The Official ISCA Podcast

Sunday, January 18, 2026. In this episode, Judea Pearl discusses his recently published book, "Coexistence and Other Fighting Words."

Dr. Judea Pearl is the Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science and Statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Director of the UCLA Cognitive Systems Laboratory. He is known internationally for his contributions to artificial intelligence, human reasoning, and philosophy of science. Dr. Pearl is the father of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, which he co-founded with his family in 2002. He lectures and writes frequently on Jewish identity, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the history of Zionism, and Israel on campus.

About Coexistence and Other Fighting Words: Selected Writings of Judea Pearl, 2002-2025:

Catalyzed by the kidnapping and murder of his son, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, world-renowned computer scientist and philosopher Dr. Judea Pearl has been a relentless advocate for reason and understanding in writings and talks spanning the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Best known for his groundbreaking work on artificial intelligence, Dr. Pearl turned his power of analysis to an anatomy of the hate that took his son’s life, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the story of Israel, antisemitism, and other related subjects. In Coexistence and Other Fighting Words, Dr. Pearl collects the best of his work, offering an indispensable guide to some of the most pressing issues of our time.

December 03, 2025.

"How Memory of the Holocaust is Used against Jews Today" - Marlene Gallner

Marlene Gallner is a Visiting Research Associate at the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism. She is one of the editors of sans phrase. Zeitschrift für Ideologiekritik, the Vienna-based biannual German-language journal dedicated to social and cultural analyses in the tradition of Frankfurt school critical theory. She has lectured and published widely on antisemitism, postwar German society, and post-Shoah philosophy. 

 "Campus Antisemitism and Critical Theory" - Zahava Feldstein

November 12, 2025.

“The Gentileman’s Agreement: Patterns Between Misogyny and Antisemitism” - Talia Rockman

This talk explores the structural parallels between misogyny and antisemitism, and the related valuation of women and Jews for their symbolic and material service, rather than as human beings. Through secondary data analysis of interviews with Jewish faculty members on Canadian campuses, from the “Faculty Experiences of Antisemitism Research” project, led by Deidre Butler (Carelton University) and Cary Kogan (Ottawa University), I examine this asymmetrical moral contract, termed The Gentileman’s Agreement, and its implications for how Jewish faculty navigate the stigma of being Jewish on Canadian campuses.

Talia Rockman is an MA candidate in Sociology at the University of Ottawa and holds a B.A. (Hon.) in Psychology from the University of Guelph. She has held Research Assistant roles for several projects related to the impact of antisemitism on Canadian campuses, including in the context of EDI, faculty unions, and academic freedom and mental health. She has presented her theoretical framework on the structural parallels between misogyny and antisemitism, and chaired panels, at the 2025 Conference for Contemporary Antisemitism in London and at the 2025 Brock University Antisemitism Symposium. Talia intends to pursue doctoral work where she will continue to research contemporary antisemitism.

“Examining Antisemitism in Antizionist Academic Discourse” - Perla Matusof

This presentation applies a discourse-analytic approach, grounded in the Decoding Antisemitism classification system, to examine how antisemitic rhetoric is embedded and legitimized in academic discourse, particularly in anti-Israel context. An analysis of a corpus of ten texts authored by academics reveals patterns of classic antisemitism, academic camouflage, epistemic pseudo-science, and rhetorical moralization. By mapping these patterns, the study offers empirically grounded tools for distinguishing legitimate criticism from coded antisemitic discourse and sheds light on the institutional mechanisms that normalize such expression within the academy.

Perla Matusof is a doctoral researcher at Brock University, specializing in contemporary antisemitism in academic and institutional contexts. Her research integrates discourse analysis and psycholinguistic tools to differentiate between antisemitic rhetoric and legitimate critique, with particular attention to its impact on Jewish students and academics. Her academic background includes studies at Université Paris 8 and Brock University. She is actively involved in educational and community initiatives addressing Holocaust memory, Jewish identity, and antisemitism in Canada. She is also a research fellow with the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism.

September 3, 2025.

Batsheva Neuer (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) - "Framing Israel: Antisemitism and the Postcolonial Imaginary at the Durban Conference"

This talk examines how postcolonial discourse was repurposed at the 2001 Durban Conference to frame Israel as a racialized colonial oppressor. Through analysis of official records and NGO statements, Neuer explores how anti-colonial language was used to legitimize antisemitic narratives within international institutions, revealing how the postcolonial framework can mask the resurgence of hostility toward Jewish political identity.

Batsheva Neuer is a PhD candidate and fellow at the Avraham Harman Institute at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her dissertation, awarded the 2024 Bernard Lewis Prize, investigates Israel and the global politics of racism in the lead-up to the Durban Conference. She has held fellowships at SICSA and the Cherrick Center and recently published in Israel Studies on the revocation of the “Zionism is Racism” UN resolution.

Tami Peterson (Gratz College) - "Mobilization for Murder: Considering Antisemitism as a Causal Factor of the Deadly 1941 Pogroms"

This talk examines the 1941 pogroms in Eastern Poland and Western Ukraine to explore how antisemitic attitudes—rather than just state ideology—can serve as catalysts for mass violence. By applying theories of symbolic political mobilization, Peterson investigates how threat perceptions among civilians transformed antisemitism into deadly action in the absence of state control.

Tami Peterson is a PhD candidate at Gratz College and currently serves as the inaugural Visiting Student Scholar at NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism. She is also a Research Fellow at the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism. She holds an MRes in Social & Political Theory from Birkbeck, University of London.

August 31, 2025. In this episode, Nathalie Japkowicz, Yfat Barak-Cheney, and Julie Ancis discuss, "Antisemitism in the Age of AI: Trends, Challenges, and Research Frontiers," for the 2025 Datathon and Machine Learning Competition on Antisemitism Detection.

