On the Nose

Last week, Columbia capitulated to Trump’s extensive demands on the university, in hopes of recovering $400 million in government funding that was revoked by the Trump administration. Almost a week later, there is still no indication that Columbia will get the money back. The university has agreed to a long list of changes, among them the creation of a new 36-officer campus police force with the p...

On March 8th, federal immigration agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a former Palestinian student activist at Columbia University, in his New York home and moved him to a detention facility in Louisiana. Khalil, a recent graduate from Columbia’s public affairs masters program and a prominent leader in the school’s movement to pressure the university to divest from companies complicit in Israel’s geno...

On February 4th, President Donald Trump said that all Palestinians in Gaza should leave the coastal enclave and go to other Arab countries such as Egypt or Jordan—a move that, if actualized, would mark a drastic chapter in the Palestinians’ history of being ethnically cleansed. Israel immediately embraced the idea, with the country’s war minister ordering the military to draft plans to facilitate...

Brady Corbet’s epic Academy Award-nominated film, The Brutalist , traces the career and personal life of fictional architect and Holocaust survivor László Toth, played by Adrien Brody, as he seeks to find his place in the United States after World War II. In this episode of On the Nose, contributing writer Rebecca Pierce, associate editor Mari Cohen, contributing editor Siddhartha Mahanta, and con...

Israeli warplanes have stopped dropping bombs on Gaza, at least for now, but there’s no ceasefire in the occupied West Bank. Since October 2023, and especially since this January, the intensity of Israeli military operations in the West Bank has escalated to a degree unseen since the Second Intifada. On January 21st, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced “Operation Iron Wall”—a bombi...

On Sunday, Israel and Hamas entered into the first phase of what could become a permanent ceasefire. Under the agreement that led to the pause, Israel will release hundreds of Palestinians, many held without charge or trial, from its prisons in exchange for the release of 98 Israeli hostages by Palestinian militants in Gaza. The deal also allows Palestinians forcibly displaced from the north of Ga...

On this episode of On the Nose —a recording of an online event for Jewish Currents members, co-sponsored by the Beinart Notebook—editor-at-large Peter Beinart speaks with Mahmoud Muna, Matthew Teller, and Juliette Touma, three of the editors of the new anthology Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture . This volume includes nearly 100 stories from people in Gaza, recorded both b...

Since October 2023, Palestine solidarity activists have faced a climate of McCarthyist repression, and all signs point to the incoming Trump administration escalating that campaign to silence the anti-genocide movement. Trump’s cabinet appointees and supporters have embraced plans to revoke visas of pro-Palestine student organizers, sue colleges to ensure they crack down on protesters, subject ant...

A Real Pain is a film starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Kulkin as two American Jewish cousins who take a trip to Poland to visit the childhood home of their grandmother. In this episode of On the Nose , editor-in-chief Arielle Angel, contributing editor Maia Ipp, and author Menachem Kaiser—all of whom are grandchildren of Holocaust survivors—dissect the movie’s depiction of millennial neuroses,...

On this episode of On the Nose —recorded at an online event on October 30th—editor-in-chief Arielle Angel speaks with author Naomi Klein and writer and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan about the place of feelings and affect in the movement for Palestinian liberation. They discuss the role of grief and rage, how movements can accommodate affective diversity, and what it means to channel emotions po...

On this special episode of On the Nose —recorded live on November 4th at McNally Jackson Books in Manhattan— Jewish Currents senior reporter Alex Kane hosts a discussion about foreign policy and the 2024 presidential election. Historian Stephen Wertheim, Arab American Institute executive director Maya Berry, and national security reporter Spencer Ackerman discuss Donald Trump’s and Kamala Harris’s...

In 2003, a group of Indian Americans  deeply involved  in India's Hindu supremacist, or Hindutva, movement established the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), an organization  explicitly modeled  on the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Just as the ADL has long insisted that fighting American antisemitism requires bolstering support for Israel, the HAF committed itself to&nb...

Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of the most celebrated American political writers of our time, devotes much of his new book, The Message , to a withering and deeply personal critique of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. On this bonus episode of On the Nose —a recording of an online event for Jewish Currents members, co-sponsored by the Beinart Notebook and the Foundation for Middle East Peace—editor-at-l...

