Tel Aviv Review

Jewish history professor Aron Rodrigue of Stanford University was the keynote speaker at an international conference held this week at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, dedicated to the Jewish history of Salonica. In the late 15th century, the then-Ottoman city (today the Greek city of Thessaloniki) welcomed large numbers of Sephardi Jews who had been expelled from Spain, making it very soon the largest Jewish city in Europe. A series of crises and disasters, culminating in the Nazi occupation in the 1940s, led to its ultimate destruction. This episode of the Tel Aviv Review was made possible by The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, which promotes humanistic, democratic, and liberal values in the social discourse in Israel.

Jan Grabowski, Professor of History at the University of Ottawa, discusses his new book (co-edited with Barbara Engelking) Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in German-Occupied Poland, focusing on the generally overlooked stories of the persecution and liquidation of Jews in rural and provincial areas in Poland, following the Nazi occupation.

Professor Tamar Hermann of the Israel Democracy Institute and the Open University discusses fresh findings from the annual Israel Democracy Index of 2021, including low optimism for the general future of the country, low optimism about democratic governance in Israel, declining trust in public institutions, and ongoing polarization of public attitudes. Israelis also reveal what they really think about the judiciary in light of populist political attacks in recent years. This episode is made possible by the Israel Democracy Institute, an independent center of research and action dedicated to strengthening the foundations of Israeli democracy.

Nathan Sussman, Professor of Economics and Senior Visiting Research Fellow and leader of the “Israel 2050: Climate Crisis Preparedness” project at the Israel Democracy Institute, explains how carbon tax can lower emissions while having virtually no adverse effects on business activity and growth. This episode is made possible by the Israel Democracy Institute, an independent center of research and action dedicated to strengthening the foundations of Israeli democracy.

Hungary’s Jewish community is the largest in central and eastern Europe, and its regime the most ‘advanced’ among its neighbors in undoing the tenets of liberal democracy. How does this affect the memory of the Holocaust in the country, as well as Jewish life more broadly? Dr Raphael Vago, retired Senior Lecturer in History and research fellow at the Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry at Tel Aviv University, joins us in the studio. This episode is made possible by Tel Aviv University’s Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism.

Amalia Sa’ar, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Haifa, discusses her co-authored book (together with Dr. Hawazin Younis) Diversity: Palestinian career women in Israel, reviewing the professional and personal experiences of female doctors, lawyers and engineers in the Jewish state.

Sari Bashi’s life was already complicated, as a Jewish Israeli human rights lawyer defending Palestinian freedom of movement. Then she fell in love with a Palestinian man trapped in Ramallah by the occupation. Her book, Maqluba: Upside-Down Love, tells what happened next.

Dr Itay Lotem, Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Westminster, discusses his new book The Memory of Colonialism in Britain and France: The Sins of Silence. In both countries, though in different ways, memory is more about issues of the present than about the past.

Dr Radu Ioanid, Romanian Ambassador to Israel and historian of Romanian Jewry, discusses his book The Ransom of the Jews: The Story of the Extraordinary Secret Bargain between Romania and Israel detailing how, over decades, hundreds of thousands of Romanian Jews were exchanged for money, livestock and goods. This episode is made possible by Tel Aviv University’s Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism.

Philosopher and cultural critic Susan Sontag spent a lifetime thinking about the mysterious space between reality and representation, becoming one of the most influential public intellectuals of the 20th century. Benjamin Moser’s acclaimed biography, Sontag: Her Life and Work captures her story with photographic complexity, leaving only a longing for Sontag’s perspective on life today.

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 possible by the Israel Democracy Institute, an independent center of research and action dedicated to strengthening the foundations of Israeli democracy.

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.