The Beinart Notebook

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.com

Our guest is one of the foremost scholars of US policy towards Latin America, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Yale historian, Greg Grandin, author of Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism and America, América: A New History of the New World.

We talked about how the Trump administration’s abduction of Nicolás Maduro fits into the long-history of US imperialism in the Western Hemisphere, and the world.

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

This week’s zoom call will be at a special time, Wednesday at 1pm ET. Our guest will be one of the foremost scholars of US policy towards Latin America, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Yale historian Greg Grandin, author of Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism and America, América: A New History of the New World. We’ll talk about how the Trump administration’s abduction of Nicolas Maduro fits into the long-history of US imperialism in the Western Hemisphere, and the world.

Cited in Today’s Video

The attacks on Zohran Mamdani for repealing two orders by Eric Adams related to antisemitism and Israel.

The texts of the Israel-related orders Mamdani repealed.

A Philosopher for All Seasons, a film about Yeshayahu Leibowitz.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Aron Wander and Nathan Goldman discuss Jewish sources about rebuking other Jews.

Israel bans Doctors without Borders and other NGOs from operating in Gaza.

On January 6, I’ll be speaking on a panel at B’nai Jeshurun synagogue in Manhattan and on January 26 with Carolina Jews for Justice in Asheville, North Carolina.

On January 27, I’ll be hosting a fundraiser near Asheville for the Gaza Soup Kitchen, a grassroots initiative, led by the people of Gaza, that serves hot meals to thousands daily across ten kitchen sites. Born from a vow to ensure no neighbor grows hungry, their mission continues in honor of founder Mahmoud Almadhoun, guided by his word, Mostamreen, “we will continue,” said right before he was killed by a drone strike. 99% of funds raised go directly to feeding and supporting the people of Gaza. Register here: https://givebutter.com/FairviewNC (donation amount is $100 and address to be provided after registration).

See you on Wednesday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, Zohran Mamdani has just been inaugurated as mayor of New York and, unsurprisingly, he’s already under attack from establishment Jewish organizations. And these attacks are really predictable and, honestly, they’re really brain-dead, and, in a way, just engaging with them at all is kind of depressing because I think they serve, in a lot of ways, not as good faith arguments, but just basically as a way to, you know, create a political headache and a kind of cloud over Mamdani, and basically make it harder for him to focus on the work that he actually wants to do. But I still think, despite that, it’s worth explaining why these arguments just don’t make any sense. And they’re all basically based on this fundamental incorrect conflation of Jews as a group of people with the state of Israel.

So, the first thing that Mamdani did was he repealed an order by his predecessor, Eric Adams, to kind of make the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, kind of encoded in New York City policy and law. And the IHRE definition of antisemitism has very little support from actual scholars of antisemitism, especially scholars who work on antisemitism and Israel-Palestine. Its major supporters are the Israeli government and its kind of allied pro-Israel organizations around the world. And you can see why it has so little scholarly support when you actually look at it, right? You can see why it makes so much sense that actually Mamdani would have repealed it, right?

So, it has these examples of antisemitism. So, basically, if you do these things, this is like prima facie evidence that you are antisemitic. One of them is denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination—I’m quoting—e.g., by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor. But the State of Israel is explicitly premised on the idea that, basically, that Jews should rule, right? That this is a state for Jews, in which Jews have superior rights to Palestinians.

This is not a secret, right? David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the state of Israel, said, this country has to have an 80% Jewish majority, because otherwise Jews couldn’t be sure that Jews would rule. And it was because of this, in large measure, that for more than half of the Palestinians who lived in Palestine under the British Mandate were expelled when Israel was created in 1948 in order to create this large Jewish majority. Many of them were expelled before the Arab armies even attacked Israel in May 1948.

And then Israel created a very different set of laws for the Palestinians that remained vis-à-vis, versus those of Jews, right? So Palestinian citizens were under military law from 1948 to 1966. When Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, it took control of millions of Palestinians who didn’t have the right of citizenship and the right to vote. It’s for all these reasons that Israel has now been declared an apartheid state by the world’s leading human rights organizations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and its own leading human rights organizations, B’Tselem and Yesh Din, right?