Nathalie Japkowicz is a professor in the Computer Science Department at American University, which she chaired from July 2018 to June 2024. Prior to that, she directed the Laboratory for Research on Machine Learning applied to Defense and Security at the University of Ottawa in Canada. She is a Professor and AI/Machine Learning researcher particularly interested in lifelong machine learning, anomaly detection, hate speech monitoring, machine learning evaluation, and the handling of uncharacteristic data including datasets plagued by class imbalances. Her publications include Evaluating Learning Algorithms: A Classification Perspective at Cambridge University Press (2011), an edited book in the Springer Series on Big Data (2016), and her recent co-authored book entitled Machine Learning Evaluation: Towards Reliable and Responsible AI at Cambridge University Press, which appeared in November 2024.

Yfat Barak-Cheney is the Director of International Affairs and the Executive Director of WJC's Technology and Human Rights Institute. Yfat earned an LL.M in International Legal Studies from New York University where she was a Transitional Justice Scholar and an International Law and Human Rights Fellow. She also holds an LL.M (with honors) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she also received her L.L.B and a B.A in International Relations, receiving an award for outstanding international law student. She previously worked with the Ministry of Justice Unit for Combating Human Trafficking and in several NGO’s. Yfat is a co-founder of ALMA – Association for the Promotion of International Humanitarian Law in Israel. She is a member of the New York Bar and the Israeli Bar Association.

Julie Ancis is a Distinguished Professor and former Interim Chair in the Department of Informatics and Founding Director of the Cyberpsychology Program at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Dr. Ancis’ extensive scholarly publications include 4 books, over 80 journal articles, book chapters, and technical reports, and over 200 professional presentations focused on diversity, multicultural competence, the legal system, and human-computer interaction. Her extensive literature review, "Cyberpsychological Investigations of Social Media and Online Antisemitism: The Scholarly Landscape," has just been published in the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism.

Sunday, April 27, 2025. In this episode, Cary Nelson discusses, "Still on the Cliff's Edge: The Continuing Campus Aftereffects of 10/7."

Cary Nelson is Jubilee Professor Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is an affiliated faculty member at the University of Haifa and the recipient of an honorary doctorate from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is 2024 co-recipient of the Campus Faculty Heroes Award from StandWithUs and Mothers Against Campus Antisemitism. His most recent book is Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Antisemitic Assault on Basic Principles (2024). He is presently completing Zionism Confronts the Abyss: The Impact of the October 7 Massacre in the Diaspora. Cary has most recently published "Mindless: What Happened to Universities?" in The Jewish Quarterly (Issue 259, March 2025).

Monday, March 31, 2025. In this episode, Ilan Troen discusses, "The October 7th Massacre and Its Aftermath: A Personal Account."

Beginning with the personal losses of family who lived on a kibbutz in the Gaza "envelope," Professor Troen will share issues involved in remembrance and recovery in the midst of an ongoing war whose character and terms for conclusion divide Israelis amongst themselves as well as Israelis from many observers well beyond the zones of combat.

Ilan Troen is professor emeritus of both the Stoll Family Chair in Israel Studies (Brandeis, 2017), and the Lopin Chair of Modern History (Ben-Gurion University, 2007. He has served as founding director of the Israel Studies centers at both institutions and dean of Humanities and Social Sciences at Ben-Gurion University. He is past president of the Association for Israel Studies and received in 2023 its "Lifetime Achievement Award." In 2024,  Professor Troen was a recipient of the Bernard Lewis Prize for his book, "Israel/Palestine in World Religions: Whose Promised Land?" 

Sunday, March 30, 2025. In this episode, Ilan Troen discusses, "The Religious Dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict."

"In 1922, the League of Nations endorsed Britain’s Balfour Declaration (1917) that proposed the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. This proposal challenged a reality that had been in force since the Muslim conquest in the seventh century and the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine to Christianity three centuries earlier.  It forced reconsiderations by all three main monotheisms and has shaped the politics of the Arab/Israeli conflict for more than a century.  After considering the adjustments made by Jews and Christians to the revolution in the common Holy Land, this lecture will focus on Islam and challenges it faced in resetting its relationship to Jews from their theologically assigned status as dhimmis (a non-Muslim subject in an Islamic state) to potential equals and to a Jewish state as a legitimate possibility.  This analysis will describe the historic Muslim relationship to both Jews and Christians and assess to what extent change has taken place and how it can be accomplished."

Ilan Troen is professor emeritus of both the Stoll Family Chair in Israel Studies (Brandeis, 2017), and the Lopin Chair of Modern History (Ben-Gurion University, 2007. He has served as founding director of the Israel Studies centers at both institutions and dean of Humanities and Social Sciences at Ben-Gurion University. He is past president of the Association for Israel Studies and received in 2023 its "Lifetime Achievement Award." In 2024, Professor Troen was a recipient of the Bernard Lewis Prize for his book, "Israel/Palestine in World Religions: Whose Promised Land?" 

Wednesday, March 12, 2025. In this episode, PhD student Daniel Freitag discusses, "Christian Antisemitism on Social Media: Russian-Orthodox, Lutheran, and Catholic Narratives on Jews and Israel."

Through a detailed content analysis of Facebook posts and comments (2012-2021) on prominent Roman Catholic, Lutheran World Federation, and Russian Orthodox Church pages, Daniel Freitag examines how these confessional online spaces — encompassing both official media and private commentary — discuss Judaism, Jews, and Israel. His research reveals both anticipated and surprising antisemitic themes.

