The Honest Take

What Really Happened After October 7: Inside Israel's War Room, and the Press That Got It Wrong | With Elliot Kaufman

"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, whe

A Is for Apple, M Is for Martyr: How Schoolbooks Teach The Next Generation to Hate Israel | With Marcus Sheff

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 teac

Who Are We, and What Do We Owe? A Chagim Special on Jewish Pride and Memory | With Ben M. Freeman, Yossi Klein Halevi & More

"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 wher

A Verdict Waiting for a Trial: Where 'Israel Is Committing Genocide' Came From, Decades Before Gaza | With Hillel Neuer

"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

"Israel Probably Did 9/11": How a Settled Conspiracy Came Back | With James B. Meigs & Michael Shermer

"'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 cou

BONUS: They Counted Terrorists as Journalists — Then Quietly Removed Them | Erin Molan, Salo Aizenberg, Leslie Kajomovitz, Gabriel Epstein

"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

Someone Should Give Soros a Shower: How Antisemitism Learned to Hide From the Keyword Filters | With Dr. Matthias Becker

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

The Soviet Factory That Built Modern Anti-Zionism | With Izabella Tabarovsky

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

BONUS: ⁠The Storming of Al-Aqsa: The 1928 Lie, the Hebron Massacre, and When the Reporting Got It Right | With Yardena Schwartz

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 we

A Failure of Imagination: Why the West Keeps Betting its Enemies will Come Around| With Cliff May

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 curr

The Jews Are Not the Target. The West Is. Can Zionism Save It? | With Alana Newhouse

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

What "Globalize the Intifada" Actually Means, From Someone Who Lived It | With Arnold Roth

Twenty-five years ago, sixteen people were murdered at the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem. One was Arnold Roth's fifteen-year-old daughter, Malki. The woman who planned it

Why Is the Jew the Enemy? How Arab Antisemitism Is Built — And How It Breaks | With Rawan Osman

She ran out of a Strasbourg grocery store so fast she left her purse in the shopping cart. Rawan Osman was in her mid-twenties, newly arrived from Lebanon, and had just s

The Familiar Villain: Gaza, Activist Journalism, and the Unspoken Rules of Reporting on Israel | With Matti Friedman

Matti Friedman spent five years inside the AP's Jerusalem bureau. He explains the staffing anomaly, the peace offer that was ordered killed, and the Hamas censorship AP r

No One Wants a Jewish Protagonist: Inside Publishing's New Blacklist | With Meg Keene

PEN America — the country's oldest and most prestigious free-expression organization — put out a report documenting how Jewish and Israeli writers are being frozen out of

There Is Nowhere Else: Israeli Security, Zionist Pride, and the Doctrine That Broke on October 7 | With Brig. Gen. Amir Avivi

Every American of a certain age remembers exactly where they were on September 11th. For Israelis, that morning was October 7th. Brigadier General Amir Avivi — a thirty-y

Broken Mirror: Internalized Antisemitism, the Non-Jewish Gaze, and Why Jewish Pride is the Answer to Jew Hate | With Ben M. Freeman

The founder of the Jewish Pride movement says Jews have spent so long fighting for the right to exist that they've forgotten how to be proud that they do. Ben M. Freeman

Garbage In, Gospel Out: Wikipedia, Reddit, and the Battle Over Truth | With Ashley Rindsberg

Episode Description When you ask ChatGPT, Google, or Gemini a question, where does the answer come from? Increasingly, it traces back to Wikipedia — and Wikipedia, inves

The Most Hated Man at the UN: How the United Nations Turned Against Israel | With Hillel Neuer

What does it feel like to walk into a room run by dictators and state sponsors of terror — and tell them the truth to their faces? Hillel Neuer has done it for twenty ye

The Second Exodus: How 850,000 Jews Were Erased From the Arab World | With Dr. Henry Green

In 1948 there were 38,000 Jews in Libya. Today there are none. Across the Arab world, some 850,000 Jews — communities that predated Islam by a thousand years — were drive