So, it’s not antisemitic to say that Israel has a racist character, that it treats non-Jews—Palestinians in particular—in a fundamentally different way any more than it would be, say, it was an anti-Afrikaner bigotry to say the South African government is based on racist principles. Or if you were to say that the Chinese state, as under the Communist Party, is fundamentally racist because it treats non-Han Chinese people, for instance, in Xinjiang—Uyghurs—in a fundamentally different way. Or if you said that the state of Iran is fundamentally racist because it treats non-Muslims differently than it treats Muslims.

Now, one might disagree with these claims, but there’s nothing bigoted about them. You’re not an anti-Chinese bigot if you say the Chinese state under the Communist Party is racist, or you’re not anti-Muslim if you say that the Islamic regime in Iran is bigoted in the way it treats non-Muslims, right? Attacks on the nature of a state are fundamentally different than bigotry towards a particular ethnic, racial, or religious group.

A second example in the IHRA definition is, quote, drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, right? But again, why is there something antisemitic about comparing Israel to the Nazis? Why is it that we can compare the Trump administration all day and night to the Nazis, and lots of other governments that we think are doing bad things, right, but we can’t compare Israel to the Nazis? Again, the examples may be good, or they may not be, depending on the specific analogy you’re drawing, just as it could be with Trump or not. But why is it an act of anti-Jewish bigotry, right?

In fact, there’s a long, long history of Israelis invoking these very analogies. One of my heroes, Yeshayahu Leibowitz—I just watched this wonderful film about him a couple of nights ago—one of Israel’s most important kind of social critics and philosophers and theologians over many, many, many decades, literally was associated with the term, with using the term Judeo-Nazi to describe Israel’s behavior towards Palestinians. He used it all the time, right, as a way of trying to suggest, not that he said that Israel was setting up gas chambers, right, but that there were things that Israel was doing that had something in common with the way the Nazis behaved, just like fascist or authoritarian or racist governments often have certain things in common, right? Yeshayahu Leibowitz, to state the obvious, was not an antisemite, and the fact that he used the term Judeo-Nazi was not evidence that he was practicing antisemitism.

The other thing that Mamdani’s under attack for doing is by repealing this order that basically said that New York could not divest from or in any way sanction the state of Israel. And again, but you see in this order that Mamdani has now repealed exactly the same conflatio…

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.com

Our guest is Philip Gordon, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and former National Security Advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris. We talked about the Biden-Harris administration’s actions regarding Israel and Gaza, Kamala Harris’s statements about Gaza during the campaign, and what policies Democrats should pursue toward Israel-Palestine in the future.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

This week’s zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM. Our guest will be Philip Gordon, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and former National Security Advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris. We’ll talk about the Biden-Harris administration’s actions regarding Israel and Gaza, Kamala Harris’s statements about Gaza during the campaign, how she might have governed as president and what policies Democrats should pursue toward Israel-Palestine in the future.

Cited in Today’s Video

Bari Weiss pulls a 60 Minutes report on Trump administration deportations to El Salvador.

Donald Trump has reportedly said he expects better treatment by CBS now that David Ellenson and Weiss are in charge.

Weiss’ Free Press co-hosted a Trump administration inauguration party with Elon Musk’s X.

Weiss’ resignation letter from The New York Times.

The ACLU denounced Weiss’ efforts to punish pro-Palestinian professors when she was a student at Columbia.

The Trump administration leaked the news that it was withholding funds from Columbia to Weiss’ Free Press.

Weiss’ support for Israel is reportedly one of the reasons Ellison hired her at CBS.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane talks to immigration expert Samah Sisay about how Trump’s new travel ban targets Palestinians.

Tareq Baconi on how the genocide in Gaza radicalized the world.

On January 6, I’ll be speaking on a panel at B’nai Jeshurun synagogue in Manhattan.