One of the more surprising findings comes from the social media account of the Russian Orthodox Church. Not only does it revive the conspiracy theory of Jewish Bolshevism as a threat to Russia's Christian identity, but also spreads narratives depicting Israel and the United States — alongside the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople — as secret puppet masters responsible for the independence of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. Meanwhile, in the discourse space of the Lutheran World Federation, some reductive and one-sided interpretations of the Middle East conflict emerge, with post-colonial thought patterns being theologized in ways that are hostile to Israel.

This research contributes to the broader study of theological antisemitism, which grapples with the persistent legacy of Christian anti-Judaism and its influence on contemporary antisemitic discourse. While acknowledging the historical roots of Christian antisemitism, this talk explores how traditional tropes are being reconfigured and disseminated in digital spaces today.

Daniel C. Freitag (Mag. theol.) is a PhD student and research assistant at the Institute for Ethics and Related Social Sciences at the Faculty of Protestant Theology at the University of Münster (Germany). He studied Protestant Theology in Münster, Jerusalem, and Heidelberg. He was also a member of the Graduate School of the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” at the University of Münster and worked for the interdisciplinary “Centre for Religion and Modernity”. Currently, he is a visiting affiliate of IU’s Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism. His dissertation project explores contemporary manifestations of Christian antisemitism on the social media platform Facebook. For more information and contact details, please click here.

Sunday, March 09, 2025. In this episode, Yaron Gamburg discusses, "Back to the Origins of Antisemitism: Attitudes Towards Jews and Israel in Contemporary Russia."

Yaron Gamburg is a Research Associate at the Institute for National Security Studies of Tel Aviv University and a PhD student at the Institute of Geopolitics at Paris 8 University. His academic research focuses on antisemitism and the discourse of the Holocaust in post-Soviet Russia. During his diplomatic service, he served at the embassies of Israel in Moscow, Paris, Washington D.C., and as Deputy Chief of Mission to the OECD, Council of Europe, and UNESCO. Born and raised in Zhytomyr, Ukraine, he immigrated to Israel in 1990. He completed his BA in Economics and MA in Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Sunday, February 16, 2025. In this episode, Norman JW Goda discusses "The Genocide Libel: How the World Has Charged Israel With the Crime of Crimes, 1982-2024."

Norman J.W. Goda specializes in the history of the Holocaust, war crimes trials, and twentieth century diplomacy. He teaches courses on the Holocaust and Nazi Germany from historical and interdisciplinary perspectives. His single authored books include Tales from Spandau: Nazi Criminals and the Cold War (2007) and The Holocaust: Europe, the World, and the Jews (2nd ed 2022). He has also co-authored, with Richard Breitman, US Intelligence and the Nazis (2005) and Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, US Intelligence and the Cold War (2010). He has edited two volumes of international essays titled Jewish Histories of the Holocaust: New Transnational Perspectives (2014) and Rethinking Holocaust Justice: Essays Across Disciplines (2018). He served a lead editor on To the Gates of Jerusalem: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1945-1947 (2014), which concerns Holocaust refugees and the question of Palestine in those years, and Envoy to the Promised Land: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1948-1951 (2017) which concerns McDonald’s work as the first US ambassador to Israel and the initial years of the new state. Goda has published articles in various journals including the Journal of Modern History, The International History Review, The Journal of Contemporary History, and Antisemitism Studies, and his work has been the subject of stories by the The New York Times, the Associated Press, US News and World Report, and other major news outlets. Goda has served as a consultant to the US and German governments, as well as for various radio, television, and film documentaries in the US, Europe, Australia, and Israel. He is currently working on a monograph concerning the 1987 Trial of Klaus Barbie in Lyon for crimes against humanity, and, with Ed Kissi of the University of South Florida, an edited volume on the universalization of the Holocaust.

December 8, 2024. In this episode, Yfat Barak-Cheney, Dr. Matthias Becker, and Tal-Or Cohen, discuss "Trends, Research Gaps, and Future Directions in the Study of Online Antisemitism."

Yfat Barak Cheney is the Director of International Affairs and the Executive Director of WJC's Technology and Human Rights Institute. Yfat earned an LL.M in International Legal Studies from New York University where she was a Transitional Justice Scholar and an International Law and Human Rights Fellow. She also holds an LL.M (with honors) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she also received her L.L.B and a B.A in International Relations, receiving an award for outstanding international law student. She previously worked with the Ministry of Justice Unit for Combating Human Trafficking and in several NGO’s. Yfat is a co-founder of ALMA – Association for the Promotion of International Humanitarian Law in Israel. She is a member of the New York Bar and the Israeli Bar Association. 

Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor, Adv., is the founder and Executive Director of CyberWell – the first ever open database dedicated to fighting online antisemitism. Tal-Or is an expert in digital social platforms, hate speech and extremism. She focuses on online antisemitism and social media hate speech policies, alongside hate crime reporting and legislation. Mrs. Cohen Montemayor has led a variety of open-source intelligence research projects, providing analysis and consulting services to the Institute of National Security Studies, the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and the Jewish Agency. A Reichman University (IDC Herzliya) magna cum laude graduate of Government and Law and a member of the Israel Bar Association, prior to launching CyberWell, Tal-Or worked in the business and web intelligence space at a boutique consulting firm in Tel Aviv.

Dr. Matthias J. Becker is an expert in cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis, and social media studies, with a particular focus on the study of hate speech within the political mainstream. His doctoral dissertation, Antisemitism in Reader Comments, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2021, analyzes antisemitic stereotypes and historical analogies in British and German online discourse related to the Middle East conflict. Since 2020, he has been leading the international, transdisciplinary research project Decoding Antisemitism. In this context, he serves as co-editor of a comprehensive 40-chapter Lexicon that offers systematic guidance for deconstructing both explicit and implicit antisemitism on social media.

