The Honest Take

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 publishing. Within 24 hours, its own president had resigned over it. Not because the report went too far, but because it suggested, gently and with footnotes, that boycotting Jews might be a form of discrimination.

Author Meg Keene wrote the Wall Street Journal piece that took the whole thing apart — and she's the most-quoted voice in the report itself. For fifteen years she wasn't a political writer at all: she built one of the most-read wedding blogs in the country, A Practical Wedding, with two books that sold well over 150,000 copies passed hand-to-hand between brides who'd never met. She was, in her own words, "the dream author."

Then Charlottesville happened. Then Tree of Life. And after October 7, she sat down and wrote an achingly Jewish novel in seven days. The Big Five wouldn't touch it. One agent said the problem was a single word — Zionist. Another said the book could survive if she renamed a character from Yael to Sue. So Meg made a choice: if they weren't going to publish her anyway, she'd tell the truth out loud, and light her own fiction career on fire to do it.

In this conversation: the free-speech paradox at the heart of the PEN resignation; how the industry's blacklist works without anyone ever having to write it down; the St. Martin's Press boycott and the rise of influencer-driven publishing; and the moment Meg went hunting for a 2024 blacklist in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency archive — and pulled up three articles she couldn't tell apart from the present, all dated 1939, all about the blacklisting of Jewish authors in Germany.

Her argument isn't to shrink. It's to write more, document more, and build our own institutions the way we always have — because, as she puts it, "we are not a people for whom culture is the icing on the cake. It's the cake."

Meg Keene

• Substack — "Field Notes for the Brave": https://megkeene.substack.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/megkeene
• X: https://x.com/megkeene
• Site: https://megkeene.com

Referenced in the episode

• PEN America — "A Silent Moratorium" (July 9, 2026): https://pen.org/a-silent-moratorium-interviews-with-israeli-and-jewish-writers/
• Dinaw Mengestu resigns as PEN America president (NYT): https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/arts/pen-america-dinaw-mengestu-resigns.html
• Meg Keene's Wall Street Journal op-ed on PEN and cultural boycotts (July 2026): https://www.wsj.com
• Jewish Telegraphic Agency archive: https://www.jta.org/archive

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-year IDF veteran, former deputy commander of the Gaza Division, and founder of Israel's largest movement of security professionals — saw it coming. Two years before the war, his organization wrote a national-security assessment describing the attack that was coming; six months before it, he published a book about it. Nobody in power acted on it.

Ben Chertoff sits down with Avivi to understand how that happened, and what it means going forward. They get into the Cold War doctrine Israel quietly adopted and why it failed; what it's actually like to defend a country forty-five miles wide, where you can see your enemies from the airport; the real history of the Gaza withdrawal and why Avivi says Israel can never repeat it in the West Bank; and his blunt, uncomfortable answer to the question of rising global antisemitism — that the only long-term future for the Jewish people is in Israel. Some of it is hard to hear. That's the point.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Brigadier General (res.) Amir Avivi is a thirty-year veteran of the Israel Defense Forces. He served as deputy commander of the Gaza Division and as aide-de-camp to the Chief of the General Staff, among other senior commands. In 2020 he founded the Israel Defense and Security Forum (IDSF / Hebrew: "Habithonistim"), a security-establishment movement that has grown to roughly 55,000 members, including dozens of reserve generals and senior defense officials. He handed the chairmanship to Brig. Gen. (res.) Erez Wiener on June 1, 2026. He is the author of No Retreat: How to Secure Israel for Generations to Come, whose Hebrew edition appeared about six months before October 7th and which he frames as having foreseen the war and its aftermath.