Reader Response

Benjamin Langer responded to last week’s video about banning the phrase “globalize the intifada.” He writes:

The word in the phrase that troubles me is not “intifada,” but “globalize.” If, as you say, “intifada” can mean a call for either violent or non-violent uprising, then globalizing the intifada could mean bringing civil disobedience and political pressure to international spaces, or could mean bringing violence to international Israel-associated targets. It’s not a stretch for many people to consider a synagogue with a JNF billboard outside, or a demonstration like Toronto’s 50,000-strong (roughly 1/4 of Toronto’s Jews) Walk For Israel as Israel-associated enough. To your Ukraine example, if people were using a phrase in Ukrainian solidarity protests that left open for interpretation that Russian-Canadian or Russian-American people or political and cultural institutions, were legitimate targets for violence, I think there would also be significant concern.

I don’t think that “globalize the intifada” should be banned, and I think that people saying it contributes a vanishingly small fraction of the added risk to Jews compared to the now innumerable and extensively documented Israeli war crimes paired with overwhelming diaspora Jewish institutional support for their necessity. The phrase is the voice of the rage, not its source! But I wonder how the movement could do better to be more surgical in its approach. A phrase that opens it up to culpability for those who take violence into their own hands provides easy ammunition for the well-organized forces of censure and suppression.

A Holiday Giveaway

Over the years I’ve had some requests to make certain interviews to be free and shareable for all in their entirety. So, I’m going to permanently remove the paywall for 8 posts from 2025. The first is my recent conversation with Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove as there have already been many requests for that one. For the rest, we’ll go with your most popular choices in the comments to this post. (Please look at other comments and if your preference has already been nominated, you can have your vote counted by just tapping like on that comment.)

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about CBS News, which is now under the control of Bari Weiss, and in particular about this segment that was done by 60 Minutes, which is the kind of flagship CBS News program about people who were deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador—Venezuelans who were deported and then who were treated really, really terribly there. And that this was all ready to go, this segment, and Bari Weiss stepped in, and, reportedly, she said that they shouldn’t air it unless they had an interview with Stephen Miller.

And it produced a big furor, I think in part because it’s one of a number of series of things that have happened since this guy, David Ellison, who runs Paramount Skydance became the owner of CBS, and then brought in Bari Weiss as head of CBS News, which suggests that—although CBS isn’t full-on Fox, in the sense that it’s just doing pure propaganda sycophancy for Trump—it is really trying not to offend the Trump administration in various different ways. In fact, it has been reported that Trump has privately said that he believed David Ellison and his father, Larry Ellison, would make CBS more sympathetic to him, and that he thought under Bari Weiss, that CBS would be more sympathetic. CBS announced after the Homeland Secretary, Kristi Noem, complained that they would now not kind of cut interviews with administration officials, but air them in full.

And this is also part of a larger dynamic we’ve seen among Bari Weiss, even before she took over CBS News, when she was still just running The Free Press, this outlet she created, of kind of moving into someone who’s kind of, I would say, having a cozier relationship with the Trump administration and the people around Trump. So, for instance, The Free Press actually co-hosted an inauguration party for Trump’s second inaugural that was co-hosted with Elon Musk’s X.

And there is, on its face, something really deeply ironic about this, right? You have Bari Weiss running CBS News as CBS News is becoming kind of part of this authoritarian oligarchy that Donald Trump is trying to create, of kind of sympathetic oligarchs who will control media enterprises in ways that will basically to a large degree, do his bidding. And Bari Weiss seems to be playing a role in that.

And yet, Bari Weiss, in an earlier part of her career, kind of really made her name as someone who spoke out very, very forcibly about free speech, and about not being cowed, journalists not being cowed from taking unpopular opinions. She kind of famously, or infamously, depending on how you looked at it, kind of resigned from the New York Times. And when she left the New York Times, she wrote that it was no longer upholding ‘the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society’; that ‘self-censorship has become the norm’; and that ‘stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences.’

And so, now you have this very ironic situation, right, where CBS News seems to be really choosing stories to satisfy the most narrow—and most dangerously narrow—of audiences in an authoritarian president, right, to make him not upset because the Ellison family still has these business interests that they want Donald Trump to be taking care of.

