The Beinart Notebook

It’s not about the legal definition. It’s about Western and Jewish exceptionalism.

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I talked with my extraordinary CUNY colleague, the Syrian-American journalist Alia Malek, author of The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria.

It’s Wonderful Assad is Gone. But Neither He, Nor Iran, Was Ever Israel’s Real Problem.

There will be no Zoom call this Friday. We’ll resume on Friday, December 20 at 1 PM with a conversation with Mahmoud Muna and Matthew Teller, author of the new anthology, Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture.

But I’ve recorded a Zoom interview (without a live audience) with my extraordinary CUNY colleague, the Syrian-American journalist Alia Malek, author of The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria. Paid subscribers will get it today. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rashid Khalidi, Rebecca Traister, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky and Bret Stephens.

My New Book

Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28 of next year. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.

So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. I’m grateful to readers for offering their favorites. One reader recently recommended Naomi Shihab Nye’s young adult novel, Habibi, about Liyana, a Palestinian-American girl from St. Louis whose family returns to West Bank, a place she struggles to make home.

Readers have also suggested additional charities working in Gaza. One is Donkey Saddle, which “has been providing ongoing support for over 15 extended families” in Gaza.

Sources Cited in this Video

Discussing Israel’s enemies in 1982, Benjamin Netanyahu said, “There is a major force behind most of these groups that is the Soviet Union. If you take away the Soviet Union, it’s chief proxy, the PLO, international terrorism would collapse.”

The Nkomati Accords between South Africa and Mozambique.

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!), Gary Monroe chronicles the end of Jewish Miami Beach and the rise of Little Haiti.

If you’re in New York, you can still catch the end of the always-excellent Other Israel film festival.

I talked to The Atlantic’s Jemele Hill about the debate over Gaza.

Housekeeping

We’re using a new system to share transcripts from Zoom interviews. They’ll no longer appear in emails but are still available for anyone who wants them by opening this post in your web browser (not the Substack app) and clicking the “transcript” button just below the video.

See you a week from Friday,

Peter

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

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Our guest is Muzaffar Chishti, Senior Fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, and one of America’s foremost experts on immigration policy. We’ll talk about Donald Trump’s plans for the mass deportation of undocumented—and perhaps even legal— immigrants. We’ll talk about the human cost of such a roundup and what it might do to the United States.

When Even Billionaires Are Afraid to Criticize Trump, What Does That Mean for the Rest of US?

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Our guest is the renowned, Israeli-born, Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov, who teaches at Brown University. In August, he described returning to Israel and encountering students whose “rhetoric brought to mind some of the darkest moments of 20th-century history.” This month he concluded that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. We’ll discuss the genocid…

It’s a Test of Whether International Law Applies to the West

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Our guest is The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, author of one of the most famous essays of the first Trump presidency, which he turned into a book: The Cruelty is the Point. We’ll talk about what is similar, and different, as Trump returns, and how Americans should respond to our country’s capacity for cruelty, both at home and abroad.

Our call this week, for paid subscribers, will be on Friday at 1 PM Eastern, our new regular time.

Our guest will be The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, author of one of the most famous essays of the first Trump presidency, which he turned into a book: The Cruelty is the Point. We’ll talk about what is similar, and different, as Trump returns, and how Americans should respond to our country’s enormous capacity for cruelty, both at home and abroad.

Paid subscribers will get an email with the Zoom link, and then once it airs, they’ll get the video. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rashid Khalidi, Rebecca Traister, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

My New Book

Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28 of next year. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.

So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. I’m grateful to readers for offering their favorites. One reader recently recommended Naomi Shihab Nye’s young adult novel, Habibi, about Liyana, a Palestinian-American girl from St. Louis whose family returns to West Bank, a place she struggles to make home.

Readers have also suggested additional charities working in Gaza. One is Donkey Saddle, which “has been providing ongoing support for over 15 extended families” in Gaza.

Sources Cited in This Video

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on Parshat Vayera.

Parshat Vayera and the Pittsburgh shooting.

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 details the Trump administration’s coming crackdown on campus speech.

Progressive New York State Representative Zohran Mamdani interviews Trump voters in Brooklyn and Queens.

Israeli reporter Barak Ravid tells the Jewish Federations of North America that “we are much closer to Israeli settlements being built in Gaza than hostages coming home from Gaza.”

Upcoming Talks

On Tuesday, November 19, I’ll be speaking at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst about “Protest, Zionism and Gaza.”