LINKS & RESOURCES

• Israel Defense and Security Forum (IDSF / Habithonistim):https://idsf.org.il/en/
• Book — No Retreat: How to Secure Israel for Generations to Come
• Guest on X: @AmirAvivi1

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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 — a gay Jewish kid from Glasgow who had to come out twice, first as gay and then as an unapologetic Zionist — joins Ben Chertoff to make the affirmative case: that Jews are not a religion but a people, an ancient civilization indigenous to the Land of Israel, and that pride, not defense, is the real answer to Jew-hatred. Along the way: internalized antisemitism and his "three D's," the "non-Jewish gaze," why he reframes "Eastern European Jews" as "Jews who lived in Eastern Europe," the UN's own criteria for indigeneity, and why he says anti-Zionism is antisemitism — no asterisk.

Key Takeaways

• Pride, not defense, is the point. Freeman's whole project is affirmative: "Jewish pride is the root to fighting Jew-hatred." You can't fight antisemitism, he argues, unless you're first proud to be a Jew.
• Jews are a people, not a religion. His "hill to die on": Judaism is equivalent to Jewishness — an Am, a civilization with a religion — and defining Jews only as a faith is a Christian import that creates endless contradictions.
• Internalized antisemitism has three forms. Diminishment (making yourself smaller — "I'm Jewish, but…"), denial (disowning your Jewishness), and deployment (weaponizing it, as anti-Zionist Jews do). Diminishment is the most common.
• Only Jews define Jewish identity — the "non-Jewish gaze." Because the non-Jewish world both isn't Jewish and has been structured against Jews, its definitions of "palatable" Jewishness are illegitimate; allies should amplify Jewish perspectives, not speak over them.
• The indigeneity case. Applying the UN's criteria (he discards the "non-dominant group" one as post-colonial nonsense), he argues Jews meet them — continuous connection to the land, a land-rooted calendar and festivals, Hebrew beneath every diaspora language, Jews buried with soil from Jerusalem. Reframes "Eastern European Jews" as "Jews who lived in Eastern Europe."
• He won't litigate Palestinian indigeneity. "I'm a Jew telling a Jewish story." He notes questions about when a collective Palestinian national identity emerged, but says it ultimately doesn't change the reality: "they are still here and we need to deal with that."
• Anti-Zionism is antisemitism — no asterisk. Criticism of Israeli policy is legitimate; the line, per Sharansky's 3D test, is delegitimization, demonization, and double standards. "Israel purposely kills Palestinian children" or "harvests organs" isn't policy critique — it's blood libel.
• Head, Hands, Heart. A proudly Jewish next generation needs knowledge (head), practice (hands), and — the hardest — cultivated pride (heart), taught from kindergarten on.

Notable Quotes

• "The greatest achievement of the Jewish people is not Israel. The greatest achievement of the Jewish people is the Jewish people, and Israel is a major manifestation of that."
• "I was failed in an essay because I would not say that Israel was the worst country in the world — and that was direct feedback given to me by a professor."
• "Jews are not a religion. We're a people with a religion. The idea that we're a religion comes from Christianity."
• "We're in an abusive relationship with the non-Jewish world… you try, you try, you try — and then the goalposts move."
• "You've given me such space to define my own identity — but with my Jewishness, you feel comfortable telling me what I am. That's the progressive world right there."
• "Grow up. Stop being so entitled. You as an individual do not get to change a 3,000-year-old civilization."

📚 Ben M. Freeman — the Jewish Pride trilogy: • Jewish Pride: Rebuilding a People(2021) — https://www.amazon.com/Jewish-Pride-Rebuilding-Ben-Freeman/dp/1913532135 • Reclaiming Our Story: The Pursuit of Jewish Pride (2022) — https://www.amazon.com/Reclaiming-Our-Story-Pursuit-Jewish/dp/1915036321 • The Jews: An Indigenous People (2025) — https://www.amazon.com/Jews-Indigenous-Ben-M-Freeman/dp/1916797474 ✍️ His Substack, The Jewish Pride Press — https://ben126.substack.com/

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, investigative journalist Ashley Rindsberg argues, has been captured.

