode changed what you hear when someone says "apartheid" or "genocide," please leave The Honest Take a rating and review o...

"'Yeah, Israel probably did 9/11. I wouldn't put it past them.' That is one more thing people can put in their knapsack of arguments for why Israel is a uniquely evil country. And I'm just not sure how we're going to argue these people out of it." That's James B. Meigs, and he has been arguing with these people for twenty years. In 2005, Popular Mechanics did what almost no newsroom was willing to do: it took the 9/11 truther claims seriously enough to test them one at a time, and it published what it found. Meigs was the editor-in-chief. He spent the next two decades being told he was part of the cover-up. Twenty-five years after the attacks, the same claims are circulating again — with one substitution. "The government did it" has become "Israel did it." Same anomalies. Same absence of evidence. New target. Ben Chertoff, who managed the reporters on that Popular Mechanics investigation and ran its fact-checking, is joined by Meigs and by Michael Shermer — founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, a Scientific American columnist for eighteen years, and the author of Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational, Denying History, and Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, Why It Matters. They take the machinery apart. Proportionality bias — the intuition that an enormous event must have an enormous cause, and that nineteen men with box cutters cannot be the whole story. Anomaly hunting, and why a handful of loose threads feels more persuasive than a mountain of settled evidence. The Gish Gallop, and why a claim you can make in one sentence takes three thousand words to refute. And the part that should trouble everyone: how material that originated with Holocaust deniers and professional antisemites — a full-page New York Times ad in 2004, a seismic-spike claim traced to the American Free Press — ended up circulating among people who considered themselves liberal, progressive and open-minded, because they liked where it pointed. Also in this episode: what happened to Tucker Carlson between 2012 and 2025. Why thermite and Building 7 refuse to die. How the goalposts moved from "made it happen on purpose" to "let it happen on purpose." Why every new story now routes through the Mossad. What it would actually cost to pay off everyone who would have to stay quiet. And what you say to a family member who believes this, without sounding condescending. Guests: James B. Meigs, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, columnist for the Wall Street Journal's "Free Expression" newsletter, and former editor-in-chief of Popular Mechanics, where he ran the 2005 "Debunking 9/11 Myths" investigation. He also writes for City Journal and Commentary. Michael Shermer, founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and author of Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. If this episode was useful, a rating and a review genuinely helps other people find it. Sources referenced Popular Mechanics, "Debunking 9/11 Myths" (March 2005 cover story) — https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a49/1227842/Popular Mechanics, "Debunking 9/11 Myths — FAQs" — https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a2043/4220721/Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts — Popular Mechanics, edited by David Dunbar and Brad Reagan, foreword by James B. Meigs (revised and updated 10th-anniversary edition, 2011) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1588165477Debunking 9/11 Myths, original 2006 edition, foreword by Senator John McCain — https://www.amazon.com/dp/158816635XJames B. Meigs, "Tucker Carlson Goes Full Truther," City Journal, Nov 18 2025 — https://www.city-journal.org/article/tucker-carlson-911-files-conspiracy-theoriesJames B. Meigs, "Conspiracies All the Way Down," City Journal — https://www.city-journal.org/article/conspiracies-all-the-way-downMichael Shermer, Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1421449072Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (University of California Press, updated and expanded edition) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/0520260988Michael Shermer, Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/142145372XADL, "Unraveling Anti-Semitic 9/11 Conspiracy Theories" — https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/assets/pdf/combating-hate/anti-semitic-9-11-conspiracy-theories.pdfHonestReporting — https://honestreporting.comMore from Michael Shermer Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time — https://www.amazon.com/dp/0805070893The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250008808The Moral Arc: How Science Makes Us Better People — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250081327Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1627798579Full catalog — https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001H6MCNY

