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Send us Fan Mail The Dominion Lawsuit Against Fox News, April 18, 2023 As a part of the Big Lie conspiracy theory, that Donald Trump had won the 2020 Presidential election but it had been stolen from him, Fox News began to feature attacks on Dominion Voting Machines.  They said that Dominion machines had “flipped” millions of votes from Trump to Biden, thus stealing the election.  Needless to say,...

Send us Fan Mail A Palestinian Reflects on life in Ramallah and Life in Ann Arbor Last year, Ramsey Hanhan published a slightly fictionalized memoir of his life.  It was called Fugitive Dreams:  A Personal Memoir.   Ramsey grew up in Ramallah, nine miles north of Jerusalem.  His parents were 1948 refugees.  In those days Ramallah was predominately a Christian town.  Today it is a bustling city.   ...

Send us Fan Mail Almost everyone knows about Winnie the Pooh, but not as many know about the Christopher Robin Poems.  There were two collections of these poems, later gathered into a single book, The World of Christopher Robin.  These are poems that my sons and my grandkids know very well because Jane and I read them over and over.  (Recently we mentioned this collectin to my grandson and he bega...

Send us Fan Mail With Israel being led by the most extreme government in its history, and with violence escalating on the West Bank, I thought it might be useful to repost this podcast.  Ian Lustick is a significant political scientist.  He specializes in intractable ethnic and colonial conflicts, and how they end.  This is his discussion of why Israel is incapable to addressing its occupation, an...

Send us Fan Mail Jane and I met Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter once, but I think we, and other Americans, knew him long before that.  These are my reflections on the life of a great American.  This includes his election as governor, Camp David, Panama Canal, his personality, and especially issues of race and racism.  It also includes his books, and especially An Hour Before Sunrise, his book on growing...

Send us Fan Mail Background to the Ukraine War.  Observations from February 24, 2022 This war will not end with the defeat of the Russian army or with Vladimir Putin in the Hague for a war crimes trial.  There will have to be a settlement.  This podcast offers some thoughts on the nature of the conflict.   Back in 2008 there was a crisis in Ukraine.  It led to the separation of two regions from Uk...

Send us Fan Mail Sixty years ago, the New Yorker published a long analytical essay on the Eichmann trial by the famous intellectual Hannah Arendt.  It became an instant classic.  It also became the center of rabid controversy.  This is a short discussion of Hannah Arendt, of her life, and of what happened when she published her discussion of this trial. 

Send us Fan Mail During the lead up to the Iraq War of 2003 I was very active in raising concerns about why this would be a bad decision.  I was interviewed scores of times and spoke scores more to civic groups, churches, and anyone who wanted to listen to me.  I also delivered two major talks.  One was in 2002 as Congress prepared to vote on the "authorization to use force" resolution. ...

Send us Fan Mail Several top American leaders wrote their memoirs about this war.  Ordinarily we assume that our leaders, those giants who hold the top positions in the country and shape the destiny of the world,  are smarter than a student who had just completed my class on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.  We assume they will have some basic knowledge of the region and will have enough sense to...

Send us Fan Mail Kennedy School Rejects HRW Head over Apartheid Report.   When Kenneth Roth retired as head of Human Rights Watch he was invited to join the Kennedy School as a senior fellow for a year.  The appointment would be with the Carr Center for Human Rights one of the 12 centers affiliated with the Kennedy School.  He agreed to the nomination but when he had his interview with Douglas Elm...

Send us Fan Mail Ron Rosenbaum published a book in 1998 discussing how 13 major scholars (and a score of lesser scholars) explained Hitler.  Who was Hitler?  Was he a charlatan just using Jew-hatred to rise to power?  Was he the personification of Evil?  Was he a Christian saint avenging the crucifixion of Christ?  Was he just a victim of German culture?  Did he slide into mass murder as events ev...

