The Honest Take

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 indi...

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 th...

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 headlin...

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 fifte...

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 bigge...

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 flo...

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...

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...

On May 11, Nicholas Kristof published a column in the New York Times titled "The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians" - a 1,500-word piece alleging systematic sexual violence by Israeli security forces, grounded in anonymous testimonies and sources with documented histories of fabrication. Ben went live the next evening with HonestReporting's Rachel O'Donoghue, who had spent 48 hours pulli...

Yossi Klein Halevi grew up the son of Holocaust survivors in Brooklyn. As a teenager, he joined Meir Kahane's Jewish Defense League. Then he moved to Israel, broke with extremism, and wrote a book called Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor - released free in Arabic - asking Palestinians to see Jews as an indigenous people returning home, not colonizers. Today, on college campuses across America, th...

Welcome to The Honest Take , the new long-form interview podcast from HonestReporting. For 25 years, HonestReporting has been the global watchdog on media bias against Israel — monitoring newsrooms, calling out distortion, and forcing corrections from some of the world's most powerful outlets. The Honest Take is where we go beyond the rapid response and sit down with the people who understand what...

What happened on American campuses after October 7 did not come out of nowhere. In this episode of The Honest Take, Shai Davidai joins HonestReporting to trace the intellectual roots of the antisemitism now shaping elite universities. From Edward Said’s Orientalism and the rise of the activist professor, to moral relativism, postcolonial theory, and the normalization of anti-Zionism as virtue, Dav...

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often thought of as a protracted political dispute based on two peoples fighting over one land. Often, they place the start date at 1948. Sometimes 1967.  But for a real understanding, it is necessary to reach back to the pre-State era, and realize the religious nature of the conflict, and one man who played a pivotal role in shaping it: The Grand Mufti of Jerus...