"CPJ has dozens of names where they claim the journalist died on a dangerous assignment, while the description says they died in their home. So use a little bit of logic and tell me — how can a journalist be on a dangerous assignment while they're in their own home?" That is Leslie Kajomovitz, near the end of this panel. On June 25, the Committee to Protect Journalists announced it was reviewing its own database of journalists killed since October 7. The reason was not an outside investigation. It was that Hamas and Islamic Jihad had begun publishing obituaries for their own fighters — and some of those fighters were already on CPJ's list. CPJ has since removed eight people for taking part in hostilities, and another seven for not meeting its own definition of a journalist. The review cost the organization a board member: Nika Soon-Shiong, publisher of Drop Site News, was ousted as the audit went forward. The International Federation of Journalists quietly dropped eight terrorism-linked names from its own list and has still offered no explanation for why. HonestReporting's research puts it further than CPJ has been willing to go: over half of the people on CPJ's October 7 War database are operatives or carry a documented affiliation with a terrorist organization. And the number that gets least attention is CPJ's own. In its 2025 annual report, CPJ counted 52 journalist deaths in Gaza — and determined that only 18 of them were targeted by Israel. The other 34, by CPJ's own finding, were killed in the course of the conflict and not specifically targeted. Of the 86 deaths CPJ attributed to Israel worldwide that year, 31 worked for the Houthi public relations department's newspapers in Yemen. Erin Molan puts it to the panel: why did so many organizations reach for the "Israel is hunting journalists" narrative, how did so many combatants get counted as press, what does it cost real journalists when the label is handed out this cheaply — and why has almost no newsroom that ran the original story gone back to correct it. Panel: Salo Aizenberg, author and researcher and a HonestReporting board member; Leslie Kajomovitz, twenty-plus years in international news; and Gabriel Epstein, Senior Policy Associate at the Israel Policy Forum. Moderated by journalist and broadcaster Erin Molan. Recorded live on August 5, 2026, as part of HonestReporting's Let's Get Honest series. Sources referenced IFJ Silently Removes 8 Terrorism-Linked Individuals — https://honestreporting.com/ifj-silently-removes-8-terrorism-linked-individuals-from-slain-gazan-journalist-list/HonestReporting Calls on News Outlets to Correct Reporting on Data From CPJ — https://honestreporting.com/honestreporting-calls-on-news-outlets-to-correct-reporting-on-data-from-committee-to-protect-journalists/After HonestReporting's Research, CPJ Ousts Nika Soon-Shiong — https://honestreporting.com/after-honestreportings-research-cpj-ousts-nika-soon-shiong-and-admits-its-gaza-journalist-list-was-wrong/The CPJ Is Finally Acknowledging That It Called Gazan Terrorists 'Journalists' — https://honestreporting.com/the-cpj-is-finally-acknowledging-that-it-called-gazan-terrorists-journalists/Terrorists & Propagandists: CPJ's Annual Report — https://honestreporting.com/terrorists-propagandists-the-not-so-independent-journalists-included-in-the-cpjs-annual-report/How the CPJ Redefines International Law — https://honestreporting.com/how-the-cpj-redefines-international-law-to-designate-terrorists-as-journalists/

When most of us picture antisemitism online, we picture a swastika, a slur, a guy in a dark room. Matthias Becker will tell you that's the part that barely matters. He's not a political scientist. He's a linguist. For more than a decade he has been reading the comments — not on fringe platforms, but under the BBC, The Guardian, Le Monde. His project, Decoding Antisemitism, has now been through 300,000-plus comments across Britain, France and Germany, and what it found is that roughly 80% of the antisemitism in those mainstream spaces never uses a slur at all. It hides in a joke. In a rhetorical question. In a name dropped like a password. Below an article about George Soros, someone writes: someone should give George Soros a shower. No slur, no threat, nothing a keyword filter will ever catch — and everyone who needs to understand it, does. Which means, as Becker puts it, that nearly every statistic you have read about online hate is built on sand. This conversation covers what actually changed on October 7 — the shift from demonizing Israel to openly celebrating