Sunday, November 24, 2024. In this episode, Matthias Küntzel discusses "October 7th and the Shoah."

Sunday, November 17, 2024. In this episode, Dr. Aaron Hagler discusses "Who is 'The Jew' in Early and Later Islamic Texts?"

Dr. Aaron (Ari) Hagler has a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania (2011) and an MA in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2005). He is the author of two books: Owning Disaster (Routledge, 2024) and The Echoes of Fitna (Brill, 2022). Previously, he has served as Associate Professor of History at Troy University. Currently, he is a history educator at Geffen Academy at UCLA.

Wednesday, October 30, 2024. In this episode, Adam Kirsch discusses "The Ideology of Settler Colonialism and the Response to Oct. 7."

Adam Kirsch is the author of numerous books of poetry and criticism, including The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature. His latest, just recently published, is On Settler Colonialsm: Ideology, Violence, and Justice. The recipient of a 2016 Guggenheim award, he is an editor at the Wall Street Journal’s Review section and frequently writes for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Tablet, and other publications.

Sunday, October 27, 2024. In this episode, Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove discusses "For Such a Time as This: Being Jewish After October 7."

Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, PhD, a leading voice of American Jewry, has been the rabbi of New York’s Park Avenue Synagogue since 2008. He was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1999 and earned his PhD at the University of Chicago Divinity School. The author of the recently published book, For Such a Time as This: On Being Jewish Today, Rabbi Cosgrove is the editor of Jewish Theology in Our Time: A New Generation Explores the Foundations and Future of Jewish Belief. His essays and op-eds appear frequently in a variety of national Jewish journals and periodicals.

Among his many professional activities, Rabbi Cosgrove sits on the Chancellor's Cabinet of JTS, where he is adjunct faculty, and is on the Editorial Board of Conservative Judaism. A member of the Executive Committee of the Rabbinical Assembly, he is also an officer of the New York Board of Rabbis and a member of the Board of UJA-Federation of New York. He serves as Rabbinical Advisor on Interfaith Affairs for the ADL and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Rabbi Cosgrove was honored to represent the Jewish community at the National September 11 Memorial Museum during the visit of Pope Francis to New York in September 2015.

Monday, October 21, 2024. In this episode, Pavel Brunssen and Andrei Markovits discuss "From Chants to Change: German Soccer's Unique Response to Antisemitism Post-October 7."

Pavel Brunssen is a Research Associate and Alfred Landecker Lecturer at the Research Center on Antigypsyism at Heidelberg University. Brunssen’s research interests include antisemitism, antigypsyism, memory cultures, European soccer, and fan cultures. He has published widely on these topics, including an edited volume entitled "Football and Discrimination: Antisemitism and Beyond." Brunssen holds a PhD in German Studies from the University of Michigan. His award-winning dissertation forms the basis of his forthcoming book, The Making of "Jew Clubs": Performing Jewishness and Antisemitism in European Football and Fan Cultures (Indiana University Press).

Andrei S. Markovits is the Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies Emeritus and an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He just concluded a fifty-year university teaching career at leading institutions in the United States, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Israel. His work on social democracy, trade unions, new social movements, antisemitism and anti-Americanism in Europe; as well as on comparative sports cultures and human-animal relations appeared in 18 languages in many books, articles and reviews. His latest work is a memoir entitled The Passport as Home: Comfort in Rootlessness (Central European University Press, 2021).

Sunday, October 13, 2024. In this episode, Günther Jikeli and Katharina Soemer discuss "Manual Annotation: Why and How?"

What is machine learning? How is machine learning helpful when observing and combatting antisemitism online? What challenges exist when using machine learning for this purpose? Why is manual annotation a necessary step for automated content detection? How do you manually annotate tweets?

Günther Jikeli holds the Erna B. Rosenfeld Professorship at the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism in the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University. He has published widely on antisemitism online and offline.

Katharina Soemer holds an MA in Sociology and Social Research from the University of Bremen, Germany. She currently manages ISCA’s Social Media & Hate Research Lab at Indiana University. Her published work focuses on online antisemitism and methods of research in that field.

Sunday, October 6, 2024. In this episode, Günther Jikeli and Katharina Soemer discuss "Online Antisemitism Before and After October 7” as part of our 2024 Datathon & Machine Learning Competition.

Günther Jikeli holds the Erna B. Rosenfeld Professorship at the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism in the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University. He has published widely on antisemitism online and offline.

Katharina Soemer holds an MA in Sociology and Social Research from the University of Bremen, Germany. She currently manages ISCA’s Social Media & Hate Research Lab at Indiana University. Her published work focuses on online antisemitism and methods of research in that field.

Sunday, September 22, 2024. In this episode, Mara Lee Grayson discusses "The Contemporary Racialization of the Jew and Its Impact on Campus Antisemitism.”

Mara Lee Grayson is the author or editor of five books, including Antisemitism and the White Supremacist Imaginary: Conflations and Contradictions in Composition and Rhetoric (Peter Lang, 2023) and Challenging Antisemitism: Lessons from Literacy Classrooms (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023, co-edited with Judith Chriqui Benchimol). Grayson is founder and chair of the Jewish Caucus of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and chair of the Jewish Caucus of the National Council of Teachers of English. She holds a PhD in English Education from Columbia University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the City College of New York. Previously a tenured faculty member in the California State University system, Grayson now works as the Director of Content Development for the Campus Climate Initiative at Hillel International.

Sunday, September 15, 2024. In this episode, Cary Nelson discusses "The Future of Campus Antisemitism after October 7."

Cary Nelson is Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts & Sciences and Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. He is the author or editor of 36 books, including six about antisemitism. Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Antisemitic Assault on Basic Principles was published this April. He was president of the national AAUP from 2006-2012.

