Tel Aviv Review

Batya Ungar-Sargon believes woke culture has created a smokescreen of racial identity politics that obfuscates the real force tearing American society apart: class inequality. But it took the liberal media to exponentially amplify the problem. Her new book  Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy  explains why.

Quarantine wasn't invented for corona. At the start of statehood, Israel encouraged mass immigration while seeking to prevent mass disease by putting immigrants through a quarantine camp called Shaar Ha'aliya. Rhona Seidelman, a historian of medicine and public health, examines the camp's legacy both remembered and forgotten, in  Under Quarantine: Immigrants and Disease at Israel's Gate .

Dr Laura Wharton, a Jerusalem City Council member for Meretz and an adjunct lecturer at the Hebrew University's Department of Political Science, discusses her book  Is the Party Over? How Israel Lost its Social Agenda , analyzing the ideological and institutional decline of the Labor Party up until the 1970s.

Prof. Daniel Statman, head of the Philosophy Department at the University of Haifa and a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, where he is the director of the Human Rights and Judaism program, discusses his new co-authored book  State and Religion is Israel , a joint legal and philosophical attempt to conceptualize the role of religion in democratic regimes. This episode is made possibl...

In  Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America , Eyal Press takes a tough look at the people squeezed in the middle of America's moral pyramid. Neither dishwashers nor bond traders, these are the prison guards, drone operators and poultry packers doing jobs we would all prefer to forget.

Although he came to prominence in Israel, as the undisputed emblem of the far-right, Rabbi Meir Kahane was a quintessential American Jew, claims Prof. Shaul Magid in a new book,  Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish radical.

After reporting on the cruelest wars of the late 20th century, journalist and cultural critic David Rieff concluded that remembering history was no defense against repeating it, and could even be a culprit. His book, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies , explains why.

Dr Yair Wallach, Senior Lecturer in Israel Studies at SOAS, University of London, discusses his new book  A City in Fragments: Urban Texts in Modern Jerusalem , which focuses on the changing nature and meaning of text – from stone inscriptions to street names to business cards – in Jerusalem of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Timothy Brennan, Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, has published a new biography of Edward Said, the feted Palestinian-American scholar and public intellectual, and his former PhD advisor at Columbia University.  Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said  explores the different aspects of a quintessential 20th-century intellectual.

Dan Rabinowitz, Professor of Sociology at Tel Aviv University, discusses his new book  The Power of Deserts: Climate Change, the Middle East and the Promise of a Post-Oil Era , analyzing the role of the Middle East as both a major generator and a primary victim of climate change, the dashed and renewed hopes for a coherent climate policy, and the role of social science in policy-making.

Amichai Cohen, Professor of Law at Ono Academic College and Senior Fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute discusses his new book  The Constitutional Revolution and Counter-Revolution , and explains the changing role of the High Court of Justice in maintaining the checks and balances of Israeli democracy. This episode is made possible by the  Israel Democracy Institute , an independent center of...

Edna Harel-Fischer, a research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute's Center for Religion, Nation and State and the Center for Democratic values, unpacks the recent controversy around governance/governability in Israel: How did it become a partisan issue? And what is the role of the public service in safeguarding the will of the people? This episode is made possible by the  Israel Democracy In...

The Tel Aviv Review takes a detour to follow the path of American nudists (intellectually). From the late 19th century to the prudish post-war years, through to the let-loose sexual revolution, historian Sarah Schrank of California State University, Long Beach reveals all, in her book  Free and Natural: Nudity and the American Cult of the Body .

The putative omnipotence of Vladimir Putin has led many to view Russia as a uniquely autocratic country. In  Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin's Russia , Columbia University's Timothy M. Frye argues that Russia is neither completely unique, nor primordially prone to strongman leadership – the explanations are far more complex. This episode is made possible by the Israel office of  Konra...

A historian's hunch led Nancy MacLean to the archives of James McGill Buchanan, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who also incidentally became the patron saint of the Koch brothers, modern libertarian thinking, and the far-right plan to rig the system beyond recognizable democracy. Her book  Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America , sparked a controver...

Prof. Jan Grabowski, a Polish-Canadian historian, discusses Jewish-Polish relations during the Nazi occupation, as well as the politics of memory in contemporary Poland and how he has been personally affected by it. This episode is made possible by the Israel office of  Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung , which promotes peace, freedom, and justice through political education.

David N Myers and Benjamin Ravid, professors of Jewish history at UCLA and Brandeis University, respectively, discuss the life and work of Simon Rawidowicz, a seminal, albeit somewhat forgotten, 20th-century Jewish intellectual, upon the  publication of an edited volume of his selected writings .

Why would citizens vote freely for political leaders plotting or even promising to attack their democracy? Why do certain policies, parties or people take priority over democratic norms at the ballot box? And can democracy count on voters to save it? Professor Milan Svolik of Yale University addresses these questions through rigorous research, but no easy solutions. This episode is made possible b...

Since when do xenophobic nationalist political actors in Europe devote themselves to gender equality, protection of women and human rights? Véronique Mottier of Jesus College, University of Cambridge, shows how populist parties in Switzerland, France, Italy and the Netherlands join the struggle to protect women's rights – when it advances their aim of excluding non-white migrants from the nation....

Facebook may not be the source of all evils – but at least many of them. In his book  Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy , Siva Vaidhyanathan argues that while Facebook has some charms, it holds special responsibility for major social and political ills today. Alongside Will Hitchcock, Siva hosts the podcast  Democracy in Danger , where together, they, along wit...

Prof. Daniella Talmon-Heller of the Department of Middle East Studies at Ben Gurion University, discusses her new book  Sacred Place and Sacred Time in the Medieval Islamic Middle East: A Historical Perspective. How and why did practices of pilgrimage and temporal rituals evolve in the first few centuries of Islam's existence?

How did America's political culture move from civil disagreement to visceral rage? In  American Affective Polarization in Comparative Perspective , Noam Gidron, James Adams and Will Horne argue that intense, emotional partisanship is distinct from routine ideological differences, and possibly more dangerous. And America isn't the only country torn apart by politics. This episode is made possible b...

Is love of country a blessing or a menace? Can a citizen of the world embrace universal values but also love one's country, and does it matter if old fashioned patriotism fades into the past? In  Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes ,  Professor Steven B. Smith defends – and rebuilds – American patriotism as an antidote to America's upheavals. This episode is made possible by the Israel off...

Michael Sfard, one of Israel's leading human rights lawyers, chronicles the evolution of the legal pillars of Israel's military occupation of Palestinians, including deportation, settlements, torture policies and more. But in his book "The Wall and the Gate," Sfard also tells of the lives and legal struggles of people who fight the policy with its very own tools: in Israeli courts. For each emergi...

Why is Israel hacking away at its own democratic institutions and values? The assault on the judiciary, primacy of the majority at the expense of minorities, loyalty as a litmus test, corruption and illiberalism – are these Israel's destiny? Hebrew University political scientist Gayil Talshir, editor of the book "Governability or Democracy" examines the roots, causes and manifestations of democrat...