It seems to me that one way of understanding what’s happened over the arc of Bari Weiss’s career is that Bari Weiss always made an exception on the question of free speech for the question of Palestinian rights. She was really a kind of almost a paradigmatic case of what people would call the kind of Palestine exception, of people who speak very, very vocally about the need to have a wide range of opinions, to not be cowed by powerful interests when it comes to voicing controversial views, but—when it comes to Palestinian rights—take a very, very different view.

And, it seems to me, the lesson that we’ve seen, that we can trace with the arc of Bari Weiss’s career is that this Palestine exception doesn’t remain with Palestine. That when you make that exception to the principles, to beliefs about free speech and censorship, ultimately what you end up doing is be…

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.com

Our guests this week are two remarkable people, Musya Herzog and Meyer Labin. Musya is a neuropsychologist who grew up in the Chabad-Lubavitch community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Meyer is a Yiddish-language journalist and writer from the Satmar community. They talk about the discourse about Israel and Zionism in ultra-Orthodox communities, and what it might take to make them more sympathetic to Palestinian rights.

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank

A way to directly help victims of the massacre in Sydney

This week’s zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM. Our guests will be two remarkable people, Musya Herzog and Meyer Labin. Musya is a neuropsychologist who grew up in the Chabad-Lubavitch community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Meyer is a Yiddish-language journalist and writer from the Satmar community. Both are now active in Smol Emuni, the religious left. They’ll talk about the discourse about Israel and Zionism in ultra-Orthodox communities, and what it might take to make them more sympathetic to Palestinian rights.

Cited in Today’s Video

The premier of New South Wales calls for banning “globalize the intifada.”

Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Samuel Stein reports on Zohran Mamdani’s looming struggle with the real estate industry.

Gaza no longer faces famine. But its people are still hungry.

Israel is preparing for a permanent presence in Gaza.

On January 6, I’ll be speaking on a panel at B’nai Jeshurun synagogue in Manhattan.

A Holiday Giveaway

We’ve had many requests to open up certain interviews, so they are free and shareable for all. So, this holiday season, I’m going to permanently remove the paywall for 8 posts from 2025. The first is my recent conversation with Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove. For the rest, we’ll go with your most popular choices in the comments to this post. (Please look at other comments and if your preference has already been nominated, you can have your vote counted by liking that comment.) If this goes well we’ll make it an annual tradition.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So now, a week or so after the terrible massacre in Sydney, Australia, the Australian government is considering doing some sensible things, like limiting the number of guns that any person in Australia can own, but also considering doing some things that would be really fundamental violations of people’s rights to free speech. Among them, the Premier of New South Wales, the Australian state that encompasses Sydney, said that he wants to ban the phrase “globalize the intifada.”

Now, this is really stupid and dangerous at a number of levels. First of all, does anyone really think that banning the phrase “globalize the intifada” would have stopped this father and son, who were evidently connected to ISIS, from having committed this terrible attack? If these people had an ISIS ideology, banning the phrase “globalize the intifada” would do absolutely nothing to prevent them from committing this heinous terrorist attack.

On its face, it’s just ridiculous to think that banning this phrase would have done anything to prevent the terrible violence that occurred. But beyond that, it’s simply a grave violation of people’s basic, fundamental rights to say that you can’t use the phrase “globalize the intifada.” Intifada is an Arabic word that means uprising. It doesn’t mean uprising against Israel or Jews. It means uprising in general. The Arab Spring was often referred to as an intifada. An intifada, like any uprising, or any revolutionary political movement, can be violent or nonviolent. The first Palestinian intifada, in the late 1980s, was largely nonviolent. The second one, in the early 2000s, was much more violent. It can be violent or non-violent.