Sunday, September 8, 2024. In this episode, Dave Rich discusses "Antisemitism in the UK since the October 7 Attack."

Dave Rich, one of Great Britain’s leading experts on antisemitism, is the author of The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel, and Antisemitism (2018) and Everyday Hate: How Antisemitism Is Built into our World and How You Can Change It (Updated Edition, 2024). He has worked for many years at the Community Security Trust, a London-based Jewish agency that aims to safeguard the British Jewish community.

Sunday, May 12, 2024. In this episode, Cary Nelson discusses "The Perilous Campus Scene: Encampment versus Enlightenment."

Cary Nelson is Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts & Sciences and Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. He is the author or editor of 36 books, including six about antisemitism. Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Antisemitic Assault on Basic Principles was published this April. He was president of the national AAUP from 2006-2012.

Sunday, April 7, 2024. In this episode, Ilan Troen discusses "Religious Dimensions of the Israeli/Palestinian Dispute."

Sunday, April 14, 2024. In this episode, Michal Cotler-Wunsh discusses "The Hamas Massacre of October 7 and Responses to It: A Chronology of Hate."

Michal Cotler-Wunsh is a prominent public speaker, researcher, and independent policy and strategy advisor on intersecting issues of antisemitism, law, human rights, and Zionism. Informed by political, professional, and academic experience, Michal explores topics surrounding mutated and mainstreamed rising antisemitism; international law, human rights, and the harm of their weaponization; the threat of disinformation and conspiracy theories to democracies; Zionism as a millennia-old identity integral to the construction of a progressive national liberation movement; the relationship between Israel and global Jewry in collaborative nation-building; and the role of “Olim” as a “live bridge” to build resiliency, address growing internal gaps, and connect Israel to global communities, cultures, and countries. Michal’s focus on process, transparency, and accountability, continues to inform and guide her in the role of Israel’s Special Envoy for Combatting Antisemitism, engaging local and global partners around the shared responsibility to comprehensively identify and address the rise and mainstreaming of ever-mutating antisemitic hate.

Michal was a Member of Israel’s 23rd Knesset. Drawing on areas of expertise and commitments, she served as Chair of the Special Committee on Drug and Alcohol Use, Chair of the Subcommittee on Israel-Diaspora Relations, and as active member of several prestigious committees including the Foreign Affairs and Security Committee, Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, and the Children’s Rights, Women’s Status, and Immigration and Integration Committees. Michal served as the first Knesset Liaison to the Issue of the International Criminal Court (ICC), was co-chair of the Canada-Israel Interparliamentary Friendship Group, was a member of several interparliamentary working groups, and Chair of the Caucus for Ethiopians in Israel. She initiated and led multiple Knesset hearings on the topic of online antisemitism, engaging social media platforms, civil society organizations, and technology experts. Recognizing the inherent connection between online hate and real-world violence, Michal co-founded the Interparliamentary Task Force to Combat Online Antisemitism, together with multi-partisan elected officials from Canada, Australia, the US, and the UK. She remains at the forefront of this and other initiatives, committed to identifying, exposing, and combatting the mutation and permeation of antisemitism in the online and real-world space.

Equipped with extensive experience, academic expertise and multi-lingual communication skills, Michal is regularly interviewed and featured as a speaker at diverse events in Israel and abroad. She is a prolific author published on multiple platforms, utilizing her hybrid identity and competencies to transcend and bridge geographic, cultural, religious, and linguistic divides. Michal serves as a trustee in The Rabbi Sacks Legacy and is a member of several not-for-profit boards, focused on governance and strategy. She is a legal advisor to the Goldin family, dedicated to the return of deceased Israeli soldiers Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul, and Israeli civilians Avera Mengistu and Hisham a-Sayed, held captive for 9 years in standing violation of international law and human rights. In this, as in other engagements, Michal is committed to underscoring shared responsibility for equal and consistent application of international law and human rights, critical to the sustainability of the infrastructure created to uphold, promote, and protect foundational principles.

Sunday, March 17, 2024. In this episode, Elhanan Yakira discusses "Spinoza, Arendt, and Contemporary Israel Bashing."

Elhanan Yakira is a professor emeritus of philosophy at the Hebrew University. His main fields of interest are early modern rationalism and anti-Israelism, with a special emphasis on Jewish and Israeli anti-Israelism. He has published a number of articles on these subjects, as well as a book: Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust. Three Essays on Denial, Forgetting, and the Delegitimation of Israel, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Sunday, February 18, 2024. In this episode, Françoise Ouzan discusses "Being a GI Jew in World War II: Coping with Hostile Attitudes in the American Military."

Dr. Françoise S. Ouzan is a Senior Research Associate at the Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center of Tel Aviv University. She is the author or editor of 11 books, including, most recently, How Young Holocaust Survivors Rebuilt Their Lives (2018) and True to My God and Country: How Jewish Americans Fought in World War II (2024), both published by Indiana University Press, Studies in Antisemitism.

Music: "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) 
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

Sunday, January 21, 2024. In this episode, Jacob Kovalio discusses "The Global Phenomenon of Conspiratorial Antisemitism."

