The Honest Take

Recorded live on October 7, 2026, three years to the day. Shahar Horovitz was 22 and had just come home from nine months of backpacking in South America when she went to the Nova music festival with about 30 of the friends she'd made on that trip. At 6:29 a.m. the music stopped. By 7:30 there were gunshots, and when she asked a police officer what to do, the officer told her: you have to run, I ca...

A rabbi picks Dara Horn up at the airport and tells her what she's walking into. Someone had been posting online about murdering children on the playground of the town's Jewish day school, and then their parents in the carpool line. The horrible part, her host says, isn't the plot. It's who was behind it: the school's own security guard. After People Love Dead Jews, stories like that came to her b...

"If you are Hamas, you have to be laughing at how easily you can play the international and American news media." For Elliot Kaufman, the coverage turned ten days in, when the blast at al-Ahli hospital was reported around the world as an Israeli strike that had killed hundreds. He points out that it was a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that landed in the hospital's parking lot. From there, he ar...

A fourth-grade math textbook asks Palestinian children to add the number of martyrs killed in the First Intifada to the number killed in the Second. A physics lesson teaches Newton's second law using a boy with a slingshot aimed at an Israeli soldier. A first-grade Arabic book introduces the letter ha with two words: attack, and martyr. Marcus Sheff runs the institute that found all of it. He was...

"The greatest achievement of the Jewish people is not Israel. The greatest achievement of the Jewish people is the Jewish people." That's Ben M. Freeman, and that's where this episode starts. Most weeks on The Honest Take, we spend an hour with one guest. This week is different. We're in the Ten Days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the stretch when you're supposed to sit down and take an hon...

"Israel is committing genocide." It's a sentence heard every day since October 7, and it is far older than the war. Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch in Geneva, returns to The Honest Take to trace where the charge came from, and how it was in circulation decades before the war it is now used to describe. Neuer traces the vocabulary back to Soviet propaganda that he says probably began i...

"'Yeah, Israel probably did 9/11. I wouldn't put it past them.' That is one more thing people can put in their knapsack of arguments for why Israel is a uniquely evil country. And I'm just not sure how we're going to argue these people out of it." That's James B. Meigs, and he has been arguing with these people for twenty years. In 2005, Popular Mechanics did what almost no newsroom was willing to...

"CPJ has dozens of names where they claim the journalist died on a dangerous assignment, while the description says they died in their home. So use a little bit of logic and tell me — how can a journalist be on a dangerous assignment while they're in their own home?" That is Leslie Kajomovitz, near the end of this panel. On June 25, the Committee to Protect Journalists announced it was reviewing i...

When most of us picture antisemitism online, we picture a swastika, a slur, a guy in a dark room. Matthias Becker will tell you that's the part that barely matters. He's not a political scientist. He's a linguist. For more than a decade he has been reading the comments — not on fringe platforms, but under the BBC, The Guardian , Le Monde . His project, Decoding Antisemitism , has now been through...

In 2018, Izabella Tabarovsky walked past a protest on an American campus and recognized the signs. Not the sentiment — the sentences . She called her father in Russian and read them out. His answer: we've heard all of this before. She grew up in Soviet Siberia, in a Jewish city with no synagogues, where the word "Jew" was a line on an internal passport and Jewish applicants to math departments wer...

In 1928, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was a man in trouble — dogged by accusations of corruption and nepotism. So he told a story: the Jews praying at the Western Wall were coming for Al-Aqsa. It worked. The criticism dissolved, and a year later 67 Jews were murdered in Hebron, ending a Jewish presence there that had lasted millennia. Journalist Yardena Schwartz spent years tracing that lie — from...

A sixth-grade teacher in an American public school gets flown to Doha. First class, five-star hotel. Nobody asks her for anything — they just send her home with some curriculum, some textbooks and a few maps. Cliff May founded the Foundation for Defense of Democracies one week before 9/11. He'd spent a decade at the New York Times before that, so he knows how a story gets built. In this conversati...

Alana Newhouse founded Tablet Magazine in 2009 and has spent the years since arguing that the things holding modern life together have quietly come apart. Her 2021 essay "Everything Is Broken" gave that condition a name — flatness — and her March 2026 essay "Zionism for Everyone" turned the diagnosis outward: Zionism, she argues, is not a slogan or a grievance but a technology for national renewal...

Twenty-five years ago, sixteen people were murdered at the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem. One was Arnold Roth's fifteen-year-old daughter, Malki. The woman who planned it is free in Jordan, wanted by the FBI with a $5 million reward on her head — and has never once said she's sorry. Arnold Roth on what the intifada actually was, why "suicide bomber" is the wrong phrase, and the thing he built in hi...

She ran out of a Strasbourg grocery store so fast she left her purse in the shopping cart. Rawan Osman was in her mid-twenties, newly arrived from Lebanon, and had just seen four Orthodox Jewish men for the first time in her life. Then she went back down to face the shopkeeper — who smiled, helped her with her bags, and, as she puts it, "converted me from an enemy to an ally." She grew up in Hezbo...

Matti Friedman spent five years inside the AP's Jerusalem bureau. He explains the staffing anomaly, the peace offer that was ordered killed, and the Hamas censorship AP readers were never told about. We throw around the phrase "media bias" as though it means a bad headline here, an unfair paragraph there. Matti Friedman is describing something much larger — and he's describing it from the inside....

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 Kee...

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 des...

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...