the murder of Israelis, and the overlap with misogyny he had never seen before. It covers his event studies of Charlie Kirk, the Capital Jewish Museum, the White House Correspondents' Dinner attack, and Dan Bilzerian's congressional run — where the single video that pushed back on him drew the most antisemitism of any in the set, over 50%. It covers why he thinks surveys can't measure this and comment sections can. And it covers what he now tells the AI companies, whose guardrails he is trying to help build. He is, after ten years in the worst of it, not a cynic. His argument is that the same technology that lets one person manufacture a wave of propaganda is the first tool we've had that is powerful enough to read the flood back. Related episode: Ashley Rindsberg, "Garbage In, Gospel Out: Wikipedia, Reddit, and the Battle Over Truth" — Becker names Wikipedia and Reddit on tape as the stumbling block feeding these models. Rindsberg's episode is how that pipeline got poisoned; Becker's is what it costs downstream — https://share.transistor.fm/s/cdb2fdb2The guest Dr. Matthias J. Becker — AddressHate Research Scholar, NYU Center for the Study of Antisemitism · Editor-in-Chief, Digital Hate ReviewDecoding Antisemitism — the project site, including all six discourse reportsDecoding Antisemitism Substack — where the event studies land firstThe lexicon Ben names in the outro — this is the free, open-access one Decoding Antisemitism: A Guide to Identifying Antisemitism Online — eds. Becker, Troschke, Bolton, Chapelan (Palgrave Macmillan / Springer Nature, 2024, Open Access CC BY 4.0). 46 antisemitic categories, each with historical background and explicit/implicit examples — read or download freeHis work referenced in the episode "Decoding antisemitism online: linguistic and multimodal challenges in the age of AI" — Frontiers in Communication, Jan 23 2026 — read it"Antisemitism Exploding on the Far-Right: The Conspiracy Theory Doesn't Need an Event Anymore" — The Algemeiner, May 7 2026. This is the Bilzerian study: ~3,000 YouTube comments across six appearances, 41% antisemitic on average, 23.6%–52% range, with the pushback video topping the set — read it"The Conspiracy Architecture Doesn't Need Jews: It Just Prefers Them" — The Algemeiner, Apr 28 2026. The White House Correspondents' Dinner study: conspiracy framing 6% → 25%, conventional blame 30% → 5% — read it"Celebrating Terror" — the case study his team published two weeks after October 7, on the online reactions to the attack. Available through the project's publications pageThe new work AddressHate — the New York think tank he describes at 59:01, connecting discourse research, malicious-actor research and algorithmic-amplification research — addresshate.orgDecoding Hate — the NYU successor project, expanding from antisemitism to anti-Asian and anti-Black racism and misogyny. Site was "about two months" from launch as of taping; not yet live at publication.Related Honest Take episodes Ashley Rindsberg, "Garbage In, Gospel Out: Wikipedia, Reddit, and the Battle Over Truth" (Jun 30 2026, 43:04) — listen · watch. The direct on-tape connection: at 57:30 Ben raises Wikipedia and Reddit as the stumbling block, because they are what feed the models. Rindsberg's episode is how that corpus got captured; Becker's is the cost downstream, in the guardrails.Izabella Tabarovsky, "The Soviet Factory That Built Modern Anti-Zionism" (Aug 25 2026, 97:16) — listen · watch. Complementary: she traces where the vocabulary was manufactured; he measures what people do with it now, sentence by sentence.The show The Honest Take · Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube playlistHonestReporting — Instagram, X, TikTok, Facebook

In 2018, Izabella Tabarovsky walked past a protest on an American campus and recognized the signs. Not the sentiment — the sentences. She called her father in Russian and read them out. His answer: we've heard all of this before. She grew up in Soviet Siberia, in a Jewish city with no synagogues, where the word "Jew" was a line on an internal passport and Jewish applicants to math departments were handed problems known as "coffin problems," because they would bury you. So she went looking for the paper trail — and found one. The Soviet Union didn't merely dislike Israel. It assigned the problem to research institutes and told them to build a scientific-sounding case against Zionism. The volumes they produced look like scholarship. They have footnotes, endnotes, citations to Hannah Arendt and to Herzl. Tabarovsky sat in the National Library of Israel and checked those citations one at a time. They're fake. Real quotes turned to mean the opposite of what they meant. From there the trail runs out of Moscow and into a UN resolution, into Mahmoud Abbas's Soviet dissertation, and