Jacob Kovalio is a researcher in Japanese, Chinese, Asian, and global history, nationalism, antisemitism, and Jihadism. Through the Transnistria compulsory work camp, Romania. and Israel, he reached Canada in 1986. He holds BA degrees in History and Development Economics from the University of Tel-Aviv and MA in Chinese History and a PhD in Japanese History, both from the University of Pittsburgh. He has taught and given lectures at the University of Tel-Aviv, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the University of Victoria [Canada], and in Japan, China, and Korea. Since 1987, he has been teaching Japanese/Chinese/Asian History at Carleton University in Ottawa. In 2021 the Government of Japan awarded him the Order of the Rising Sun Gold Rays with Rosette for his contributions to Japanese scholarship and Canadian-Japanese relations. Among his publications are The Russian Protocols of Zion in Japan: Yudayaka/’Jewish Peril’ Propaganda and Debates in the 1920s,” (2009), Japan in Focus (1994), ed. “Arnold J. Toynbee and Japan,” (in Japan in Focus) “Antisemitism and racism in Japan” online democracy.” Dr. Kovalio has spent six years in Japan; he is fluent in Japanese, Hebrew, Romanian, Russian, and other languages.

Sunday, January 14, 2024. In this episode, Richard Landes discusses "Jewish Anti-Zionism and Masochistic Messianism."

Richard Landes was trained as a medievalist at Princeton University (MA 1979, PhD 1984). His work focused on apocalyptic beliefs and millennial movements (Heaven on Earth, 2011), initially around the year 1000 (Peace of God, 1986; Relics, Apocalypse and the Deceits of History, 1996; Apocalyptic Year 1000, 2003). He developed the concept of “demotic religiosity,” an orientation that prizes 1) equality before the law, 2) dignity of manual labor, 3) access to sacred texts for all believers, and 4) moral integrity over social honor. But he increasingly focused on contemporary movements (Paranoid Apocalypse,2006), especially Global Jihad. He made a series of documentaries in 2005/6 titled “According to Palestinian Sources…,” which document the extensive staging of footage (Pallywood), the staging of the Al Durah footage (Making of an Icon), and the impact of that fake broadcast as “news” by Western news media (Icon of Hatred). In 2015, he retired from Boston University where he was a Professor in the History Department and lives with his wife in Jerusalem. He is currently completing a book titled They’re so Smart cause We’re so Stupid: A Medievalist’s Guide to the 21st When he completes this book, he plans to return to his medieval work (While God Tarried: Disappointed Millennialism from Jesus to the Peace of God, 33-1033).

Sunday, December 10, 2023. In this episode, Corinne Blackmer discusses "Queer Anti-Zionism: Antisemitism in LGBTQ Communities Then and Now."

Corinne Blackmer is professor of Judaic Studies and English and director of Judaic Studies at Southern Connecticut State University.  She has published a large array of articles on diverse subjects, from pinkwashing, contemporary Israeli literature, and the Hebrew Bible, to Jewish women’s modernism, Jewish ethics, and Jewish women’s graphic novels.  She has co-edited with Andrew Pessin a volume on antisemitism, Poisoning the Wells: Antisemitism in Contemporary America, and recently authored (Wayne University Press), Queering Anti-Zionism: Academic Freedom, LGBTQ Intellectuals, and Israel/Palestine Campus Activism, which was a finalist in the National Jewish Books Award.  She lives with her wife and family in New Haven Connecticut.

Sunday, December 3, 2023. In this episode, Dave Rich discusses "Everyday Hate: How Antisemitism is Built into our World, and How We Can Change it."

Dr. Dave Rich is one of the United Kingdom’s leading experts on antisemitism. He has worked for almost thirty years for the Community Security Trust, a Jewish charity that protects the UK Jewish community and writes about antisemitism and extremism for a range of national and international media. Dave is a research fellow at the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism. Everyday Hate is Dave’s second book, following The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel, and Antisemitism.

Sunday, November 12, 2023. In this episode, Izabella Tabarovsky discusses "Soviet Antizionism and Contemporary Left Antisemitism."

Izabella Tabarovsky is a Senior Advisor at the Kennan Institute (Wilson Center), a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism & Policy (ISGAP), a founding fellow of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (LCSCA), and a contributing writer at Tablet. Her research and writing focus on Soviet antizionism and contemporary left antisemitism, Soviet Jewry, Holocaust in the USSR, and Stalin's repressions. Her paper, “Demonization Blueprints: Soviet Conspiracist Antizionism in Contemporary Left-Wing Discourse,” appeared in the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism in the summer of 2022. Her book on late-Soviet antizionist campaigns will be published by Routledge as part of an LCSCA series on contemporary antisemitism.

Monday, November 6, 2023. In this episode, Ellie Cohanim discusses "Is Antisemitism an Integral Part of the Islamic Republic of Iran's DNA?"

Ellie Cohanim is a Senior Fellow with Independent Women's Forum (IWF), is host of "Global Perspectives with Ellie Cohanim" for Jewish News Syndicate (JNS),and is a National Security Contributor to Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN). Ellie Cohanim served as U.S. Deputy Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism at the U.S. Department of State by appointment of the President of the United States and the US Secretary of State. She is an expert on Iran, Israel, the Middle East, the Abraham Accords, and US foreign policy. Ms. Cohanim was the State Department’s first Iranian-born Envoy and led diplomatic initiatives which resulted in forging groundbreaking partnerships in the Arab world to combat antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and Islamophobia. Ms. Cohanim also persuaded the first-ever Muslim faith group to adopt the IHRA working definition of antisemitism, all as part of the Abraham Accords efforts. As Deputy Envoy, Ms. Cohanim was the lead official for the State Department in creating and implementing policy on countering antisemitism in the Near East and Western Hemisphere regions. She also worked closely with Jewish communities in Venezuela, Chile, Argentina, and Colombia in confronting local issues of antisemitism.

Sunday, October 29, 2023. In this episode, Yehudit Barsky discusses "Islamist Antisemitism in the United States: Recent Developments."

Yehudit Barsky is a Middle East specialist who researches the nexus between Islamist movements and antisemitism. Her research interests encompass radicalization methodologies in antisemitic extremist movements, and the intersection between recruitment systems of jihadist, white supremacist, and other extremist movements. She is a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy and is the author of Islamist Antisemitism in the United States (INSS, 2023) and Terrorist Incidents and Attacks Against Jews and Israelis in the US: 1969-2016 (CSS, 2016).

