In this episode of PeaceCast, NJN's Maxxe Albert-Deitch is joined by Ittay Flescher, who some of our listeners may recognize as the Education Director of Seeds of Peace Jerusalem, others might recognize as the Jerusalem Correspondent for The Jewish Independent from Australia, and a deeply insightful analyst of Israeli politics. He has been published in Haaretz, The Age, ABC Religion and Ethics, Jerusalem Post, Fathom and last year brought the publication of his first book, The Holy and the Broken: A cry for Israeli-Palestinian peace from a land that must be shared.

Buy the book: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-holy-and-the-broken-a-cry-for-israeli-palestinian-peace-from-a-land-that-must-be-shared-shortlisted-for-the-75th-us-national-jewish-book-award-ittay-flescher?variant=44491257675810

Read more of Ittay's work: https://www.ittay.au/articles

Check out Ittay's US tour dates: https://www.ittay.au/

This episode features the audio from a NJN webinar, originally recorded on February 4th, 2026, hosted by Hadar Susskind.

Maoz Inon's parents were killed by Hamas on October 7. Aziz Abu Sarah's brother died shortly after being beaten in an Israeli prison. But these two individuals did not turn their pain into a desire for retribution. Instead, they draw on their personal tragedies to fuel peace activism. Their partnership is a challenge to the idea that Israelis and Palestinians are destined to be adversaries.

At a moment when public conversations about Israel and Palestine feel more polarized than ever, New Jewish Narrative is bringing together two voices who refuse to give up on our shared humanity.

Preorder Aziz and Maoz's upcoming book at thefutureispeace.com.

Check out their peacebuilding work at iinteract.org.

This episode features the audio from a NJN webinar, originally recorded on January 15th, 2026, hosted by Noam Shelef.

• In this conversation, Peace Now's Hagit Ofran helps us understand: What to make of the recent headlines about E-1 and how this fits with other changes in the West Bank over the past year.
• How settler violence and government policy reinforce one another to drive Palestinians out of certain areas.
• Why these developments matter for Palestinians, Israelis, and the rest of us who care about what the future looks like.

Hagit Ofran is Israel's leading expert on settlements and the Israeli government's policies in the Occupied Territories. As co-director of Peace Now's Settlement Watch program, Hagit has spent decades documenting settlement expansion and tracking the legal and political mechanisms driving de facto annexation.

In this episode of PeaceCast, NJN's Maxxe Albert-Deitch is joined by Barak Sella, editor of Class of 95: A Literary Anthology on the Assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Class of 95 presents, for the first time in English, Israel's poetic response to this national trauma. Originally published in Hebrew as Machzor 95, this anthology gathers diverse and powerful Israeli voices, including both renowned poets and a new generation of writers who gave words to a nation's shock, grief, and search for meaning. This English edition brings forty of those poems to new audiences, organized according to the five stages of Jewish mourning. Together, they move readers from the stunned immediacy of November 4, 1995, through grief and reckoning, to the recognition that Rabin's assassination is not only a personal or national trauma but a lasting chapter in Jewish history.

Learn more about Class of 95: https://www.theclassof95.com/

In this episode of PeaceCast, NJN's Maxxe Albert-Deitch is joined by author, internationally renowned human rights lawyer, and longtime activist Sari Bashi to discuss the new English translation of her book Upside-Down Love, originally published in Hebrew in 2021.

Told in alternating chapters by both Sari and Osama (a pseudonym), Upside-Down Love is a moving portrait of two ordinary people falling in love and navigating the regular pitfalls of a relationship, set against an extraordinary backdrop of the West Bank. The pair met when Sari represented Osama in petitions to Israel's Supreme Court to allow him to pursue his education overseas. Their story offers a new lens on current events in Israel-Palestine—experiencing the conflict in their day to day lives, raising their children, and coping with constant threats to themselves, their families, and loved ones. Osama and Sari's star-crossed romance—an intimate, vulnerable portrait of an astoundingly resilient Israeli-Palestinian relationship—has since become a beacon of hope in the aftermath of October 7, 2023. Now on its way to becoming an international sensation, Upside-Down Love speaks to the unique circumstances of this specific moment in history, while also illustrating a timeless truth: Love will triumph over bigotry and destruction.