In this episode, Rindsberg walks through how a small, coordinated network of editors — a "gang of 40" — has reshaped the way Wikipedia presents Israel, Zionism, and the war in Gaza, and how those edits flow downstream into the AI systems the world now treats as neutral arbiters of fact. He breaks down the tactics: swarming, the 500-edit barrier, severing Jewish historical ties to the land, weaponizing arbitration, and laundering terror-linked content through Reddit and into the models.

It's a tour of the machinery behind the "narrative engines" — Wikipedia, Reddit, Google, and AI — and a sober look at what media literacy actually requires when the encyclopedia itself has a point of view.

The Honest Take

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HonestReporting

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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 years. As executive director of UN Watch in Geneva, he's become, by his own account and several media outlets', "the most hated man at the UN." In this conversation with Benjamin Chertoff, he explains the machinery behind the headlines: who actually writes the resolutions, how the "automatic majority" of 56 Muslim-majority states plus the dictatorships works, why Western democracies go along to get along, and how the Human Rights Council went from its founding chair Eleanor Roosevelt to a representative of Gaddafi's Libya.

They get into the Iran moment — the UN's near-silence on the massacre of Iranian protesters, followed by its sudden fury once the US and Israel struck the regime — and the case of Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur condemned by France, Germany, Canada, the US and others for "Holocaust inversion" and antisemitism, who remains effectively unaccountable. Neuer breaks down the disinformation feedback loop (NGO → UN statement → "the UN says" → global press), the meaning of the Council's Israel-only "Agenda Item 7," and whether the institution can ever be fixed.

Guest: Hillel Neuer — Executive Director, UN Watch. Host: Benjamin Chertoff. From HonestReporting.

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 driven out, dispossessed, and denationalized in barely three decades. Most of the world has never heard the story.

Dr. Henry Green, founder of Sephardi Voices and emeritus professor at the University of Miami, has spent more than fifteen years recording the testimonies of those who lived it. In this conversation with Ben Chertoff, he traces how the Jews of Baghdad, Benghazi, Cairo, Casablanca, Aleppo and beyond went from flourishing — at one point Jews were 35–40% of Baghdad — to gone: the Farhud, the rise of the Mufti, Nazi propaganda in Arabic, the great rescue operations, the ma'abarot transit camps, and the long erasure of an entire refugee history.

Henry explains why this exodus was left out of the textbooks, what justice might look like, and why his new work puts a forensic dollar figure on what was taken — work he carried to the UN in Geneva in September 2025. And he closes with the story of a young Hillel president who found her own grandparents in the Sephardi Voices archive and wept.

Guest: Dr. Henry Green — founder, Sephardi Voices; emeritus professor of Religious & Judaic Studies, University of Miami. Co-author of Sephardi Voices: The Untold Expulsion of Jews from the Arab Lands (2021, with Richard Stern­berg) and author of new work, The Forgotten Exodus of Arab Jews, presenting a forensic valuation of seized Jewish assets.

• The scale of the exodus: From 150,000 to 3 Jews in Iraq, 38,000 to 0 Jews in Libya
• Indigeneity and antiquity — the Talmud written in Babylon; "I'm a Babylonian Jew"
• Life as dhimmi under Islam vs. persecution in Christian Europe
• The Farhud (1941 Baghdad pogrom) and Nazi reach into the Arab world
• Baghdad's golden age — Jews 35–40% of the city; the Zilkha banking family
• The rescue operations: Magic Carpet (Yemen) and Ezra and Nehemiah (Iraq)
• The ma'avarot transit camps and the dominant Ashkenazi diaspora narrative
• Antisemitism vs. anti-Israel
• The Abraham Accords and Morocco's reckoning
• Recognition, justice, and reparations; the case taken to the UN in Geneva, September 2025

Notable quotes

• "Libya in 1948 had 38,000 Jews. Today there are zero."
• "I'm a Babylonian Jew." / "How can I deny that I'm Iraqi? I've been there for 3,000 years."
• "I have no Jews. I only have Moroccans." — the King of Morocco
• "Why would a million people leave in 30 years? That is ethnic cleansing."
• "You can't talk about one refugee story without the other."