into an American Communist Party book that a successor organization quietly serialized "for our young readers" one month after October 7th. A conversation about where the vocabulary came from, why it outlived the state that built it, and what a nineteen-year-old is supposed to do about it now. Her book is Be a Refusenik: A Jewish Student's Survival Guide, with a foreword by Natan Sharansky. Related episode: Shai Davidai, "Elite, Educated, Antisemitic: How Academia Fosters Jew Hate." Tabarovsky traces where this vocabulary was manufactured; Davidai traces how the American university taught a generation to hear it as justice. The guest Izabella Tabarovsky — X/Twitter · Substack, The New Refuseniks · Tablet contributor page · Wilson Center · London Centre for the Study of Contemporary AntisemitismBook — Be a Refusenik: A Jewish Student's Survival Guide (Wicked Son, Nov 20 2025, foreword by Natan Sharansky) — Amazon · Barnes & Noble · Waterstones · Z3 announcementHer essays referenced in the episode "Zombie Anti-Zionism" — Tablet, Jul 31 2024 — read it"Mahmoud Abbas' Dissertation" — Tablet, Jan 18 2023 — read it"The Cult of 'Antizionism'" — Tablet (on the ICSZ) — read it"The New Refuseniks" — Tablet, Jun 21 2021 — read itPeople and things discussed Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism — own site · advisory board incl. Judith Butler · Fathom critiqueRuth Wisse on antisemitism as political technology — Ask Haviv Anything ep. 138, "Why antisemitism works" — listen · Apple PodcastsMatti Friedman on the West's Israel cosmology — "Introduction to Gazology," The Free Press — read itFrantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth — Grove AtlanticHasan Piker — ADL backgrounder · JTA interview, Apr 2026Shabbos Kestenbaum — X/TwitterNatan Sharansky in conversation with Tabarovsky, Be a Refusenik launch, Univ. of Haifa, Jul 2026 (71 min) — watchLong print Q&A, Hadassah Magazine, Aug 10 2026 — read itThe show The Honest Take · Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube playlistHonestReporting — Instagram, X, TikTok, Facebook

In 1928, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was a man in trouble — dogged by accusations of corruption and nepotism. So he told a story: the Jews praying at the Western Wall were coming for Al-Aqsa. It worked. The criticism dissolved, and a year later 67 Jews were murdered in Hebron, ending a Jewish presence there that had lasted millennia. Journalist Yardena Schwartz spent years tracing that lie — from a box of letters in a Memphis attic, to the Mufti's wartime estate in Berlin, to October 7th, when Hamas named its attack the Al-Aqsa Flood. Her book is Ghosts of a Holy War. This week marks 97 years since the Hebron massacre. In 1929, The New York Times reported it plainly as a massacre of unarmed Jews, and New Yorkers marched in protest. Those articles are still sitting in the paper's archive. Almost nobody has gone back to read them. A re-release of the conversation that opened this show. The guest Yardena Schwartz — website · X/Twitter · published clips (Muck Rack)Book — Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine That Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Union Square & Co.) — publisher · Amazon · Barnes & Noble · GoodreadsHer reporting referenced in the episode "How the first Palestinian leader became a Nazi war criminal" — The Spectator, Dec 28 2025 — read itReview of Ghosts of a Holy War — The Jerusalem Post — read itBooks and films discussed Oren Kessler, Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict — publisherTom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate — publisherPalestine 36 (dir. Annemarie Jacir, 2025) — Palestine's Oscar entry, US run via Watermelon Pictures — Variety review · Screen DailyBackground on what's discussed The 2017 Temple Mount / Al-Aqsa metal detector crisis — Wikipedia · Foreign Policy, July 2017Jerusalem and the Temple Mount status quo — ADL backgrounderThe show The Honest Take · Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube playlistOriginal episode — audio · YouTubeCompanion article — "The Lie That Lit the Match"HonestReporting — Instagram, X, TikTok, Facebook