Send us Fan Mail Now that Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has passed on, it is time for me to post the story of the time I ran for pope.  The Vatican and I have very different stories about what happened but this is my version.   There is also the story of Pope Joan, the female pope.  And of Spotlight, the Best Film of the year.  Enjoy

Send us Fan Mail An impeachment is not the same as a criminal trial, which may be what Donald Trump is facing,  given that the January 6 Committee has referred four possible crimes to the Justice Department.   Trump had TWO impeachment trials, the first for holding up congressionally approved arms shipments to Ukraine until they opened an investigation of his opponent, the second for the insurrect...

Send us Fan Mail This is an unusual podcast.  It is s summary of a lecture delivered some years ago by the head, i.e., editor, of the Anchor Bible Project.  This is an effort to translate and ofer exegesis on 66 books.  47 were done at the time of the talk.   The editor says that we need to remember that the books of the Old Testament were not books.  They were scrolls that were organized into a s...

Send us Fan Mail In late December,  Jane and I will celebrate our 60th Wedding Anniversary.  Ten years ago, we celebrated our 50th anniversary by taking our whole family of ten on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Kenya.  We visited all the places that Jane and I knew from our time in that wonderful country.   Whenever an anniversary rolls around I always think back to when I first met this amazing and...

Send us Fan Mail A year ago, I made a list of books on religion that I found very engaging when I read then.  I wanted to share those with you, but it took me a year to get the podcast ready.   These are not books on religion in a conventional sense, the kind of thing that might remind you of your religion class when you were 12.  These are serious books by scholars and intellectuals.  They are in...

Send us Fan Mail Podcast Zoom Chat Would anyone out there like to have a Chat?  My friend and my wife thought this might be a good idea.  After all, I have 37,000 downloads in 124 different countries and I never get to interact with any of you.   Well, on Saturday, December 3 from 12:00 - 1:00 (Eastern Standard Time), I am going to be available if anyone wants to chat.  Do you want to follow up on...

Send us Fan Mail Back in the 1990s I took high school seniors from around the country to the Middle East for a month of visitation and discussion.  We would spend two weeks in Jordan and two weeks in Syria.  In Damascus we would always go to the amazing covered marketplace, the Hamidiyah souk.  One summer, we had an unpleasant incident in which a young merchant engaged in an act of sexual harassme...

Send us Fan Mail Netanyahu has apparently come back from the dead.  As of today (November 2, 2022) he is expected to form an exceptionally hard right government with Kahanist parties  that were previously considered poison.  What does this mean?  Here is my earlier podcast on the political model of Rabbi Kahane who was banned from politics because of his racist ideology.   (There is a debate withi...

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Send us Fan Mail This is a well-known pattern in electoral studies:  That the President's party loses seats in the House in the off-year election.   This podcast discusses recent patterns and the logic behind the patterns, as well as a few reasons why the rules may not hold.  This podcast is posted exactly two weeks before the 2022 mid-term elections.  it is risky to post such a discussion at...

Send us Fan Mail With the protests in Iran escalating, I am beginning to see some structural and political parralels with the first Palestinian Intifada of 1987-1993.  There may also be parallels with the anti-Shah protests of 1978 that brought the Ayatollah Khomeini to power but I have not had time to think  those points through.  However the common thread in all three sets of protests are that t...

Send us Fan Mail I have been running this podcast over in my mind for twenty plus years, well before I even knew what a podcast was.  It started when a Muslim student, with curiosity and respect, asked me to explain Christian thinking.  It is certainly not an easy question to answer, but I have given it my best shot in this podcast.   When I told a friend who was a priest that I was planning this...

Send us Fan Mail Ken Burns has a documentary on the Holocaust starting tonight (September 18) on PBS.  His focus is on US policy rather than upon the Holocaust itself.  This is my attempt to help students understand what the Holocaust was, and was not. 

Send us Fan Mail Starting on September 16, 1982 and extending over three days, right wing Christian militia forces went into the Sabra and Shatilla camps near Beirut and massacred 800 (or was it 3,000?  Who knows for sure?) unarmed Palestinian refugees.  The protests within Israel and world-wide were so strong that the right wing government of Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon was forced to set up a...