Buy or pre-order the book (out in the US on January 20th, 2026)- https://bookshop.org/p/books/upside-down-love-sari-bashi/6b7db8d45024dc23?ean=9798228590052&next=t&

In this episode of PeaceCast, NJN's Maxxe Albert-Deitch is joined by author and journalist Micah L. Sifry to discuss his new book, When Doves Try: Israel's Peace Now Movement 1978-1983. This book tells the story of how a handful of young Israeli reserve officers helped ignite the country's largest grassroots peace movement, which our listeners know as Peace Now, or Shalom Achshav.

Micah Sifry first encountered Peace Now as a college student, researched its rise while living on a kibbutz during Israel's 1982 Lebanon War, and has followed its trajectory ever since. Blending memoir, archival research, interviews with its founders, political history, and fresh reporting, When Doves Try traces how an all-volunteer movement reshaped Israeli politics—and what its struggles reveal about the possibilities and limits of democratic activism.

Get the book: https://micahsifry.com/books/ Find more of Micah's writing: https://theconnector.substack.com/ Learn more about Peace Now and their ongoing work: https://peacenow.org.il/en

In this episode of PeaceCast, NJN Director of Programs Maxxe Albert-Deitch is joined by comedian and podcast host Orli Matlow (host of War Is Stupid: An Antiwar Podcast About War)

Read more about War Is Stupid: An Antiwar Podcast About War: https://warisstupid.substack.com/

Listen to War Is Stupid: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNvZw9ofCuL9a0SUDFOJcT_kRAEfYhZ-N

This episode of PeaceCast, cohosted by NJN's President and CEO Hadar Susskind and NJN and T'ruah board member Rabbi Esther Lederman, is a recording of a webinar hosted on November 18th, 2025.

In the month since the Trump-brokered ceasefire went into effect, the fighting has mostly stopped and the living hostages have been returned to Israel (as have most of the deceased hostages). Yet, we've seen few signs of progress towards the next stages of President Trump's 20-point plan to end the war and rebuild Gaza.

Dr. Baskin is uniquely positioned to speak on these issues. His decades of experience in back-channel negotiations and peacebuilding, including as a mediator for the deal that freed Gilad Shalit in 2011, provide him with a broad network of contacts in the Israeli security establishment and among Palestinian leaders.

This is a recording of a New Jewish Narrative webinar from October 1, 2025, hosted by Hadar Susskind.

At an unusual press conference at the White House on Monday September 29 — with Prime Minister Netanyahu at his side — President Trump unveiled a plan to end the Gaza War. The document, which was emailed to reporters during the event, included 20 substantive points—some of which are supposed to happen whether or not Hamas accepts the plan.

To help us make sense of these developments, NJN hosted two seasoned observers of American diplomacy for this webinar.

Laura Rozen is a veteran foreign policy journalist. She has served as the diplomatic correspondent for Al-Monitor, foreign policy reporter for Politico, and for Foreign Policy magazine, where she launched the Cable blog in 2009. She now writes and reports the Diplomatic newsletter at Substack, and also serves on the editorial board of Just Security.

Joel Braunold is the Managing Director of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, the former executive director of the Alliance for Middle East Peace, and a contributing editor at Lawfare. He works regularly with the US State Department, USAID, the National Security Council, and Congress on the needs of the peace-building community. Outside the United States, he has worked with national governments across Europe, multilateral institutions, and parts of the Arab world.

In this episode of PeaceCast, NJN Director of Prgrams Maxxe Albert-Deitch is joined by Tamar Cohen, the Resource Development Director at Comet-ME. Comet-ME is an Israeli-Palestinian NGO providing off-grid renewable energy, clean water, and wireless internet infrastructure to vulnerable Palestinian communities in the occupied Palestinian territories. Among other projects, Comet-ME is currently working on a grassroots emergency project to install community-run security cameras in Palestinian villages in Area C of the West Bank.

Learn more about Comet-ME: https://comet-me.org/

New Jewish narrative: https://www.newjewishnarrative.org/