So, yes, “globalize the intifada” could be interpreted as a call for violence. It could also be interpreted as a call for an uprising that’s not violent. But even if “globalize the intifada” is interpreted, or meant by the speaker, as a call for violence, we allow people to call for violence on the streets all the time. Threatening violence against one individual person is one thing, but saying you support violence in general in some kind of political context is not at all. If people protest in defense of Ukraine’s right to fight against Russia, and protest for their government to give arms to Ukraine. They’re protesting in support of Ukrainians using violence in that cause.

The fact that it’s a call for violence doesn’t mean that it should be banned. Similarly, if someone goes out in a protest and says Israel has the right to defend itself; I stand with the IDF. In the wake of what Israel’s been doing in Gaza, those are endorsements of violence. People have the right to say those things. People have the right to participate in political speech, and in political speech around a whole range of different things. People often endorse violence of various forms that they believe will serve their political ends. Sometimes those calls for violence are odious, sometimes those calls for violence, as—let’s say in the case of Ukraine—might be ones that are widely supported. But the point is that people have the right to make that kind of political speech.

You know, I still remember when it was conservatives—including many Jewish conservatives— who would say, in response to what they felt like were the excesses of the ‘woke left’ who were trying to restrict speech on college campuses that would say again and again that speech is not violence. And that’s actually true. At least, speech that endorses violence in a broad sense, right? Again, I’m not talking about violence directed at a particular individual in a particular moment, but people who endorse the idea of violence in some broader sense, that speech is not in and of itself violence, right? If you say, I supported the Iraq War, right, that was a call for violence. It was not violence in and of itself. And this distinction is completely being collapsed in this case. Again, this is even if you assume the harshest interpretation of the phrase, which is that it is a call for violence, which some people who will use that phrase would strongly contest.

I think a lot of this reminds me of this now-famous book that Naomi Klein wrote called The Shock Doctrine, in which in the wake of a shock, in which people are traumatized and angry and afraid, you take advantage of that to push through things that you’ve been wanting to push through for ages, but you now have the political opportunity to do so in a time when reason often goes out the window, and you can appeal to people’s emotions and fears.

We saw this, of course, in the United States after September 11th with the passage of the Patriot Act. To a different degree, we saw this after October 7th in the United States, with a massive crackdown on free speech, of rights of people to protest on university campuses and elsewhere, that I think historians will look back—as they do in the post-911 era—as a period of very serious infractions of people’s rights to free speech, the firing of professors, the deportation of students on foreign visas because they had made politically controversial statements.

All of this stuff is now what is being attempted to be reenacted in Australia by Australian politicians and by pro-Israel organizations. None of this will do anything to make Australian Jews safer. What it will do is exactly what it did in the United States after September 11th, what it did in the 1950s in the hysteria and the wake in the McCarthy era during the Korean War, and what it has done since October 7th. It will do in Australia what it has done in America, which is not to make anyone safer, but to make the country less free.

And when you start to violate people’s basic rights to free speech for one political purpose, you open the door to people to start doing that in many, many arenas. So, if you can ban the phrase “globalize the intifada” because people find that phrase threatening, and they say that speech that could support violence is in itself violence, you are opening the door to lots and lots of other people going around and trying to restrict your speech on the same grounds.

And that’s the way in which countries becom…

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.com

Sarah Schwartz, a human rights lawyer who grew up in Sydney, is the founding executive officer of the Jewish Council of Australia, a Jewish community organization founded to fight against antisemitism and all forms of racism, and to support Palestinian freedom and justice.

This week’s zoom call will be at A SPECIAL TIME: THURSDAY AT 2 PM Eastern. In light of the Chanukah massacre in Sydney, we’ll talk to Sarah Schwartz, a human rights lawyer who grew up in Sydney, and is the founding executive officer of the Jewish Council of Australia, a Jewish community organization founded to fight against antisemitism and all forms of racism, and to support Palestinian freedom and justice. We’ll talk about the unique history of the Jewish community in Australia, about the rise of antisemitism there and about how to combat it while also opposing bigotry against all people.

Cited in Today’s Video

The Babylonian Talmud’s discussion of the dangers of lighting a Chanukiah in public.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Anne Irfan shows how the Trump plan for Gaza is crowding Palestinians there into even less land.

