The “Making & Breaking History” Edition

The Promised Podcast

Allison Kaplan Sommer, Don Futterman and Noah Efron discuss three topics of incomparable importance and end with an anecdote about something in Israel that made them smile this week.

--“The Revolt of Diaspora Jews”?--

Are we seeing a “revolt” of Jews in England, America and elsewhere in the diaspora against Netanyahu’s planned annexation of territory in the West Bank?

--Rest in Peace?--

It’s like a koan: Is a cemetery that stopped being a cemetery more than a hundred years ago still a cemetery? (Answer: When your backhoe turns up 19th century graves, it is.)

--Defending the Haganah--

For 28 years, the “Haganah” fought underground to protect Jews in Palestine and to end British rule, and ever since, the organization and its fighters have been lionized in Israel as heroes. Has the time come to focus on the darkest of their deeds?

--Let’s Talk About Nazis--

For our most unreasonably generous Patreon supporters, in our extra-special, special extra segment, we pick up the gauntlet-upon-guantlet laid down first by Tablet Magazine when it interviewed proudly racist and anti-semitic scholar Kevin MacDonald, and then by Haaretz opinion editor Esther Solomon, when she responded that “it is not courage, it is self-abasement, for any jewish publication to call up an anti-Semitic white supremacist and be grateful for their time”. Like most Jews, talking about Nazis is our comfort zone, and that’s what we do.

All that and the enchanting music of Dandan!