The Beinart Notebook

Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern. Given the growing chance of a regional war in the Middle East, our guest will be one of the best analysts of Palestinian and Middle Eastern politics, Mouin Rabbani , Co-Editor of Jadaliyya , a publication of the Arab Studies Institute, and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies . We’ll t...

Paid subscribers will get the link to Friday Zoom calls on Tuesdays and the video and podcast the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens. Sources Cited in this Video Senator Josh Hawley’s speech at the National Conservativism Conferenc...

Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern. In light of Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the presidential race, we’re going to talk to two Democratic strategists about what happens now, and what impact it could have on US policy towards the Gaza War. Rania Batrice is a Palestinian-American political consultant. She served as deputy campaign manager for Bernie Sa...

Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern. Our guest will be Laila Al-Arian, an investigative journalist and executive producer of Fault Lines , an Emmy and Peabody award-winning show on Al Jazeera English. She’s also the executive producer of “ The Night Won’t End ,” an extraordinarily powerful documentary about three families in Gaza during this war. We’re going...

Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern. Our guest will be James Zogby, founder of the Arab American Institute, and a longtime member of the Democratic National Committee. Last week he offered a proposal for how to replace President Biden as the Democratic Party’s nominee. We’ll talk about the pressure inside the party on Biden to bow out, and what might happen...

Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern. Our guest will be Rami Khouri , Distinguished Public Policy Fellow at the American University of Beirut, Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, DC, and a regular columnist for Al Jazeera online. Rami lived in Beirut for 17 years and has for many years written about relations between Israel and Lebano...

I made a second video this week because I wanted to say something about Jamaal Bowman, who lost his primary race for Congress last night. He lost because he had the courage to visit the West Bank and speak about what he saw. He lost because he’s an unusual politician. He has moral courage. Sources Cited in This Video: A Politico article about Bowman’s trip to the West Bank. A Jewish Currents artic...

Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern. Our guests will be Raja Khouri and Jeffrey Wilkinson, co-authors of the book, The Wall Between: What Jews and Palestinians Don’t Want to Know About Each Other . Since October 7, dialogue between Palestinians and Jews has become even more difficult, and there are those in both communities—and on the left and right—who ques...

Our call this week will be at a special time: Thursday at 11 AM Eastern. Our guest this week will be Geoffrey Levin , Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University and author of the new book, Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978 , which explores a largely unknown history of American Jewish criticism of Israel in the first decades...

For the foreseeable future, our Zoom calls will be held at a new time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern. Our guest this week will be Raef Zreik , associate professor of Jurisprudence at Ono Academic College in Israel, a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Van Leer Institute, and a former member of the executive committee of Balad, one of Israel’s predominantly Palestinian parties. He’s one of the most brill...

For the foreseeable future, our Zoom calls will be held at a new time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern. Our guest this week will be Congressman Ro Khanna , who represents the 17th district of California and is a leading progressive voice in Democratic foreign policy. He has called on Israel to immediately halt its attack on Rafah and also tried to convince protesters against the war to support Joe Biden’s...

For the foreseeable future, our Zoom calls will be held at a new time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern. Our guest this week will be Jamil Dakwar , a human rights lawyer, adjunct professor at New York University, and former senior attorney with Adalah , which advocates for the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel. He’ll be speaking in his personal capacity. We’ll talk about the case against Israel at t...

For the foreseeable future, our Zoom calls will be held at a new time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern. Our guest this week will be Lily Greenberg Call, former Special Assistant to the Chief of Staff at the Department of Interior, who last week resigned to protest US policy in Gaza. She is the first Jewish Biden administration staffer to resign over the war. For ten years, until 2022, she was a youth acti...

For the foreseeable future, our Zoom calls will be moving to a new time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern. Our guest this week is someone I admire greatly, Tel Aviv University History Professor Yael Sternhell . We’ll talk about repression in Israeli academia following the arrest of Palestinian legal scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who teaches at Hebrew University. We’ll also talk about Israeli discourse...

Our Zoom call this week will be at a Special Time: 1 PM Eastern . Our guests will be two professors— one Palestinian and Jewish— with deep insights into the protests on their campus: The first is Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia who gave this blistering speech about the university’s crackdown on pro-Palestine protesters. The second is David Myers , the S...

Our Zoom call this week will be at our regular time: Noon on Friday. Our guests will be two Columbia University undergraduates with differing views on the protests at their campus: Ilan Cohen, a senior who attends Columbia and the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Gabi Frants, a senior who attends Barnard College. They’ll talk about the student movement that has swept Columbia, and the nation. Paid...

Our Zoom call this week will be at a special time: Thursday at Noon EDT . Our guest will be  Musallam Abu Khalil , a doctor in Gaza. Musallam works for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) running a primary care clinic in a makeshift school shelter in the Nusierat refugee camp in central Gaza, which houses thousands of internally displaced people. In his personal time, he runs the  D...

Our Zoom call this week will be at a special time: Friday at 11 AM EDT . Our guest will be Vali Nasr , Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle East Studies and International Affairs at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies, author of The Shia Revival , former official in the Obama administration and one of America’s leading experts on Iranian foreign policy. We’ll talk about the dange...

Our Zoom call this week will be at our normal time: Friday at Noon EDT. Our guest will be Abdalhadi Alijla, a Gaza-born political scientist who has done some intriguing writing about Gaza’s political future after this war. We’ll talk about Israel’s stated plans to empower Gaza’s families and tribes, the Biden administration’s effort to empower the Palestinian Authority, and what will become of Ham...

Our Zoom call this week will be at our normal time: Friday at Noon EDT. This Friday, I’ll be answering questions. Feel free to ask me anything during the Zoom call and I’ll do my best to answer. Since I just published an essay in the New York Times about the historic rupture between American Jewry’s two dominant creeds— liberalism and Zionism— I thought it might be a good moment to talk directly w...

Our Zoom call this week will be at a special time: Thursday at Noon EST . Our guest will be Avner Gvaryahu, Executive Director of Breaking the Silence, an organization of Israeli military veterans who oppose the occupation. We’ll discuss his recent essay in Foreign Affairs , “ The Myth of Israel’s ‘Moral Army ’” as part of a broader discussion about the way Israel is fighting in Gaza and why it is...

Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST. Our guest will be Norman Finkelstein , someone who has long fascinated me but whom I’ve never met. I want to ask about his upbringing as the child of Holocaust survivors, how his parents imparted the Holocaust’s moral lessons to him, and about how he understands the very different ways that many other children of Holocaust surv...

Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST. Our guest will Ussama Makdisi , Professor of History and Chancellor’s Chair at the University of California Berkeley, author most recently of Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World and co-host of the Makdisi Street Podcast . I want to ask Ussama, who is one of America’s leading historia...

Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST. Our guests will Dr. Lina Qassem-Hassan , the Chairperson of the Board of Directors of Physicians for Human Rights Israel and Guy Shalev, the organization’s Executive Director. They’ll talk about the unfolding public health catastrophe in Gaza. Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. The...

Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST. Our guests will be James Zogby , President and Co-Founder of the Arab American Institute, and Abdelnasser Rashid , a Palestinian-American State Representative from Illinois. We’ll talk about how the war in Gaza is affecting Arab Americans and whether they will vote for Joe Biden this fall. Paid subscribers will get the link thi...