It's Pride Month, and at a queer women's sauna night in Barcelona, two married Jewish women — wearing Stars of David — were surrounded, interrogated, and thrown out to chants of "Free Palestine." Not in Tehran. Not in Gaza. In a room built on the promise that no one gets turned away for who they are.

Journalist Eve Barlow knows these spaces from the inside. She was deputy editor of NME — the biggest weekly music magazine in the world — broke bands, wrote the cover stories, and built LGBTQ+ coverage from scratch at GQ. She was at the beating heart of progressive culture. Then, around 2019, she said one thing out loud: that the anti-Zionism rising around her was antisemitism wearing a new coat. The world that let her in turned on her. She named her newsletter after what they did to her — Blacklisted.

In this conversation, Eve and host Ben Chertoff go past the headlines on:

• The Barcelona sauna incident — and why the perpetrators were elites (a university sociologist, a lawyer, a teacher), not the ignorant
• Where "Queers for Palestine" actually comes from — the queer-theory and post-colonial lineage that turned a civil-rights movement into an oppressor/oppressed morality play
• Why marginalization became a political identity the movement can't put down — and the eerie parallel to how Jews went from "oppressed" to "oppressor"
• The "as-a-Jew" anti-Zionists — Matt Bernstein, Zach Polanski — and the market that rewards them
• The pinkwashing smear, flipped on its head: Israel's real LGBTQ+ record vs. the rest of the region
• Released hostage Emily Damari, and the particular vulnerability of being openly gay in captivity
• And a closing message to the queer Jewish kid who's been told to choose between their people and their pride

Eve's argument: Pride began as a celebration of how far people had come in a single generation. Somewhere along the way it inverted — from celebrating victory into a contest over who is most oppressed. The moment a people succeeds, it gets recast as the oppressor. Her answer isn't to shrink. It's to refuse the trade.

Eve Barlow's links

• 📰 Blacklisted (Substack): https://evebarlow.substack.com
• ✍️ "Queers for Zion" (SAPIR Journal): https://sapirjournal.org/aspiration-ii/2026/queers-for-zion/
• 𝕏 https://x.com/Eve_Barlow
• 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/evebarlow

Chapters

• (00:00) Cold open
• (00:18) Welcome — who is Eve Barlow
• (02:08) The Barcelona sauna incident
• (06:52) An outlier, or an epidemic?
• (11:34) From NME and GQ to fighting Jew-hatred
• (20:35) The writing on the wall: BDS, London, and leaving the UK
• (28:09) Where "Queers for Palestine" comes from: queer theory & post-colonialism
• (35:36) Marginalization as political pathology
• (42:26) Moral superiority and the activist "cult"
• (48:22) Building a new closet: "take off your Magen David"
• (52:42) The "as-a-Jew" anti-Zionists: Matt Bernstein & Zach Polanski
• (57:19) Pinkwashing — and Israel's real LGBTQ+ record
• (1:02:17) Most rights in the region — and still room to grow
• (1:04:13) "Queers for Zion" and Emily Damari in captivity
• (1:08:52) To the queer Jewish kid told to choose
• (1:12:04) Where to find Eve's work
• (1:12:41) Ben's final reflection

The Honest Take goes past the headlines to find out what's actually true about Israel and the people covering it. Hosted by Ben Chertoff for HonestReporting.

▶️ Watch on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLuF-lEHTGTw_RrfN9EP6pdWhgjMX7Fg5 🎧 Listen everywhere: https://thehonesttake.transistor.fm

If this conversation made you think, do us one favor: leave a rating and a reviewwherever you're listening — it's the single biggest thing that helps new people find the show. And follow HonestReporting on Instagram, X, TikTok, and Facebook.