A sixth-grade teacher in an American public school gets flown to Doha. First class, five-star hotel. Nobody asks her for anything — they just send her home with some curriculum, some textbooks and a few maps. Cliff May founded the Foundation for Defense of Democracies one week before 9/11. He'd spent a decade at the New York Times before that, so he knows how a story gets built. In this conversation he traces one lie from Soviet disinformation desks to "Israel pushed us into Iraq" to "Israel is dragging us into Iran" to whatever version is in your feed tonight — and argues it isn't a rumor problem, it's a purchase. An influence operation doesn't need you to say nice things about Qatar. It only needs you talking about somebody else. A week before the towers came down, two people walked into Cliff May's office to tell him the country was asleep. Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan's ambassador to the UN, and Jack Kemp, the former congressman and Housing and Urban Development secretary, had a thesis and nobody to test it. America, they said, was taking a holiday from history — the Wall was down, the Soviet Union was gone, and the country had decided it no longer had enemies. Then they read him a list: Beirut in 1983. New York in 1993. Saudi Arabia in 1996. Two embassies in Africa in 1998. The USS Cole in 2000. "Is anybody looking at these and trying to connect the dots?" He took the assignment. Nine days later he had an answer he hadn't gone looking for, and the rest of his career — he quit the New York Times and built the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. This conversation is about what he's watched since. Not only the conspiracy theories that trail every American war — the Jews were warned about 9/11, Israel pushed America into Iraq, Israel is dragging America toward Iran — but the habit underneath them: a West that keeps betting its adversaries will eventually come around. Iran in 1979 and China after the WTO already ran that experiment and already returned the result. And then the part that costs money. May's argument is that the deflection is bought, not merely believed — and that an influence operation doesn't have to purchase silence about itself, only a different subject. He describes the offer made to junior people around Washington, the reach of that money into American K-12 classrooms, and why "don't talk about us, talk about the Jews" is the cheapest line item on the menu. In this episode: • Kirkpatrick, Kemp, and the memo that became FDD — written the week before 9/11 • Why he says the 1979 revolution in Iran was Islamic, not Iranian, and how al-Qaeda grew out of it • Misinformation versus disinformation, and why a platform now does for free what the KGB needed a service to do • Mearsheimer and Walt went looking for foreign influence over US policy — and walked past the largest source of it • What hundreds of billions of dollars actually buys in Washington • The sixth-grade teacher who flew first class to Doha, and the curriculum she brought home • Carlos the Jackal's prison book, and the coalition it argued for • 1979: the Iranian communists who joined the revolution and were jailed and executed by the state they helped build • Twelver Shiism, the Mahdi, and what "reconcile competing interests" means when the interest is death to America • Why letting China into the WTO was, in his words, a noble experiment that already returned its result • The cognitive war Israel is winning on the ground and losing on the screen • Yahya Sinwar: "I don't want a villa. I don't want a Mercedes." • Why he thinks the K-12 finding is more disturbing than the campus one Guest: Clifford D. May is the founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the host of the Foreign Podicy podcast. He spent a decade at the New York Times as a city reporter, a foreign correspondent in Africa, a Washington correspondent and an editor of the Sunday magazine. His essay "Know Thine Enemy" was published in April 2026. More at https://www.fdd.org Mentioned in this episode: • Martin Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand — https://iupress.org/9780253045041/israel-denial/ (note: link is a placeholder — see production notes) • John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, "The Israel Lobby" • Matt Pottinger, chair of FDD's China Program • FDD, Mapping Qatar's Footprint in the United States — https://www.fdd.org/qatarmoneyusa The Honest Take is HonestReporting's interview show — going past the headlines to find out what's actually true about Israel and about the people covering it. Hosted by Ben Chertoff. 🎧 All episodes: https://podcast.honestreporting.com 🍏 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802 🟢 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1pCnClcM4jiggKP46YZGjG ▶️ Watch on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLuF-lEHTGTw_RrfN9EP6pdWhgjMX7Fg5 If this gave you something to think about, do us a favor — leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. 