On this episode of On the Nose —recorded live at Jewish Currents ’s daylong event on September 15th—editor-in-chief Arielle Angel speaks with a panel of authors, scholars, and activists about the movement for Palestinian freedom in the wake of Israel’s genocide. Noura Erakat, Fadi Quran, Dana El Kurd, Amjad Iraqi, and Ahmed Moor discuss the challenge of Palestinian unity under Israel’s program of...

For this live taping of the literary podcast Between the Covers —recorded at Jewish Currents’s daylong event on September 15th and presented in partnership with On the Nose —host David Naimon convened a conversation with renowned writers Dionne Brand and Adania Shibli about contesting colonial narratives. Rooted in their long-standing literary practice and in the demands of this moment of genocide...

In this live taping of Jacobin ’s podcast The Dig —recorded at Jewish Currents’s recent daylong event and presented in partnership with On the Nose —host Daniel Denvir convened a conversation with scholars Aslı Bâli and Aziz Rana on the past and present of left internationalism. Placing the current eruption of solidarity with Palestine in the context of the rise and fall of Third Worldism, they di...

Recently, far-right figures like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson have hitched their anti-Israel politics to blatant antisemitism , platforming Holocaust denial and using decontextualized passages from religious texts like the Talmud to argue for the fundamental immorality of Judaism; in some cases their rhetoric has migrated beyond the right-wing echo chamber. Meanwhile, following a cheeky tweet...

On July 31st, Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s top political leader, was killed in Iran. Haniyeh came to the capital city of Tehran for the presidential inauguration; an explosive device went off in the guest house where he was staying. Just hours before, Haniyeh had met with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Israel hasn’t taken responsibility for the attack, but they’re widely believed to be...

Since October 7th, a low-grade regional war has played out across the Middle East, pitting Israel and its Western allies against various Iran-backed forces. The Yemeni Houthi faction has targeted ships in the Red Sea in response to Israel’s war on Gaza, prompting a wave of US and British airstrikes on Yemen. Meanwhile, Iraqi militias have repeatedly fired rockets at US forces in their country. Hez...

Should leftists vote for the Democratic nominee in the 2024 presidential election? Many have balked at supporting an administration that has funded and armed Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza: Some are refusing to vote outright, while others are conditioning their vote on a dramatic shift in policy. Although President Joe Biden has now dropped out of the race, and will almost certainly be replaced by...

Donald Trump’s decision to tap Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate marks the culmination of a Republican foreign policy transformation. While some aspects of Trump’s foreign policy choices in his first term alienated neoconservatives, other elements aligned with their views—and his previous vice presidential pick, Mike Pence, hailed from the interventionist wing of the party. By contrast,...

Until 1948, around 800,000 Jews lived as an organic and inseparable part of the Arab Middle East and North Africa. But political shifts in the mid-20th century upended this reality. The violent creation of the State of Israel, and the rise of an increasingly exclusivist Arab nationalism, fueled anti-Jewish hostility that led to the exodus of all but a few thousand Jews from the region. The rich Ar...

On June 25th, New York Congressman Jamaal Bowman lost his primary election to George Latimer, a longtime Democratic Westchester County politician. The race attracted national attention because of the unprecedented role played by the Israel-advocacy group AIPAC: The lobby’s super PAC spent $14.5 million on television ads attacking Bowman, while AIPAC donors contributed about $2.5 million to Latimer...

In May 2021, Palestinian American poet, physician, translator, and essayist Fady Joudah wrote two poems engaged with the violence of Israeli apartheid. Reflecting on the conundrum of where and how to publish them, he explained : “I’ve long been aware of the crushing weight that reduces Palestine in English to a product with limited features . . . This sickening delimitation mimics physical entrapm...

Since October 7th, American Jews have been sharply divided over Israel’s war on Gaza—a fracture that has been manifest within all manner of institutions, including synagogues. Many leftist Jews do not participate in synagogue life at all, in part because most congregations are explicitly or tacitly Zionist. But for those who are affiliated with a synagogue community that doesn’t completely align w...