In 2012, Dr. Charles Asher Small pulled an all-nighter at Stanford, started googling a Yale administrator, and stumbled onto a money trail that became one of the most consequential antisemitism research projects in the West. The founder of ISGAP — which he launched in 2003 alongside Elie Wiesel — joins Ben Chertoff to lay out what he found: an estimated $100 billion in undisclosed Qatari money flowing into American universities, $10 billion to Cornell, $1.3 billion to Texas A&M, a K-12 curriculum in 8,000 American classrooms that erased Israel from the map, and a campus-to-City-Hall pipeline that runs all the way to the mayor of New York. We also press him on the hardest question: where the documented paper trail ends and connect-the-dots begins.

• ISGAP: https://isgap.org — publications free to the public.
• "Follow the Money" project — Qatar / Muslim Brotherhood university funding research.
• DETERRENT Act — federal bill (passed the House, before the Senate) lowering the foreign-gift disclosure threshold from $250K to $50K.
• New (May 2026) ISGAP report — "Institutional Capture: Qatar Foundation International": https://isgap.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/QFI-US-Report.pdf — published the day after this taping; documents $65.3M across 220 K-12/education programs (2009–2025).

• (00:00) - — Cold open:** "$10 billion to Cornell" — the white-sheets vs. keffiyehs analogy.

What happens when the very system built to protect minorities leaves Jews out entirely - and then gets turned against them?

David Christopher Kaufman is a journalist, a Black man, and a Jew. That combination gives him a lens on American identity politics that almost no one else has. In this conversation, he argues that October 7th didn't just expose antisemitism - it exposed the structural failure of the DEI framework to account for Jews at all. The result: Jews now have the highest hate crime rate of any group in America, and yet they're the only minority expected to argue for their own victimhood before anyone will believe them.

We talk about Zohran Mamdani's rise and what it tells us about where the DSA and the progressive left are actually headed. We talk about the word "Zio" - which Kaufman says hit him the same way the N-word does. And we talk about why he believes Jewish safety is the defining civil rights issue of this moment - and why American Jewish leadership is failing to say so out loud.

David Christopher Kaufman is opinion editor at the Daily Mail, former editor at the New York Post, and author of the Substack Counterintuitive.

Follow David: davidkaufman.substack.com

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HonestReporting is a media watchdog holding the press accountable on Israel coverage.

Website: honestreporting.com

YouTube: youtube.com/@honestreportingvideo

British-Israeli barrister Natasha Hausdorff has spent years inside the world's most powerful international courtrooms — the ICJ, ICC, and UN — watching the legal case against Israel get built in real time. She joins Ben Chertoff to take the genocide accusation apart, piece by piece.

The ICJ never said Israel committed genocide — so why does every headline say it did? The ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant on a legal standard that inverted the burden of proof. And right now, three countries are quietly trying to rewrite the Genocide Convention itself — to eliminate the intent requirement that separates genocide from ordinary warfare. If they succeed, no Western democracy will ever again be able to fight a non-state actor without facing genocide charges.

Israel is the test case. Hausdorff explains who's running the play — and what comes next.

Natasha Hausdorff is a British-Israeli barrister and Pro Bono Legal Director of UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI). She holds a BA/MA from Oxford and an LL.M. from Tel Aviv University in international law and the law of armed conflict. She was a Fellow at Columbia Law School's National Security Law Programme and clerked for Chief Justice Miriam Naor, President of the Israeli Supreme Court. Her family has lived in Israel for eight consecutive generations since 1847.

Hausdorff is the founding director of the Centre for International Rule of Law and appears regularly on BBC, Sky News, Fox News, CNN, and Times Radio. She has briefed parliaments across Europe and addressed the UN Security Council.

• UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI)
• Joan Donoghue HARDtalk — ICJ president corrects the record
• Daniel Bernstein, "When Genocide Loses Its Meaning" — Skeptic, May 2026
• Sir John McColl on IDF urban warfare — Forces News
• John Spencer on urban warfare — johnspenceronline.com
• Karim Khan interviewed by Mehdi Hasan — Zeteo
• Piers Morgan Uncensored: Natasha Hausdorff (June 2025)
• UN Watch testimony — Natasha Hausdorff (Oct 2025)