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Alana Newhouse founded Tablet Magazine in 2009 and has spent the years since arguing that the things holding modern life together have quietly come apart. Her 2021 essay "Everything Is Broken" gave that condition a name — flatness — and her March 2026 essay "Zionism for Everyone" turned the diagnosis outward: Zionism, she argues, is not a slogan or a grievance but a technology for national renewal, and the reason it enrages people has less to do with Jews than with what its success implies about everybody else. Ben Chertoff sits down with her for a conversation that runs from why Gen Z readers demanded a print edition, to the line about envy that lit up Jewish Twitter, to whether the word "Zionism" should be retired, to what she'd tell a 25-year-old journalist trying to build something real in a collapsing media landscape. Her answer to the last one is the same as her answer to the first: figure out what is distinct about you, build a vision around it, and jam on it every single day. Alana Newhouse is the founder and editor-in-chief of Tablet Magazine, which she launched in 2009 and which relaunched in print in 2025 on the strength of demand from its youngest readers. She grew up in Lawrence, New York, and was educated at the Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway, Barnard College, and the Columbia Journalism School. Before Tablet she covered religion and then edited the culture section at The Forward, and edited Nextbook. Her 2021 essay "Everything Is Broken" introduced the idea of flatness and gave rise to what's since been called brokenism; her March 2026 essay "Zionism for Everyone" argues that Zionism is a technology of national renewal available to any people willing to use it. Zionism is a technology, not a slogan. Newhouse's argument is functional, not sentimental: national renewal requires distinctiveness, a vision of the future, and ruthless pragmatism about getting there. Israel has all three, which is why it works — and why watching it work is unbearable for societies that have discarded all three. Antisemitism is a symptom of a sick society, not a freestanding disease.When you ask what someone is actually feeling when they say Jews kill babies, she argues, what you find underneath is envy — and envy points at a lack in the person feeling it. The fight is not really about the Jews. "The target here is the West. We are just in the way." The Jewish state is the first line of defense in an argument about whether any people is entitled to be particular. Retiring the word "Zionism" would be a mistake. Against the argument that the term is a liability, she holds that it is not a marketing choice picked up recently and discardable now — it names something real and old. Flatness is the underlying condition. The 2021 essay's diagnosis — systems optimized until all friction and texture are gone — is the same diagnosis she applies to nations that have sanded off their own distinctiveness. October 7, in her reading, was the shock that broke a lot of people out of it. Diasporism is a costume. The revival of Bundist doikayt on the Jewish left is not, in her view, a Jewish argument at all — it's a Jewish door into an ideology the arguer already wanted. The media collapse is an opening, not an ending. Legacy institutions are losing their monopoly, independents are inheriting the audience, and the two sets of norms are merging. She builds tools for the people who will do the work — "I make pens for creative people." The method scales down to one person. Everything she says about nations she means about individuals: know what is distinct about you, build a vision around it, and show up to it daily. Links 🎧 Listen and subscribe: https://podcast.honestreporting.com 🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1pCnClcM4jiggKP46YZGjG 🌐 https://honestreporting.com Guest: • Tablet Magazine — https://www.tabletmag.com • "Zionism for Everyone," Alana Newhouse, Tablet, March 2026 — https://www.tabletmag.com/feature/zionism-for-everyone • "Everything Is Broken," Alana Newhouse, Tablet, January 14, 2021 — https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/everything-is-broken • Alana Newhouse on 18Forty — https://18forty.org/podcast/alana-newhouse/ • Alana Newhouse on The Unspeakable with Meghan Daum — https://www.theunspeakablepodcast.com/p/alana-newhouse-flatness-broken-systems-tablet-magazine Referenced in this episode: • Daniel Gordis's response to "Zionism for Everyone" — https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/i-think-israelis-would-have-a-hard • Irwin Kula's response, via Shaul Magid — https://shaulmagid.substack.com/p/irwin-kulas-response-to-alana-newhouse • "Is jealousy the root of anti-Zionism?", Jerusalem Post — https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-893186 • Gil Troy on the argument for retiring "Zionism," Jerusalem Post, June 18, 2026 — https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-899675 • Columbia Journalism Review on the American Jewish press after October 7, January 2025 — https://www.cjr.org/world/front-row-seat-polarization-american-jewish-press-october-7-hamas-israel-zionist-coverage.php