Dana El Kurd talks to Matan Kaminer and Ben Schuman-Stoler about Gaza and the Abraham Accords.

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

See you on Thursday at 2,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

When I woke up on Sunday morning and read the news of this terrible massacre on the first night of Chanukah in Sydney, Australia, a couple of things went through my mind.

The first is about the nature of Jews in Australia, and the second is about the nature of Chanukah. I’ve had the good fortune of spending a fair amount of time in the Jewish community in Sydney and Melbourne, and the Australian Jewish community is one of the most extraordinary that I have ever seen anywhere in the world. It’s a very, very cohesive Jewish community; very, very vibrant; very strong dedication to Jewish education. And it’s different than the American Jewish community in that it is closer to the European experience.

Most American Jews came to the U.S. in the late 19th or early 20th century. Many Australian Jews came later, before or after the Holocaust. And so, you have a much larger percentage of families in Australia that are the direct descendants of people who survived the Holocaust, with many, many families being touched very, very deeply by that experience. It is really a community that is more, I think, affected, more closer to, more traumatized by the experience of the Holocaust than almost any other Jewish community on Earth. And so, for a community that has that deep trauma in so many Australian Jewish families, to now have this new trauma, this terrible, terrible massacre that killed—we now know—15 people on the first night of Chanukah is just horrifying beyond words.

The second thing is about the fact that it happened on Chanukah. When I read the news, I was reminded that there’s not a lot of discussion about Chanukah in the Talmud, but in the relatively brief discussion there is, there’s a discussion in Tractate Shabbat about the nature, about the mitzvah to put the Chanukiah—the Chanukah lamp—in the entrance to one’s house.

And the rabbis say that the mitzvah, the obligation, is to put the Chanukiah, the lamp, in the window, so it is visible to the public. But then, they say that the sages say that in a time of danger, in a time of religious persecution, when Jews are not allowed to perform the mitzvah of lighting the Chanukah lamp, it is permitted to place the Chanukiah on the table instead, so it can’t be seen from outside.

And so, it was very, very poignant to think about this discussion in the Babylonian Talmud against the backdrop of this experience in Sydney, Australia, which did turn out to be extremely dangerous—deadly, actually—to perform the mitzvah of publicizing the miracle of Chanukah, and that the rabbis, you know, the rabbis close to 2,000 years ago, were worried about this very issue. Could Jews safely celebrate Chanukah, publicize the mitzvah of Chanukah, or did we need a special dispensation to say that in times of grave danger, that Jews can perform the Chanukah ritual, the celebration, in private?

And so, to me, that seems to me, in some ways, kind of one way of thinking about what is at stake today, in a world of rising antisemitism. Do we live in a world in which it is safe for Jews to light Chanukiahs in public, as the rabbis prefer to publicize the miracle that happened, that we celebrate on Chanukah, or do we live in a time of such great danger that Jews should have to do so in private because the risk of doing what those Australian Jews did on the first night on Bondi Beach in Sydney is actually too dangerous?

I am sure, I am sure, that the response by Jewish communities around the world will be to double down on the obligation to publicize the miracle, perform the celebration of Chanukah in public, to not be daunted, to not be scared by this. But it is terrible. It is terrible to imagine that there might be some who actually now need to go back to the Talmudic discussion, about whether it’s safe, in fact, to light a Chanukiah, given now that we’ve seen this terrible, terrible massacre in Sydney. It just shows that we still live in a world that is dangerous for Jews, and that some of the ancient, ancient discussions about how to keep Jews safe are still relevant today, and that some of the terrible, terrible horrors that many Australian Jews faced, the antisemitism in their families in Europe, that in a different way, that antisemitism has returned in Australia, and on Chanukah of all holidays.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.com

Mahmood Mamdani is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University, and father of the mayor-elect of New York City. We’ll talk about Professor Mamdani’s new memoir about his family’s experience in Uganda, his research on the similarities—and differences—between settler-colonialism in South Africa, Israel-Palestine and the United States, and what it’s like to be a Muslim in Trump’s America.