Sunday, October 22, 2023. In this episode, Christopher Leighton discusses "Contending with Christian Supersessionism: When Best Intentions Falter."

Christopher Leighton is the Founding Director of the Institute for Islamic, Christian, Jewish Studies (ICJS) in Baltimore, Maryland. In addition to his thirty-three years of inter-religious leadership at the ICJS, he has served as an Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins University and St. Mary’s Seminary and University. He has published numerous articles and edited Bill Moyer’s resource guide Talking about Genesis (Doubleday 1996) as well as Irreconcilable Differences (Routledge 2001). His latest work, A Sacred Argument: Dispatches from the Christian, Jewish, Muslim Encounter, is forthcoming. He has lectured and conducted seminars in cities around the country. He is a graduate of the Princeton Theological Seminary (M.Div.) and is an ordained Presbyterian minister. He has studied extensively at the Baltimore Hebrew University, Yad Vashem, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Columbia University-Teachers College, where he earned his doctorate in Philosophy and Education. Since his retirement, Chris lives with his wife Betsy, and their two dogs in New Harbor, Maine.

Sunday, October 15, 2023. In this episode, John Pawlikowski discusses "Removing the Shadow on the Cross: Rooting Out Antisemitism from Christian Teaching."

John is a member of the Order of Friar Servants of Mary (Servites) and was ordained at the University of St. Mary of the Lake. One of the founding faculty members of the Catholic Theological Union (CTU), he served on the faculty from 1968 until his retirement in 2017. For nearly fifty years, John has been an active participant in the Christian-Jewish Dialogue as well as the wider interreligious dialogue. He served for six years as President of the International Council of Christians and Jews and has served several terms on the board of the Parliament of the World’s Religions.  He was deeply involved in the development of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., having served four terms on its board by presidential appointment. On the social ethics front John has worked with the Office of Justice & Peace at the National Conference of Catholic Bishops on its Energy Statement and its Pastoral Letter of the Economy.  He has been a participant in three United Nations international conferences on world peace, on alternative energy, and on human trafficking.  He was a member of the U.S. governmental team that negotiated the termination of the United Nations Trusteeship for Micronesia. In 2014 the Catholic Theological Society of America conferred on John its annual John Courtney Murray Award. He was awarded fellowships by Cambridge University (UK), The Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium), and the Graduate Theological Union (Berkeley, CA) and awarded Honorary Doctorates by Hebrew Union College, Dominican University, and the Catholic University of Australia.

Sunday, September 10, 2023. In this episode, David Bernstein discusses "Does Radical Social Justice Ideology Fuel Antisemitism?" 

The author of Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews, David Bernstein is the founder of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values (JILV), which opposes illiberal ideologies and supports liberal values in and out of the Jewish community. He is also a co-founder of the Institute for Liberal Values, a consortium of like-minded organizations supporting liberal principles. He is past President and CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and the former executive director of the David Project. He spent 13 years at the American Jewish Committee in senior roles. David is a prolific speaker, podcaster, and writer, having written hundreds of opinion pieces in the Jewish and general press.

Sunday, September 3, 2023. In this episode, Dan Michman discusses "'Antisemitism': The Origins, Structure, and Contested Reception of the Term." 

Dan Michman is Professor (Emeritus) of Modern Jewish History and the former Chair of the Arnold and Leona Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research at Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan; he is also Head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research and Incumbent of the John Najmann Chair in Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. His publications, available in twelve languages, cover a broad range of topics regarding the Shoah, its historiography and representations,  its impact on Israel, world Jewry, and the Western world, and on modern Jewish history and antisemitism. Prof. Michman’s recently (co)-authored and (co)-edited books include Pinkas: Geschiedenis van de joodse gemeenschap in Nederland (A History of the Jewish Community in the Netherlands, (1999); Post-Zionism and the Holocaust: The Role of the Holocaust in the Public Debate on Post-Zionism in Israel (I: 1993–1996, II: 1997–1998) (1997, 2007); Holocaust Historiography: A Jewish Perspective: Conceptualizations, Terminology, Approaches and Fundamental Issues (2003); Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations: Belgium (2005); De la mémoire de la Shoah dans le monde juif (2008); Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements (2008); The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos During the Holocaust (2011); Adolf Hitler, the Decision-Making Process Leading to the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin al-Hussayni: The Current State of Research (2017); Getting it Right, Getting it Wrong: Recent Holocaust Scholarship in Light of the Work of Raul Hilberg (2017); Les Juifs d'Afrique du Nord face à l’Allemagne nazie (2018); Emotions, Imaginations, Perceptions, Egos, Characteristics: Egodocuments in Dutch Jewish History (2021); Holocaust Historiography between 1990 to 2021 in Context(s): New Insights, Perceptions, Understandings and Avenues – An Overview and Analysis (2022); Jewish Solidarity : The Ideal and the Reality in the Turmoil of the Shoah (2022).

Sunday, May 7, 2023. In this episode, Magda Teter discusses "Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism."