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. So, Rabbi Jonathan Sachs tells this story about the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe. And the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe tells his students: ‘you must live according to the times.’ And the students are a little puzzled by what exactly that means. And the Sith Libavitcher Rebbe explains, and I’m paraphrasing here, essentially that what ‘live by the times’ means is that you should use the weekly Torah portion as a lens through which to understand your time. You should see it as a reflection of the events that are happening around you in the world. And I think that’s a very powerful concept right now.

Yesterday, many Jews read in shul Parshat Vayera, and I want to read a little snippet from that week’s Torah portion. It goes: ‘G-d appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day. He lifted his eyes and looked, and lo, three men were standing over against him; and when he saw them, he ran to meet them from the tent entrance and bowed down to the earth.’

And Sachs makes the point that, as this passage is interpreted in Jewish tradition, the way it’s interpreted is that G-d comes to Abraham to speak to Abraham. And then Abraham sees these three men, these three strangers who are coming towards him, and he essentially tells G-d to pause. Says G-d, sorry, I can’t talk to you right now. There is a greater imperative that I have, which is to welcome these strangers. And then Abraham feeds them and bathes them.

And from this passage, the rabbis in tractate Shabbat in the Babylonian Talmud take the principle that greater is hospitality than receiving the divine presence. And then as the story continues, those three men, who turn out to be angels after giving Abraham and Sarah the news that Sarah will have a child, they go on to Sodom, the city of Sodom, where Abraham’s relative Lot lives. And Lot also welcomes them into his home, but because the city of Sodom is ferociously hostile to strangers, to outsiders, the people of Sedon come and demand that Lot hand over these strangers to them so they can do violence, indeed sexual violence, to these strangers. And when Lot refuses, they threaten him, and then the angels take Lot and his immediate family out and the city is destroyed.

I think to go back to the point of the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, to read these Parsha according to the times, it seems to me really hard not to read this Parsha against the backdrop of the impending mass deportation of potentially millions of extremely vulnerable Americans by the Trump administration. And, you know, what happens in the wake of elections is that people want to be politically savvy. And so, they feel like, well, people have voted for a tough on immigration policy, so there must be some merit in this. There might be some wisdom in this. No, it’s certainly true that our immigration system is deeply, deeply problematic, that we need many, many, many more judges and officers to handle asylum claims, that our asylum system doesn’t work very well, that we need a much, much higher levels of legal immigration, that the whole system absolutely is very, very dysfunctional.

But the answer to that dysfunction, again, is to have an asylum process that works, and to have an immigration process that actually responds to the needs of the United States to bring a lot of people into the country, because actually our economy needs that, even though it also needs to redistribute the economic benefits better of that immigration. But the fact that many Americans voted for Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan doesn’t change the fact that it is a brutal, cruel policy that if implemented, even partially, will be a tremendous stain on this country. People need to remember that oftentimes things that are done in America that we feel most shameful about enjoyed widespread support from both the populace and many elites at the time.

And I think what Parshat Vayera, the point it makes, is you can’t actually have an authentic, genuine relationship with G-d if you don’t also care about vulnerable people in your midst. And in this case, the vulnerable people being the stranger, the outsider. Many of these undocumented immigrants, and again, this will also affect many, many legal immigrants as well, including people who’ve risked their lives for the United States, like people who were brought from Afghanistan, who fought alongside the United States in America’s long war there. These are many of the hardest working, most vulnerable, most decent people in the United States who are contributing the most and getting the least from our country. And to watch them be treated in this kind of brutal, dehumanizing, vicious way that we’re seeing is exactly the opposite of the message from this week’s Parsha.

And I think there’s something else to say about this week’s Parsha that should be particularly important for Jews to remember. Interestingly, again, in this spirit of living according to the times, it was also during Parshat Vayera that the Pittsburgh shooting massacre in the synagogue took place. And if you think about Lot as representing the role of the Jew, what does Lot do? He extends sympathy to the stranger and then is turned upon for having extended sympathy to the stranger himself. The Torah tells us 36 times that you should remember the heart of the stranger because you were strangers in the land of Egyp…

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Our guest is New York Magazine Editor-at-Large Rebecca Traister, among the best writers on gender and politics (and many other things) in America. This essay she wrote after Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016 still captures many painful truths about the brutal burden facing not only women presidential candidates, but American women as a whole. They talked…