Mazel Tov Cocktail

This episode I talk to Maiya and Eva from the IfNotNow Jewish activist group in the United States. We talk about Jewish and Palestinian coalitions against Israeli occupation, challenging the Trump administration and the US Jewish establishment and building international Jewish movements.

This episode I talk to John Safran about his new book ‘Depends What You Mean by Extremist: Going Rogue with Australian Deplorables’. We talk about Islamophobes and white nationalists, a Jewish themed Christian fundamentalist event, John’s Jewish socialist grandparents, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Jewish racists in Australia and more.

This episode I talk to to a couple of Jewish lefties, Yehuda and Ali about their Jewish left group in the process of formation in Sydney. We talk about the actions they’ve done so far, opposing Netanyahu’s Sydney visit and holding a Passover seder at Villawood detention centre. We talk about their political outlook, overseas influences, politics and religion, Zionism, the Holocaust and plans for the future.

This episode I talk to Leandros Fischer, political scientist, and an activist in and expert on the German left. We talk about how to beat the far right, Angela Merkel perhaps not being our great liberal hope, historical analyses of Nazism, how Palestine figures in German politics and how to combine anti-racism and anti-capitalism.

We talk to Jordy Silverstein,an activist with the Australian Jewish Democratic Society, and a historian at the University of Melbourne. We talk about the government's attempts to weaken the Racial Discrimination act, multiculturalism- its limits and potentials, Aboriginal sovereignty, Holocaust narratives, Zionism and more.

This episode I talk to Christian from Left Renewal , the new anti-capitalist radical tendency within the Australian Greens party. We talk about the history of the Greens, the contradictions between pro-environment and pro-worker politics and the possibilities for left populism.

I talk to Faisal Al-Asaad about settler colonialism, the limits of Muslim hyphenated identities, the global rise of the far right , the possibilities of developing non-nationally bounded relationships of solidarity and more!

In this first episode of the Mazel Tov Cocktail podcast I talk to Allegra Reinalda about Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism. We talk populism, anti-politics, conspiracy theories, Podemos and Trump.