Magda Teter, Professor of History and the Shvidler Chair of Judaic Studies, is a scholar of early modern history, specializing in Jewish history, Jewish-Christian relations, cultural, legal, and social history, as well as the history of transmission of historical knowledge in the premodern and modern periods. Teter is a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research and the author of Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland (Cambridge, 2005), Sinners on Trial (Harvard, 2011), Blood Libel: On the Trail of An Antisemitic Myth (Harvard, 2020), and two edited volumes, as well as numerous articles in English, Hebrew, Italian, and Polish. Teter’s work has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, YIVO Institute, and the Yad Ha-Nadiv Foundation (Israel), among others. She has been a Harry Starr Fellow in Jewish Studies at Harvard University, an Emeline Bigelow Conland Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies also at Harvard University, and the Mellon Foundation fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. In 2012-2016, she served as the co-editor of the AJS Review and in 2015-2017 as the Vice-President for Publications of the Association for Jewish Studies. And in 2020-2021, Teter is the NEH Senior Scholar at the Center for Jewish History.  Music:

Sunday, April 30, 2023. In this episode, Ruth Cohen-Dar explores the topic "What is Israel's Role in the Fight Against Antisemitism?"

Ruth Cohen-Dar was born in the Negev to a mother who was a third generation Jerusalemite and a father of Greek descent. They were a family of pioneers, who established a village near Ashkelon. She served in the Israeli Army for three years as an officer, after a year of volunteering as a community worker in a rural community in the Negev. Cohen-Dar holds a B.A. and M.A. in Political Science from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She has worked at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs since 1986 and was posted abroad on three occasions, the last time as Deputy Ambassador in Poland. Since 2020 she has served as the Director of The Department for Combating Antisemitism and Holocaust Remembrance, as well as the Co-Chair of Israel's delegation to the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance). 

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Sunday, April 23, 2023. In this episode, Meron Medzini discusses "Anti-Semitism and Philo-Semitism — Their Role in the Birth of Israel."

Professor (Emeritus) Meron Medzini was born in Jerusalem in 1932. After high school, he served as an infantry officer in the Israeli army and then traveled to the United States to obtain university degrees. He holds a BA from City College of New York (1957), MA from Georgetown University (1960), and Ph.D. from Harvard (1964) in Asian Studies. Between 1962 and 1978, he served as director of the Israel Government Press Office and in that capacity was spokesman for Prime Ministers Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, and Yitzhak Rabin. He has pursued an academic career, teaching for four decades at the Hebrew University School for Overseas Students and in the Department of Asian Studies. He also taught at Tel Aviv University and lectured in various universities abroad. He is the author of nine books. His Golda – A Political Biography (De Gruyter Verlag, Berlin, 2016) won the Israel Prime Minister's Prize. His book on Japan and the Jews during the Holocaust was translated to English and Japanese. He also authored some 100 articles in academic publications in Israel and abroad. In 2016, the Japanese Government awarded him the Order of the Rising Sun for promoting Israel-Japan Cultural relations. He resides in Jerusalem.

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Sunday, April 16, 2023. In this episode, Jarrod Tanny discusses "Antisemitism in the Academy and the Fate of Jewish Studies: An Insider's View."

Jarrod Tanny is Associate Professor of History and the Charles and Hannah Block Distinguished Scholar in Jewish History at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Between 2008 and 2010 he was the Schusterman post-Doctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at Ohio University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, focusing on Russian and Jewish history. Originally from Montreal, Canada, he completed an M.A. at the University of Toronto and a B.A. at McGill University. His monograph, City of Rogues and Schnorrers (Indiana University Press, 2011), examines how the city of Odessa was mythologized as a Jewish city of sin, celebrated and vilified for its Jewish gangsters, pimps, bawdy musicians, and comedians.  In 2012, Dr. Tanny published an essay called “Between the Borscht Belt and the Bible Belt: Crafting Southern Jewishness through Chutzpah and Humor,” in the journal Southern Jewish History. Most recently, he published “Curb Your Orgasm: Larry David and the Schlimazel as Sexual Deviant,” in Jewish Film & New Media: An International Journal. He is currently working on a larger study on Jewish humor in post-World War II America and its place within the larger context of the European Jewish past. Tanny just completed writing a book tentatively titled The Babylonian Seinfeld, a satiric take on the hit TV series, in which the great rabbis of the Talmudic era sit gathered in the Yeshiva to discuss and debate the issues raised in each Seinfeld episode. He has also published numerous opeds on antisemitism in The Forward, Tablet Magazine, The Times of Israel, The Jewish Journal, and The Jewish Review of Books. Tanny’s growing concern over the rise of antisemitism on college campuses and the seeming indifference of faculty led him to establish the Jewish Studies Zionist Network, an association for Jewish Studies scholars who are pushing back against the demonization of Israel and its supporters in the academy. 

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Tuesday, April 4, 2023. In this episode, Walter Russell Mead discusses the subject "The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People."

Walter Russell Mead is the Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at Hudson Institute, the Global View Columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College in New York. He is also a member of Aspen Institute Italy and board member of Aspenia. Before joining Hudson, Mr. Mead was a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations as the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy. He has authored numerous books, including the widely recognized Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004). Mr. Mead’s latest book is entitled The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Future of the Jewish People.

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Sunday, March 26, 2023. In this episode, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin discusses "Antisemitism and the Politics of Ethnic Studies of California's K-12 and Higher Education Classrooms."

Tammi Rossman-Benjamin is co-founder and director of AMCHA Initiative, a non-profit organization that investigates, documents, and combats antisemitism at institutions of higher education in America. She has written numerous articles about academic anti-Zionism and antisemitism and has lectured widely on these developments and the growing threat they pose to the safety of Jewish students on university campuses. She was a faculty member in Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz from 1996-2016.

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Sunday, March 5, 2023. In this episode, Linda Maizels discusses "The American Political Left's Response to Antisemitism."

Linda Maizels is an independent scholar who earned her PhD from the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Her article on campus antisemitism appeared in the book Contending with Antisemitism in a Rapidly Changing Political Climate, edited by Alvin H. Rosenfeld and published by Indiana University Press in November 2021. Her most recent book, What is Antisemitism? A Contemporary Introduction, was published by Routledge in September 2022. 

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